Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021)
Article: Editorial: God’s Messengers: Theological Reflections On Angels
Author: Stephen J. Wellum

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Editorial: God’s Messengers: Theological Reflections On Angels

Stephen J. Wellum

Stephen J. Wellum is Professor of Christian Theology at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and editor of Southern Baptist Journal of Theology. He received his PhD from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and he is the author of numerous essays and articles and the co-author with Peter Gentry of Kingdom through Covenant, 2nd edition (Crossway, 2012, 2018) and God’s Kingdom through God’s Covenants: A Concise Biblical Theology (Crossway, 2015); the co-editor of Progressive Covenantalism (B&H, 2016); the author of God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of the Person of Christ (Crossway, 2016) and Christ Alone—The Uniqueness of Jesus as Savior (Zondervan, 2017); and the co-author of Christ from Beginning to End: How the Full Story of Scripture Reveals the Full Glory of Christ (Zondervan, 2018); and the author of The Person of Christ: An Introduction (Crossway, 2021).

Throughout church history, similar to the moon, theological reflection on angels has waxed and waned. In the early church and reaching its high point in the Middle Ages, there was a lot of discussion of angels within Christian theology. One cannot read Anselm’s, Cur Deus Homo? (Why God Became a Man) or Aquinas’ corpus without noticing lengthy discussions on angels. In the Reformation, there was a correction to the medieval fascination with angels, but it was not until the Enlightenment that belief in and a focus on angels diminished. Largely due to the rise of deism and its corollary methodological naturalism, focus on this world and the human sciences became more prevalent. Much of the classic liberal theology of the eighteenth and nineteenth century dismissed belief in angels as a relic of a by-gone era, thus revealing that they were many steps removed from the Bible’s understanding of God, the world, and spiritual realities.

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In fact, even today, numerous biblical scholars interpret the NT language of the “demonic,” “principalities and powers, and “spiritual forces” as only referring to political, social, economic, and religious structures of power of our present world. For example, G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible, argues this point, and the late Colin Gunton in his Actuality of the Atonement, follows suit. Today, often these interpretations are combined with a Marxist twist, so that when Scripture speaks of our Lord Jesus Christ disarming the “powers” and triumphing over them (Col 2:15; cf. Heb 2:14–18), it is only referring to his vi...