How to make angels of Angles

Martyrdom, relics and persuasion in propagating the faith

A year that every English-speaking Christian should keep in mind is AD 597, when Pope Gregory made St Augustine the first Archbishop of Canterbury. It is said that when St Gregory first saw fair-haired Englishmen on sale at a slave-market, he asked who they were. He was told that they were “Angles:” to which he replied, “they’re not Angles, but angels!” Hence he dispatched St Augustine to bring these angelic-looking people to the Christian faith. The heroic exploits of St Augustine, his successors, and the holy kings and priests of Anglo-Saxon Britain make for fine reading. But already, when the missionary bishop arrived at the end of the sixth century, Christianity had long since been established in those islands. Before the English came to Britain, there were already British bishops, saints – and martyrs who died for their Christian faith.

Britain’s protomartyr, a man persuaded

We travel back now to third century Roman Britain and the city of Verulamium, to the north of London. There lived a man whose death would give that city a new name. Himself a pagan, he was once startled by an unexpected visitor at his door: a man wearing the distinctive cloak of a Christian priest. This was in the days when Christianity was prohibited throughout the Empire on pain of death. The priest, Amphibolus by name, sought refuge from the authorities, and had heard of the man’s good repute. The latter agreed to shelter him. They spent days and nights together in hushed conversation, fearing the step of the soldiers’ boots outside. During those conversations, Amphibolus persuaded his host of the truth of the Christian faith.

One day came the knock on the door that Christians have come to fear in many lands through many generations, whether in Ancient Rome, under Islamic rule, under the Communists of the Soviet Union, and even now in North Korea, China and parts of the Middle East. The man swiftly took off Amphibolus’ priestly robe and put it over his own clothes. The secret  propagation of the faith by this brave and holy priest was more important now to Alban than his own life, convinced as he was that he would enjoy eternal felicity in the next. While Amphibolus made his escape, the soldiers took the householder and tried him, tried to force him to recant. He replied, “my name is Alban, and I serve the one true God.” So the first martyr, or “protomartyr” of Britain was beheaded. He gave his name to that city, and to the abbey church which stands there this day. There, you can find relic of his body enshrined, where the mass is offered daily in thanks for his gift and in hope of his prayers and aid. Though a cathedral of the Church of England, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox services of veneration are also regularly offered there.

Belief is a tricksy word. In our day, it is often taken as something opposed to reason, which cannot be explained, essentially as a kind of unjustifiable opinion which people have a right to hold if they wish, but not to impose on others. It is even treated in Britain as a “protected characteristic,”  though it must be admitted that the legal protections sometimes seem to extend more to non-Christian beliefs than those of the nation’s historic faith. So, when the Catechism of the Book of Common Prayer exhorts catechumens to “believe the articles of the Christian faith,” we may think that we are supposed to subscribe to a long list of impossible things to believe before breakfast. But belief is not unthinking assent. It is not opposed to reason. We do not know the content of St Alban’s conversations with Amphibolus, but whatever he heard, it was reasonable enough to make him give up his life for the sake of the itinerant missionary. He was persuaded of the truth of the faith.

This does not just apply to British martyrs, of course. Apostles such as St Peter and St Paul were likewise convinced enough of the Christian faith that they died for it. Neither in their writings come across as particularly stupid or gullible men. They were intellectually convinced that Jesus had died for their sins, rose from the dead, and ruled over their lives. They thought, not just opined, that they had to entrust themselves to Him and Him alone as their saviour and to obey Him as their Lord. The faith for them was not just a matter of “opinion,” take it or leave it: it was literally the matter of life and death.

St Stephen’s exhortation

St Alban was the first martyr of the Britons, but there was plenty of precedent elsewhere. Already, many had borne witness to the Christian faith with their lives. The first among them was St Stephen, one of the first deacons of the Church. We read his story in the New Testament book, the Acts of the Apostles. Acts was written as a sequel to the Gospel of St Luke, one of the four biographies of Jesus with which the New Testament begins. It describes the life of the very first Christians, the early Church, after the Ascension of Jesus to heaven. Acts 6:5 describes how Stephen and others were ordained as deacons by laying on of the Apostles’ hands to assist in the worship of God at the table or altar of the Eucharist and to preach the Gospel. To this day, deacons also assist in the distribution of Holy Communion and of financial aid from the church’s offertory to those in need.

St Stephen’s death is recorded in detail in Acts 6-7. His final speech to his persecutors while he is on trial gives a succinct account of how the Old Testament segues into the New, and is fulfilled by the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ. It is not merely a statement of belief, but a reasoned argument to the Jewish religious leaders, aimed not at defending his views, but at persuading his opponents.

Stephen, who had been preaching the Gospel of Christ, stood accused by the Council of the Temple in Jerusalem of blasphemy against Moses and God (Acts 6:11). As he prepares to speak, his face changes so that he, like the later Angles, looks like an angel (6:15). Instead of merely defending himself, he begins to preach on the book of Genesis. God appeared to Abraham, he says, and commanded him to leave his home in Mesopotamia to find the promised land. There he found himself surrounded by enemies and without an heir. Nonetheless, God promised Abraham successors, and gave him the covenant of circumcision by which his people would be henceforth known. So, Isaac was born, and then Jacob born of Isaac, and the twelve patriarchs who would give their names to the tribes of Israel were born of Jacob in turn. They sold their brother Joseph into slavery in Egypt, but he rose to prominence there and became governor under Pharoah. Thanks to his counsel, Egypt saved up stores of grain to last through a long famine. Jacob, hearing this, sent his sons out to petition the Egyptians for grain. Joseph met them and called for all the members of Jacob’s extended household to join him. When Jacob and the patriarchs died, Stephen reports that their bodies were carried to the tomb Abraham had bought in Shechem and buried there.

After Abraham comes Moses. The numbers of Israelites grew in Egypt, confirming God’s initial promise to Abraham. However, a new pharoah, threatened by their numbers, oppressed them severely, going so far as to order the murder of their babies. One of those who survived was Moses. St Stephen does not recount the famous story of his mother leaving him in the Nile in a wicker basket, presumably because it was already so well known to his Jewish audience. He goes straight to how Pharoah’s daughter raised him as her own son. Moses therefore learnt the “wisdom of the Egyptians.” At the age of forty, he saw one of the Israelite slaves being mistreated by a taskmaster, and in defending his kinsman killed the Egyptian. This, St Stephen interprets as a sign of how God will free the Israelites by Moses’ hand, but warns that the Israelites did not recognise the sign (7:25). Moses tries to step in between two Israelites who are arguing with one another, but they dismiss him. “Who made thee a ruler and judge over us?” asks one: “wilt thou kill me as thou diddest the Egyptian yesterday?” Moses flees into exile in Midian, an Arab land on the Sinai peninsula. There he has two children. Forty years later, he meets the “angel of the Lord in a flame of fire in a bush” (7:30). He draws near, trembling, and the Voice of the Lord says to him, “I am the God of thy fathers, the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Moses, says God, although he was rejected by the Israelites, would lead them as their “ruler and deliverer,” after showing “wonders and signs in the land of Egypt, and in the Red Sea, and in the wilderness forty years.”

Because St Stephen is trying to persuade a Jewish audience that Jesus is their true Messiah, he focusses on the parts of Moses’ story that most directly prophecy the coming of Christ. He omits the accounts of the miraculous staff that turned into a snake and back, as well as the plagues God sent on Egypt, and only obliquely refers to the original Passover. You can read about this in Exodus chapters 7-14, which his audience no doubt knew well as the foundational story of the Jewish people. Instead, he cites Moses’s words from Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Torah:

“A prophet shall the Lord your God raise upon unto you of your brethren like unto me; him shall ye hear” (Acts 7:37, echoing Deuteronomy 18:15).

But despite Moses receiving the Commandments, St Stephen says, from the “Angel which spake to him in the mount Sinai,” while he was atop the mountain, the Israelites turned from God, and persuaded his brother Aaron to let them make a golden calf, and to worship “the host of heaven” (Acts 7:42).

We have to turn back to Deuteronomy 4:19  to realise what this means: God warns Moses of the danger that:

“thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun, and the moon, and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them, and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven” (Deut 4:19).

“Heaven” meant simply the sky. When the ancients looked up at the night sky, they did not see, as we do, soulless balls of flaming gas or rotating masses of rock. The lights of the sky were the “hosts of heaven” whom other nations called “gods,” but whom Scripture calls angels. God had set these to watch over every nation, that is, every people on the earth. The mistake that the Israelites made, and would keep making, was to fall back into the pagan practice of worshipping those angels, including the fallen ones who passed themselves off as gods, instead of worshipping the one true God who revealed Himself to Moses. They mistook the messengers for the sender and ended up sacrificing to demons.

St Stephen’s sermon continues with the tabernacle, the tent that the Israelites made as a holy place for God’s presence to reside as they journeyed through the wilderness. Later, King Solomon, son of King David, built a more permanent house for God, the Temple of Jerusalem. But, Stephen says, citing the prophet Isaiah, God needs no temple made by human hands, since heaven is His throne and earth His footstool.

Now Stephen concludes his speech to the leaders of the Temple with a challenge: “Ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye” (Acts 7:51). Though they are circumcised in the flesh, they are, he accuses them, “uncircumcised in heart.” They are the physical descendants of Abraham and inheritors of the covenants made between their forefathers and God, their resistance to the Holy Spirit has prevented them from full adoption as sons of God. They have “received the Law (the Torah) by the disposition of angels,” but “have not kept it” (Acts 7:53). And that is why, Stephen says, they became the “betrayers and murderers” of “the Just One,” Jesus, whose coming their ancestors foretold.

The Temple leaders are understandably angered by this accusatory speech. But remember, as he spoke, his face had been shining like that of an angel; and now, Holy Scripture tells us,

full of the Holy Ghost, he looked up steadfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and said, ‘Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God’ (Acts 7:56).

This is too much for the Temple leaders. They stone him to death. Among those present and complicit in his death was one Saul, known better to posterity by his Greek name, Paul. As St Stephen died, echoing His Lord’s death on the Cross, he prayed for his murderers’ forgiveness: “Lord, lay not this sin to their charge” (Acts 7:60). Perhaps this act of forgiveness was the channel by which Saul’s heart began to soften.

Scripture’s appeal to tradition

There is much to learn from St Stephen’s speech. First, his belief in Christ was not unreasoning or irrational. It was grounded in the history of his nation, the Jewish people. Nor was it a radical contradiction, a sudden change from what had come before. St Stephen is not presenting Christ’s coming as something totally unexpected, a matter for blind faith. On the contrary, he is amassing the evidence of what has come before to say, this Jesus whom you had killed was precisely the Just One whom our forefathers had prophesied and foreshadowed; and your rejection of him, like their rejection of Moses, is entirely predictable. It is what has always happened: Abraham gave us the circumcision, but we betrayed it. Jacob had twelve sons, one of whom was the prophet Joseph, but they betrayed him and dumped him in a pit to be enslaved by Egyptians, just as Jesus’ twelve disciples left him to die alone on the Cross. And yet Joseph forgave his brothers, and invited not just them to feast with him, but his father’s wider household of seventy mixed Jews and Gentiles, just as Jesus gathered a wider body of seventy disciples around the chief twelve Apostles and invites all to be baptised and to take part in the Eucharistic feast. The twelve represent the totality of the tribes of Israel, and the seventy reflect the seventy angels God appointed after Babel to be patrons of the gentile nations. Then, Moses was rejected by the Israelites, but freed them from slavery in Egypt, just as the rejected Jesus offers all people freedom from he slavery of death and sin.  In Christ, the Presence of God has descended to fill not the Temple of stone built by Solomon and rebuilt after the Israelites returned from exile to Babylon, but a new and mobile Tabernacle of flesh and blood, the Body of Christ Incarnate which continues in the Church. You see how every Old Testament image Stephen alludes to points rationally and logically at fulfilment in the person of Jesus Christ. He is trying to persuade, not to impose or to cajole.

We also learn from St Stephen’s speech something very important about how the early Christians came to their faith in Christ. Throughout the speech, we have seen how he is always citing the tradition of his forefathers, the sacred stories of the Jewish people. But what is not obvious at first sight is that much of what he says cannot be found in the Bible. He is appealing to non-biblical, other ancient Jewish sources, which he and the author of Acts, St Luke, clearly thought held some authority. Not as much authority as the revealed Word of God in the Torah, but enough authority that they expected the Temple authorities to find the argument convincing.

It is something of a problem to advocates of sola scriptura that Scripture itself cites extra-canonical sources as authorities. At several points, in fact, St Stephen’s speech refers to the book Jubilees. This is a Jewish book, most of which dates to some time around the second century before Christ. It retells the story of Genesis but fills in certain details. For example, although we read of Jacob’s remains being buried in Shechem by the Israelites in the Old Testament book of Joshua (24:32), the detail of his sons’, the twelve patriarchs’ remains also being taken there features only in Jubilees (46:9). When St Stephen give Moses’ age as forty at the time he kills the Egyptian taskmaster and the time he spent in Midian as forty years, these too are details from Jubilees (47:10-12), not from the Bible. But most importantly, St Stephen describes the Torah being given to Moses “by angels,” a common ancient Jewish tradition, but not one directly recorded in the Torah itself.

Articles and Apocrypha

Many would prefer to keep things simple and to stick to the Bible alone rather than bothering with apocryphal literature. But there are important points to be made here. If we are going to “believe all the articles of the Christian faith,” as the Catechism of the Prayer Book insists, then we need to know what that faith is, but also what the grounds are for believing it. We need to know on what authority the Church discerns true faith and practice. Among the historic formularies of the Church of England is the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion, which although separate from the Book of Common Prayer are nowadays usually printed at the back of it.

These Articles are a summary of 16-17^th century Reformation doctrines to which all clergy once had to assent before ordination. Nowadays, one has only to declare that the Articles “borne witness to Christian truth,” rather than profess an absolute adherence to what, after all, represent theological points disputed several hundred years ago and on which consensus has considerably changed throughout the Christian churches. There is no particular reason why the Church of England, founded in its present form in AD 597, should be bound forever to the theological leanings of two centuries. Nonetheless, at their best, the Articles at their best mediate the consensus of the ancient Church. The Sixth Article teaches that

“Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary for salvation: so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man, that it should be believed as an article of the Faith, or be thought requisite or necessary to salvation.”

It goes on to list the books of the Old and New Testament. However, it then lists “other books,” not in the Bible, but which “the Church doth read for example of life and instruction of manners.” These are what the Roman Catholic Church calls the “Deuterocanon,” or “second canon” of Scripture. They are also contained in Eastern Orthodox bibles. They are read in public worship in the Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican churches, but not in most Protestant churches. In the Protestant world, they are called the “Apocrypha.” This needs some disambiguation, because the books such as Jubilees as Enoch to which I have referred can also, and more properly, be called Apocrypha. All the word “apocrypha” means is that they are books for private reading rather than public reading in church. Confusingly, they are not contained in the so-called Apocrypha that you will find printed in bibles and listed in Article 6.

In sum, we can distinguish three levels of authority: first, there is the undisputed authority of the Bible, the Old and New Testaments, which the Church of England teaches contain everything one needs for salvation (not that they are exclusive repositories of all truth, or that tradition is redundant). Then there is the second layer of books, the Deuterocanon misleadingly called “Apocrypha,” which feature in the lectionary for public Mattins and Evensong, and are useful “for example of life” but not to define points of doctrine. Thirdly, at the lowest level, there are the properly-called Apocrypha, such as Enoch and Jubilees. These are by no means prohibited or secret. They are not to be taken “as gospel,” as it were, but can give us a deeper insight into how Jews in the time of Christ understood their faith. You can get by without ever reading them. However, given that the writers of the New Testament and even Jesus Himself often quote these texts, even though the Bible contains everything necessary for salvation, to understand it deeply, they are very helpful and rewarding indeed: and as part of the wider Jewish and Christian tradition, they can help to explain certain things we do in church which are not mentioned explicitly in the Bible.

Reformers, Relics and Angels

Take the example of relics. Recently, I told the story of St Oswald, his miracle-working severed arm, and the relic of his head in Durham Cathedral. Today’s post began with St Alban, and I mentioned that his relics are also enshrined in the cathedral that bears his name. If you go to Lichfield Cathedral, you will find relics of the ancient Mercian bishop St Chad enshrined there, too.

These are all Anglican cathedrals. And yet, the 22^nd of the Church of England’s 39 Articles roundly rejects the “Worshipping, and Adoration, as well of Images as of Reliques, and also invocation of Saints” as “a fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but rather repugnant to the Word of God.” The Protestant Reformers were trying to get back to the faith and practice of the ancient Christian church, and because they could find no reference to relics in the Bible, they assumed that it was a mediaeval innovation. What they did not have is access to texts like Jubilees, which St Stephen was referring to in his description of how the ancient Israelites, during their 40 year wandering in the desert, thought it important to carry around the bones not only of Jacob, but of all twelve of his sons, the patriarchs of the tribes of Israel. Nor did they have archaeological evidence which suggests that the very earliest Christians celebrated the Eucharist not only in special, large parts of wealthy peoples houses set aside for worship, but at the graves of the early Christian martyrs. Relics were kept by Christians from the very earliest days of the Church, but this was nothing new: they were basing this on ancient Jewish practices which the 16^th century Reformers simply did not know about.

Bearing in mind that the Reformers’ intention (however flawed its execution) was not to found some new religion, but to go back to the most ancient roots of Christianity, Anglicans can reasonably say that while we would not go so far as to “worship” or “adore” relics, which Article 22 condemns, praying in the presence of those relics, venerating them, and calling upon the saints whose heaven-bound remains they are is an ancient and commendable practice which was known to the early Church. The restoration of that ancient practice is therefore consistent with the spirit of our Reformers, even though they historically rejected it. Relics of the saints give us, as it gave the ancient Jews and Christians, a concrete, physical vehicle of the salvific work that Christ is effecting in this concrete, physical world, among people of our own kin and nations. There is something sacramental about a relic, visibly and material linking local people and places via the Resurrection to the invisible and spiritual Kingdom of Heaven. The use of relics does not constitute an “article of faith” necessary for salvation, since their use cannot be proven by Scripture (though the preservation of mortal remains certainly can), but they can be a powerful means of reinforcing our faith. After all, what speaks more forcefully of someone’s commitment to truth than that they would die rather than betray it? And since those saints believed it so strongly as to offer their bodies to martyrdom, we might have second thoughts about treating their mortal (or immortal!) remains so lightly.

Finally, the account of St Stephen’s martyrdom is full of reference to angels. It is no coincidence that the modern church speaks almost as little about angels as it does about relics. The Reformers wanted to sunder the spiritual from the material, wary even of attributing an objective spiritual presence of Christ to the Eucharistic bread and wine, let alone the spiritual presence of saints in their relics. Following their trajectory, the materialist spirit of our age has become allergic to the idea of spiritual realities altogether, a reluctance historically encouraged, alas, by the Reformers’ indifference to any other spiritual reality than God Himself.

Hence angels, like relics, are embarrassing for a Church that seeks to curry favour with the intellectual spirit of the modern age. Yet the Bible itself is filled with angels, and the revelation of God relies on them. It is through angels that the Word of God was conveyed to the men who wrote the Bible. The authority of the Bible does not depend on which prophet or Evangelist or Apostle wrote it, whether a particular book of the Bible was really written by Moses or St Mark or St Paul, but on whether it was delivered to them by God, through His holy angels. The account in Acts of St Stephen’s speech begins with his face being changed into the likeness of an angel and ends with him seeing the heavens opened, presumably as full of angels as every other account of such visions in the Bible suggests. During his speech, he keeps mentioning angels: Moses sees the angel of the Lord in the burning bush, the hand of that angel delivers the Israelites from slavery at the Passover, it is an angel which speaks to him on Mount Sinai (a Jubilees reference not included in the biblical account), the Israelites make the idolatrous mistake of worshipping angels instead of God, and reiterating the point at the end, it is “by the disposition of angels” that the people of Israel received the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament.

Most introductions to the Christian faith, tempered by the spirit of the age, do not make much of relics, saints and angels. Our churches may be named after saints and angels, may even contain relics of saints, but these are regarded as merely historical ephemera that we should ignore as we concentrate on the story of Jesus Christ. Perhaps for the last two or three centuries, where the Christian faith has had to present itself in terms endearing to modern rationalism and scepticism of the supernatural, that was the wisest course. That said, the results have not been impressive.

Nowadays, there is an awakening both to the limits and perils of a purely materialist view of the world, which makes the environment, animals and even other people just a blank canvas which the most powerful will can redefine. We see how our technology offers liberation on one hand, but traps and addicts us on the other. We see how easily nations without any transcendent values descend into meaningless chaos, how towns and villages with no common story end up nothing more than a place for disconnected individuals to live and put up with one another. Those are the negatives of a worldview which rejects anything that cannot be weighed or measured.

On the other hand, there is also an awakening to spiritual realities, both positive and negative. On the negative side, there is growing evidence of demonic activity. Clergy from a range of denominations are reporting a rise in the number of harmful spiritual experiences and people requesting blessings and exorcisms. There is speculation about what spiritual forces artificial intelligence might be ushering into the world, because if evil spirits can work through an Ouija board, there is nothing stopping them working through a motherboard. And in popular culture, particularly the music scene, performers are only promoting Satanic themes, and connecting these explicitly with transgressive, anti-normative ideologies. But on the positive side, many people who are repulsed or damaged by these movements are finding solace in traditional, biblically orthodox, liturgical churches which take the spiritual world and the spiritual life seriously. Others are finding solace in other spiritual movements. But ultimately, they will find true solace only in Christ, in whom alone is salvation from the world, the flesh and the Devil.

From Christ the Angel to Angelic Angles

This is because the “angel” of whom St Stephen spoke — the angel who appears to Abraham, to Moses, who guides the Israelites and gives the Torah, is none other than Christ Himself. This may come as a surprise to readers brought up in mainstream Protestant traditions or without much religious background at all. Isn’t the whole point of Christianity, its big difference from the Judaism that came before it, that until the angel Gabriel visited the Blessed Virgin Mary and she “conceived by the Holy Ghost,” God did not walk upon this earth? Doesn’t this mark an absolute rift with Judaism, and constitute the main reason why Jews and, for that matter, Muslims reject Christianity?

Things are not so simple. In fact, a large part of what was mainstream Judaism leading up to Jesus’ time very much did believe in a second “presence” of God that visited the world while God in His essence remained in heaven, completely transcendent and above all things. This was especially true of the kind of Judaism which focussed on the Temple in Jerusalem, but which was driven to extinction when the Roman Empire destroyed the Temple in AD 70. In the last century, pre-Christian Jewish writings were discovered which clearly speak of God’s Word or Voice actively appearing in the world in the form of an angel. This is what Isaiah (63.9) refers to as “the Angel of the Presence.”

You can also find plenty of these references in the Old Testament, but even more in the Greek translation, called the Septuagint. Greek was the language of the Ancient Near East much as English is the main language of much of the world today. Just as many modern Jews are native speakers of English but don’t really speak or read that much Hebrew, so in Jesus’ time and the centuries leading up to it, many Jews primarily engaged with their Scriptures in Greek rather than in Hebrew. That is why the Septuagint translation was made. But after the fall of the Temple and the rise of Christianity, a non-sacrificial form of Judaism, based more on the study and keeping of the Torah, began to dominate. The priests were replaced with the Rabbis, hence this is called “rabbinical Judaism.” At this stage, it seems that Jewish scholars edited out Temple Judaism references in the Hebrew Scriptures which overly favoured Christian interpretations. So, when later Christian scholars thought they were turning back to “the original Hebrew” of the Old Testament, what they were really turning to was a version that had been edited specifically to get rid of the parts Christians wanted to retain. The result is that in some places, the Greek Old Testament actually preserves older readings than the Hebrew. Modern Old Testament scholars have to read both.

What we find from reading the Septuagint and non-biblical, Second Temple Jewish literature such as Jubilees and 1 Enoch, is that rather than Christianity springing up from nowhere as a radical rejection of the religion that had come before it, Christ’s Incarnation was something that a significant strand of Jewish tradition had been pointing to all along. This helps to explain some of the otherwise perplexing references in the New Testament to Christ as “an angel” — it would be a great mistake to think that He was a created being, which angels are. Rather, He is the “Angel of the Presence,” the Word or Voice of God who appeared in physical form to Abraham, to Moses, who spoke to the Prophets, and whose glory filled the animal-skin Tabernacle and the stone Temple. What has changed is that in Christ, uniquely, the Presence of God camped in a new Tabernacle of human flesh and blood.

Christ’s story is grounded in the bigger story of the people of Israel, and theirs in the bigger story yet of the spiritual realm, the angels and the saints who do God’s will, and the great battle against the fallen spirits. This context of an ongoing spiritual war is the context in which Christ was born, to lead us to victory and freedom. And it is our context, now, as much as it was His. Through Him, we participate in the ancient battle between angels and demons, who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Through missionaries like St Amphibolus and St Augustine of Canterbury, through martyrs like St Alban, the English-speaking peoples have been drawn into the ranks of that supernatural army. The belief that sustained our predecessors did not require a radical departure from reason or tradition. St Augustine’s mission was in continuity with St Amphibolus’, St Stephen’s, the Apostles’, theirs in turn with Christ’s, and His with that of His Father, the God of Israel. St Gregory was right. The mission of the Angles is one with the mission of the angels.