Nor should we doubt for a moment how very literally these images were meant to be taken. All of this might seem to some of us today, of course, to reduce much of the soteriology of the New Testament to little more than naïve mythology or bad science; but that would be a thoroughly parochial judgment. Persons of every age are constrained to think and speak within the image of reality they know; but that does not mean that the truths they attempt to enunciate are exhausted by those conceptual forms. Whatever the case, though, the fact remains that, for Paul (as for all the Christians of his time), Christ’s triumph over and subjugation of the cosmic Principalities and Authorities and Powers (1 Corinthians 15:24-28) has literally opened a path through the planetary spheres, the encompassing heavens, the armies of the air and the potentates on high, all the way to God. This is a claim at once both physical and spiritual. And, even if now most of us can make sense of only the latter, we should nevertheless—just for understanding’s sake—understand that this was not so for the earliest Christians. We should at the very least let ourselves recognize the integral unity of the natural and the supernatural, the cosmic and the divine, in Paul’s joyous proclamation that “neither death nor life nor angels nor Archons nor things present nor things imminent nor Powers nor height nor depth nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Romans 8:38-39). (Needless to say, we could easily add “aerial toll houses” or “demons of the air” to that inventory.)
David Bentley Hart, "Nor Height Nor Depth: On The Toll Houses"
