>The contemporary Christians I've heard preach on the subject mostly define
>an angel as 'a messenger of God' and usually make the point that this can
>be an ordinary person as well as a spirit.
I wonder what denomination these contemporary christians are. Certainly in biblical literature, angels can take the form of ordinary people but that does not mean that they are ordinary people (as the unfortunate Sodomites found out when they attempted to bugger about three visitors).
>Also, at least some mainstream
>Christians would say that fallen angels (and other kinds of demons if there
>are such) are all created by God, because Hell cannot make anything new.
I would be interested to know of a mainstream church that _didn't_ say that fallen angels were originally created by God.
>I think one thing that's clear from this discussion is that even our
>world's three great monotheistic religions, which share much of their
>Scriptures, include a variety of ideas about and definitions of angels and
>demons.
You've mentioned this variety of ideals and definitions of angels before but you haven't given any specifics.
>AR itself says (page 7) that the current classification system that goes
>under Anaxial's name is an expanded version of his original scheme, and
>that other classification systems are also used in Glorantha.
But the classification system that AR is talking about isn't about Angels but the decks of Anaxial's Ark (first deck: creatures of above, second deck: domesticated animals etc).
>In the Divine Comedy (not in the Inferno, one of the other two books that
>are much less read) Dante meets the shade of a Pope who in life
>produced an elaborate scheme describing the orders of angels and their
>duties. When he came to the afterlife he found that his scheme was
>completely wrong, and the poet says this was 'the funniest thing he'd
>ever heard'.
As far as I can make out, this is a reference to Paradiso Canto 28. The dispute between Pope Gregory and Dionysis the Aeropagite is about the hierarchies of angels (namely thrones, principalities etc) rather than the basic definition (that angels are heavenly servants of god) and the dispute wasn't all that great.
So all in all, I'm bemused at what you find so objectionable about the definition of gloranthan angels as being denizens of the Sky world.
--Peter Metcalfe
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