Angels

“Are they not all ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation?”

— Hebrews 1:14

Angels are created, spiritual beings, without bodies, who serve God in his heavenly court and carry out his will, especially on behalf of “those who are to inherit salvation” (Heb. 1:14). Scripture presents them as morally accountable creatures, made originally good: some remain confirmed in holiness, worshiping God and ministering to his people, while others fell and now stand arrayed against him as the demonic host (Satan and the demons). Angels are themselves creatures, not objects of worship; only God may be venerated, and angels who appear in Scripture consistently refuse it.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no dedicated chapter on angels. Its one, indirect touchpoint is chapter 4, “Of Creation,” which opens by saying that God made “the world, and all things therein, whether visible or invisible.”¹ That phrase echoes the Nicene Creed’s own “maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible,” and it is the confession’s only nod to angels as part of what God created in the beginning: it says nothing about their nature, fall, or ministry, and no further weight should be placed on it.

Biblical Basis

Scripture describes angels as spirits (Heb. 1:14) rather than embodied creatures, “far superior” to man in knowledge and power yet still creatures, subject to God and unable to perform what only God can do.² Job 38:7 places them at creation itself, and Genesis 3:24 has one guard Eden after the Fall. They appear throughout redemptive history: giving the law at Sinai (Gal. 3:19), announcing Christ’s birth (Luke 1:26-38; 2:10-14), ministering to him after his temptation and in Gethsemane (Matt. 4:11; Luke 22:43), and announcing his resurrection and ascension (Matt. 28:2-7; Acts 1:10-11). Hebrews 1:14 calls them “ministering spirits sent out to serve for the sake of those who are to inherit salvation,” and they are said to watch over believers (Ps. 34:7; 91:11), protect children (Matt. 18:10), and rejoice over a sinner’s repentance (Luke 15:10). They also worship God directly, as in Isaiah’s temple vision (Isa. 6:1-3) and the throne-room scene of Revelation 5:11-12. A number of Old Testament passages speak of “the angel of the LORD” in terms that approach identifying him with God himself (Gen. 16:7-13; Ex. 3:2-6; Judg. 6:11-24); many Reformed interpreters, including Calvin, have read these as appearances of the pre-incarnate Christ rather than of a created angel.³

Historical Development

The corporeality of angels

The early and medieval church debated whether angels, though not embodied in the way humans are, nonetheless possess some kind of physical form. Appealing to passages describing angels’ luminous appearance (e.g. Matt. 28:3; Luke 2:9), the Second Council of Nicaea (787) held that angels have “bodies composed of ether or light.” The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) reversed this, ruling that angels are wholly incorporeal, “and this has been the common opinion in the Church” since.²

Speculative angelology and the Reformation’s correction

Alongside that dispute, patristic and medieval writers built out an elaborate angelology addressing the number, rank, and internal hierarchy of the angels, most influentially the Celestial Hierarchy attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, and the question of exactly when the angels were created, debated as late as Peter Lombard’s twelfth-century Sentences.⁴ Calvin rejected this whole genre of inquiry by name: “None can deny that Dionysius (whoever he may have been) has many shrewd and subtle disquisitions in his Celestial Hierarchy, but on looking at them more closely, every one must see that they are merely idle talk.”⁴ He set against it Paul’s own reticence about what he saw in the third heaven (2 Cor. 12:4), and stated the Reformation’s governing rule for the whole doctrine: “we must renounce those vain babblings of idle men, concerning the nature, ranks, and number of angels, without any authority from the Word of God.”⁴ That rule is the root of the Reformed positions taken up below, both on guardian angels and on the invocation of angels.

Opposing Views

Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox veneration and invocation of angels. The practice of invoking angels in prayer, first attested in Ambrose, was sanctioned by the Second Council of Nicaea (787) and later called “good and profitable” by the Council of Trent (session 25).⁵ The Roman Catechism justifies it on the ground that angels who behold God’s face have taken up “the sponsorship of our salvation,” and the Roman Breviary includes prayers to angels for the Feast of the Angels.⁵ Rome distinguishes the veneration owed to angels from the worship owed to God alone.

The Reformed rejection of angel veneration. Reformed theology holds that this distinction is not one Scripture recognizes: the same language used elsewhere in the New Testament for religious service to God or Christ is applied to what Rome calls mere “veneration,” so “the entire distinction is arbitrary, supported neither by etymology or Scripture.”⁵ “Lutheran and Reformed people and virtually all Protestants reject the religious veneration of angels along with that of the saints because Scripture clearly prohibits it” (Deut. 6:13; 10:20; Matt. 4:10; Col. 2:18-19; Rev. 19:10; 22:9).⁵ Calvin makes the same point from the angels’ own conduct in Scripture: their ministry is meant to point us to Christ, not to themselves, so that “we invoke and celebrate him as our only defender,” and Abraham’s servant, though commended to an angel’s care (Gen. 24:7), still prays directly to God rather than to the angel.⁶

Rationalist denial of angels. A modern view treats the Bible’s statements about angels as accommodated popular superstition or poetic personification of natural forces, denying that angels exist as real beings at all. Reformed theology has answered that this reading cannot be sustained without rejecting the authority of Scripture’s own plain historical statements about angels.²

Objections and Responses

Does every believer, nation, or church have its own guardian angel? The fuller doctrine of guardian angels assigned to particular people, cities, and nations traces to the Shepherd of Hermas and especially Origen, following an existing Jewish angelology that assigned angels to specific domains (Raphael to healing, Michael to Israel, and so on); “the church fathers and later Roman Catholic theology and the Roman Catechism … recognized guardian angels,” while “Calvin and most Reformed theologians rejected the idea.”⁵ Reformed exegesis is cautious rather than flatly dismissive: Matthew 18:10 (“their angels … always see the face of my Father”) “does teach that children have guardian angels; that is, that angels watch over their welfare. But it does not prove that each child, or each believer, has his own guardian angel.”² Acts 12:15, where Peter’s friends say “It is his angel,” reports the untutored guess of “an uneducated servant” about a popular belief, not a doctrinal claim of the text itself.² Daniel 10’s “prince of Persia” and “prince of Grecia,” set against the archangel Michael as Israel’s own prince, have led many interpreters toward some doctrine of national guardian angels, but even reading these as angelic powers shows only that a real spiritual conflict underlies the earthly one, not that “every country and people has its own angel” as a general rule.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 1. ↩
Charles Hodge, “Chapter XIII. Angels,” in Systematic Theology, Volume I (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1871), 637-648. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.5. ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 14, sec. 4. ↩ ↩² ↩³
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 10, “Creator of Heaven and Earth.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Calvin, Institutes, 1.14.12. ↩