Angels

When we entertain the idea of angels, we enter into territory that in some ways is very difficult. So difficult, in fact, that we might be tempted to leave it alone. And in fact, the matter is many theologians have done just that. After all, the framework of Christian doctrine does not require the angelic realm. No other doctrines of scripture are overly affected by the neglect of angelology. And angels are really little more than bit players in the drama of redemption. But angels are worth our consideration for a number of reasons. And I'd like to note three of them here. First of all, their use in Western mythology actually obscures their character and calling. The Judeo-Christian tradition is full of a rich mythology of angels. When we think of angels, we really don't tend to think of their biblical characterizations, so much as we tend to think of them in terms of their literary descriptions. Whether those descriptions come to us from Dante's Inferno, Milton's Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis' use of pseudodownesis in number of his books, or the pop religious pot-boilers of Frank Peretti. A second reason that angels are worth spending some time with is the recent explosion of angels in new age and postmodernist spirituality. The 1970s saw a popular cultural interest in things satanic and the occult. And that was simply the beginning of a cultural shift away from the rationalistic worldview of the Enlightenment toward a new paganism driven by superstition and occult interest. In recent years, angels have been added to this kind of designer spirituality that we have today. You can go into any bookstore and find dozens of different books on angels. We used to be that for a couple of years, a month didn't go by where you wouldn't find a different TV show in one way or another that portrayed angels. And the vast majority of it, 99% would probably not be an understatement. The vast majority of it was totally devoid of any factual basis whatsoever. The sources for the current angelology of our culture appear to be an eclectic mix of romanticism, and kind of vacuum cleaner spirituality. Everything just gets sucked up into it. Anything that's got there with kind of a friendly supernaturalism has been projected onto angels today. A third reason, I'm going to have to follow this a bit more closely, possibly. A third reason that angels are worth our attention, I think possibly one of the reasons that we're coming back to them today in our culture, is because of the reduction of reality that has taken place in the Enlightenment West. You see, we may overreact to the happy syncretism of new age religion by merely dismissing the angelic. If we do so, we make a mistake. I think it's a mistake that goes back to the Reformation and we want to see it there. It's a real cost in bypassing the angelic. It's a real cost to be paid when we ignore angels. In his book, The Eclipse of Heaven, AJ Kanye's argues that the post in the Enlightenment West has impoverished its worldview. We've reduced our vision to that which we can see, to that which we can measure, to that which we can calculate. And this reduction of reality has taken place in a number of ways. Well, first of all, it's taken place by way of a kind of scientific secularization. We're all familiar with this. The obvious reduction of reality in the secularization of anti-theistic scientific culture is there for all of us to see. The only things that are real are those things which can be known. Those things which can be calculated, plugged into a taxonomy, you know, understood by a table or a flow chart. But the reduction of reality is also part of orthodox Christianity. This is point two here. Think here of Demers' dualistic idea again. Even orthodox Christians have reduced Christianity, but in the opposite direction as scientific secularism. Scientific secularism has said only those things we can touch are real. Only those things we can measure are valid. We evangelicals have sometimes gone off the other end. Only those things we can't touch are real. Only those things we can't measure are valid. Well, we affirm both heaven and earth, the angelic and the human, but we place them into an antithetical tension, which one another. Here's the dualism. The heavenly or the angelic functions for us primarily as a negation of the creation. A negation of the this world play. And thus for many of us, this world is less real, less good than the heavenly realm. Where scientism secularizes heaven, popular Christianity has secularized creation. And whenever you secularize one side, you vulgarize the other. A third reduction, that's important for us to take note of. Well, it's my own. I guess we could call it reformed anti-dualism. Reformed anti-dualism always comes across as anti-heavenly. You see, there's a dangerous reduction in the reformed anti-dualistic approach to reality. In seeking to defame dualism, and I would am like theologian who would like to do that, we often come across as being anti-heavenly. Let me just give you an example here. For years I taught in a Christian liberal arts college, and I would claim something like this. I would say that heaven is not the ultimate destiny of the redeemed. Scripturally, it is a renewed creation, is the restoration of all things that is our destiny. The Bible never says anywhere that people go to heaven. What we see in Revelation 21 and 22 is that the heavenly city, the New Jerusalem, comes to earth. We should not think of heaven as a static otherness, which negates creation and receives the human soul. But what people were here when I would say that is, aha, Williams doesn't believe in heaven. That's not what I said, but that's what is heard. Because what they hear is that I am dethroning that very thing which they hold to be the most real, the most true, the most important. Well, here's my thesis, let me get to D here, the heavenly. And the angelic which is its emblem, so we want to talk about angels here, is not antithetical to phenomenal reality. Heaven is not antithetical to earth. Yes, there's oftentimes an important moral tension in Scripture between heaven and earth.

But in the final analysis, you don't affirming one is not to negate the other. Heaven is not antithetical to earth, but is rather a declaration that reality is more than what merely appears before our eyes. The coming of heaven makes the earth more real rather than less real. Because, typically, both heaven and earth are essential to creation. You don't have creation with one of them locked up. You've only got only half of God's intentions. I take that this sense of more, not less, is what C.S. Lewis's overall concern is in his literary use of angels. The angelic brings a heightened sense of reality. A depth of reality. What makes sense of this? I think we need to do a biblical survey and a history of angelology. So, Roman and Mural II, the biblical testimony concerning angels. The primary term for angel in the Old Testament is malach, that's the Hebrew word. And the New Testament is anglos. And both terms mean messenger. Now, obviously, one does not have to be a spirit to be a messenger. So, we shouldn't be surprised that both testaments will use those words to refer to human beings' occasion. Sometimes, the New Testament will help us out here by adding the little descriptive phrase of heaven if it's talking about an angel rather than someone just showing up with the mail. Context is the key here, however. Scripture doesn't bother to treat angels as independent entities in any way. The Bible seems to have no interest whatsoever in an analytic knowledge of angels. There's no taxonomy of angels. There's no history of angels. There's no concentrated reflection upon angels anywhere within the biblical materials.

However, from offhand comments about them, we may conclude a series of propositions about angels. And here we go to be the nature of angels. First of all, here, like us, they are created beings. Angels are not eternal. You see, Psalm 148 and Colossians 1, they had a beginning. Like us, they're absolutely dependent upon God. There is no autonomous existence anywhere. Second, Hebrews 1, verse 4, tells us that they are spirits. They don't naturally belong to that part of the Creator order we call the earthly. Now, we see here immediately one of the major problems. Calling angels spirits, as we already said, that God is a spirit. We suggest that spirit is a genus, a class to which both God and angels belong. But the fact of the matter is, God is as different from angels as he is from us. Angels like us are created. Angels like us are dependent beings. The fact is the term spirit, at least from our perspective, may be capable of definition only by negation. When we say that angel is a spirit, meaning that we mean a non-corporeal or incorporeal person, we don't really mean that spirit is a genus, as in God is made up of spirit. And angels are made up of spirit, some kind of rarefied substance. What might best think of angels has belonged to that part of creation that Colossians 116 calls the invisible. And that distinguishes angels from God as much as associate them. While both God and angels are invisible to us, angels are created and belong to the Creator order. Third, angels can, however, become visible. Lots of beautiful examples here. Think of Gabriel appearing to Mary and to Joseph. The angels at the empty tomb and John chapter 20, the angels at the ascension in Acts chapter 2. One interesting little side statement here, a kid bit here, is that angels are always depicted in Scripture as males. Is this a cultural convention of the thought world of Scripture? Well, possibly. But it does raise the interesting question of the way cultural conventions and expectations fill in that which is obscure, that which is nebulous. And the fact of the matter is, when it comes to angels, there's a lot, even from a biblical perspective, that remains obscure, ambiguous, and nebulous. Some years after the screw tape letters was first published, CS Lewis wrote a new preface for the book, it's a funny thing to read. In that preface, he addressed some of the objections that people had concerning his depictions of the angelic and demonic realms. If you read the book, you know the heaps, that's the whole thing, and a kind of competitive, corporate, managerial hierarchy of business. And he uses that as the metaphor for getting at both the angelic, but especially the demonic. Lewis argued that his depictions had as much right to stand as the one that we see in Renaissance art. You know, the plump infantile cherub, kind of syncretistic bow to a classical Greek cupid. Any argue that his depictions has much right to stand as the, and I'm not quoting him precisely here, but the winged whispish and effeminently wimpy creatures that float around, you know, Victorian culture, which always, when you see Victorian angels, you can tell they were a sexually repressed culture. In fact, Lewis's depictions, shocking as it is, may really be ever so much closer to the biblical reality than either the Renaissance or the Victorian picture. You see, the biblical angel is less likely to come to us as a warm breeze whispering words of comfort, you know, the new age angel. Then he is, I just read this last night with my son, then he is to come, and the first thing he says is what? Don't be frightened, I'm not here to kill you. You know, that's exactly what it is with Mary. That's the biblical angel. When he shows up, it's not here to take your life. So shocking as Lewis's is, it may be closer to the reality. But the fact that we have, when we think of angels, what do we think, we think through the conventions, the literary conventions of our culture. Demons have tales, that's from Milton. Angels have wings, that's from Milton. The fact of the matter is, is nowhere, are we told, the angels have wings, are we? Cherubim have wings, nothing says they're angels. Interesting. Number four, there's a whole herd of them. I don't know what the proper, I don't know if they travel in packs or gaggles or whatever, but there are a lot of biblical texts that talk about the hosts of heaven. Number five, there may even be classes of angels. Maybe even some form of organization. First, that's only in four and Jude nine, both speak of Michael as an archangel. While it's not clear what relationship the Cherubim and Seraphim have to angels, they're spoken of as well. Cherubim are very common in the Old Testament. They minister below the heavenly throne. And if you recall, it was a Cherubim that guarded Eden after Adam was thrown out. Seraphim, I recall, are only mentioned in Isaiah chapter six. They don't appear anywhere else in scripture. Well, what about angelic activity? First of all here, angels seem to be about the business of continually praising and worshipping God. A lot of texts here, Psalm 103, Psalm 148, Revelation 5, 7, 8, Luke chapter 2. Second, angels minister to believers. Hebrews 1, 14 calls angels ministering spirits. We start looking up texts on angels. You find out that one of the activities they seem to enjoy particularly is breaking disciples out of prison. In Acts chapter 5 and Acts 12, they were important in jail breaks. But what about guardian angels? Guardian angels appear for the first time to be an issue in the inter-testamental thought of Jewish theology. And that may in fact stand behind the statement in Acts chapter 12, verse 15, in which the maid confused Peter with his angel. But in Matthew 18, verse 10, we do have the statement that, quote, their angels, their T-H-E-I-R, angels always behold the face of God. I think it's apparent, I like the idea of guardian angels. Fourth, they execute judgments upon the enemies of God. Do I have text there for you for these? Second Kings 19, except there, okay? Exodus 14. Fourth, excuse me, fifth, they reveal and communicate God's message to man. Hebrews 2, 2, speaks of the angels revealing the law to us. Far away, the most significant and recurrent activity ascribed to angels in Scripture is their role as agents of revelation. An angel does just what the name says, he's a messenger. Genesis 22, judges 13, first Kings 19. The relationship of angels to Jesus is an interesting one. They're active at his birth. They're there at the tomb. They're there at the resurrection and the ascension. But the fact of the matter is, outside of making appearances at some of these crucial events in his life, angels play almost no part whatsoever in Jesus' earthly ministry. He does make the statement in the Samuel and John chapter 1 that you ain't seen nothing yet. You're going to see the gates of heaven open and angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man. But we really don't see a lot of angels here. In fact, the most extended biblical text dealing with angels is Hebrews chapter 1, verse 5, through chapter 9, verse 2. But it's a text which makes the particular point that one greater than the angels is here. The text that spends, in all of Scripture, spends the most time talking about angels, relativizes them and says they're not very important. So, matter of fact, it'd be a text that you'd want to send to people who seem to be caught up with the whole issue of angels today. It'd actually be an interesting evangelistic opportunity getting into a discussion with someone about angels. If you're interested in angels, you ought to be paying attention to the one who is greater than the angels. The revelatory role of angels is supplanted by Jesus, the one who is their natural superior. A Romanimeral 3. Let's do a bit of a history here on angelology. And the first character we want to talk about here is Philo of Alexandria, first century. And Philo really participated in the inter-testimental speculation about angels that, again, it was so common within Jewish circles. Philo's cosmos, his view of reality, was shaped a bit like Jacob's ladder in Genesis 28, the dream that Jacob had at Bethel. God stands at the top and angels fill in the ranks between heaven and earth. Again, remember that whole thing we talked about the analogy of beings. Same thing there we're talking about here. We might call it the chain of being, or the ladder of being. We'll call it the ladder of being, for our purposes. Between God and us there are different wrongs. And Philo suggested that, this space is full. There are no empty spaces here. The angels fill in the ranks. And they're part of the larger genius of souls. At the top of this, just like the analogy of being, at the top we have spirit or soul or mind. As Thomas Coins will come to call it, down at the bottom we have matter. Some souls become embodied in Him and flesh, become embodied in matter, while others remain ethereal. The pure souls, those souls that do not get trapped in matter, according to Philo, God calls angels, and they're free to serve as his ministers. B, in our outline here, pseudo-dinesias, a writer from the 6th century, about 500 in Syria. And he picks up on this idea of the chain of being, or the ladder of being, in a book called This Celestial Hierarchy. And he wants to fill all of this in. And interesting what's going on here with this. They're not thinking of, let's kind of clue you in what I'm doing here. They're not thinking of angels functioning. They're not thinking of them in terms of being messengers. They're trying to define them. They're trying to plug them in, trying to, you know, give a kind of metaphysical definition. And where do they fit on the huge map of metaphysics? pseudo-dinesias says, at the top of God, don't try to write this down. I'm going to go through it too quickly. Let anything go. We have self-im, then cherubim, then thrones, dominions, powers, authorities, principalities, archangels, angels, and then us guys. The Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas will take this one step further, again with the same idea from Philo and pseudo-dinesias. In his Summa Theologica, questions 50 through 64, and then 106 through 114, he takes up and develops these issues. Everything you always want to know about angels, but we're afraid to ask, is right there in Thomas's work. What we get here for Thomas is he uses angels in order to demonstrate, at least to his satisfaction, that a mind does not need a body, and that minds are superior to bodies. Why? Because angels don't have bodies. What we have up here is mind. Again, what we have down here is matter, and angels make the case. That materialism is wrong. You can't have minds without no bodies. Oh, also interestingly for Thomas. Angels for him, and for a large part of his discussion, has nothing to a visible revelation. Angels are the objects of a kind of natural knowledge. And again, because he's not looking at them functionally, what do they do in the Bible? He's thinking, what are angels made up of? Where do they live? It's in this context, in medieval theology, that the discussions like how many angels consider them ahead of a pen. I'm not sure that question was ever really considered, by the way. Erasmus jokes that it was, but those kinds of questions were part of the issue of the day. Well, we shouldn't be surprised then. When we come to the Reformation and find a very different attitude toward angels. What we find is that the concern was on function now rather than metaphysical speculation. The medieval project of reconciling angels with the speculative and overly metaphysical ideas of the day would come up against the Protestant objection. And Karlbart said it this way. To look in two directions, that is to say both in terms of theology, scripture, and philosophy in the natural world, is to see straight in neither. If we try to find angels both in the Bible and elsewhere, we shall only see hazy pictures. Our philosophy will spoil our theology and our theology will spoil our philosophy. Again, Thomas Aquinas had held that angels are pure spirits. And this was a burning issue for him and the medieval world to understand where they fit in the nature of things. The Reformers will accept the existence of angels, but they will focus not on these metaphysical questions, they'll focus on functional questions. Indeed, from the very beginning, the Reformation demonstrates almost a certain reticence to speak about angels, to think about them at all. They seem to be part of the medieval Roman Catholic tradition, more than anything else. And Calvin here is a good example. By the way, if you're interested, look at book 1, chapter 14, is Calvin's primary discussion on angels. Well, in fundamental agreement with classical tradition, Calvin said angels exist, their creatures, all things we've said already, their spirits, some fall out of their own evil will, others did not, and their God's messengers. But for Calvin, there are three principles that will control his thinking about angels. The first one is the principle of Solus Cryptura, the Bible alone. The Bible must set the tone, the Bible must even set the form. He doesn't want to be speculative. He asked this question. Quote, what point is there then in anxiously investigating, and what day apart from the stars and planets, the other heavenly hosts begin to exist. And he's talking about the angels here. He's saying all these questions that we have about what are the nature of angels, when did they begin to exist? Where are they? Those kinds of things are irrelevant to us. Angels in Scripture are purely public messengers of salvation. And the goal of Scripture is edification, not mystical or intellectual enlightenment. What knowledge, excuse me, let me restate that. What good would having a speculative knowledge of angels do us? Second for Calvin, his pastoral principle. The Bible is a means by which men and women achieve godliness. And godliness is manifested more in moral terms than in purely intellectual virtue. Calvin pointedly contrasted the speculation of a Dionysius who talked as if he had been to heaven with Paul, who had been to third heaven, but considered talking about it illegal. Third for Calvin, probably the most important. The absolute sovereignty of god, praise is to be given only to god. He said there's a spiritual danger of dwelling on angels. It divides us in our loyalty. The time we spend thinking about considering roomating on angels is time we should be actually meditating on Jesus Christ. The end of both Scripture and the Christian life is to glorify god. Angels exist to reflect that glory as in a mirror. Calvin hints that to spend time on an angel is to abuse the angel because the angel's job is to glorify god. Quote, the whole praise of salvation rests with god alone. For the angels don't bring help to whomever they wish to help. Nor they moved by their own will. They only obey the will of god. In other words, angels are ends, not means. And what is idolatry? It is taking a means as an ends. Well, real quick, the post, post-reformation period. John Milton in the 17th century who wrote Paradise Law seems to be somewhat aberational of Protestant angelology. He seems to bring angels down to this level because he makes them thoroughly embodied. You get a materialistic hierarchy. Angels walk the earth, Frank Paradise much the same thing. On the whole, however, Protestant orthodoxy tends towards a kind of minimalism over the centuries after the Reformation. Almost to the point of secularism. What Bart would later call the angelology of the weary shrug of the shoulders? By that, he meant. Yes, we confess angels exist. But other than that, they don't do anything. We have no real purpose for them. And that attitude will continue on into the enlightenment. So that by the time you get to people like Renee, two people like Renee Decartes, he would simply say, these are fictitious or mythological creatures. And at spending any time on such gobbledygook takes us away from clear thinking about how the real world works. Now, we come from a Carl Bart. Carl Bart certainly wrote, far more about angels than any modern. And far more good to this, even though he's been dead for 30 years, far more good about angels than anyone in this century still to date. He gave some 250 pages of one volume of his church dogmatics to the issue of angels. So we want to talk a little bit here about Carl Bart. Bart suggested first of all that angels are essentially marginal creatures. And this is their glory. Wonderful statement. Again, it makes the point that spending too much time thinking about the angel, Mrs. The Angel's own point. He's pointing you to Christ. Angel stand in the wings of the biblical drama. They're at the burning bush. They're at the annunciation of Mary. They're at the empty tomb. They're at the last trumpet. But they're like the character in the Shakespearean play. You know, the sword bearer, the spear bearer, they oftentimes appear to be merely window dressing. They are necessarily legendary figures standing with flaming sword at the boundary. Here's what we start to get into it at the boundary between history and revelation between poetry and prose. Bart's angelology focused on two roles of angels. We want to talk about them for a moment. First of all, they are representatives of heaven. And secondly, they are witnesses to the divine glory. First of all, representatives of heaven. Heaven is the mysterious counterpart. It is the wince of all God's words and works. Again, a fully functional view of creation needs both heaven and earth. It's the point, and I think quite rightly, that throughout the biblical narrative heaven leans in upon us. One of the ways we evangelicals have vulgarized heaven is that we've turned the whole thing into this kind of affair. Heaven's up there. We're down here. And there's no connection. The only way there's any connection is we've got to die. As we are right now, heaven does not relate. But what we see in scripture is that the powers of heaven are coming to earth. The norms of heaven are coming to earth. We are called to do the will of God on earth as it is in heaven. And in the final scenes of the biblical story, heaven itself comes to earth. Heaven seeks to be present. And the fact that heaven leans in upon us keeps us from secularizing the creation order keeps us from pushing God and his kingdom, God and his norms, God and his ways out of our lives. And as inhabitants of heaven, who show up once in a while, standing in the corner holding the spear, angels are bearers of that mystery. They're heralds of the mystery of God. By their very presence, they whisper to us what you see is not all there is. But it suggests that a world without angels would be a world without wonder. And a theology without angels is a theology without awe. In the end, if our theology can't accommodate the mystery, it will fail to communicate God to us. That's marvelous. That's definitely marvelous. That's a good warning to us, reformed, rationalistic, theologians. Pascal once said that when human beings face a cosmos shorn of mystery, we can only say, quote, the eternal silence of these infinite spaces fill us with dread. But to entertain angels is to let that silence become, again, the tremendous mystery of creation that the medieval world thought that it was and that we've lost. But we need to be careful. We need to remember that we are seeking to speak, speaking to think about inexpressible things. Things that man is not permitted to tell, as Paul was in second Corinthians 124, we must beware of a presumptuous knowledge which in the end tells more than it can know. It's often a case, I think. I just got done just this last week reading two different books on heaven. And I came away convinced that both authors must have had revelations because both of them said more about heaven than the Bible does. And oftentimes when we talk about angels, we end up doing the same thing, we end up speaking far beyond the biblical materials. Well, angels are not simply representatives of heaven. They are also as Bart pointed out, witnesses to divine activity. And I want to start by reading this for a long quotation with you. Top of page 94 in your outline. Their high advantage is the advantage of the angels. Their high advantage in relation to human creation is also their disadvantage. They have no definable being in relation to it. They don't exist in act independently or autonomously. They have no history or aims or achievements of their own. They have no profile or character, no mind or will of their own. They have all these things yet not as their own possession, but wholly and exclusively as God is so rich in relation to them. They are themselves only a possession, his possession. The lowest creature of earth has an advantage over even the highest of the angels to the extent that while it belongs to God, it may also belong to itself. But conversely, even the least of the heavenly hosts is more than the most perfect of earthly creatures to the extent that it belongs fully to God and in no sense to itself. Like Calvin, an extremely functional approach toward angels. There is nothing one can say, as far as Bart is concerned, about angels ontologically. Sometimes even in his work, angels appear to be nothing more than personifications of divine providence. Angels are known only in the context of their serving, the communication of God's second statement here. There can be no question of any special, autonomous or abstract experience of angels in and of themselves. The subjects of this kind of experience could not be the angel of God, but only ideas or ghosts or figments of the imagination or even demons. And therefore, the opposites of the genuine angels, and quote, again, make the point that I've made already that angels do not draw attention to themselves. They bear the messengers. The biblical function of angels is one of divine agency, undue concentration upon them, distracts us from God. However, I will come back and state it again that an important function of the angelic realm, and Bart says this too, is that it reminds us not to fall into the trap of thinking our reality is all there is. There is a richness of toriotic, that's beyond our can. In conclusion here, C.S. Lewis said there are two equal and opposite errors that we fall into about angels and demons. One is to disbelieve in them altogether, the other is to believe, and then to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.