He's been exchanging videos with Gavin Ortlund on the subject. Joe has commented on some issues beyond what Gavin brought up as well. You can watch Gavin's most recent video here, which makes a lot of good points. You can find Joe's videos here, here, here, and here. I've said a lot about prayer to saints and angels in the past. You can find a collection of many of my posts here, for example. What follows are some of my initial reactions to Joe's videos:
- Let's begin with the big picture. There's a lack of prayer to saints and angels in scripture and the early patristic sources. The Bible consists of dozens of documents written by dozens of authors covering thousands of years of history. The patristic documents that lack prayer to saints and angels consist of thousands of pages covering a triple-digit number of years. The best explanation for the lack of support for prayer to saints and angels in such large contexts is that the sources in question didn't support the practice. That has a lot of significance.
Origen, one of the sources discussed most by Gavin and Joe, wrote thousands of pages of extant material. Joe's evidence that Origen believed in prayer to saints and angels consists, as far as I recall, of his misuse of Against Celsus 8:64 that Gavin corrected and a small amount of material at the beginning of On Prayer 10. The other material Joe cites in On Prayer is about whether the saints and angels pray with us and other issues distinct from whether we can pray to them. If Origen believed in praying to saints and angels, and it was an apostolic tradition always held by the church and so forth, we wouldn't expect the alleged evidence for the belief to be so meager. That meagerness is deeply suspicious and raises doubts about how Joe is interpreting the small amount of material he cites.
Against Celsus is a lengthy document, around 500 pages in English translation. Origen says a lot about prayer in that document, in multiple contexts, and never advocates anybody other than God as the recipient of prayer. He addresses the fact that Christians don't pray to angels and other created beings several times, and he never offers any clarification about how those created beings are supplicated in some other form of prayer. Contrast that with his many references to different types of prayer elsewhere, such as when he distinguishes between praying to the Father and praying to the Son in Against Celsus and distinguishes between different types of prayer on multiple occasions in his treatise On Prayer. If he's so interested in making such distinctions in so many other places, how likely is it that he would believe in praying to angels and saints, yet never make the relevant distinctions when that subject comes up? Origen's mentioning of qualifiers elsewhere is evidence against Joe's claim that Origen intended a qualifier without mentioning it in the passages about not praying to created beings.
- In Against Celsus, multiple terms are used to express Origen's relevant comments on praying in the English translations I've seen: "invoke" (5:5), "send up our requests" (5:11), "pray" (8:26), etc. I don't know Greek, but from what I can tell from the English translations I've read, the issue isn't just how Origen defined one term. And I'm not aware of any reason to think any one of these terms, much less all of them, inherently involves worship due only to God. In the ancient world, as today, it was common for people to refer to praying to gods, angels, deceased humans, and other beings known to be lower than the God of monotheism. As a general principle, it's unlikely that both Celsus and Origen had some narrower definition of prayer in mind without specifying for their audience which type they were addressing at the time. So, the issue doesn't seem to be what terminology is used to refer to prayer itself. Rather, Joe has to appeal to the surrounding context and argue that the context is singling out a particular type of prayer while excluding others.
- Joe claims that the passages in Against Celsus about praying only to God are about the highest type of prayer, which involves worship due to God alone, because that's what Celsus brought up. But the fact that Celsus brings up issues of such worship in some places doesn't prove that Origen is only addressing that subject. For one thing, that isn't the only context in which Origen makes his relevant comments. And even when Celsus has brought up those worship issues in the context under consideration, people frequently address more than what the person they're responding to brought up. We don't just look at Celsus' comments to see what Origen was addressing. We also look at the comments of Origen. The former is a relevant factor in the process of interpreting the latter, but it doesn't limit the latter. In his videos responding to Gavin, Joe has, by his own admission, brought up subjects Gavin hadn't raised. So, Joe's actions in his exchanges with Gavin provide us with some examples of how people often address more than what the person they're interacting with brought up. In one of his videos, Joe (incorrectly) cited Against Celsus 8:64 in support of praying to angels, even though he's claiming that Celsus was only addressing a higher type of prayer. If Origen sometimes addressed more than what Celsus brought up, even by Joe's standards, then a Protestant doesn't need to limit his interpretation of Origen to what Celsus brought up. For example, Against Celsus 5:5 addresses why we shouldn't invoke angels. In that section, he mentions, "And it is enough to secure that the holy angels of God be propitious to us, and that they do all things on our behalf, that our disposition of mind towards God should imitate as far as it is within the power of human nature the example of these holy angels, who again follow the example of their God; and that the conceptions which we entertain of His Son, the Word, so far as attainable by us, should not be opposed to the clearer conceptions of Him which the holy angels possess, but should daily approach these in clearness and distinctness." He's addressing how we can get angels to be favorable to us. So, he isn't focused on worship that's due only to God. And he says that it's sufficient to imitate the angels. Invoking them isn't needed. Origen doesn't say that we can pray (or whatever term Joe wants to use) to angels in some lesser sense, along with imitating them. In other words, Origen's alternative to invoking angels in section 5:5 of the document doesn't involve praying to them in some lesser sense that doesn't involve worship that's due to God alone. So, it isn't just that Origen excludes angels when addressing who we should pray to in a context about worship to be offered only to God. Rather, even when Origen is discussing an alternative approach that he recommends, he says it's sufficient to merely imitate the angels. Do Catholics merely imitate the angels when wanting their favor? No, Catholics also pray to angels under those circumstances. This is an example of a context in which Origen could have discussed Joe's concept of a lesser form of prayer that's appropriate to direct to angels. Instead, Origen refers to the sufficiency of imitating the angels without offering them prayer of any type. Similarly, in 5:13 Origen is addressing the charge that Christians think portions of the creation they don't worship are "of no account", since they don't worship those parts of the creation. That's an example of a context in which Origen could have brought up a lesser type of prayer offered to angels (and saints). He didn't. He repeatedly denies that prayer is to be offered to anybody other than God and repeatedly fails to bring up some lesser form of prayer that can be offered to other beings, even when bringing up such prayers would be highly relevant and prevent a misunderstanding of his unqualified references to praying only to God.
- 5:4 mentions the four categories of prayer Joe appeals to in On Prayer 9-10. But in Against Celsus 5:4, Origen says that "every" one of all four of those types of prayer go to "the Supreme God". He goes on to distinguish between prayer to the Father and prayer to the Son. So, he doesn't just have one type of prayer in mind. He's referring to how multiple types are to be offered only to God.
- Joe initially appealed to Origen's comment about how angels pray with us "even when not asked" (Against Celsus 8:64). He cited it as evidence that Origen supported prayer to angels. So, if Joe is to be consistent with his earlier comments, he can't claim that Origen wasn't addressing a type of prayer that's acceptable to offer to angels at that point. But, in that passage, Origen explains that we shouldn't be doing such asking of angels. (This is especially evident in Henry Chadwick's translation.) If Origen was referring to an acceptable form of prayer to angels, why would he say we shouldn't do it?
- So, what should we make of Origen's treatise On Prayer? In it, he appeals to multiple definitions and types of prayer. See, for example, the reference in section 2 to "the meaning of prayer (aw-thar') in its two senses, and similarly of prayer (neh'-der), for the latter turn in addition to its common and customary general usage". Elsewhere in that treatise, he makes other distinctions, like the distinction between praying to the Father and praying to the Son, which he repeats in Against Celsus. He often makes an issue of distinguishing one type of prayer from another, so it's significant, accordingly, if he refers to prayer without such qualifiers in contexts like the ones in Against Celsus in which he denies that we should pray to angels and other created beings. To quote Origen himself, as I've cited him above, it makes sense to go by the "customary general usage" of the terms in question if Origen doesn't qualify them for us. So, it isn't enough for Joe to single out a definition of prayer in Origen's treatise On Prayer that's favorable to Joe's purposes and impute it to unqualified references to prayer in Against Celsus or wherever else. Origen could have qualified his language in Against Celsus, as he often did in On Prayer. It's significant if he repeatedly doesn't use such qualifiers and shows no concern about avoiding the appearance of condemning prayer to angels (and saints and other created beings). Origen's lack of concern for qualifiers in Against Celsus seems best explained if he intended to reject every type of prayer to created beings, not just a particular type.
- Before he made the distinctions among four categories of prayer that Joe focuses on (in sections 9-10 of On Prayer), Origen had already been discussing prayer in general, without qualifying it as he does in sections 9-10. Joe acknowledges that Origen applies the "prayer" language to every one of the four forms discussed in sections 9-10, not just the one form Joe wants us to focus on when interpreting Against Celsus. We need to keep in mind that Origen used the "prayer" language (along with other terms) in more than one way, a fact Joe admits. We should be careful, then, to ask what justification Joe has for assuming a particular meaning in the relevant passages in Against Celsus.
- There are some sections in On Prayer in which Origen discusses how saints in the afterlife and angels help us in prayer (6, 20). He refers to how they pray with us and help in other ways, but says nothing of our bringing requests to them or invoking them in any other manner. He brings up some analogies of how they help us, and the analogies only involve their helping us while our prayers are directed to God: "Suppose that a righteously minded physician is at the side of a sick man praying for health, with knowledge of the right mode of treatment for the disease about which the man is offering prayer. It is manifest that he will be moved to heal the suppliant, surmising, it may well be not idly, that God has had this very action in mind in answer to the prayer of the suppliant for release from the disease. Or suppose that a man of considerable means, who is generous, hears the prayer of a poor man offering intercession to God for his wants. It is plain that he, too, will fulfil the objects of the poor man's prayer, becoming a minister of the fatherly counsel of Him who at the season of the prayer had brought together him who was to pray and him who was able to supply and by virtue of the rightness of his principles, incapable of overlooking one who has made that particular request" (6). It's significant that Origen describes ways in which saints in heaven and angels help us in prayer, but doesn't include our supplicating them.
- Joe argues that the opening of section 10 in Origen's treatise refers to prayer to saints, but it just refers to "men" without specifying men in heaven. He refers to how we can make requests of saints "should some Paul or Peter appear", which makes more sense if he's limiting the men in question to men we encounter who are alive with us in this life on earth. If Origen was including saints in heaven, it wouldn't be a matter of the conditional situation of whether an equivalent of Paul or Peter appears. Rather, Paul and Peter and many others like them are in heaven. There's no conditional involved. The fact that Origen makes a conditional comment about an equivalent of Paul or Peter rather than referring to the certainty of being able to make requests of Paul, Peter, and other saints in heaven makes Joe's interpretation unlikely. And my interpretation of section 10 makes more sense of sections 6 and 20, where Origen writes about how saints in heaven and angels help us in the context of prayer without saying anything about supplicating them. Section 10 and the other two sections I've cited make more sense if the saints in heaven and angels aren't being invoked and the opening of section 10 is about earthly relations. The point of the opening of section 10 is to show that if we "even" interact with men on earth in such ways, all the more we should interact with God that way. Origen isn't expanding invocation to include saints in heaven and angels. Rather, he's saying that our earthly relationships should further our appreciation for relating to God in such ways in prayer. Section 9 refers to "things in close relation to the subject of devotion and prayer" just before mentioning the four activities Joe brings up, so it seems that Origen is including some activities related to prayer, not just prayer itself. It doesn't make sense to think of everything at the opening of section 10 as prayer. I doubt there are many Catholics, if any, who would classify everything mentioned there as prayer. Gavin cited the Anglican scholar Eric George Jay rightly commenting, "It is to be noted that this passage [On Prayer 10] nowhere refers to departed saints." (Origen's Treatise On Prayer [Eugene, Oregon: Wipf & Stock, 2010], conclusion of n. 4 from previous page on page 126)
- To his credit, Joe acknowledged that some comments about the saints and angels' involvement in our prayers that Origen made near the end of his treatise are somewhat speculative and presented with some hesitation. For example, Origen wrote, "Also it may well be that the assemblies of believers also are attended by angelic powers, by the powers of our Lord and Savior himself, and indeed by the spirits of saints, including those already fallen asleep, certainly of those still in life, though just how is not easy to say." (20) He goes on, just after, to raise other possibilities about angels and saints in the afterlife, commenting, "In reference to angels we may reason…we need not abandon the belief that the blessed departed in spirit also, perhaps more than one who is in the body, make their way likewise into the churches…we may conjecture that if any man be unworthy of a holy angel and give himself up through sin and transgressions in contempt of God to a devil's angel, he will perhaps, in the event of those like him being few, not long escape that providence of those angels which oversee the church by the authority of the divine will and will bring the misdeeds of such persons to general knowledge…For in place of the already mentioned twofold company of saintly men and blessed angels there may, on the other hand, be a twofold association of impious men and evil angels." And there are further indications elsewhere that Origen wavered on issues like these, even expressing a higher degree of hesitation than what's quoted above. He wrote in his commentary on Romans, "Now whether those who are disembodied or the saints, who are now with Christ, do anything and labor on our behalf in imitation of the angels who attend to the service of our salvation; or, on the other hand, whether even sinners, themselves without bodies, do anything in accordance with the intention of their own mind in no less imitation of the evil angels with whom they are to be cast into the eternal fire, as was indeed said by Christ; let this too be kept among the hidden things of God. They are mysteries which are not to be committed to paper." (in Thomas Scheck, Origen: Commentary On The Epistle To The Romans, Books 1-5 [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University Of America Press, 2001], section 2:4:6, p. 111) None of these comments of Origen that I've quoted in this paragraph are about praying to saints or angels. They're about whether saints and angels intercede on our behalf, which is at a lower level than whether we can pray to them. If Origen was so hesitant about the intercession of saints and angels, why should we think that praying to them was an apostolic tradition always held by the church? We have to be careful to note that Origen didn't always express hesitations like these. But he did sometimes. And that makes far more sense under the view that matters like these pertaining to the intercession of saints and angels and prayer to them were gradual developments, not traditions held universally since the time of the apostles.
- So, Joe is wrong about Against Celsus and On Prayer, and material elsewhere in Origen goes against Joe's position as well. It still makes the most sense to interpret Origen as having believed in praying only to God, as we commonly use that term today, meaning that he didn't believe in praying to saints and angels.
- Joe keeps appealing to visions, the afterlife in Luke 16, and such. Those appeals are problematic, for reasons I've explained elsewhere on this blog and in the comments section below one of Gavin's videos (here). It's not as though Protestants have been unaware that people interact with saints and angels in visions and in the afterlife, interact with angels when they appear to people on earth, etc. The idea that Protestants have been opposing such things is absurd, given how prominent they are in scripture, how frequently Protestants have spoken positively about such things (e.g., speaking positively of Mary's interaction with Gabriel in Luke 1), etc. And Joe hasn't given us reason to think that accepting something like interacting with a saint or angel in a context like a vision or the afterlife implies acceptance of praying to saints and angels. The two are significantly different, for reasons I went into in the comments section linked above, and Joe isn't addressing those differences. We have scriptural precedent for the former (interacting with angels in visions, etc.), but not the latter (praying to saints and angels); having a saint or angel nearby in a vision, the afterlife, or a saint or angel's visit to earth gives us reason to expect that saint or angel to hear what we're saying, whereas we don't have reason to expect a saint or angel to hear a prayer; a vision or a saint or angel's visit to earth is initiated by that being, not by us, whereas prayer would be something done on our initiative; etc. The fact that we can speak to saints and angels in context X doesn't prove that we can do so in context Y when there are significant differences between those two contexts. That's especially so when scripture (and some extrabiblical sources) have an absence of speaking to saints and angels in context Y, even though we'd expect such speaking to be mentioned explicitly and often if it was happening at the time, whereas speaking to them in context X is mentioned explicitly and often. To make matters worse for Joe's position, speaking to God in context Y is also mentioned explicitly and often, even though speaking to saints and angels in that context is absent. So, we have a lot of speaking to all of these beings (God, angels, and saints) in contexts like visions, the afterlife, and earthly visits by those beings, but we only have examples of speaking to God in the context of prayer. When you combine the differences between the nature of each context (the nature of visions, the afterlife, etc. and the nature of prayer) and the differences in what we see exemplified in scripture and the early extrabiblical sources (many prayers to God and interactions with other beings in contexts like visions and earthly visits, but no prayer to those other beings), that evidence strongly supports the conclusion that Joe is placing significantly different things in the same category.
- I'll close with some comments on Joe's last video, though that video isn't aimed at Gavin. Joe mentions Martin Luther and the Seventh-day Adventists with regard to soul sleep (2:47). Joe isn't trying to be exhaustive. He's not claiming that those are the only relevant individuals who ever held to soul sleep. But he doesn't mention the earlier sources. And that can easily leave people with the false ideas that many Catholics have about pre-Reformation agreement with their beliefs, pre-Reformation unity, etc. Soul sleep was believed by a substantial number of pre-Reformation Christians for hundreds of years. Matthew Dal Santo spends much of a book I've cited before discussing such sources (Debating The Saints' Cult In The Age Of Gregory The Great [United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2012]). As he explains in the book, some advocates of soul sleep believed in some form of prayer to the saints, but he goes as far as to use terms like "radical" (308) and "profound" (315) to describe the difference between how the cult of the saints was viewed by proponents of soul sleep and how it was viewed by those who rejected soul sleep. And those who rejected soul sleep also widely disagreed about some afterlife issues. Here's a post where I cite some examples from Dal Santo's book. The diversity of pre-Reformation views of the afterlife, including some belief in soul sleep, causes significant problems for a Catholic view of the cult of the saints and prayer to saints in particular.
- At 4:54, Joe says that a belief in soul sleep would cause "major" problems for a belief like praying to saints. He even goes on to say that such prayer "doesn't work" under soul sleep. I disagree. Dal Santo's book discusses how some sources held to both soul sleep and prayer to saints. But combining the two does create a significantly different situation than what Catholics believe in, and Joe should be held accountable for his own standards. He's the one who chose terms like "major" and "doesn't work".
- Soul sleep isn't all that's relevant here. For example, the comments of Origen that I quoted earlier about his hesitations regarding the intercession of the saints (in his treatise On Prayer and his commentary on Romans) are problematic for Joe's position without any belief in soul sleep on Origen's part. There are afterlife views other than soul sleep that pre-Reformation sources held that are likewise inconsistent with a Catholic view of prayer to the saints.
- And that brings up another issue. The Biblical authors, Origen, and other sources don't need to have told us why they held certain beliefs against Joe's position in order for us to conclude that they held those beliefs. God could forbid or discourage prayer to saints (and angels) without telling us why. Maybe he wants himself to be the only recipient of prayer in order to heighten the quality of our relationship with him and our appreciation of his primacy, for example. Even if Joe were right about the saints' ability to hear our prayers, the irrelevance of Biblical passages about contacting the deceased, etc., we'd still have reason to reject prayer to the saints (e.g., its absence across millennia of Biblical and early patristic history should make us hesitant to accept it, regardless of whether we know the reasons why those people didn't pray in that manner; patristic passages condemning prayer to departed souls and prayer to angels can't be dismissed with the same reasoning Joe applies to the Biblical evidence [for example, sources like Justin Martyr and Lactantius use different language than the language in the Biblical passages Joe addresses]).
- Some of the Biblical passages about contacting the deceased use broader language than what Joe brings up, such as the relevant material in Isaiah, which Joe didn't address (Isaiah 8:19, 19:3). Joe's translation of Deuteronomy 18:11 doesn't use the broader language you often find in other translations: "one who consults the dead" (New American Standard), "one who inquires of the dead" (English Standard Version), etc. It's true that much of the language in passages like these doesn't apply to praying to saints (e.g., the references to mediums; not everybody in heaven has died, which means that not everybody prayed to is among the dead). But the best way to make sense of all of these passages as a whole is that attempts to contact the deceased in general are being condemned, not just some forms of the practice. It's possible that such broad language was intended to only apply to as narrow a range of practices as Joe suggests. That happens sometimes. Broad language occasionally is used when only something narrower is in view. But it doesn't follow that such an interpretation usually is the best one or is best in this situation. It isn't. And we have evidence that the passages are meant to have the broader application I'm suggesting: the absence of prayer to saints in the Old and New Testaments, early Jewish opposition to praying to saints, and the early patristic opposition to the practice. Maybe all of those sources rejected prayer to saints for some other reason. Maybe their rejection of the practice wasn't connected to the Biblical passages in question. But the most parsimonious explanation of all of the evidence is that such broad language as we find in these Biblical passages has the broad implications Protestants believe it does and that the lack of prayer to saints among the relevant ancient sources isn't just a coincidence. When such Biblical passages (and echoes of them in the early patristic literature) are accompanied by a lack of prayer to the dead, the Protestant explanation of that evidence is the best one.
- Joe cites Mark 12:24-27 against the idea that the saints are dead (1:02:39). But the prohibitions of trying to contact the deceased are about the physically dead, not the spiritually dead. Otherwise, Moses would have been sinning by speaking to the spiritually dead Pharaoh, figures like Isaiah and Paul would have been sinning when they spoke to spiritually dead sinners (Ephesians 2:1), etc. Physically dead believers are often referred to as "dead" (John 11:14, 1 Thessalonians 4:16). It's not as though spiritually dead people were the only individuals the ancient Israelites wanted to contact (e.g., Samuel was physically dead, but spiritually alive in 1 Samuel 28).
- Joe dismisses the distinction between initiating contact with the dead and responding to them after they initiate contact (51:43). But it's a valid distinction. It was wrong for Saul to try to contact Samuel in 1 Samuel 28, but once Samuel had returned to the earthly realm, it became acceptable for Saul to interact with him (as reflected in Samuel asking Saul questions, which implies that it would be acceptable for Saul to answer those questions, as well as Samuel's assumption that Saul would listen to what Samuel was saying). Go here for some evidence that Hermas made the distinction Joe is dismissing in the context of interacting with angels. Let's say you're Zechariah after the events at the opening of Luke 1 or Peter after the Mount of Transfiguration. The fact that Gabriel or Moses appeared to you earlier in life doesn't prove that you should expect them to hear you anytime you want to speak to them. Zechariah and Peter aren't assured of an audience with Gabriel or Moses for the rest of their lives just because they were present when Gabriel or Moses entered the earthly realm on a particular occasion. Speaking to Gabriel in the Luke 1 context makes sense. Speaking to him five years later, when he hasn't appeared before you and you have no reason to expect him to hear you, doesn't. There has to be a reason why we have so many examples of Biblical figures responding to angels and the deceased who appear on earth, in a vision, and such, but not a single example of praying to angels and the deceased. The idea that we can interact with them if they enter or reenter the earthly realm, but shouldn't initiate contact with them, is the best explanation of the evidence.
- Joe's hypothesizing about how the saints could hear us doesn't turn those possibilities into probabilities. Whether it's possible for the saints (or angels) to hear us is just one of the issues involved. Whether it's probable that they do is a distinct issue. And a passage like the Mount of Transfiguration or Revelation 6 only demonstrates some degree of availability, knowledge of earthly events, and such. It doesn't prove that they have all of the knowledge needed to hear all of the relevant prayers.
- Presenting prayers to God, as in Revelation 5, doesn't imply knowledge of all of the prayers' contents. If I know that my friend is sick and has been crying out to God for relief, I don't have to know all of the contents of his prayers in order to present them to God in the sense of saying something like "Consider his prayers and be gracious to him." I know that he's praying to God and I know some of the details about the contents of those prayers, but I don't know all of the details. Nothing in a passage like Revelation 5 leads to the conclusion that the saints have all of the knowledge they'd need in order for the Catholic view to function. The fact that a being is involved in presenting prayers in some sense doesn't get you there. I addressed issues like these further, including more of the details in Revelation, in the comments section under one of Gavin's videos (here). Or go here for an article on this blog that addresses the issues to some extent.
- Joe refers to how active Satan seems to be and refers to how we should expect saints to have more abilities than Satan (44:38). But even if we grant a superiority of the saints, that wouldn't tell us the ways in which they're superior, such as the timing of when they'll have the superior characteristics in contexts in which they have them. There are different stages to life, including different stages in the afterlife. We're saints before we die, yet there are things Satan can do that we can't do in this life. And scripture sometimes refers to Satan as a representative of the demons in general, so you can't assume that every reference to him is about one spirit (e.g., the theme in the gospels about Satan casting out Satan involves multiple spirits, even though they're collectively referred to as "Satan"). When Protestants refer to the potential for demonic deception (in praying to saints or whatever other context), they're not only referring to Satan. They're referring to demons in general, even if they refer to Satan as a representative of all demons. And some Protestants may be careless or inconsistent along the lines of what Joe criticizes. It's fine for Joe to criticize that sort of carelessness or inconsistency, but it's not inherent to the Protestant position.
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