I recommend Gregory Boyd's study God at War for its survey of Biblical and other material relating to the holy angels and also to "princes" (as in the Book of Daniel) that may obstruct God's good purposes. If you should read it, it would be interesting to see what you think of it.
27 July 2011 at 04:08
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Having recently read Peter Kreeft's excellent book on Angels and Demons
And amplified by a comment of Kristor from last week+, I am becoming convinced that angels - traditionally understood - are probably the conceptual and imaginative key to re-animating the world.
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(Tolkien may be of some help in recovering this ancient perspective of ranks of angels and fallen-angels (i.e. demons); since the Valar including Morgoth are gods/ creative senior angels below the One God; and there are ranks of lesser angels including Sauron, Saruman and Gandalf.)
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As CS Lewis proved on many occasions, all language is metaphorical - never wholly literal (this also applies to science); and angels are the way that early Christians were able to comprehend the organization of the universe; since an un-mediated God is apparently too abstract for human comprehension.
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Aside from general ignorance of the correct (pre-modern) understanding of the nature of angels; the only thing that stands in the path of such recovery of the living universe by means of angels is not reason, nor logic, nor history, nor theology, nor philosophy - and certainly not science - but the encultured and ingrained snigger of the ruling elites, that I know so well myself - an 'argument' which is apparently more powerful than all of the above.
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+ Excerpt from Kristor's comment:
Christianity and Judaism do not say that there are no gods, but that, despite their great power, we should not worship them, because they are not God.
Only God is God; as the Nicene Creed has it, He is the God [of the] gods. Only the God of the gods is properly worshipped.
To make this clear, Christianity calls the gods “angels.”
The angels run the world as God’s ambassadors and agents. There are uncounted billions of them, one (at least) for each created thing: each spring, each tree, each man has a guardian angel.
Our native sense that the world is alive is then the sense that it is full of angels, and that the natural things about us are somehow thoroughly alive to the influence of the angels.
"The necessity of angels"
1 Comment -
I recommend Gregory Boyd's study God at War for its survey of Biblical and other material relating to the holy angels and also to "princes" (as in the Book of Daniel) that may obstruct God's good purposes. If you should read it, it would be interesting to see what you think of it.
27 July 2011 at 04:08