But Do I Believe in Angels?

I’ll be honest, my post “I Don’t Believe in Demons” led to the single biggest day of traffic on this blog since I left Beliefnet.  It’s intriguing to me that so many people are so interested in this topic — more even than in issues of sexuality in the church, which is always a traffic generator.  There were a lot of gratifying comments under that post from thoughtful folks who said that they pretty much agree with me, but they’d never really known how to talk about the issue.

There are also a lot of folks who really want to hear me discuss this issue with Greg Boyd, so I’m working on a chat with him about this that we can record and make public.

The obvious follow-up question to my thoughts about demons is, What Do I Think about Angels?

Well, to be honest, I tend to think the same thing about angels as I do about demons — that they don’t exist.  The problem is that the Bible has so much more reference to angels than it does to demons.  The Book of Revelation alone has scores of verses about what angels do, etc.  John the Elder, though a master of hyperbolic and metaphoric language, seems very convinced about the existence of angels and their role in the eschatological kingdom of God.

I guess the biggest question vexing me in all of these ponderings about angels and demons is this: What is the place of humankind in the economy of God? Maybe there are, as some cosmologists suggest, many other planets that are inhabited by rational beings.  That would make all the difference for me.  Because if there aren’t — if human beings are truly the crown of God’s creation — then I just struggle to believe that there are spiritual beings like angels and demons that occupy some kind of metaphysical middle ground between God and humans.

If, however, there are other rational beings out there — that is, beings that are cognizant of the possibility of God and therefore able to have a relationship with God — then all bets are off about the likelihood of angels and demons (and the Nephalim!).