This is in response to Catholic Light’s favorite Protestant, Ken Shepherd, who commented on a previous post about praying to the saints.
Ken, I have to take issue with your assertion that “asleep” in the NT is anything other than a euphemism for bodily death. Is our God the God of the living, or the dead? In Revelation, are the saints who cast their crowns before the Lamb “asleep”? No: “…they are before the throne of God and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them” (Rev. 7:15)
Or Revelation 4, which describes the worship of the Lamb that goes on “day and night”?
Are the saints indifferent about what happens on Earth? “…I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?'” (Rev. 6:9-10) That sounds like they’re tremendously concerned with enacting justice on earth.
You don’t cease to be a member of the Church merely by dying. There is one body in the Lord, not separate bodies for the physically living and the dead. “From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.” (Eph. 4:16) Some do the work in heaven, others do it on earth. There’s nothing we can do for the saints in heaven; they have attained perfection. However, since they have been transformed into “little Christs,” they have the ability to pray to the Father and intercede on our behalf, just as Revelation says they do.
I think it’s best to leave the question of imputed righteousness for another day. (For now, I’ll point out that Christ himself commanded us to “be perfect, even as my Father in Heaven is perfect,” and I think he meant it!) What I’d like to do is ask, if you don’t mind, when and where you think prayer to the saints originated? Because I can show you references to that practice that are contemporary with Scripture, and in the decades following. To my knowledge, that wasn’t even a significant point of controversy within Christendom until Martin Luther reacted against the real, scandalous, and devil-inspired abuse of relics and other saint-related devotional practices.
If the practice is wrong, it was wrong almost from the very beginning, since as I mentioned before there are ancient accounts of the earliest Christians venerating the graves of the saints and building altars over their bodies. And why didn’t Jesus step in to stop it? What was the Holy Spirit doing for 1,500 years, if it wasn’t guiding the Church? Why would he allow his children to persist in such gross errors for so long?
Month: March 2004
Hatred is a liberal value, part II
An actual license plate, seen in a northern Virginia parking lot:
H8 GWB
The Left is always accusing conservatives of being “haters,” motivated by animus and little else. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this is what the psychologists call “projection.”
Contraception leads to gay marriage
OpinionJournal.com has a piece by Methodist minister Donald Sensing about the connection between artificial contraception and gay marriage. Though on the surface, the two phenomena have little in common, he makes the right connections:
Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.
I don’t share his pessimistic view of how modern people view marriage — from my perspective, most secular married couples want to remain married until death, though many are woefully unprepared to make that happen — but he’s a pastor and deals with married people on a more intimate level than I do.
It is my fervent hope that Protestants join the Catholic Church in opposing artificial contraception, the exacerbating cause of bad marriages, illegitimacy, spousal abuse, and abortion. (It isn’t the sole cause, and eliminating it wouldn’t make those problems disappear, but it drives those problems.) Such a change would only be a return to the universal Protestant tradition until 70 years ago, when the Anglicans decided they would abandon Christianity for the siren-call of the world, and decide to place their faith in latex and chemicals instead of God’s providence.
Found a house
As I mentioned in a previous post, our family was hunting for a house for the last few weeks. We just bought one today. It’s about three miles south of where we live right now — that will add maybe another 5-8 minutes to my commute. No big deal when your commute is already a bit less than an hour.
Just to add to the “praying to the saints” discussion, we have been asking for St. Joseph’s intercession all along. We think he came through for us, big-time: the house is bigger than we thought we’d get, and at a very fair price. We’re still going to finish our novena, though.
Terrorists overturn government in major European country
The going rate for ousting a pro-American European government: 200 dead Spaniards.
The cliché is right this time: the terrorists did win. They might not have been on the ballot, but they managed to turn mass murder into an effective political tool.
UPDATE: David Frum voices the same opinion at NRO today. “Lesson: terrorism can work. Prediction: therefore expect more of it. Expect more terrorism aimed at the United Kingdom, against Australia, against Poland, and – ultimately – against the United States. For the terrorists must now wonder: If murder can influence elections in Spain – why not in the United States?”