Chapter One
ANGELMANIA!
A lot of people get carried away with angels, but we still
need to think about them.
An awful lot of what people say about angels is nonsense.
For centuries people have entertained the wildest speculations
about both angels and demons. We've all heard the question
about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, a question
that for many of us epitomizes the fanciful, irrelevant nature of
doctrine. "Who knows and who cares?" we think when we hear a
question like that.
A Brief History of Angelology
The study of angelology (the doctrine of angels) played a surprisingly
big role in medieval thought. The basic textbook on the subject
was a book called Celestial Hierarchy, purported to be authored
by Dionysius, an Athenian converted to faith in Christ through the
preaching of the apostle Paul (Acts 17:34). Medieval theologians
generally accepted the book's claim at face value and consequently
treated it as an authoritative guide to what the apostles believed
about angels. Modern scholars, though, uniformly agree that the
book was written centuries later, and so they refer to its author
as "Pseudo-Dionysius." We'll talk more about this angel book in
chapter 12.
Angelology reached its heyday in the thirteenth century, when
Europe's most brilliant minds wrote extensively on the subject and
university students (e.g., at Paris) were required to take courses in
it. Two thirteenth-century theologians epitomized that era's interest
in angels and developed the most thorough, sophisticated systems
of angelology the world has ever seen. Thomas Aquinas (1225-74),
widely regarded as the most brilliant Christian theologian and philosopher
during the long stretch of centuries from the fall of the
Roman empire to the Renaissance, was known as the Angelic Doctor.
A member of the Benedictine Order, Aquinas devoted a good bit
of his classic, multivolume work Summa Theologiae to angels.
Aquinas's older contemporary Bonaventure (1217-74) was
called the Seraphic Doctor because he was a member of the Franciscans.
They were known as the Seraphic Order because Christ
was reported to have appeared to Saint Francis in the form of a
seraph. Bonaventure himself was said to have been visited by an
angel, and he interpreted the sixth angel of the book of Revelation
as a reference to Francis.
Aquinas, Bonaventure, and other theologians of the time
sought to answer a number of perplexing questions about angels.
They tried to explain when and where the angels were created, to
what rank of angels the Devil had belonged and why he fell, what
each of the different kinds of angels does, and similar minutiae
Some of the lesser lights of the period got especially carried away
with speculations on such matters. One thirteenth-century cleric,
Albert the Great, opined that there were 266,613,336 good angels
and exactly half as many fallen angels - 133,306,668 in number - making
the total number of angelic beings 399,920,004. Most
medieval theologians, however, including Aquinas and Bonaventure,
argued that the number of angels is incalculable and admitted
that some things about angels were beyond our ability to attain
certain knowledge.
MORTIMER J. ADLER
The myth that intense discussion focused on the number of angels that
might dance on a pinhead is simply one of the many modern inventions
contrived to make a mockery of mediaeval thought.
In fairness, we should acknowledge that medieval theologians
did some good thinking about angels and demons - and contrary
to popular myth, they did not debate the angels-dancing-on-a-pin
question. They did debate whether angels occupy space at all and
whether angels move in or through space. These questions may also
seem arcane, and they probably go beyond what we can know with
any certainty, but they were serious questions that had some bearing
on the larger question of just what kind of beings the angels are.
In reaction to the excesses of late medieval theology, John
Calvin, one of the leading Protestant Reformers of the sixteenth
century, threw buckets of cold water on angelology. Calvin urged
Christians to be wise and "leave those empty speculations which
idle men have taught concerning the nature, orders, and numbers
of angels." To this day angels are given much more "press time" in
Catholic theology than in most Protestant theological traditions.
That hasn't stopped some Protestants, however, from exercising
their own imaginations on the subject of angels.
The scientific revolutions of the past four centuries actually began
to erode belief in spiritual beings among educated people, especially
in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries. Belief in
angels - let alone adherence to extravagant views about them - came
to be regarded in many circles as superstitious nonsense As
late as 1982 Mortimer J. Adler, a prominent American philosopher
who actually believed in angels, commented, "It would appear to be
a dead subject, of interest only to historians, and of limited interest
even to them." Even in 1990 Malcolm Godwin could write a book
declaring angels to be "an endangered species."
How quickly things change. The year that Godwin's book was
published, interest in angels, which was already building, exploded
in America. On the leading edge of the angel craze was Sophy Burnham'sA Book about Angels, one of the bestselling books of 1990. A
Gallup study reported that belief in angels among US teenagers rose
from 64 percent in 1978 to 76 percent in 1992. In 1993 Touched
by an Angel (remarkable, it should be noted, for its restraint in its
portrayal of angels) began its ten-year run on prime-time network
television. Angelmania was upon us.
STEPHEN F. NOLL
People are now talking about angels. But does anyone think about them
seriously?
The media seemed to reach its angel saturation point toward
the end of the 1990s, but popular interest in angels remains high.
According to Barna Research, by the year 2000 over four-fifths
of Americans believed that angels exist and that they influence
people's lives. Belief in angelic influence, of course, is what makes
this subject important. If angels do exist and influence human lives
today, what can we know about them?
The Roads Not to Be Taken
Two all-too-easy approaches to this subject seem to grab many if
not most people. The first easy way is to take an attitude of uncritical
acceptance toward any information about angels that comes our
way, or at least any that appeals to us. Angels are fascinating and
mysterious creatures, and any insight we can gain about them can
be exciting. Unfortunately, it is impossible for everything people
say about angels to be true. Angels are reported to have communicated
revelations from God that started religions as diverse as
Islam and Mormonism. Some angels are said to have announced
that only one religion is true, while other angels are said to have
informed the world that all religions are valid. Some people believe
angels protect everybody; others believe angels only protect people
who have the right kind of faith.
Not everyone sees it this way. Many of the most popular writers
on angels take the view that anything goes. Terry Lynn Taylor tells
her readers, "Get used to the idea that there are no `right' or `wrong'
opinions - only opinions that are different or similar. There are no
right or wrong religions, no right or wrong ways to God." Frankly,
this is nonsense - and we mean that quite literally. Taylor's claim
that there are no right or wrong opinions or religions is itself an
opinion; and it is either right (something we should accept) or
wrong (something we should not accept). More precisely, it is either
true or false. The opinion that no opinion is right or wrong is nonsense
because, if it's right, it's neither right nor wrong!
Later in the same book, Taylor asserts, "The best measure of
truth is what you feel in your heart is true." On a surface level,
it is contradictory to claim that there are no right or wrong opinionsand that there is something called truth. However, both claims
amount to the same thing: you should accept whatever you feel in
your heart and not concern yourself with whether it matches with
someone else's "opinion" of what is right or wrong. This is a prescription
for self-delusion. We are, of course, under no obligation
to accept the opinions of others. However, if we want to know the
truth, we will listen to others and put our own opinions to the test.
What we "feel in our hearts" might, after all, turn out to be false.
Similarly bad advice is Karen Goldman's suggested approach to
reading her own book on angels: "Eat it all up, and spit out whatever
you don't want." We need to be more discriminating in the
restaurant of ideas than to swallow whatever tastes good.
We also need to avoid uncritical, gullible thinking about the
Devil. Belief in the existence of the Devil and his helpers, the demons,
is also widespread, though not as prevalent as belief in angels. But
some people give the Devil entirely too much credit. They blame
almost everything bad that happens - including anything bad that they do - on him. Rather than viewing the Devil as a simple explanation
for everything that
goes wrong, we need to find
a way of recognizing what is
truly demonic and what is the
result of other factors.
The other oversimplistic
attitude that some of us
are inclined to take toward angels and demons is an unmeasured
skepticism. It is understandable for thinking persons, disturbed by
the excesses of popular teaching and lore about angels, to view the
whole idea with what the mid-twentieth century Swiss theologian
Karl Barth called a "weary shrug of the shoulders." It is easier to
deny the existence of angels altogether, or at least to deny that we
can know anything about them, than to sort through all of the
conflicting and hyped claims.
The easiest path, though, is often not the right one. If angels are
poised to help us, we may be missing out if we don't pay attention
to them. And if demons pose a threat to us, we ignore them at our
peril. The smart thing to do is to find out what we can about both
angels and demons and determine what, if any, change in our lives
we ought to make in the light of that knowledge.
In this book we will be taking a hard look at many popular
notions about spiritual beings. We will not try to address every controversial
question about angels and demons; instead, we will be
glad if we succeed in setting forth a good, helpful way of thinking
about the subject. Our goal is to discern the truth about angels and
demons and to dispel much of the nonsense about them that is so
prevalent in our society. Our method is to think critically - neither
gullibly accepting nor casually ignoring what others say, but giving
careful, reflective consideration to the subject. Some of the things
that we have learned about angels and demons, frankly, surprised
us. They may surprise you as well.
SENSE
You can't believe everything you hear about angels.
NONSENSE
You can just ignore the whole subject of angels. (Continues.)
