Jesus is Superior to Angels, Not an Angel Himself

Pattern Christology and Pattern Theology explore the relationship between angels and humans, including a claim that Jesus once had an angelic nature known as the Angel of the LORD. Pattern christology doesn’t rise and fall on this premise; the more important point is that Jesus had a created nature of some kind prior to the incarnation. But viewing the Angel of the LORD as a literal angel (who is also truly divine) has some benefits of harmonization that are worth defending.

The primary push-back against this view is that the book of Hebrews postures Jesus as superior to angels. In that context, the author makes sweeping statements about the secondary role that angels play in God’s creation, some of which seem to refute the idea of equality or interplay between the races of angelkind and mankind.

To understand how Hebrews relates to this issue, we need to look at the argument being made. Hebrews 1 endeavors to show Jesus’ supremacy over two groups, the prophets and the angels. These groups are related, because the prophets would get their messages from angelic sources (2:2).

To establish that Jesus is superior to angels and prophets, the author appeals to two aspects of Christ’s history – his creation and upholding of the universe, and his death, burial, resurrection, and ascension to the throne of God in Heaven. The former is an appeal to his divine nature, which is supreme over all by nature. The latter is an appeal to his human nature, which became supreme over time though his obedience. On this point of temporal supremacy, the author writes,

After making purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs. (Heb 1:3b-4)

Jesus owns the universe as its divine creator, and he inherited the universe from the Father as a man who laid down his life to save it. That inheritance happened at a point in time, at the ascension, when the degree of authority he possessed as a man flipped from being less than an angel, to more. The author continues this point in the next chapter.

For it was not to angels that God subjected the world to come, of which we are speaking. It has been testified somewhere, “What is man, that you are mindful of him, or the son of man, that you care for him? You made him for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned him with glory and honor, putting everything in subjection under his feet.”

Now in putting everything in subjection to him, he left nothing outside his control. At present, we do not yet see everything in subjection to him. But we see him who for a little while was made lower than the angels, namely Jesus, crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. (Heb 2:5-9)

The original psalm (Psa 8) asks the question “what is man” in reference, it seems, to the race generally. But the author of Hebrews’ use of the psalm focuses it prophetically on the chief man, Jesus, who ascended over all dominion and authority. So it isn’t that every human has the same authority as Jesus. We are coheirs as his bride, but we receive derivative authority over portions of his inheritance, not authority over the whole thing (cf. Mat 19:28).

So the supremacy that the author of Hebrews assigns to Jesus is not a racial supremacy of mankind over angels. It’s the supremacy of a single man over every other creature in creation, angel and human alike. The author focuses on angels because this is what the Hebrews were turning to in their turning from Jesus – worship of angels, elevation of prophetic scriptures of the old testament without the one they pointed to, etc. But his argument gives Jesus authority and supremacy over all the rest of mankind as well, both as a function of his deity, and as a function of his unique propitiation as a man, and his consequent human ascension to the throne of God.

So yes, the author postures Jesus against angels, and places them under subjection to him. But this does not rule out a prior angelic nature, or claims about an image-bearing relationship that links angels and humans. Jesus’ ascension over the angels was a product of his incarnation, death, and resurrection, not his nature.

Furthermore, we know that even Christians don’t stay human in the sense of exclusively descending from Adam. We probably retain that lineage, as Christ does in the resurrection. But per 1Co 15, we become more than descendants of the man of dust; we also bear the image of the man from heaven. So if there is a racial superiority in view, then we have to acknowledge that it’s a racial superiority of the resurrected man over the angels, and the resurrected man is more than a descendant of Adam. On my view, where Christ formerly had an angelic nature, and gave that up for a human nature, his final resurrected nature would be a union of both (cf. Rev 21:1-2). There must be something heavenly about his original and current nature for Paul’s words to have any meaning, so either there is now a third line of image-bearers, or Jesus is the protype for a union of the previous two lines of angel and human.

This would suggest that in the resurrection, angels have a change in nature as well. There’s reason to believe that they’re involved in our resurrection/rapture/ascension (Mat 24:31, Rev 14:14-20). Perhaps they too receive a new united nature at that point, to match our own. This would defeat any nitpicking about Hebrews, because just as we become more than mankind, angels become more than angelkind. We all become like Christ, after his new image that merges both lines.

In any case, the argumentation in Hebrews is focused on a specific problem, and the statements made by the author have a limited scope that references the superiority of a single man. His argument is unconcerned with racial equality or differences between angels and humans in their final state, and shouldn’t be taken to speak to that issue.