I'm trying to pick up the blogging slack this week...so if this is not particularly interesting (or understandable) please forgive me for the copy & paste from the intro section of my dissertation on the doctrine of angels. --DP
Clear evidence exists throughout Christian history that one branch of the faith tends to be preoccupied with developing a theology of power while another remains equally committed to a theology of weakness. Both expressions are justifiable interpretations of the faith and are often predicated upon the assumption that they have either inherited or duplicated the quintessence of early Christian practice. Power theology is what figures like Luther referred to as a “theology of glory” due to the disproportionate amount of attention given to issues that reside beyond the cross. Those who resonate with power Christianity imply that a faith without strength is a faith not worth having. This dichotomy between power and weakness intermittently rears its head throughout the history of the Church: from monasticism to inquisition, iconography to iconoclasm, pietism to quietism. The disputes between the Antiochene and Alexandrian schools during the Patristic Age were effectively in relation to the difference between a theology of power and that of weakness. The Alexandrians emphasized the power of Jesus’ divinity, whereas the Antiochenes stressed a theology of limitation found in the humanity of Jesus. Both were correct according to
It is not unfair to suggest that much of today’s Pentecostal and Evangelical witness tends to focus upon power Christianity. Their language is rife with the subject of miracles, salvation, the life to come, and victory over everything from singleness to Satan. It is a very hopeful expression of the faith, but tends to minimize the already in anticipation of the not yet. Mainline liberal Christianity, in contrast, tends to identify more closely with a theology of weakness by caring for the downtrodden and sympathizing with the ostracized, but often expresses this activity in a theologically fuzzy rehashing of social justice issues. Fuzziness aside, their kindness in response to the face of human need reveals that natural theology is not something that can only be understood from the inanimate sectors of creation, but that it may be comprehended by merely looking 
at our own species. The reformed churches also tend to lean to the side of weakness theology due to their focus upon human depravity but they are not known for their ability to translate that focus into a theology of liberation. Their interest in progressive sanctification also reveals the remnants of power Christianity residing in their dogmatics. No one is safe because rarely, if ever, does any Christian movement succeed in discovering the sweet spot between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is the ever longed-for, but seldom realized homeostasis of theological utopia.
Accordingly, angels tend to be the darling of power Christianity, but in situ, they are revealed as agents of both expressions of the faith. This leads to the possibility of discovering a sort of angelic Christianity that reflects the testimony of Hebrew and Christian Scriptures where angels act as powerful, yet ever-dependent agents of God, whose insatiable appetite for goodness is as frightening as their helpless captivity to a higher nature is mystifying. Angelology has generally been considered a minor doctrine of tangential importance when compared with the central canons of theology proper: Christology, salvation, worship and ecclesiology. Due to the enormous pressure that theologians face to contribute original, creative ideas to the discipline, not a few have overstated the significance of their contributions for the sake of humanity’s insatiable desire to hear something new (Cf. Acts
Creativity is a communicable attribute that we share with God himself but its role as servant to the interests of the individual is only a handmaiden to its role as servant to God and truth. This is to say that a stentorian defense of adiaphora only serves to obscure rather than disclose the centrality of decidedly Trinitarian scholarship. Therefore it would be reckless to suggest that angelology represents the Gründung (foundation) of what it means to be a theologian; at best angelology is an overlooked complement to the essence of the Christian faith as revealed in the challenging simplicity found in the message of Jesus.
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