Extra Credit Podcast

Over the past four years I’ve become increasingly convinced that the heart of Paul’s theology can be traced back to his encounter with the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus.

“Saul, Saul, why do you you persecute me?”

After this encounter—and still blind—Paul sat in a house on the Street called Straight, he was surely meditating deeply on these words. He hadn’t harmed Jesus directly, had he? He had persecuted those who follow this Jesus, but that’s not how Jesus had put it. Apparently this Jesus was in such tight union with his people that to persecute them was to persecute Him.

In other words, these Christians must’ve been in “union with Christ” by their virtue of being “in Christ.” They were his body and Christ was their head. Paul uses the phrase “in Christ” well over 160 times throughout his letters. And this is (literally) the beating heart of his gospel: our participation “in Christ.”

Unfortunately, many Christians in our world don’t read Paul this way today. Rather than centering “union with Christ” at the heart of Paul’s thinking, many have come to see Paul’s judicial or legal language at the center (i.e. “justification”) because of misreadings of Romans and Galatians.

Following New Testament scholar Douglas Campbell, we try to trace the heart of Paul’s theology not to Galatians and Romans but to Ephesians and Colossians. It is interesting that “justification” language does not appear in either of these letters. Rather, what we find shot through both Ephesians and Colossians is Paul’s meditations on our “union with Christ.”

It isn’t that Paul’s use of legal/judicial language in Galatians/Romans is wrong, but that it is not central. What we need to do is read Romans and Galatians through the lens of Ephesians and Colossians.

Why?

In foregrounding our union with Christ we see that Paul’s primary way of speaking about our relationship with God is with personal and familial language, rather than legal language. In the words of Clark Pinnock, when it comes to our relationship with God we are in the “family room” not the courtroom.

By letting the familial language be the driving force in Paul’s thought, we can more easily see the way in which our relationship with God is covenantal rather than contractual.

Covenantal relationships are familial, personal, unconditional, and driven by love. Contractual relationships are legal, impersonal, conditional, and driven by obligation. Contracts are centered on me and my rights. Covenants are centered on my responsibility and love for you.

As James B. Torrance writes:

The God of the Bible is a covenant-God not a contract-god, and the worship appropriate to a Covenant God is radically different from the worship appropriate to a contract-god. The one is a worship of joy and gratitude, the other can be a worship of fear and anxiety.

God has established a covenant with humanity. He says to Israel: “I will be your God and you will be my people,” “Be holy as I am holy.”

Doesn’t this sound like a condition? Like a contractual relationship? “If you have faith, if you are holy, then you are in the covenant relationship with God.”

But this is Paul’s radical, unconditional gospel: not even your faith or holiness is a condition to salvation. You and I are not by ourselves on our side of the covenant. In fact, the whole covenant (the whole diagram above) is just another way of saying the name “Jesus.”

Jesus is himself the entirety of the covenant. He is both God and human! 

Karl Barth puts it like this:

Jesus Christ is in His one Person, as true God, man’s loyal partner, and as true man, God’s [loyal partner]…Thus He is in His Person the covenant in its fullness, the Kingdom of heaven which is at hand, in which God speaks and man hears, God gives and man receives, God commands and man obeys, God’s glory shines in the heights and thence into the depths…We do not need to engage in a free-ranging investigation to seek out and construct who and what God truly is, and who and what man truly is, but only to read the truth about both where it resides, namely, in the fullness of their togetherness, their covenant which proclaims itself in Jesus Christ.

Jesus is God to us and us to God. His life, his obedience, his love, and even his faith in God become ours.

But don’t think of this as an accountant’s ledger where what was in Jesus’ “bank account” gets impersonally transferred to our “bank account.” That’s legal/contractual language.

Rather, think of Jesus’s life, obedience, love, and faith as the root and trunk from which our life, our obedience, our love, and our faith grow. It is from him that we receive it all. We are grafted into him. Any love, obedience, or faith we have is just the life of Jesus growing up in us. We are in Christ!

This is what Paul begins to learn on the road to Damascus: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” The connection between Jesus and his body is not a legal fiction. It is real, organic, and deeply personal.

“He who sustains the world lay in a manger, a wordless Child, yet the Word of God. Him whom the heavens do not contain, the bosom of one woman bore. She ruled our King; she carried Him in whom we exist; she fed our Bread.”

-St. Augustine

When Jesus calls us to receive the little children in his name and to become little children ourselves he is not speaking of some reality that he knows nothing of. As Hans Urs von Balthasar says, Jesus knows what it is to be a child by experience. 

This week we meditated on the fact that God became a little child precisely because God is childlike. God doesn’t have to change his nature in order to come as a helpless baby. It is the most fitting way he could come among us.

The deep mystery of Christmas is that God comes among us as a little child. But the mystery deepens. Our God not only becomes a child at Christmas, he is eternally a Child: the eternal Son of the Father.

John 1:18 tells us that “No man hath seen God at any time, the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.”

The mystery of Christmas is that the Son has eternally been “carried” in the bosom of his Father. And he never grows-up or grows-out of that childlike relationship he has with his Father. Everywhere he goes he is cradled in the Father’s bosom.

But in order to share this relationship with us Jesus makes it so that the relationship he has with his Father from all eternity becomes the same relationship he has with his mother. He is in the Father’s bosom. He is in Mary’s bosom.

Jesus trusts God for all things. He lives in dependence on his Father. He gives thanks to his Father. He cries out to his Father. He rests in his Father’s embrace.

Jesus trusts his Mother for all things. He depends on his Mother. He thanks her for carrying him. He cries out in the night for her. And he rests in her embrace.

And this relation of dependence is how he is saving Mary. By needing her and Joseph—in the way only God can be need— he is giving grace to them.

He does the same for each of us. In every child that we welcome in his name he is depending on us. He asks us to carry him in the children around us, and by doing so he is giving us grace on top of grace to become children of his Father.

As Chris Green puts it: “The promise of Christmas is that God the Son became a child of his Mother so that you and I might become children of his Father.”

Here are the quotes from Hans Urs von Balthasar that we reflected on:

A child, therefore, is not merely a distant analogy for the Son of God: Whoever turns with loving concern ‘to such a child’ (any one out of hundreds of thousands), and does this, consciously or unconsciously, in the name of Jesus, of one mind with him—that person is welcoming the archetypical Child who has his abode in the Father’s bosom.

***

Love is what enables the child to experience its absolute neediness as something other than a threat, since it is lived as the situation in which the mother’s ever-latent love may be realized always anew.

***

In everything the human child is dependent on free acts of giving by others: in him, plea and thanks are still indistinguishably one. Because he is needy he is also thankful in his deepest being…And when he grows older and we say to him ‘Say please’, ‘say thank you’, we are not teaching him anything new but only trying to bring into his more conscious sphere what is already present from the beginning.

***

Here we see the source of the prohibition in the Sermon on the Mount against worrying about the morrow, and of the request in the Our Father that asks only for today’s bread. Such things are understandable only coming from the children of God, for, when children ask for something, they always do so in the emphatic present, and when they sit down at a full table they never think of tomorrow’s meal.

And the quote from G.K. Chesterton:

Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we.

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.

Matt. 18:1–5

While Dietrich Bonhoeffer was working on his first dissertation—what would become Sanctorum Communio—he was splitting his time between his heavy load of academic study/writing and preparing Sunday School lessons for children at his church.

In fact, as Andrew Root points out, there is a consistent thread running through Bonhoeffer’s entire life and work; he continually found himself ministering to children/youth—and it shows in his theology.

It is no surprise, then, that at the end of his dissertation on the sociology and theology of the church we find this line: “The church-community as the community of saints carries its children like a mother, as its most sacred treasure.”

Just a few short years later Bonhoeffer found himself in Barcelona, serving at a German speaking Lutheran church as a 22 year old. While in Barcelona he delivered a series of lectures, one of them titled, “Jesus Christ and the Essence of Christianity.” In the lecture he takes up the question of the essence of the Christian message, and the demanding nature of Jesus’s message. There is something in Jesus that calls us to a stark decision, an either-or, an all-or nothing demand.

With all this in mind it would seem that only the most religiously serious and the morally scrupulous people could answer his stark call. And yet, Bonhoeffer points out, Jesus has no time for these people. Rather, he spends his time with two groups of people: children and sinners.

Here’s the excerpt of the lecture that we looked at:

Jesus is able to confront human beings with this alternative of “all or nothing” only because he knows he is acting with God’s authority; “and blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me.”....In all these episodes, we thus see Jesus up on the icy heights of that unrelenting demand on human beings. Who will dare to follow him? Who will enter his discipleship?...Everywhere we encounter the same trembling apprehension before the terrible severity of Jesus’s demand. He turns to the moral heroes and pays no attention to the weak…

Closer examination, however, reveals a surprising picture. He who was seemingly so unapproachable, who came with his razor-sharp either-or, now appears not among the ascetics or moral heroes or Pharisees, but rather among two groups of people hitherto living completely unnoticed beneath the surface, people who seemed least able to fulfill his severe demands. Jesus turns his attention to children and to the morally and socially least of these, those viewed as less worthy. This turn is something totally unprecedented and new in world history, and in the person of Jesus it seems to constitute a break. Plato opened his school for those who love wisdom, for the philosophers, for those who strive to live an ethical life. Buddha sought his following among the ascetics, among those who had turned their backs on the world. Jesus goes to the children and holds them up as examples to those who are already decidedly moral. When Jesus enters Jerusalem, apparently so many children already know him that they surge toward him and sing hosanna to him in the temple–quite to the consternation of the moral party, the Pharisees…When mothers bring their children to have Jesus bless them, those who consider themselves to be the real, genuine disciples of Jesus run in and want to drive the women out. It was then that Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me.”

Once when Jesus is out with his disciples and they are arguing over the rewards they will receive for living in his discipleship, Jesus “called a child, whom he put among them, and said, ‘Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven’” (Matt. 18:2–3), or “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea” (Mark 9:42). For Jesus the child is not merely a transitional stage on the way to adulthood, something to be overcome; quite the contrary, he or she is something utterly unique before which the adult should have the utmost respect. For indeed, God is closer to children than to adults. In this sense, Jesus becomes the discoverer of the child. He sees the children and wants to belong to them; who would block his path? God belongs to children, the good news belongs to children, and joy in the kingdom of heaven belongs to children. “Woe to anyone who puts a stumbling block before one of these little ones.” This notion is so utterly alien to the sensibility of antiquity that only one other might seem even more alien, namely, that Jesus, this man of the ruthless either-or, goes not only to children but also to sinners. He traffics with the socially despised, the outcasts, the tax collectors, the deceivers, and the prostitutes. People see this preacher of purity and holiness eating at midday among these people–a horrible sight for a Jewish rabbi–going into their homes, talking with them on the street, defending adulterers before the entire community. They are horrified when they hear him speak out against those who are in fact moral: “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you” (Matt. 21:31)...

The answer, or rather the paradox, is found in Jesus’s unprecedented idea of God. God is utterly superior to the world, utterly transcends it, that is, is removed from the world, is totally different; God is wholly unlike human beings and human nature and is eternally inaccessible to human thought and will. This God wants only one thing from people, namely, that they be nothing before him, and demands nothing from people but that they make absolutely no claims. God wants human beings to be inwardly completely poor, completely unknowing, God wants an empty space in them into which he can move. God wants only the outstretched hand of the beggar so that he can fill it, God wants those who have nothing; God does not want the righteous or those who already know, the saints, but rather the unrighteous, the foolish, the sinners…

God comes to those who make no claims. In Paul’s words, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no flesh might boast in the presence of God.” When people merely listen, merely receive, that is, when they seem to be farthest from God in irreligion and immorality, then God is closest to them. Religion and morality contain the germ of hubris…In this sense, religion and morality can become the most dangerous enemy of God’s coming to human beings, the most dangerous enemy of the Christian message of good news. Thus the Christian message is basically amoral and irreligious, paradoxical as that may sound…

God comes to people who have nothing but space for God, and the language of Christianity calls this void, this emptiness in human beings “faith.”

God calls us to become like him. Jesus says “Follow me!” I am the way and the truth and the life. Leave everything behind!

God wants us to become like him. But to become like this God is not to become something higher or more powerful than what we are, it is to become a child like our Lord Jesus, who was carried by his mother.

As Andrew Root put it, “Salvation comes into the world carried in the arms of a teenage mother.”

Martin Luther could never get over the fact that the God of the universe comes to us as a child who has to be carried.

The Holy and Almighty God becomes vulnerable in a manger.

All God wants is an empty space in you and me into which he can move. And that is precisely the reality of a child’s personhood. When you and I learn that this is the truth of our being–that we are the type of beings that have to be carried by others–we have taken a step onto Holy Ground.

The congregation is called to carry its children because by carrying its children the community of the church is positioned to experience the revelation of Jesus Christ who comes into the world as as helpless child.

Angelology has nothing to say to us if it is separated from Trinitarian theology. The one God the angels face is triune. Their worship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, is simultaneously their service to us (and vice versa).

Just so, the angels consistently refuse to be worshiped. They won’t accept worship, because they were created to worship (see Col. 2:18 and Rev. 22:8—9). There is, however, one angel within Scripture that does not refuse worship when it is offered to him.

The Angel of the Lord

It is often assumed that the Christian confession of the Trinity is a total break from Judaism’s understanding of God. It is assumed that the Jewish faith is flatly or simply “monotheistic” while the Christian faith introduces a modification to that. Nothing could be further from the truth.

As Robert Jenson argues, the God of Israel is unique in that he is not only the author of history but also a character within it. He lives his history with his people. Histories hold together just like plays do; they have a single plot.

And history, just like a play, has a cast of characters. If you read through the Old Testament it is easy to identify the characters in this drama/history. On Israel’s/humanity’s side of the story there are a lot of characters (Moses, Abraham and Sarah, Joshua, Isaiah, Ezekiel, etc.). But on God’s side there are only three characters.

First, there is the Lord of Israel who rules Israel’s history because he is its author. He, in a manner of speaking, stands outside of the drama just as an author stands outside of the story he writes.

Second, there is God himself as a character within the drama. The old rabbis recognized the peculiar way the Scriptures talk about this character on God’s side. The Scriptures refer often to a character/agent in the story that is distinguishable from God, but still God. This character goes by different names: the Word of the Lord, the Glory of the Lord, the Name of the Lord, and the Angel of the Lord.

In the Scriptures, whenever the Angel of the Lord shows up in the drama he is clearly identified as someone other than the Lord, but by the end of the scene he turns out to just be the Lord himself. 

The old rabbis of Israel noticed this subtlety within the texts (with the Word of the Lord, the Glory of the Lord, the Angel of the Lord, etc.) and used one term to classify them all: the Shekinah. The Shekinah is God as character in within the story. Or: God with us.

The third and final character within God is the “breath,” the “wind,” or the “spirit” of God. Whenever Israel’s story gets stuck or stagnate, God’s breath begins to blow and it keeps Israel’s history moving towards its dramatic ending (resurrection).

In this way the New Testament doesn’t add anything. It certainly does not introduce any new divine characters in the drama. Rather, as Jenson says, it provides a sort of playbill for the drama.

Imagine you are running late to a play. When you arrive you head straight for the auditorium and on your way in you are handed a playbill. You reach your seat but the lights are down because the action has already begun. 

All the characters of the drama are on stage, doing what they do. But it isn’t until the intermission when the lights come up that you are able to look over the playbill and find the list of the actors’ names.

The New Testament provides us something like a playbill. It has always been Jesus’ of Nazareth at work in the drama, whether playing “roles” like the Angel of the Lord. He is the Shekinah, God with us as another character within the drama.

And nothing could be more fitting for him to take on the title of “angel.” For what does “angel” mean except messenger? Jesus of Nazareth is not only a messenger of God, but he is the message of God in flesh.

In that sense, just as Jesus Christ is the Chief-Apostle, he is no less the Chief-Angel.

Here are the quotes from Maggie Ross’s essay “Barking at Angels” that I finished with:

Behold the God who is infinitely more humble than those who pray to him, more stripped, more emptied, more self-outpouring—and we need to remember that humility and humiliation are mutually exclusive. Humility knows only love, and God is love. The scandal of the incarnation is not that we are naked before Emmanuel, God with us, but God is naked before us, and, in utter silence, given over into our hands and hearts. And it is in the depths of this beholding, in the silence of the loving heart of God, that the divine exchange takes place most fully, where each of us in our uniqueness and strangeness is transfigured into the divine life. And it is for this that God comes to us, the Word made flesh, stable-born and crucified.

Therefore, in this world’s night, let us enter more deeply into stillness so we may behold the herald angels. Let us be undistracted even if the sheepdog continues to bark at our side. Let us so plunge into this beholding that its silence and light will radiate even through our own darkness to illumine all the darkness and pain of this world, to announce tidings of great joy for this day and all the days to come.

“In the resurrection, the wounds of Christ do not disappear; they are glorified. Only the devil appearing as Christ has no wounds, being too vain to bear them.”

-Maggie Ross

In his Church Dogmatics III.3 Karl Barth discusses the doctrine of angels for about 200 pages. It is only at the very end of this discussion that he briefly (approximately 25 pages) undertakes the topic of the “Devil and his angels.” But the brevity is intentional:

Why must our glance be brief? Because we have to do at this point with a sinister matter about which the Christian and the theologian must know but in which he must not linger or become too deeply engrossed, devoting too much attention to it in an exposition like our own…

Sinister matters…must not be contemplated too long or studied too precisely or adopted too intensively. It has never been good for anyone–including (and particularly) Martin Luther–to look too frequently or lengthily or seriously or systematically at demons… there is the imminent danger that in so doing we ourselves might become just a little or more than a little demonic.

The very thing which the demons are waiting for, especially in theology, is that we should find them dreadfully interesting and give them our serious and perhaps systematic attention. In this way they can finally catch out, not bad theologians, but good. For this reason, having consciously and intentionally devoted a full discussion to the angels, we shall take only a brief look at this matter. It is not a question of treating them lightly, but of handling them as best befits their nature. A quick, sharp glance is not only all that is necessary but all that is legitimate in their case.

Following Barth’s lead in our own theology of angels, we are only taking a very quick, sharp glance into the abyss of the evil powers that are out to eat up God’s good creation.

I first learned to make a distinction between the satanic and the demonic from Chris Green. The demonic is chaotic disorder, and threatens to destroy us and our way of life. The satanic is not chaos/disorder but false order and false light. It offers us rescue from the threat of the demonic. 

Evil is always attacking us in this dual way: threatening us with disorder and chaos on the one hand, and extending us a protection from that disorder and chaos through a false order on the other.

Or as 1 Peter 5:8 says: your adversary the devil is like a lion who prowls and roars. The one thing a lion does not do when it is prowling is roar. I think this gets at the duality of the devices of the enemy. The roaring threatens us so that we run away and find refuge. But it is when we are lulled to sleep in refuge that we can become sitting ducks for the prowler.

This is a clever device. Paul says the devil is trying to outwit us. The devil is witty and clever. In that sense he has a sort of warped, perverted sense of humor. But as Robert Jenson points out, the devil is mere wit. He’s a bad comedian. He’s never truly funny because the joke is never on himself.

God, on the other hand, is the belly-laughter at the ground of all things. And he is quite happy for the joke to be on himself.

Here’s Jenson on the good humor of God and the bad humor of the devil:

If one were to…talk of Satan as a fallen angel, one could say that this is how he fell: he could not take God’s big joke on him and the other great spirits. He refused to join Michael and the others in service to those mere animals, those humans down there, whom God impishly and foolhardily proposed to elevate unto himself, and in service to whom God proposed to assign the great spirits… [Satan] never sees the joke on himself, as God does and we sometimes do.

It is the sovereign test: When the voice in the night tells me, “You are hopeless,” is it said with a laugh or a snicker? If the former, the voice is God’s; if the latter, out with the ink bottle.

The devil’s inability to let the joke be on himself reveals his lack of humility. It is his pride—his bloated sense of self-importance—that keeps him from laughing at himself and forces him to snicker at us.

The way we break free from the witty joke of the devil (being trapped in the deadly spiral of the demonic and the satanic) is humility; we must laugh at ourselves and the wonderful joke God is telling. When we laugh at God’s joke—enthroning lowly human beings on his own throne—we are being let in on the divine joke that all the angels have been laughing at since the beginning of creation. And “God's laughter is our salvation” (Jenson).

This week we move to the middle tier of the angelic hierarchy to discuss dominions, powers, authorities (and principalities).

Here is Dionysius the Areopogite’s ordering of the hierarchy:

Top: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones

Two things come to mind with this middle tier of angelic choirs: first, all these words have to do with power and authority; and second, anyone who has read the pauline epistles will probably associate this list with the evil powers that must be overcome. We take them in turn.

I.

Talking about power, authority, and hierarchy is very difficult for modern people to do well. We have to avoid two pitfalls, one on each side. We don’t want to talk about power and authority in a way that suggests abuse, domination, or control, but we also don’t want to suggest a free-for-all, every-man-for-himself chaos without any structure whatsoever.

We take some time to discuss authority and power (and hierarchy) as God means it to be. To do this we looked at a few passages from Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy to see what he means by the term.

These are passages taken from his section on the highest triad of choirs:

Our venerable hierarch describes this threefold Order as a co-equal unity, and truly the most exalted of the Hierarchies, the most fully Godlike, and the most closely and immediately united to the First Light of the Godhead.

…the lower ranks of the Celestial Beings receive the understanding of the divine works from those above them in a fitting manner, and that the highest are correspondingly enlightened in the Divine Mysteries by the Most High God Himself. For some of them are shown to us as enlightened in holy matters by those above them, and we learn that He who in human form ascended to heaven is Lord of the Celestial Powers and King of Glory…and Jesus Himself is depicted as teaching them and revealing directly to them His great goodness towards mankind.

Moreover, I am astonished that even the first rank of Celestial Beings, so far surpassing all the others, should reverently desire to receive the divine enlightenment in an intermediate manner. For they do not ask directly, ‘Wherefore are Thy garments red?’ but first eagerly question one another, showing that they seek and long for the knowledge of His divine words, without expectation of the enlightenment divinely granted them.

II.

Why do we associate this middle tier of the angelic hierarchy with evil powers? To tackle this question we read through most of Colossians 1—2. In both Colossians and Ephesians we find Paul talking about the thrones, dominions, powers, and principalities in both positive and negative ways.

In Colossians 1:15—16 we find that these angelic beings were created in Christ and for him. God does not create evil, and the purpose of these choirs of angels is Jesus Christ himself—they are for him. But in Colossians 2:15 Paul tells us that on the cross Jesus disarmed the rulers and authorities, triumphing over them by unmasking them.

So we have authority and power as it was created in and through Christ and we have some sort of perverted authority/power that is actively working against Christ, that must be unmasked in Jesus’ death.

This is where (I think!) the word “elemental principles” comes in. In both Colossians and Galatians Paul mentions these elemental principles (Grk. Stoicheia), and he seems to always have something negative in mind.

Colossians 2:20 Paul writes that we have died with Christ to the elemental principles of the world. In Galatians 4:8—9 he calls these elemental principles the “no-gods” that enslave humanity.

We are entering choppy water here, but what we can say with some level of clarity is that the elemental principles are spiritual powers/forces that have the world under a spell. On the cross Christ breaks that spell by exposing (unmasking) them for who they truly are.

If we put this in the language of “rulers, authorities, and powers” we might be able to say that the power structures of this world have been set up by these evil powers and principalities (the elemental principles). This is the type of power we are all familiar with. The type of power that “lords it over” others. But Jesus’ power works differently. “Not so among you!” To truly have power in the way that Jesus has power and authority is to become one who serves. True power is seen in humility, taking responsibility, and service.

There are the “principalities and powers” as Christ knows them and has ordered them, that operate according to his way of having power and authority, and there is worldly power and authority.

The gift of the cross is liberation from these elemental principles. On the cross Christ does not break your will so that he can dominate and control you. On the cross Christ breaks the power the elemental spirits have had you in order to free you.

Jesus does not want to dominate you in the way that the evil principalities and powers have. Jesus wants to set you free. His power and authority makes you you. He does not rob you of your personhood and individuality with his rule, he gives you your true self.

What dies in the death that we die with Jesus is the will of the elemental spirits. What is born in our resurrection with him is our freedom.

Two questions have been on my mind in thinking through a theology of angels. First, why is it that in the story of Jacob’s Ladder (and again in John 1:51) that the angels ascend and then descend? We would imagine they would first descend from heaven to what is lower—the earth—and then ascend. So, why the reversal of the movement of angels? The second question is deeply connected to the first: why does Peter tell us in 1 Peter 1:12 that the angels long to look into the mystery of the gospel?

To get at something of an answer to these two questions we looked at the two angelic choirs that are located at the top of the angelic hierarchy: Cherubim and Seraphim (or vice versa).

Traditionally Christians have noted that Scripture speaks of nine different choirs of angels and theologians throughout the church’s tradition have ranked these nine choirs into three groups of threes (with differing orders depending on the theologian you’re reading!). The top triad is said to be closest to God’s throne while the bottom triad is closest to the earth.

Top: Cherubim, Seraphim, Thrones

In Scripture when we are given a glimpse of God’s throne room through prophetic vision it is the Cherubim and Seraphim that we find closest to the throne (see Rev. 4-5, Isa. 6, Ezek. 1).

The tradition is established from the beginning in Genesis. Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden and God places the Cherubim with a flaming sword to guard the way to the Tree of Life.

We find the Cherubim closest to God’s throne again in Exodus. The Lord instructs Moses to have two Cherubim of gold made and placed on top of the Ark of the Covenant—one on each end. And God promises Moses this: “There, above the cover between the two cherubim that are over the ark of the covenant law, I will meet with you” (Exodus 25:22).

But the deep secret of the throne room of God—the things into which angels long to look and yet cover their faces with their wings—is that on God’s throne sits a human being, something lower than all the angels (Heb. 2:6—8). In Ezekiel’s vision of God’s throne chariot by the River Chebar we find that the one seated on the throne is one “like a man.”

How is it that the one seated on the throne in God’s most holy throne room—which is surrounded by the Cherubim and Seraphim—looks like a human being? The ancient church fathers responded: “Because he is one!”

Gregory the Great (6th century) preaching on this text from Ezekiel is crystal clear:

We should observe how the order is maintained: above the living beings is the firmament, above the firmament is the throne, and above the throne a man is delineated. For above holy men still living in…the body are the angels, and above the angels are superior angelic powers closer to God, and above the powers is…the man Christ Jesus.

But notice that the “order” which is “maintained” is actually reversed. Above human beings are the angels, and above the angels are the higher angelic beings who are closer to God (and so further away from human beings), and yet above these powers is the human being Christ Jesus.

John’s Gospel gives us the clue. The way Jesus speaks in the Gospel of John shows that he sees the cross as his throne. “When I am lifted up [on the cross] I will draw all men to myself.” From the cross the last words of Jesus are not despairing, but triumphant. Not “My God why have you forsaken me?” but “It is finished.”

Listen to the way John depicts the scene of Golgotha: “And carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha). There they crucified him, and with him two others—one on each side and Jesus in the middle” (John 19:17–18).

Just as the two cherubim made for the ark of the covenant were to be on each side of the “mercy seat” and God promises that he will meet the Israelites between the two cherubim, so Jesus is enthroned “in the middle” with “one on each side.”

This is the secret of God’s throne room: the one on the throne which the angels face is a human being. But he is not only a human being, he is the crucified human being. This is why the angels hide their faces with their wings. They long to look at the deep mystery of the gospel, but it is too much to take in. Not simply because it is “high and exalted” but because it is so high and exalted that it comes in meekness and humility. The way Jesus is high and exalted is by being lowly.

This is why the angels first ascend and then descend. The one seated on the throne—to which they ascend—is the one who has descended to the lowest depths, and continues to descend into all things in order to fill all things with himself.

The angels’ ascending and descending are not two movements but one. Their ascending is their descending. The higher they ascend, the lower they descend because the one they ascend to is the crucified one who descends into death, into hell.

This is why Moses could not see the face of God. God hides him in the cleft of the rock, just as the angels hide their faces. Why? Because if Moses would’ve seen the face of God, he would’ve seen the face of a Jewish carpenter. He would’ve seen the face that Mary smothered with kisses.

That alone would’ve been too much for him to take in. But there is more. Not only would he have seen the face of Jesus, but in the face of Jesus he would’ve seen his own face. Christ, who is our life, has taken the faces of all humanity into himself and seated us with him in the heavenly places.

Or as Jesus promises to the church of Laodicea in Revelation 3:21—22 “To the one who is victorious, I will give the right to sit with me on my throne, just as I was victorious and sat down with my Father on his throne.”

The angels in the throne room face God. But the God the angels face is no longer other than the one who became human, and he has seated us on his throne between the cherubim and seraphim.

It’s all really too much to take in.

Hebrews 13:2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.

This week we take up the hospitality of angels and the question of guardian angels.

Here are some of the questions we tried to cover:

* Why are angels and hospitality so often tied together? How do angels show hospitality? How are we to respond to the hospitality of angels?

* One of the best (and funniest) questions I had submitted last week was: “Why did my guardian angel take this whole year off? Could he not spread his vacations out a little more?”

* So, based on that question we asked: Do we each have a guardian angel?

* What does it mean to say that they “guard” or “watch over” us?

* We discussed the issue of human responsibility in light of angelic agency in the world. Do angels do things for us so that we don’t have to do them? Are we less responsible for what goes on in the world around us because of the angels/demons?

* How do angels/demons interact with the world?

For an interesting (and beautiful) account of guardian angels check out Sergius Bulgakov’s Jacob’s Ladder.

When discussing a theology of angels we are met with a whole range of problems. Doesn’t the belief in angels belong to an older, more simple-minded time? What does it mean to believe in angels in a modern world of science and technology?

C.S. Lewis said there are two equal but opposite errors we make when it comes to angels and demons: we either make too much of them or we make too little of them. I think he’s generally right. But it might be a bit more complicated than that.

Belief in angels for most modern, western Christians amounts to nothing more than sentimentality (our feelings of tenderness and warmth regarding the idea of angels) or mythology (angels are tall, strong, white men with long blonde hair who show up to do what we want done, but can’t/won’t do for ourselves). Either way they are sort of pushed out of our “real” world into the world of our feelings or wild beliefs.

For the ancient church (and the medieval church) things were very different. The idea of angels slotted very nicely into their understanding of the world. Angels were an object of considerable interest. Questions were raised and answered concerning the nature of angels, the hierarchy of angels, the free will of angels, etc.

For us today we are often left with what Karl Barth calls “an angelology of the shrug of the shoulders.” But while the ancient Christians and modern Christians seem to be polar opposites, they both have the same underlying issue when it comes to thinking and talking about angels: both are primarily concerned with the nature of angels. In an ancient world, angelic nature fits in quite well with their picture of the world. In a modern, scientific world angelic nature doesn’t quite fit (and so usually retreats to sentimentality or mythology).

St. Augustine makes the decisive point regarding angels and I think it is where we must begin:

Angels are spirits; although they are spirits, they are not angels [until] they are sent, [then] they become angels. For “angel” is the name of an office, not of a nature. If you seek the name of this nature, it is spirit; it is “angel” from what it does.

The word “angel” means “messenger.” So, to use the word “angel” is not to name the nature of these heavenly beings. It names what they do. The word “angel” names an office not a nature. And this office of angels is what Scripture is primarily interested in. Scripture is not interested (so much!) in giving us instruction on the nature of heaven and the angels, but in the action of angels.

Hebrews 1:14 is the passage Augustine is drawing on: “Are not all angels spirits in the divine service, sent to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”

The angels have no world of their own. They were created (just as heaven was) for the sake of our world. They are ministering spirits that serve the purpose of the world’s salvation. They are witnesses. This is our calling, too. This is why we pray that God’s will be done on earth as it already is being done in heaven among the angels. Angels bear witness to the message of God. The “message of God” is another way of naming Jesus of Nazareth. He is God’s message.

In this way we can see that just as Jesus is the “chief apostle,” he is also the “chief angel.” He is the First and Primary Messenger who is himself the Message.

Heaven is not the world that angels are concerned with. Heaven is the place within creation that God has created from which he acts in and for the earth. Heaven is the place God comes from when he comes to the earth. As Isaiah prayed, “Oh that you would rend the heavens and come down!”

When God acts in the world he always comes from heaven. And this is the beginning of a true theology of angels: whenever God is poised to act in the world from heaven, it is the angels who are there (here!) opening up space on earth for God’s will to be done just as it is in heaven.

And we can locate this action every Sunday. We can point to the bread and wine on the table, to the preacher’s lips proclaiming the gospel, to the open page of Scripture, to the baptismal font, and to the brothers and sisters gathered and locate heaven. Here is the place God has promised that he will “rend the heavens and come down” (Robert Jenson).

As Martin Luther put it:

Go to the place where the Word is spoken and the sacraments ministered, and there set up the title “The Gate of Heaven.”

This is what angels do.

Or in the language of the book of Hebrews, when we gather together as a very mundane and ordinary group of people and do these very mundane and ordinary things like preach the Word and consume bread and wine, we have not come to something that can be touched, “But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering…”

Amen.

After a brief teaching on the power of sin Taylor Johnson led us through an incredibly meaningful time of prayer, interceding for all those affected by suicide. I hope you will listen and pray along with the class.

The prayer guide he created is really beautiful. You can download it below to follow along with the class and pray on your own.

If you haven’t already, you can subscribe to Taylor’s Substack here: