Is our world too small for the supernatural worldview the Bible gives? Pastor Andre asks whether one of the problems facing Christians is that our world has simply become too small: just not big enough to handle everything that the Bible talks about. We confess an invisible world, God, angels, demons, heaven, resurrection, the incarnation, spiritual warfare. But how much does that actually shape the way that we really imagine reality?

In this episode Andre starts with Colossians 1 and the Nicene Creed: creation is all things visible and invisible, and this is basic Christian cosmology. The supernatural is not only the dramatic stuff that makes headlines. What about prayer, worship, baptism and the Lord's Supper, the gathering of the local church on Sundays? Christianity is supernatural all the way down, from top to bottom. Then he takes the objections in turn. Isn't that dangerous? There are real dangers, and scripture gives us the boundaries that we need, but we are not safe if we stay away from these things: there are dangers on both ends. Isn't this a distraction from the main things? The incarnation, the victory of Christ, the church, spiritual warfare and Christian hope all involve the unseen realm, so these are the main things. Doesn't it lead to speculation? We mustn't go beyond what is written, but the Bible actually reveals far more about the invisible world than we often realise, and ignorance isn't safe either.

Along the way: asking people on the street whether they have ever had an experience they couldn't explain, and how often "no, no" turns into "oh, actually"; a culture that is strongly materialist and yet just can't let it go; Michael Heiser and Hans Boersma, each credited with reservations, both challenging the flattening of the Christian cosmos produced by modernity; horizons that have shrunk to the political, to the bodily, to the cultural; why boredom with the Bible is not the Bible's fault; and the central claim, that the two realms, visible and invisible, interact, with traffic between them, especially in the far less spectacular: worship, prayer, the preached word, bread and wine. Christians don't need a world made more magical, Andre concludes. The biblical world is astonishing enough, and Christianity is wonderfully strange already.

REFERENCED ALONG THE WAY

- Michael Heiser

- Hans Boersma

- David Aune

- John Milton

- The Nicene Creed and the Westminster Confession of Faith

- Scripture: Colossians 1:15 to 20, 1 John 3, Ephesians 3, 1 Samuel 28,

Isaiah 34

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