God Knew I Needed An Angel So He Gave Me My Wife Shirt
‘Tis the season for winged humanoids to alight everywhere from store windows to Christmas tree tops to lingerie runways. But it wasn’t always so.Angels, at least the Christian variety, haven’t always been flying people in diaphanous gowns. And their various forms—from disembodied minds to feathered guardians—reflect twists and turns of thousands of years of religious thought, according to an upcoming book.”There is lots of interesting theology about angels, and in some ways we’ve kind of lost the knack for that,” said John Cavadini, chair of theology at the University of Notre Dame.”We tend to think of angels as things that we’d find in a Hallmark card,” Cavadini added. “But many people, especially in antiquity, were very interested in them”—in what they might look like, how they might organize themselves, how they behave.In the Bible angels served as envoys of God—angelos being Greek for “messenger.” Other than that, the scriptures leave a lot of room for interpretation.”There isn’t a lot of detail, and that’s the fascinating thing,” said Ellen Muehlberger, a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan.
God Knew I Needed An Angel So He Gave Me My Wife Shirt
(Related: “Real Christmas Trees Save Water.”)”The Same Substance as God”In the early days of Christianity, some believers considered Jesus Christ himself to be one of many angels, said Muehlberger, who’s working on a book on the shifting theology of angels in ancient times.”We only know about this because of later, fourth-century authors who penned negative descriptions of this belief” to refute it, she said.Jesus officially lost his angelhood when the Roman Emperor Constantine I convened the Council of Nicea in 325. There, bishops were charged with turning the still varied and sometimes conflicting conceptions of God, Christ, and Christianity into a single, unified theology.”The Council of Nicea defined Christ as totally divine, as of the same substance as God,” Muehlberger sai”Christians who worked to interpret the council’s decrees over the next several decades took this to mean that Christ was not an angel. Angels were something else entirely.”A Beautiful Mind