Unaware of Angels

Marcia Seglestein has a commentary on the topic at OneNewsNow, comparing what the Evangelical Billy Graham's book about angels with Roman Catholic Peter Kreeft's book. She notes that "modern-day accounts of angels are impossible to confirm." I'd add that while empirical scientific study and confirmation is lacking, there are so many eyewitness accounts from all times around the world that I think the evidence is there for any one with an open mind. Yes, and what about fairies and leprechauns? Well, exactly: How many people do you know first hand or even second hand who swear they've encountered those creatures (herding unicorns?). With angels it's an entirely different matter.

Comments

[Jordan]

Indeed. What you say is even more striking if you include the reality of, ahem, fallen angels as well.

[Hunter Baker]

On that score, read Malachi Martin's Hostage to the Devil. Just not at bedtime.

[Puddleglum]

How about if leprechauns and fairies really are angels? I think it's Tim Keller who makes the case that angels are like the elves in LOTR. These things may well enter into the popular imagination and even some ethnic cultures because they actually correspond to real experiences.

I'm not sure about any of this. I'm just sayin'

P-glum

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

I read "Angels and Demons" before "Da Vinci Code" and thought it was a far more entertaining story, historical inaccuracies notwithstanding.

[Maggie]

In my life it's been the opposite - I know people who claim to have encountered faeries, but I haven't heard any true angel stories.

Fallen-angel stories, on the other hand . . .

I guess, in a conquered land, one WOULD encounter the SS more often than the resistance. Sigh.

[Kamilla]

Ah well, fallen angels, yes. I think Chuck Missler's theory that "extra terrestrial" beings are, in reality, the return of the Nephilim is interesting.

I believe I've encountered angels twice in my life. On took the form of a man from Ghana who appeared on a train in Ukraine. The young man, who said he was a medical student, spoke Russian and English and not only saved us from being thrown off the train but purchased our linens for the night. He got off the train in the same Ukrainian town as we did, said he was visiting friends, but no one seems to have seen him again.

The second angel I didn't see. I was driving back down to Denver from the mountains late at night and, just at the point on I-70 I hate the most, hit a patch of black ice. I was headed straight for the concrete barrier at over 60 mph with no way to avoid the collision. Before I knew what had happened, I was headed up Floyd Hill as if nothing untoward had never occurred.

No way that occured without miraculous intervention.

Kamilla

[Janet]

"modern-day accounts of angels are impossible to confirm." Does she mean that ancient accounts of angels are possible to confirm?

AMDG, Janet C.

[Tony Esolen]

Um, how could one confirm the appearance of an incorporeal being? Why is it that journalists never trouble to find out anything about what they write about?

[Jordan]

Are angels incorporeal? I guess a lot of them could dance on the head of a pin if that's the case...

[Tony Esolen]

The old canard about scholasticism -- arguing about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin -- was a bit of unintendedly ironic bigotry from the Enlightenment. The question, after all, is exactly analogous to one's asking about the ontological status of Newton's infinitesimals.

Milton believed that angels were corporeal, but he is in the minority. Thomas Aquinas argued, in fact, that because angels were not individuated by matter, each one is his own genus, each a unique manifestation of the divine intellect. "Kinds" of angels, then, exist not because there are genera of angels, but because of the duties they are given, or because of the nature of the vision of God they are given.

[Jordan]

I agree re: the "canard". The question is an important one when understood in context, e.g. whether or not angels are corporeal beings, a question itself whose answer will bear relevance to understandings of theophanies in the Old Testament and so on.

It's not clear to me that because a) Aquinas thought angels weren't corporeal, and b) it is the "minority" position, that c) angels aren't corporeal. Not that I don't respect Thomas' opinion...

[Rob G]

In Eastern Christianity two of the traditional names for the angels are the "incorporeals" and "the bodiless hosts" or "bodiless powers." These terms appear not only in Orthodox theology but in liturgical usage as well. I imagine that there is similar, if not identical, usage in the RC Church.

[Sally Thomas]

I think that's right, if the Baltimore Catechism is any indication (as I imagine it is). My kids and I were just talking about that the other day. The catechism defines angels as "spirit without body" (whereas man is both body and soul).

And I've heard them called "pure intelligence," though I'm not learned enough to know where that phrase comes from.

A friend and I had an angel encounter similar to Kamilla's: we were driving through Arkansas together one dark and stormy night, and we were low on gas (because we were stupid college students who didn't think to, like, look at the gas gauge as we were pulling out of Memphis).

In the middle of pretty much nowhere, the car ran out of gas. Just as it was stuttering to a halt, we saw a light, which we were able to coast towards -- it was a gas station, on the outskirts of a place called Amagon, and it was all lit up and inexplicably full of people, who looked as though they were having a party of some kind. We got gas and continued on our way without thinking too much about it, though the festival atmosphere in the midst of all that darkness and rain did strike us as kind of strange.

It was only later, when we recounted this story, that members of my friend's family, who all live in Arkansas and are familiar with that town, said, "That gas station's been closed for ten years."

Whooooo . . . . weeeeeeeeiiiiirrrrrrd . . .

So we've always referred to those people, whoever they were, as the "Amagon Angels." They certainly seemed good.

Oddly enough, too, neither of us was Roman Catholic at the time, but we both are now.

[Don]

If angels are incorporeals, can they deduct wings and halos and mileage between Heaven and earth as a business expense?

[Margaret]

If angels are understood to be corporeal, why did Jesus distinguish himself from a bodiless spirit by eating and having them handle him?

[Tony Esolen]

Jesus' eating after the resurrection is one of those moments in Scripture that explode in meaning -- and that cannot be explained by lame appeals to cultural expectations. It's the LAST thing that somebody in Asia Minor preaching to Greeks would want to present. Same thing with the agony in the garden; try preaching that to Stoics. Same thing with Christ's cry from the cross. Same thing with the YHWH from the burning bush. Same thing with the command not to make any graven images ... We are too used to these verses.

[Rob G]

"If angels are incorporeals, can they deduct wings and halos and mileage between Heaven and earth as a business expense?"

According to Quasi-Areopagus the Dionysite, in his magnum opus "The Divine Names and Other Italian Fun Songs," angels enjoy tax-exempt status.

[Brian]

If my memory serves me still was it not the common opinion of the early fathers that angels were composed of a material but invisible ethereal substance. Reason being that only God was pure Spirit. The thinking was that there was no determinant to prevent a pure spirit from being infinite, so angels cannot be pure spirits, but only God is. The Creed has it that God created all things "visible and invisible," rather than material and spiritual. Then again how did these fathers explain the disembodied soul, which would have to exist in a spirit state?

Graham's angelogy is extremely deficient. He grants nothing to them that is not in scripture, so philosophy is out. He even held that they have not the same destiny as men because Christ is not their Savior. It is true that the angels were not redeemed; but the good angels were saved by faith in Jesus, such is the traditional view. Saved from what? A finite destiny of perfect happiness without the Beatific Vision? The Psalms have the command: "Let all the angels of God adore Him (Christ)."

Sally Thomas' story is fantastic. I believe it.

[Wonders for Oyarsa]

"Kinds" of angels, then, exist not because there are genera of angels, but because of the duties they are given, or because of the nature of the vision of God they are given.

How do devils fit into this picture?

[Tony Esolen]

Individual ruins of what they had been created to be, them demons....

[Clifford Simon]

I traveled a rather long way to meet my gf for the first time, and we were in a town I didn't know. We were standing in an ATM line outdoors because I had run out of cash. She, as gf's do, was dangling in my arms, then gave me a big conspicuous kiss on my cheek.

While we were still waiting in the line, the stranger behind us struck up a conversation. "Aww... just married?" he asked my gf.

"No," she said.

"Engaged?"

"No."

"What, then?"

"We're just friends."

Well, he couldn't believe that! Disturbed and incredulous, he asked how it could be.

Later I said, "Honey, that man was an angel sent to test your heart and refine you and deliver you to me." And we were engaged soon after.

(Well, he couldn't have been anything other than a human being... and of course you have to go to a place where the folks *would* be incredulous. But I still wonder whether an incorporeal angel was invisibly compelling the guy ;) )

[Beth]

A number of years ago as I was going through a difficult time, I was awakened early one morning while it was still dark by the feel of a hand stroking my head. At first I was a little irritated, thinking my husband was waking me up when I wanted to sleep. But I realized the hand was positioned so that the person would have been standing to the side of the bed on my right, not on the left where my husband continued to sleep. I not only felt the hand, but because I wear earplugs at night, I could hear the amplified sound of the stroking. I was more curious than anything, so I reached up to see if I could feel an arm, but there was nothing there.
I believe the Lord sent an angel to comfort me, and to tell me that He was thinking of me in my struggle, and I'll always be grateful for that.