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In this episode of The Jimmy Akin Podcast, Jimmy dives into a debate with Lutheran pastor Jordan Cooper on praying to saints! He dismantles Cooper’s claim that it implies saints are “almost omniscient,” exposing logical flaws and offering a steelman argument. With sharp wit, Jimmy blends Scripture, theology, and science—citing Near-Death Experiences and biblical insights—to defend Catholic teaching. Expect a lively, thought-provoking clash of ideas that challenges assumptions and invites listeners to rethink the saints’ role in prayer.
TRANSCRIPT:
Coming Up
JORDAN COOPER: To argue for prayers to the saints, what you’re arguing for is not only the idea that saints are in heaven praying for the church generally before the Father, and seeing kind of the events of the world unpack themselves. What they’re saying is that the saints have an almost divine omniscience.
Let’s get into it!
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Howdy, folks!
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Introducing Jordan Cooper
Jordan Cooper is a Lutheran pastor and YouTuber who sometimes interacts with Catholic topics, and recently he published a short titled “Do Roman Catholics Make Saints Omniscient?”
His answer would seem to be “almost.”
JORDAN: Almost divine omniscience. Almost omniscience.
This recent short is part of a much longer video—in fact, a series of videos—that Jordan did several years ago on asking the saints for their intercession.
He covers a bunch of related topics in these videos, and we may discuss more of them in future episodes, but this time I want to focus on one particular argument he makes.
In the short, he focuses on a single argument, and since he’s just republished this argument, I assume it represents the current state of his thought.
So let’s look at what he has to say.
The Intercession of the Saints
First, though, I want to clear away an objection to avoid some potential confusion.
There are people in the Protestant community who argue that the saints in heaven do not pray for those on Earth.
In other words, they don’t Intercede or = Pray for us. So there is no Intercession of the Saints.
Some even say that the saints in heaven aren’t even aware of things happening on Earth.
But that isn’t the way the Lutheran tradition often approaches this topic.
In fact, the Lutheran Book of Concord states:
Apology for the Augsburg Confession 21:8-9
We grant that the angels pray for us. This is attested to by Zech. 1:12, where the angel prays, “O Lord of hosts, how long wilt thou have no mercy on Jerusalem?”
We also grant that the saints in heaven pray for the church in general, as they prayed for the church universal while they were on earth.
And Jordan agrees with this. As he states in a follow-up video from 4 years ago:
JORDAN: There’s no disputing that the saints in heaven pray for the church. We see that, I mean, revelation, the saints in heaven are seemingly very concerned about what’s going on with the church. They’re crying how long? Oh Lord. They’re bringing bowls onto the altar, and the saints are very much involved in their worship in seeing what’s going on on this earth.
So Jordan does believe that the saints in heaven are aware of things here on Earth.
And he believes that the saints in heaven pray for us, so he believes in the intercession of the saints.
Both of which are to his credit.
Asking for Their Intercession
So then what’s the problem? I mean, if the saints up in heaven interceding for us, why can’t we address them directly and ask them to do what they’re already doing?
Good question! And it’s one that occurred to early Christians.
This is why—now that there were humans up in heaven—Christians started turning to them in the first place and asking them to be their prayer partners in heaven.
But when the Protestant Reformation happened, the Reformers generally didn’t like this, which is why most Protestants today reject the idea of asking the saints for their intercession.
Still, Lutheranism’s approach is sometimes more mixed.
For example, the Apology for the Augsburg Confession—which is part of the Book of Concord—does not rule out the practice.
Instead, it says this:
Apology for the Augsburg Confession 21:10
Even if the saints do pray fervently for the church, it does not follow that they should be invoked. But our Confession [that is, the Augsburg Confession] affirms only this much, that Scripture does not teach us to invoke the saints or to ask their help. Neither a command nor a promise nor an example can be shown from Scripture for the invocation of the saints; from this it follows that consciences cannot be sure about such invocation. Since prayer ought to come from faith, how do we know that God approves such invocation? How do we know, without proof from Scripture, that the saints hear the individual’s prayers?
So the apology says that it does not follow that they should be invoked and that the Augsburg Confession affirms only this much, that Scripture does not teach us to invoke the saints or to ask their help. From this it follows that consciences cannot be sure about such invocation.
So this passage isn’t saying that asking the saints for their intercession is forbidden, just that they can’t be sure of the practice. As they conclude: How do we know, without proof from Scripture, that the saints hear the individual’s prayers.
There’s more to say about this, and I’ll discuss it in the future, but I understand how a Protestant—using the principle of Sola Scriptura or = “By Scripture Alone”—might say something like, “Well, I’m not confident of asking the saints for their intercession since I don’t have an endorsement of it in Scripture, so I’m not comfortable doing it myself.
“But I can see that it’s a reasonable inference from the fact that the saints are interceding for us in heaven, so I don’t mind if you do it, and we don’t need to fight about it.”
In fact, that was the attitude taken a few years ago by a group commissioned by the Lutheran bishops of Germany in dialogue with a group from the German Catholic bishops.
They stated:
Communio Sanctorum 7:3:243
According to Lutheran understanding, the remembrance of the saints occurs solely in our praying to God. In the Catholic church, the remembrance of the saints can take the form of an invocation, which is made possible only in Christ and is to be distinguished from praying to Christ. Insofar as these conditions in doctrine and practice are maintained and Christ’s role as the sole mediator is not diminished, this difference, according to Lutheran thinking, is not church dividing.
And that strikes me as a reasonable position.
However, different groups of Lutherans have different views, and some of them can express themselves in rather harsh terms.
This was particularly true back during the passions of the Reformation Era, and the Lutheran Book of Concord is not Univocal, which means it doesn’t = Speak with one voice.
If you look in another part of the work—known as the Smalcald Articles—it says:
Smalcald Articles 2:2
The invocation of saints is also one of the abuses of the Antichrist.
Whoa! That escalated quickly!
The Apology for the Augsburg Confession says asking the saints for their intercession isn’t proven, but the Smalcald Articles say it’s an abuse of the Antichrist—a position that would be very hard to defend exegetically given the way the New Testament understands the antichrist.
Yet here—in two different parts of the Book of Concord—we have two very different estimations of asking the saints to intercede for us.
While Jordan doesn’t say that this is an abuse of the antichrist, he does reject the practice.
JORDAN: It’s something that we reject.
Jordan thus doesn’t have a problem with the intercession of the saints. He thinks they are interceding for us.
He just has a problem asking them to do what they’re . . . already doing.
It’s a little like saying, “Hey, down here on Earth I pray for my fellow Christians all the time. Just don’t ask me to pray for anything for you specifically.”
Logical Nonsense
Anyway, in the short, Jordan has a specific argument he’s looking at. So what does he have to say?
JORDAN: To argue for prayers to the saints, what you’re arguing for is not only the idea that saints are in heaven praying for the church generally before the Father, and seeing kind of the events of the world unpack themselves, what they’re saying is that the saints have an almost divine omniscience.
So that’s Jordan’s main complaint, that the idea of asking the saints for their intercession implies that they have—in his words—“an almost divine omniscience.”
Or—as Jordan puts it later in the video—it gives them “almost omniscience.”
JORDAN: Almost omniscience
And that’s just logical nonsense on Jordan’s part.
Omniscience is the quality of = Having All Knowledge, and since the amount of possible knowledge is Infinite or = Without Limit, Omniscience means = Having infinite knowledge.
This reveals the flaw in what Jordan is claiming, because to be “almost omniscient” would mean to have almost infinite knowledge.
But there is no such thing as almost infinite.
Think about the number 1. How many numbers will you have to count after that to arrive at an infinite or unlimited amount?
Well, since 1 is a finite or limited number, you’d need to count an infinite or unlimited amount of additional numbers to get to an infinite amount.
Okay, now imagine the number 1 million. How many numbers will you have to count to get to an infinite amount?
Since 1 million is still a finite number, you’d still need to count an infinite amount.
And the same thing is true of 1 billion and a trillion and any other number you can name.
It doesn’t matter what number you start with, for any finite number, you’ll always have to count an infinite quantity of new numbers to get to an infinite amount.
Put another way, all finite numbers are equally far from infinity. There is no such thing as “almost infinite.”
So this is just logical nonsense on Jordan’s part.
And he knows that. In is follow-up video from 4 years ago, he says:
JORDAN: We don’t get the idea that there is this, as I said, almost omniscience on the part of the saints. Now, the argument, of course, is, well, it’s not omniscience because it’s still finite, right?
Right. However much knowledge the saints might have, it’s still finite, which means that the phrase “almost omniscience” is logical nonsense.
And by introducing this phrase—including in his recent short—Jordan is introducing logical nonsense into the discussion.
Which is exactly what you do when you don’t think your argument is strong enough to win on the merits.
You start introducing emotionally laden nonsense to hopefully win on a non-intellectual level.
At least, that’s what non-scholarly apologists do, and—frankly—I’d expect better from Jordan since he is capable of doing scholarly work and usually doesn’t use logical nonsense.
But we waive that point. We do not press it. We look over it.
PIRATE KING FROM PIRATES OF PENZANCE (1983): But we waive that point. We do not press it. We look over it.
Steelmaning Jordan Cooper
So let’s set aside the logical nonsense and try to steelman Jordan’s argument, because—even though the idea of almost omniscience is nonsensical—you can still argue that something is beyond human ability.
Why might someone think that in this case?
JORDAN: Because the saints themselves are, to some degree, able to hear the prayers of so many people. I mean, think about the blessed Virgin Mary or think about Saint Peter. When you think about how many prayers Saint Peter must have to actually hear so that he can hear every word that is spoken by everyone that is praying to him, and not just out loud, but even prayers that are in your head. So it gives the saints almost this kind of divine quality or this divine attribute of almost omniscience to the point that they’re able to hear everything both externally and even in people’s minds.
There are several things in this worthy of comment, and I want to start with a compliment, because Jordan expresses some hesitancy about just how much the saints are aware of. He says that they are able to hear prayers to “Some degree.”
JORDAN: The saints themselves are, to some degree, able to hear the prayers.
I like the fact that he’s being cautious about what he’s claiming the saints are aware of.
That’s good, because we don’t know a lot about how stuff works in the afterlife works, so it’s a healthy instinct to be cautious and not try to claim too much.
Good job, Jordan!
Unfortunately, he then goes beyond what the Catholic Church actually teaches by attributing a maximal degree of awareness of prayers to the saints.
Specifically, he cites both Mary and Peter in this regard.
JORDAN: Think about the blessed Virgin Mary, or think about Saint Peter. When you think about how many prayers Saint Peter must have to actually hear so that he can hear every word that is spoken by everyone that is praying to him, and not just out loud, but even prayers that are in your head.
Yeah, this is not something the Catholic Church teaches.
Many people may assume that the saints hear every word of every request for their intercession, but the Church does not teach that this is the case.
It just doesn’t.
You can go all the way through the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and you can go all the way through Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum—which is the standard scholarly collection of doctrinal passages from magisterial documents all the way down through history, so it’s huge—and you won’t find anything addressing how or how much the saints are aware of our requests for their intercession.
You will find passages endorsing the fact that we should ask for their intercession, but you won’t find anything saying that they hear every word of every prayer.
What this means is that Jordan is not attacking Catholic teaching here. He is at most attacking a Catholic theological opinion, but he’s not attacking what the Church teaches.
Church Teaching & Theological Opinion
At this point, it’s worth discussing the difference between Church teaching and theological opinion, because this is a distinction that they often don’t have in Protestant circles.
Church Teaching—or = Doctrine—is what the Church authoritatively teaches, and Catholics are expected to agree with it.
However, theology is something different. Theology is the attempt to understand God based on his revelation. Theology = Understanding God from revelation
Theology goes beyond Church teaching, and so it is not a matter of doctrine. It is a matter of opinion, and Catholics are free to agree or disagree with theological proposals.
For more on this, see my book Teaching With Authority.
Within theology, some ideas are more common than others, but theological opinions are not equal to Church teaching, and so you’re free to make your own theological proposals if you disagree with the ones that are out there.
Like I said, they tend not to have this distinction in Protestant circles, and they tend to conceive of teaching—or doctrine—and theology as the same thing, but it’s a very real distinction in Catholicism.
What Jordan is doing by critiquing the idea that the saints hear every word of every request for their intercession—even mental requests—is only attacking a theological opinion rather than what the Church teaches.
How Do Requests for Intercession Work?
To clarify this issue, it’s also worth discussing how requests for intercession may work.
First, I’ll tell you what’s historically been the most common understanding of this, and then I’ll describe some alternatives.
You sometimes hear Protestants criticizing asking the saints for their intercession on the grounds that it makes the saints aware of all kinds of things they have no way of being aware of—like they’re omniscient the way God is.
But this is not the historically common opinion on how this works.
In fact, the most common opinion has been that the saints are not aware of all kinds of different things and that they do not have special powers of awareness beyond those we have in this life.
Instead, the common opinion has been that they wouldn’t know about our requests at all except for one thing: God tells them.
And, of course, being omniscient, God does know about all of our requests, so he simply lets the saints know about the ones that concern them.
St. Thomas Aquinas argues this way:
Summa Theologiae III-II:72:1
Each of the blessed must needs see in the divine essence as many other things as the perfection of his happiness requires. . . . Each one wills . . . to know what concerns himself. Hence . . . they wish to know what concerns themselves, and consequently it follows that they know it in the Word. . . . [Therefore,] they know in the Word the vows, devotions, and prayers of those who have recourse to their assistance.
So think about it this way: Let’s suppose you die and go to heaven, but you leave your family back on Earth—let’s say your children.
Would you want to know if your children get in a fix and want you to pray for them in heaven?
Most people would! They’d want to know when their children want prayers.
And so the common opinion has been that God lets those in heaven know when their family members want prayer.
Only our family in Christ isn’t limited by blood ties, and so God lets those in heaven know whenever someone wants their prayers.
In heaven, we will love all the people God loves, and God loves everybody, so in heaven we will love everybody and want to know whenever anyone wants our prayers.
And so—in love—God will let us know.
I think this is a reasonable view, though I’m not 100% sold on it.
Although a lot of people don’t know about it, there is actually quite good evidence that we have a low level of ESP in this life.
St. Thomas Aquinas agreed with that. He called ESP “Natural Prophecy” to distinguish it from the ≠ Supernatural Prophecy that God gives.
Well, I don’t know how much ESP we will have in the next life.
So I don’t have a problem with the idea that the saints will have more awareness through their own abilities than we do in this.
And maybe that’s how they know about our requests for their intercession.
But even if that’s not the case, God is omniscient, and so he can easily let the saints know about our prayer requests.
That’s a separate issue from the level of detail they know about them in.
I don’t know if you’ve ever watched much live Protestant television—like the 700 Club or things like that—but if you have, one of the things you’ll have seen is call-in lines where people can call the ministry and ask for prayer.
Sometimes, they’ll write the prayer requests on a slip of paper and bring it to the TV host to pray, and the TV host may have a big stack of prayer requests he’s praying over.
Now, there’s no way he’s read all of those when a big event is going on, and that’s okay.
The host has limitations that prevent him from reading them all in this kind of situation.
Even though the TV host hasn’t read every word of every prayer request, the host knows that these people want prayer, and God knows the details of their requests.
So the host can simply pray, “Father, please help all these people who are asking for your mercy!”
And God knows exactly who they are and what the people are wanting for help with.
I don’t see anything wrong with this at all.
And—if it turned out that the saints in heaven have limits similar to the ones we have in this life—I think it would be just as valid for a saint in heaven to do the same thing.
The saints might not know every word of every prayer request you make—contrary to Jordan’s assumption—but God could still let the saint know to whatever degree of detail the saint is able to process about those who want his prayers, and he can pray for them.
So this is one way the saints could pray for us, even if they had limitations like the ones we have in this life.
I think there’s good evidence, though, that they don’t have such limitations, and we’ll get to that.
What’s the Problem?
So let’s just go with Jordan’s line of thought and assume that the saints know all the words of every request for their intercession.
What would this opinion involve?
Well, Jordan would not have shown that this would make the saints “almost omniscient”—because that’s a logical contradiction and thus logical nonsense—but his argument about Mary and Peter would show that the opinion involves the saints having an ability that is superhuman.
At least, they would have an ability that exceeds what humans can do in this life.
So what?
What’s the problem with that?
JORDAN: We’re simply never told that those are qualities that are true of any creature.
Okay, so here we’re getting to Jordan’s real concern.
When he says that “we’re never told that those are qualities of any creature,” what he means is “we’re never told by Scripture that those are qualities of any creature.”
Here Jordan is assuming the Protestant principle that we should do doctrine and theology Sola Scriptura or = By Scripture Alone.
And he’s here using the strong form of sola scriptura, according to which you need a positive warrant from Scripture—something that either states or implies a view—before you’re allowed to hold it.
Because what he’s saying is, “Scripture doesn’t tell us that departed human beings have this ability, therefore you shouldn’t hold the opinion that they do.”
This is in contrast to the weaker form of sola scriptura, which would let you hold an opinion as long as it’s not contradicted by Scripture.
Protestants often shift between these two understandings of sola scriptura without even realizing it.
They often apply the weaker understanding of sola scriptura to opinions they like, so you can hold something they like as long as it’s not contradicted by Scripture.
But then they apply the stronger understanding of sola scriptura to opinions they don’t like, so you can’t hold those views unless you have a positive warrant from Scripture to document them.
And that’s what Jordan is doing here. He doesn’t like the idea that departed humans have this ability, so he wants to see a positive warrant for it, and he says there isn’t one.
We’ll get to that subject in a minute, but for now, I’d just like to note that this is another “Where is that in the Bible?” moment.
Protestants who don’t like a Catholic teaching or opinion often attack it by saying, “Where is that in the Bible?” coupled with the assumption that—if there’s not some biblical text explicitly or implicitly teaching it—that you shouldn’t believe it.
And that’s what Jordan is doing here.
Well, it’s no surprise if you make Protestant assumptions that you’ll come to Protestant conclusions.
However, that proves nothing if you’re not already a Protestant.
Catholics do not accept the principle of sola scriptura, and so they don’t need to provide a biblical passage supporting an opinion.
They might, for example, appeal to Tradition, including the way the Holy Spirit has guided the development of the Church’s practice to unfold principles that were implicit in the deposit of faith handed down from Christ and the apostles.
Then there’s the fact that sola scriptura—and especially the strong form of it that Jordan is using—is self-refuting.
If you need a passage of Scripture to state or imply the doctrinal and theological views that you hold, then you’re going to need a passage that states or implies this very view.
The trouble is that there aren’t any passages that state or imply sola scriptura—and especially not this strong version—so the doctrine is self-refuting.
The principle itself thus causes it to implode, so that’s not a good start for the case Jordan is making.
Can God Give This Ability?
But let’s take a step back and look at this opinion from another angle.
Jordan’s argument that the saints don’t have the ability to know the details of all the requests for their intercession wasn’t just based on an appeal to sola scriptura.
It was also based on an intuitive sense that in this life we can’t process that much information.
JORDAN: Think about the blessed Virgin Mary or think about Saint Peter. When you think about how many prayers St. Peter must have to actually hear so that he can hear every word that is spoken by everyone that is praying to him, and not just out loud, but even prayers that are in your head. So it gives the saints almost this kind of divine quality.
So he’s using human experience in this life—where we can’t process that much information at once—to argue for the idea we won’t have the ability to do so in the next life either, as it’s—in his words—“an almost divine quality.”
Well, the next life is not this one, and God’s going to do things to and for us then that will make us different than we are now.
So let’s start with the question of whether God can give departed humans the ability to process that much information?
One of the things we know about God is that he’s Omnipotent, which means that he is = All Powerful.
In practical terms, that means God can = Do Anything Logically Possible.
God can’t do things like make “square circles” or “4-sided triangles,” because the very terms involved in saying those phrases contain logical contradictions, so square circles and 4-sided triangles are not logically possible entities.
They’re just logical nonsense—like the idea of “being almost omniscient.”
But anything that doesn’t involve a logical contradiction is something that God can do.
So what about giving a human the ability to process a large amount of data. Can God do that?
The idea of a human with improved data processing abilities doesn’t contain a logical contradiction, so sure, God could give departed humans that ability.
In fact, we even see God granting similar abilities to other creatures in Scripture.
In Numbers 22, we have the account of Balaam’s ass—or his donkey, as many modern translations render it.
In this passage, God gives the donkey the ability to speak to Balaam in a human manner—something that implies a significant upgrade on the donkey’s intellectual abilities.
Now, with stories this early in the Bible—before they were keeping the kind of exact records they kept later—there’s always a question about how literally we should interpret it.
But the text unambiguously depicts God giving the animal an intellectual upgrade, and that’s consistent with the ability to give such upgrades that God’s omnipotence applies.
And I suspect that Jordan would agree that God can give departed humans the ability to process however much information they need to process.
He just doesn’t see Scripture stating or implying that God does this.
If I Were Protestant . . .
Now, if I were Protestant and if this were all the information I had, my own approach would be to stop here and remain partly agnostic.
We don’t know a lot about the afterlife, and so the prudent thing to do is not to make judgments about things we don’t have evidence for.
So if I didn’t have any evidence—other than the fact that God will do some kinds of improvements in us—I would leave it up to God whether we’ll get this kind of intellectual upgrade.
I certainly wouldn’t rule it out, as I expect God to reveal mysteries to us that would seem to require a significant intellectual upgrade.
But—in fact—I do have extra evidence.
For example, I expect that in the next life we’ll be able to understand the justice and mercy of God and how they fit together in much greater detail than we understand now.
Specifically, we’ll see “the big picture” of good and evil and what all the goods are for the sake of which God tolerates evil.
In other words, we’ll have the data and perspective we need to see how God has been completely just and good in dealing with his creation and all the evil he has allowed in it.
That is, we’ll have a full and satisfying answer to the problem of evil.
That would seem to imply a very significant intellectual upgrade in terms of the ability to process data.
Also, God has revealed that the final judgment will be public and will extend to even the smallest things we’ve done in this life.
Jesus says:
Luke 12:2-3, ESV
Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed or hidden that will not be known. Therefore whatever you have said in the dark shall be heard in the light, and what you have whispered in private rooms shall be proclaimed on the housetops.
So even things we’ve whispered privately will be publicly known.
Well, the public revelation of those kinds of tiny details—from countless human beings—strongly suggests we’re going to be able to process way more information than we can now.
Even just experiencing the review of our own lives and all the things we’ve done in this kind of detail—and seeing how they are evaluated in terms of God’s justice and mercy—involves way more information than we can currently process.
Just understanding your own life’s final judgment implies a huge boost in data processing, and when you add to that the processing of other people’s final judgments, we’re talking about really massive amounts of data.
And then there’s our knowledge of the divine mystery. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul says:
1 Corinthians 13:9-12, ESV
We know in part, and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So Paul says our partial knowledge of God will pass away and be replaced by perfect knowledge of him. He says that right now he knows God in part, but then he shall know him fully, just the way God has fully known him.
And even though we’ll never be omniscient the way God is, that sounds like a big intellectual upgrade to me.
So even as a Protestant, I would be strongly sympathetic to the view that departed humans will get a massive intellectual boost.
But Jordan isn’t sympathetic to that, at least when it comes to the idea of asking the saints to pray for us.
What About Jesus?
There’s also another aspect to this question. It’s an exception that Jordan mentions to his own argument, and I haven’t covered it yet because I wanted to make his main argument clear.
But Jordan does acknowledge that there is an exception to his argument, which he discusses here:
JORDAN: We’re simply never told that those are qualities that are true of any creature other than, well, not creature, but the human nature of Christ. Because of the hypostatic union, that Christ’s person himself, he is able to have that kind of omniscience, but that is never ascribed to mere creatures. We’re simply never told that those are qualities that are true of any creature.
I’d quibble with several things in the way Jordan expresses this. For example, Christ’s human nature is a creature—a created reality. It’s not something that existed for all eternity like his divine nature.
But Jordan does acknowledge that Christ’s human nature has the kind of data processing power needed to deal with this many prayer requests.
I’d say that Jordan is wrong that Christ’s human nature is omniscient. His divine nature is omniscient, but human intellects like the ones Christ’s human nature gives him are finite.
And this is not a new view. For example, back in the 1200s, St. Thomas Aquinas said:
Summa Theologiae III:10:1
The union of the two natures in the Person of Christ took place in such a way that the properties of both natures remained unconfused, i.e. “the uncreated remained uncreated, and the created remained within the limits of the creature,” as [St. John] Damascene says [De Fide Orth. 3:3,4]. Now it is impossible for any creature to comprehend the divine essence, as was shown [previously], seeing that the infinite is not comprehended by the finite. And hence it must be said that the soul of Christ [in] nowise comprehends the divine essence.
So Christ’s divine intellect comprehends the infinite divine essence, but his human intellect is still finite.
Or, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church says:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 472
[The] human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of his existence in space and time. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, “increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favor with God and man” [Luke 2:52] and would even have to inquire for himself about what one in the human condition can learn only from experience. This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself, taking “the form of a slave” [Philippians 2:7].
So there were limits to Christ’s human intellect, though they are different than the limits we have.
As the Catechism goes on to state:
Catechism of the Catholic Church 473-474
At the same time, this truly human knowledge of God’s Son expressed the divine life of his person. The human nature of God’s Son, not by itself but by its union with the Word, knew and showed forth in itself everything that pertains to God. Such is first of all the case with the intimate and immediate knowledge that the Son of God made man has of his Father. The Son in his human knowledge also showed the divine penetration he had into the secret thoughts of human hearts.
By its union to the divine wisdom in the person of the Word incarnate, Christ enjoyed in his human knowledge the fullness of understanding of the eternal plans he had come to reveal.
So Christ had an augmented knowledge that by God’s power goes beyond what you and I know in this life.
But what about the next?
Christ Our Advocate
There are multiple passages in the New Testament that indicate that Christ is interceding for us in heaven.
For example, in Romans 8, Paul states:
Romans 8:34, ESV
Christ Jesus is the one who died—more than that, who was raised—who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us.
Similarly, the author of Hebrews states:
Hebrews 7:25, ESV
[Jesus] is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.
And John states:
1 John 2:1, ESV
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous.
So we have abundant evidence that Christ is interceding for us up in heaven.
Now, at this point, Jordan could do the same thing with Jesus that he did with the saints.
That is, he could say, “Hey! Wait a minute, you Catholics! Just because we know that Christ is interceding for us doesn’t mean that you can ask him for his intercession! That’s a totally different subject! These texts do say that he is interceding for us, but that doesn’t mean he’s aware of every word of every prayer people say to him—even mentally.
“I mean, Jesus knows humanity is sinful—he died on the Cross because we’re sinful, so he obviously knows that.
“So maybe he’s up in heaven interceding for us just based on the fact that we’re sinful, and he doesn’t know the details of our prayers. So don’t ask Jesus for his intercession.”
But Jordan doesn’t take that route.
He wants to say that we shouldn’t ask the saints for their intercession—even though they are interceding—because he thinks they can’t know the individual words of our prayer requests.
But he doesn’t seem to have a problem with the idea of asking Jesus for his intercession—because he also is interceding—and because he thinks Jesus’ human nature can know the individual words of our prayer requests.
Well, at least he acknowledges that much.
We Will Be Like Who?
But what about us? If we go with the idea that Jesus’ human nature has the ability to process the words of the prayers people say to him, do we have any indication that we’ll be given similar abilities?
We’ve already covered some of the biblical evidence pointing to our getting a big intellectual upgrade—like the information about the final judgment and our coming to know God fully, the same way he’s already fully known us.
But there’s also this passage in 1 John:
1 John 3:2, ESV
Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
So this passage says we will be made like Jesus—or even God more generally—and it’s one of several passages like that.
So if Jesus has the ability to intellectually process all that information, and we’re going to be made like Jesus, why won’t we be able to process that kind of information as well?
Why judge what our future state will be like by the limitations we have in this life, when the Bible has already given us multiple indications that we will receive a big intellectual upgrade, and it explicitly says that we will be made like Jesus or God?
I’m not saying that you can’t draw a sharp line here and say, “Well, we won’t be made like Jesus in that way.”
But we’ve already seen multiple factors pointing to an intellectual upgrade, and if you want to say that the upgrade won’t be such that we’ll be able to process this much data, you need to show why that is the case.
Things are thus not looking good for Jordan’s “we’re never told that they’ll have this ability” argument.
We may not be told that explicitly, but we are told several things that strongly suggest it.
This is one of the problems with sola scriptura, and especially the strong form of it. The data that Scripture alone gives us frequently Underdetermines many issues—that is, it = Doesn’t Prove one possible interpretation over another.
And this is an example of that. Scripture doesn’t prove conclusively either that the saints will have the data processing power needed to handle the details of the prayer requests Mary or Peter are receiving, but neither does it prove conclusively that they don’t.
Scripture alone just does not settle this issue conclusively.
However, Scripture does point to us receiving a big intellectual upgrade, and that does a lot of damage to Jordan’s argument.
Science & the Afterlife
Now, thus far I’ve been approaching this subject from an exegetical and theological perspective, but there’s another way to approach it, which is scientific.
Advocates of sola scriptura frequently hold that Scripture is not meant to teach us the details of science, and that we should listen to what science discovers unless Scripture specifically contradicts it.
Well, Jordan’s argument acknowledges that Scripture doesn’t say that the saints don’t have the intellectual ability to process a large number of prayers. Remember, he said:
JORDAN: We’re simply never told that those are qualities that are true of any creature.
So if we’re never told in Scripture that these are the qualities of any creature, that also means that we’re never told that they are not the qualities of any creature.
If we were told that, Jordan would be citing that as proof of his claim.
So Jordan acknowledges that Scripture never tells us one way or another whether those in the afterlife will have this kind of ability, which means that we ought to follow what science can tell us on this subject . . . if it tells us anything.
So . . . let’s science!
Scientific research into life after death began in the late 19th century with the founding of the Society for Psychical Research in 1882.
Esteemed scientists including Nobel prize winners—people like William James, Charles Richet, and William Crookes—were early members.
A particular phase of scientific research into life after death began following the 1975 publication of Raymond Moody’s book Life After Life, which gave impetus to the study of Near-Death Experience.
Near-Death Experiences—or NDEs—are situations in which a person comes close to death and may even experience clinical death such as cardiac arrest.
Well, in the last 50 years, a lot of research has been done on NDEs, and thousands of them have been recorded.
This allows scientists to do statistical studies of the experiences and catalogue their common characteristics.
Two of these characteristics have proved to be a speeding up of the person’s thoughts and an access to a vast amount of new understanding.
These characteristics of NDEs have been reported for years, and in 2020 the peer-reviewed journal Consciousness and Cognition by the respected science publisher Elsevier issued a paper by a team of scientists that provides recent numbers for them.
As part of the study, they surveyed those who had Near-Death Experiences about the content of these experiences—including negative content, because not everyone has pleasant experiences. Some report hellish ones.
Content element #2 was whether your thoughts speeded up perceptually during the experience.
And content element #4 was whether you had the feeling of suddenly understanding everything about yourself, others, or the universe.
They then reported how many NDErs said they had the different content elements in their experiences.
For content element 2, a combined 65% reported their thoughts speeding up, while 35% did not report this.
And for element 4, a combined 72% reported suddenly feeling like they understood everything about themselves, others, or the universe, while 28% did not report this.
Not everyone remembers their NDE the same way. Some people remember certain pieces of it once they revive, and others remember other pieces.
But from these numbers, it’s clear that both having speeded up thoughts and having dramatically increased understanding are core parts of Near-Death Experiences.
To give you a sense of what that’s like, here’s how one man who had an NDE while drowning described what happened to his thoughts:
Dr. Bruce Greyson, After, p. 31
My thoughts were moving so quickly at this point. So many things seemed to be happening simultaneously, and in an overlapping manner. Suddenly, images began to pass through my mind at extremely high speeds. I was amazed to find that my mind seemed to be understanding at the same high speeds. Then, I was even more amazed at how I could be thinking of other things like this, at the same time as understanding the images. Suddenly, everything made sense. I remember thinking, “Ahhh, so that’s it. Everything is so perfectly clear and simple in so many ways; I had simply never thought about it from this point of view.”
And here’s how a woman described an NDE she experienced following surgery:
Dr. Bruce Greyson, After, p. 42
In every scene of my life review I could feel again what I had felt at various times in my life. And I could feel everything everyone else felt as a consequence of my actions. Some of it felt good and some of it felt awful. All of this translated into knowledge, and I learned—oh, how I learned! The information was flowing at an incredible breakneck speed that probably would have burned me up if it weren’t for the extraordinary Energy holding me.
Other people report that they had vast amounts of new understanding—that all they had to do was think of a subject and suddenly they knew everything about it—they just couldn’t bring this knowledge with them back into this life.
And these are only people who had brief experiences, which is why they’re called Near-Death Experiences.
These aren’t the experiences of those permanently established in the glory of heaven. These people’s experiences seem to reflect just a little of the beginning of the afterlife.
So from a scientific perspective, we also have significant reason to expect a massive upgrade in our information availability and processing power.
Conclusion
Things are thus not looking good for Jordan’s argument in the short.
He has other arguments, too, and we can cover those in the future.
But the idea that we shouldn’t ask the saints for their intercession because that would require the more popular saints to process large amounts of information doesn’t work.
In the first place, the idea that the saints hear every word of our requests is a theological opinion, not a Church teaching.
So the most Jordan’s argument would do is disprove one, optional model of how the saints’ intercession works.
Jordan’s claim that it makes the saints “almost omniscient” is logical nonsense, because there is no such thing as “almost omniscient.” That’s like saying, “Almost infinite” when you’re clearly talking about a finite thing.
And if we steelman Jordan’s argument and thus take it to mean that the saints would have to process information in a way we can’t in this life, the claim is also problematic.
It doesn’t matter that Scripture never tells us that saints have this ability, first, because this argument will only be convincing to someone who is already committed to Protestantism, and second, because Scripture also doesn’t tell us that they don’t have this ability.
This means that Scripture underdetermines the issue and so cannot be appealed to in order to settle the matter.
What Scripture does tell us is that God can give massive cognitive upgrades—like the one he gave to Balaam’s ass—and it gives us strong reason to think he will give that to saved humans in the afterlife.
We’re going to comprehend the intimate details of our entirely earthly lives and how they fit with God’s justice and mercy on judgment day.
And not only that, we’ll also comprehend the same thing for others since judgment day is a public event.
We’ll also understand other mysteries, including the mystery of God, which St. Paul says we will fully know, even as God fully knows us.
And if you agree that Jesus’ human nature knows the details of all the prayers people offer to him, well, Scripture says we will be made like him—or God more generally—for we will see him as he is.
All of that points to very large cognitive upgrades for saved humans.
And this is confirmed by the findings of science, which has discovered that those who have temporary, Near-Death Experiences report dramatic increases both in the speed of thought and the knowledge they have access to—for example, saying they only had to think about a topic to instantly know everything about it.
All of this severely undermines the argument Jordan makes in this short.
So Jordan, thanks for playing. Better luck next time!
* * *
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God bless you always!
VIDEO SOURCES:
Jordan Cooper’s recent short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RLwimq7axs
Original long video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3046OcXloZU
Jordan’s follow-up video from 4 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vBgbyLXL84