(e) They are an order of intelligences distinct from man and older than man.
Angels are distinct from man. 1 Cor. 6:3—“we shall judge angels”; Heb. 1:14—“Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?” They are not glorified human spirits; see Heb. 2:16—“for verily not to angels doth he give help, but he giveth help to [pg 446]the seed of Abraham”; also 12:22, 23, where “the innumerable hosts of angels” are distinguished from “the church of the firstborn” and “the spirits of just men made perfect.” In Rev. 22:9—“I am a fellow-servant with thee”—“fellow-servant” intimates likeness to men, not in nature, but in service and subordination to God, the proper object of worship. Sunday School Times, Mch. 15, 1902:146—“Angels are spoken of as greater in power and might than man, but that could be said of many a lower animal, or even of whirlwind and fire. Angels are never spoken of as a superior order of spiritual beings. We are to ‘judge angels’ (1 Cor. 6:3), and inferiors are not to judge superiors.”
Angels are an order of intelligences older than man. The Fathers made the creation of angels simultaneous with the original calling into being of the elements, perhaps basing their opinion on the apocryphal Ecclesiasticus, 18:1—“he that liveth eternally created all things together.” In Job 38:7, the Hebrews parallelism makes “morning stars”—“sons of God,” so that angels are spoken of as present at certain stages of God's creative work. The mention of “the serpent” in Gen. 3:1 implies the fall of Satan before the fall of man. We may infer that the creation of angels took place before the creation of man—the lower before the higher. In Gen. 2:1, “all the host of them,” which God had created, may be intended to include angels. Man was the crowning work of creation, created after angels were created. Mason, Faith of the Gospel, 81—“Angels were perhaps created before the material heavens and earth—a spiritual substratum in which the material things were planted, a preparatory creation to receive what was to follow. In the vision of Jacob they ascend first and descend after; their natural place is in the world below.”
The constant representation of angels as personal beings in Scripture cannot be explained as a personification of abstract good and evil, in accommodation to Jewish superstitions, without wresting many narrative passages from their obvious sense; implying on the part of Christ either dissimulation or ignorance as to an important point of doctrine; and surrendering belief in the inspiration of the Old Testament from which these Jewish views of angelic beings were derived.
Jesus accommodated himself to the popular belief in respect at least to “Abraham's bosom”(Luke 16:22), and he confessed ignorance with regard to the time of the end (Mark 13:32); see Rush Rhees, Life of Jesus of Nazareth, 245-248. But in the former case his hearers probably understood him to speak figuratively and rhetorically, while in the latter case there was no teaching of the false but only limitation of knowledge with regard to the true. Our Lord did not hesitate to contradict Pharisaic belief in the efficacy of ceremonies, and Sadducean denial of resurrection and future life. The doctrine of angels had even stronger hold upon the popular mind than had these errors of the Pharisees and Sadducees. That Jesus did not correct or deny the general belief, but rather himself expressed and confirmed it, implies that the belief was rational and Scriptural. For one of the best statements of the argument for the existence of evil spirits, see Broadus, Com. on Mat. 8:28.
Eph. 3:10—“to the intent that now unto the principalities and the powers in the heavenly places might be made known through the church the manifold wisdom of God”—excludes the hypothesis that angels are simply abstract conceptions of good or evil. We speak of “moon-struck” people (lunatics), only when we know that nobody supposes us to believe in the power of the moon to cause madness. But Christ's contemporaries did suppose him to believe in angelic spirits, good and evil. If this belief was an error, it was by no means a harmless one, and the benevolence as well as the veracity of Christ would have led him to correct it. So too, if Paul had known that there were no such beings as angels, he could not honestly have contented himself with forbidding the Colossians to worship them (Col 2:18) but would have denied their existence, as he denied the existence of heathen gods (1 Cor. 8:4).
Theodore Parker said it was very evident that Jesus Christ believed in a personal devil. Harnack, Wesen des Christenthums, 35—“There can be no doubt that Jesus shared with his contemporaries the representation of two kingdoms, the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the devil.” Wendt, Teaching of Jesus, 1:164—Jesus “makes it appear as if Satan was the immediate tempter. I am far from thinking that he does so in a merely figurative way. Beyond all doubt Jesus accepted the contemporary ideas as to the real existence of Satan, and accordingly, in the particular cases of disease referred to, he supposes a real Satanic temptation.” Maurice, Theological Essays, [pg 447]32, 34—“The acknowledgment of an evil spirit is characteristic of Christianity.” H. B. Smith, System, 261—“It would appear that the power of Satan in the world reached its culminating point at the time of Christ, and has been less ever since.”
The same remark applies to the view which regards Satan as but a collective term for all evil beings, human or superhuman. The Scripture representations of the progressive rage of the great adversary, from his first assault on human virtue in Genesis to his final overthrow in Revelation, join with the testimony of Christ just mentioned, to forbid any other conclusion than this, that there is a personal being of great power, who carries on organized opposition to the divine government.
Crane, The Religion of To-morrow, 299 sq.—“We well say ‘personal devil,’ for there is no devil but personality.” We cannot deny the personality of Satan except upon principles which would compel us to deny the existence of good angels, the personality of the Holy Spirit, and the personality of God the Father,—we may add, even the personality of the human soul. Says Nigel Penruddock in Lord Beaconsfield's “Endymion”: “Give me a single argument against his [Satan's] personality, which is not applicable to the personality of the Deity.” One of the most ingenious devices of Satan is that of persuading men that he has no existence. Next to this is the device of substituting for belief in a personal devil the belief in a merely impersonal spirit of evil. Such a substitution we find in Pfleiderer, Philosophy of Religion, 1:311—“The idea of the devil was a welcome expedient for the need of advanced religious reflection, to put God out of relation to the evil and badness of the world.” Pfleiderer tells us that the early optimism of the Hebrews, like that of the Greeks, gave place in later times to pessimism and despair. But the Hebrews still had hope of deliverance by the Messiah and an apocalyptic reign of good.
For the view that Satan is merely a collective term for all evil beings, see Bushnell, Nature and the Supernatural, 131-137. Bushnell, holding moral evil to be a necessary “condition privative” of all finite beings as such, believes that “good angels have all been passed through and helped up out of a fall, as the redeemed of mankind will be.” “Elect angels” (1 Tim. 5:21) then would mean those saved after falling, not those saved fromfalling; and “Satan” would be, not the name of a particular person, but the all or total of all bad minds and powers. Per contra, see Smith's Bible Dictionary, arts.: Angels, Demons, Demoniacs, Satan; Trench, Studies in the Gospels, 16-26. For a comparison of Satan in the Book of Job, with Milton's Satan in “Paradise Lost,” and Goethe's Mephistopheles in “Faust,” see Masson, The Three Devils. We may add to this list Dante's Satan (or Dis) in the “Divine Comedy,” Byron's Lucifer in “Cain,” and Mrs. Browning's Lucifer in her “Drama of Exile”; see Gregory, Christian Ethics, 219.