Angels and Demons

Both words are ordinary words for a job. The Hebrew malak and the Greek angelos mean messenger, and both are used of human messengers as easily as of heavenly ones: the same Hebrew word describes the men Jacob sends ahead to Esau in Genesis 32:3. The English word angel is a transliteration rather than a translation, and it has acquired two thousand years of freight that the original has to be stripped of before the texts can be heard.

Here is the whole of what the Bible directly asserts, and it fits in a paragraph. Angels are created, which Psalm 148:2-5 says by commanding them to praise the LORD because he commanded and they were created, and which Colossians 1:16 says by including the invisible thrones and dominions among the things made through Christ and for him. They are spirits and servants (Hebrews 1:14). They are numerous beyond counting, myriads upon myriads in Daniel 7:10 and myriads of myriads in Revelation 5:11. They deliver messages, which is the job the word names, and they worship, which is what the seraphim are doing in Isaiah 6 and what the whole company is doing in Revelation 4 and 5. They guard, strike, rescue, strengthen and, in Hebrews 1:14, serve those who will inherit salvation. They do not marry (Matthew 22:30). They do not know everything, since 1 Peter 1:12 says there are things into which they long to look and Matthew 24:36 says the day and hour are unknown to them. And they must not be worshipped: Colossians 2:18 warns against it, and in Revelation 19:10 and 22:8-9 an angel physically stops John from bowing and says 'Worship God!'

Almost everything else that circulates is inference, tradition, or Milton. The elaborate ranking of angels into nine orders comes from a sixth-century writer who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Acts 17:34, and whose Celestial Hierarchy arranges the terms scattered across Ephesians 1:21, Colossians 1:16 and Romans 8:38 into a graded system. The scheme shaped Eastern and Western theology profoundly and it is a construction, and the New Testament shows no interest in the arrangement: Paul lists the powers in order to say that Christ is above all of them and that none of them can separate us from his love. Only two angels are named in the Protestant canon, Michael and Gabriel. A third, Raphael, is named in Tobit, which is scripture for Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox readers and not for Protestants, and a Protestant student who wants to understand why Catholic and Orthodox piety speaks of three archangels should know that this is why rather than assume invention.

The tradition has generally known its own limits here, which is worth saying because the tradition is often blamed for the excess. Aquinas devotes many questions of the Summa to angels and repeatedly marks what cannot be known. Calvin, in the Institutes, having set out what scripture says, warns readers against curious speculation about angelic natures and ranks, on the ground that the Holy Spirit has taught what is useful and that we should not be wise beyond the text. The discipline he recommends is the discipline of this lesson. It is also the hardest one to keep, because the subject is fascinating and silence is unsatisfying, and a teacher who will not fill a gap will find that his congregation fills it from a film.

One disputed case, handled as a disputed case. Matthew 18:10 says that 'their angels in heaven always see the face of My Father in heaven', and in Acts 12:15 the believers praying for Peter say of the girl who reports his arrival, 'It must be his angel.' On these and related texts, Roman Catholic teaching affirms guardian angels as doctrine, and the Catechism states that from infancy to death human life is surrounded by their watchful care; Eastern Orthodoxy holds the same and has a settled place for it in prayer. Most Protestant confessions affirm the ministry of angels without making individual guardianship a defined article, treating it as probable rather than certain, since Acts 12:15 reports what the believers said rather than endorsing it. Notice that the difference between the communions here is not about whether angels serve believers, which Hebrews 1:14 settles, but about how much the two texts will bear.

A particular figure appears through the Old Testament and behaves in a way no other created being does. Hagar meets the angel of the LORD in the wilderness, and Genesis 16:13 says 'So Hagar gave this name to the LORD who had spoken to her', and the name she gave was 'You are the God who sees me'. At the bush, 'the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a blazing fire from within a bush', and two verses later it is God who calls out to Moses from within the bush, and in verse 6 He says, 'I am the God of your father'. In Judges 6 the angel of the LORD sits under the oak, the LORD speaks to Gideon, and Gideon cries out that he has seen the angel of the LORD face to face. In Judges 13 Manoah's wife describes the visitor as one whose appearance was like the angel of God, exceedingly awesome, and Manoah says they are going to die because they have seen God. The pattern is consistent: the figure is both distinguished from the LORD and spoken of as the LORD, and the narrators never flag this as a problem.

Three readings of that pattern have serious defenders. The christophany reading holds that this is the pre-incarnate Son, and it is old: Justin Martyr argues it at length in the Dialogue with Trypho in the second century, Irenaeus assumes it, and it was standard in the early apologists. It became common again among the Reformers, and Calvin takes it in his commentaries on Genesis and Judges. Its strength is that it makes the oscillation intelligible without dividing God, and it coheres with John 1:18, that no one has ever seen God and that the one and only Son, who is Himself God and is at the Father's side, has made Him known. The agency reading holds that this is a created angel who speaks in the first person as his sender's plenipotentiary, a convention well attested in the ancient world and in the Old Testament's own treatment of prophets, who say 'thus says the LORD' and then continue in God's own voice. Its strength is that the text calls the figure an angel, that Exodus 23:20-21 speaks of an angel of whom God says 'My Name is in him', which sounds like delegated authority rather than identity, and that it does not require reading later Christian doctrine into a Hebrew narrative. The third reading, sometimes called the interchange or extension reading, holds that the figure is God's own presence in an appearing form rather than either a second person or a distinct creature, which explains the identification without settling the question of distinct personhood.

Now the fact that will surprise most students. Augustine changed the church's mind in the West, and he changed it away from the christophany reading. In books 2 and 3 of On the Trinity he examines the Old Testament theophanies at length and argues that they were mediated by created angels rather than by the Son appearing in his own person. His motive was not carelessness with the text: the Arian argument had made use of these passages, reasoning that since the Father is invisible and the Son was seen, the Son must be lesser than the Father. Augustine cuts that argument off by denying that the Son as such was what was seen. Whatever you conclude about his exegesis, notice what has happened. A major shift in Old Testament interpretation was driven by a doctrinal controversy about something else, and it stuck for a millennium in the Latin West. Systematic theology does that, which is exactly the danger this track warned you about in its first module.

So where does an honest reader land? With three observations and no verdict. First, the New Testament never explicitly identifies the angel of the LORD with the pre-incarnate Christ, which is a striking silence given how much else it identifies. Second, it comes close in several places and the places are disputed: 1 Corinthians 10:4 says the spiritual rock that accompanied Israel was Christ, 10:9 in the BSB says 'We should not test Christ', John 12:41 says Isaiah saw Jesus' glory and spoke about Him, and Jude 5 has a textual variant in which it is Jesus who delivered a people out of Egypt. Notice what the BSB, which you have in front of you, has done at three of these. At 1 Corinthians 10:9 and Jude 5 it prints Christ and Jesus in its text, and its own footnotes concede that other editions read 'the Lord' in each place. At John 12:41 it capitalises 'Him', though the Greek pronoun carries no capital and the identification of whom Isaiah saw is the very point in dispute. So the BSB's typography and text-critical choices lean toward the christophany reading in exactly the places the argument turns. The agency reading answers that even where Christ or Jesus is the right reading, these texts say Christ was present with Israel and active in its history, which is a claim about the Son's pre-existence and does not by itself say that each appearance of the angel of the LORD was the Son appearing; and where 'the Lord' is the right reading, the christological evidence is thinner still. The christophany reading answers that the texts show the New Testament writers readily placing Christ in Israel's story, and that this is what you would expect if the Old Testament appearances were his. Weigh both. Third, the pattern in the Old Testament texts is real and demands some explanation, so the agency reading owes an account of why the narrators are so relaxed about the identification. The question is genuinely open, competent people hold all three views, and the doctrine of the Trinity does not stand or fall on it, since it was established from texts that say what they mean without this help.

The Old Testament material is easy to misread because the English word Satan looks like a name and behaves like one. In Hebrew it is a common noun meaning adversary or accuser, it is applied to human beings, and in Numbers 22:22 it is applied to the angel of the LORD himself, who stands in the road 'to oppose him', the BSB's English for a form of the Hebrew satan. In 1 Kings 11:14 the LORD raises up Hadad the Edomite as an adversary to Solomon. So the word names a function before it names anyone in particular.

In Job 1 and 2 and in Zechariah 3 the word carries the definite article, which in Hebrew means it is a title: the accuser. The BSB prints 'Satan' there, as a name, and puts the title only in a footnote ('That is, the Accuser or the Adversary'), so on this question its main text and the Hebrew point different ways. The other reading deserves its full strength: a definite title can designate one particular being, as 'the president' names one person, so the article alone does not show that the figure in Job was a mere office-holder and not the same personal enemy the New Testament calls the devil. What the article does show is that the text does not call him by a name, and a reader should not assume the later identification is already stated in Job. In Job he presents himself before the LORD among the sons of God, converses with him, asks permission, and acts only within limits God sets twice. In Zechariah 3 he stands at the right hand of Joshua the high priest to accuse him, which is the posture of a prosecutor in court, and the LORD rebukes him. Read these scenes without the later picture in your head and what you find is a figure within the heavenly council whose role is to bring charges, not a rebel hiding from God. That is a genuine feature of the text and a reader who does not see it has imported something.

Then 1 Chronicles 21:1 uses the word without the article, which may be the first place it functions as a name, and the verse attributes to this figure the incitement of David's census that 2 Samuel 24:1 attributes to the LORD. Between the Testaments the figure develops sharply in Jewish literature: 1 Enoch and Jubilees give elaborate accounts of rebellious angels, Jubilees names their chief Mastema, the Qumran texts speak of Belial and set the sons of light against the sons of darkness, and the Wisdom of Solomon says that through the devil's envy death entered the world. By the time the New Testament is written the picture is settled: a personal, malevolent, created opponent, called diabolos, which is the Greek translators' word for the Hebrew satan and means slanderer; the evil one; Beelzebul; the prince of this world in John 12:31; the god of this age in 2 Corinthians 4:4; the ruler of the power of the air in Ephesians 2:2; and the great dragon of Revelation 12:9, 'that ancient serpent called the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world'.

Two errors are available here and a teacher should be able to name both. The first is flattening forward: reading the New Testament devil back into Job so that the divine council scene becomes an intruder sneaking into heaven, which requires ignoring the article, the permission, and the prosecutorial role. The second is flattening backward: treating the developed figure as an invention of the intertestamental period with no rootage in Israel's scriptures, which requires ignoring the continuity of the accusing function that Revelation 12:10 preserves exactly, calling him 'the accuser of our brothers', and ignoring how much of the New Testament's language is drawn from Genesis 3 and Job rather than from Enoch.

The responsible statement is that the function is continuous and the portrait develops, and that Christians differ on how to describe the development. Most confessional readers, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant alike, treat it as progressive revelation of the same reality, on the model the Hermeneutics track took from Geerhardus Vos: revelation comes in stages, and an early text is a whole thing at an early stage rather than a defective version of a later one. Other readers treat some of the development as Second Temple accretion that the New Testament writers inherited along with their vocabulary. What nobody should do is pretend the Job material and the Revelation material say the same thing in different words. They do not, and a student who has seen the difference for himself is better placed to defend the New Testament than one who has been told there is nothing to see.

The popular account is specific. An archangel named Lucifer, the highest of the angels, fell through pride before the creation of the world, taking a third of the angelic host with him, and became Satan. Ask where each element comes from and the sources thin out fast.

What the New Testament actually says is brief and careful. 2 Peter 2:4: 'For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them deep into hell, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment'. Jude 6: 'And the angels who did not stay within their own domain but abandoned their proper dwelling - these He has kept in eternal chains under darkness, bound for judgment on that great day.' John 8:44 says the devil was a murderer from the beginning and refuses to uphold the truth. 1 John 3:8 says he has been sinning from the very start. 1 Timothy 3:6 warns that a recent convert may become conceited and fall under the same condemnation as the devil, which is the nearest thing in the New Testament to attributing pride as the cause, and it is an aside in a list of qualifications for elders. That is the evidence. Some angels sinned, they are under judgement, and the devil's opposition is of long standing. No date, no narrative, no number.

Notice something about the two fullest texts. Jude 6 speaks of angels who abandoned their proper dwelling, and the next verse compares Sodom and Gomorrah, which pursued 'strange flesh' (literally, in the Greek, other flesh); 2 Peter 2:4 moves straight from the sinning angels to Noah and the flood. Both are looking back at Genesis 6:1-4, the sons of God who took wives of the daughters of man, as that passage was read in the Second Temple period, above all in the Watchers narrative of 1 Enoch 6 to 16. Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name a few verses later. So the New Testament's two clearest angelic fall texts are attached to a story about angels and women in Noah's generation, not to a story about pride before Adam. That is an awkward fact for the popular account and it is not much noticed.

Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel 28 are where the popular account gets its narrative, and both passages state their subject. Isaiah 14:4 says 'you will sing this song of contempt against the king of Babylon'. The song then says, 'How you have fallen from heaven, O day star, son of the dawn!' and reports the boast, 'I will ascend to the heavens; I will raise my throne above the stars of God', ending, 'But you will be brought down to Sheol, to the lowest depths of the Pit.' The name Lucifer is not in the Hebrew; it is the Latin Vulgate's rendering of the phrase for the morning star, and it entered English through Latin-influenced translation. The BSB's own footnote at verse 12 lists 'Lucifer' as one possible rendering, alongside 'morning star' and 'shining one'. Ezekiel 28:2 addresses the prince of Tyre, who has said, I am a god, and 28:12 raises a lamentation over the king of Tyre. The Fathers who applied these to Satan, among them Origen and Tertullian, did so as a second and deeper reading rather than as the text's first sense, and the reading became standard in the medieval West.

Most commentators now resist it, and the resistance is not modern liberalism. Calvin, in his commentary on Isaiah, is blunt: 'The exposition of this passage, which some have given, as if it referred to Satan, has arisen from ignorance; for the context plainly shows that these statements must be understood in reference to the king of the Babylonians.' He goes on to call it gross ignorance to imagine that Lucifer was a name for the king of devils. The case against the traditional reading is contextual, and it is strong: both oracles are taunt songs against named human rulers, the boasts are the standard hubris of ancient kings, and the language of falling from heaven is used elsewhere for the humiliation of the proud without any angelic reference.

The case for keeping something of the traditional reading should be stated too, because it is not nothing. Ezekiel 28:13-15 says things that are hard to say of the historical ruler of Tyre: 'You were in Eden, the garden of God'; 'You were anointed as a guardian cherub'; 'From the day you were created you were blameless in your ways - until wickedness was found in you.' Defenders argue that the oracle moves from the human king to the power standing behind him, and point out that Daniel 10:13 and 10:20 speak of the prince of Persia and the prince of Greece as spiritual beings opposing an angel, so the Old Testament does know the idea of a spiritual power behind a nation. Critics reply that Ezekiel's language is drawn from royal ideology and Eden imagery used of kings elsewhere, and that the move from king to power behind him is asserted rather than signalled in the text. That is where the argument stands.

Luke 10:18 is the last text usually enlisted, and it is genuinely ambiguous. 'I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.' The seventy have just returned rejoicing that the demons are subject to them. Some read the saying as a reference to a primeval fall; others read it as Jesus describing what is happening through the mission he has just sent out, which fits the immediate context better. Revelation 12:7-9 describes a war in heaven and Michael casting the dragon down, and the chapter places that casting down in connection with the birth and exaltation of the child rather than before creation. So the verdict of this section is a short one: scripture affirms that angels sinned, that they are judged, and that their chief is the enemy of God's people. On when, how and why, it says very little, and the detailed story most Christians carry in their heads owes more to Paradise Lost than to any text. Losing the story costs nothing that matters. Keeping the habit of supplying it costs a great deal, because a person who will invent a chapter of angelic history will invent other things too.

In the Gospels demons are personal, they speak, they recognise Jesus before anyone else does, they resist and are expelled by his word, and their expulsion is presented as the kingdom arriving. The evidence about their relation to illness will not resolve into a formula, and a teacher must not force it. Matthew 4:24 lists the demon-possessed alongside those having seizures and the paralyzed as different categories of sufferer, which distinguishes them. (The BSB's 'demon-possessed' is a stronger English word than the Greek, which is a form of daimonizomai and means roughly 'demonised' or 'under a demon's power'.) Luke 13:16 has Jesus describe a woman's eighteen-year spinal disability as Satan binding her, which does not. Both are in the text. Whatever account you give has to accommodate both, and any account that tidily assigns all sickness to one cause has edited one of them out.

Three New Testament emphases are constantly overlooked and each is a control. First, authority already belongs to Christ: Colossians 2:15 says 'having disarmed the powers and authorities, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross', and Hebrews 2:14 says that by His death He might destroy him who holds the power of death, that is, the devil. The decisive battle is not pending. Second, the response prescribed is not technique. Ephesians 6:10-18 is the one sustained passage on the subject, and its equipment is truth, righteousness, the gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the word of God and prayer, with the repeated verb being to stand. There is no formula in it. Third, Luke 10:20 puts a hard limit on enthusiasm: when the seventy return elated that the spirits are subject to them, Jesus says, 'Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.' And Acts 19:13-16 gives the church its cautionary tale in the sons of Sceva, who used the name as a technique and were beaten for it.

Now the question this school cannot avoid. Most of this course's students live and teach where the reality of spiritual powers is not a theological proposition but the assumed background of daily life, in Africa, in much of Asia, in Latin America, in the Pacific and in parts of eastern Europe. A minority read these texts in settings where the assumption runs the other way. The two groups are not reading the same page in the same way, and each has something the other needs. Paul Hiebert, an anthropologist and missionary who worked in India, named the Western problem exactly in his 1982 essay The Flaw of the Excluded Middle, published in the journal Missiology. Western Christians, he argued, operate with a two-tier map: an upper tier of God and ultimate questions, and a lower tier of the empirical world handled by science, with nothing in between. The middle zone, the realm of spirits, ancestors, curses, healing and the unseen forces of this world, is simply absent from the map, so when a person from a culture that lives in that middle zone brings a question about it, the Western missionary has no category and answers either with medicine or with a doctrine of providence, neither of which addresses what was asked. Hiebert's point was not that everything believed about the middle zone is true. It was that a map with a hole in it cannot be used to correct anything, and that a Christianity that refuses the question leaves people to answer it from the old religion in private.

The reverse error has been named just as clearly, and by people who live in the cultures concerned rather than by outsiders. Esther Acolatse, a Ghanaian theologian, argues in Powers, Principalities, and the Spirit that Western theology has emptied the New Testament's language of powers of any real referent while African Christianity has often expanded it until every misfortune has a spiritual agent, and that both moves are failures of interpretation. The costs of the second are documented and severe: untreated illness, including psychiatric illness, when a person is told to stop treatment; money extracted from the poor for deliverance; marriages and families broken by accusations; and, at the worst end, children accused of witchcraft, abandoned or abused, a pattern reported in parts of West and Central Africa and in diaspora communities, which African churches and African governments have themselves confronted. There is also a quieter theological cost. The New Testament never permits a sinner to transfer responsibility to a demon. When Paul lists what is wrong with people in Galatians 5:19-21 he calls the list the acts of the flesh, and the flesh is theirs.

The mainstream traditions have each worked out a practice, and knowing them is useful whichever culture you teach in. The Roman Catholic Church retains a rite of exorcism, revised in 1999, which is reserved to a priest with the express permission of his bishop and which requires that medical and psychiatric explanations be excluded first; the discipline is deliberately slow and it exists to protect the vulnerable. Eastern Orthodoxy keeps prayers of exorcism in the baptismal rite itself, so that renunciation of the devil is part of every Christian's beginning, and reserves anything further to specific and usually monastic figures. Pentecostal and charismatic churches, which is where the majority of the world's Christians who practise deliverance are found, have developed extensive ministries and, in their more careful streams, their own protocols and warnings against abuse. Lutheran, Reformed and Anglican bodies have generally been more restrained, treating word, sacrament, prayer and the ordinary pastoral means as sufficient, with provision in some Anglican dioceses for an authorised deliverance adviser. Anabaptist and Baptist practice varies widely by region.

Walter Wink deserves naming because his reading is influential and is a real option rather than a straw man. In his Powers trilogy, beginning with Naming the Powers in 1984, he argued that the New Testament's principalities and powers are the inner spirituality of outer institutions, the animating ethos of a corporation, a nation or a system, which can be fallen and can be redeemed. The strength of the reading is that it takes Ephesians 6:12 seriously, where the struggle is, in the BSB's words, 'against the powers of this world's darkness', and that it gives an account of why structural evil outlives every individual who staffs it. The weakness, named by sympathetic critics as well as hostile ones, is that it is difficult to square with the Gospel narratives, where the demons speak, are addressed, and depart, and that a power which is only the interiority of an institution is not the sort of thing that can be rebuked by name. A reader can accept Wink's structural insight without accepting his reduction, and many do.

So the discipline at the end is the discipline from the start. Say what scripture says. It says that created spiritual beings exist, that some are in rebellion, that they are real and dangerous and already defeated, that Christ has authority over them and shares it with his church, and that the equipment given to us is truth, faith and prayer rather than a method. It does not give you a hierarchy of demons, a technique, or a licence to diagnose. If you teach where the powers are assumed, your job is to say that Christ is stronger and that fear is not the Christian posture, and to refuse to let a spiritual diagnosis carry a person away from medicine or away from repentance. If you teach where the powers are dismissed, your job is to say that the texts assume real personal agency, that you cannot remove it without editing the Gospels, and that the brothers and sisters who take it for granted are reading the New Testament more straightforwardly than you are. Both of those are hard to say in the room where they are needed. Say them anyway.