The Joy of Angels

Angels were scarce in eighteenth-century New England. The Puritans certainly did not ignore the supernatural since the supernatural is part of the biblical story. But the subject of angels had long fallen out of fashion. In their vast corpus of sermons, tracts, and writings, the Puritans seldom referenced the subject of angels. When they mentioned angels, they did so with a great deal of trepidation and only in their regular exposition of Scripture. Rarely did they engage in what contemporary theologians call “angelology”—the doctrine of angels. In this episode we begin to discuss the theology of angels in the thought and writing of Jonathan Edwards