We are familiar with the “disenchantment” thesis about modern culture. When Max Weber suggested it in the early twentieth century, it seemed to fit many aspects of Western life at the time. Perhaps it still does. A rationally ordered imagination and practice—think “science”—gradually evacuates spiritual vitality from our common experience of the world. We live today in a landscape emptied of the gods and their ghostly minions.
I tend to agree with those who question the thesis. People remain engaged with magic and the supernatural. The secular stories (“myths”) that many people tell about our world, even if devoid of explicit religious language, still appeal to occult forces (national passions, collective energies, progressive or traditionalist utopias, the spirit of the age). Our outlooks are shadowed by vestiges of a biblical worldview, and we are ever encountering visionary hints, prods, and comforts from the “beyond.” Our developed world remains highly “enchanted.”
But while I question the thesis, I think we could do with more disenchantment of one area of existence—the sphere of politics. That doesn’t mean banishing God from public life. But let us remember that God is not a magical enchanter, conjuring forces that we can locate and tap into for our purposes. That is a category mistake. God is not an angel. And it is angels and demons we need to recognize as properly banished from our commonwealths.
Not that the role of angels in politics has ever garnered much scrutiny. During the periodic upsurges of interest in angelic life, an individual and philosophic focus has predominated. Angels protect; demons attack. It’s all very personal, which is perhaps as it should be. In the realm of social life, angels are noticeably absent, and seemingly for providential reasons. These reasons may cause us political anxiety, given that they imply precisely the disenchanted social realm for which our angelic fantasies often try to compensate, with visions of the Antichrist, supported by armies of demonic bureaucrats. It is an unhelpful reaction.
Psalm 82 is a wonderful place to see what may be afoot in this (beneficially) civil space devoid of spiritual entities orchestrating events. The psalm opens with God sitting in a heavenly court, among “the gods.” The scene is similar to several others in the Bible (Job 1, 1 Kings 22) where God talks to his “sons,” including Satan, sending them out on missions. In Psalm 82, however, God judges this host of inferior gods. He castigates them for their unjust ordering of the affairs of the world, which favors the wicked.
Gods, sons of God, hosts: It is not clear who sits in the heavenly court. The Greek text for Deuteronomy 32:8 calls them “angels,” whom God sets over each nation, while taking Jacob as his own special portion (see Dan. 10). So, there they are, Medes, Egyptians, Bactrians, Indians, Americans, British, Slavs, Chinese, Shoshone, each with their own guiding national angel. The angels have instructions: “Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy” (Ps. 82:3). Knowing what we do about these “sons of God”—a lustful and greedy lot, as we learn in Genesis 6—it comes as no surprise that their supervision of gentile justice proves wanting. “They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course” (Ps. 82:5). The message is clear: The failure of angelic justice leaves the world on the brink of dissolution.
The global disaster is stark. God condemns these governing angels and casts them from their heights into the dust of human desolation: “I have said, Ye [are] gods; and all of you [are] children of the most High. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes” (82:6–7). In the very next psalm, these “princes” are likened in their destiny to the miserable Oreb, Zeeb, and Zalmunna, Midianite nobles slaughtered for their opposition to Israel’s entry into the Promised Land (Ps. 83:11; Judges 7, 8). They are like those for whose downfall Mary will later praise the Lord (Luke 1:52). Or like King Ahab, himself deceived by a lying spirit from on high. Angel and unjust ruler alike, by God’s command, rush toward a pitiless demise. They end up being the same. Heaven is, as it were, depopulated and humanity’s mortal remains are multiplied.
Psalm 82 ends with a plea that God himself might “judge the earth.” The hope is that God will at some point “inherit the nations.” Christians take this final moment of recognized direct divine sovereignty as realization of the Messiah’s kingdom: Having defeated the evil rulers of the world aligned with the great Beast, Jesus the Lamb is revealed before all eyes as King of Kings and Lord of Lords (Rev. 17:14; 1 Cor. 15:24).
In the meantime, however, evil rulers prosper. They are the successors of the unjust mortal men whom the angels failed to control. They may even be the angels’ progeny, carrying within themselves vestigial memories of a greatness now lost in the fury of human resentment, greed, and lust. God rules, that is, an earth without angelic manipulation, for better or worse, where the mighty rise and fall, over and over, while the humble await their Savior. It is a providential governance, but surely a strange one, a “strange work” and “strange act” (Is. 28:21).
My interpretation of Psalm 82 is, I admit, eccentric. Most Christian exegetes have confined the psalm’s addressees to earthly players. From the early Church to later ages, interpreters identified the “mighty” and the “gods” of the opening verse as metaphors for the sons of Israel, that is, “the Jews.” Jewish cruelty, especially toward the “poor” Jesus, demanded their demotion from God’s promised blessings. The Church and the Christian elect, by contrast, will—in this traditional interpretation—replace them.
This traditional interpretation is repellent. If one is to stick to a this-worldly reading of the psalm, I prefer the Jewish one: The opening evocation of “the gods” is taken to refer to the first Adam, a creature who might have maintained a privileged status, but whose sin brings death upon him and his descendants. But I contend that my own reading makes more sense than either, not only within the text’s wider scriptural framework but also, frankly, in relation to our world. We do not live in a pretty time. Angels are not snatching the poor from the clutches of the wicked any longer. Apparently, they never did. They should have.
The de-angelification of our common life clears the air a bit. Defending the poor, the fatherless, and the afflicted is something we are left to figure out and take responsibility for. That requires hard thinking, debate, and testing against a straightforward bar of accountability. St. Paul, to be sure, speaks of our struggle “against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high [places]” (Eph. 6:12) that are aligned with the “devil.” But these are not our political leaders. The once mighty overseers of the nations have fallen, and our leaders are now quite mortal. They will come and go like the rest of us. We deal with them the way we deal with any human being or institution; we order our civil lives as we would with any set of human agents, however benighted. This is all hit or miss, after all. We seek to govern well and responsibly in fits and starts, experiments and policies. Without angels, it is all a human scramble, woeful failures with glints of righteousness.
We are in battle against demons. But as St. Paul stresses, the battle has to do with the sins of our own hearts, captive to the temptations and “wiles” of Satan. Their remedies, says Paul, lie in donning an “armor” of faith, the gospel of peace, the word of God, and the righteousness of our own obedience. Perhaps divine transformation in the midst of the enchanted precinct of the heart will help the cause of justice in this world.
But maybe not. God, in his strange providence, has been known to allow the wicked to retain their sway, even intensify their power, to heat up the crucible of spiritual transformation. For these transformative spiritual struggles are part of the great kingdom of his beloved Son (Col. 1:13), whose sway is emerging on a different plane altogether from our world’s affairs, frustrating as that may be to us now, as we are embroiled in the naked, disenchanted, and exposed machinations of our earthly efforts for what is right. I’m not saying that we’re on our own in the grand communal struggle for earthly justice. God superintends all our affairs. My point it this: Our powers to fail or to prevail in this realm are ours, not someone else’s, and those powers are capable only of temporary triumphs and temporary setbacks—both a warning and consolation in our time of political furor.
The end of all things to which we tend is another matter altogether. That belongs to the God of Jacob. There’s plenty of room here for fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12).
