Cherubim, Steampunk UFOs, and Regular Old UFOs

Introduction

So the president attracted some attention, which he does have some talent for doing, when he ordered the release of all the information the Federal Government had on file regarding Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). This was an order that involves massive amounts of material, and so it will be released in installments, humongous tranche after ginormous truckload. The process has already started. The first tranche was dropped just a few days ago, and it promises to be like the other releases coming later—eyewitness reports, hoaxes, murky videos, inexplicable. phenomenon, photos, and bright lights.

So . . . what are Christians supposed to do with this sort of thing? Where does this fit into our worldview?

A Hypothetical Sighting

I am going to make up an example in order to illustrate a point to be argued in the following section.

Suppose an secular friend of mine and I are out walking at night, and all of a sudden we see an object up in the sky, and we are unable to identify it. That would make it, at least for the time being, a UFO. It is not the moon, it is not an airplane, and it is not a hot air balloon. It is very bright, and it moves like nothing either of us have ever seen before. It moves back and forth above us in very strange ways, and we stare at it for about five minutes. At the end of that time, it whisks itself away and disappears into the night.

A long silence follows, and then my friend says, “Did you ever see Close Encounters of the Third Kind? This was just like that.”

And I reply, “Man. I never thought I would live to see one of the cherubim.”

What my friend saw with his eyes, he placed within the framework of his worldview paradigm. What I saw with my eyes—which was exactly the same physical phenomenon that he saw—I placed within the framework of a recent reading of the prophet Ezekiel.

Life in Outer Space

This can be illustrated another way. When I am asked if I believe in extraterrestrial life, my answer is “Certainly.” When I am asked if I believe that there is life in outer space, I reply, “Absolutely.”

This is because I believe in cherubim and seraphim, angels and archangels, principalities and powers, and thrones, and dominions. There are all kinds of critters. There is also spiritual wickedness in high places, which would likely be fallen versions of the foregoing. At this point, people might narrow their eyes and say, “You know what I mean . . .”

And yes, I do. They mean the kind of life that is described in the cosmology that aligns with our stories, with our science fiction—green aliens with bulbous eyes and heads, Klingons with corrugated foreheads, and Vulcans with pointy ears. These are all the kind of beings that our stories have trained us to expect—not supernatural beings, but rather natural beings like us. Like us, only different.

And so when we see something, we fit it into the template we grew up with, inserting it into the cosmology that we share with virtually every other 21st century person. But that cosmology is a construct.

A medieval man and a modern man walked into a bar . . . oops, sorry. Wrong track. A medieval man and a modern man walked outside on a clear night, and looked up at the night sky. What did they see? In one sense, with their eyes, they saw exactly the same thing. They saw a vast expanse of sable black, punctuated with pinpricks of light. Their experience of the phenomena was precisely the same. Their interpretations of it were wildly varied.

In their cosmological assumptions, they each saw something completely different. The modern man was looking out, into a vast three-dimensional Pacific Ocean, where various planets existed like so many islands. You would traverse that expanse in something called a ship, and you would at some point make landfall. You would then send some people ashore in a skiff . . . excuse me, in a landing pod. There they would encounter the natives, who would then proceed to kill all the travelers wearing red shirts.

The medieval man would have the sensation of looking up, as though he were gazing up the side of a skyscraper. He would feel like he was look at an artifact, something that had been exquisitely designed. There would be a sense of dizzying height. And a very great mistake is made by those who assume that medieval geocentricity meant that they believed the earth to be the most important place of all. This is just a misconception. The earth was the center, true enough, but what was at the center of the earth in Dante’s description? That is right—the devil. That did not make the devil the most important creature in the universe—that is only what he thought he was. For medieval man, we were at the center in the same way that the sump pump might be in the center of your basement. The great dance was going on upstairs, in the ballroom. We could go out at night and look up at that ballroom dance, press our noses to the pane, and yearn for the day when we might get in. There was certainly no hubris in it.

For background reading, if you want to pursue this, try Lewis’s The Discarded Image. That being a weighty academic work, you might want to try his chapter length treatment of the same topic—”Imagination and Thought in the Middle Ages,” which can be found in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature. And of course, he deftly packaged the whole thing up in his Ransom Trilogy as well.

Spiritual Realities

These UFO manifestations are too well attested for all of them to be dismissed as hoaxes. Some have been hoaxes, sure enough, but large numbers of people have seen things that cannot be accounted for. They genuinely appeared to many, and they remain legit unidentified. So what are we to make of them?

I believe that we are dealing, for the most part, with spiritual apparitions, designed to mislead and deceive. These UFO’s are creatures of the atmosphere, correct? Well, the Scriptures teach that the devil is the “prince of the power of the air” (Eph. 2:2). In addition to that, he is the spirit that works in the children of disobedience (Eph. 2:2). The word for spirit here is pneuma, which also means wind or breath. If we are looking at tricks in the sky, then one of our first reflexes should be to think of the trickster. Who is that?

We have many scriptural reasons for believing that these are creatures with shape-shifting abilities. You do not look at one of the cherubim as though you were looking at a cow in a pasture. Multiple things are going on—eyes, wheels, faces of different creatures, and so on. And there are two aspects to this. First, when these creatures appear, they have the ability to manifest themselves in different ways, that being their choice. And secondly, we—of necessity—are going to translate what we see into categories that we can understand.

And when these things appeared in the 19th century, which they did, there would naturally be a tendency to categorize them in Jules Verney ways . . . you know, steampunk UFOs. As in, a flying saucer with a smoke stack, rudders, undercarriages, and flapping wings.

After all, Helios pulled the sun with a chariot, not an F250 with a tow hitch.

As we read passages like this, one possibility is that the manifestation of the vision was accommodated to our level of technology, appearing as chariots. Another is that we saw something remarkable, and described it in the words that we had, describing it as chariots. Some manifestations we can work with; some we cannot.

One Last Thing

Some Christians might be thinking that this is all very well and good, but why do we have to choose? Couldn’t we accept the biblical cosmology, but also leave room in the budget for life on other planets? And couldn’t those forms of life be technologically advanced enough to visit us, and so on?

So why don’t I believe that these apparitions are planetary beings, only from another planet? With advanced technology and all that, just like in our stories? There are several reasons why I think this is unlikely. I don’t think we can rule it out absolutely, but I really do believe it to be unlikely.

From what we can observe about the cosmos, as far as we can see, the entire universe is subject to the laws of entropy. The whole thing is running down, headed toward an eventual heat death. That remains a long, long way off, but there will come a point when that is the way it is. The resurrection will come before that happens, but that is where everything is headed. This betokens a fallen cosmos, and I believe that this condition was linked to the fall of Adam.

The entire cosmos is yearning for the manifestation of the children of God. Our resurrection will be the day of a cosmic liberation (Rom. 8:22-23). So I believe it would be kind of a rip off if there were an unfallen planetary species out there somewhere, and then one day their world started to fall apart because of something we did. Adam’s federal representation, it would seem, would not extend to them, and yet, in order for their world to start disintegrating, it would appear that justice would require that they be connected to us somehow . . . and I don’t see any possible connection.

The rebellion of some of the angels would be in a separate category because they were not entailed in our fall or our redemption. The serpent fell first, which he had to do in order to tempt our first parents. And they are excluded from the redemption that has been offered to us (Heb. 2:16). I am assuming this is the case because they fell from a greater height, sinning against much more light.

So if extra-terrestrials are manning these things, and they really are flying saucers from another world, these creatures are either fallen or unfallen. The secular mind, in imagining such things, does not budget for the reality of the Fall, but it nevertheless remains an important consideration. But if they are fallen . . . how?

And if they are unfallen . . . how? And why aren’t they preaching to us? Instead of acting like atmospheric poltergeists?