This is the 18th blog in this series which began with the blog Being and Becoming Human. The previous blog is The Human Being: A Spiritual Animal (II).
The popularity of angels and angel worship has varied through the history of Christianity
This is the 18th blog in this series which began with the blog Being and Becoming Human. The previous blog is The Human Being: A Spiritual Animal (II).
The popularity of angels and angel worship has varied through the history of Christianity and the various cultures which embraced Christian theology. Angels have at times been admire or feared as beings greater than humans, even seen as divine beings. We see this especially in some of the pseudopigrphical works written by Jewish writers and then, after the time of Christ, by Christian writers, between 300BCE and 300AD. In writings from the earliest centuries of Christianity some ancients when first encountering the Gospel, thought Christ or the Holy Spirit were some kind of angels. (In the earliest days of Islam, Mohammad also seems to have equated God’s spirit with an angel). The canonical Scriptures are more reserved in their comments about angels often portraying them mostly as God’s messengers (which is what the word “angel” itself means) but not as gods (see Psalm 104:3-4 and Hebrews 1:7). Still, angels, because they are bodiless powers or spirit beings, were thought of as being “closer” to God than humans whose physical nature was sometimes seen as a barrier between humans and God. (Angelology was further popularized in 6th Century Christianity by the writings of the author now often called Pseudo-Dionysius and who may well have been a student of a Syrian pagan philosopher).
Early Christians came to understand that in fact the angels were not superior to humans, for when God decides to enter into His creation, God comes not as an angel but rather becomes incarnated in the human, Jesus Christ. “For indeed He does not give aid to angels, but He does give aid to the seed of Abraham“ (Hebrews 2:16). As the Letter to the Hebrews proclaims about the incarnation, saying, God’s Son ….
“having become so much better than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name than they. For to which of the angels did He ever say:
“You are My Son, Today I have begotten You”?
“I will be to Him a Father, And He shall be to Me a Son”?
But when He again brings the firstborn into the world, He says:
“Let all the angels of God worship Him.” (Hebrews 1:4-6)
In Hebrews 2:5-9 we read:
For He has not put the world to come, of which we speak, in subjection to angels. But one testified in a certain place, saying:
“What is man that You are mindful of him, Or the son of man that You take care of him? You have made him a little lower than the angels; You have crowned him with glory and honor, And set him over the works of Your hands. You have put all things in subjection under his feet.”
For in that He put all in subjection under him, He left nothing that is not put under him. But now we do not yet see all things put under him. But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.”
Humans and angels are both creatures made by God. Angels are bodiless powers of heaven, but are not gods, are not omnipotent, nor are they eternal beings. Christ Himself testifies that it is humans whom God the Fathers calls gods, not the angels (John 10:34, quoting Psalm 82:6). And though Christ says in the resurrection, the resurrected will be like angels, he is using a metaphor and does not say we become angels, for humans do not lose their humanity in being resurrected from the dead (Matthew 22:30).
Metropolitan Kallistos describes the difference between humanity and angels:
“Body, soul and spirit, three in one, man occupies a unique position in the created order.
According to the Orthodox world-view, God has formed two levels of created things: first the ‘noetic’, ‘spiritual’ or ‘intellectual’ level, and secondly, the material or bodily. On the first level God formed the angels, who have no material body. On the second level he formed the physical universe—the galaxies, stars and planets, with the various types of mineral, vegetable and animal life. Man, and man alone, exists on both levels at once. Through his spirit or spiritual intellect he participates in the noetic realm and is a companion of the angels; through his body and his soul, he moves and feels and thinks, he eat and drinks, transmuting food into energy and participating organically in the material realm, which passes within him through his sense-perceptions.
Our human nature is thus more complex than the angelic, and endowed with richer potentialities. Viewed in this perspective, man is not lower