HistoricalChristian.Faith
HistoricalChristian.Faith
Dates: c. 2021 · Wikipedia
Summary: Douglas Wilson (b. 1953), a Reformed/CREC pastor in Moscow, Idaho, is a modern
proponent of the angelic / Watcher reading. In the expository sermon "The Nephilim, Hades, and
Other Oddments" he holds that the "sons of God" (bene elohim) are celestial beings — never the line
of Seth — and the Nephilim the giant offspring of their union with human women (Gen 6:1–8). He differs
from Fr. Stephen De Young on the mechanism: where De Young
explains the begetting by a sacral-kingship fertility ritual, Wilson holds a literal-embodiment
account — the angels relinquished their celestial bodies (Jude 6's habitation) to take wives. He
reads 1 Peter 3:18–20 as Christ heralding victory to those bound angels in Tartarus, and frames the
Flood as judgment on a "genetic-engineering" / "being-as-God" rebellion of which modern bioethics is the
continuation.
There is no reason to resort to the contrived idea that the bene elohim were actually descendants of Seth who apostatized by intermarrying with the daughters of Cain. Elsewhere in Scripture, the phrase bene elohim always refers to celestial beings.
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson rests the angelic reading on the consistent scriptural usage of bene elohim (cf. Job 1:6; 38:7) and rejects the Sethite identification outright.
the Nephilim were the gigantic offspring of an unnatural sexual union between celestial beings (bene elohim) and human women (Gen. 6:1-8).
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com.
Paul is referring to his resurrection body as his "house," or "habitation." The angels abandoned their first estate, relinquishing their celestial bodies (or habitations) in order to marry human women.
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. This is Wilson's literal-embodiment answer to "how spirits beget," distinct from De Young's ritual mechanism: he leans on Jude 6's oikētērion ("habitation") and its only other New Testament use, 2 Corinthians 5:2, where Paul calls the (embodied) resurrection body a habitation — inferring that the angels' relinquished "habitation" was likewise a body. Flagged overstatement. The premise about 2 Corinthians is right, but the lexical transfer to Jude does not hold: oikētērion means "dwelling / abode," its body-sense in 2 Cor is supplied by Paul's clothing-and-tabernacle metaphor rather than the word, and Jude's own Enochic context (with the parallel ἀρχήν, "first estate") fixes the "habitation" as the angels' heavenly station — as the whole patristic database reads it (Bede: "the seats of the heavenly kingdom"; Theophylact: "the heavenly manner of life"). Weighed on the oikētērion argument page (assessment: weak).
Jesus does not say that this cannot be done. He says that it is not done by the angels in Heaven. The reason it is not done by them is that they were not the ones who left their assigned habitation.
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson rebuts the classic objection (so Chrysostom: angels are incorporeal and "in heaven they neither marry") by reading Matt 22:30 as a description of what the angels in heaven do not do, not a statement of metaphysical impossibility — leaving room for angels who abandoned their estate (Jude 6) to have married. The narrow point holds — the saying is scoped to the angels "in heaven" (Mark: "which are in heaven"), and Scripture grounds the non-marriage in deathlessness ("neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels," Luke 20:36), not incapacity. But it clears only the Matthew 22:30 prop of Chrysostom's objection; the deeper incorporeality premise still needs a separate embodiment mechanism. Weighed on the Matthew 22:30 argument page (assessment: sound).
The word rendered as preached here is not the word for preaching the gospel, which means that this was not an offer of a second chance. The word means to "herald," or to "announce." … The Lord was declaring that He was now the final victor, and that He now held the keys to Death and Hades (Rev. 1:18).
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. On Wilson's reading the "spirits in prison" are the disobedient angels of Noah's day, and the proclamation is one of victory, not salvation. (Whether the "spirits in prison" are the imprisoned Watchers or the human dead is genuinely contested — weighed on the 1 Peter 3:19 argument page, where Wilson stands with the modern-critical reading against the unanimous patristic database.)
There was a chasm between Tartarus on the one side, and Paradise on the other. … The lowest pit of Hades there was called Tartarus, and that is where the angels were locked up—the ones that Jesus preached to.
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson reads Hades as a structured place — a chasm dividing Tartarus (the prison of the rebel angels, 2 Pet 2:4) from Paradise / Abraham's Bosom (Luke 16:22–26) — and notes Christ told the thief he would be with him "that day, in Paradise (Luke 23:43)." This "oddment" is really about the intermediate state and only adjoins the Nephilim question through the imprisoned angels.
The Flood was brought about through our rebellion as expressed through perverse genetic engineering. The lust that was driving that genetic engineering was a swollen conceit that thought the autonomous idea of "being as God" was actually not absurd.
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson casts the antediluvian rebellion as a "being-as-God" overreach and modern bioethics as its continuation — a moral application paralleling De Young's "knowledge given before humanity is ready" theme, though Wilson frames it as transgressive bioengineering rather than demonically revealed "technology."
why on earth would such unions result in giants? And why would the entire ancient world concur with the reading that this was a perverse celestial/earthly connection, from Josephus to Beowulf to the Book of Enoch—from responsible histories to oddball books?
— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson appeals to a broad ancient consensus — Josephus, 1 Enoch, and the Beowulf tradition — for the angelic reading. Flagged overstatement. The Beowulf citation is double-edged: the poem ties Grendel and the gigantas to the kin of Cain (Gen 4, "in Caines cynne"), a human ancestor, not to fallen angels — and depicts the Flood drowning that "race of giants." It is a genuine reception witness to the giant-and-Flood tradition (and the poet had absorbed Enochic giant-lore), but its genealogy is the Augustinian/Sethite-adjacent one that displaced the angelic reading, so it witnesses for the rival camp on the very point Wilson needs it for. Josephus and 1 Enoch carry the angelic case; Beowulf does not. Weighed on the Beowulf argument page (assessment: weak).