The cult of the dead

Protestant England was particularly troubled after the war [WWI] was over, because most of its very Protestant churches were unable to permit prayers fro the dead that so many bereaved families would have liked to offer. Spiritualism, with its promise of renewed contact with the departed briefly flourished because of this, prompting Rudyard Kipling to write his poem "En-Dor," warning the bereaved that they were being cruelly manipulated for gain. P. Hitchens, The Rage Against God (Zondervan), 117. 

The cult of the dead is widespread in paganism. Necromancy is a common expression. And this remains popular with mourners who attend a séance in the desperate hope of contacting a departed loved one. A way to exploit people in crisis. 

There are different paradigms for the cult of the dead. In the West, Catholicism is the best known. That includes prayers for the dead. On that paradigm, your eternal destiny is fixed at the moment of death, but prayers can expedite the passage from Purgatory to heaven. Prayers for the dead are only availing for souls in Purgatory. You must die in a state of grace. If you die in mortal sin, you're out of luck. That's an exclusivist paradigm, although modern Catholicism is increasingly inclusivist. When traditional Protestant theology forbids prayers for the dead, that's the specific context. 

Then you have inclusivism in freewill theism, which may include postmortem salvation. On that view, you're not heavebound or hellbound at the moment of death. Your eternal destiny is indeterminate at the moment of death. That will be settled after you die. This is driven by one or more theological assumptions. Primarily, freewill theism's belief that everyone should have an equal opportunity to be saved, yet in this life, spiritual opportunities are highly inequitable, so postmortem salvation compensates for disparities in this life. It's also a way to reconcile inclusivism with the Gospel demand that indexes salvation to faith in Christ. If that's not possible in this life, you get a second chance in the afterlife. 

Another paradigm extrapolates from the principle of retroactive prayer. This can be combined with exclusivism. On this view, prayers for the dead don't change the decedent's postmortem condition. Rather, if availing, they affect his spiritual trajectory before he died. 

The basic idea is that God's relation to time is different from the supplicant. It isn't always necessary to pray before the event, as if God must wait to find out what we pray for, then act after the fact. If God is outside of time, or God knows the future, then God can set the answer to prayer in motion before we pray. That's consistent with exclusivism, but fundamentally different from the traditional Catholic paradigm. If you think about it, many prayers require the chain of events to be underway prior to prayer for the prayer to be answerable. On this view, prayers for the dead are just a special case of that general principle. The decedent's eternal destiny is fixed at the moment of death, yet postmortem prayers may retroactively affect his final destiny prior to death.  

I've discussed this before. Now I'd like to quote from a recent article that provides some additional argumentation: William M. Webb, "Petitionary Prayer for the Dead and the Boethian Concept of a Timeless God," International Philosophical Quarterly 59/1 (2019), 65-76. 

I disagree with Webb's characterization of God's viewpoint as a timeless present. I regard God as strictly timeless. But his argument doesn't turn on that nuance. 

Although prayer for the dead is widely practiced by members of the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, the practice is less com­mon among Protestants and is generally condemned within Evangelical Protestant circles.1 Maintaining that a postmortem change in spiritual state is not possible, various authorities within conservative Evangelical traditions claim that petitionary prayer for the dead is at best useless, on account of the immediacy and irrevocabil­ity of the deceased’s fate,2 and at worst sinful inasmuch as it wills a state of affairs contrary to that which God has already providentially brought to pass.3

Gould enumerates three requirements for the practice to be rational: (1) The real influence requirement—prayer makes a difference to what God does; (2) the personal existence requirement—the departed consciously exist as the very same people that they were in life, and (3) the open future requirement—a change of spiritual state is possible after death.5

In this article I argue that petitionary prayer for the dead can be justified apart from a belief in the possibility of a postmortem change in an individual’s spiritual state, and therefore, it can be defended in spite of the criticisms traditionally leveled by Evangelical Protestants. While I accept the first two of Gould’s prerequisites, I challenge point (3). By adopting a Boethian or Augustinian conception of God’s relationship to time, the requirement for change in an individual’s spiritual state after death becomes irrelevant along with the majority of traditional criticisms against the practice. By placing God outside of time in such a way that all prayers—past, present, and future—are apparent to God as part of a “timeless present,” the practice of praying for the deceased can be defended on the same grounds as petitionary prayer about the future. Indeed, I submit that a Boethian understanding of God’s eternity necessarily entails a position in which petitionary prayer for the dead is not qualitatively different than petitionary prayer about the future.

As a compatibilist, my personal view is that a Boethian conception of God’s relationship to time actually eliminates many of the problems raised against petitionary prayer in the same ways that it has been said to eliminate problems brought about by theological determin­ism, the tension between our apparent freedom of will and God’s sovereignty, and the problem of evil.12

To say therefore that praying for the well­being of the dead entails asking for something that is impossible fails to acknowledge that God perceives these prayers at the same time during which he perceives the life of the deceased in its own pres­ent. It would only be impossible for these prayers to be efficacious, then, if God were somehow unable to act in time in response to future prayers thus perceived—a serious limitation to God’s omnipotence!

I would say that if we accept theological determinism, then all of God’s decrees become eternal under the Boethian position.32 According to the eternalist’s understanding, God knows what he will do from eternity just as surely as he knows what he has already done. This means that all petitionary prayer—whether it be directed at the dead, the living, the past, the present, or the future—runs the risk of willing a state of affairs in opposition to God’s settled will. If God is timeless, then it could be said that prayer for the future, which is already determined, is also poten­tially sinful by the same rationale. God perceives prayers for the future in the same eternal present from which he would perceive prayers for the past, both of which he has already foreordained through his eternal decrees. If the supplicant knows that God has ordained some circumstance in the future, isn’t he being presumptuous to request something different?

To the degree that an eternalist is committed to the practice of petitionary prayer on Biblical grounds, I would suggest that he has some interest in not casting blame on the practice of prayer for the dead when his reasons for assigning that blame also condemn petitionary prayer in general.

Therefore, there is no reason to believe that God is unable to act in time in response to future prayers made on behalf of past or present persons.

In fact, if the mind of God contains knowledge of all prayers from all times in a tenseless present, then it would seem that God’s temporal relationship to future prayers is exactly the same as God’s temporal relationship to past prayers, that is to say, it is atemporal in both cases.  From the timeless perspective, prayer for those who have died in the past is no less rational than prayer for those who will die in the future.

Additionally, if petitionary prayer about the future is deemed acceptable, then prayer for the dead need not entail a situation in which the supplicant is praying for a counterfactual circumstance in opposition to the state of affairs which God has presumably brought to pass any more than prayer regarding the future offends against God’s knowledge or decrees about what will come to pass. God’s sover­eignty over the ultimate fates of deceased individuals can be maintained because God perceives prayers on behalf of the deceased individual while the deceased individual is still alive.