Thinking about the “things visible and invisible” of the Nicene Creed has resulted in several posts about angels and their “essential” relation to the visible world. “Essential” is Karl Rahner’s word. I’ve been trying to flesh that out with Walter Wink’s and my own suggestions. Wink discusses angels primarily, though not only, as the “within” of the products of human history—communities, institutions, established roles, ideologies, and such. I have looked also to the area Wink passes over too quickly, the... Read more

Scientists are hard at work investigating the question, Is there life on other planets. They are finding Earth-like planets and listening for radio signals from possible alien civilizations. Imagine the excitement if another intelligent “life form” is discovered, although travel and even communication back and forth will be completely impractical. I suspect part of the excitement is due to the fact that we feel otherwise so misplaced in the cosmos. In the present scientific picture of the world, it’s practically... Read more

Walter Wink, a Methodist theologian and Bible scholar, has helped modern minds appreciate the New Testament’s language about spiritual reality. Most often for this side of reality we use the word “angels.” It sounds like beings separate from the physical world, interacting with that world occasionally but not by their very nature. In the New Testament, however, the spiritual and the material are close together. Wink sums up the New Testament’s various words for this angelic reality with the phrase:... Read more

The highly symbolic angels of Church teaching and lore give us a clue to the meaning of that abundant reality that the Creed refers to with its “things visible and invisible.” But people have taken angels literally and the result is that angels no longer challenge us with the mystery of one reality. We too easily imagine another, invisible world when this one seems too much for us. We’ve domesticated angels into themes for country western songs. Our angel stories are... Read more

Angels and devils don’t usually figure in our calculations about how to solve our problems. We live in a largely disenchanted world, as my last post described. But to settle for that disenchanted world is to give away too much. This post takes a cue from a 1960’s civil rights activist. At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, Fannie Lou Hamer spoke up against racism in American politics. She described a struggle that was not so much against flesh and blood... Read more

This post is an introduction to a series about angels, and it says approximately nothing about angels. Instead, it looks at a world from which angels, or anything spiritual below God, seem to have been removed. It sets the stage for a re-entrance of angels in a more biblical, and more relevant, sense than we usually imagine. If you have fallen out of love with angels in the course of your grown-up years, you might find yourselves, like me, liking... Read more