Decreation has a fascinating speculative section about angels. Griffiths is a Catholic theologian, and Decreation is a work of speculative theology within the magisterial "grammar." That is, Griffiths works within the boundaries of Catholic doctrine, speculating about things within that framework. It's like exploring unexplored or under-explored territory within the borders of a country,
Concerning the angels, Catholic doctrine most definitely assumes that they exit and have had significant interactions with humans and human history. Consequently, in Decreation Griffiths assumes the existence of angels and speculates about their nature, activity, and destiny. Theologians of the past once devoted a great deal of attention to angels. But among modern theologians, angelology is a marginalized topic due to scholarly embarrassment. No serious scholar wants to be talking about angels in front of their peers at a scholarly conference. You'd look a bit cuckoo.
Here's Griffiths writing about the place of angels in modern theology and popular culture:
Angelology is not a prominent topic in contemporary academic or ecclesial theology. In the 1970s I read theology as an undergraduate at Oxford without the topic ever being raised, so far as I can recall. Much the same is true, I should think, in theological education in Europe and North America today. I teach in a school of divinity in the United States [Griffiths teaches at Duke University], a place where young men and women are trained for ordained ministry in one or another Protestant denomination, and, for the most part, they go through their training without ever being called on to give theological thought to the question of the angels, or to attempt an account of these interesting beings. The presence of angels (and demons) in the texts of the Christian archive is of course acknowledged, especially their prominent place in Scripture; and the thought of this or that person--Augustine, Denys, Bonaventure, Thomas, even the Protestant divines and poets--on the subject is acknowledged and treated when it comes up. But by and large, it is treated historically rather than theologically, and often with some embarrassment. Angelology is not thought of by many theologians working today as a locus of importance for theological thinking.
Things are very different among Christians on the ground in most of the world. The catalogs of publishers of devotional material, Catholic and Protestant and Orthodox, in the United States, offer and enormous body of literature about the angels; and purveyors of Christian goods display an cornucopia of angels--statues, images, books of prayers to them, guides to how to arrive at intimacy with your very own guardian angel, and so forth. Much of this is deeply sentimental...
Reading this passage during Advent really struck me. Because angels are absolutely everywhere during the Advent and Christmas seasons. Advent and Christmas are stuffed with angels.
The reasons for this are obvious. The Nativity texts in Matthew and Luke are dense with angelic activity. The birth of Jesus was, perhaps, the busiest moment in the history of human/angelic affairs. Angels are everywhere in the Nativity story. Angels appear to Zechariah, Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, and very likely the Magi. (The Magi are "warned in the dream" to not return to Herod. How that warning is given is not described, but it's safe to assume, given how Joseph is later warned in a dream by an angel to flee to Egypt, that the warning to the Magi also involved an angel.)
Because of these texts angels fill our Advent and Christmas seasons. Angels top our Christmas trees. Angel ornaments fill our houses. Lighted angel displays appear in our yards. Angels inhabit our Nativity sets. We dress our children up as angels for our Nativity plays. And we sing song after song about angels. Like I said, Advent and Christmas is stuffed with angels. You can't talk about Advent and Christmas without mentioning the activity of angels.
And then--poof!--they're gone. The season moves on and the angels fade into the background, awaiting their annual reemergence in secular and sacred consciousness the next holiday season.
Following Griffiths, I find all this profoundly odd. There's this huge deluge of sentimental talk and depiction of angels during Christmas and Advent that completely evaporates from Christian consciousness the rest of the year. Well, as Griffiths points out, it doesn't really evaporate among the people in the pews, where angels remain objects of fascination. But angels do evaporate as an object of Biblical and theological reflection among theologians and pastors. We preach the Advent series, where we talk constantly about angelic activity, because we have to given the Biblical texts, but never to pause to wonder out loud what all this angelic activity might mean about the cosmos and our lives outside of the Christmas season. Simply put, angels have implications. We love the stories about angels during Christmas, love singing "Angels We Have Heard on High," but never get around to exploring the implications of those stories, angelically speaking.
And this is why, I think, a sentimental Precious Moments approach to angels pervades our culture. Look at the angel section of any bookstore and you'll see a lot of silly, embarrassing stuff. But that's not the fault of the culture. I blame the pastors, scholars and theologians! As Griffiths points out, the Christian teaching class has ceded the field to the purveyors of sentimentality and sensationalism. Christian intellectuals don't say boo about angels, fearing embarrassment in front of their snobby peers, creating a theological vacuum that gets filled with kitsch and nonsense.
What, then, in my suggestion? Well, I think the Advent and Christmas season just might be the perfect time to talk about the angels. Angels are everywhere right now. We're telling stories about them, seeing them, and singing about them. But most of this is done unreflectively. We hardly know what we're saying or singing. We just strap some wings on Junior, adjust his halo, and push him onstage for the Christmas pageant. "How sweet!" we exclaim. We share stories about angels this time of year the same way we talk about Santa Claus. Angels are just seasonal sentimental supernaturalism.
But all this is our fault. I blame the pastors and theologians. Angels have implications. We're just too embarrassed to talk about them.
