The Christian Church agrees with you and Orthodoxy has always rejected the Neo-Platonist / Gnostic conceit that matter is evil. We believe in a bodily resurrection.
That’s a theological error, and a severe one. The Orthodox, Catholics and other traditional churches have always venerated the Archangels, and all other angels who sided with God. All fallen angels have already fallen - there is no possibility of the good angels such as St. Michael, St. Gabriel, St. Raphael and St. Uriel and our own guardian angels falling into sin - otherwise we would have a real crisis, since we would not be able to trust our guardian angels.
My question is.... should we be trusting in Angels?
I don't.
I trust in God, I trust in Christ, I have little trust for anyone or anything else to be fair.
I don't hold Angels as anything but messengers and servants of God.
Though I suppose how you view Angel's potential for sin is a biblical interpretation issue of Revelation 12.
if you believe Revelation 12 is historical, then sure you can believe all the angels who can fall to sin have already fallen and the rest are "safe"
I do not though, as when Satan is cast out after the war, He has a short time on Earth, specifically 42 months.
and if that is the case, then 1/3 of angels
will fall, and thus, even angels that remain Holy for now, have the potential to choose sin.
and I believe that Ephesians 6, lends credibility to that idea that Satan being cast out of heaven is yet future still.
12 For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.
Let that sink in, while we strive against this current fallen flesh and await the redemption of our bodies, our true enemy is not the flesh, but spiritual evil, and those spiritual evil forces are still in heaven, after the cross. They have not been cast out yet, the "neither was their place found any more in heaven." .. is not something that happened at the cross if Paul's talking about it being a current reality decades after the Cross.
I'm very much a futurist, in fact more than most people who consider themselves futurists. So I see Angels as still having the potential to sin, with no potential for redemption.
I suppose I can affirm that Michael will not, as he is named. I'd like to think Gabriel won't, but he isn't specifically named in Revelation 12 as being on God's side. The rest you listed, aren't in canon scripture so I can't affirm them at all.
I don’t think you understand what carnal means in this kind of theological context, which is a reference to carnal sin, in the form of fornication.
Carnal is a term that is often
used to refer to sexuality true, but it is not specifically that. Carnal just means to do with the body. the root word carn just means flesh. You can still be carnal in a bad way if your god isn't sexuality but your own stomach, your pleasure coming from eating, or bodybuilding (which can lead to a narcissistic self worship of your own body as well), your pleasure coming from endorphins from working out plus admiring your own image, or a way of carnality I always struggle with myself, viewing yourself as more intelligent than others, and so your own "mind" can become your god, the desire to be "right" can stem from a desire to seek out truth and valuing truth, which is a good thing as long as you know that truth comes from God and Jesus is the truth, but it's a fine line to cross over into a vanity where "knowing it all" is a desire you have to know more than other people.
But in essence we are carnal beings, we are flesh, and God has a design on that that we will eternally still be flesh. It will just be flesh that is not corrupt, we will be like Christ and His glorious body. That is the promise. So that is what I mean by carnal, that it is bodily, that we have a physical body, and that that physicality will be a good thing, because, it's what God desires we have..
In any case, since Scripture clearly states that sexual relations outside of marriage are inherently sinful, and since the Holy Apostle Paul warns that fornication is one of those sins which, like sodomy, can interfere with our salvation, and since Christ our True God clearly states that in the Eschaton we will not be married, or given in marriage, but rather will be “like the angels”, the Scriptural position on this issue is clear, and is the basis for the doctrine of the Orthodox, Catholic and traditional liturgical Protestant churches.
Prior to this thread, I had not come across anyone outside of Mormonism or Islam suggesting at the possibility of reproduction or sexual relations in the Resurrection. And I am frankly astonished and bewildered that people adhering to the Nicene Creed and the 27 book New Testament canon would suggest such a thing.
Isaiah 65:23 is still scripture. Again, I do not know how it will come to pass, that there are offspring, but no Marriage.
I just know that Isaiah 65:23, has the people on the New Earth having descendants.
Now, there are some people, like Randy Alcorn (who wrote the book "Heaven") that if you read between the lines in what he says, he considers a possibility, he doesn't voice it directly because it does fly in the face of many traditional interpretations which many were brought into the Church by Greek Philosopher "converts" like Augustine, who I know a lot hold as a saint but considering the errors he injected into the Church like Amillennialism.. I have trouble really adhering to a lot of his doctrines. I think he was trying to harmonize Christianity with Plato which I think was a terrible route to go.
Anyway because of the predominance of the idea of an eternity without sex or children in the Church, people like Randy Alcorn wouldn't directly say what he thought, but he suggested the idea "we are all in the same covenant marriage...." and just trailed off.
It's hard to speculate beyond that, but there are 2 truths.
1. Marriage as we know it is not a thing after the resurrection, Christ weds the Church.
2. There are going to be descendants of the people of God on the New Earth
again it could be children raised out of the rocks for all we know, Jesus said God can do that for Abraham, why couldn't God do it for us?
It should also be noted that in the everlasting life of the Parousia, everlasting life would make reproduction unnecessary, and furthermore, Adam and Eve did not receive the instruction to reproduce until after they were expelled from Paradise.
God gave the command to be fruitful and multiply in Genesis 1, before the fall, when He was pleased with His very good creation. Marriage was also a creation before the fall.
That's one of the things I loathe about "traditional" denominations. They treat those things as products of sin.
God's original plan didn't involve death, but it did involve reproducing and new life.
I have no idea how God intended for a world where things reproduced indefinitely without any death, but that was what He intended.
and that is ultimately the crux of it all, that God had a plan, and God is all knowing so God does not change His plan. God makes promises, God does not repent of His promises, He fulfills them. So if God created and said be fruitful and multiply, and death wasn't part of that plan, and He blessed them, and gave them everything they needed.. then I have no reason to believe that God changed His mind and has a plan B that we're doing now instead of the original plan.
The only other way to see it, is that God's plan all along was for us to fall, that that was His intent, was for us to fall, setting us up to fail.
Now God knew we would go against His intentions and fall, and there was always a plan to redeem from that fall, but the intent wasn't to have a fall. The intent was to have a thriving world of life that God provided for and would dwell on. Sin was acting against that intent.
and in Isaiah 65 and Revelation 21 and 22, we go back to God's intent for the Earth, a New Earth, that thrives with life, and God provides for and dwells on.
