§ 42. This conception is indigenous to the Old Testament and has passed over into the New. It contains in itself nothing impossible and does not conflict with the basis of the religious consciousness in general. But at the same time it never enters into the sphere of Christian doctrine proper. It can, therefore, continue to have its place in Christian language without laying on us the duty of arriving at any conclusion with regard to its truth.
- The narratives of Abraham, Lot, Jacob, of the call of Moses and Gideon and the prophecy of Samson, bear the stamp very clearly of what we are accustomed to call ‘myth.’ Indeed, in many of them God Himself and the Angels of the Lord are so interchanged that the whole can be thought of as a Theophany in which the appearance perceived by the senses need not be that of a being independent and different from God. In this indefinite form the idea is older than these narratives, perhaps even older than the narrated events. That they are not exclusively Hebraic in the narrower sense seems clear from many other traces, such as the history of Balaam. Poetical representations of many’ kinds in the Psalms and the Prophets lead to the same conclusion; anything can be called an angel that is a bearer of a divine message. So that sometimes definite individual beings are to be conceived under this term and sometimes not. Of the former we have scarcely any other explanation to give than that in general different peoples have imagined many kinds of spiritual beings in different forms because of a consciousness of the power of spirit over matter; and the less this problem is solved the more that consciousness gives rise to a tendency to suppose there is more spirit than that manifested in the human race and different from that in the living animal, whose powers and mechanical instincts with their own power over matter, must themselves as matter be brought within our power.
Now we, to whom the majority of the heavenly bodies are known, satisfy this longing by the familiar supposition that most or all of these are filled with animated beings of varying grades. Previously there was no alternative but to people either the earth or the heavens with hidden and spiritual beings. The Jewish people seem to have decidedly adhered to the latter method, especially after the highest Being came to be thought of also as the King of the people, who therefore must have servants around Him to send as He chose to every part of His kingdom and to allow them to share in every branch of administration. This is certainly the most developed conception of the angels. Consequently we must distinguish them clearly from our conception of spiritual life developed on other planets according to their nature and in association with an organism, since the Biblical idea cannot be connected with this, but is something quite different.1 We ought rather to think of them as spiritual beings, not belonging to any definite heavenly body, who could embody themselves temporarily, according to their tasks, in the manner in which they have appeared from time to time in our world. And obviously we know far too little of the interstellar spaces, as also of the possible relations between spirit and body, to deny outright the truth of such a notion. Indeed, if we regard the appearance of such beings as something miraculous, this is not so much because we must necessarily hold that such a temporary incursion of alien beings into the order of our lives would interrupt the course of nature, but much more because (in Christianity generally and also to a great extent in the Old Testament) their appearance is associated with special points of development and revelation. In the New Testament angels appear at the Annunciation of Christ and of His forerunner and at Christ’s Birth in narratives of a more or less poetical character which lie outside the proper field of the Gospel tradition. This is true also in some measure of the strengthening angel in Gethsemane, with respect to whom at any rate no witness is quoted. In the case of the Resurrection and the Ascension, as well as the conversion of Cornelius and the liberation of Peter, it is possible to doubt whether angels or men are meant. In the account of Philip, the expressions ‘angel of the Lord’ and ‘spirit’ alternate as they do in the Old Testament. But after this angels disappear altogether even from the Apostolic history.
- Everywhere, however, in our Holy Scriptures the angels are assumed; but nowhere is anything taught respecting them. Apart from the usual prophetic and poetical language in descriptions of the Last Day,2 Christ Himself refers to them only in His warning against despising little ones3 and in connexion with Peter’s useless defence of Him.4 If we want to take this as definite teaching we must also put forward the doctrine that children (and perhaps every individual) have special angels, that the angels behold the face of God, and that they can be employed in legions.5 The same applies to the Apostolic passages if we refer to angels all the obscure and ambiguous expressions about thrones and principalities.6 Even in the Epistle to the Hebrews7 the angels are not so much subjects of dogmatic teaching as mediums for such teaching. The writer maintains that Christ is more exalted than all the angels, as they are mentioned in the Old Testament, in the Prophets, and the Psalms; to the angelic appearances in the New Testament there is no reference. Christ and the Apostles might have said all these things without having had any real conviction of the existence of such beings or any desire to communicate it, just as everyone adopts popular ideas and makes use of them in discussing other things, as, for example, we might talk of ghosts or fairies, although these ideas had no definite sort of relation to our actual convictions. We do not mean to suggest what is usually understood by ‘accommodation,’ which is often taken to mean adapting oneself to prevailing ideas whilst holding opposite convictions.