The Forgetting — Part 3: The Cost, and the Way Back

A map that is too small for the territory does not announce its own inadequacy. It simply leaves you lost in places it does not show — standing in terrain the map insists should not be there, with no language for what you are experiencing and no guidance for what to do next.

This is the position of many believers today. And the cost is higher than is generally recognized.

The first cost is experiential. When the invisible world is functionally retired, the believer is left without a framework for their own life. Answered prayer becomes coincidence, or at best a vague sense that things worked out. The conviction of sin under preaching becomes mere emotional response to rhetoric. The sense of dark opposition in certain seasons — the inexplicable heaviness, the sudden assault of doubt that arrives precisely when faithfulness is most required — has no name and no explanation. It simply registers as psychological weather, to be managed with better sleep or a change of circumstances.

People who have had genuine encounters — moments where the membrane between the visible and invisible seemed suddenly, undeniably thin — are left alone with those experiences. They do not bring them to the church, because they already know, instinctively, that the church will not know what to do with them. They will be met with embarrassment, or with therapeutic redirection, or with a kindly skepticism that is almost worse than open dismissal. And so the experiences go underground, unintegrated, and the person carries them in isolation.

This is a pastoral failure of the first order.

The second cost is apologetic. The biblical faith makes claims that are irreducibly supernatural. The resurrection is not a metaphor. The incarnation is not a symbol. The demonic is not a poetic idiom for social dysfunction. These are claims about things that actually happened and forces that actually exist. A church that has quietly absorbed a materialist frame of reference is not equipped to defend these claims, because it has already conceded the foundational assumption of its opponents — that the supernatural is implausible on its face.

When the secular critic says the resurrection is impossible because dead men do not rise, the church that has spent a generation accommodating materialist assumptions has very little to say in response. It has already agreed, functionally, that the world is the kind of place where dead men do not rise. The resurrection then becomes an embarrassing exception to be defended rather than the vindication of a cosmology in which the God who made matter from nothing is perfectly capable of reordering it.

The third cost is the deepest. It is the cost to worship itself.

Worship that is not grounded in a vivid sense of who God actually is — enthroned above the heavens, attended by beings of terrifying holiness, the one before whom Ezekiel fell on his face and Isaiah cried out that he was undone — that worship will inevitably shrink. It will become therapy, or inspiration, or communal affirmation. It will be warm and it will be sincere and it will be almost entirely horizontal. The vertical dimension — the overwhelming, holy otherness of the One being addressed — will quietly drain away, because the cosmology that makes that otherness felt has been quietly abandoned.

You cannot fully worship a God whose world you have stopped believing in.

---

And yet.

The world does not stay flat. Reality has a way of reasserting itself, and the invisible world has never actually receded — it has only ceased to be perceived. The membrane is as thin as it ever was. The principalities are as active as they were in Daniel's Babylon. The angels have not stood down. What has changed is not the territory. What has changed is the map.

And maps can be redrawn.

The recovery begins, as most recoveries do, with return. Not nostalgia — not a romantic retreat into pre-industrial simplicity that was never as simple as we imagine — but a deliberate return to the text on its own terms. To read Ezekiel as Ezekiel wrote, without the reflex to domesticate. To take Paul's principalities and powers as Paul meant them — actual beings with actual influence over actual nations and institutions. To receive the Divine Council framework not as an exotic scholarly novelty but as the assumed cosmology of the entire Old Testament, hiding in plain sight, waiting to be seen.

This is what recovering a biblical worldview actually looks like. It is not mysticism. It is not the uncritical embrace of every reported supernatural experience. It is the patient, rigorous, text-grounded work of allowing Scripture to define reality rather than allowing the surrounding culture to define what Scripture is permitted to mean.

And it changes everything. It changes how you read the news — not as the random collision of economic forces and human ambition, but as the surface of something deeper, a visible ripple over invisible currents. It changes how you pray — not as the dispatching of requests to a cosmic customer service department, but as genuine engagement with a personal God who acts in history and who has invited his people into that action. It changes how you understand suffering, and opposition, and the strange recurring patterns of human evil that materialist frameworks can describe but never adequately explain.

It changes how you worship. Because you are no longer addressing a theological abstraction. You are addressing the One whom the Seraphim cannot look at directly, before whom the Cherubim veil their faces, who scattered the nations at Babel and called Abraham out of Ur and raised his Son from the dead and is even now, in ways we only partially perceive, moving history toward its appointed end.

That God is worth the full weight of the word holy.

---

In the autumn of 1904, something broke open in the hills of Wales.

Evan Roberts was a young coal miner with no formal theological training and no institutional backing. What he had was a consuming sense that the invisible world was real and near and pressing in, and a willingness to say so plainly. He traveled from village to village, and the meetings that followed were not notable for polished preaching or sophisticated programming. They were notable for the overwhelming sense of divine presence that descended on them — for confessions that no one had solicited, for singing that broke out without being led, for the conviction that settled on entire communities like weather.

One hundred thousand people came to faith in Wales in the space of roughly nine months. The taverns emptied. The police reported dramatic drops in crime. The pit ponies in the coal mines were said to be temporarily confused because the miners had stopped swearing and the animals no longer recognized their commands.

This was not the product of better methodology. It was the product of a people — my people, as it happens — who had never entirely lost the sense that the invisible world was real, and who, when that world suddenly made itself undeniable, had a framework to receive it.

That framework is what we have been describing in these three installments. It is not a new framework. It is the oldest one we have. It is the framework of the biblical authors, of the Celtic saints, of the believers across twenty centuries who read Ezekiel and Isaiah and Daniel and took them at their word.

It is available to us still.

The world did not go flat. We simply forgot how to see its depth. And the first step toward remembering is the willingness to let the text mean what it says — and to discover, perhaps with something like Ezekiel's own astonishment, that the world it describes is the world we actually live in.

We were always meant to live there. We were just taught, slowly and without anyone quite intending it, to look away.

It is time to look again.

The Forgetting — Part 2: How the World Went Flat

It did not happen overnight. That is the first thing to understand. There was no single moment when the church voted to retire the supernatural, no council that declared the invisible world closed for business. What happened was slower and more subtle than that — and for that reason far more difficult to resist.

It happened the way a tide goes out. Gradually, and then all at once.

The shift begins, in the account most historians would recognize, somewhere in the seventeenth century. This is not to say that the Enlightenment was simply wrong about everything — it was not. The development of empirical method, the insistence on evidence, the dismantling of superstitions that had accrued around genuine Christian faith like barnacles — these were not without value. But the method carried hidden assumptions that proved, in time, to be more influential than the findings.

The assumption was this: that the real world is the measurable world. That what cannot be weighed, quantified, and reproduced under controlled conditions is either not real or not relevant. Isaac Newton himself did not hold this view — he was a serious student of Scripture and spent enormous energy on biblical prophecy. But the world that took his mechanics and ran with them arrived at a cosmos that was essentially a machine. Vast, elegant, and empty of presence.

This is what historians of ideas call the disenchantment of the world. The German sociologist Max Weber identified it as the defining feature of modernity — the evacuation of meaning, spirit, and presence from the natural order, leaving behind a universe that runs on impersonal forces and yields its secrets only to mathematics. The gods were gone. The angels were gone. The thin places were paved over. What remained was matter in motion.

The church did not embrace this openly. It would have recognized open embrace as apostasy. What it did instead was something more dangerous — it accommodated. It made peace. It learned, generation by generation, to speak the language of the surrounding culture while quietly retiring the parts of its own language that culture found embarrassing.

The supernatural did not get denied so much as it got domesticated.

Miracles became rare, then exceptional, then the exclusive property of the biblical period — safely historical, impossible to verify, and therefore impossible to be embarrassed by. Angels became decorative — greeting card figures, metaphors for human kindness, a way of saying that something felt providential without committing to the claim that an actual being was involved. The demonic became psychological — a vivid ancient way of describing what we now understand as mental illness, nothing more. The cosmos of Ezekiel and Daniel, of Paul's principalities and powers, of John's Revelation — all of it gradually reinterpreted as the symbolic idiom of a pre-scientific age that the modern mind had outgrown.

And the tragedy is that most of the people doing this reinterpreting were not liberals. They were not theological progressives trying to strip the faith of its content. They were ordinary believers, sitting in orthodox churches, reading their Bibles — but reading them through a set of assumptions about what is real that they had absorbed from the surrounding culture without ever examining. The disenchantment was not something they chose. It was something they caught, the way you catch an accent from the people around you, without noticing it is happening.

This is what makes it so difficult to address. A man who has decided not to believe in angels can be argued with. A man who has never quite gotten around to believing in them, who finds the whole subject faintly awkward, who would not know what to do with them if he did believe — that man is much harder to reach, because he does not think he has a position that needs defending. He thinks he is simply being reasonable.

Industrialization deepened the problem in ways that are easy to underestimate. What the Enlightenment did philosophically, the industrial revolution did experientially. It built an entire world — the world most of us now inhabit — in which the mediation of technology between human beings and raw reality is so complete that the experience of genuine contingency, of dependence, of standing before something that cannot be managed or optimized, has become vanishingly rare.

My Celtic ancestors could not flip a switch and have light. They could not turn a dial and have heat. They could not open an application and have their question answered in seconds. They lived close to the ground, close to the weather, close to birth and death and the rhythms of a creation they did not control. That proximity did not make them better theologians automatically. But it kept them honest about something the modern world works very hard to conceal — that human beings are small, dependent creatures living in a world they did not make and cannot ultimately manage.

When that honesty is removed, something goes with it. Not faith necessarily — not at first. But the felt sense of inhabiting a world where something other than human agency is at work. The sense that the visible is not self-explanatory. The instinct to look up.

And here is the pastoral irony that must be named plainly. Outside the church, materialism is at least consistent. The secular person who believes that matter is all there is, that consciousness is a byproduct of chemistry, that death is simply the end — that person is wrong, but they are not incoherent. Their map matches their behavior.

Inside the church, the same assumptions produce something far stranger. A cognitive dissonance that goes largely unexamined. The creed is affirmed — He maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible. The prayers are prayed. The resurrection is defended. And then Monday arrives, and the functional map of reality that guides decisions, shapes expectations, and determines what counts as plausible is virtually indistinguishable from that of the secular neighbor.

The invisible world is affirmed on Sunday and forgotten by Tuesday. Not rejected — forgotten. Which is, in some ways, worse.

Because rejection at least implies the thing was real enough to push against. Forgetting implies it was never quite solid enough to hold onto in the first place.

This is where the modern church finds itself. Not apostate, not liberal, not hostile to the faith — but thinned. Operating on a map too small for the territory. Reciting words whose full weight it has quietly ceased to feel.

How that weight might be recovered — and why it matters more urgently now than perhaps at any point in living memory — is where we turn next.

The Forgetting — Part 1: The World They Lived In

There is a peculiar blindness that afflicts the modern church. It is not the blindness of outright unbelief — the pew is still occupied, the creed still recited, the hymns still sung. It is something quieter and in some ways more dangerous. It is the blindness of a people who affirm another world with their lips while living as though this one is all there is.

This was not always so. And it was not always so among God's people.

The men who wrote our Scriptures inhabited a cosmos that was thick with invisible presence. When Ezekiel sat among the exiles by the Chebar River and the heavens opened, he did not reach for metaphor. He reached for precision. He strained to describe what he saw — the living creatures, the wheels within wheels, the eyes, the fire, the overwhelming glory — with the careful language of a witness who knows he is reporting something real. "The likeness of," he says repeatedly. "The appearance of." Not because he doubts the reality, but because the reality exceeds his vocabulary. This is not a man mythologizing. This is a man trying to be accurate about something that actually happened.

Isaiah in the Temple. Daniel by the Tigris. John on Patmos. These were not men who experienced the supernatural as an interruption to normal life. They were men whose understanding of normal life already included the active presence of an invisible world — a world populated with beings of enormous power, governed by a God who sat enthroned above it all, and intersecting with human history at every point.

This was not unique to the prophets. It was the assumed cosmology of the entire biblical world.

The ancient Israelite farmer did not need to be convinced that invisible forces were at work in his harvest, his family, his nation. The question was never whether such forces existed. The question was which ones were being attended to, and whether Israel was faithful to the One who stood above all others. The Deuteronomy 32 worldview — in which the nations were parceled out to lesser divine beings while Israel remained the LORD's own portion — was not advanced theology reserved for scholars. It was the water everyone swam in.

This same porousness persisted well into the Christian era, and nowhere more naturally than among rural peoples whose daily lives kept them close to the unmediated texture of created reality. My own Celtic ancestors — the Welsh, the Britons, the broader family of peoples who received the gospel early and held it in their particular way — carried an intuition that the boundary between the visible and invisible was thin, and that certain places and times made that thinness felt. They called them thin places. And they did not mean it as poetry.

They meant it as geography.

A farmer watching the weather knows he is not in control. A fisherman reading the sea knows the same. A people who bury their dead in the hillside and plant their crops by the season and lose children to fever in the night — these are people who have never been tempted to mistake the visible world for a closed system. Dependence was not a theological concept to be argued. It was a daily experience to be navigated.

Into that world the gospel arrived not as a disruption of the supernatural but as its clarification. The invisible world was real — but it was now interpreted. The powers were real — but they were named and ranked and shown to be subordinate. The thin places were real — but the One who made himself known in them had now spoken finally and fully in his Son. Celtic Christianity did not abandon the supernatural worldview of its pre-Christian past. It baptized it, corrected it, and gave it a center.

The result was a faith that was robustly, unselfconsciously supernatural. Not credulous — the Celtic church produced serious theologians and serious monks. But operating on a map of reality in which the invisible world was always present, always active, and never far.

That world is largely gone from the modern church. How it was lost is a story worth telling. But before we tell it, we need to feel the weight of what was there — and what we are missing.

The biblical authors were not naive. They were not pre-scientific primitives who would have known better if they had access to our knowledge. They were witnesses. And what they witnessed was a world far larger, far more populated, and far more alive than the one most modern Christians functionally inhabit.

We were meant to live in that world too.

Something Is Wrong and You Know It

There is a particular kind of anxiety loose in the world right now that doesn’t quite fit the usual categories. It isn’t simply political anxiety, though politics is certainly unsettling enough. It isn’t purely economic, though the financial pressures on ordinary people are real and heavy. It’s something deeper — a feeling that the ground itself is uncertain, that the rules that once seemed to govern reality are quietly being rewritten, that something is happening beneath the surface of events that the available explanations don’t quite reach.

If you’ve felt this, you’re not alone. And more importantly — you’re not wrong.

That last sentence is where I want to begin, because I think it matters enormously. The temptation, especially for those of us formed by a therapeutic culture, is to treat this unease as a symptom to be managed rather than a perception to be understood. We reach for explanations that locate the problem inside us — anxiety disorder, doomscrolling, information overload — and prescribe remedies accordingly. Rest more. Limit your news intake. Practice mindfulness.

These things aren’t worthless. But they don’t address what a growing number of people are actually sensing: that something outside of us is genuinely disordered, and that our unease is in some measure an accurate response to reality rather than a malfunction to be corrected.

-----

The Collapse of the Old Confidence

A generation ago, the educated Western consensus was broadly materialist and broadly optimistic. Science and reason were steadily illuminating a universe that operated by comprehensible laws. Religion was a private comfort for those who needed it, but the serious business of understanding the world belonged to empirical inquiry. History was progress, slower than we’d like but unmistakably moving in the right direction.

That confidence has largely collapsed — and not because Christianity defeated it. It collapsed under its own weight. The 20th century, with its industrial-scale slaughters and its totalitarian experiments conducted in the name of reason and progress, was difficult to square with the narrative. The 21st has continued the unraveling. We have more information than any humans in history and less shared sense of what it means. We have unprecedented connectivity and epidemic loneliness. We have extraordinary technology and a growing intuition that the technology is doing something to us that we didn’t fully consent to and can’t quite name.

What’s emerged in the space where confident materialism used to stand isn’t a return to orthodox faith — at least not yet, and not for most people. It’s something more unstable: a widespread sense that the purely material explanation isn’t sufficient, combined with no reliable framework for what lies beyond it. People are reaching for something. The explosion of interest in astrology, folk spirituality, psychedelics as a path to transcendence, and various forms of esoteric seeking reflects genuine perception of a dimension that the old materialist map left off. The hunger is real. The available food, in many cases, is not nourishing — and some of it is genuinely dangerous.

-----

What the Bible Has Always Known

Here is where a biblical framework does something that secular analysis cannot: it names what is happening without being surprised by it.

The Scriptures do not present history as a story of uninterrupted progress toward a rational and peaceful future. They present it as a contested space — a reality in which human affairs are shaped not only by human decisions but by powers and principalities that operate behind and through visible events. The Apostle Paul, writing to the church at Ephesus, is explicit: "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).

This is not metaphor. Paul is describing a genuine ontology — a real structure of reality in which beings with agency and intention operate in the space between heaven and earth, and in which human history is partly the outworking of their activity.

This is not a fringe position within Scripture. It runs from Genesis through Revelation, and it was the common understanding of the early church. The world is not simply what it appears on the surface. There are layers. There are actors we do not see. And their activity is not benign.

For the person who is sensing that something is wrong at a level beneath the political and economic — this is not a frightening complication to the biblical picture. It *is* the biblical picture. The unease you feel is, in part, an accurate perception of a real situation that the Bible has always described.

-----

The Crucial Difference

But here is what the biblical framework provides that the various alternative spiritualities do not: not just a description of what is happening, but a clear account of who holds final authority over it.

The powers are real. Their activity in history is real. The disorientation and darkness they produce is real. And none of this catches God off guard, alters his purposes, or exceeds his sovereignty. The same Paul who names the principalities and powers in Ephesians 6 opens that letter by declaring that God has seated Christ "far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every name that is invoked, not only in the present age but also in the one to come" (Ephesians 1:21).

This is the difference between the biblical account and every other spiritual framework trying to make sense of the same phenomena. Other frameworks can perceive that something non-human is operating in history. Some of them can describe its characteristics with surprising accuracy. What they cannot provide is a secure position from which to understand it — a vantage point outside the contest that tells you how it ends and who wins.

The person reaching for astrology or folk spirituality or esoteric seeking in response to a genuine spiritual perception is not wrong that the perception is real. They are reaching for a map in territory that requires one. The problem is that those maps don’t include the full landscape, and some of them were drawn by parties with an interest in misdirection.

The biblical account is not simply one more spiritual option in a marketplace of frameworks. It claims to be — and I would argue is — the only account that accurately locates the human reader within the full picture: fallen world, active powers, sovereign God, redemption accomplished, outcome certain.

-----

An Anchor, Not an Escape

I want to be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not suggesting that Christian faith is valuable primarily because it makes anxious people feel better. That would be selling it far too cheaply, and it wouldn’t be true — the biblical picture, honestly received, is not simply comforting. It is clarifying, which is a different and better thing. Clarity about a difficult situation is more valuable than comfort that depends on not looking too closely.

What the biblical framework offers the person who is sensing that the world is stranger and darker and more contested than the standard explanations allow is not an escape from that perception but a home for it. Your unease has a name. The darkness you’re sensing has a source. The feeling that something is being systematically inverted — that what is called light is increasingly indistinguishable from what the tradition called darkness — is not paranoia. It is discernment, however incomplete, of something real.

And the God who names these things in Scripture is not a God who observes the contest from a safe distance. He entered it. The Incarnation is precisely the claim that the one who holds authority over every principality and power did not manage the situation from outside but stepped into the middle of it — and that the outcome of that entry was not defeat but victory, the full implications of which are still unfolding in history and will be completed at his return.

That is an anchor. Not because it resolves every question or makes the darkness disappear. But because it tells you where you stand, who you stand with, and how the story ends.

-----

*If you’re sensing that the world is stranger than the available explanations account for, and you’re looking for a framework that can hold that perception without either dismissing it or leaving you without ground to stand on — that’s exactly what this space is for. Start with Ephesians. It knows where you are.*