Transcript

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You're listening to episode 325 of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World, where we look at mysteries from the twin perspectives of faith and reason.

In this episode we're talking about guardian angels.

I'm Dom Bethanelli and joining me today is Jimmy Akin.

Hey Jimmy.

Howdy Dom.

People have lots of questions about guardian angels.

Do we have individual guardian angels?

Are our guardian angels guarding only us?

Do we have more than one guardian angel?

When do we get our guardian angels?

Do our guardian angels ever get reassigned to other people?

Do we continue to have guardian angels after this life?

And do our guardian angels get reassigned to other people after this life?

That's what we'll be talking about on this episode of Jimmy Akin's Mysterious World.

So Jimmy, why did you want to discuss today's mystery?

Well, to be honest, it's because I'm sick of answering the same questions about guardian angels over and over again.

In the decades now that I've been doing apologetics, I've noticed that certain questions keep coming up over and over again for a while.

They go through cycles.

In the early days of Catholic Answers Live, it was, did Jesus have brothers?

And I'd have to answer the question over and over and over again.

I'd just hit the middle hotkey and trigger the macro I'd written and the same words would spool out of my mouth every time.

Then, after the issue of Jesus' brothers passed its cell by date, the question became where is purgatory in the Bible?

And the same thing would happen.

Now, I really want to help people who have questions, but humanly speaking, you get tired of saying the same thing over and over and over again.

So it seemed to me like the obvious solution is to create resources for the most commonly asked questions and refer people to those.

I've encouraged Catholic Answers to do this, to create an online resource of the most commonly asked questions and then point radio callers to this, but so far I haven't gotten any traction with that idea.

I've thus thought about creating one on my own website.

I've even thought about writing books with the most commonly asked questions.

There could even be a trilogy of such books, and I've jokingly thought about giving them titles like I Told You Once and As I've Said Many Times and Don't Ask Me Again, though for marketing purposes it would be better to give them titles like Your Top 20 Most Asked Questions and things like that.

Well, lately I've been getting the same set of questions about guardian angels.

The same questions keep getting asked over and over, and recently I was preparing for a pre-recorded episode of Catholic Answers Live, and I reached a breaking point and said that's it.

I'm going to create an episode of Mysterious World where I answer these questions, and then I'm going to point people to that as a resource.

I even arranged for the episode to have an easy-to-remember episode number, 325, which is the year of the first ecumenical council of Nicaea.

So I can easily remember that and tell people to go to mysterious.fm

slash 325 to get their guardian angel questions answered.

So, here we are today.

You, Dom, get to ask me all the annoying guardian angel questions, and I'll answer them, and then we'll have a helpful resource to help people who want to know about them.

I will be the last person to ask you these annoying questions.

No, you won't be the last to ask, but you'll be the last I answer.

That's right.

So let's begin.

Where does the idea that we have guardian angels come from?

The modern idea of guardian angels grew slowly, and it only comes into sharp focus quite late in Biblical history.

The starting point is the idea of angels themselves, and here we must say that the modern understanding of angels is quite different than that we find in the Bible.

Today, we use the term angel as a general catch-all term for any created non-human spirit.

If something's a creature, so it's created, and it's a spirit, and it's not human, we call it an angel.

But in the Bible, the term is more restricted than that.

In the Bible, there are a variety of different types of spiritual creatures, and they go by different names.

God is depicted as a heavenly king surrounded by his heavenly court, and there are many different types of courtiers of different ranks.

Towards the top, just under God himself, are the so-called sons of God.

We read about them, for example, at the beginning of the book of Job, where they come into God's throne room.

In other passages, they're also called sarim, a word that means princes or commanders.

Also, like a king, God has throne guardians, whose job is to keep unauthorized people away from the sacred space of God's throne.

Ezekiel sees the seraphim fulfilling this function, and Isaiah sees the seraphim fulfilling this function, and Ezekiel sees the cherubim fulfilling it.

There are also people with special jobs in the heavenly court, like the satan, whose name means opposer or prosecutor, whose job it is to accuse people of wrongdoing, and eventually he loses his place in the heavenly court.

There's also the commander of the Lord's army, who shows up in Joshua.

That also means that, like an earthly king, God has soldiers that are in his army.

And then, at the bottom of the heavenly hierarchy, there are the messengers, the low-ranking guys who deliver messages to different places, and they interact with humans a lot since they bring messages to us.

The Hebrew term for messenger is malach, which gets brought into Greek as angelos, and that gets brought into English as angel.

So, you can see how, in the Bible, the term angel originally referred to just the lowest level of the heavenly hierarchy, but during the Christian Age, its usage expanded to cover any member of the heavenly hierarchy except for God himself.

So, we need to keep in mind that what we would call angels are not necessarily what people in antiquity would call angels.

How does that impact the angel's function of guardianship?

Well, it means that there might be creatures that would be assigned guardian functions from all up and down the hierarchy, depending on the importance of the person or thing that they're guarding.

And, in this regard, we see predecessors to the idea of heavenly guardians even outside of Israel.

For example, the Catholic Encyclopedia states, So, in that last case, Nabopolassar, being king, says he had a high-ranking cherub guarding him, not just a lowly messenger.

What about in the Bible?

Where do we see the concept of guardian angels starting to emerge there?

It emerges slowly, but the first thing we see that's like this is happening in Genesis 16. In this passage, Sarah, Abraham's wife, has given her Egyptian handmaid, Hagar, to Abraham to have a son through her.

Only after Hagar gets pregnant, their relationship goes south.

Hagar starts despising Sarah, and Sarah is a jerk in return.

So, Hagar runs away, and we read, The angel of the Lord also said to her, I will surely multiply your offspring so that they cannot be numbered for multitude.

And the angel of the Lord said to her, Behold, you are pregnant and shall bear a son.

You shall call his name Ishmael, because the Lord has listened to your affliction.

He shall be a wild donkey of a man.

His hand against everyone, and everyone's hand against him.

And he shall dwell over against all his kinsmen.

So she called the name of the Lord who spoke to her, You are a God of seeing.

For she said, Truly here I have seen him who looks after me.

Genesis 16, 7-13. So, here the angel of the Lord finds Hagar and promises to bless her, telling her that the Lord has listened to her affliction, that she will have a multitude of offspring through her son Ishmael, and this kind of sounds like the angel of the Lord is looking out for her.

But there's a problem here, because it's the angel of the Lord, and there's some ambiguity about whether the angel of the Lord is just an angel, or whether he's the Lord himself.

You'll notice that at the end of that passage, it says the Lord spoke to her, and she replies, You are a God of seeing, even though she was just talking to the angel of the Lord.

Some early church fathers have held that the angel of the Lord is the pre-incarnate Christ, and so there's some ambiguity in this passage.

So when's the first passage where we don't have that ambiguity?

It's a few chapters later, or at least appears to be a few chapters later, in Genesis 19. In Genesis 18, the Lord and two angels appear to Abraham, who serves them a meal.

Only the angels aren't identified as angels in this chapter.

The Lord gives Abraham the promise of Isaac, his son through Sarah, and he tells him that he's going to destroy the city of Sodom, though Abraham convinces him that if he can find ten righteous men in it, he'll spare the city.

Then, in chapter 19, the two angels, who are now called angels, go to Sodom to scope it out, but they only find Abraham's nephew Lot is righteous.

So they then protect Lot and get him and his family out of the city before it's destroyed, only Lot's wife looks back and gets turned into a pillar of salt, so only Lot and his two daughters survive.

Here, the angels are identified as angels, and they do function to protect Lot, but that wasn't their only mission, because they were also there to check out Sodom and evaluate how bad its wickedness was.

Then, in chapter 21, we get another encounter with an angel involved in Hagar, only this one's a little bit different.

In this case, Isaac has gotten old enough to be weaned, so Abraham throws a feast, and Ishmael, his son through Hagar, starts laughing at him, which gets up Sarah's nose, and she demands that Abraham kick out Hagar and Ishmael.

Abraham doesn't want to do that, because he loves Ishmael, but God tells him to do what Sarah says, and he'll make a great nation out of Ishmael.

So Abraham gives Hagar food and water and sends her off.

Well, the food and water runs out.

And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept.

And God heard the voice of the boy.

And the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, Fear not, for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is.

Lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make him into a great nation.

Then God opened her eyes, and she saw a well of water.

And she went and filled the skin with water and gave the boy a drink.

Genesis 21, 15-19 This passage is a little different than the previous one in that it is an angel of God, not an angel of the Lord that speaks to Hagar.

The phrase angel of God is different than angel of the Lord, which involves the divine name Yahweh.

Though it's not clear that angel of God is meant to be different in meaning.

But the angel is still looking out for Hagar and her son and thus providing a garden function.

And we see this kind of pattern basically replicating through much of the Old Testament.

God sends individual angels to look out for individual people.

But we only have indications that this is done on an occasional basis.

It's like God sees someone in need of an angel at a particular time and sends one to help them on that occasion, rather than having an angel serve as a permanent guardian.

A particular example of this is in the book of Tobit.

In that book there is a moment where two humans are praying.

One is the book's title character, Tobit, who has been blinded.

He's a man of good works.

For example, he interrupted his own dinner to go bury the dead at the risk of his own life.

But afterwards he was sleeping outdoors with his face uncovered due to the heat and sparrows pooped in his eyes, causing white films to form over them so he couldn't see.

And his wife had to become the breadwinner for the family by doing the few kinds of work that women were allowed to do in their time.

The other person who's praying is a woman named Sarah, who has been given in marriage to seven different husbands.

But the demon Asmodeus is in love with her and kills each new husband on their wedding night, resulting in suspicion for their deaths falling on Sarah.

Both Tobit and Sarah pray to God and ask Him to let them die.

But God has other plans, and we read At that very moment, the prayer of both was heard in the presence of the glory of the great God, and Raphael was sent to heal the two of them, to scale away the white film of Tobit's eyes, to give Sarah the daughter of Regel in marriage to Tobias, the son of Tobit, and to bind Asmodeus, the evil demon, because Tobias was entitled to possess her.

Tobit 3, 16-17. So Raphael, whose name means God heals, comes down from heaven and disguises himself as a human relative of Tobit's, and he works to heal Tobit, get rid of Asmodeus, and get Tobias and Sarah hitched.

When his tasks are done, he reveals himself to them and says, I will now declare the whole truth to you, and I will not conceal anything from you.

I have said it is good to guard the secret of a king, but gloriously to reveal the works of God.

And so, when you and your daughter-in-law Sarah prayed, I brought a reminder of your prayer before the Holy One, and when you buried the dead, I was likewise present with you.

When you did not hesitate to rise and leave your dinner in order to go and lay out the dead, I was sent to test you.

So now God sent me to heal you and your daughter-in-law Sarah.

I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Lord.

Tobit 12, 11-15. So Raphael is one of the seven holy angels who enter the presence of God and who present prayers of God's people on earth to him.

We thus see another reference to pre-Christian Jewish belief in the intercession of the angels, just like we saw in Episodes 323 and 324 on the Book of Enoch.

But Raphael is not Tobit's or Sarah's regular guardian.

He's just sent to help him out on this particular occasion.

However, we do start to see angels serving as more regular guardians in the Old Testament, only on the level of nations rather than individuals.

In Deuteronomy 32 we read, This is a reference back to the Tower of Babel incident, where God confused the languages of the peoples, forcing them to become distinct nations.

And we're told he fixed their borders according to the number of the sons of God.

The sons of God being high-ranking angels, you'll remember.

So he put each nation under the direction of a high-ranking angel, but he kept the nation of Jacob, or Israel, for himself.

We see the same idea reflected in Sirach 17, where it says, However, this didn't mean that he also didn't use an angel for Israel.

Earlier in the Pentateuch, in Exodus 23, God's describing the Exodus event, and we read, So God also had an angel direct in Israel during the Exodus, though he also maintains a special relationship with Israel that he didn't maintain with the Gentile nations.

We also hear about such an angel in Baruch 6, which is known as the Letter of Jeremiah, where the prophet is addressing the Judeans who have been deported in the Babylonian exile, and speaking for God, he says, Say in your heart, it is you, O Lord, whom we must worship, for my angel is with you, and he is watching your lives.

Baruch 6, 6-7 So God's angel was still watching out for Israel during the Babylonian exile.

The most informative discussion of these angelic national guardians is in Daniel.

In Daniel 10, there's a passage where Daniel has been fasting and mourning for three weeks, and then finally the angel Gabriel shows up and says, Fear not, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your heart to understand and humbled yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words.

The prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me twenty-one days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, for I was left there with the kings of Persia, and came to make you understand what is to happen to your people in the latter days, for the vision is for days yet to come.

Daniel 10, 12-14 So Gabriel would have shown up three weeks earlier, but the angelic prince of Persia resisted him, and he stopped him from getting through until Michael, one of the chief angelic princes, came to help.

Gabriel then delivers his message, and afterwards he says, Now I will return to fight against the prince of Persia, and when I go out, behold, the prince of Greece will come.

But I will tell you what is inscribed in the book of truth.

There is none who contends by my side against these except Michael, your prince.

So now Gabriel is going to go back to the angelic battlefield, and together he and Michael are going to kick the angelic prince of Persia's butt, meaning that the Persian empire is going to fall, and then the angelic prince of Greece will arise and fill the resultant power vacuum, which refers to the conquests of Alexander the Great that took place in the late 330s BC. And notably, here we're told that Michael is not just one of the chief princes, but that he is specifically your prince, meaning Michael is the angelic prince or guardian of Israel.

The same thought is emphasized later in chapter 12 of the book, where we read that at the end, At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who is in charge of your people, and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time.

But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.

Daniel 12, 1. So once again, it's emphasized that Michael is the angelic prince that has charge of Israel, which we also heard about in episode 324 on the Book of the Watchers.

In 1 Enoch 20, we're told the names of the seven special angels who watch, and one of them is Raphael, just like we heard in the Book of Tobit, and we're told that he's in charge of the spirits of men.

Another is Gabriel, who is in charge of Paradise and the serpents and the cherubim.

And another is Michael, whom we're told that he is one of the holy angels who has been put in charge of the good ones of the people.

The people being the people of Israel, in contrast to the men that Raphael is in charge of.

The text is a little confused here and it's proposed that it originally said that Michael was in charge of Israel, or the righteous people of Israel.

So we've seen regular guardians on the national level in the Old Testament.

Do we get any indications of ongoing guarding by particular angels for individuals?

Not clearly, but there are a few passages that could suggest it.

For example, in Psalm 34 we read, And in Psalm 91 we read, These passages speak of people who fear the Lord, receive an angelic protection by individual angels or groups of angels.

But they don't clearly establish the idea of ongoing regular guardianship.

That's a concept that comes into focus in other Second Temple era literature outside the Old Testament.

In Episode 319, we read, In Episode 319, we discussed the book of Jubilees, which dates to about 150 years before Christ.

And Jubilees contains a passage that is strongly suggestive of guardian angels.

Jubilees is a rewritten version of Genesis and Exodus, and it has a passage where Rebekah is talking to her husband Isaac about their two sons, Jacob and Esau.

There's hostility between Jacob and Esau, and there's even a danger that Esau might try to kill Jacob at this point.

But Rebekah tells Isaac, So this sounds like Jacob and Esau have two different protectors, or guardian angels, and Jacob has the better one.

So if Esau attacks Jacob, Jacob's protector will be able to defend him.

We also encounter the ideas of angels guarding individuals in the New Testament, and it most clearly comes into focus in Matthew 18, where, after discussing little children, Jesus says, So this suggests that little Jewish children, or little ones, have angels who guard them on a regular basis.

However, some commentators, many commentators, see the little ones in this passage as extended metaphorically to include Christian believers in general, since Jesus emphasizes that Christians must become like little children.

And Jesus says that these angels always see the face of the Father.

At a minimum, that means that they have guaranteed access to the Father in order to inform him about the dangers that their charges are facing, and so intercede for them, as we've seen angels do in other situations.

On this understanding, the angels might spend time down here on earth looking out for their charges, or at least looking down from heaven on their charges.

But when a problem arises, they are guaranteed access to God's throne room to intercede for the people they're protecting.

However, the verb for see in this passage is in the present tense in Greek, and in Greek, the present tense has a tendency to refer to an ongoing action.

So the passage could also mean that they are always standing in God's presence in heaven and always seeing his face, so that they can always intercede for their charges.

Although that would conflict with other passages where only select angels get to stand in God's presence continually, as we saw in episode 319 on the book of Jubilees.

It also might conflict with the idea of angels doing more than just interceding for people, since they'd be needed down here on earth to effectively defend their charges.

It's thus not clear whether we should envision these angels as just having guaranteed access to God on his throne, or whether they should be understood as always standing in God's presence.

However, the hereafter is so complex that it likely goes beyond our ability to imagine it, and so all of this imagery is accommodated to human understanding, and it may be that we shouldn't pit these images against each other.

Do we have any other passages that speak of guardian angels for individuals in the New Testament?

There is one that many commentators have taken that way, and it's in Acts 12. In this passage, King Herod Agrippa I has just killed James son of Zebedee, and he's trying to kill St. Peter too.

He's got St. Peter locked up in preparation for his execution, but during the night, an angel shows up and lets Peter out of jail.

At first Peter thinks he's dreaming, but he's not.

So far we have the idea of an angel helping Peter, but that didn't prove it's his guardian angel.

Since we've seen angels helping people on an occasional basis in the Old Testament.

But then this happens.

Many commentators have read this passage and understood it to mean that the people at Mary's house thought that since Peter was in jail, it couldn't be him at the door, and so it must have been his angel, his guardian angel, who it was believed looked like him, explaining why Rhoda thought it was Peter.

And this is a possible reason.

However, in his commentary on Acts, David Peterson writes, So there's more than one way to read the passage.

It could be that the people in the house thought Rhoda had confused a purely human messenger sent by Peter with Peter himself, because as we've mentioned, the term angel just means messenger, and sometimes it refers to human messengers.

Or it could be that the people in the house thought that Rhoda was seeing a heavenly angel who was assigned to guard Peter and who thus looked like him, or at least was appearing in Peter's form.

And there is some evidence that some in the ancient world thought that your guardian angel looked like you, or at least could appear to look like you, though Peterson argues that this evidence dates from quite a bit after the time when the book of Acts was written, and he notes that Rhoda only claimed to hear Peter's voice rather than see him.

In any event, the passage is ambiguous.

The people in the house may or may not have been referring to Peter's guardian angel.

Do we read anything else about guardian angels in the New Testament?

There is a section in Revelation that may refer to them, but if so, it's not referring to individual humans having guardian angels, but to churches having them.

In Revelation 1, John sees a vision of Jesus holding seven stars in his hand, and he's told that the seven stars represent the angels of the seven churches in Asia that he's been directed to write to.

Then in Revelation 2 and 3, there are seven messages to be sent to these churches, and each one begins with an instruction like, "...to the angel of the church in Ephesus write, Revelation 2.1, and to the angel of the church in Smyrna write, Revelation 2.8," and so on.

The question, as with the Acts 12 passage, is whether these are human messengers or heavenly messengers.

If they're meant to be human, then they would refer to the pastor, or what we today would call the bishop, of the individual churches.

He's God's messenger to deliver his word to the church.

But it's also possible that they represent the guardian angels of the seven churches, and this view seems to be better supported by the fact that overwhelmingly, when Revelation refers to an angel, it's referring to a heavenly messenger, not a human one.

In fact, there are no passages elsewhere in Revelation that are plausibly understood as referring to human messengers.

So I think it likely that Revelation is envisioning churches as having their own guardian angels.

Thus, for example, my parish, St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Fayetteville, Arkansas, would have its own guardian angel, in addition to the individual guardian angels of the people who worship there.

We've now covered what the Bible has to say about guardian angels, and what some other Second Temple literature, like Jubilees, has to say.

But are there later references that we should also take into account?

One work is the Shepherd of Hermas, which is a Christian work that was written perhaps around the year A.D. 80. We'll talk about it in a future Lost Scriptures episode, since some early Christians considered it scripture.

In it, the author, Hermas of Rome, has extensive dealings with his guardian angel, who appears to him under one form initially, but later appears dressed as a shepherd, and Hermas doesn't immediately recognize him.

We read, I thought that he'd come to tempt me, and I said to him, Well, who are you?

For I know, I said, to whom I have been entrusted.

He said to me, Don't you recognize me?

No, I replied.

I am, he said, the shepherd to whom you were entrusted.

While he was still speaking, his appearance was changed, and I recognized him as the shepherd of Hermas.

His appearance was changed, and I recognized him as the one to whom I was entrusted.

And immediately I was confused, and fear seized me, and I was completely overwhelmed with sorrow, because I had answered him so wickedly and foolishly.

Shepherd of Hermas, Visions, 5, 1-4 So, this is early 1st century Christian testimony to belief in guardian angels, because Hermas recognized the shepherd as the angel to whom he'd been entrusted.

The book also contains a passage a little later on that's really interesting.

It says, Now hear, the shepherd said, about faith.

There are two angels with man, one of righteousness, and one of wickedness.

Shepherd of Hermas, Mandates, 6, 2-1-36 So, all those cartoons that you've seen where people have a good angel on one shoulder and a bad angel on the other, those are actually based on a belief that some Christians had going all the way back to the 1st century, though that isn't a teaching that's in the Bible.

This view is also shared with modifications by some in the early Jewish community, though not about guardian angels per se, but about what are called accompanying angels, that accompany man at certain times in their lives.

The 1906 Jewish Encyclopedia states, Accompanying angels are not permanent, but temporary companions.

Every angel wears on his breast a tablet inscribed with the name of God.

Two angels, one good and one evil, accompany man as he returns from the synagogue to his home on Sabbath Eve.

The souls of the pious are received by three good angels, those of the wicked by three evil angels, who accompany them and testify for them.

Jewish Encyclopedia, S.V. Angelology.

So, on this view, when you come out of the synagogue on the Sabbath and go home, you've got a good angel and a bad angel accompanying you, though this only happens on the Sabbath Eve, not every day as apparently in the case of the Shepherd of Hermas.

Also, when you die, your soul is received by three accompanying angels, three good ones if you're a good person and three evil ones if you're an evil person.

And that is at least somewhat similar to what Jesus says in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, where he tells us, The fact Jesus says Lazarus was carried by the angels means that there were at least two, though it doesn't specify that there were three.

And Jesus doesn't say anything about the rich man being carried by angels to his place of torment in Hades.

So, we can't read Jesus as fully endorsing the idea of the later rabbis about this.

However, this gives us a good sense of the early literature concerning guardian angels.

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So Jimmy, where do you want to go from here?

Well, guardian angels for purposes of this episode are a religious mystery, though in a future episode we will be looking at what people report about encounters with them and we'll have things to say from the reason perspective then.

For today, though, we're going to be looking at the issue from the faith perspective and I'd like to start by noting that the church, by noting what the church does and doesn't teach about guardian angels.

Then we'll look at some of the questions that people have about them.

Okay, what can we say about guardian angels from the faith perspective?

What has the church taught?

Not as much as you might think.

The 1910 Catholic Encyclopedia notes, So it's not an article of faith, meaning it's not a dogma, but that doesn't mean that the church doesn't have non-infallible teachings in this area.

The Roman Catechism, which was published in 1566, says, And to be present with every man to protect him from any serious injury.

For as parents, when their children have occasion to travel a dangerous way, infested by robbers, appoint persons to defend and assist them in case of danger.

So has our Heavenly Father placed over each of us in this our journey toward the heavenly country.

Angels, guarded by whose care and diligence we may escape the ambushes prepared by our enemies, repel their terrible attacks, and proceed directly on our journey.

Secured by their guiding protection against the devious wandering into which our treacherous foe may mislead us from the way that leadeth unto heaven.

Roman Catechism 494. So this passage says that each one of us is entrusted to the care of angels who defend us from the ambushes prepared by our enemies, which might refer to either human or demonic enemies, and to guide us away from the devious wandering from the way to heaven that the devil may try to encourage us to do.

However, the passage does not answer every question about guardian angels.

For one, who is the we that the passage is referring to?

Is it literally every man or is it every man who belongs to the Christian faith?

And second, when do we get these angels?

Is it from baptism, from birth, from conception, or from some other time?

The text doesn't say but in his Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, Ludwig Ott summarizes common theological opinion.

He says that it is a certain opinion that every one of the faithful has his own special guardian angel from baptism.

But then he goes on to say According to the general teaching of the theologians, however, not only every baptized person, but every human being, including unbelievers, has his own special guardian angel from his birth.

St. Basil, with reference to Matthew 18.10, teaches, every one of the faithful has an angel standing at his side as educator and guide, directing his life.

Adversus Aenomium 3.1 According to the testimony of St. Gregory the Wonder Worker and of St. Jerome, every person has from his birth his own special guardian angel.

St. Jerome comments on Matthew 18.10, how great is the value of the human soul that every single person has from birth received an angel for his protection.

Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma, 223 32b, pages 120 and 121 So, Ott considers it certain that Christians have guardian angels at least from the time of their baptism, but that the theological opinion tends to be that everybody, Christian or not, has guardian angels from birth.

And, in light of our better understanding of when human life begins today, one could propose that we extend that back to conception.

More recently, the Catechism of the Catholic Church has stated From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession.

Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd, leading him to life.

St. Basil, Adversus Aenomium 3.1 CCC 336 So, this passage says human life has angelic guardianship from its beginning, which, given the church's understanding, would point to conception.

It's also noteworthy that it says human life instead of the lives of believers.

This also would point in the direction of everybody, not just Christians, having guardian angels.

Then, with that as background, let's turn to the questions that people have about guardian angels.

First, what is the most fundamental thing we need to know about guardian angels?

Well, since their function is to guard us, we're going to be guarded.

And, since God is their boss and God does things well, they're going to guard us well.

In other words, we can trust that God will supply us with an adequate level of guardianship.

That doesn't mean that we'll never encounter problems in life or that we'll never sin through our own free will or that others will never hurt us or that we'll never die, because that's going to happen to all of us.

But, it does mean that the guardian angels will help us get through all these challenges.

We won't simply be left at the complete mercy of others or of the forces of darkness.

And, that we'll have the level of guarding that God has determined is appropriate.

So, whatever other conclusions we may come to about guardian angels, or whatever conclusions we may fail to come to, we can trust that we will be adequately guarded.

Then, let's look at a more specific question that a person might ask.

Do we have individual guardian angels?

The biblical data on this is much, much weaker than you might imagine.

We saw that in the Old Testament, they don't really have the idea of an angel guarding a person on a permanent basis.

Nations, like Israel and Persia and Greece, seem to get permanent guardians, like Michael in the case of Israel.

And, angels only get assigned to people on a per-occasion basis in the Old Testament, like when Raphael gets assigned to help Tobit and Sarah.

But, we don't have any clear indication of angels being assigned to individuals on a permanent basis.

Things are a little different in the New Testament, but not that much.

It looks like in Revelation churches have guardian angels, but we saw that the passage in Acts 12 that refers to Peter's messenger could refer either to a human messenger or a heavenly one.

And, even the passage in Matthew 18, where Jesus refers to the little ones having angels who always see the face of his Father, doesn't mean that they have individual guardian angels.

It could be interpreted to just mean that there is a group of angels up in heaven who get to see the Father and who intercede for the little ones on earth, without these angels being assigned to the little ones in a one-to-one manner, so that each little one has one specific guardian angel guarding them.

On the other hand, there's that passage in Jubilees that envisions Jacob having one protector and Esau having another.

And, of course that passage isn't in your Bible, unless you're an Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, as we discussed in episode 319, but it does show that the idea of individual guardians was out there and so it's possible that Jesus was envisioning this in Matthew 18. Also, later in the first century, we have Hermas entrusted to a specific angel, and it's certainly been the default assumption down through Christian history that we have specific guardians assigned to us, though the Roman Catechism from 1566 is less specific on this than you might think.

All it says is that we have angels, in the plural, guarding us, but it doesn't say that we have specific angels assigned to us as individuals.

However, the more recent Catechism of the Catholic Church does quote the 4th century Church Father Basil of Caesarea as saying, Inside each believer stands an angel, as protector and shepherd, leading him to life.

CCC 336. That at least envisions each believer having an angel assigned to him, though as the Catechism points out, and you can look this up in paragraph 20 of the Catechism, quotations are often presented to enrich the works doctrinal teachings rather than being doctrinal teachings in their own right.

Summing this up, though, I would say that it looks like we do each have an angel assigned to us.

Are we limited to just having one guardian angel, or could there be a group of them?

Could we have more than one guardian angel?

Well, we have multiple passages beginning with Jesus and including the Roman Catechism speaking of us as being guarded by angels in the plural, and though we may have one assigned to us, there don't seem to be any texts that say we have only one assigned to us, and I haven't found anything in church teaching that says we're limited to just one guardian angel.

So, purely as a matter of speculation, I'd have to be open to the possibility that God might assign more than one guardian to a specific human individual, in which case I guess it'd be kind of like we have a group of angelic bodyguards.

That would certainly seem to be the case in instances where God has assigned accompanying angels to a person in addition to whatever guardian they ordinarily have, like when Raphael came to assist Tobit and Sarah, even though Tobit and Sarah presumably had their own guardian angels.

It's thus hypothetically possible that he could assign more than one guardian to a person on a regular basis.

I have no basis for saying that God actually does that, but I can't eliminate the possibility.

Are guardian angels guarding only us?

Do we have their exclusive attention, or could they also be guarding other people at the same time?

This is also a matter of speculation rather than something I think can be answered with any confidence.

The way Christians have historically envisioned the matter, each person has the exclusive attentions of one guardian angel, but I don't have any biblical texts or church documents that say that, so I can't eliminate the possibility that God could have an individual guardian or group of guardians watching over a group of people the way a shepherd or a group of shepherds watches over a flock of sheep.

What I can say with confidence is that even if guardians have multiple charges, we will all be properly guarded, so we don't have to worry about being improperly guarded if our guardian is watching out for some other of God's children.

We've already touched on the next one a bit, but when do we get our guardian angels?

This is something that thought has changed on over time.

Some in the Christian era thought we get them at baptism, but that's hard to explain if Jewish children in the time of Jesus had guardian angels because we can't just assume that they were baptized.

Others have thought that we get them at birth, but what about all the dangers we face before birth?

Even before the modern horror of induced abortion, there was what's sometimes called spontaneous abortion or miscarriage, and there are some estimates that miscarriage occurs in as much as 40% of pregnancies, usually before the mother is even aware that she's pregnant.

It's hard to imagine God leaving unborn children unprotected, so I like the idea the Catechism suggests, which is that we're guarded from the beginning of life, which is conception.

I can't prove this, but it's the most logical theory to me and the one I personally believe.

Do we have our individual guardian angels for our whole lives from conception to death, or could our guardian angels ever get reassigned to other people?

What the Catechism says is that human life is guarded from its beginning until death, but it doesn't say that it's the same angel or group of angels due in the garden that whole time.

As a result, purely as a matter of hypothetical speculation, I can't rule out the possibility that we have different guardians at different points in our lives.

What is guaranteed is that we will be properly guarded, not that it's the same angel that's due in that garden the whole time.

It's thus conceivable that we have one guardian at one point and then later another guardian takes his place.

We even seem to see angels swap in roles like that in Scripture.

Like in Daniel, when Gabriel is on his way to deliver a revelation but the Prince of Persia stops him, Gabriel then fights with the Prince of Persia to a draw until Michael comes and helps him.

And it's Michael's help that lets Gabriel get through to Daniel.

Presumably that means that Michael has the Prince of Persia in a headlock or is containing him with some kind of hold and action while Gabriel is talking to Daniel.

I mean, if Michael just left the angelic battlefield, presumably the Prince of Persia would come and start fighting with Gabriel again to stop the revelation.

And then once Gabriel is done talking to Daniel, he and Michael are going to gang up on the Prince of Persia until he's defeated.

So it looks like Gabriel and Michael have a tag team approach to dealing with the Prince of Persia.

First, Gabriel is fighting him, then Michael shows up and fights the Prince of Persia to free up Gabriel to go talk to Daniel.

So it looks like these two angels are swapping tasks.

Namely, who's fighting with the Prince of Persia at the moment.

Well, if angels can swap out that role, then it would be conceivable for them to swap out the role of guardian to human.

In fact, earlier I mentioned the possibility of a group of angels guarding people like shepherds guarding a flock.

And shepherds definitely swap in and out, with one or more shepherds watching the flock at one time, and one or more other shepherds watching it at another time.

So the same thing could hypothetically happen with humans.

The question is, why would angels want to do that?

I could see it happening if one angel had urgent business he needed to attend to, like defending a particular human against a particularly strong demon, so that another angel needs to temporarily take over the routine guarding duties, while the first angel dealt with the more powerful demon, kind of like Gabriel and Michael dealing with the Prince of Persia.

But it's harder to see why this would happen on a routine basis.

Shepherds substitute for each other routinely because they get tired and need to go home and rest.

But angels don't get tired, so there's no obvious need for them to substitute for each other routinely.

I'm thus dubious of this possibility, but I can't eliminate it entirely since I'm not an angel and can't imagine with perfect accuracy everything they may have to deal with.

They might have other things besides tiredness that I can't even imagine that might motivate them to substitute for each other.

Do we continue to have guardian angels after this life?

Like many of these questions, this is something I don't think we know the answer to.

On the one hand, once we're out of this life, we don't need garden anymore, and we certainly don't need garden once we're safe in heaven, though you could propose that we might still need to be guarded on our way to heaven, like when passing through the aerial toll houses that our Eastern Orthodox friends propose.

But once we're in heaven, we won't need to be guarded, and so you can propose that once we're in heaven, we won't have guardian angels anymore because there's nothing for them to do for us.

On the other hand, you could argue that over the course of our lives, we form a bond with our guardian angel, and that this bond persists in the afterlife, even if the angel is no longer guarding us.

The same way that we form a bond with our spouses in this life, and that bond will persist in the afterlife, even if, as Jesus says, we will be like the angels of heaven and won't be married to our spouses anymore.

We'll still have a bond with them, and we'll still love each other.

In fact, we'll love our spouses even more than we were able to in this life.

So the same thing could be true of our guardian angels, when we'll finally understand and fully appreciate everything they did for us in life, which will give us an extra reason to be grateful to them and to love them, beyond the fact that they're fellow creatures of God that we should love anyway.

It's also possible, even though they may not be guarding us anymore, that they might do something else for us.

God could assign them new duties to help us out in some other way.

And so the relationship might shift from a guardian relationship to doing something else.

I thus don't think we can answer this question with any certainty.

If our guardian angels don't need to guard us once we're in heaven, could they be reassigned to guard other people on earth, or would that depend on the answer to the previous question?

I don't think that the answer would depend on what happens with the previous question, because angels aren't limited in the way human beings are.

Consequently, even if we have a continuing relationship with our guardian in heaven, or even if they're doing something else for us besides guarding us, I don't see why that would mean they couldn't also be guarding someone on earth.

I thus think it's possible that whether or not we have an ongoing relationship with them, that they could be given a new person or group of people to guard.

However, it's also possible that this doesn't happen and that they aren't given new charges once they're done guarding us.

We've now covered some of the more out-there questions that people ask about guardian angels.

Is there anything else you'd like to say on the subject?

Not particularly, though I would like to point out that the questions we've covered at the end are all highly speculative.

This was just an exercise to think through the possibilities.

As a result, people can have different opinions about them, and I'm sure that if you go searching, you will find different opinions about them.

For example, you might find that St. Thomas Aquinas weighed in on one question or another, and that he was more definite in his answer than I was.

That wouldn't be surprising to me because a lot of thinkers, including Aquinas, tend to advance opinions based on what strikes them as fitting.

For example, it would be fitting for God to do something this way, therefore God does it that way.

They also tend to be very confident about what they can deduce about angels on philosophical grounds apart from what Biblical revelation says, and so they may confidently advance opinions based on philosophical arguments.

I think it's totally fine for them to make whatever arguments strike them as good ones, but what they are offering are just opinions and not church teaching.

Even if there's someone as respected as Aquinas, his opinions are just that—opinions—and you're not required to believe them.

Personally, I'm much more modest in what I think we can deduce about God and the angels.

Just because it strikes us that something is fitting doesn't mean it strikes God as fitting.

There are a lot of things that God thinks are fitting that are totally counterintuitive to humans.

I mean, God becomes man, God dies on a cross, quantum mechanics, so I'm not as confident when it comes to fittingness-based arguments.

Similarly, I don't think that we can deduce as much philosophically as some thinkers propose.

Philosophical arguments are usually based on intuition, but we need to correct our intuition with observational data.

I mean, look at the difference between the Aristotelian-based science of the Middle Ages and compare it to what we learned following the Scientific Revolution when we started rigorously looking at observational data.

Well, when it comes to angels, we don't have a lot of observational data.

We have what Scripture tells us, and we have a little observational data outside of Scripture, but it's not that much.

So I think we have to be cautious when trying to draw a lot of firm inferences about angels on philosophical grounds.

I, thus, tend to be more cautious than many thinkers in terms of what I think is conceivable or possible, and I want to leave more room for God and how He might set things up, because, as God says in the book of Isaiah, And because of how little we know about angels, I think we have to leave more possibilities open for them than we might otherwise guess.

None of that is to say that the historic answers to questions about guardian angels are wrong.

They may be completely correct, and you can make philosophical and fittedness-based arguments for them.

Those arguments may even be very strong.

I just don't think that we can say those arguments are absolutely conclusive.

unknown, what's your bottom line on guardian angels?

It's possible that the view of guardian angels that most people assume is totally correct.

For example, we may have each, one, and only one guardian angel who we receive at conception, who guards us all through life, with whom we may continue to have a relationship in heaven, and he never gets reassigned to another person.

On the other hand, in view of how little we know about angels and how great the mystery of God and what he chooses is, it's also possible that other things may be true.

I'd say it's thus at least within the realm of conceivability that we have more than one guardian angel, that they may be guarded more than one person, like shepherds guard sheep, that they may get swapped out over time, that we may or may not have an ongoing relationship with them in heaven, including them being assigned to do something other than guard us, and that whether or not that's the case, they may also be assigned to guard others on earth, even after they're done guarding us.

At least these are hypothetically conceivable possibilities.

We'll have to wait until the afterlife to find out what's definitely true, but you're welcome to form your own opinions in the meantime.

And what further resources can we offer to the listeners and viewers?

We'll have a link to Peter Kreef's book, Angels and Demons, What Do We Really Know About Them?,

which is a speculative work and Kreef gives his opinions in it.

We'll also have a link to the Catholic Encyclopedia on Guardian Angels and the Jewish Encyclopedia on Angelology.

Very good.

And now it's time to hear from you.

What are your theories about guardian angels?

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Thank you.

So Jimmy, what's our next episode going to be about?

Next week we're going to look at a scientific experiment I recently took part in.

It was a remote viewing experiment, only I was not serving as a remote viewer because I'm not a remote viewer.

Instead, I was serving as an outbounder, a person who goes out to a secret location and then the viewers try to perceive where I am.

We'll present you with several options for where I may have been.

Then we'll look at what one remote viewer perceived about the target and whether or not it actually matched any of the possible locations.

Then I'll reveal where I actually was and we'll see how well the remote viewer did.

Very good.

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Thanks, Dom.

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