For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds, casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ, … -II Corinthians 10:3-5

Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit, according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the world, and not according to Christ. -Colossians 2:8

But I make known to you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached by me is not according to man. For I neither received it from man, nor was I taught it, but it came through the revelation of Jesus Christ. -Galatians 1:11-12

Each of the above passages all refer to knowledge of God, respectively. In this vignette of a post, I simply want to register something that I don’t think many a Christian, and definitely not many a nonChristian dwells upon very frequently; viz. that ideas have spiritual backgrounding, they are not merely naked symbols awaiting a purely human input. The way people ostensibly treat ideas, and the words that are used to signify those ideas, you’d think that they are merely feasting on a smorgasbord of utilitarian veggie trays and charcutier bars. But as Scripture rightly points out ideas have concrete consequences; and beyond that, they have antecedent sources, spiritual sources even. This is what I want to alert people to once again: we are in a battle, a spiritual battle, a battle that has been won by the triumphing roar of the Lion of the tribe of Judah; nevertheless, until the last enemy, which is death, is placed under the second Adam’s foot, we inhabit a land pulsated by serpentine ideas given in forked and various expressions all across the landscapes of people’s veritable affections and intellects.

The aforementioned realities are why when I do theology, when I write blog posts, when I walk outside and say hi to my neighbors, I do so fully aware that there is nothing innocent about anything in this world. We are in a raging battle, and the most purportedly dispassionate ideas, the most arcane academic balderdash, the most Stoic of expressions hanging off the philosopher’s beret are chalked full with spiritual ideation. Either an idea correlates with and bears witness to the reality of God in Christ (who is the ground and reality of everything), or it has come to be, instead, from the primordial goo of the satan’s green and stagnate breath of deceit and mischief.

Christian reality finds its genesis in God’s Self-revelation in Jesus Christ; it is a revealed knowledge enlivened by the breath of God as He hovers over the bosom of the Father for us. It seems, far too often, the theologian, let alone the Sunday Christians, simply presume that we have been naturally outfitted to just know God. As such the procedure comes to be one where the would-be knower of God looks out into the world, with a white slate, simply waiting to discover whatever they can of God by reflecting on His attributes as vestiges hanging in the trees and clouds. But the result of this procedure ends up producing a categorical godness, and a superstructure of ideas, as its consequents, that ends up only having corollary with the would-be knowers’ fertile imagination. It is these discoveries that then become the bases by which purportedly ‘orthodox’ ideas about God, and thus all subsequent theologizing, are developed. The point, either way, is that ideas have a spiritual substructure that most don’t seem to recognize. They simply presume that people are free in themselves to develop ideas from the nudity of their own unimpressed minds.

Rather than getting too deep in the theological weeds, as I noted earlier, I simply wanted to register the fact that ideas are necessarily spiritual. And that said ideas either stem from the Kingdom of the Son of His love, or they do so from the kingdom of darkness. We are involved in a battle, a spiritual battle, at least according to Holy Scripture. We don’t ever take a break from this battle, especially when we are in the business of supposedly developing theological ideas. There is no dispassion or disaffectivity available to the thinker, we are all embroiled in this great flambé of spiritual wane and tribulation. Even so, we live in a world, and from a revelation that has triumphed over the world of dark spiritual realities and ideas, by the personal reality of God in Christ who isn’t simply an idea, but who is a person. Indeed, the kingdom of darkness is disanimated by ‘naked ideas,’ but God’s Kingdom in Christ is invigorated by the personal weight of God’s flesh in the humanity of Jesus Christ. The kingdom of darkness floats and flutters upon the winds of the satan’s propositions, indeed, this was how he tricked himself into Eve’s and Adam’s Edenic world, he propositioned them. God in Christ reverses the proposition by His person, not a proposition. He doesn’t need our permission to, He doesn’t need to trick us with a slithery word, but He simply is and does, and invites us to His banqueting table of ‘righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.’

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places. -Ephesians 6:12