The point about the ‘powers’ is that, in Paul’s world, they are both (what we would call) ‘earthly’ and (what we would call) ‘heavenly’ or ‘supernatural’. Those terms are slippery. We perceive them through the lens of modern Western thought, in which a great gulf stands between the present world of space, time and matter and any other, whether we call it ‘heavenly’ or ‘spiritual’ or anything else – or indeed whether, like the sceptics and rationalists, we sweep such categories off the table as so much metaphysical nonsense.
