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Sunday, July 09, 2023

If somebody prays for you, does it follow that you can pray to him?

Obviously not. Yet, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox often act as if passages in the church fathers about how the saints pray for us are evidence that those fathers believed in praying to the saints. Or let's say that somebody lives a thousand miles from you, but is part of the same denomination you belong to. And that denomination has set aside a particular day to pray about something. Let's say it's praying for missionaries. So, that person is praying with you for missionaries, in the sense that you're both praying for them on that day. Does the fact that he's praying with you prove that you can pray to him? Would you go into your bedroom, say a prayer to this man who lives a thousand miles away, and expect him to hear the prayer? No, you wouldn't. If you prayed for him, would it make sense for somebody to conclude that you must have no objection to praying to him as well? No. In that sort of everyday experience, we make the relevant distinction between praying for an individual and praying to him, praying with somebody and praying to somebody, being prayed for by somebody and praying to that person. And Protestants aren't the only ones who make those distinctions. Catholics and Orthodox do as well. They have to. They couldn't function in everyday life without doing so. But when they get into discussions about praying to the saints (and angels), they often act as though all of these distinctions can be disregarded. Supposedly, citing a church father's reference to how the saints pray for us or with us or how we pray for them is sufficient to prove that the father believed in praying to the saints.

To make the situation worse, some of the patristic sources who refer to something like the saints' praying for us or with us say elsewhere that we shouldn't pray to the saints. So, even if we thought that the saints' praying for us or with us implies the acceptability of praying to them (which it doesn't), the fact would remain that these church fathers didn't follow that line of reasoning. To the extent that we're considering what view these historical sources held, not what view we think they should have held, we have to make the distinctions I've referred to.

An advocate of praying to the saints could acknowledge those distinctions and claim that bringing up those other beliefs (e.g., that the saints pray for us) isn't meant to suggest that those other beliefs imply a belief in praying to the saints. Why are those other beliefs being brought up, then? Catholics and Orthodox frequently bring up issues like whether the saints pray for us and whether they pray with us when the issue of whether we should pray to them comes up. And, in my experience, they don't even ask whether the Protestant they're interacting with objects to beliefs like the saints' praying for us and their praying with us. Rather, the Catholic or Orthodox just starts citing patristic support for those beliefs as if they refute what their opponent has said about praying to the saints. You can find examples of that sort of behavior in some threads in our archives, like in the comments section here.

Maybe what an advocate of praying to the saints has in mind is that the saints' praying for us or praying with us is evidence that they have the ability to hear us. But their praying for us and with us doesn't inherently involve hearing us, as my illustrations in the opening of this post demonstrate (a person who lives a thousand miles away can pray for you and with you without hearing you). And an ability of the saints to hear us would only get you part way to the conclusion that you can pray to them. There can be other factors involved that make it inappropriate to pray to them, even if we somehow knew that they would hear us if we prayed. In other threads, I've documented that there are multiple reasons to not pray to saints and angels. It's not as though whether they can hear our prayers is the only issue involved. As I mentioned earlier, some of the patristic sources who tell us that the saints or angels pray for us or with us also say that we shouldn't pray to them. Even if the patristic sources thought saints and angels sometimes or always have the ability to hear us, it wouldn't follow that those patristic sources believed in praying to saints and angels. I doubt that many Protestants, if any, would deny that angels can sometimes hear us, such as when they're carrying out activities near us on earth, but it doesn't follow that Protestants believe in praying to angels.

As I've mentioned before, advocates of praying to the saints and angels frequently mishandle discussions of the subject in a lot of ways: citing forged documents as if they're authentic, assuming without argument the earliest possible date for documents they think support their position, failing to make appropriate genre distinctions, etc. After you pull out all of the weeds that shouldn't have been cluttering up the discussion, there isn't enough left to make a good argument for praying to the saints and angels.

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