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How many types of Angel are there?

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How many types of Angel are there?
Will God allow them to communicate with humans today?

Off of the top of my head, there are two: cherubim, and seraphim.

There was something I read about there being a third type of angel, found in Revelation, but I have not studied Revelation enough to confidently say that the claim I read about is correct.

As for your question of whether or not angels speak to us today, I would refer you to Hebrews 13:2. That verse describes how some people have met angels without even realizing it. Angels are working in our lives, and I believe that we can still hear from them.
 
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ViaCrucis

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How many types of Angel are there?

As many as God made. People have opinions, but it's not like there's an angelic bestiary we can look up to find out.

Will God allow them to communicate with humans today?

That's up to God. Though the author of Hebrews reminds us that when we welcome the stranger we might be, in fact, "entertaining angels" and not even know it.

If someone claims that an angel came to them, however, I'd be incredibly suspicious. Not because it can't happen, but because the Church doesn't listen to the words of angels but the word of God. So anything that would come presenting itself as an angel best be in agreement with what God has said. As we are reminded even the devil himself will try to present himself as "an angel of light" to deceive. And Paul says that if even an angel preaches a gospel other than what we have already heard, to not believe it.

To be very honest, I don't spend much time even thinking about the angels. They have their work, whatever it is, and we have ours. We should be concerned with ours.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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ViaCrucis

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Gabriel, Michael belongs to which type?

Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel are four angels which are traditionally recognized as being chief-angels, aka archangels. Only Gabriel and Michael are mentioned in the Tanakh/Protestant Old Testament, Raphael is mentioned in Tobit, one of the Deuterocanonical books, and Uriel is mentioned in 2 Esdras* (also called 4 Esdras or Latin Ezra) an apocryphal work that is only really found in appendices in some medieval copies of the Vulgate.

*The naming of the books of Esdras is complicated. The Tanakh (Jewish Bible) only has one book, Ezra (in Greek, Esdras). The book was in Christian Bibles split into two, and called 1 Esdras and 2 Esdras; then in Protestant English Bibles 1 and 2 Esdras became Ezra and Nehemiah. And then the other books of Esdras (3 and 4 Esdras) then became known as 1 and 2 Esdras after 1 and 2 Esdras became Ezra and Nehemiah.

After the rebuilding the Temple when the Jews returned from the Babylonian captivity we enter into a period of Jewish history known as the Second Temple Period, which lasted until the destruction of the 2nd Temple in 70 AD. During this time there is a lot that got written, including a number of books of the Old Testament as well as most of the New Testament. A lot of these works would never be received as Scripture by Jews or Christians, but they were still influential in various ways, such as the several books which make up the "Book of Enoch", which is actually quoted directly in the Epistle of St. Jude in the New Testament. While not Scripture, and therefore not divinely inspired, they were still historically and culturally significant, and informed both Jewish and Christian thinking to varying degrees--including the names of different angels.

Generally speaking, we only see the names of angels at all in Post-Exile, Second Temple Judaism--prior to the Babylonian Exile angels are nameless. Which is why we don't see Gabriel and Michael mentioned until the book of Daniel, and then also mentioned again in the New Testament.

So while the Bible, depending on who you ask, only mentions 2-3 angels by name (all identified as chief or arch-angels in Judaism and Christainity), both Jewish and Christian tradition have always recognized many archangels, usually at least seven--though only the "Big Four" of Gabriel, Michael, Raphael, and Uriel are common in all traditional lists of archangels.

Which is kind of why I said that such things really don't matter, and there's no angelic bestiary, there's no authoritative, definitive list of types of angels, or names of angels. We really shouldn't even be all that interested in that because it's probably at best only a distraction. The angels do their thing, and we do ours.

-CryptoLutheran
 
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throughfiierytrial

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Off of the top of my head, there are two: cherubim, and seraphim.

There was something I read about there being a third type of angel, found in Revelation, but I have not studied Revelation enough to confidently say that the claim I read about is correct.

As for your question of whether or not angels speak to us today, I would refer you to Hebrews 13:2. That verse describes how some people have met angels without even realizing it. Angels are working in our lives, and I believe that we can still hear from them.
Guardian angels as well as messengers
 
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