Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021)
Article: C. S. Lewis And Billy Graham On Angels
Author: Michael J. Plato

SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021) p. 143

C. S. Lewis And Billy Graham On Angels

Michael J. Plato

Michael J. Plato is Assistant Professor of Intellectual History and Christian Thought, Colorado Christian University, Littleton, Colorado. He is currently completing his PhD at the VU University Amsterdam on the reception of Scottish philosophy at early Princeton. He has published articles on antimodernism in popular culture and philosophical posthumanism and transhumanism. He has also contributed entries to The Jonathan Edwards Encyclopedia (Eerdmans, 2017).

Introduction: Angels In America

When approaching any discussion of theology in the twentieth century, one has to keep in mind the long and unrelenting march of modernity that preceded it. From the rationalistic aspirations and empirical science of the Enlightenment, to the urbanization and mechanized uniformity of the industrial revolution, to the distractions and mediated enchantments of popular culture, for better or worse, theology in the past century has been inflected with these developments.

This has certainly been the case when it comes to angelology. At once marginalized and yet highly popular (at least outside the walls of academe), it has disappeared and reappeared, usually on the fringes of respectability. It is at one moment summarily dismissed as outdated superstition, and at another moment, it is embraced to the point of mystical indulgence. C. S. Lewis seemed to have captured this dichotomy best when he noted the sentiments towards demons in his own time: “There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall … One is to disbelieve in their existence. The

SBJT 25:2 (Summer 2021) p. 144

other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them.”1 This contested division has not disappeared in the decades between Lewis and our own time, and it seems that any discussion of angels requires an almost embarrassed apologetic. There is now a sense of something almost vaguely heretical about discussing angels, which is not surprising given how much the subject has been appropriated by the New Spirituality movements.2 The late literary critic Harold Bloom (1930‒2019) was onto something when he wrote, back before the turn of the millennium:

After [the English poet William] Blake, the angels seemed to withdraw, except for a solitary visionary like the young Joseph Smith, founder of Mormonism. There are angels aplenty in nineteeth- and twentieth-century art and literature, but they tend to be isolated and idiosyncratic images of a lost spirituality. And yet they remain a mirror of spiritual aspiration, ...