includes both what we would call ‘earthly’ or ‘political’ rulers and what we might call any ‘non-human’ or ‘supernatural’ quasi-personal ‘forces’ that stand behind the ‘earthly’ rulers. They already feature prominently in significant biblical contexts such as Deuteronomy 32, Isaiah 14 and arguably Daniel 7.29 Then, in a famous passage in Romans 8, we find ‘death . . . life . . . angels . . . rulers . . . the present . . . the future . . . powers . . . height . . . depth’ – with Paul adding ‘any other creature’, not only in case he’d left anything out but in order to remind us that all these
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