Chapter 29 · ~12 min read
The Supernatural World They Took for Granted
angels, principalities, and the unseen realm the New Testament keeps assuming
The modern Western Christian, when she opens the New Testament, brings centuries of philosophical filtering with her. The Enlightenment taught educated Europeans to be embarrassed by supernatural language. Scientific naturalism taught the next generation that any talk of unseen powers was, at best, metaphor. The respectable Christian response, for two hundred years, was to translate the supernatural into psychology — demons became inner compulsions, angels became poetic ways of talking about providence, principalities and powers became sociological structures of injustice. The disreputable Christian response was the opposite — to populate the cosmos with vivid territorial demons, name them, map them, and turn every personal struggle into a spiritual warfare battle.
Both responses are flattenings. And both miss what the first audience actually heard when they listened to the New Testament read aloud.
a worldview the writers do not bother to explain
Open the New Testament anywhere. The supernatural isn’t an exotic addition; it is the assumed background. Paul writes, in the passage every Sunday-school student eventually learns, that our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms (Ephesians 6:12, NIV). The King James Version’s older translation of the same verse — principalities, powers, the rulers of the darkness of this world — is the phrasing many readers still half-remember. Paul doesn’t pause to explain what the principalities and powers are. He assumes his audience knows.
Jesus, in the gospels, casts out demons as a regular feature of his ministry — not as a sensational sideshow, but as a normal expression of what the kingdom of God arriving in the world actually looks like. The gospel writers narrate the exorcisms without commentary, the way a modern reporter might narrate a politician shaking hands at a rally. He drove out the spirits with a word. Move on.
The angel Gabriel turns up in Luke chapter one and announces a pregnancy without anyone telling the reader who Gabriel is or why he’s qualified to make such announcements. Daniel, six centuries earlier, had met an angel who explained that he had been delayed twenty-one days because the prince of the Persian kingdom resisted me, and that Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me (Daniel 10:13, NIV). The book of Jude, near the end of the New Testament, quotes the apocryphal book of 1 Enoch on rebellious angelic watchers as casually as if Jude expected his readers to nod along. Paul mentions, in passing in 1 Corinthians, that none of the rulers of this age understood God’s hidden wisdom, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory (1 Corinthians 2:8, NIV) — a verse interpreters have argued about for two thousand years, since the rulers of this age might refer to Pilate and Caiaphas, or to the spiritual powers operating behind them, or to both at once. Paul doesn’t stop to explain which he means. His audience could hold the question open.
None of these passages — and the list could be extended for pages — treats the unseen realm as exotic, sensational, or in need of justification. The writers aren’t arguing for a supernatural worldview. They’re working inside one, the way modern writers work inside the assumption of a heliocentric solar system, or the assumption of cellular biology. The supernatural is the background. It’s the air the New Testament breathes.
That’s what the modern Western Christian has often lost. And the question Beat 3 wants to open is the question of what, exactly, was in that air.
what the first audience took for granted
The Second Temple period — roughly the four hundred years between the rebuilding of the temple after the exile and the destruction of the second temple by Rome in AD 70 — was a time when Jewish thought about the unseen world developed enormously. We met this period in chapter twenty-six. What we didn’t say there is how much of that development was about angels, spirits, principalities, and the structure of the heavenly realm.
The biblical writers had always assumed a populated heavenly world. The Hebrew Bible speaks of bene elohim — the sons of God, members of a divine council that meets in passages like Job 1-2 (where the satan, the accuser, takes his place among them), 1 Kings 22 (where the LORD asks his council who will entice Ahab into battle), Psalm 82 (where God presides in the great assembly and renders judgment among the “gods”), and Daniel 7 (where the Ancient of Days sits with his court and the books are opened). Whatever else these passages mean — and there’s significant scholarly and theological discussion about that — they describe a heaven that isn’t empty except for God. It is populated.
By the time of the New Testament, that picture had become richer and more textured. 1 Enoch — the book Jude quotes — laid out an elaborate angelology, including the story of the watchers who descended in Genesis 6, took human wives, and unleashed corruption in the world before the flood. Jubilees and the Dead Sea Scrolls developed the picture further. There were chief angels and ordinary angels, watchers who had fallen and those who had remained, principalities assigned over the nations (a reading often anchored in Deuteronomy 32:8, where some of the older manuscript traditions — including a Dead Sea Scrolls fragment that reads sons of God and a Septuagint tradition that reads angels of God — divide the nations according to a heavenly number rather than the sons of Israel read by the Masoretic text that stands behind most English Bibles), spirits in some sense responsible for the rebellious behavior of the Gentile peoples. Hierarchies, ranks, regions, responsibilities. None of this was secret esoteric knowledge. It was the air educated first-century Jews breathed when they read scripture.
The American Old Testament scholar Michael S. Heiser (1963–2023), longtime scholar-in-residence at Logos Bible Software, did more than any other recent figure to bring this Second Temple supernatural worldview into the conversation of ordinary evangelical Christians. His 2015 book The Unseen Realm: Recovering the Supernatural Worldview of the Bible (Lexham Press) takes its title from exactly the recovery move this chapter is trying to make. Heiser’s specific readings of certain passages — particularly his reconstruction of the divine council and his interpretation of Psalm 82 as a scene of heavenly judgment on rebellious lesser elohim assigned over the nations — are contested. Some conservative evangelicals push back hard on what they see as importing pagan polytheism into the Bible; other mainstream scholars take the underlying argument seriously while disagreeing on details. The point worth taking from Heiser is the broad one, not the disputed specifics: the biblical writers assumed a populated heavenly realm. The supernatural was not the exception. It was the background. On that broad point, the field has been moving with Heiser, even where scholars disagree with his particular reconstructions.
Two scholars we’ve already met in this book — the British New Testament scholar Richard Bauckham (Senior Scholar at Ridley Hall, Cambridge) and the late Larry Hurtado (long of the University of Edinburgh) — have worked the same vein from the other direction. Bauckham, in Jesus and the God of Israel (Eerdmans, 2008), argues that early Christians did something quite remarkable inside this populated heavenly world: they included Jesus in what Bauckham calls the unique divine identity of the one God of Israel. The point matters here because Bauckham’s framework lets us see what was not happening when the New Testament writers spoke of principalities and powers and angels. They weren’t making Jesus one figure among many in a crowded pantheon. They were preserving Jewish monotheism — there is one God, the God of Israel — while acknowledging that the heavenly realm around that one God was populated by created beings of various ranks. Hurtado, in Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003), documented how the earliest Christian devotional practices — prayer, worship, baptism, exorcism — reflected exactly this complex picture: one God, worshiped uniquely; one Lord Jesus, included in that worship; and a heavenly hierarchy of created spirits, angels, and powers below, against which the church’s struggle was real but already mostly won.
This is the worldview the New Testament doesn’t bother to explain because its audience already had it. And recovering it does something specific. It doesn’t require the modern Christian to map the demonic geography of the contemporary world, name the principality over Persia, or rebuild a first-century cosmology in twenty-first-century terms. What it does is let the New Testament’s own language come back into focus — language that has always been there, and that Christians of every theological tradition still pray, sing, and quote, often without quite hearing what it is saying.
three passages, audible again
Try rereading these with the first audience’s background assumptions audible.
For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms. (Ephesians 6:12, NIV). The modern reader, raised inside the two flattenings this chapter opened with, often does one of two things with this verse. The dismissive-naturalist reader translates the rulers, the authorities, the powers into purely human structures — systems of injustice, unjust governments, cultural forces. The hyper-charismatic reader takes them as named, mappable, territorial demons to be confronted in deliverance ministry. Both readings flatten Paul. Paul’s audience would have heard him assuming the populated heavenly realm Second Temple Judaism had been describing for centuries — and saying that the Christian’s real opposition was located in that realm, not in the human beings who served as its visible expression. The verse names something more strange and more serious than either modern reading captures. It names a real ordered structure of unseen forces, against whom the church’s resistance isn’t violent and isn’t metaphorical, but is, Paul says, spiritual — fought with truth, righteousness, the gospel, faith, salvation, scripture, and prayer (the rest of Ephesians 6 spells out what those weapons are).
None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:8, NIV). The rulers of this age are, on one level, Pilate and Caiaphas and the political authorities who put Jesus to death. But Paul’s vocabulary — archontes tou aionos toutou in his Greek — is the same family of words he uses in Ephesians 6 and elsewhere for the principalities and powers. The first audience would have heard the double resonance. The political rulers who killed Jesus were also, in some sense Paul doesn’t pause to spell out, serving the unseen powers above them. The crucifixion was, simultaneously, a Roman execution and a cosmic event. The unseen rulers thought they had won; they had, in fact, walked into their own defeat. The two-level reading isn’t a modern allegorical add-on. It’s the natural way Paul’s first audience would have heard it.
If I drive out demons by the finger of God, then the kingdom of God has come upon you. (Luke 11:20, NIV). The exorcisms in the gospels read, to a first-century audience, as exactly what Jesus says they are — the in-breaking of God’s reign into territory that something else had been holding. The modern reader, embarrassed by the language, often quietly skips past the exorcism stories or recasts them as ancient explanations for what we would now call mental illness. The first audience read them differently. They read them as proof that the kingdom Jesus announced wasn’t merely words. Where Jesus arrived, the unseen powers that had occupied the territory were displaced. The kingdom was concrete. It went into places that had been occupied and reclaimed them. That’s what the gospel writers want their readers to see.
There is no claim being made here that the modern Christian needs to reconstruct a detailed map of the unseen realm in order to read the New Testament well. That isn’t what the first audience did either. They didn’t, in most cases, claim to have a clear picture of the populated heavens; they assumed it the way a person assumes the structure of a building she has lived in all her life — not by thinking about it, but by moving through it. Recovering their worldview is more modest than building one for ourselves. It’s, mostly, a matter of letting the New Testament’s own language land. Principalities and powers wasn’t a poetic flourish. Angels and demons weren’t metaphors for psychological states. The rulers of this age wasn’t a generic complaint about politics. The first audience read all of this inside a world they took to be populated, and they read it as describing things that were really there.
The recovery, when it lands, does something quiet. It doesn’t turn the modern Christian into a deliverance minister, and it doesn’t turn her into a credulous reader of every supernatural claim. It lets her hear the New Testament the way the first audience heard it — as a document written inside a world that was, in its own way, full. The Christian doesn’t have to populate her own imagination with named demons to take that world seriously. She only has to stop translating Paul’s principalities and powers into something less than what he meant. Whatever else is happening in the unseen realm, the New Testament’s claim is that the decisive battle has already been fought, and Christ has won it. The Christian isn’t asked to recover the cosmology. She is asked to take her stand inside the victory.