484 Introduction

the angelic powers. That the angels of the Law had brought about the death of Christ is the probable sense of 1 Cor. ii. 6-8. That they did it in ignorance of God's wisdom tallies with the statement that it is through the Church that the manifold wisdom of God is to be made known to the principalities and powers. It is not in virtue of any personal hostility to Christ that they crucified Him, but in virtue of their complete identity with the Law. The Law was against us, and Law and grace are incompatible. If so, the angels of the Law would necessarily, according to Jewish angelology, stand in opposition to Christ, till they were despoiled of the dominion they had exercised and placed in their true position. So far then from holding any position of authority, or exercising any mediatorial function, they are for the Christian as if they were not. He has died to the Law, and therefore to the angels of the Law, and all those elemental spirits, to which both Judaism and heathenism had been in subjection. All that he hoped to win through worship of them, and more than all, he has already in Christ. To serve them is to fall back into bondage to unmeaning ordinances, to miss the substance while clutching at the shadow. The angelology of the Epistle is thus in harmony with that of Paul, as gathered from the certainly genuine Epistles; and where it shows advance, the de- velopment is on thoroughly Pauline lines, and amply accounted for by the false teaching which it refutes. There is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the Epistle on the ground of its doctrine of angels. It is an interesting fact that the Council of Laodicea, about the middle of the fourth century, condemned angel worship; and the worship of Michael, which Theodoret, in the fifth century, speaks of as still carried on in the district, existed into the Middle Ages.