"SONS OF GOD" MARRYING THE "DAUGHTERS OF MEN"

I

IN the preceding chapter we have seen that Spiritism in one of its forms was directly responsible for the flood. The "sons of God" who took to themselves wives of "the daughters of men" (Genesis VI), were evil angels, who entered upon that intercourse the offspring of which were the "Nephilim," "the fallen ones," the mighty heroes of antiquity. These in their turn, presumably, furnished the ground for the stories of the loves of the gods and demigods of classic lore.

The proof of this being presented, as well as its corroboration by the ancient Jewish synagogue and the early Christian writers, it remains to more fully consider objections raised against it on the ground of the nature of angels as well as the teaching of our Lord in Matthew XXII. 30.

It is said for example, that an angel is altogether spiritual and immaterial, and hence such implied intercourse is impossible.

To this it might only be necessary to reply,

(1) Even if it were true, even if the angelic nature were such, it could not change the fact stated in the text, that "the sons of God" took to themselves wives of "the daughters of men," the offspring of which were as described. Nor could it change the fact that "sons of God" is a phrase everywhere in the Old Testament used of angels, and not men.

That is to say, faith does not wait to learn the possibility of a thing before it believes it. It believes it on the evidence presented, assuming its possibility until the opposite has been shown.

In this case, however, "impossibility never can be shown until an exhaustive knowledge is possessed of all that is possible to angels in the line of sinful degeneracy within the powers bestowed upon them at creation." (Kurtz, quoted by Fleming, p. 89.)

(2) This leads to the remark that no one is qualified to say just what the angelic nature may be, because no one really knows. On the other hand, the implications are against the spiritual and immaterial idea as shown in our former chapters dealing with satan, angels and demons. Angels have appeared to men in human form, and have been taken for men, and have partaken of food like human beings.

It may be said that these were instances where God wrought miracles to produce the phenomenon, and hence that they furnish no standard for judging of what angels in rebellion might do.

But what right have we to suppose a miracle? The Bible being silent on the question of a miracle in such instances, why should we introduce it? Especially, why should we do so when we know that the working of miracles on God's part is reserved for great emergencies?

Moreover, angels themselves may work miracles, as we have already seen. What about Satan's assumption of the body of a serpent in Eden? What about the magicians withstanding Moses in Egypt? What about the beast with the two horns in the book of Revelation (XIII, 11-15), and "the spirits of demons working miracles which go forth unto the kings of the whole world to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty?" (Rev. XVI, 13, 14.)

Angels do not possess power to create something out of nothing, which is alone the prerogative of God, but they may be able so to combine existing elements as to form for themselves bodies similar to the human.

(3) It may be questioned whether there is any being in the universe who is simply spiritual and immaterial, except the Infinite Himself, Who is above and beyond all time and space. Isaac Taylor in his Physical Theory of Another Life, takes the position that the idea of an absolutely incorporeal being is irreconcilable with that of a finite creature, because anything created can subsist and work only within the limits of time and space, and corporeality confines the creature to such limits. It is God only Who exists above and beyond these limits.

In other words, an embodied state of some kind is indispensable to a finite mind, whose faculties can not otherwise come into play or produce effects.

(4) As Fleming reminds us, should all these views still be unsatisfactory, there remains the fact that human bodies have been possessed by evil spirits, which may have been the case here. Through the medium of such bodies thus possessed, "the sons of God" may have had the intercourse referred to.

Indeed this has been the opinion of some of the older commentators, and is suggested as early as the Clementine Homilies (Horn. IX). It is a very simple, and yet sufficient, solution of the difficulty, for we are taught in the Gospels that the powers and faculties of the human being thus possessed were completely controlled, intensified and directed by the demon, or else that the two natures, in some incomprehensible manner were interfused and the weaker overborne by the stronger.

The remarkable physical proportions, the superhuman strength and the evil disposition of the Nephilim would be the natural effects of such a power imparted to human beings by fallen spirits. Nor would such possession necessarily involve the suffering of physical and mental evils to which demoniacs of the Gospels were subjected, for Satan can transform himself into an angel of light, and no doubt his emissaries would conduct themselves in a way to accomplish the object they had in view. (The Fallen Angels, p. 95.)

(5) One more supposition is still to be considered, namely, that "the sons of God" in their spiritual nature, or at the most in some kind of subtle, ethereal body, or with the appearance of a human body, might in some incomprehensible way effect what the text in Genesis declares to have been the fact. Augustine in the City of God, book 15, thinks this possible; and so also does Dr. Henry More, an English divine and philosopher of the seventeenth century (Mystery of Godliness, book III, C. 18), and the Rev. Theo. Campbell in the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, 1867, all quoted by Fleming.

Of course this involves difficulties of its own, and is not presented as a solution, but merely as a supposition worthy of consideration. Those who wish to consider it further will find a good deal of information in a book easily accessible, known as Earth's Earliest Ages, by G. H. Pember, pp. 205-213, 375-391, edition of 1885, Armstrong, New York.

We quote a paragraph or two from this work:

"Spiritualists teach that all will marry in the next world, if they do not in this; and that true marriage lasts through eternity. The natural inference is that the true spouses of some are already in the spirit-land. And to such an extent is this inference followed out that many are reported to be receiving visits and communications from those spiritual beings with whom they are to be united forever. The ceremonious marriage of a woman to a demon is a thing not unknown in the United States."

He mentions a book called "An Angel's Message," claiming to be communications from a spirit to an English lady, his destined bride for eternity. The demon-lover describes himself as the spirit of a man of deep religious feeling, who, during his sojourn in the flesh was accustomed to visit the house of the lady's father, though at that time he found no attraction in her. In the course of years he died, as did also the mother of the lady. Soon after the decease of the latter her daughter began to receive communications understood to come from the mother, in the course of which the demon-lover is introduced, and thereafter inspires the medium, (i.e., the lady in the case) himself. It is she who, under his inspiration and control now pens the following:

"She who writes these lines is my wife more than may be thought possible by those who have not had a similar state opened in themselves. She is not so as to her natural body, but she is so as to her spiritual body. For 'there is a natural body, and there is a spiritual body.' The one is within the other as a kernel within a shell.

"But this state can come to the outward perception of those only who are open to spirit-intercourse. No others can perceive, during their life in the world of nature, that which belongs to the spirit alone. This state constitutes mediumship; for she who is mine is not only a writing medium, but she is also susceptible of very palpable impressions of my presence with her. We are one; and she has received the assurance of that truth by other means than the merely being told so in these writings."

There is much more to the same effect; but that which we have quoted is sufficient to unveil the danger which may be threatening many.

II

It remains to speak of our Lord's words in Matthew XXII, 30, and the parallels, where in rebuking the Sadducees, He says:

"Ye do err, not knowing the Scriptures nor the power of God.

For in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are the angels of God in heaven."

Two ways of meeting this objection in harmony with the foregoing have been suggested. One is, to say that Christ is speaking of the holy angels only, from which no inference is to be drawn as to that of which the same beings might be capable if fallen from their original state.

The other is, that He is stressing the word "heaven", meaning that they do not marry in heaven, but saying nothing as to what they might do under other circumstances or in a different environment. The first is the view of Kurtz the theologian, and the second that of Nagelsbach, the commentator, in the Lange series.

But is either hypothesis a necessity? It is true that angels always appear in the Bible as masculine, never feminine, the former being the gender used of beings in whom "sexual distinctions do not exist; but is it inconceivable that the germ of such distinction may be latent in their nature?

Man, for example, was not created to sin, and yet he had in his constitution the capability of sinning, a capability which came into operation in his departing from the ordinance of the Creator. In like manner it is thought, the germ spoken of as a possibility in the angelic nature might be unfolded as a result of wilful departure from the original condition of existence, and the sinking to a lower and unnatural state in apostasy from God.

Our author quotes Paradise Lost, Book I, where Milton names the chiefs of the fallen angels after the idols of the Canaanites and others, and of some he says, they bore the names

"Of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male,

These feminine, for spirits, when they please,

Can either sex assume, or both; so soft

And uncompounded is their essence pure."

Finally, following Kurtz again, there is an analogy seen in the resurrection life of man. In this world he has the distinction of sex, but in that which is beyond, i.e., in heaven, he will neither marry nor be given in marriage, but in that respect be equal to the angels.