In our coffee hour conversation on Sunday we began a series on angels. We talked about the angelic hierarchy and about the roles that angels play in the governance and maintenance of the created order. I anticipated a common objection that the Church’s teaching on angels interposes a kind of celestial bureaucracy between God and the created order.
After all, God is omnipotent and doesn’t need any help in running the universe. What’s the point of having an intervening order of angelic beings? This is in many respects exactly the teaching of monergistic religions like Islam and Calvinism: that God does all the things and that creatures are akin to puppets moving about on divine strings. God is the primary - and therefore the only - cause of everything.
Of course, this idea leads irresistibly to the conclusion that God causes misfortune and evil. If God is the sole cause of everything, then he causes illness and disaster and death. And he causes those humans who wind up in hell to go there - in fact, he desires their damnation. The best we can do is resign ourselves to fate: whatever will be, will be.
Aside from being a sophomoric bit of redundancy, the idea that “whatever will be, will be” seems to absolve us from much responsibility. Everything is above our pay grade, because we’re not paid at all: we’re slaves to forces that don’t ultimately care about us (or about most of us, at any rate).
The other extreme from monergism is the equally fatalistic idea that the universe is simply a product of mechanical and chemical and quantum causes that stretch back toward infinity. There is no God, which means that there is no primary cause of anything. This leaves everything equally meaningless and depressing.
Fortunately, both of these visions of the universe are deeply contrary to the Christian view set forth in the Scriptures and in the teaching of the Church. The Catholic and Orthodox Faith holds that God created rational beings (men and angels) and endowed them with free will so that they could really love him. No one loves under compulsion: love requires knowledge and freedom of the will.
There are all kinds of secondary causes within the created order, among them the free acts of men and angels. God has created a universe in which much of the unfolding of reality in time is driven by things he has created. While he holds the final cards, so to speak, and will weave all that is done by created beings into ultimate good, during the time and in the space allotted to them, created things have real effects on the universe. Rational beings such as human beings and angels have a very great impact on the unfolding of history. What we do really matters, both to ourselves, to others, and to God.
We can choose to cooperate with God, or we can choose not to. God wills our salvation and that of the whole world, but within human history (and even before it, if we consider the fall of the angelic beings who became demons) God’s will is not always done. And it is God’s will that his work of healing the world through Jesus Christ, of reconciling all things to himself, is in many ways delegated to angels and to mankind. He honors us with real responsibility for things, as he has done since the beginning when he gave Adam and Eve the mission of tending, keeping, and guarding the earth.
Our lives, our actions, and our choices have profound meaning. We have been given great responsibility, and with that has also been given unimaginable blessings. God understands our limitations and our failures and desires for us to offer all that we have and all that we are to him, including those limitations and failures, so that he can use us to bring about his Kingdom.
It’s a wonderful thing to realize that you have been brought into the world by God out of love, and that God has put you here to help him make all things new again in Christ. We begin by giving ourselves, our souls, and bodies to him as a reasonable and living sacrifice, and as we do, we will surely see that God is using us to reach others and to bring blessings into the world. That’s a very grand design, and you are at the heart of it!
So use your agency to God’s glory. Be the secondary cause of something great!
