How do angels work, and do I have one for myself?

Hello, we're back with Christopher Carr. How you doing today? Good evening, Cassian. How are you?

I'm doing great. I know we've already had our introductions for the last 15 minutes, but it's uh, it's so glad to have you back here.

I'll just put that on the record. I'm excited to talk about our topic today, but how have you been since we last spoke about two weeks ago?

Yeah, well, I've been busy. You know, I've got all the classes. I've already gone through 60 essays.

I have another 60 essays waiting for me and this is my fall break coming up right now.

So I have two days off from teaching, but I don't have two days off from grading. So I'm just gonna be plugging away doing that.

Essays are the worst. Oh, yeah, they're bad to write and they're really bad to read.

Do you actually read every word or are you skimming? Oh, no, I read them. I actually have a, sorry to say, this will bring you bad flashbacks from when you were in college,

I guess, but I actually have a rubric, like a thing, like a chart and I look at topic sentences, the clearness of the content, the flow of ideas, the focus of the paragraphs, the word choice, and all the mechanics, the grammar and punctuation.

And I have a score for each one and now I obviously don't make a,

I do make a lot of marks on the page, but I know that students generally don't pay much attention to those things, so I don't write a lot of comments for them.

I basically just write them for me, so I know how I'm supposed to score things.

Do you ever get into that like writer's block where it's like re -write, re -read a page over and over again because you just keep zoning out or is that just me and my

ADHD? No, no, I mean when it comes to undergraduate essays,

I want to move through those. I don't want to read the same thing again because it probably hurt the first time, so I want to be able to reduce the amount of abuse that I suffer and just get it done.

Yeah, okay, okay, that makes sense. And it needs like 10 pagers or one pagers, 500 words, double spaced.

What are these? No, no, no, no. Oh, no, no, no. I am sorry to say this is a little bit of an indictment of our educational system, but students who come out of high school do not know how to write.

Oh, okay. And I then, what

I try to do is assign very short, very targeted assignments so they can work on crafting a solid two, three paragraphs maybe, and then my colleagues can enjoy the fruits of my labors because they'll hopefully get some practice writing solid paragraphs.

Then they can string them together for some multi -page assignment. I get people who are generally very raw and I want to preserve my sanity.

I have other things I want to do with my brain. Wow, I'm not jealous.

Are these typed or handwritten? Typed. Oh my gosh, imagine handwritten. That would just be a sin.

Well, listen, not to date myself, but I learned how to type on a typewriter. Remember these things?

You see them in museums now. Vintage. Mm -hmm. So if you had to write a footnote, it's like, oh,

I got to put a footnote on this page. Then you have to start measuring with a thing to make sure you have enough space on the bottom for the footnote.

With the whiteout? Loving the whiteout.

Now I just use it on sneakers and stuff. Right, right. Yeah, now I just cover up the chips in my wall.

Nice. Well, today's topic is going to be so much lighter than our first topic, which hopefully didn't scare anybody.

I definitely had some conversations with my friends after our demonic conversation and I might have scared them, but I've been comforting them and praying for them.

So they'll be fine. But today we'll be talking about angels and this was originally why

I wanted to speak with you because when we first spoke on the phone, you mentioned how you performed an angel study and how you through your studies, which

I don't even know how that would work, kind of have a basic understanding of their intellect and how they manifest and how they typically show up in the

Bible and I'd like to learn a little bit more about, you know, your studies and then from there let's talk about, you know, angels' role in the

Bible in general and then we can jump into some verses. So why don't you give us a little bit of overview on some of your work on this topic?

Right. Well, my work on the topic is primarily to teach a class. Angels tend to be one of those subjects that students are interested in and since my department, the

Religious Studies Department, is always struggling to figure out what our market would actually want to, what they want us to offer them, so we actually get enrollment in our classes, angels seems like a best -seller.

So I said I'd go ahead and give that a try. And the reason why

I gave it a try is, I guess, for two reasons. One, I do have a friend who now, unfortunately, is not in very good health, whose vocation involved many conversations with her guardian angel and the guardian angels of other souls who needed somebody to pray for them at the moment of their deaths.

So this person, I can tell you her name. She's a religious now. She's a hermitess.

So she goes by a different name, but her name is Patricia Huh? What's a hermitess?

It's a female hermit. Oh, okay. Got it. Okay. Yes, so she lives hundreds of miles away from me.

Her given name is Patricia and her last name is Devlin. D -E -V -L -I -N.

Patricia, if you're listening. Huh? Patricia, if you're listening. Hello. Shout out to Patricia.

I don't even know. Well, no, it seems unlikely, but you never know.

Maybe she'll, in reruns, she'll listen to it. She wrote a book called The Light of Love and it basically is kind of an autobiographical recounting of her conversations and her experiences because she's always been in poor health and what she does is she's basically asked to suffer for souls at the moment of her death, of their death rather, as a way for Christ to offer that soul last -minute grace and special circumstances so the person can you know, not be separated from God.

So would she go to people's houses and be with them at the time of death? No, no. There was a period of time in her life where she had this peculiar vocation.

She doesn't have it anymore. It was a it was a period of several years and then

Is this a vocation that she chose or was she hired for it or it was just a God gift?

No, no, the way she describes it in her book is she lost her sight at a young age but after she had gone completely blind there was a particular day where she actually saw in her mind's eye, you might say, light and it was her guardian angel approaching her about something that the

Lord wanted her to do and it was to pray for souls at the moment of her death, particularly by offering her suffering for those people.

So obviously since I got to know this person through mutual friends this, you know, her her experiences were things

I took note of and then when I got to know a couple of exorcists so it's like I'm going from the light side to the dark side

I began to approach that same subject matter of the angels from a different perspective and I began to see some convergences there and once I began to see the convergences that got me thinking about the thinking that's already been done on the angels in the

Christian tradition, particularly in the Middle Ages. So in St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa the

Summa Theologica there is an entire treatise on angels. What's a treatise?

A treatise, it's a subsection of his theological work. So it's a thematically identifiable set of pages where he just treats questions about the angels.

Kind of like what we're doing right now. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, it's like it's like an episode except in a book.

Okay, cool. So I look at Aquinas and some others and of course my friend isn't the only person in the

Christian tradition who has claimed to have encountered angels. There are other holy persons who also make similar claims and you just,

I don't know, I just get sort of sucked into it. I will say that obviously as a

Catholic myself I tend to read more of those sorts of authors but I do have in my collection a very fine book on the angels by the

Reverend Billy Graham. It obviously his approach reflects his own ecclesial commitments and he sees things strictly through biblical categories, but he has a lot of anecdotes in that book about people encountering angels who, you know, protected people in times of danger and that sort of thing.

Even up even outside the Bible, but he sees in their biblical consistency. So it's a it's a good book and I try to gather as much intel as I can and eventually

I found myself with enough information I could put a class together. So, what are some of the the topics in the class, you know, is it how they appear, how they sound, how do you tell that it's an angel and not a demon trying to mislead you?

You know, what are what are angels like, you know, how can you be sure that you're seeing an angel?

You know, my first thought when you brought up the woman, you know, seeing an angel in her head, how did she know it was her guardian angel?

Because I like to think that my gut instinct is my guardian angel, but, you know, am I wrong? Oh, yeah, angels are part and parcel of the

Christian tradition, I think, as a whole and certainly the Catholic Church says explicitly in the

Catechism, everybody's got one. Everybody's got a guardian angel. It's not a it's not an optional belief.

With respect to what I would cover in class, I'm sorry, just to interrupt, would you say that everyone has a guardian angel if they believe in God, or do you think everybody in general, period?

I believe the teaching is everybody's got one whether they're Christian or not. Yeah, I like to think so.

So, I tend, given the fact I have sort of a systematic mind,

I begin with the existence of angels, because obviously a lot of people don't believe in them, and I look at some of the reasons for accepting that angels exist.

Then, I actually borrow a lot from a Thomistic philosopher.

Now, when you, I'm sorry to throw 25 cent words at you, but at some point, you'll be really comfortable with this vocabulary, so keep having the podcast and you'll just go building up the knowledge, and then you'll know all this stuff backwards and forwards.

You're going to create like an FAQ that comes with this podcast. That's right. If somebody identifies themselves as a

Thomist or somebody identifies the person as a Thomist, it means that their thought has been shaped by St.

Thomas Aquinas. That's just shorthand. That person's in a

Thomist tradition or whatever. So, there's a gentleman who was actually instrumental in helping publish the

Encyclopedia Britannica. His name was, excuse me, Mortimer Adler, and he wrote a book called

The Angels and Us, and it is a philosophical, it's a philosopher's reflection on angels, their existence, their nature, and what they do.

So, he doesn't really take into account divine revelation, but he says, philosophically, it is not unreasonable to posit the existence of a spirit, a finite spirit that was never meant to be a soul, and then he goes through, all right, well, if there is such a thing, then we know spirit is kind of like this, which means the being that is a spirit has to be like A, B, and C.

So, he works through all that stuff, and that's what I basically start with. Then, once I get the basic package together of what an angel is and what they can do, sometimes

I'll hit a certain topic. I will bring in data from divine revelation or supernatural experiences for both the good angels and the bad angels.

Eventually, it all works out. So, I probably spend the first two -thirds of the class on the good angels and the last third on the bad angels.

Bad angels are just demons, right? Yeah, that's right, and by the time

I actually get to the point where I'm talking about the bad angels, we've already said a lot about them because the behaviors that they exhibit are consistent with the principles for the good angels.

They're the same kind of being. So, that's basically what I do. It's a little philosophy.

It's a little divine revelation. It's all mixed together, which is fine because what's a theologian except a philosopher who applies those principles to divine revelation?

Every theologian is a thief. Basically, we steal from philosophy so we can understand revelation better.

That's what we do, and some philosophers are better at it than others. Okay, yeah,

I mean that structure looks good. I'm curious about the meat of this. So, would it be better to just kind of understand in general angels' role in the

Bible, or what are some of these divine revelations that you go over in your class, just before we get into the specifics?

I'm gonna ask you to rephrase the question there. I wasn't following along. Try me again. So, what are some of these aspects that you review about angels?

Is it their intellect? Oh, yeah, I'll tell you what. We can start with that if you want to.

Yes, we do start with the angelic intellect. At least one of the things that we do, because actually we have to start with spirit.

Because that's the mode of being that an angel is, and it's also the mode of being of our own souls.

And so the nice thing is, if we learn something about our own spiritual souls, that insofar as our spirits function as the life principle of the body, that's what a soul is.

It's just the life principle of a living material thing. Then, well, if we have a spiritual soul and the angels are spirits, we can sort of work backwards and say, okay, we operate in such -and -such a way because our spirits have to work together with a material body.

So what would the spiritual operations be like in a creature that doesn't have a body and is just a spirit?

So let's take the intellect as an example here.

Think about how we know things. We basically have to learn things through our senses, unless we get a divine revelation from God or something.

But by and large, we learn things piecemeal through our senses. And what happens now, this will be a

Thomistic understanding of how the intellect works. The information you get from your senses is experienced in a unified way.

Now in my world, the power of the soul that brings together all of your sensory information is called the imagination.

So I know that the imagination is like, oh, I want to grow up and be a fireman. What's that going to be like? You know, use your imagination.

All right, that actually has a proper function, it has a meaning in philosophical studies of human knowing.

And it's basically the power of the soul to consolidate all of the information from your senses.

So you experience a kind of holistic, holistically inside you, everything your senses give you.

I see. Because it's not like we have five different tracks, right, in our mind, where we experience sight over here and hearing over there and touch over there.

It's all one. Yeah. So somehow, so the question is, we know things as certain kinds of things.

So for instance, I'm, your people can't see this, but I'm holding up a pen, okay? So we know this thing is a pen because this thing here has the what -ness of a pen.

So what happens is, through our senses we capture all the sensory material things of this thing, but we also capture the what -ness, and that's in our imagination too.

And then what the intellect does, the real spiritual power, it goes into the imagination, just kind of plucks out the what -ness and leaves all the variants, you know, to the side, the variables to the side, and then assigns a name to the what -ness based on your language.

So this is a pen. It would be something else in a different language. And then what we do is we piece together a bunch of these names or words to build sentences, and then from then, paragraphs.

And this is how we know things. We build knowledge piecemeal from the little pieces that our souls pick up through our senses.

Are you with me so far? I am with you. Okay. So we get our ideas from the intelligible realities that surround us.

Great. So an angel, by definition, is a spirit without a body.

And so if it is the body that enables us to come into contact with other knowable things, which we then piece together in terms of our body of knowledge, and angels don't have one of those bodies, where do they get their ideas from?

I just assumed they were like all -knowing, like God. They just like understood everything immediately.

You are partially right. Oh, my imagination made that, so...

The angels are not all -knowing. That is an attribute that has to be reserved for God.

Infinite knowledge is for an infinite being. That's God. Angels are finite beings.

And one of their evidences of their finitude is the fact that they're created.

They have come into being. You know, only God, who is infinite existence, and who's eternal, has always been here.

That is coextensive with infinite knowledge. But if you have a beginning, if you were brought into existence out of nothing, that already makes you finite.

So that's it. So angels are not all -knowing. They know more than us, but they don't know everything.

So how do they acquire knowledge then? I'm about to tell you. But I wanted to give you the kudos saying that, yeah, they just sort of understand things automatically.

That's true. We have to understand things by building sentences and paragraphs and all the other junk that I'm going to have to read over the next few days, you know, as my students attempt to show me that they can think.

Angels, on the other hand, don't have to do that. And I don't know, I mean, I don't want to put you on the spot or anything, but if angels don't have bodies with which they can encounter other things and then learn from them or whatever, there really is only one other source for angels in terms of where they're going to get their knowledge.

Can you sort of intuit and guess what that source is?

No, no, not necessarily. Go in the other direction. Oh, from the past?

No, no, don't go. All right, I gotta think hierarchically here.

So we are beneath angels in the grand scheme. From animals? We need to go up.

What's above an angel? Sorry. Yes, that is the correct answer.

Angels get their ideas from God. It's almost like they're programmed.

Now what God does is he creates a spirit, let's say an angel, and that angel has a certain intellectual power.

God, who is also a God of justice, is not going to deprive that intellectual creature of the ideas it needs to operate according to the way that God created it.

So God supplies angels with the ideas that they need to have.

At the time that they need them? At the time that they were created. So they're created with all the information that they need to know.

Right. And the way they know things depends on the strength of their intellect.

So angels, this may be a new feature that we may need to talk about later, angels are hierarchical.

I was gathering that one of the different types of angels that there are. That's right. So if you have the traditional nine choirs of angels, there's even a hierarchy, a ranking, even within each choir.

Which we could do a quick little recap that there's the top angels that kind of guard maybe God's throne, and then there's angels that are more doing the bidding on earth.

Do you think of a beehive? Am I on the same track? I guess so.

I don't know much about bees. I'm going to be honest with you there. I guess bees are sort of hierarchical.

If that works for you, that's fine. Sure, sure. You've got the queen bee, you've got the bees that really tend to the babies, you've got the guard bees, and then you've got bees that go out and get pollen, and then you've got bees that don't do anything but reproduce with the drones that die immediately.

So they're kind of useless. But that's my podcast. That's my other podcast. The bees one.

No, but it sounds like that's typically, you know, there's higher glorifying angels that are more next to the throne room, and then there's lower ones maybe making sure

I don't cross the road at the wrong time. Yeah, well, now

I'm not sure about the nuances with respect to the differences of opinion among, let's say, the

Catholic, the Orthodox, Protestants about how hierarchical the angels happen to be.

Like, whether or not, you know, you've got, let's say, the Dominions, and everybody within the rank of Dominion is pretty much the same.

At least within my own church tradition, the Catholic tradition, every angel is hierarchical.

There is no egalitarian status among the angels literally at all. So that not only are the choirs ranked, but every angel within that choir is also ranked, and everybody's got a spot.

And if you just accept that paradigm for a moment, what happens then, the rank of the angels is based on their power, their natural abilities that God gave them, which includes their intellectual power.

So one of the ways you can tell angels apart from each other is how many ideas they need. So, you know, the lowest possible angel might have been instilled by God with, you know,

I don't know how many millions of ideas in order for the angel to know its thing. But if you're talking about the top angel, and presumably if the angels are hierarchical, there was the top angel, all

God would need to do is give that angel the simplest of ideas, like maybe being.

And that angelic intellect would go into that idea of being and literally figure out everything else.

I'm trying to like, so what would that angel do then with that idea? That seems like pretty basic.

Well, they would basically take that idea and they would be able to figure out everything that God has done in terms of creation.

Literally everything in a one moment of intuition. Remember, we have to think things out discursively, piece by piece.

Angels don't have to do that. Like you said, in one moment of intellection, they literally unpack everything that's in that idea, everything that's implied in it.

And some angels with a lesser intellect will need more ideas to see as much as a higher angel with just one idea.

So, I love this conversation. I want to keep going into like, was all of this information from that woman that's a hermit, or was this just aggregated from many divine revelations?

No, no. This is, I'm trying to think if it's in the treatise on angels and the summa by Aquinas.

It might be. Are those books? Huh? Are those texts?

Are those books? What are those? All right. Yeah. So, the Summa Theologica of St.

Thomas Aquinas is one book, but it's many volumes. And trying to think,

I know that he talks about the fact that angels do not know things discursively.

They don't know by composing, which means bringing words together, or dividing, meaning this word does not belong with this other word.

So, those two words are divided. And, you know, composing and dividing, based on the intelligible things that we pick up from our imaginations and using our language, that's the standard mode of human knowledge.

Angels don't have to worry about that. And what I try to do when

I get to this point in the class is to impress upon the students how powerful the angelic intellect is.

You know, we're sitting here, we have, let's say, I don't know how many, what the average would be, how many ideas an educated human being would have.

We'll just throw a number out there, maybe 15 ,000, I don't know, whatever our vocabulary happens to be.

But an angel can know everything that we know and more with like three ideas.

It's a totally different way of understanding computation and just understanding. I didn't even know that was possible.

So, you're saying that this came to St. Thomas through a divine revelation?

No, no, no, no, no. St. Thomas, no, St. Thomas was just using the tools of his trade, philosophy, and stuff from the

Bible, stuff from the church fathers. And it just stands to reason, if a material being, a material creature that has a spiritual soul, has the power of knowledge, and has to exercise the power of knowing through the body, we're basically limited in what we can know because we pick up ideas as we go and then piece them together.

Angels don't have a body, so they don't pick up ideas. God and his justice gives them every idea that they need according to the power of the intellect that God gave them.

So, if you're talking about in the grand scheme of things, you know, angel number five, then God gives that angel five ideas, maybe being, time,

I don't know, think of a couple other things. And just by cognitively understanding what those basic concepts are, the angel knows everything that we know and more.

Right. Yeah, I understand the philosophical approach and how we could deduce that type of logic.

I think I was more so asking you to cite your source in the way of, you know, was this through divine revelation?

Was this through multiple studies? You know, the same type of way that you knew so much about demons. Was this from heart?

You know, I'm stuck in my human brain of like, well, what, was this a test? Was this research? Or was this

God gave someone this knowledge and that's how we understand this? Or was this more philosophical and we're just inferring this?

Yes, this is more of a theological conclusion. Yes, I don't think there's anything in the Bible that speaks to this directly.

Okay. But I mean, again, it is sort of confirmed in the fact that when you see the bad angels, you know, manifest themselves in a deliverance or an exorcism, they seem to know an awful lot.

I was about to say, if angels know all this, then demons, bad angels also instantly know as much as they are permitted to know.

That's correct, which is why we need to be cautious. Because if the angelic intellect is so powerful that by one moment of cognition about a certain idea, they can basically understand what would take an entire library to teach us.

The good angels use that information to help us towards God, or at least use their angelic powers to help us towards God, and the demons do the exact opposite.

But all of their information is from God, not the devil. Every angel's ideas is from God.

Okay. But when the angels, and this would have been at the moment of their creation, but when the fallen angels basically failed their test and decided they didn't want to be with God anymore, you know, they had already been given the ideas required by their nature, by the justness of God.

Now they just take their angelic, intellectual power and use it as a weapon against us.

So that's kind of explaining why there's more powerful. There's a hierarchy in hell as well. Yes.

Okay. Well, before we get too distracted with demons, because I could talk about that all day, that was such a good conversation.

If you haven't heard it, go back and listen to it. I want to stick with the topic of a hierarchy of angels and how humans in the

Bible describe the encounters with angels, because it seems to me, you know, Old Testament, New Testament, it's written differently.

It's a different time period. So the way that people reacted to angels in the

Old Testament, very differently, they were casual, you could argue, and maybe that's semantics, maybe it's syntax.

But when you reference biblical encounters of angels in the New Testament, people are freaking out.

And I guess my question is, is this because culturally, people are just less used to angels?

Or in the New Testament, when people are scared, are they experiencing the scary looking angels with the eyes and the wings and the faces and the horse heads?

You know, I can pull up some descriptions, just Old Testament versus New Testament, and we can kind of discuss openly how these two experiences,

Old versus New Testament differ. Does that sound okay? Yeah, go for it. I know that I asked really long questions.

So I'm just standing, I'm getting a bit confused. Sorry. But I'm going to start with Exodus, where we have

Moses seeing a burning bush. And Exodus 3 .2,

there was the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire, it did not burn up.

So I guess just real quick, angels don't have to be angels. They can be unearthly manifestations of fires that don't actually burn?

Or is that kind of like a one -off? It seems to me that in the

Old Testament, there are certain things which are considered to be signs of God's presence.

Now, here's another vocabulary word for you, a theophany. Theos meaning

God, and that there's something revelatory. That's the last half of the word.

I forget what the actual Greek word is actually now that I think about it. But fire is a sign of God's presence.

And so if you are witnessing a manifestation of a good angel, and it would make sense that there might be fire involved with that, because you're talking about also an angel in the divine presence is also fire.

So I'm not the expert in Exodus, because you know with the burning bush, soon

God starts speaking. So it's like the angel has this little introductory role saying, okay, take off sandals from your feet, this is holy ground.

Then Moses starts talking with God, you know, there's like a little, like the angel's an MC or something.

But I think it also has taken into account the manner of writing, and this is really the only thing

I might be able to offer of any substance to this particular question. And that is there is a style of writing about the supernatural which is appropriate for the centuries before Christ, which is obviously quite different than at the time of Christ in the

Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. It seems like in the New Testament what you have is a little bit more of a,

I don't know if this is the right word, but like an existential description of an encounter. So that you would get maybe a little bit more about what the angel looked like, and you certainly would get more about how the person reacted to what they saw.

In the ancient world, maybe what's going on is they're not really as interested in describing the nuts and bolts of the actual encounter because they want to get a bigger theme addressed.

That, you know, Moses did in fact encounter God, and maybe as an act of charity

God kind of eased him into talking with God by having him speak to an angel first, or having the angel speak first.

And it is the style of writing in the ancient world to kind of just take this sort of thing in stride.

Whether Moses actually took it in stride at the time he saw that, we have no idea.

I mean the best that we can do is, you know, think about the movie from the 1950s,

The Ten Commandments, with Charlton Heston there, and how he sort of was a bit overcome at the burning bush scene.

I don't know, have you seen The Ten Commandments? No, I should be pretending like I did. I gotta tell you, man,

I try to make movie references in my classes, and I realize as time goes on I am less and less relevant.

In your defense, Christian movies nowadays, they're not worth mentioning most of the time.

But it just seems to me there are certain movies that everybody should have watched just to maintain their

American citizenship. Everybody should watch The Wizard of Oz, it seems to me.

I thought The Ten Commandments, but nobody in my class except maybe one person saw The Ten Commandments.

I don't know what else to add in there. I mean what parts, what movies are quintessential American movies that you should just have in your collection or available on Netflix or whatever.

Anyway. Of course, right when you ask what's your favorite movie, your mind goes blank. That's just what happened to me. Yeah, but I'm talking about what movie is quintessentially

American that every American should at least have some, at least watched it once. I mean is

Star Wars up there now? I mean the original maybe? I don't know. But anyway,

I digress. So the deal is - I'm going to make a poll about that in this podcast. If you're listening to this on Spotify, put it in.

I can do that. In The Ten Commandments, which I think should be on at least every

Jews and Christians, yes, I've seen that movie list. There's actually no mention of the angel.

It's just God speaking from the burning bush. So that little detail is not part of the screenplay.

So just in terms of what we do have in scripture, the sacred author clearly wants to indicate to Moses that this is going to be a supernatural encounter of the good kind, which is why

I have an angel followed by the voice of God. And it seems like the angel is just the setup man at the moment.

Okay, I'm going to read another verse from Genesis. So again, another Old Testament verse that also describes an encounter with an angel.

And it's right when Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed. And verse 19, one through 29, it begins, the two angels arrived at Sodom in the evening and Lot was sitting in the gateway of the city.

When he saw them, he got up to meet them and bowed down with his face to the ground. My Lord, he said, please turn aside to your servant's house.

You can wash your feet and spend the night and then go your way early in the morning. No, they answered, we will spend the night in the square.

So I just want to focus on that verse because it becomes very quickly something else in that verse, just with people trying to knock down his door to see the angels.

And I don't want to make it about that, but just this reaction. Because they're not going there to see the angels.

So go on. We'll keep this podcast clean. No, I, so he,

I don't know, just me, or that just seems casual that he's sitting at the gate, sees the angels and he bows.

There is that sign of respect, almost like he doesn't deserve to see their faces in my opinion, but he's not like shocked.

He's not crying. He's not speechless. He kind of says, Hey, you're welcome to stay in the guest house, but I recommend the main house.

You know, it's up to you guys. Is that just me? Or do you think that's also just the authors of that time? Well, it's an open question.

Let me just see what my translation has to say here. And by the way, your translation was fine. It matches.

I'm what I'm looking at here. I am also curious, just as a background from the last two references, you think those are low ranking angels?

Do you think those are higher ranking angels? You know, they seem very basic messages, but I wasn't sure if there was a specific classification for certain angels deliver certain types of messages.

Well, if we want to stay within the bounds of divine revelation, there's very few instances of angels given certain tasks.

Obviously Gabriel announcing the incarnation, Michael protects Israel, the cherubim drive out

Adam and Eve. We'll get back. All that kind of thing. Well, maybe we'll put that to the side for the moment.

These angels here, there is no particular name in terms of rank or function.

They're just angels, so there's no way to tell. Certain other passages do go in a little bit more detail, but here

I'm just looking and I'm not sure that these angels are recognized as angels by lot.

Now he calls them lords, but I really don't know what the original

Hebrew would be there. I don't think it's necessarily the case that he's acknowledging the fact that these two men are in fact angels.

This could just be a sign of respect by lot to these unknown people, just in case they're of a higher social ranking or something.

As you read through the rest of the passage, which of course for the sake of propriety, we will not do. Everybody else thinks that these angels are men too.

Really? That was going to be my next question. Were they trying to essentially assault these beings knowing they were angels?

Is that why the desire was there? No. I think these guys wanted to just get together with these men because they look like men.

Interesting. It just seemed so feral and ferocious in this passage.

Yes, it's pretty unbecoming. There's no doubt about it. Interesting.

But I think the lesson is basically that angels can, if called upon by God to do so, appear as us.

And they are unrecognizable, except maybe for something that they do in the process.

And certainly there have been private accounts of individuals who have been helped by a person who was there and then looked up and the person wasn't there anymore.

So there is a biblical precedent for angels and maybe especially guardian angels to help people in the guise of a human being.

And then you don't find out until after the fact that maybe that wasn't a human being because how could they have disappeared so quickly kind of thing.

Well, let's move on to maybe some angels that are clearly angels. And based off just descriptions that are provided in the word, in my research, again,

I'm entering this very basic. I hear angels. I picture Mary and Joseph in the manger and angels come and they have incense and they've got animals.

That is literally where I'm at. And so in this research and just understanding that there's way more to the story with angels, my research show that there's different types with different jobs that look differently.

And this really is backed up by what you're saying with the hierarchy. And what I found is there's different types.

Like one is called the seraphim and the seraphim are angels that are closely associated with worship and praise of God.

And if we go to Isaiah six, two, it says above Isaiah, six, two above him were seraphim each with six wings, with two wings, they covered their faces and with two, they covered their feet and with two, they were flying.

So it looks like I got wings on their face, wings on their feet, and then they're also flying.

So that's all I've got is that they're associated with worship and praise.

Does that mean, you know, when you like, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty, that's them? Or is, you know, or when

I get really emotional in church when I'm worshiping, that's those angels really moving in the crowd?

Do you know a lot about the seraphim? Well, give me just a second here. Okay. This may be a part you just want to edit here because I do have slides that I have.

I have stuff on these guys. Hold on a sec. This is, so I'm just going to take a second to set up my answer because I'm going to, to what the heck one would

I need here? Change, action, choirs, that's what I want. Are choirs like casts of angels?

I'm sorry, what? Are choirs like casts of angels? Like the upper class? Yeah. Okay.

That's fair enough. Let's see what I got here. All right, so I'm looking at my,

I'm going to try and do this so it's podcast worthy because you're doing some editing, right?

I can do whatever you want. I mean, if they're boring and they're just kind of for show, that's what you know.

I mean, that's, I know way less than you, so don't ever feel like you don't know enough. All right.

I just want to sound smooth and professional. That's all. The seraphim are in fact traditionally considered to be the highest choir or rank of angels.

It comes from a Hebrew word meaning burning or glowing, and seraphim is already plural, so seraph would be singular, seraphim would be the plural, so just so you know that.

And you're right, where we see the seraphim is in Isaiah 6, and for those

Christians who go to what you might call a more traditional liturgy and they have what they call the Sanctus in Latin, holy, holy, holy,

Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of thy glory, that kind of thing, that we're basically quoting what the angels, the seraphs, seraphs, there

I go, I anglicized the plural there, the seraphims, they're in the presence of God all the time because technically in Christian worship, in one way or another, you are bringing yourself into the presence of God, and so it's appropriate to say what the angels say who are in the presence of God all the time.

So yeah, they are the ones closest to God without a doubt. Now as we work through the choirs,

I just want to point out to everybody that the ranking of these choirs, the nine angelic choirs, all of them are present in the

Bible somewhere, but they're not present altogether in the same place, so that the listing of the nine choirs has actually changed over time, especially in the middle ranks.

The seraphim and the cherubim are always on top, the archangels and the angels are already always on the bottom, and then there's been in the

Middle Ages, particularly when this list was sort of been worked out, there's a lot of variations in the middle.

So the list I'm going to give you, if you're interested, will be kind of where the list is now.

The debate seems to be over, but the historical development of the list is just a it's a matter of tradition, you might say, and not something that the

Bible can answer for us. But this was kind of decided over a period of time in the

Middle Ages that there are A. there are different types of angels, and B. what we're going to call them and see what they do.

Yes. Interesting. So what are the nine, if you don't mind, if you have them right in front of you, oh

I do, I do. Okay, so the top are the seraphim, rank number two are the cherubim, and I do have my etymology here.

The meaning is uncertain. There is a Hebrew word which looks like cherub, like cherub, but at least the sources

I've got don't really tell me exactly what the word means. Cherub like a shrub? Uh, well, sort of.

Or am I picturing the wrong thing? No, it's uh, I swear, a cherub is like, it's not just one of my favorite bands.

Oh, never mind. Remember, cherub is just a shortened form, and you know, when you think of cherub, you think about, you know, the little cupid person on Valentine's Day.

That, that, that's almost an insult to the angels, really. Because, you know, hey, this little kid, diapers, and he's going around shooting people arrows to make people fall in love, and whatever.

And I'm thinking, holy cow, we just, I'd say this in class too, we just figured out that the, the angelic intellect is so powerful.

Why, why would an angel want to waste his time thinking about how to shoot little darts at people?

Yeah, yeah, we have anyway, we've commercialized that.

And what I've seen from the notes that, thank you, chat, gbt, not gonna lie here, is that these angels are often associated with the presence and glory of God.

So very similar to the Seraphim, but they're also depicted as guarding the

Garden of Eden after Adam and Eve's expulsion, which is way more intense than a little baby cupid.

Yeah. To guard. Yeah, but flaming swords. The text is pretty explicit about that.

Yeah, Ezekiel 10 5 says, the sound of the wings of the cherubim could be heard as far away as the outer court, like the voice of God Almighty when he speaks.

Right, and I'm just doing a quick look in Genesis. Oh, is it

Genesis 3? Right, so this is

Genesis 3, starting at verse 23. Therefore the

Lord God sent him forth from the Garden of Eden, that of course is Adam, to till the ground from which he was taken.

He drove out the man, and at the east of the Garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword which turned every way to guard the way to the

Tree of Life. So these are armed angels, they are not to be messed with.

At every way on the way to the Tree of Life, so that means like throughout the path within the

Garden of Eden, there's more cherubim. So even if I got past the first one, there's more. Presumably.

Oh, there would be more, yes. Yeah, it's way more intense than a little baby cupid.

Oh yes, undoubtedly. Okay, so we've got the first two, the seraphim, the cherubim, and then there's...

Okay, then we have the thrones. Now I had a note here that gave me...

Were those the eyes? Hold on just a second here. Thrones are mentioned in Colossians chapter 1 verse 16, and that's the hymn, the

Christological hymn that Paul includes at the beginning of that letter to the Colossians. So the thrones are mentioned as a separate angelic choir.

So those are the first three, seraphim, cherubim, thrones, and then the dominion. What do the thrones do? I'm sorry, he's mentioned by Paul in Colossians, but what are they doing?

Are they just around the throne? Well, I'll tell you what, let me go through the nine first, and then

I'll go through their tasks, because the list of the choirs tends to be more of a tradition, even though the names of the choirs are in Revelation.

So the ordering tends to be a matter of tradition. And then the tasks assigned to each choir is more of a theological opinion, let's say.

Now people who are more involved in deliverance ministry, they might have a little bit more intel on that, but even then, on this side of things, it's still,

I think, pretty conjectural. But I'll share with you what the conjectures is, and you can go with it from there.

So seraphim, cherubim, thrones, then the dominions, then the virtues, then the powers, and then the lowest rankings are the principalities, archangels, and angels.

All right, so those are the nine choirs. Their tasks. The seraphim, their task is love, especially love for God, because of their close proximity to God.

The cherubim is more of knowledge, knowing

God, and knowing wisdom. They, being still very close to God, they have a little bit more of an intellectual role or intellectual bent than the loving bent of the seraphim.

Now, God can operate in the universe in a couple of different ways. He can intervene in the world directly, or he can delegate.

So the angels are there in part to fulfill the commands of God, if there's a particular command that God wants to be implemented through the intermediation of the angels.

Now, obviously, this is the sort of thing where if angelology is not a particular part of your church, this seems like it's pretty superfluous, this way of thinking, because, you know,

God, Jesus, will just do it directly. And of course, God, Jesus, can do that if he wants to.

But, you know, there's no law that says that God can't, you know, engage the assistance, not that God needs it, of these other creatures that God has created.

So the thrones, their primary function, again, as a matter of theological opinion, is communicating

God's commands to the other angels who are beneath the thrones, whose job it is to implement them.

So the thrones would communicate God's commands and oversee the efforts to see that God's commands are implemented.

The dominions would be ones who appoint specific tasks to the immediate virtues and powers beneath them, so that God's commands are fulfilled.

And there's also a sales structure of, like, regional manager to, like, senior manager to, like, associate.

Yeah, no, that's pretty close. Yeah, that's right. And there's also a little tradition, at least from among the people

I know, that dominions serve as guardian angels of human institutions.

What do you, like, a church? Like a university, let's say. Maybe a corporation, if it's worthy of it,

I don't know. But that's what I have been told by people who do more of this work than I do.

I'll just share with you, you can take for what it's worth. But I thought that was sort of interesting.

All right, so the virtues underneath the dominions, their specific role in implementing

God's command is to oversee creation and to then prepare for the lower angels to enact

God's commands. And virtues apparently can also be invoked for protection against accidents and illness.

But the virtues seem to have some sort of role in, if there's a particular command by God that has to take place in a certain place, the virtues do some work behind the scenes to get that place ready for the actual command to be implemented.

And meanwhile, the powers, their specific role seems to be determining the means by which the commands of God are to be accomplished.

So they're the ones who actually are kind of on the ground doing the nuts and bolts planning.

Okay, this has to be done then, this has to be done then, this person has to go there. So they're a little bit more, you know, at the personnel level, you might say, rather than the big picture kind of thing.

The principalities are kind of your lower management. They directly implement, they direct the implementation of God's commands.

They also serve as guardians of nations and provinces and diocese. The archangels are the ones that execute, excuse me,

God's commands. And the angels, the lowest ranking, they're the ones that communicate with human beings, if that need be.

So in terms of the archangels, they're the ones that actually, they're the last angels in the food chain there to actually implement whatever

God wants to command done. And the angels are a little bit more interpersonal. They're the ones that are in the trenches with us.

Yeah, that is, I guess I'm just like wowed right now, because the lowest ranking angels are like so unfathomably powerful and high to us.

You know, it's like the top of Everest is like their bottom. You know, like it just goes so infinitely higher and unfathomable in power and intellect and execution that their lowest one is the one that we are already floored by, we are already just speechless by, we're already brought to tears by, that's their lowest ranking one.

Yeah, that's right. And I, you know, when I said earlier about the hierarchy of the angels being differentiated by the number of ideas,

I think that's still right. I mean, even if you've got the lowest, presumably if there's a top angel, there must be a lowest angel,

I would imagine. But even the way their intellect functions, even if their number of, the number of ideas that that angel's intellect would require is an awful lot.

Yeah, there's still something about the angelic nature, which is, it's got an edge over us, there's no doubt about it.

This is perfect. Now, I would like to introduce a topic that I think had better be addressed before we...

Go ahead. How many angels are there? Oh, I feel like it's like how many people are in heaven right now, like that's unfathomable, you can't count that.

True, but you can at least, I think, gain an appreciation of how large the number might be.

So what I'm going to do is offer you a line of reflection that is from Patricia Devlin, who

I'd mentioned earlier in the podcast, and a particular conversation she claimed to have had with her guardian angel.

And so the conversation went something like this. She asked her guardian angel whether or not when a person dies, the guardian angel gets assigned to guard a different soul.

You know, so being a guardian angel, it's like a job. You just keep on getting souls to guard, and that's your thing, until the end of time.

And Patricia reports that her guardian angel said no. The guardian angel said, when an angel is chosen to be a guardian angel by God, that guardian angel is chosen for that person because there is a special fit and bond between that soul and that guardian angel, such that that guardian angel can never be another soul's guardian angel.

And most guardian angels, as a matter of tradition, come from the rank of angels.

I was about to say. Though there are apparently exceptions that maybe a person has this particular role or function that would require a guardian angel from like maybe the archangels or something.

Okay. So the conversation went like this. So only one guardian angel per soul, that's it.

God does not ask every angel in that rank of angels to be a guardian angel, and some of those lower -ranking angels want to be guardian angels and don't get to be.

And oddly enough, in that conversation, the guardian angel is reported to have said that there's actually training.

Like if they want to be a guardian angel, they have to learn how to love and discipline and other virtues so they can actually be effective guardians of a soul.

And some angels sign up and they don't finish. So what this means, if you add all this stuff together, is that there are more angels in the rank of just the angels, the ninth choir, than there will ever be members of the human race.

And that's got to be an incredibly large number. That number does not include all of the other angels in the other eight choirs, and it excludes the one -third of the angels that God created which are now demons and aren't eligible to be guardian angels.

I just feel like I shrunk a million times. I feel so small in this world. You know, we think the material creation that God has put us in is pretty vast.

It pales to the vastness of spiritual creation just based on the number of angels

God must have created if this private conversation has any veracity to it at all.

What else did they discuss? Any other? Oh, well, in terms of the function of a guardian angel in a separate conversation, you know, angels are basically, well, angelos in Greek means messenger.

So we name these beings, these creatures, basically according to the function through which we know them best.

So in the Bible, more often than not, an angel is communicating a message.

They're God's messengers to us, you know, King David, Lot, whoever.

So we call them, we give them a name according to their function, but they're all angels whether they communicate with us or not.

So, while that is true that God can use angels to communicate with us, we can enlist our guardian angels to communicate with God.

Now, by and large, I would say that outside the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, the propensity is just talk to God, talk to Jesus directly.

There's no need for any intermediary. Christ is the intermediary and he's God anyway. But, I mean, you can talk to your friends in a number of different ways.

You can talk to them in person, you can send messages through other people, you can use technology. And so what this guardian angel indicated is, if you want, yes, you can speak to God directly, but you can also speak to your guardian angel and say, please ask

God to do this, or tell God I need that. And the guardian angel said, we'll do it and we will not change your request.

We will go right to the throne of God and deliver the message that you have given us, the angels, and we won't change it.

And we'll just deliver it to God and God will do what it is infinite love will, what was best for you.

And the angels, well, this particular angel said that actually angels love to do that.

They love to be put to use by us. So I would just like to suggest to everybody, and I say this to my students in class, just keep that handy in your spiritual toolbox.

By all means, work on your relationship with God by every direct means possible. But don't shy away from using other means that God seems to have made possible, which would include your guardian angel.

And who knows, maybe if you're really feeling creative, let's say if you're taking one of my tests in class, maybe you want to just say a silent prayer, my guardian angel and the guardian angels of everybody else in this room, please speak to God so I can remember the answer to question eight.

Yeah, why not? Yeah, why not? It's actually right. I feel like,

I wish I could react quicker, but I feel so marinated in this. This is, I mean, hit me again.

Give me one more, because I know that we're over an hour, but give me one more thing that she heard from her guardian angel.

Oh, what she heard from her guardian angel. Oh boy, I got to think about this now, because those are my go -to ones for sure.

Oh, okay. How about the names of the angels? Now, we know that there are three named archangels in the

Bible, two, unfortunately, if you're a Protestant, because of the difference in the table of contents of the

Old Testament. Let's see, I have... Gabriel, right? What's that?

Gabriel, is that what you're referring to? Yep, that is correct. There it is right there. Gabriel, which means strong one of God, what it means.

And Michael, who also appears in the Bible, is who is like God.

Now, there's a book called Tobit, which is considered canonical and inspired by Catholics, and I believe the

Orthodox too. And in that book, you get Raphael, which means God has healed.

Yeah. Now, you'll notice that all of these angels are named after God.

And one of the little pieces of intel that Patricia reports is that all the angels are named that way.

They're named after some attribute of God. And since God is infinite existence, he has an infinite number of attributes, so presumably angels can have all sorts of different names.

And in the course of her book, there are, I'm looking here, nine different angels who share their names, at least the meaning of their names in English.

I don't know what the actual Hebrew would be. And they would include clear judgment of God, patient work of God, kindly spirit of God, joy in the love of God, tender sorrow of God, protectiveness and gentleness of God, gentle wisdom of God, searching the heart of God.

And at least according to Patricia here, who of course, as a hermitess, she's

Catholic, she claims that either an angel, I think one of these angels or her guardian angels said that the guardian angel of John Paul II, who is now a canonized saint in the

Catholic Church, had a guardian archangel whose name was Fortress of the

Lord. It's formidable. I know, especially since the work he had to do.

So I would just maybe share with everybody, angels are persons and they have names and they have names that are given to them by God, which reflect both the angel's own individual character and how that character actually reflects what is contained in God.

And it is bad form to ask an angel, you know, in prayer, their name.

If they want to tell you, fine, but just don't ask. Why would that be bad?

Is that like insulting? You know, that's a good question. Because that was the first thing

I thought of was I want to know my guardian angel's name. Yeah. There might be a sense of propriety there,

I think. If you know the name, and this is kind of a biblical principle, if you know the name of something or somebody, you kind of have jurisdiction over that person.

So the reason why parents get to name their children is because parents have authority over their children.

And when an exorcist is trying to kick a demon out of a possessed person, one of the key leverages that an exorcist has is if by the power of Christ, the demon is compelled to reveal his name.

And if you know the demon's name, it becomes a lot easier to kick him out. Who knows?

Maybe there's an angel with that name. I suppose that's possible.

But still the power of a name. I mean, what is something we take for granted and underestimate? That's right.

We just think of names as labels. Right. In fact, maybe this will be the thing that will kind of put you over the edge.

Oh, great. The guardian angel in this book told

Patricia that we have names.

We have names given to us by God. And the angel said, if you ever found out what your real name is, the one that God gave you, you could hardly stay alive anymore.

You'd have to want to be with God like right then and there. So we've got a name given to us by our parents, but our real father is

God. And God gave us a name, and we just don't know what it is yet.

Yeah. You might make me cry on this podcast, Christopher. I'm damn near there.

See, being a theologian, it's not all just reading crusty tomes in some basement archives somewhere.

Maybe some guys like doing that. And there are some guys who look like they need to eat more cheeseburgers, and they're super pale, and they're vitamin

D deficient. But we still need people like that. I hope that higher education still needs people like me, because I'm not necessarily called to do that.

Wow. I need a minute to think about all these things. This was a lot. This made me feel really small.

This kind of put a fear of God in me just because of its vastness. And I hope listeners feel the same way.

I feel like this is literally a whole new world. I feel like this is three

Earths worth of knowledge, just learning about angels. So thank you so much for sharing all about this.

Yeah, you're welcome. And I would just tell everybody, since a lot of what

I said in the last several minutes did come from private revelation, it's private, which means it doesn't have to be authoritative for anybody.

Now, I know Patricia personally, even though she's not doing particularly well right now, I know her to be somebody who was in her right mind during this period of her life.

And it seems quite credible to me, and it fits with other things that we know from divine revelation and theological tradition.

But people are perfectly welcome to take as much salt as they would like, a grain of salt, a bushel of salt, don't care when it comes to these private revelations.

And certainly nobody is obliged to assent to them as true. But I do blend them in to my classes because I do think they offer highlights of things about angels that we do know from authoritative sources.

Yeah, I completely agree. It seems like a very personal subject that I hope people share more about and continue asking questions, because it seems very,

I want to use your word, unbecoming when you do hear of it, let alone experience it. Have you personally feel like you've ever experienced an angel?

Not in the way you'd have anything listed in the

Bible, no. I mean, I think maybe there's been one time I've been prodded, and I'll just leave it at that, which was,

I think, good advice. Unfortunately, I had a little bit more of an intense experience of a bad kind, which was happily temporary, because I was in a set of circumstances where I didn't really know better, but I know now, and that's all by the boards,

I'm happy to say. But I like my normal life. I don't want to go necessarily and dabble in these things.

I do my best work when I'm not freaked out. Yeah, interesting.

Well, we could talk all day, and hopefully we find another topic to talk about, because I always enjoy these conversations with you,

Christopher. So thank you so much for coming on, and I hope everyone enjoyed listening. Thank you,