Truth Unites - Did Satan's Fall Corrupt Nature?

Episode Date: March 17, 2023

In this video I explain and defend the angelic fall theodicy as an explanation for natural evil. Truth Unites is a mixture of apologetics and theology, with an irenic focus. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) serves as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of Ojai. SUPPORT: Become a patron: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites One time donation: https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://gavinortlund.com/

In this video, I'm going to talk about what's sometimes called angelic fall theodicy, which is the idea that some aspects of natural evil, will come back to that term later, are best explained by the fall of angels. Now, my experience is when I first mentioned this idea, people think it's weird, and they think it's overly speculative, like why would someone believe that? But I've been thinking about this for about 15 years now. I find it fascinating. I find it resilient. I find it actually makes a lot of sense. I don't know whether it's true, but I put it forward as a hypothesis.

So I say it explains much of what we don't know and it fits with everything we do know. So it's a working hypothesis. I found that pretty smart Christian minds throughout the modern era take it seriously. And so I want to put it forward and, you know, commend it for people to consider. You could put it simply. Sometimes people think it's this elaborate, really crazy idea. You could put it simply as saying natural evil began with evil. Natural evil began when evil began. Another way to put it is that creation became fallen

when the first creatures within her fell. So it's actually kind of actually an elegant and simple hypothesis. It doesn't advance any new theological claims. It basically just takes two age-old beliefs, classical Christian beliefs. Number one, that some angels became evil, they became demons, they fell away from God. And number two, that evil, that evil corrupt. nature. Evil spoils nature. It takes those two things and all it does is combine them, bring them in, bring them into contact with each other. And as we'll see, toward the end of this video, this idea has a lot of resonance with classical ways of thinking about angelology, which is simply the doctrine of angels. And we'll talk about demonology as the theology of demons. And we'll

talk about Augustine and Aquinas a lot. And then we'll talk about some of the great minds of the modern era who have taken this idea seriously. So I have four sections to this video. First, I want to explain why natural evil theodicy is so important and why this challenge is so difficult. That will help us appreciate, you know, an answer if we feel how difficult the question is. Secondly, I want to situate angelic fall theodicy within a larger taxonomy of other responses to natural evil, other natural evil theories. And I want to show why some of those seem to have some shortcomings in my view. they don't provide the full answer.

That, again, hopefully will make us more sympathetic to how Angelic Fall Theodicy can make a contribution. Thirdly, I just want to give a brief sketch of what Angelic Fall Theodicy is by just working through how it's been articulated from starting in the late 19th century up to the present day. And that's where we'll talk a lot about C.S. Lewis and a lot about the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien,

which is a fictional expression of it. And then lastly, I want to explore a classical angelology, and that is, we'll just focus on two representative Christian theologians, perhaps the two greatest Christian theologians of all time, Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas. And basically what I want to try to show is that the reason we might find Angelic Fall Theodicy so strange is because we have kind of an eccentric view of angels across the board. And I think once we start thinking in sort of classical Christian intuitions about angels, Angelic Fall Theodesty starts to make a lot of sense. So if you get to the end of the video, here's what you can kind of expect,

is that you'll get an overview of not just what is a potential response to this really challenging philosophical dilemma of pre-human natural evil. More on that in a moment. But you'll also have a broader, I would say, for me, I'll just say it in a testimonial way. What it's done for me is give me this more enchanted view of the world, which that's my current research project right now is how, In the modern era, there's a sense of cynicism, disenchantment, despair, and how that makes an impact for how we share the gospel with people. Thinking about angels is one really wonderful way to re-enchant the world.

Here's an entry point, okay? If you've ever read through the Chronicles of Narnia, you might be familiar with this passage in the voyage of the Don Treader, where the children meet a character named Ramandu, who's what's called a retired star. Now, already right there, you just might wonder, what? they call him a star at rest and one character says well in our world a star is a huge ball of flaming gas

and in response Ramandu says even in your world my son that is not what a star is but only what it is made of and then he says that they've already met another star another character earlier and so I mean you don't need if you're paying any sort of attention at all you sort of wonder well what in the world does that mean

what is a star made of what is a star in elsewhere in his fiction in that hideous strength, which I'm going to do another video on that book. It's one of my favorite books of all time. C.S. Lewis refers to angels as, quote, those high creatures whose activity builds what we call nature. What does that mean to say angels build nature?

Well, those are the kinds of things we're going to get into in this video, especially in that last section. We'll talk about how Thomas Aquinas says that angels and physical objects together constitute the universe. We'll talk about how Augustine thinks that angels, are either inhabiting the stars or they direct the stars, but he just takes it for granted, as most pre-modern Christians did, that angels and stars have some kind of dynamic relationship. See, this is again where we've fallen away. We can retrieve these pre-modern instincts about angelology that re-enchant the world

and also give us some tools to respond to this problem. So, you know, this is going to be a longer video. It may be a little bit different than my usual stuff, but I hope it's of interest to people. pretty hard on it. I won't waste time in it. I'm drawing this from two different academic articles I wrote. One is forthcoming. The other came out in 2015. I'll put a link to that one in the description. And I hope this video will be of interest to people. Even if you don't face that, even if you don't feel the challenge of this, as I do. But let me start in this first section by trying to help us feel the challenge of this. Why is this issue important? This issue of

pre-human natural evil has been my personal greatest source of struggle in thinking about faith and thinking about God and creation and how did God set up this world. It's a really difficult problem. So it's one aspect of the problem of evil more generally. The problem of natural evil is where we're focusing in here. And there's lots of reasons for that. One is the sheer quantity of evil that we're talking about. And the other and the main difficulty is that it's prior to human. and therefore a lot of the traditional theodices, which are responses to the problem of evil,

don't apply in the same way to this. So what we're talking about here is everything from natural disasters to diseases to genetic defects, everything that we might call evil or suffering, and particularly what we're thinking about is the animal kingdom. Okay. And most people, my experience is most people tend to just intuit that, well, it's the human fall that causes all of that. but unless you're a young earth creationist, and to some extent, even if you are, it's really difficult to pin it all on just the human fall. And I'm not going to get into young earth creationism that much in this video. I think I'll do another video on Augustine's Doctrine of Creation drawing from my work on that,

where I explain why I'm not a young earth creationist. If you're a young earth creationist, I'm sorry. You might feel kind of frustrated by this video because I'm not going to give your view much attention. I'll just say by summary, I don't think that Young Earth creationism is the best response to this challenge. Biblically, theologically, historically, I think it's kind of a new idea. And I'll defend that when I talk about Augustine and his view. And just scientifically, I just think the scientific evidence is overwhelming. So sorry, young Earth creationists out there, but I'm not going to get into that in this video.

But for everybody else, whether you're an old Earth creationist or an evolutionist, creationist or whatever label you might use. As long as you're outside of that camp, the Young Earth camp, what we have is this problem of unimaginably long stretches of time, eternity-like stretches of time, in which animals experience not just death. That's what sometimes people think it's just, it's not just death, it's disease, it's defects, it's the sense of competition and struggle. It's the massive amount of extinction of species. Most animal species, the vast majority of species have died out. The seeming futility and waste. In my article on this, I talk about how, you know, it's not just death and suffering. It's the whole quality and aroma and feel of the pre-human

natural realm. And the fact that suffering and death are the very, are not just present, but they're the driving forces. One of the phrase that often comes up is red in two, and claw, which is from a poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson called In Memorium, which he wrote for a friend who died at the age of 22 and in the poem. It's this long poem, really interesting poem. He's talking about the cruelty of nature. And I want to say, you know, I understand this point can be overstated as though the natural order were just as evil as possible. Because we want to acknowledge at the same time, it's beautiful and it's incredibly orderly. But I would just say, I think it's hard for us to not feel the challenge that the skeptic can put to us based upon this.

My own personal point of entry in really feeling this for the first time deeply and kind of reconciling myself to the fact that this is a really big problem, is, was reading through Ann Dillard's Pulitzer Prize winning book, came out in the 70s. It's called Pilgrimate Tinker Creek. It's a fascinating book. It's drawn from her journal entries where she's just reflecting upon nature. And she lives in Virginia and she's just observing outside her home muskrats and butterflies and frogs.

And she's pondering the religious implications of nature. And the tension that she's haunted by is being a moral creature in a seemingly immoral world. And she's basically saying, how could a loving God produce this? And she says at one point, any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any God who is merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world who behaves as badly as praying mantises. The universe that suckled us is a monster. Now, that's intense. Let me encourage those of you watching out there who are theists, not to get too defensive right away. I think this

will help us on this topic. If we can receive this criticism a little bit and practice what Richard Mao calls intellectual hospitality. Try to see the world through this eyes of it does. There is something that seems dark and sinister and grisly out there that you can't just say began at the human fall. And people have always wrestled with that, but especially since the 19th century. So late 18th century, early 19th century, you have geological discoveries that indicate the age of the earth. And so people start realizing, okay, dinosaurs lived a long time ago and things like this. and then at 1859 you have Charles Darwin publishing the origin of species. He himself struggled with the theological implications of his own theory.

One of his famous quotes in a letter to a friend is, what a book a devil's chaplain might write on the clumsy, wasteful, blundering, low, and horribly cruel works of nature. Since Darwin's time, this has become a standard philosophical argument against the existence of God. Problem of natural or evil. William Rowe, well-known atheist, talks, you know, his famous metaphor that often comes up is a deer that is caught in a forest fire. Imagine the forest fire blows through, but it doesn't quite kill the deer, so it's just maimed but not yet dead. Oh man, this is, you know, you've been thinking about it's so terrible.

Richard Dawkins will use arguments like this in his book, River Out of Eden, one of his older books. He talks about a certain species of wasp that paralyzes caterpillars. so it can slowly devour them alive. Now we could go on with specific examples, but in case anybody's eating out there while you watch this video, just to summarize, here's how Margaret Schuster puts the challenge for us, okay? She says, the evidence virtually compels assent to the assumption

that death and suffering and the suffering that goes with it have been a reality since the beginning of the drama of life in this world. Nature has always been read in tooth and claw, sometimes in fantastically brutal ways that mock the very thought of a loving or even benign hand designing it thus. Now, again, some of us might feel some instinctive defensiveness already. Let me just sort of encourage us to try to court this idea a little bit. One of the things that is challenging is that many of the traditional theodices don't work for

this kind of evil. So, for example, if you're talking about a free will defense or something like that, you have to apply that very differently to the animal kingdom than you do to human beings. and one of the problems is just the sheer extravagance and prodigality of the death and suffering that is out there. For example, if biological history on planet Earth were compared to a 24-hour day, human history would be the final two seconds, not minutes, of that day. That gives you a sense of the scale of suffering and death that we're talking about. So it's just that there's so much of it and just seems weird and counterintuitive there would be such a long span of time and then human beings this little blip at the end of it.

And I can understand. I've been through it myself. I can truly understand how this can be a tortuous kind of objection to thinking, well, is there an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God that's driving this? If so, why would he set up the world like that? Just as I can understand how people will want to retain Young Earth Creationism. Again, I'll address that view another time. I don't think that one totally gets you off the hook, though. But anyway, here's the thing that's interesting,

is despite the fact that this is a really difficult problem, there's less treatment of it. Michael Corey wrote a book on this. He opens up by saying very little research has been devoted to this topic in recent years, and for good reason. It is a seemingly intractable problem that has plagued philosophers and theologians for centuries. Michael Murray wrote a book, read in tooth and claws, the title of the book.

significant book in this area. He opens by making the same observation. There's a few other books. There's an important book by Christopher Southgate called The Growning of Creation. He makes the same observation. He says, we've been overly preoccupied by human suffering that we've given so many theodices to that. We've neglected the problem of animal suffering. So that's the problem. Do you all feel the weight of it? I hope you can, with me, sympathize, not just because I love animals, but because this is just a tough problem. It's really hard. It's really hard. Okay.

What are the possible responses? Let's give a taxonomy of four broad categories, but even before that I'll go to two very broad, at the most basic conceptual level. Christian efforts at theodicy or responding to the problem of natural evil in this case have tended in two different directions. This is a very broad sort of heuristic device to put it at this twofold level, so don't take this too absolutely. It'll mislead you, but it can get us started to think. First, you can think more of the Western way of thinking associated with Augustine

that tends to look backward and see suffering and pain as the consequence of sin. A second is a more eastern instinct, often associated with Ironaeus, that tends to look forward and see evil and suffering as associated with development. Okay? So within contemporary philosophy, a free will defense will be in the world. the first camp, the Western way of thinking, a greater goods defense will be in the second camp. Now, again, if you actually read Ironaeus or Augustine, you see they're not neatly there. So just see that as a very broad heuristic device, not literally exact. So here's, but that's a basic way of view, you know, two, at the most basic level, two different instincts.

Here's my feeling. Throughout church history, the Augustinian fallenness, Western theodices have been dominant with developmental Iranian Theodyses being in a more supplementary role, but since the geological and cosmological evidence has rolled in that has shown us the scale of the suffering and that the vast majority of it predates human beings, it's flip-flopped. And now most of the literature in Theodicy is going toward developmental models and fallenness models are, if anything, supplementary. sometimes they're not even on the table at all.

Now, I'm concerned about that because I think when we put too much pressure on the idea of development, this runs dangerously close at times to implying or entailing that God is the author of evil. So that's my concern here. So let me, so, okay, let's step back and go a level deeper. There's four possible responses to the problem of pre-human natural evil. In my article, I go through these at greater length. The first bucket of responses would basically be to say it's not wrong. really evil. So sometimes, for example, people say animals don't really actually suffer.

This view is often associated with Descartes and his famous view that animals are kind of like machines. And C.S. Lewis developed a more cautious version of this in the problem of pain, chapter 9 on animal pain, where he's basically distinguishing between sentience and consciousness. And he's saying animals can feel pain in terms of their nervous system working, right, but they don't have the organizing consciousness to interpret that as suffering in any real sense. Others will say, well, okay, animals do suffer, but that's not a morally significant fact. It's not evil that animals suffer. And people will appeal to Job 38 to 41 and Psalm 104, these passages where God provides for

carnivores, and it seems to sort of delight in the fierceness of carnivores as well, in Job 41, especially. And so they're saying, well, you know, predation and carnivorousness are good because God made them. Now, I want to steer us away from this response. I think these responses are problematic. I go into it more in the article, but basically suffice to say that it's hard to make an absolute qualitative cutoff from animals to human beings in terms of consciousness. It seems like it's more of a quantitative or a difference of degree, not kind. From everything we can tell from the natural sciences, it does look like at least the upper-level

mammals do experience suffering. It might be not the same level of suffering the human beings do, but it's still suffering, you know. And I would just say it's extremely difficult to just think that the deer and the forest fire is just a machine that's not suffering. You know, my wife and I adopted two dogs that had been abused. And one of the reasons we knew that is because they were afraid of tall men. This is really sad. But they weren't afraid of other people. Think about that. A tall man walks in the room and they cower and fear and go to the bathroom on the floor, but anybody else comes in there fine. Why is that? Well, what the person we adopted them from thought was that they had been mistreated by a tall man or tall men. And so that's an example of

where animals certainly appear like they have some kind of, however dim, memory of suffering. And I just think this whole way, again, I really do not like any answer. that ends up running the risk of normalizing evil and making it sound like it's not really evil. And I would say just, you know, because here's the other thing. Even if you say, okay, they lack the sort of narrative consciousness to experience it as real suffering, it's like, okay, well, what if it's just temporary? Is that's, is that not suffering? Would you say that someone, that an infant or a six-month-old who suffers and feels the sensation

of pain and screams, the fact that they can't remember it 10 minutes later, it doesn't mean it's morally significant. So I go into that more, but I want to steer us away from that. I think just denying that this is a problem at all is not the best answer. The second kind of bucket of responses that you will see is people who want to, in some way, move away from the omni-god of classical theology. They might say he's not omnipotent. They might say he's not omnipedevolent, or they might say he's not omniscient.

And there's all kinds of options here, process theology, various forms of deism and penentheism. So I won't even get into these. You can read the article. But the biggest ones, this is actually a big movement. So if you know the name Jürgen Moltmann, he applied the idea of canosis, which means self-emptying. Traditionally, you think about this in Christology, you know, even there, I think it can be wrongheaded. But it's idea that, you know, Christ, you know, from Philippians to Christ emptied himself and so forth. But people apply that to God for creation.

And they say creation is an act of divine self-emptying. And there's all kinds of views like that. I'm going to steer away from those views as well here. I suppose in another context we could talk about that. But I would just state I have theological concerns with those views I hold to a classical doctrine of God. God is omnipotent, all-powerful in my theology. So that's not the route I want to encourage us to go either. If someone else out there holds to that, we'd have to talk about that.

The third variety of responses, though, would be what I referenced as Irinaean, species of developmentalism. So the idea here is that natural evil is somehow a necessary evil that leads to a greater good. There's a couple different ways that this can go. Sometimes what people say is natural evil is a necessary corollary of good. It's harmonized by the greater beauty of the entire creation. Just as a painting has both bright colors and dark colors, just as a beautiful. beautiful piece of music has both tension and release. So it is with God's creation. Natural

evil strikes us so strongly because we're just seeing the parts, not the whole. This is one idea. You can see that idea in Augustine. I talk about that in my book on Augustine. This is a really big one in the late 19th century. Another way people will go in this route is they'll talk about how natural evil is necessary for a sustainable world. This is a big theme in Murray's book, Michael Murray's book. A lot of times here, you know, basically we need a world of consistent laws in order to have the kind of biodiversity that we have. And so natural evil is a necessary byproduct of the good that God has made. Sometimes people will say, and this can be combined with these ideas, that natural evil is a necessary ingredient for moral formation. So this is a kind

of soul-making the odyssey. And John Hick is associated with this. The idea, God The idea is that God must seem distant and there must be a kind of difficulty in apprehending his work to allow for genuine moral formation. So that's another possible response. The fourth category of responses are various fallenness accounts. So these are the Western Augustinian ideas, if you're thinking in those categories. Four broad options that I've been able to think about. There's probably more. one is Youngerth Creationism.

Another is the Angelic Fall Theodicy. I'll come back to that one in a moment. Another is the idea that there's a backward causation to the human fall. So it's like the effects of the fall were applied retroactively. That's something you find in William Dembski's book, The End of Christianity. Another one is the idea that God created the world as fallen in preparation for humanity. You find that idea in Emil Brunner, if you know that theologian. You also find that, again, a lot of these responses are common in the late 19th century, responding to Darwin,

James McCosh, who is the president of Princeton University. That was his way of thinking about this. What's interesting, by the way, is how relatively rare young earth creationism was among even the fundamentalists in the late 19th century and the early 20th century. A lot of the fundamentalists were some species of old earth creationists. You can read the book The Fundamentals, edited by R.A. Tori, about half the first. the contributors to that are old earth creationists. The book that really launched young earth creationism as a kind of whole movement is the Genesis Flood by John Whitcomb and Henry Morris, 1960s, I want to say 61. And basically, it's amazing how controversial that book was at that time. That was not like

the standard conservative view. Moody Press actually declined to publish it. They published it elsewhere because they were afraid it would offend their constituency. The Youngerth creationism is not like the standard default conservative view. That's only in recent times that it's become more like that. But a lot of the early fundamentalists were, they held the gap theory, which is a species of old earth creationism, for example. That's the idea in the Schofield reference Bible, which was hugely popular in the 20th century. William Jennings Bryan, who represented the prosecution at the Scopes trial, held

to a day age view. That's an old earth creationist view. So anyway, so Youngerth creationism was not the most common view. There's all these different options. So to sum up, if you don't want to say that natural evil isn't a problem at all, and it's not really evil, and if you don't want to move away from a classical doctrine of God, then you've kind of got these two very broad categories, fallenness and development. Now here's, now in my opinion, they work well together. What I argue is that we need some combination, a cumulative approach that combines both. But my concern is if you put too much emphasis upon number three developmental accounts, they can sometimes run into the tendency of normalizing evil. Here's the thing about it. People will often say, well, you need natural evil,

you need consistent laws that make it inevitable, that there is going to be evil. But here's the thing. We know that one day God will create different physical conditions. We know that, know that one day in heaven, there's never going to be a day in heaven that a crocodile eats a three-year-old boy. Okay? That's not going to happen on the new earth because we know the resurrection body of Christ is a prototype of that. It's the first fruits of what's going to happen to all of us. And, you know, his Christ's resurrection is the first fruits of our resurrection, and then all of creation is groaning to participate in that new resurrection life. So the fact is that the skeptic can always just say, yeah, but it's not strictly necessary that God create the world in this way.

And I think that's a fair objection for them to make. If your child was eaten by a crocodile, honestly, those theories are pretty cold comfort. Because you can always just ask, well, why would God create a world where this was allowable? I mean, at least doesn't take away the tension and the struggle. The other thing is passages like Psalm 104, Psalm 104-21-talks about God feeding the lions. Well, that shows that God providentially cares for the world in its current state. It doesn't necessarily mean that the current state has not been marred by the effects of sin. After all, the Bible says God providentially cares for all human beings in Matthew 545, and that doesn't mean human life hasn't been marred by sin.

So I don't see Psalm 1 10421 or Job 38 to 41 is necessarily determinative in that sense. It doesn't prove that the world has not been spoiled in some way. So that doesn't mean developmental theodices are bad. It just means we've got to go beyond that. I would like to see if we can retain a sense that evil, all evil, is an alien intrusion into God's good creation. And that's where I think an angelic fall theodicy can be so useful. Third section of the video, let me sketch this idea a little bit by just canvassing how it's come about in history. The earliest person I can find who explicitly states it.

Now, I think it's resonant with themes in the church fathers, and I'll come back to that. But the explicit idea, like as a solution to the problem of these long stretches of time, is 1876, a person named George Pember. And then I've traced out as it kind of grows. In the early 20th century, you get a number of people who's starting to think like this. And one of the ideas is that this isn't a new hypothesis. You know, they're drawing from the fact that, well, we've always believed in the fall of angels. Here's how one person put it.

Clement C.J. Webb said that morally evil human wills exist, we know, that they injuriously affect the environment of other persons we also know. No new difficulty is added by the thought that superhuman evil wills exist and have injuriously affected the environment of humanity as a whole. And this supposition would go a long way toward explaining why it is hard to regard nature as altogether good. And then I've just traced out in my article in the 20th century, this kind of grows. this is one of the common appeals of this hypothesis, is that it kind of fits with everything we've already believed as followers of Christ. In the 1950s, a philosopher named E. L. Maskell touches upon that theme. He says that this idea is all the more compelling because the doctrine of the

angelic fall was certainly not originally postulated in order to account for the existence of evil in the material world before man. It is therefore striking that the twin beliefs that the angels had charge over the material world and that many of them had fallen away from God before the commission of the first human sin were, so to speak, stored away in readiness for answering a problem as yet unthought of, namely that of a possible distortion and deviation in pre-human evolution. As you moved forward through the 20th century and into the early 21st, you see some pretty heavy-hitting theologians and philosophers, some of the brightest minds in Christianity, I would say. The analytic philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, speculates. It kind of comes

in tangentially, but he's talking about a developmental theodicy with John Hick, and then he says, ah, but there's another possibility, and he attributes it to Augustine. He talks about Satan and his cohorts wreaking havoc upon the natural order. Thomas Torrance, the Reformed Scottish theologian, very brilliant theologian, talks about. this idea. He references C.S. Lewis's articulation of it. I'll come to Lewis in a second. He encourages us not to shrug off the idea. He associates it with the principle of entropy and so forth. Another interesting theologian that has speculated about Angelic Falthy Odyssey is the Roman Catholic theologian, Hanser's von Baldassar. I love von

Balthasar. I've engaged him in connection to my work in apologetics. His major work is this three-volume work called Theodrama, and he's basically opposing Carl Bart in insisting upon a real fall of personal angels. And then he references C.S. Lewis's theory about Angelic Fall Theodicy, and he says, here looms the insoluble question of whether the excess of suffering ascertained by the phenomenologist has not something to do, even at the level of the subhuman will, with the principalities and powers of which Paul speaks. Has it not something to do with the God of this world? the prince and ruler of this world, whose original fall from God is responsible for the deep rent that goes from the bottom right up to the top, where it emerges as mankind's tragic

history, the stubborn persistence of this topic in Scripture, and also in the life of Jesus, should cause us to pay greater attention to it. He goes on to give a caution about speculation, and he's obviously saying this is ultimately something we can't know, and he commends C.S. Lewis for locating it as a theological speculation. but he takes it very seriously. And that's what I found is that, you know, this is taken seriously by some pretty serious Christian minds. Let me talk about C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien is my final two examples of that.

C.S. Lewis, I'll just recount how he articulates this first. Problem of pain. Chapter 9 on animal pain. He talks about how basically the fall of Satan may be the best explanation for animal suffering. And I'll skip my first quote on this and just read to you where basically he says, it seems to me a reasonable supposition that some mighty created power had already been at work for ill on the material universe or the solar system, or at least the planet Earth, before ever man came on the scene. If there is such a power as I myself believe, it may well have corrupted the animal creation before man appeared. In the book Miracles, I've also located a passage where he says the same thing, less tentatively, more positively.

This was published seven years after the problem of pain, where he basically says nature's positive depravity calls for a very different explanation. You see, he'd been distinguishing between nature's imperfection and nature's depravity. And he's saying developmentalism can explain some of the imperfection. But he says nature's positive depravity calls for a very different explanation. According to the Christian, this is Christians, this is all due to sin, the sin both of men and of powerful non-human beings. supernatural but created. The unpopularity of this doctrine arises from the widespread naturalism of our age

and will disappear as this error is corrected. Beings in a different and higher nature, which is partially interlocked with ours, have, like men, fallen and have tampered with things inside our frontier. By the way, one of the misunderstandings that I think Lewis's language there actually leaves open, and unfortunately Alvin Planteca's language too wreaking havoc, is this idea that the angelic fall the odyssey is envisioning Satan and or demons directly and locally and willfully harming creation. And that really isn't what the idea requires, nor is that what even Lewis is envisioning. I don't know planting enough, he doesn't say enough to, but this is, this becomes apparent in a interchange that Lewis had with the philosopher C.E.M. Jode.

So in a 1950 publication, Jode responded to the problem of pain, critiquing this, and then Lewis responded back. You can read about this in the book God and the Doc, which collects a bunch of different writings, including these. And basically, one of the points that is clarified through that interchange is Lewis is saying this is not the direct local activity of Satan upon nature. It's just the introduction of evil itself causes disintegration and decay and disorder and so forth. So just as we don't, just as a young earth creationist doesn't think that when Adam and Eve sinned, then after that they started going around harming animals. It's like, no, no, no, no. It's just the fall itself caused disorder, disintegration,

etc. It's an indirect impact. So that doesn't mean it's right, but that's just a clarification of the idea right up front. Now, for Tolkien, Lewis had read the problem of pain allowed to the inklings, and he dedicated that book to them. And he shared with Tolkien the basic angelology within which Angelic Fall The Odyssey makes sense. Tolkien fictionalized that in the Silmarillion. A Tolkien scholar named Richard Pertill talks about this and says, Lewis might have in some sense borrowed from Tolkien or Tolkien from Lewis, or more likely they arrived at the general idea independently out of their common Christian tradition.

In a second, I'm going to show you from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, I hope, how this is common Christian tradition. This way of thinking about angels makes a lot of sense in kind of a pre-modern imagination. But let me show how Tolkien fictionalized this. He doesn't use that term Angelic Fall Theodicy, but it's basically what the Silmarian is about. My friend Austin Freeman has a book about Tolkien's theology. You can check it out. It's really interesting book. One of the things we can say is that even though it's fiction in his letters, and I go into this more in my forthcoming article, Tolkien makes it clear that he does think of these angelic like beings called the Ainur and then some of them the Valar in the Silmarillion are angels.

Okay, so, you know, I'm not, this isn't too much of a leap here because he himself talks about them as angels in his letters. And basically, to cut to the chase, Tolkien recounts how the creation of the world comes about through angels, through these beings, the Ainur. And they're basically, they're creating music and that creates the world. And then there's disharmony. There's one of the angels who creates disharmoning. It's kind of like the fall of Satan. His name is Melkor. And in his letters, Tolkien refers to Melkor as the devil of that world.

And basically, the world is created through this constant warfare between the good Ainur and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, and the, okay? So, by the way, some of the I knew are, basically, they come to live and they like leave off some of their power. I know this is kind of weird. They leave off of their powers and they come to live in this certain realm and they're, and they're called the Valar and they're the power and they're given this sort of territorial dominance over this world and governance over the world. And then they're creating it. And this is one of the big questions is, and this is one of the big questions in the pre-modern tradition is, do angels partake of creation proper? Or do they, is God the only creator and they're just assisting in the process? And it's more the latter idea. But while they're assisting, it says, but Melkor was there too from the first and he meddled in all that was

done, turning it as he might to his own desires and purposes, and he kindled great fires. When, therefore, the earth was yet young and full of flame, Melkor coveted it and said to the other Valar, this shall be my own kingdom, and I name it unto myself. And then there's this great battle, and in the context of the battle, the Valar are succeeding in their work, but Melkor is sort of harassing them along the way. It says, they built lands, and Melkor destroyed them. Valleys they delved, and Melkor raised them up. Mountains they carved, and Melkor threw them down. they hollowed and Melkor spilled them and not might have peace or come to lasting growth for as surely as the Valar began a labor so would Melkor undo it or corrupt it and yet their labor was not all in vain

and though nowhere and in no work was their will and purpose wholly fulfilled and all things were in hue and shape other than the Valar had at first intended slowly nonetheless the earth was fashioned and made firm. Now, so the idea here is it's a warfare model of creation. And the three relevant facts are first, the Valar come to inhabit and govern. They're the guardians of the world. Second, they have a significant agency in creation. And then third, they have to overcome Melkor and his harassment in order to create. Now, that's just a fictional work. But what I want to show is Lewis's proposal, taken seriously by theologians as high-minded and as brilliant as Ivan Balthazar or Alvin Plantiga, and Tolkien's imagination that goes into his fiction,

all of that funnels out of classical Christian intuitions about the nature of angels. And that we're actually in the modern era kind of out of step with that. Let me show that from Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. But they are just representative of the pre-modern Christian tradition. and what is being drawn upon too is also the scripture all throughout the Bible especially I'll put up some of these verses but especially Job 387 this is where they were drawing from but there are associations between angels and stars throughout the scripture and sometimes between angels between stars and glorified saints in heaven so for example I'm reading through

St. Augustine's literal commentary on Genesis in 2017-2018 every morning just slowly working through for my work on Augustine's doctrine of creation. I come to this amazing passage where he's posing the question, are the stars and other heavenly bodies insouled or inspirited by angels, or are they merely directed by angels? And then the footnote, the editor of the work is talking about how different fathers line up on different sides of that. You know, Origin and Jerome are on one side and Basel and John Damascus are on the other and this kind of thing. So the question is, basically, do angels inhabit the stars in the way that we have a soul that inhabits our body? Or do they merely direct them and govern them and basically tell them where to go and move them? Now, just think about that.

That's the question. He just takes it for granted that angels are doing something to the stars. It's only a question of whether they inhabit them or merely direct them. And he calls that a commonly asked question. It's a big discussion in the day. And throughout his writings, I found many passages like this. In Corridian, Augustine basically says he's not sure whether the sun and the moon and all the stars belong to that same society of angels, although some people think that there exist shining bodies that do not lack sense or intelligence.

What's just amazing to me is the assumption that, well, surely the angels are doing something to the stars. So I'm reading through that and that's making me curious. And I'm thinking, okay, why does Augustine think like that? What can we learn from that? Maybe he's not dumb and we just roll our eyes at him. Maybe we can learn something from that. As it turns out, it's not just the stars. So you remember that passage in Voyage of the Don Treter about stars, but it's not just the stars.

It's basically, Augustine has this hierarchical vision of creation. And the angels are a part of creation. And so the lower parts of creation depend on the, higher parts of creation, and in God's providence, the higher parts govern and oversee the lower parts. And so basically, Augustine says, to the sublime angels who enjoy God in obedience and serve him in bliss, are subjected every bodily nature, every non-rational form of life, every will, whether weak or bent. That is so that they may act upon or together with the things subjected to them, whatever the order of nature requires in all of them on the orders of him to whom all

things are subject. Fascinating those words to act upon. It's like, well, what does that mean? We'll come back to that with Thomas in a second. Another idea in Augustine, and there's so much more, I'm just flying through this to give a summary. This is some of this is coming out of my forthcoming article. Another idea with Augustine is that earth is the location for demons. So basically, the fallen angels are being incarcerated here on earth. There's lots of passages like this. I guess I could read. The angels that sinned were thrust down. into this foggy atmosphere around the earth as into a prison where they are being kept in order to be punished at the judgment. Then the city of God, he says the same thing, that at their fall,

the angels were thrust down to the lower parts of this world where they are, as it were, incarcerated. Thomas Aquinas has similar, so he'll pick up on a lot of these themes. It's pretty common. That's the amazing thing that you often find is that sometimes theology in the modern era deviates in certain ways from things that are pretty much widespread in the pre-modern era, And that's how it is with angelology. At one point in the Summa Theologica, Thomas is basically saying, you know, he's addressing whether the angels were created before the physical world. And he's saying, well, there's a diversity of views among the church fathers on this, but he favors the view that they're created along with the physical universe. And his reason for that is the angels are part of the universe.

They do not constitute a universe of themselves. But both they and corporeal natures unite in the universe. constituting one universe. There's a sentence you could think about for a long time. Basically, angels and physical objects together constitute the universe. Thomas also thinks he has the same hierarchical vision in which basically angels, they're the governors of the world. They're, you know, they're territorially watching over and directing physical creation. He says spiritual creatures were so created as to bear some relationship to the corporeal creature and to rule over every corporeal creature. Hence it was fitting for the angels to be created in the highest

corporeal place as presiding over all corporeal nature. Later, when he's talking about how angels govern the world, he writes, as the inferior angels who have the less universal forms are ruled by the superior, so are all corporeal things ruled by the angels? And so even among the angels, there's a hierarchy. There's the higher angels that rule over the lower angels and so forth. And then human beings, he says the angels stand in their own nature midway between God and man. So it's kind of a, so anyway, I mean, there's more to unpack, more fascinating Thomas quotes, but I don't want to go on too long. Let's summarize the main idea. Think about this when you look up at the stars at an night's sky. This is why I say it reenchance the world. Now, you don't have to accept all of the outdated

cosmology of these pre-modern theologians. You don't have to accept all the details, but the basic idea that the physical realm isn't cut off from the spiritual realm, that when you're looking at the stars, you're actually looking at the effects and movements and energies of angels, that will re-enchant the world for you very quickly, if you struggle as I do sometimes with feeling the barrenness of a modern way of looking at the world. Now, what difference does that make? and now before someone out there dismisses this and says well that's crazy

I mean how could you know you know to clarify they're not saying you can physically measure the angels they're saying all that we call the physical has something behind it animating it and that's just what we already believe if we believe in God but we just believe God mediates his government of the world through angels why is that so impossible to think you know so if you might here's the point of all this If you approach the question of Angelic Fall Theodicy with the background of that classical angelology, it starts to feel a little bit less random. You've got these two principles. Number one, there's a dynamic relation between angels and physical objects.

And number two, there's a role of stewardship or government that angels are entrusted with over the physical creation. Both of those points help explain the mechanism of Angelic Fall Theodicy, which is the point at which it's often critiqued. For example, one recent philosophical critique of Angelic Fault Theodicy says that basically it's thinking that demons can directly interact with and manipulate parts of the physical universe, but this is objectionable. The author says because immaterial substances are incommensurable with material substances without there being a special provision for such interaction. So that's the concern here. Now, I would say that that modern instinct, that thinking that you need a special circumstance for the physical and non-physical to interact, that that's a modern instinct that's the exact opposite instinct of most of the pre-modern tradition. The pre-modern tradition says, no, no, no, no, it's always that way. The physical and the spiritual are always, they exist in this tight interrelation.

And I think that, you know, we just have to be open to the fact that our modern intuitions about angels has developed. in certain ways, I think John Milton's book, Paradise Lost, has shaped modern imagination about the satanic fall because you've got them like traveling to earth, you know, and the fall takes place way far away. But the classical Christian way of thinking is that spiritual and material substances are not incommensurable. They're inextricably intertwined. Okay. And so that speaks to this concern of arbitrariness in the mechanism. Another criticism of angelic fall Theodicy is that the theory remains very much unresolved since there is no clear answer to the question of how these dark powers originated and why God should have permitted them to wreak havoc for so long. But if you think about Angelic Falls the odyssey from the vantage point of a classical angelology represented by people like Augustin and Thomas,

were less likely to think of God permitting demons to wreak havoc upon the world. That's just what demons do and that's what angels do. They're here. They're all around us sustaining the universe, you know. And so if you've got that background intuition, it's going to seem a lot less arbitrary to suppose they could have had an impact upon material creation. Hopefully that makes sense. I'm not trying to say that that proves it's right. I'm just trying to say if you're thinking along the grooves of a classical Christian imagination, the ideal of angelic fall the odyssey isn't going to seem so out there and bizarre. You know what I mean?

The metaphor I use is like a pregnant woman who drinks too much and engages in substance abuse and how that will affect the child within her. It's not that she's directly harming the child, but this would be a metaphor for how the angelic fall can impact the world because the relation of a child in the womb to the mom is maybe one analogy you could think of for this very mysterious relationship between physical reality and the angelic realm. Even if you are out there and you're still just rolling your eyes at me, at least hopefully you can maybe help explain how this is being conceived. And I will say one last thing, and that's for some reason the people who are always willing to take Angelic Fall Theodyssey

seriously, always tend to be people who like Tolkien. So if you like Tolkien, it's harder to dismiss for some reason because he's, you know, he really does think and write in terms of like a cloud. classical Christian way of looking at the world, a classical Christian metaphysic. A Christian metaphysics is implicit in everything in Lord of the Rings. That's why it's so rich and enchanting. And the modern way of looking at the world is not enchanting. So final thoughts, to sum it all up. Why take this seriously at all? Well, there's a principle from Sherlock Holmes, which is when you've eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. That's a smart principle. The fact is,

that angelic fall theodicy may seem fantastic and bizarre, but all the other options are difficult too, and in my mind they're a little more difficult. I can't go the route of atheism. Then I lose all the ability to even call it natural evil. And meanwhile, I lose all hope, and there's lots of other problems I have with that. I think the evidence for God is very overwhelming. And then just the work of Christ in my own life testifies to that as well. So at every level, I'm committed to theism. But then you say, okay, well, what about Young Earth creationism? Well, that's not the most, you know, that view is not without its own kind of counterintuition as well. Because now you've got to say that basically the same kind of thing we're proposing here happened.

It just happened really recently, you know, so that on day five, the world is in vegetarian bliss. There's no sharks and falcons and so forth eating other animals. Then Adam and Eve sin on day six. and now the digestive tracks and the instincts and everything of these vegetarian animals changes. Now, I'm not trying to make fun of that. You know, you can believe that. I'm just saying that's not all that radically different from what I'm proposing. I'm just saying we think of that happening back with the angels and it happened way long ago.

Now, someone might say, but this is so unbiblical. You know, you're just, this is so speculative. Why don't you just stick with the scripture? Why don't you just stick with what the Bible says? I can imagine someone feeling that. I can understand that. But my feeling about that would be, okay, if you stick with the Bible, you do not have an exhaustive account that is going to fill in these blanks for you either. The Bible itself generates these questions. Where does the serpent come from in Genesis 3? If you just say, I'm just going to stick with the Bible, you've got to answer that question. Who is this serpent? In Genesis 3, where does it come from? What's his history? What was he doing? Who is he? You know, there's all kinds of questions that. that should give us patience for wrestling with this. By the way, in my paper, I also talk about Genesis 1, 2, formless and void, which is a really fascinating piece of this whole discussion.

One other thing is to say that if we're just going to stick with the Bible, it has a lot to say about Satan. The Bible calls Satan the ruler of this world, the God of this world. In Ephesians 2, following the course of the world is parallel to following Satan. In Matthew 4, 8 and 9, Satan offers Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. Satan does seem to have a kind of dominion over this world. Furthermore, demons do seem to impact physical reality all throughout the Bible. Demons are not floating off in some ethereal realm.

All the time, you know, when Job, too, he comes to God and he says where he's come from. It's from going to and fro on the earth from walking up and down on it. Now, okay, I'm not saying you have to take that literally. My point is Satan is regularly portrayed as active in the world, and demons are too, and the fact is that all throughout the Gospels, for example, they do have a physical impact upon material reality. I went through one time and it counted all the times there's an exorcism in the Bible.

In almost every time, there's a physical illness that is healed that's interwoven with that. You know, there's the woman in Luke 13 who has a disabling spirit. She's bent over, unable to straighten herself up. When she's healed, Jesus refers to her as a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for 18 years. In another instance, there's a demon oppressed man who is mute.

When the demon is cast out, he can speak again. That's Mark Matthew 9. Later, there's a demon oppressed man who's both blind and mute. When the demon is cast out, he can both speak and see. In another occasion, there's a young man with epilepsy, and he's healed when the demon is cast out. I mean, you just go through over and over and over. The fact is that demons do seem to corrupt nature.

In other words, when a demon oppresses someone, it doesn't just make them have a weird feeling in their soul or a weird, they don't just get depressed. It has physical effects like blindness and, you know, being crooked and other things like this. So I'm not saying that itself proves angelic fall theodicy. I'm saying this idea that the fall of angels could impact material reality isn't this isn't such a crazy idea. There's no wild leap in supposing that the effects of the fall look a little bit like the effects of what these fallen beings do now. So I would say that something like Melkor's harassing of the Valar is exactly what we would anticipate based upon just biblical categories of and theological categories of what angels are and what demons are, even apart from the utility of this with respect to natural evil theodicy. I finished the whole video. And my camera battery didn't die.

What do you think? Is this crazy? I love it. And the reason why I is thinking about angels reenchance the world. I'd rather just believe and be duped. I'd rather believe in God and believe in angels and be duped than not believe because I've stared down the other direction. And not only do I think it's less plausible, but it's just such a barren worldview.

But if you, like I do, look up at the stars. at night and just feel that deep longing inside like there's something more. A Christian imagination gives you categories for that. A naturalistic one, it's got nothing. It's just, nope, that's the evolutionary process tricking your brain. You feel that because it helped your animal ancestors survive and there's nothing more to it. The difference between those two is infinite. a Christian imagination allows you to look up at the stars at night and it couldn't be more enchanting. What you're looking at is beauty and wonder and there is something behind it all. And angels are just one way to go.

I mean, I don't want to put too much focus on angels per se. I mean, you want to go through that ultimately to God himself. But angels are one way of puncturing the despair of the modern world. And in the meantime, they provide a pretty good answer to this question. I think. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. If you watched it all the way through this video, if you made it through all the way to the end, number one, like the video and talk about it, help me share this. Beyond that, leave a comment and let me know what you think about this. Do, let me know you've finished and I'll love your comment. I'll read the comments on this video.

I'll heart the comment if you tell me you made it all the way to the end. And then tell me what you think about this idea. Let's do a poll in the comments, you know. Is this a, crazy idea or does this maybe make some sense? Let me know what you think. Thanks for watching everybody. God bless.