What are angels?
Dear Ann,
I can tell you something about where and when the concept of angels developed in western Christianity, but I am not sure whether I, or anyone else, can ever define the word. Nor do I know whether these described beings are real or are figments of our imagination. I hear people talk about their “guardian angels” watching over them and I have no idea of what those words means to them. All lives seem to me to have to navigate through pain and tragedy with some regularity, so having a “guardian angel” does not seem to me to be of much help. We use the word “angel” rather loosely. I am quite convinced, for example, that I married an angel and that our four daughters are angels, to say nothing of our three granddaughters, but I suggest that such a statement is more the description of a subjective feeling that it is an objective statement of reality.
The word “angel” itself comes from a transliterated Greek word, which means literally a messenger. Any crucial advice that one got from a messenger came to be thought of as a message from God. Then the messenger himself or herself began to be thought of as speaking with the voice of God. In time a supernatural dimension was added to the meaning of the messenger and thus he or she came to be called “an angel.” To the degree that these creatures were literalized and then defined as if they were themselves supernatural represented an alien influence on Judaism and actually compromised the Jewish claim that divinity was monotheistic.
In Jewish mythology, Satan was an angel serving in God’s court in the book of Job, but later he came to be thought of as a “fallen angel,” and ultimately as “the devil,” which reflected, I believe, the Zoroastrian dualism of ancient Persia.
If I think of angels at all, I think of them as nothing more than human beings through whom I receive enlightenment or insight, which is so valuable to me that I call it a gift from God. That is not a supernatural assertion so much as it is a suggestion that understanding, insight and second sight comes to us from beyond ourselves.
I hope these random thoughts help. I am so engaged in the task of dealing with the reality of human concerns in this world that I spend little time trying to discover truth about beings that are not human or who are thought to inhabit a realm that is not of this world.
I loved doing the series of lectures in Toronto at the College Street United Church of Canada recently. Thank you for being there.
~John Shelby Spong
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