Angelology: Knowledge of Angels

Abstract

Abstract This chapter outlines the actual differences between Roman Catholics and Protestants, and presents a brief catechism of reformed doctrine. Despite the caution that Protestants expressed about going beyond the immediate authority of Scripture, reformed writers wrote extensively and imaginatively about angels. Modern emphasis on the visual imagination, where Protestant artists were certainly less creative than their Catholic counterparts, perhaps occludes this. Protestants addressed many of the issues traditionally examined in writing about angels, adapting them to their own soteriology and to transformations in the understanding of natural philosophy. There was no single, unified Protestant angelology, and angels were an area of conflict between Protestants, but angelology did not disappear in the two centuries after the Reformation.