I‘m so sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your childhood daydreams of wings and harps were sadly misguided. Hopefully most of you know this already, but you’d be amazed at the number of decently-educated Christians who are shocked when I tell them this:
You will never be an angel. All the angels there will ever be have already been made and they’re not taking applications for new members. You might just as well dream of dying and becoming a hippo. And you may have a little saint in heaven, but the only angel you’ve got in heaven is your guardian angel, the one who was given to you when you were conceived.1
A few years back, I mentioned this to a group of high school seniors and they were crushed. “Nobody ever told us that EVER!” they shouted. I’m not exaggerating; they actually shouted.
I felt certain that couldn’t be true. In twelve years of Catholic education, nobody ever mentioned what you become if you die and go to heaven? So I asked the next junior I saw:
“Jordan, if you die and go to heaven, what do you become?”
*pause* “Well, you don’t become an angel, I know that much.”
I suppose I was pleased by that (although still concerned that these kids didn’t know that a person in heaven is a saint, not an angel). But I just had to wonder: who told them they became angels?
Catholics certainly don’t believe this, but neither do Protestants. According to all the major world religions, when you die, you might become a saint or a god; you might cease to exist entirely or exist within the collective consciousness of the divine. You might live in a sensual paradise or be freed from the restrictions of the body. But one thing’s for sure: you do not become an angel.
Until Mormonism, that is, which apparently teaches2 that Adam is now Michael the Archangel and Noah is now Gabriel.3 And yet somehow I doubt that my Kansas kids, whose understanding of Mormonism comes entirely from South Park, have based their understanding of human nature on LDS doctrine.
So where did these kids get the idea that Grandma’s got wings? It seems that Dickens had a hand in it and Heart and Souls sure didn’t help. Cartoons show people dying and floating up to heaven where they get their angel duds. And then we read poems and gravestones and tattoos about “God’s littlest angel,” and we assume that all these grieving people must be right. The idea that someone we love taken too soon is an angel is consoling and only the worst kind of Scrooge would rob people of that little bit of light in the darkness of grief.
But truth always offers more consolation than platitudes. And there is deeper joy in the truth that those who are welcomed into the embrace of God are saints in heaven, watching over and interceding for us, than the Hallmark drivel that when you die you get wings.
You see, an angel is an entirely different being from a human being. Angels are pure spirit; they’re not disembodied souls. They don’t have wings or halos because they don’t have bodies. Now, maybe they choose to manifest themselves with wings (Is 6) or halos when they appear to humans, but at other times they look like people (Gen 18) or robots (Dn 10) or glow sticks (Mt 28). Often, they don’t bother taking on the appearance of a body at all, because it’s not natural to them. They aren’t human; they never had bodies to begin with.4
Human beings, on the other hand, were created body and soul, a sort of natural-supernatural hybrid. There’s a famous Lewis quotation floating around the internet (and a women’s bathroom stall in Missouri):
Some googling tells me there’s no evidence Lewis ever said this, and it’s a good thing because this is some seriously bad theology. Real Christian theology has been clear on this for almost two millennia. You are not a soul trapped in a body.5 You are not a body with a spiritual component.6 You are a soul and you are a body. That’s what it means to be a human being.
Because we’re body and soul, valuing either the physical or the spiritual at the expense of the other is always going to mess us up. This is the reason that when we use our bodies without regard to our souls, we kill ourselves spiritually, emotionally, relationally. After all, the separation of body and soul is called death.
We know about this connection instinctively. A body without a soul isn’t called a person anymore but a corpse. And a soul without a body is incomplete as well–there’s something missing there. If you die and go to heaven, you’ll be a saint; you’ll be a soul without a body and more perfectly happy than you’ve ever been before, and yet you’ll be imperfect. Because, unlike the angels, you were not made to be pure spirit. You were made to be body and soul. Which is what we’re talking about every Sunday when we say, “I look forward to the resurrection of the dead.” This isn’t some metaphorical resurrection we’re talking about here–you’re actually going to get a body.
And here’s another moment where people usually start yelling–“We’re getting our bodies back? Nobody EVER TOLD US THAT EVER!!!”
Well, whether they told you that or not, you’ve been professing to believe it for years. We don’t know what the glorified body you’ll get at the end of the world will be like, exactly. Healthy and glorious for sure, maybe able to fly and walk through walls–I mean, who really knows?
What matters is that you’ll have a body because your body is integral to who you are. You’re not a spirit, you’re a person. You’ll never be an angel (just like you’ll never be a hippo) but, God willing, you’ll be a great saint. So why don’t we all toss the cartoon angel nonsense out the window and start living for reality–and for heaven–instead?
- Happy feast of the Guardian Angels! [↩]
- I say apparently because it’s very hard to get a handle on the teachings of Mormonism. I’ve never found a definitive resource online. This is, of course, complicated by the fact that the leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Mormonism) is able to completely reverse Church doctrine. As in, “Polygamy used to be required; now it’s absolutely forbidden.” So if I’m wrong, I apologize. I’m going with what I found on the all-knowing internet. [↩]
- Happy belated Feast of the Archangels! [↩]
- Props to Christian Answers for the Scripture references. [↩]
- That’s Gnosticism. [↩]
- Shall we call that Modernism? [↩]
So Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat is bad theology? Nobody ever told us that EVER!
The bible tells us that the breath of God and the Body makes us a living soul. At death the breath of God goes back to Him and the living soul is no more. There is no soul per say the way you have explained it. Kindly read your Bible again and see for your self just what the Bible really says.
Hey, amazing explanation. I just want to say that this quote is false, lewis never said that…
Okay, I hear people say (and have said myself), “Heaven is not a place.” I guess the idea here is that heaven and hell are more states than physical places, right? But if we get glorified bodies (which I believe and knew before (thank goodness)), and bodies take up space, then doesn’t that mean that heaven is a place at least in the sense that our bodies will indeed take up space in it? I remember getting into an argument with someone over whether there would be singing in heaven. ‘We’ll get bodies,’ I argued, ‘and if you have a body then you have a voice, right? And presumably you’d be able to sing with that voice, right?’ But I also hear people say that heaven is beyond time or that there is no time in heaven. But if we have bodies and those bodies move in any way, then doesn’t there necessarily have to be time? These are the questions I am always led to when I think of the Resurrection of the Body, but it seems like no one actually knows the answer. I guess this post was an old post, but thanks for resharing it on the memorial of the Guardian Angels!