Faith & Spirit Quote by Leo Rosten

Rosten’s definition has the tidy certainty of a dictionary entry, but it’s doing the sly work of satire: shrinking an entire category of the sacred down to a job description with a clear institutional employer. The angel here isn’t the flaming, terrifying messenger of scripture; it’s an outsourced “spiritual creature,” deliberately bodiless, engineered for “service” to a specific bureaucracy: “Christendom and the church.” That narrowing is the point. By swapping wonder for function, Rosten exposes how religious imagination gets domesticated once it passes through an institution’s needs.

The phrasing carries a wink. “Created by God” sounds like orthodoxy, but it’s immediately harnessed to administration, as if heaven runs on staffing charts. “Without a body” reads like theology, yet it also suggests the ideal worker: tireless, frictionless, immune to appetite, desire, or dissent. In a single clause, Rosten hints at the appeal of angels to any system that prefers its agents pure, obedient, and uncomplaining.

Context matters: Rosten was a novelist and humorist best known for his ear for cultural language and the way communities define themselves through jargon. That sensibility shows up here. The definition isn’t trying to map metaphysics; it’s mapping power. Angels become a mirror for how “Christendom” (a civilizational identity) and “the church” (an institution) recruit symbols to legitimate their authority. The subtext is less about heaven than about who gets to claim it, and for what ends.