The argumentation of my paper has to do not on the fall of Lucifer per se, but on the fall of those angels who fell with him following him. That an irruption among the heavenly hosts of angels somehow came about at some point in primordial history, resulting in a remainder of holy angels on the one side and apostate angels on the other, is indeed the canonical witness of Scripture. But whatever set off the angelic mutiny that ultimately and permanently divided the royal retinue of angels comprising God’s heavenly court, I argue that it is highly implausible that each angel who mutinied did so independently of the other angels, making free-will decisions and carrying out actions with no psychological group dynamic playing a role.
With some myriad of angels having presumably allied themselves with Lucifer, a question rarely discussed, however, is what sort of cause-effect relationship or operative group dynamic might plausibly have instigated or contributed to the collective fall of these angels? Like many theologians before and after him, Francis Turretin (1623–1687) is reserve to make any definitive claim, but simply addresses the foregoing question with a basic nondescript explanation: “Although that fall did not happen without the intervention of divine providence, still its true cause must be sought in the angels alone and by no means in God. The sole cause, therefore, was the proper will of each devil by which individuals of their own accord turned from good to evil. They fell because they willed to fall; they could fall because they were created mutable and capable of falling.” The Dutch Reformed theologian, Petrus van Mastricht (1630–1706), offers an even more bare-bones answer: “Scripture does not say whether each one sinned individually, or one for all, or likewise whether they all committed the same sin, or each his own.”
To our central question — Is it likely that a bandwagon or cascade effect was in play among the hosts of angels who joined Lucifer in mutinying against the Most High God? — I propose two scenarios involving a collective behavior model that serves as a theoretical basis to ruminate more imaginatively and constructively about the collective fall of Lucifer and his angels rather than limiting the basis of such considerations to the free-will choice of each angel in isolation from other angels. A critical premise of my overall argument is that an analogy between human personhood and angelic personhood provides the basis for presupposing that a psychological group dynamic could have played a role in instigating or contributing to a collective angelic fall.