Jo Dunkley, a British astrophysicist and Professor of Physics at Princeton, says the solar system is astonishingly empty. The Christmas story tells us otherwise.
Our Universe is the title of Dunkley’s book where she defines our solar system as a loosely defined collection of objects. This includes planets, asteroid rocks, comets, dwarf planets, and innumerable pieces of space debris. Yet “despite all this,” she concludes “the Solar System is astonishingly empty.”
She might be astonished to learn it isn’t. Look at the Christmas story. An angel appears to the shepherds. They’re terrified. The angel says fear not – the Messiah is born. Then suddenly a great company of the heavenly host appears with the angel, praising God: “Glory to God in the highest heaven” (Lk.2:13-14). With that, the shepherds’ terror literally disappears.
How? Probably because of two things. First, the appearance of the heavenly host (more on this later). Second, the host said God is in the highest heaven. This implies a lower heaven, or heavens, which is how Jesus begins the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father in the heavens (the Greek word is plural – heavens).
Older Christian traditions understood there were at least three levels of heavens. All three make up the universe. The first heaven includes your body and the atmosphere surrounding it. Our Father in the heavens means God is present in us – and the immediate air around us.
The Apostle Paul knew this. He’s the only New Testament writer who was taken up third heaven, peering into the highest heaven (II Cor.12:1-4). He saw our universe stuffed with principalities and powers (Rom.8:38ff; Eph 1:21, 3:10, 6:12; Col.2:10, 15). Early commentators took principalities and powers as the names of various kinds of angelic beings, good and bad.
This was all old news in ancient times. As Charles Taylor writes, up until 1500 the universe was viewed as enchanted. It was stuffed with spiritual beings. They would appear on occasion. The shepherds lived in this world. You didn’t have to be religious to recognize it. It was the “implicit, largely unfocussed background” of everyone’s everyday experience.
People knew that if the angel of the Lord appeared, it might be bad news. Read Isaiah 37:36. Judgment. 185,000 Assyrians wiped out. Small wonder the shepherds were terrified. But it was a different matter if the heavenly host appears. This group of angels has power from God to assist and strengthen God’s people. With their appearing, the shepherds felt comforted.
And awestruck. Dionysius states that there are nine orders (or choirs) of angels, three triads of three each, in order from highest to lowest. The highest order, the seraphim, devote themselves to contemplating God, beholding Him face to face, and loving and praising Him. Each order helps to reveal and declare God’s glory to the order below. The heavenly host is huge.
Pope Gregory I, in his Homilies on the Gospel, lists the same nine choirs, but with a different ranking. Dante in the Convivio gives still a third ranking, but affirms the ranking of Dionysius in the Comedy, canto 28. Aquinas discusses much of this in the Summa Theologica.
But who reads the Summa? Not a problem. Visit any old cathedral. Look up, at the ceilings. Note how they’re stuffed with spiritual beings (I’m pretty sure the Sistine Chapel ceiling has no empty space). If you want a fuller description of these spiritual beings, click this link.
But you might be asking, So what? Here’s what: in earlier societies, before the Enlightenment (c.1500), religion was “everywhere,” was woven into everything else, and in no way constituted a separate “sphere” of its own. God was present in the entirety of the universe.
But with the Enlightenment, our public spaces were emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality. This is why Jo Dunkley describes the solar system as empty. An empty universe is emptied of God, making the faith more of a privatized matter, less of a public faith.
This has even emptied out the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer. Most American Christians pray: “Our Father in heaven,” not the heavens. So God is up there, far away, largely absent from our universe that’s mostly empty, a few objects separated by nothing – what we call “space.”
The Christmas story tells us otherwise. But recognizing this requires seeing we live in an enchanted universe where the heavens and the earth are chock-full of God’s glory.
 Jo Dunkley, Our Universe: An Astronomer’s Guide (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019), 27-30.
 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007), 3.
 “La religion est partout”; c.f. Danièle Hervieu-Léger, Le Pèlerin et le Convert (Flammarion, 1999), 20-21.