#3 UNDERSTANDING ANGELS + Dr. Christopher Carr

Hello, hello! Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense, so we can get to know God our Creator better.

All right, welcome back to Biblically Speaking. We're on episode three, and if you think I sound better, it's because I do. I am using an official mic, so I feel like a radio host. And I also just got a standing desk, so I just feel like I'm overall up-leveling in life.

And because of that, since I'm getting the mic after the episode, prepare for much worse quality for the actual episode. But it's okay, you know? It's just I'm going to keep you in anticipation, because episode four, it's going to be music to your ears.

Literally. This week, I'm going to meet with Christopher Carr again, because he's awesome and so easy to talk to. And if you didn't listen to my first episode about demons with him, I totally get it. It was pretty rough, pretty scary.

But at the end of the day, it's all quality information coming from a PhD. And whether or not you choose to believe in it, I still think it's fascinating. And I still think we should be aware of other perspectives, especially in the faith, you know, from like a growth and maybe spiritual protection type of place.

And just, I mean, honestly, I've never been to a church that talked about any of these things. So this is just truly mind-blowing for me. I mean, I've dabbled in Catholicism, but I've mostly been non-denominational and never have I really gotten any explanation beyond like hell being a burning place of terribleness.

So I really enjoyed the last conversation I had with Christopher. And on the lighter note this week, we're going to talk about angels. And this was because our first conversation, he kind of brought up, oh, I studied angels.

And I don't know how that works, but it turns out he's a professor. So he teaches about it. It's an entire topic that, surprise, all of his students are interested in. So he goes over basically his curriculum in the class today.

And then he answers just some questions on kind of like demons, angels live in a hierarchy and they have different roles and they have different duties. And all of this information is coming from, I mean, it's coming from a firsthand source.

I mean, his friend was having direct conversations with her guardian angel. So at the end of the day, again, believe what you want. I still think we should be aware of it. And I really hope you enjoy it.

Also, I feel like I'm endlessly curious about this and I'm endlessly confused about this, but if you have questions, please submit them. I don't know how, but I'll figure out a way. Still trying to navigate producing a podcast, but if you have questions or is there like a story in the Bible that you don't get, or you just want some context on, on why would you include that story in the Bible over another story?

Papyrus ain't cheap. Submit it. I'm sure we can find some experts that can talk about it. Also I've been watching Is Genesis History on Amazon Prime. This isn't an ad, this isn't any promotion material, but it has truly changed my perspective on life.

I just feel like everything I knew before is wrong and watching people with PhDs talk about the world and its creation in both a scientific and biblical way, in a way that makes sense. I just like, I feel like I'm pressing the reset button.

Like my whole mind is getting remolded. So I hope you enjoy, you listen and buckle up because this is going to get so interesting. Also, if you did listen to the demon episode, I just want to offer you some comfort through this episode about angels that you do have a guardian angel and it is looking out for you regardless of what you believe.

That's something that we talk about a bit today. So I just wanted to, you know, before you don't listen, give it a try here. I think it's, it's still information that you should take with a grain of salt and you should consider because there is a God that loves you even if you don't understand him.

And I'm slowly learning that. Hello, we're back with Christopher Carr. How are you doing.

Today? Good evening, Gazian. How are you? I'm doing great. I know we've already had our.

Introductions for the last 15 minutes, but 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 going to be plugging away doing that. Yikes. 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. I do. I actually have a, sorry to say, this brings 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'm 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. 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. Got it.

But 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. 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. 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 the thing to make sure you have enough space on the bottom. With the whiteout? Ah, yes. Yes, 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 from all my photos. 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 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 us to offer them, so we actually get enrollment in our classes.

Angels seems like a bestseller, 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. What's a hermitess? It's a female hermit. Oh, okay, got it.

Okay, yeah, 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, hello, shout out to Patricia.

I don't even know. Well, no, it seems unlikely, but you never know. Maybe 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 is basically asked to suffer for souls at the moment of their death 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? No, no, there was a period of time in her life where she had this peculiar vocation. Oh, okay. She doesn't have it anymore. 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 death, particularly by offering her suffering for those people.

So obviously, since I got to know this person through mutual friends, 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 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.

Okay, kind of like what we're doing right now. Yeah, kind of, yeah, it's like an episode, except in a book. Okay, cool. And so I look at little 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 outside the Bible, but he sees in their biblical consistency.

So 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 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 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. That'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. Oh, that's beautiful. 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... 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 build building up the knowledge, and then you'll know all this stuff backwards and forwards.

I'm going.

To create like an FAQ that comes with this podcast. That's right. Just like things Chris mentions.

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. Okay, that makes sense. 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 Mortimer Adler, and he wrote a book called The Angels and Us.

It's a philosopher's reflection on angels, their existence, their nature, and what they do. 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.

Then, he goes through, 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 when 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. 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 going to 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.

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 a 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, it 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, that makes sense. So, the question is, we know things as certain kinds of things. So, for instance, 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 whatness 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 whatness, 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 whatness and leaves all the variants, you know, to the side, the variables to the side, and then assigns a name to the whatness 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 and 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. Okay. 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.

Right. Angels, on the other hand, don't have to do that, and I don't know. I mean, if 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? Can we say from humans? No, no, not necessarily. Go in the other direction. Oh, from the past? No, no, don't go. All right. I got to think hierarchically here.

So, we are beneath angels in the grand scheme of things. We need to go up. What's above an angel? Sorry, it's been a while. 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 intellective power. God, who's 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. Oh, so they're created with all the information that they need to.

Know. Right. Interesting. 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. 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. Kind of, if 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.

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 those things.

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 intellect. 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. Got it. 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, you know, 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.

Right. Angels don't have a body, so they don't pick up ideas. God, in 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 like 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 deduce that type of logic. I think I was more so, like, 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, like, 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 the 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 different.

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?

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. Sorry, my notes. 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? 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 we're talking about also an angel of the divine presence.

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 the angels of 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.