The Night School with The Book of Tobit

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The Night School with The Book of Tobit

Series 14, Part 1

January 23, 2024 • Rick Ganz

We begin our development of a more sufficient explanation of Angels than we typically rely on with the biblical Book of Tobit, a book included in the collection of Scripture that Jesus would have known. This “short story” is charming, interesting, and at times profoundly beautiful. It was in this Book that the Judeo-Christian tradition has one of its significant starting points concerning Angels.

Angels are everywhere attested in the Scriptures, and they regularly appear with Jesus, helping Him, assisting Him. Consider, how His conception was announced to Mary of Nazareth by the Angel that tradition calls “Gabriel”; His birth was announced to the shepherds by an Angel, and then the Heavens became “filled” with Angels praising this fact. And consider the two Angels who sat inside the empty tomb after the resurrection of Jesus, who met Mary Magdalene there and gave her instructions.

What is the deal with Angels? For what purpose did God create them? Are Angels “necessary”?, as some ask, who really have no idea how to think about Angels.

The Book of Tobit (written sometime between 250 BCE and 175 BCE - around the time that the Book of Daniel was written) is a good, accessible place to start our exploration.

More from The Night School for Deeper Learning: Series 14 (Spring 2024)

The Night School Series 14 Introduction Video

January 11, 2024 • Rick Ganz

Series 14 of The Night School for Deeper Learning, led by Rick Ganz, is titled "Angels: A Forgotten Friendship." The series will be about us deconstructing the wrong assumptions that we have made about the angels, when or if we ever bother to think about them. We will seek to open up for us a sufficient way to understand the reality of the angels and their godly purposes among us. What is God up to in this calamitous Age of our world and society? Might be be trying to open up for us, through the helplessness that we can feel these days, a way to discover a forgotten friendship?

The Night School with Jean Danielou, SJ

February 27, 2024 • Rick Ganz

In Part I, we had a narrative introduction to the work and mission of Angels - of a particular Angel, Raphael, at work among human beings - in the biblical Book of Tobit. In Part II, we are taken into a broader, deeper description of the Angels and their mission by the learned Jesuit Fr. Jean Danielou, SJ in his book published in 1953 (and still in print) The Angels and Their Mission. With an accessible style and motivated by spiritual zeal to communicate clearly and movingly, Fr. Danielou gets us to notice how widely present are the Angels in the Bible, and very significantly present in the life and work of Jesus. We are shown how seriously the greatest of the early Christian teachers (the "Fathers of the Church" as they are called) took Angels and wrote about them. The Angels were there all along, but nearly all of us have overlooked them, thinking them a fanciful decoration (a symbol for something else, etc.), things not worthy of our attention.

The Night School with St. Augustine

March 19, 2024 • Rick Ganz

In Part III of this Night School series on Angels: A Forgotten Friendship, we explore how it was that Angels became more fully integrated into the theological (not only the biblical) understanding of the Christian Church. Someone of the enormous capabilities of St. Augustine (353-430 CE) was the one to do this.