The New Testament: A Translation

by David Bentley Hart

a positively uncanny world in some ways, conceptually quite unlike our own, in which—contrary to certain theological and cultural developments of later centuries—the partition between the natural and the supernatural, like that between the physical and the spiritual, simply did not yet exist. It was a world in which numinous intelligences, in the form of stars, were visible to the eye in the sky at night, in which the heavens above were occupied by spiritual potentates of questionable character, in which angels ruled the nations of the earth as local gods, in which demons prowled the empty places, in which spirit and breath and wind were all one thing (at once transcendent and materially palpable), and in which the entire cosmos was for many an eternal divine order and for many others a darkened prison house soon to be destroyed and replaced by a redeemed creation. And above it all, literally seated on high in an empyrean beyond the turning heavens, was God in his true dwelling place, in light inaccessible, from whom humanity was separated by a gulf at once spatial and spiritual. In that world, the highest divine reality was always near at hand—just there, above the stars, or just there at the rapidly approaching end of days—and yet also always beyond reach.