It's been a while, and I reserve the right to be wrong about some details, but I did go on a huge Milton/angelology bender in high school.
I guess the first thing is that 98% of angelology is non-Biblical. In the New Testament the word used is ό ἀνγελος, which of course is Koine Greek for 'messenger' and transliterates to 'angelos,' so God's messenger's are angels! I don't know the Hebrew word off the top of my head, but afaik the situation in the Old Testament is similar--there's no direct discussion of angels, every so often God's messengers just show up (and get wrestled with or whatever). But by the time of Augustine it was agreed that they existed (he devotes scads of text to them in City of God. Scads).
I always assumed that it was God’s plan to create humans all along, and that he just set up the infrastructure before he started on that and that that’s why angels were made before humans.
This is a pretty standard interpretation afaik. But it's also fairly standard to say that angels have to have free will, at least in a general Protestant worldview (and SPN has always struck me as fairly Protestant)--Milton says explicitly that there's no value to the service if it isn't freely given. And of course the whole point of the Fall is that humans had free will and chose poorly.
My understanding has always been that everyone has free will but that it's all part of the plan. So I definitely agree with your interpretation of the in-show events, and raise a very skeptical eyebrow to the idea that the angels don't have free will and the humans do.
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I guess the first thing is that 98% of angelology is non-Biblical. In the New Testament the word used is ό ἀνγελος, which of course is Koine Greek for 'messenger' and transliterates to 'angelos,' so God's messenger's are angels! I don't know the Hebrew word off the top of my head, but afaik the situation in the Old Testament is similar--there's no direct discussion of angels, every so often God's messengers just show up (and get wrestled with or whatever). But by the time of Augustine it was agreed that they existed (he devotes scads of text to them in City of God. Scads).
I always assumed that it was God’s plan to create humans all along, and that he just set up the infrastructure before he started on that and that that’s why angels were made before humans.
This is a pretty standard interpretation afaik. But it's also fairly standard to say that angels have to have free will, at least in a general Protestant worldview (and SPN has always struck me as fairly Protestant)--Milton says explicitly that there's no value to the service if it isn't freely given. And of course the whole point of the Fall is that humans had free will and chose poorly.
My understanding has always been that everyone has free will but that it's all part of the plan. So I definitely agree with your interpretation of the in-show events, and raise a very skeptical eyebrow to the idea that the angels don't have free will and the humans do.