Should Christians Pray to Saints? A Response to Gavin Ortlund

In this episode, Jimmy Akin examines Gavin Ortlund’s case against asking the saints for their intercession. He looks at what Scripture actually says, the meaning of “prayer,” Protestant beliefs and practices, evidence from Revelation, and early Christian testimony—including St. Hippolytus—to show why the biblical and historical case is more complex than “pray to God alone.”

TRANSCRIPT

Coming Up

GAVIN: Should Christians pray to those already in heaven to ask for their intercession? This is a huge area of Christian disagreement, and it’s one that none of us can really avoid, because we’ll practice one thing or another. So in this video, let’s give a brief overview, very brief, of a Protestant view.

Okay. Let’s get into it!

* * *

Howdy, folks!

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Introduction

Recently, Gavin Ortlund put up a video titled “Should Christians Pray to Saints?”

This is a topic a lot of people have addressed, and here Gavin takes a swing at it, so let’s see what he has to say.

In my interaction with the video, I’ll be pointing out both where I think Gavin is right and where I think he’s wrong.

First, Gavin frames the issue like this:

GAVIN: Because the question we’re after here is what is the truth? What should we do? What does God want us to do? Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what I think. It doesn’t matter what any one of us thinks. It matters what does God think.

Yep. No problems there. Truth is the ultimate question, and so we should be concerned about what God thinks, not something else.

 

“The” Protestant Position

GAVIN: And the Protestant position is pray to God alone.

Well, that’s the position of many Protestants, and part of this is going to turn on what you mean by the word pray—which is something we’ll come back to.

But it’s always a big red flag whenever someone says “The Protestant Position”—as if there were just one, because that’s almost always false.

Protestantism is an enormously theologically diverse movement.

It’s not like in Catholicism, where there is an official position on many matters—say, the one you could look up in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

There is no Catechism of the Protestant Church, and any time someone talks about the Protestant position, they are almost always misrepresenting things.

Both Protestants and Catholics do this. Protestants do it to make it sound like they are more united than they are, and Catholics do it because it makes Protestantism an easier target.

In both cases, it’s usually a sign that the person does not get out as much as they should and interact with people of different viewpoints.

In this case, there is diversity in the Protestant world on the question of whether Christians can or should ask the saints for their intercession.

For example, the Anglican scholar and Anglo-Catholic leader Darwell Stone wrote a short book titled The Invocation of the Saints, and in his later book The Faith of an English Catholic, he wrote:

The Faith of an English Catholic (ch. 13)

Probably there are few among [Anglo-Catholics] who question the lawfulness of invoking the saints, most of them practice invocation as an habitual devotion, and they agree in assigning a prominent position in their thoughts and prayers to the holy Mother of our Lord. The enthusiasm with which the refrain “Hail Mary, full of grace,” was sung by vast assemblies at the first Anglo-Catholic Congress in 1920 was to many the most impressive feature in the Congress. . . .

Some Anglo-Catholics hold strongly that in expression as well as in thought all invocations of our Lady and of the saints should be restricted to the request for prayer. They would limit all such devotions to the words “pray for us,” “pray for me.” They have no difficulty in the complete form of the Ave Maria [i.e., the Hail Mary]. . . . but they think it well that invocation should not exceed the phraseology here used. Others wish to use stronger phrases, as, for instance, the words of the well-known hymn Ave maris stella [i.e., Hail, Star of the Sea].

There are also some in the Lutheran tradition who have not had a problem asking departed saints for their intercession.

Martin Luther did not want people to pray to Mary thinking that she would grant their requests on her own initiative, but he didn’t have a problem addressing her. In his 1521 Commentary on the Magnificat, he taught that she should be addressed by saying:

Commentary on the Magnificat 6

O blessed Virgin, Mother of God, you were of no account and utterly despised; yet God in His grace looked upon you and accomplished such great things in you.

In the same document, Luther expressed his desire for Mary to intercede on this behalf, saying:

Commentary on the Magnificat 1

May the tender Mother of God herself procure for me the spirit of wisdom, profitably and thoroughly to expound this song of hers.

And Luther continued printing the old version of the Hail Mary in his Betbüchlein or Little Prayer Book through the end of his life.

That definitely involves communicating with Mary. I mean, it’s in the name: Hail, Mary means Hello, Mary, so you’re definitely talking to her.

The Hail Mary is still in Luther’s little prayer book today, and some later Lutherans have maintained the tradition of praying the Rosary.

In fact, a few years ago fellow YouTuber Jordan Cooper wrote that:

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/justandsinner/the-invocation-of-the-saints-is-not-a-neutral-or-harmless-practice/

I recently came across a Lutheran pastor (in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) who posted a picture of the Virgin Mary with the entirety of the hail Mary attached to it, including the request for Mary to “pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.” What was particularly troubling to me was the fact that a number of other LCMS pastors shared this prayer and called it salutary.

Salutary means good or beneficial. And bear in mind that the LCMS or Lutheran Church Missouri Synod is one of the most conservative Lutheran groups out there, so even though Jordan doesn’t approve of this, it’s definitely something out there in Lutheran circles.

We see the same thing in the Methodist tradition. A few years ago, the English Methodist systematic theologian Geoffrey Wainwright was asked to give a speech at the Evangelical Wheaton College, in which he said:

One final, even eschatological connection may be detected between the Holy Spirit and those Christians whose faithful witness has been sustained by the Spirit to the point of sainthood and even martyrdom.

They may be invoked not only for the sake of their example in the past but also for their continuing personal help from within the heavenly community as enabled by the Holy Spirit—a pneumatically conveyed unity in prayer.

We also see the same thing in the Reformed tradition. For example, St. Louis University professor Belden Lane—a Reformed theologian—writes:

While Reformed Christians like myself may hesitate in speaking of prayer “to” the saints—because of a concern to maintain the mediatorial centrality of Christ—it is not only possible, but even necessary, to speak of prayer “with” the saints, inviting them also to pray for us.

So we’ve seen individuals from the Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, and Reformed traditions endorsing asking the saints for their intercession, and I could keep going. These are just a few quotations to illustrate the position.

But now let’s shift from the theologians to what actual people do.

As we’ll see, Gavin seems to think that we are completely cut off from the departed—and it’s understandable why he’d think that, given both the ideas that are popular in our culture and in the Protestant culture that he is part of, specifically.

But the data indicates that this isn’t true. An astonishingly large number of people—at least 40 to 50% of people—report having contact with their departed loved ones in what are known as After Death Communications or ADCs.

These are usually spontaneous. You’re just going about your business when, one day, your departed loved one shows up.

According to a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center 53% of U.S. adults reported having an ADC. That’s a majority of the population.

And the rates are even higher among older people, like widows and widowers, since they have lived longer lives.

Naturally, people communicate with their loved ones when they show up in an ADC, but even without an ADC, people still talk to their lost loved ones.

After my grandfather died, my Church of Christ grandmother talked to him regularly. I heard her doing so.

And it’s natural that she would do that, because it’s the calling of the human heart—it’s natural—to talk to the people you care about.

In his book Letters to Malcolm Chiefly About Prayer, C.S. Lewis wrote about the calling of the heart when it comes to asking God to help departed loved ones. He said:

Letters to Malcom 20

Of course I pray for the dead. The action is so spontaneous, so all but inevitable, that only the most compulsive theological case against it would deter me. And I hardly know how the rest of my prayers would survive if those for the dead were forbidden. At our age the majority of those we love best are dead. What sort of intercourse with God could I have if what I love best were unmentionable to Him?

Now, Lewis was talking about praying for the departed, but if it’s natural to talk to God about the departed, it’s even more natural to talk to the departed themselves.

After all, you talked to them in this life. That was natural. And it’s natural to keep on talking to them after they’ve died.

It’s not natural to suddenly act like talking to your dearest loved ones is suddenly forbidden, so people keep on doing it, even if they don’t have a theological framework that supports it—like my Church of Christ grandmother.

As part of that, people naturally tell the departed about what’s going on in their life.

According to the Pew Research study I mentioned a moment ago, 28% of U.S. adults told dead family members about events in their life.

And that includes 21% of Evangelicals—or one in 5.

So Gavin may not be aware of it, but there’s a whole lot of talking with the departed going on in his own community.

Of course, what we’re interested in here is not just having communication with the departed or telling them about your life but—specifically—about asking them to pray for you.

Here we have less data, but a 2014 Pew poll of Hispanics in the United States found that 9% of Hispanic Evangelicals—or basically 1 in 10—ask the saints for their intercession.

The number would be even higher if you asked them if they ever ask departed loved ones who are not saints to pray for them.

So Gavin is oversimplifying things when he just says that the Protestant position is to pray to God alone—as if there were just one position.

He may be representing the majority position—especially among theologians—but it’s not the only view.

In the absence of a Protestant pope or a Catechism of the Protestant Church, one has to survey the Protestant community to find out what views are held, and we’ve seen—both on the level of Protestant professionals like theologians and on the level of ordinary Protestants—that there is a diversity of views and practices on this question.

 

What Do We Mean by “Prayer”?

Now let’s get back to Gavin.

GAVIN: And the Protestant position is pray to God alone. That is what God taught us to do in his word.

Okay, now that’s a very specific claim. By “[God’s] word,” Gavin means the Bible, so Gavin is claiming that God taught us to pray to God alone in the Bible.

That means that Scripture must state or imply that we are to pray to God alone, so we’ll look at that.

But first I need to make a distinction that Gavin is glossing over.

In his discussion he conflates two different senses of the word pray.

The word pray entered English in the early 13th century from French, which got it from the Latin word precari, which means “ask earnestly, beg, or entreat.” (https://www.etymonline.com/word/pray)

You’ll notice that there is no reference to God in this definition. It was a normal word that meant ask, and we ask other people for things all the time.

Acts 10:48

And he commanded them to be baptized in the name of the Lord. Then prayed they him to tarry certain days.

You still see this usage in older British English. For example, in the Protestant King James Version of the Bible, Acts 10:48 records that after Peter baptized the household of Cornelius that they prayed him to remain with them for several days.

In other words, they asked Peter to remain, and they “prayed” to Peter even though he was just a human being.

This original meaning of pray as ask gave rise to expressions like “I pray you,” meaning “I ask you”—“please, if you will.” (Same)

Genesis 12:13 (King James Version)

Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.

Thus Genesis has Abraham saying to his wife Sarah, “Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister.”

But it’s clear that here Abraham is talking to a human—not to a God or one of the gods. He’s just talking to Sarah, so the word pray was used to refer to requests made of human beings.

And these are just two of many examples in the King James.

But eventually, English-speaking Protestants started restricting the word pray to refer to making requests of God.

As a result, if you look in a modern dictionary, you’re likely to find this restricted sense. For example, the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines prayer as “to speak to God, especially to give thanks or ask for help.” (https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/pray_1)

Now, English-speaking Catholics carried on using the word pray the way it had always been used, so they’d talk about Praying to the saints, meaning Asking the saints—specifically, asking for their intercession.

But Protestants would hear this language in their new-fangled “talking to God” sense, and it would sound bad to their ears. What do you mean, “praying to the saints”? We should pray only to God!

And all kinds of theological fights got started—and they still go on today. All over social media.

2 Timothy 2:14

Remind them of these things and charge them before God not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers.

Now, St. Paul warned us about quarreling about words. In 2 Timothy 2:14, he told Timothy to warn people before God “not to quarrel about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers.”

1 Timothy 6:4

He is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions.

And in 1 Timothy 6:4 he warned about men who have an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, and evil suspicions.

So we need to avoid quarreling about words, and that means carefully defining them—learning how to translate between the ways different communities use words—so that we can focus on the substance that the words represent instead of the words themselves.

In this case, that means being aware of the two meanings of pray in English—the historic meaning of ask—which Catholics still use—and the more modern meaning of talking to God—which the English Reformation gave us.

It also means looking at how the equivalent terms get used in Greek, because if you want to understand what God has taught us to do in his word

GAVIN: what God taught us to do in his word.

Then you’re going to need to know how the Greek New Testament uses words.

You’ll also need to know how early Church Fathers who wrote in Greek were using them.

And here we come to a problem, because the relevant words work differently in Greek than they do in English.

The word Proseukhomai is often translated Pray, but it has a narrow, specific meaning.

It specifically means invoking a deity—either God or one of the gods.

Thus Bauer, Danker, Arndt, and Gingrich’s A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament defines proseukhomai as pray in the sense of “to petition deity,” and Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament says that “From the very first proseukhomai means calling on God.”

So since this term is used to refer to praying to God or one of the gods, I will refer to this type of prayer as Divine Prayer, meaning Prayer Addressed to a Deity—just because we don’t have separate terms like this in English and it will help avoid some confusion.

Now, in the New Testament, when you wanted to talk about a person making a request of someone who wasn’t God or one of the gods, you used a different Greek verb, like Aiteó, or Deomai, both of which mean Ask.

Mark 15:43

Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself looking for the kingdom of God, took courage and went to Pilate and asked [aiteó] for the body of Jesus.

Thus Mark 15:43 uses aiteó when Joseph of Arimathea asked Pontius Pilate for the body of Jesus.

Galatians 4:12

Brothers, I ask [deomai] you, become as I am, for I also have become as you are. You did me no wrong.

And in Galatians 4:12, Paul uses deomai when he asks the Galatians to become as he is.

So the key thing is that in Greek, proseukhomai is used only for talking to deities, and other verbs are used for making requests of other people.

That’s going to be important, so remember it.

Latin has a similar distinction, though it’s not as sharp.

In Ecclesiastical Latin, the normal verb for divine prayer is Oro Pray (to God). It tends not to be used when you’re making a request of another person.

And you can see that in translations of Church documents today. While English-speaking Catholics may talk about praying to the saints—using the older sense of the word that just means asking the saints—Church documents tend not to.

The standard, older name for this teaching is the Invocatio Sanctorum or Invocation of the Saints, and newer documents like the Catechism of the Catholic Church speak of asking for their intercession.

But “praying to the saints” is something that English-speakers say colloquially. It’s not the official language that the Church uses.

So, with all that as background, let’s get back to Gavin.

 

Gavin’s Main Argument

GAVIN: Okay, the fundamental rationale for not praying to our departed fellow Christians—any of them—can be stated briefly. Christianity is a revealed religion. We have no authority in ourselves to determine our prayer life or our spiritual life in general, that’s something we look to what God has said to determine. And nowhere has God ever taught us that we are to pray to or ask for the intercession of saints in heaven or anyone else in heaven other than God.

If we were to put this into logical form, it would be something like:

P1. Unless God teaches us otherwise, we are not to ask for the intercession of the saints.

P2. God has not taught us to ask for the intercession of the saints.

C1. Therefore, we are not to ask for the intercession of the saints.

Now, the way this would normally be understood, it would be a sola scriptura or sufficiency of Scripture argument.

When Gavin says that nowhere has God ever taught us that we are to pray to or ask for the intercession of the saints

GAVIN: nowhere has God ever taught us that we are to pray to or ask for the intercession of saints.

He means nowhere in Scripture.

And this fits in with the Protestant claim that we are to form our doctrine Sola Scriptura or By Scripture Alone.

In other words, if you want to hold a doctrine, you need to have a biblical basis for that doctrine.

Sometimes this is expressed a little differently by appealing to the Sufficiency of Scripture, which is the idea that Scripture is sufficient to give us a basis for every doctrine that Christians should believe.

I think that this is the natural way to take Gavin’s argument as he’s expressed it here, but later Gavin says something that would question that idea, so we’ll get to that.

Even if Gavin doesn’t frame the argument in terms of sola scriptura or the sufficiency of Scripture—whichever you want to appeal to—a lot of people certainly do, so we’ll consider that argument here.

What I want to note at the moment is that if you take the argument the way you’d normally expect, then there must be a place where God teaches us not to ask the saints for their intercession in his word.

GAVIN: That is what God taught us to do in his word.

And it’s important to point out, here, that something can be taught in one of two ways.

It can be taught explicitly—by Scripture making a direct statement on a matter.

Or it can be taught implicitly—not by making a direct statement but by implying it nonetheless.

Westminster Confession of Faith 1:6

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

That’s why the Westminster Confession of Faith says that all things that are necessary for man’s faith are either expressly set down in Scripture or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture.

London Baptist Confession (1689) 1:6

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

Similarly, the London Baptist Confession says that all things that are necessary for man’s faith are either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture.

So—whether you call it sola scriptura or sufficiency of Scripture—there are two ways something can be taught in Scripture. One is by explicit statement, and one is by the implications of explicit statements.

When it comes to the first way something can be taught—explicit statements—we can dispense with this one quickly, because there is no statement anywhere in Scripture that says we are not to ask the saints for their intercession. None.

Neither is there any passage that says we are to pray only to God. This will surprise some people, but it’s the truth. Do a word search or an AI search of Scripture if you want to verify that, because it’s true.

There are lots of passages where people pray to God, and there are exhortations to pray to God, but there just aren’t any passages that say that we should pray only to God.

Even if there were, you’d still have to ask whether such a passage uses a word that means praying to a deity—like proseukhomai—but there aren’t any such passages—using any word.

This means that Gavin can’t prove what he wants using explicit statements, so if he’s going to prove it, he’ll have to do it by implication.

That will be important, so remember it.

 

Supporting Gavin’s Second Premise

P1. Unless God teaches us otherwise, we are not to ask for the intercession of the saints.

P2. God has not taught us to ask for the intercession of the saints.

C1. Therefore, we are not to ask for the intercession of the saints.

Now, we saw that Gavin proposed an argument that can be phrased as two premises and a conclusion.

The second premise is that God has not taught us to ask for the intercession of the saints.

As phrased, that’s a negative proposition. It expresses something that God has not done rather than something he has done.

But talking about something God has not done isn’t going to get you very far unless you assume a rigid version of sola scriptura that holds that Christians must never do things unless God has positively commanded it.

And—at least most of the time—Protestants don’t use such a version of sola scriptura. They only use such a rigid version when it’s convenient for them, but not all the time.

I mean, God never commanded Christians to have bathrooms and air conditioners in their churches, so if you apply the rigid version of sola scriptura, get ready to strip out all the bathrooms and air conditioners!

Instead, what Protestants normally do—at least when it comes to things like beliefs and practices they want to keep—is they allow anything that’s a reasonable inference from what God has said.

But what do you do when God hasn’t said anything about a subject and you want to reject it?

You make an argument from silence, like this one:

GAVIN: When we look to the period of divine revelation, we discover that asking for their intercession, us communicating to them, is nowhere taught or modeled anywhere in God’s revelation to us, despite hundreds of passages about the nature of prayer.

Here Gavin is conflating two things: asking for the saints intercession and us communicating with them.

GAVIN: asking for their intercession, us communicating to them.

That’s an issue, because communicating and asking for intercession are two different things.

He’s also mistaken about there being hundreds of passages in the Bible about the nature of prayer.

GAVIN: hundreds of passages about the nature of prayer.

There are hundreds of passages in which someone prays. According to an estimate by Joe Carter of the Gospel Coalition, there are 650 prayers in the Bible.

According to a stricter estimate that requires us to have the words of the prayer, there are 222 recorded prayers.

But whichever figure you prefer, that’s the total number of prayers in the Bible—not passages about the nature of prayer.

If you mean passages that instruct how prayer works—to whom, in whose name, with what attitude, whether God hears, persistence, intercession, the Spirit’s help, etc.—there are only a few dozen. I’ve seen it estimated to be between 30 and 60.

So the hundreds figure is sloppy—or, to put more charitably—Gavin is being hyperbolic when he says “hundreds of passages about the nature of prayer.”

And none of those passages say anything like “do not ask the saints for their intercession” or “do not talk to anyone in heaven but God.”

So Gavin will have to build his argument not by appealing to what the text says but by appealing to what it does not say.

In other words, he’ll have to make an argument from silence.

Like this one:

GAVIN: Here’s one way we can make this concern. Noah did not ask for the intercession of Abel. Abraham didn’t ask for the intercession of Noah. Moses didn’t ask for the intercession of Abraham. David didn’t ask for the intercession of Moses, the latter prophets didn’t ask for the intercession of David, the apostles didn’t ask for the intercession of the Old Testament saints. Polycarp didn’t ask for the intercession of the Apostle Paul. Irenaeus didn’t ask for the intercession of Polycarp, and so on and so forth.

Arguments from silence are notoriously weak. They can sound persuasive until you start thinking about them, but then they fall apart.

It’s true that the figures Gavin names are not recorded as having asked the previous figures for their intercession—either in the Bible in the case of biblical figures or in the handful of documents we have from them in the age of the Fathers—but so what?

We’re only given teeny, tiny summaries of these people’s lives. You know how many verses mention Noah in Genesis? 68!

A man’s entire 950-year life, compressed down to 68 verses—the vast majority of which have to do with the Flood.

Apart from the Flood and the story of Noah’s vineyard, we know nothing at all about Noah’s life, and we certainly don’t know about what practices he may or may not have engaged in regarding his ancestors, like Abel.

The same is true of everyone else Gavin names. We know only tiny bits about their lives, and we know only those bits that were relevant to the author’s purposes.

In no case was the author trying to tell us whether they did or did not ask the departed for their intercession, so you can’t make any inferences about this one way or another.

And that’s why this argument from silence—like arguments from silence in general—is weak.

Arguments from silence only have weight to the extent that the author has a reason to mention something—that is, if it’s relevant to the purposes he is trying to accomplish by writing.

And none of these authors were trying to teach us about whether it is or is not permissible to ask the departed for their intercession, which is demonstrated by the fact they never even raise this subject!

So this argument from silence lacks all force.

That’ll come as a surprise to you if you already buy Gavin’s conclusion and thus want to see his argument succeed, but if you think about it objectively, you can’t appeal to such examples one way or the other.

These passages don’t mention practices regarding the departed, so Gavin can’t say, “Hey, they don’t mention asking for their intercession, therefore they never did that.”

And I can’t say, “Hey, these passages don’t mention them not asking for intercession, so they must have.”

We’re on the same playing field, and silence doesn’t tilt either way.

 

The Argument from Silence Fallacy

In his video, Gavin apparently shifts what he is arguing. A bit later, he says:

GAVIN: We have to test later developments in church history by God’s revelation to us. Just as we test a lesser authority by a greater authority, all we want to do is pray as God has commanded that we should pray.

Earlier, he made the simple claim that God has not taught us to ask for intercession.

GAVIN: nowhere has God ever taught us that we are to pray to or ask for the intercession of saints.

Now, he’s talking about what God has commanded us regarding prayer.

GAVIN: as God has commanded that we should pray.

But these are two different things, and the type of reasoning that Gavin is engaging in is common among many in the Protestant community, where they shift between a weaker claim—like God hasn’t told us to do this—and a stronger claim—like God has told us we must not do this.

This is like the reasoning used in some parts of the Church of Christ movement, which says “God never commands us to use musical instruments in worship in the New Testament; therefore, we must not use musical instruments in worship today.”

It’s exactly the same logic, and it’s logically fallacious.

It’s an abuse of the argument from silence, and you’ll find it listed in logic textbooks as the Argumentum ex Silentio or Argument from Silence fallacy.

Which is a pretty obvious name, when you think about it.

 

“No Evidence”?

Gavin also frames the argument from silence like this:

GAVIN: How likely is it that praying to deceased believers was a practice among God’s people, and yet no one ever mentioned it? And we have no evidence for that.

Now, any time someone says, “we have no evidence for that,” it should immediately make you suspicious, because it’s a big red flag.

Usually when people say this, it isn’t true. They often say it as a rhetorical flourish to dismiss evidence that they don’t want to acknowledge.

• Like when an atheist says, “We have no evidence for the existence of God”—except for all the philosophical arguments that God exists.
• Or when a Jesus mythicist says, “We have no evidence that Jesus existed”—except for all the early Christian and non-Christian documents that say he did.
• Or when a Seventh-Day Adventist says, “We have no evidence that the early Christians worshipped on Sunday instead of Saturday”—except the passages that talk about Christians gathering on the first day of the week and speak of “the Lord’s day.”

Sometimes, the person may be so uninformed that they’re genuinely unaware of the evidence that exists.

More commonly, they are so ideologically unreflective that they don’t recognize that the arguments of their opponents contain evidence.

But—one way or another—the “we have no evidence” claim is usually false, which is what makes it a big red flag that you should automatically start questioning.

And we’ve arrived at a good point to consider this, because Gavin has now arrived at a stage where he’s going to consider some counter-arguments:

GAVIN: All right, some counterarguments. Well, maybe it is in the Bible.

Yeah! Maybe it is. Now we’re going to get to some of the evidence that Gavin was just saying doesn’t exist.

Everything Gavin has claimed so far has been his framing, which dismisses the evidence as if it didn’t exist. Now we’re going to get into the actual evidence.

 

The Evidence of Revelation

GAVIN: So for example, in Revelation 5:8, we have this reference to elders presenting the prayers of the saints to God.

So first we need to look at what Revelation 5:8 says. This passage occurs when John has been caught up to God’s throne room in heaven. He sees the throne surrounded by four living creatures and twenty-four elders. He sees Jesus—the Lamb—receive a scroll, and then he tells us:

Revelation 5:8

And when he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.

So here we see the twenty-four elders—who are plausibly taken to represent the leaders of God’s people in heaven—offering to God the prayers of the saints.

In the New Testament, the term saint normally means living Christians on earth, so here we would see the saints in heaven offering to God the prayers of the saints on earth—or the departed saints offering the prayers of the living saints.

Now, they don’t have bodies up in heaven, so this is a mental offering of prayer—in other words, it’s intercession.

We also have evidence of angelic saints interceding in this way, because in Revelation 8, we read:

Revelation 8:3-4

And another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to offer with the prayers of all the saints on the golden altar before the throne, and the smoke of the incense, with the prayers of the saints, rose before God from the hand of the angel.

There’s more to say about these passages, but between them we have significant evidence that both human saints and angelic saints intercede for the saints on earth by offering their prayers to God, which Revelation depicts under the form of incense.

Now, the first reaction that many who are against asking the saints for their intercession have when this is pointed out is to say, “Well, maybe they’re offering God our prayers, but these prayers weren’t directed at them. It’s not like early Christians were asking the saints for their intercession. These prayers were directed to God.”

There are several responses that can be made to that, but a key one is: Then that only makes the problem worse! On that reading—which I think is probable—then the saints and angels in heaven are aware of our prayers even when we don’t direct them to the saints and angels.

Further, it shows that they’re willing to take our prayer requests and present them to God, even when we haven’t asked them to.

Therefore, how much more would they be aware and willing to respond to our requests if we do ask them directly!

Now—of course—this passage doesn’t show Christians asking the saints to pray for them, and this is the point where Gavin tries to draw a firewall around the implications of these passages. He says:

GAVIN: There’s two different things here. Them praying for us and us praying to them are two different things, but these get conflated so many times. Or it will be assumed that one entails the other rather than argued that one entails the other.

Gavin tries to bolster this argument by pointing out that—historically—many Protestants have not had a problem with the idea that the saints in heaven are praying for us:

GAVIN: In the Apology of the Augsburg Confession in the Lutheran tradition: “Concerning the saints, we concede that in heaven they pray for the Church in general.” In the Reformed tradition, Zacharias Ursinus put it like this: “We readily grant that the saints in heaven do ardently desire the salvation of the church militant and that their prayers are heard according to the counsels of God, but that the saints know the misfortunes and business of every one in particular, and that they hear the prayers which may be addressed to them, we deny.” John Calvin in the Reformed tradition said something similar: “But though I grant that in this way they pray for us, they do not, however, lose their quiescence so as to be distracted with earthly cares, far less are they to be invoked by us.” Later in the Anglican tradition, Archbishop John Tillotson: “We do not deny that the saints in heaven pray for us, that are here on earth, because they may do so for anything we know. But that they do so is more than can be proved.”

Now, I really want to compliment Gavin here, because he’s right to point this out. Many Protestant theologians have not had a problem with the idea that the saints are praying for us.

That idea doesn’t usually trickle down to the popular level in Protestant circles—because Protestant pastors almost never mention it from the pulpit—but it’s there on the level of theologians, and I want to give Gavin his props for pointing it out.

Having said that, there is a reason Protestant ministers almost never mention this from the pulpit, which is that if they did preach about the fact that the saints in heaven pray for us, people might draw a natural inference from that and say, “Oh! Well, then maybe I should thank them for what they’re doing. Maybe I should tell them what specifically I want them to pray for.

“Those twenty-four elders in heaven are like twenty-four priests in God’s heavenly temple. Priests intercede for the people. And the ancient Israelites would tell the priests what they were praying for and what they wanted the priests to pray for, so maybe I should do the same thing. I should ask the saints in heaven for their intercession—as well as saying thank you for it.”

So preaching about the intercession of the saints would lead to people asking for their intercession, and Protestant preachers can’t have that, so they basically never preach about this subject.

They’re afraid that people would draw a natural implication from this.

And that gets us to the real issue here. We’re talking about what the implications of the text are.

These texts can be appealed to as an implicit basis for asking the saints for their intercession.

Now, earlier we looked at the two ways that—if we assume sola scriptura is true—Gavin could show that Scripture teaches something:

Westminster Confession of Faith 1:6

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

Either there is an explicit statement in Scripture—so that it is expressly set down in Scripture—or you can deduce the claim by good and necessary consequence from Scripture.

Or, to put it another way:

London Baptist Confession (1689) 1:6

The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down or necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture; unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelation of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

You show that the doctrine is expressly set down in Scripture or that it is necessarily contained in the Holy Scripture.

As we covered, there just aren’t any passages saying, “Don’t ask the saints for their intercession” or even any passages that say “Pray to God alone.” So Gavin can’t appeal to anything that is expressly set down in Scripture.

That means he must appeal to something deduced by good and necessary consequence, something that is necessarily contained in Scripture.

In other words, on sola scriptura, he would have to support this claim by inference.

However, we’ve just seen that the opposite interpretation also can be supported by inference.

So we’re dealing with one inference versus another. Which inference is right?

 

“Necessary” Inference

There are at least two ways one could proceed to break this tie between positions.

One is to look at the kind of inference that sola scriptura requires. It wasn’t just any kind of inference.

The authors of the Westminster Confession said that not only must inferences be good, they must also be necessary, and the authors of the London Baptist Confession said it must be necessarily contained in Scripture.

That word—necessary—is important. The authors of these confessions didn’t want people sneaking doctrines in with some maybe, kinda-sorta, iffy inference. They wanted it proved—really proved—from Scripture alone.

Gavin suggests that he’s using that kind of standard when he says:

GAVIN: Christianity is a revealed religion. We have no authority in ourselves to determine our prayer life or our spiritual life in general, that’s something we look to what God has said to determine.

So if you apply the necessary standard, what happens to the view that Gavin is proposing—that God has taught us not to ask the saints for their intercession?

GAVIN: the Protestant position is pray to God alone.

Well, then this view must meet the necessary inference test, and you can’t do that. You can’t show by inference that it is necessary that we must pray to God alone.

You could maybe, kinda-sorta offer an iffy inference, but not the necessary inference—the proof that the authors of the confessions wanted.

One reason is that Gavin has only an argument from silence, and those are notoriously weak.

Another reason is that Gavin’s argument from silence is only inductive, and inductive arguments are never conclusive.

And a third reason is that there are passages in Scripture that can be taken the other way—like the passages from Revelation 5 and 8 that we saw.

On the other hand, if you reject sola scriptura—or even if you just relax the standard, say to something like, “Just draw whatever inference seems reasonable”—then it would be perfectly reasonable for ordinary Christians to thank the saints and ask for their intercession since they’re doing it anyway.

That’s precisely the natural inference that Protestant pastors don’t want their flocks to draw, which is why they almost never preach on this.

The inference is too natural and too obvious to risk it.

And this kind of inference isn’t just a modern thing. The idea that the saints and angels in heaven intercede for us was not a new idea for the readers of Revelation.

Back in Episode 16 of the podcast, I covered how there is extensive evidence—in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and in other Second Temple Jewish literature—for belief in the idea that angels intercede for us.

And in Episode 97, I responded to a short Gavin put out about relics in which I pointed out that we have extensive evidence for Jewish people honoring the bodies of their ancestors and turning to their ancestors for help. As I said then:

Do we have any evidence for the ancient Israelites seeking help from the dead?

Actually, we do.

In the ancient Near East, it was a widespread belief that there was a reciprocity between the living and the dead. The living respected and cared for the dead—such as by giving them food—and the dead were expected to help the living.

We have evidence of that belief being shared in Israel as well. We’ve already seen that the ancient Israelites gave food to the dead, so they were holding up their end of the bargain. And the evidence indicates that they expected the dead to hold up their end as well.

If you’d like to read more about that, you can consult Elizabeth Bloch-Smith’s book Judahite Burial Practices and Beliefs About the Dead.

Among those practices were the custom of leaving food at the graves of the dead. One passage that mentions this is in the book of Tobit, which says:

Tobit 4:17

Place your bread on the grave of the righteous but give none to sinners.

For most Christians, this counts as a statement of Scripture, but even in the Protestant community, it counts as a Second Temple Era witness to Jewish belief and practice.

And Tobit is far from the only passage testifying to this. As I said in Episode 97,

This custom was so normal in ancient Israel that it’s mentioned in the book of Deuteronomy, which contains special laws for how the Israelites were to tithe.

There were certain things that they were and were not supposed to do with the tithes they offered, and these included regulations connected with burial customs.

Deuteronomy 26:14 states that, when you brought the tithe of the third year, you were supposed to declare:

Deuteronomy 26:14

I have not eaten any of the tithe while in mourning; I have not brought any of it while unclean; I have not offered any of it to the dead.

This forbids using this tithe in three ways: First, the Israelites weren’t supposed to eat any of the tithe while mourning—that is, mourning for the dead; second, they weren’t supposed to bring any of it while unclean—contact with the dead being something that caused ritual uncleanliness; and third, they weren’t supposed to offer any of this tithe to the dead.

Notice that this doesn’t prohibit giving food to the dead. It prohibits using the tithe of the third year for that purpose. You can’t infer that food is not to be offered to the dead from this passage any more than you can infer that you must not eat while you are in mourning or that you can’t touch food while you are unclean.

You obviously can touch food while unclean and eat while you are mourning. The text presupposes those common practices, and so it also presupposes giving food to the dead. It just that you’re not supposed to do that with the tithe of the third year.

As the Jewish Publication Society’s Torah Commentary on Deuteronomy says:

JPS Torah Commentary: Deuteronomy 26:14

This practice was widespread in the ancient world, and it is also attested among some Jews in Second Temple times and later, as in Tobit 4:17: “Pour out your bread and wine on the tomb of the just and give not to sinners.” In some graves excavated at Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom, holes were found in the floors, similar to holes found in tombs at Ugarit, which served as receptacles for food and drink offerings to the dead. The Torah does not forbid this practice, but because contact with the dead is ritually defiling, it prohibits the use of the tithe for it.

So both earlier in Israel’s history—when Deuteronomy was written—and later, in the Second Temple era—when Tobit was written—giving food to the dead was normal. You just didn’t do it with the tithe.

We thus see abundant evidence that, contrary to what Gavin said, the Israelites did honor or venerate the dead—and on an ongoing basis.

So you have people coming back to family graves—year after year—providing food for the dead, and what? Are we expected to believe that they never talked to the dead? That they never told them what was going on in their lives and about challenges they were facing? That they never asked for any help in dealing with those challenges?

This would be a completely unnatural reading of this period in Israelite history and the texts that bear witness to it.

We thus see that it isn’t just New Testament believers who read the book of Revelation that would make the logical inference that you could ask the departed for assistance.

Believers in the Old Testament made the same inference. It would have been happening all the time, and the Old Testament never forbids this practice.

We also see other evidence in the New Testament for Christians having contact with spirits. In 1 John 4, we read:

1 John 4:1

Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God.

So John expects that Christians will have contact with spirits, and he says to test the spirits to see whether they are of God.

That means you have to talk to them. You can’t test a spirit without talking to it. So John expects Christians to talk to spirits.

And—supposing that you talk to a spirit, and supposing that you find out it’s of God—what then? If you know the saints and angels in heaven are already interceding for you, would it be okay to thank the spirit and maybe ask it to keep doing that?

If so, you just asked for the spirit’s intercession.

Now, one response to this would be to say, “Hey, wait! These aren’t human spirits! They’re angelic or demonic spirits!”

I’m sure that they include angelic and demonic spirits—and if you find out you’re talking to a demonic one, then you should sever contact immediately. Hang up on the spirit and don’t take it’s calls.

But if it turns out to be an angelic spirit, that doesn’t settle the issue, because we’ve already seen that the angelic saints in heaven are also interceding for us.

So—again, you might want to say, “Thanks, Mr. Angel, and please keep it up!”

On the other hand, we can’t just assume that these are angelic or demonic spirits.

As I mentioned earlier in this episode—and as I covered in Episode 86, where I responded to Gavin on ghosts—apparitions of departed human spirits are astonishingly common.

As I covered today, 53% of U.S. adults report experiencing at least one apparition of a departed loved one, and the number will be even higher among older folks. So this is a normal part of human experience.

And—what?—if the spirit of a human—or a spirit claiming to be a human—show up, are you not supposed to test it?

Obviously not. John is articulating a general principle that would apply to human spirits as much as angelic or demonic ones.

So, once again, the New Testament expects us to talk to spirits when they show up.

Putting these facts together, we see that:

1. Spirits in heaven are willing to intercede for us.
2. Spirits in heaven do—in fact—intercede for us.
3. Spirits are expected to manifest to the living.
4. The living are expected to test these spirits.
5. The living are expected to talk to these spirits.

And from that it’s a totally natural inference to say thanks and please keep it up to the good ones.

Is it really plausible to expect the reader of the New Testament to say, “Yes, they’re willing to intercede; yes, they do intercede; yes, they do appear; yes, you should text them; and yes, you should talk to them—just don’t say thanks and please keep it up! Never request what they’re already doing!”

That’s a completely unreasonable inference, so the idea that you can show we must not ask the saints for their intercession by good and necessary inference just fails.

A Historical Objection?

GAVIN: Okay, here’s a second counterargument.

GAVIN: Now, since one of the counterarguments will be, well, that’s sola scriptura. You don’t have to have everything clearly in the Bible, even though that’s not actually my argument, my argument was: if this is something that is licit, how likely would it be that there’s no evidence of it? Different argument.

Yeah, that would be a different argument. You could put it like this:

P3. If it’s licit to ask for the saint’s intercession, there would be evidence for it.

P4. There’s no evidence for it.

C2. Therefore, it’s illicit to ask for the saints’ intercession.

The problem is, we’ve just seen that there is evidence for it, including in both the Old and the New Testaments, so this argument fails.

And we’ve already seen why it fails on the sola scriptura argument.

GAVIN: Nonetheless, let’s talk about church history, because another one of the counterarguments will be, yeah, but this has always been a practice in church history. And in response to that, what I want to argue is that actually, no, we have no clear examples of praying to the saints for the first 200 years of church history. And even then, it begins very gradually and modestly, such that medieval praying to saints looks very different from patristic praying to saints. So you have something that slowly comes in after the fact. Two hundred years after the fact of after like the Apostolic Era, and then after like Peter and Paul are dying and so forth, and then it’s slowly building from there.

Okay, so that’s Gavin’s rebuttal to the objection that this has always been present in Church history.

How does Gavin support this claim?

GAVIN: we have whole treatises on prayer written by prominent Christians like Tertullian, Origen, and Cyprian, but they never mention praying to deceased Christians or anything like that.

Okay, so we do have a treatise that deals with prayer from each of the three individuals Gavin just named. We have:

• Origen’s On Prayer
• Tertullian’s On Prayer, and
• Cyprian’s On the Lord’s Prayer

As the name of the last one indicates, Cyprian’s treatise is about the Lord’s Prayer specifically—not prayer in general—so you wouldn’t expect him to address the question we’re interested in. You can cross it off your list.

Tertullian’s treatise is also built around the Lord’s Prayer, though he goes on to talk about proper attitudes and customs. Yet he never gives us an articulation of who it is and isn’t okay to pray to, so you can cross that one off, too.

What about Origen’s On Prayer? Here the answer is straightforward. The words he uses for prayer are Eukhé and Proseukhé, and these are noun forms that correspond to what we discussed earlier. They are words used—specifically—for things you say to a deity—either God or one of the gods.

They are not the words typically used for things you say to another human being.

Now, Origen would say that you’re not to say a proseukhé to a saint—that you’re not to say a divine prayer to them, like you’d do with a god, but that’s different than making a simple request. Since in this work Origen is concerned with divine prayer, he would not be discussing whether it’s okay to merely ask a saint for intercession.

Gavin’s argument from silence thus appeals to works where you would not expect the question of whether it’s okay to ask a departed loved one to pray for you to come up, and so it doesn’t hold force as an argument from silence.

But Gavin goes on to say:

GAVIN: Take Origen, for example. Several years ago I had a back and forth about this with Joe Heschmeyer. I will link to my final video in the video description here if you want to check out my fuller case on Origen, summatively engaging that. But one of the things I pointed out there is that it’s very easy to confuse the saints praying for us and us asking them for their intercession. I think I used the language of the arrow down and the arrow up. And you can’t just assume the arrow down logically requires the arrow up. You need to argue for that, but these two things get pushed together. And this is sometimes what happens when people read a later practice, like praying to the saints, back into someone like Origen. Origen himself is very clear on this topic. Pray to God alone. It’s explicit, it’s emphatic, it’s over and over in his writings. You can see this example on the screen here. There’s many passages where he says this. And that is how he is generally interpreted.

Here Gavin is misreading what Origen says. He’s quoting from Origen’s work Against Celsus, and there are two problems with what he says.

First, the Greek word that Origen uses when he says to pray to God alone is a form of proseukhomai—which is restricted to talking to God or a god. What Origen is saying is that we must make this type of prayer to God alone—not to other gods.

And that’s manifest in the text, because—second—that’s exactly what Origen is talking about here. He’s arguing against Celsus, who argued in favor of praying to demons—or, in Greek, daimones—which they understood to be divine spirits—like gods, not fallen angels.

Origen understands that usage and quotes Psalm 95 from the Septuagint, which says:

Psalm 96:5 (LXX)/Psalm 95:5 (MT)

For all the gods of the nations are demons,
but the Lord made the heavens.

So Origen is here equating demons with pagan gods, and he’s contrasting praying to God with praying to demons, or pagan gods.

You can even see that in the passage Gavin puts on screen; it’s just that he doesn’t highlight this part for you, so it isn’t obvious. Origen says: “Away, then, with this counsel, which Celsus gives us, to offer prayer to demons” and “our duty is to pray to the Most High God alone”

So Origen is saying to make divine prayers only to God, not to demons, and in both cases he uses a form of proseukhomai.

He’s thus not talking about asking people—on earth or in heaven—to intercede for you.

This is not the Greek term you would use if you were talking about that. You’d use another term.

So Gavin is simply misreading and misapplying Origen on this point.

By the way, if you want to look up this passage for yourself, you’ll likely find it in On Prayer 8:26. It looks like Gavin has a typo that’s a chapter different.

 

The Late Third Century?

Now I’d like to look at a related claim Gavin makes, which is that the practice of asking the saints for their intercession was something that came into the Church starting in the late third century.

GAVIN: And then you start to see this practice coming in throughout the patristic era starting in the late third century.

The Third Century is the period between A.D. 201-299, and that’s when Gavin says we start to see this practice arising in Christian circles.

Specifically, he said this started in the late third century

GAVIN: starting in the late third century.

That would mean something like A.D. 275-299 or thereabouts. Much earlier than that, and it would be the mid third century or the early third century.

But we actually do have evidence of asking the departed for their intercession earlier than that, and Gavin mentions some of that evidence:

GAVIN: you do find some other scattered evidence of praying to saints or asking for their intercession starting in the late third century, particularly at the Roman shrine associated with Peter and Paul, where you can see some scratched inscriptions left by Christian pilgrims there, saying things on the wall, things like, “O Peter,” or “O Paul, intercede for us.” People would write this on the wall there.

Here Gavin seems to be referring to the graffiti at the Basilica of San Sebastiano in Rome, but he’s assigning these a late date.

These graffiti—and there are more than 500 of them—appear to have been written over a period of years between A.D. 250-320, and scholars date the earlier ones to around A.D. 250-260, which would be mid third century, not late third century.

However, we can leave that aside, because we have earlier evidence from the Church Father known as St. Hippolytus of Rome.

He wrote a commentary on the book of Daniel, which is the earliest surviving continuous commentary on a book of the Bible and is usually dated to between A.D. 202-211, with A.D. 204 sometimes proposed as the most likely date.

So this is early third century, and maybe right at the beginning of the third century.

In the commentary, Hippolytus is talking about when Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego were in the fiery furnace, and he says:

Commentary on Daniel 2:30:1

Tell me, you three boys—remember me, I entreat you, that I also may obtain the same lot of martyrdom with you—who was the fourth person with you who was walking in the midst of the furnace and who was hymning to God with you as from one mouth?

Notice that he explicitly asks for their intercession, saying, “Remember me, I entreat you, that I also may obtain the same lot of martyrdom with you.”

So Gavin is wrong about us having documentation starting from the late third century. We can show it almost a century earlier than that.

We have it from right at the beginning of the third century.

And it’s very unlikely that our first surviving reference to it is when the practice first developed, simply because of how much material from these early centuries has been lost.

I get a bit annoyed when I hear people like Gavin say things like, “Hey, we don’t have a record of this for four hundred years—or three hundred years—or two hundred years after the apostles,” as if we would expect to have one.

This is like when Jesus mythicists say, “Hey, we don’t have any contemporary records of Jesus Christ from the Romans—like an execution order from Pontius Pilate or things like that.” Because we would not expect to have such a record.

In both cases, an appeal is being made to an era where the vast majority of sources that existed back then have been lost, so we would not expect to have one mentioning what we’re interested in.

This is another argument from silence that lacks a solid foundation.

I’m thinking about doing a video on this subject. If you’d like me to make one, let me know in the comments.

Recently I was doing some preliminary research I could use for such a video, and—as part of that—I calculated how much written religious output we would expect the Christian community to produce based on the growth of the Christian population, the rate of literacy, how much people normally wrote, and so forth.

To cover the period of the Church Fathers, I looked at the first seven centuries, and I found that a good mid-range estimate—neither high nor low—for how much the Christian community would have written about religion was about ~36,000,000,000 words by the year 700.

And remember, that’s a mid-range estimate. I also estimated minimum and maximum numbers, and this is what the central estimate—which was much closer to the lower estimate than the higher estimate—was.

But here’s the thing: that volume comes almost exclusively from the years after Christianity was legalized in the early fourth century, when the Christian population started to explode.

If fact, almost all of that 36 billion was written after the year 300—literally 99% percent of it.

So there was so little Christian writing done before the year 300 that you can’t look on that period as representative of Christian thought.

The Faith was overwhelmingly passed down and discussed in oral form, and the literature from this period can’t be treated as a representative sample on anything that wasn’t a central claim of the Christian faith.

Yes, you can expect central things like God and Jesus to be mentioned, but not tiny, peripheral issues like whether you can ask a departed loved one to pray for you.

You’d be lucky to find such references—and we have been lucky in finding them as early as we have.

Then we have to consider how much of the writing done in this period has survived for us to read it.

The percent varies by century.

We have something around ~150,000 surviving words from the first century, the vast majority of which are in the New Testament.

Comparing that to the central estimate of about ~258,000 words that would have been composed in the first century, the surviving words represent about ~58% of what Christians would have written.

So the survival rate for the first century is a little more than half.

But this changes dramatically when we get to the second century.

The central estimate is that there would have been about ~13,000,000 words composed in the second century—which is vastly more because of the growth in the number of Christians.

But because there was no second century work equivalent to the New Testament that Christians were determined—come hell or high water—to preserve, we only have about ~535,000 words, or half a million, that survive from the second century.

That means the survival rate of Christian writing from the second century plummets to about ~4% of what Christians likely wrote.

The situation gets worse in the third century.

The central estimate is that—because of the growth in the Christian population—about ~368,000,000 words would have been composed—again, much more.

But only ~2,700,000 of these words survive, so the survival rate is pushed down to ~0.7%.

So we have Hippolytus asking for the intercession of the saints right at the beginning of the third century—a century from which only 0.7% of Christian religious writing has survived.

That means that the origin of this practice must be dated earlier, to the second or the first century.

If it was the second century, then we only have 4% of Christian religious writing, which means 96% is missing, and it is very likely that someone in that missing 96% wrote about the same idea.

So we can date asking the saints for their intercession to the second century with confidence.

What about the first century?

Well, it’s certainly possible that someone wrote about this in the first century, but I don’t want to just assert that it was—for two reasons.

First, because—while we can confidently say that someone likely wrote about this before our first surviving record at the beginning of the third century, requiring a second century date—pushing it back two centuries can’t be done with confidence.

And second—and more directly—because the Christian population was so small in the first century and wrote so little that—even though we have a bit more than half of what they wrote—it’s less likely that the idea would have been consigned to writing in the first century.

However, that doesn’t mean the idea is unlikely to date from the first century.

I mean, think about it: How many times do you say a spontaneous prayer off the top of your head—to God, to Jesus, or to anybody else—and then you mentioned that prayer in written form?

The overwhelming majority of spontaneous prayers people say are never mentioned in writing.

I know I say thousands of prayers for every prayer that I mention in something I write.

And the same thing was true of the early Christians.

One way of showing that is by comparing the number of Eucharistic prayers we have in the written record from the first three centuries.

You know how many clearly survive? One. That one is found in the Didache 9-10.

It’s also possible that we have a second one in another work known as Apostolic Tradition 4, but it’s debated whether this was penned before or after 300.

And it’s claimed that the core of the Anaphora of St.s Mari and Addi comes from this period, but—again—that’s uncertain.

So we have somewhere between 1 and 3 Eucharistic prayers from this period, but we know Christians were praying at the Eucharist every week—or even more frequently.

And they were usually praying extemporaneously, so the ratio of thousands of spontaneous prayers for every one that gets written down.

So think about it: If the first written record—now lost—of asking the saints for their intercession was in the second century, then that would have been preceded by thousands of spoken requests of the same nature that weren’t written down.

And that’s for each Christian who made such prayers.

When you take into account the fact that there were around 64,000 Christians by the year 200, it would actually be many times that.

So we have to push the idea of asking the saints for their intercession back well before it got written down.

People usually don’t get an idea and immediately write it down. The development of an idea is inevitably earlier than its first written mention, let alone its first surviving mention.

So if our first surviving mention is at the beginning of the third century and the first, now-lost written mention was in the second century, then it is very likely that the idea itself dates back to the first century.

That puts us in the realm where we have texts like the one we saw in Revelation 5 and also the one we saw the one in Revelation 8 describing how human and angelic spirits are already interceding for us.

And given the frequent contact that early Christians had with spirits—as illustrated throughout the New Testament—and particularly by the warning we saw in 1 John 4, it is highly likely that some Christians would have drawn the natural inference to thank them and ask them to please keep up with the intercession.

Given that we have abundant evidence from the Old Testament and Second Temple eras for the idea of the departed and angels interceding for us—some of which I covered in Episode 16—it’s highly likely that Old Testament believers had already drawn this implication.

This is all the more reinforced when you realize that studies consistently show around half of all adults—in multiple cultures around the world—report spontaneous After Death Communications.

Well, our age is not special in this regard. Departed loved ones have been showing up all the way through human history, including in the Old Testament era—and in the New Testament era.

So if you’ve been in contact with your departed loved ones, you’re quite likely to ask them for help, and so—just speaking sociologically—it’s highly likely that believers have been asking for such help all the way through history.

It’s just that they weren’t worshipping their ancestors as deities, and so this didn’t rise to the level of being explicitly discussed in ancient Israelite literature, though we do see traces of it—both in the literature and archaeologically.

It’s thus very likely that asking the departed for help not only goes back to the first century but much farther than that.

But there’s another factor which needs to be mentioned, which is that we don’t even need the idea to go back to the first century.

We would if we were adhering to a super rigid version of sola scriptura that says every practice must be explicitly authorized in Scripture. Or one that says you have to be able to rigidly prove every practice from Scripture.

But the vast majority of Protestants don’t hold such a view—at least not when it’s inconvenient for them.

Instead, they will default back to the idea that Christian practices are reasonable as long as they don’t contradict Scripture and are—well—reasonable.

But such ideas may take a while to emerge in Christian consciousness. They may not go all the way back to the first century.

Like using organs to perform music in church. Organs weren’t even invented in the first century, so the idea of using them took a while to emerge.

All that’s required is that a reasonable idea emerges at some point in Christian history and—thereafter—it’s reasonable to embrace it.

We’ve already seen that the idea of asking the saints to pray for us is reasonable—that’s why Protestant preachers almost never preach about the intercession of the saints. They’re afraid their congregations would draw the reasonable inference from this.

So it isn’t necessary that this idea go back to the first century. It’s perfectly fine for it to emerge later in Church history.

But—in fact—we do have evidence suggesting that it goes back to the first century. In fact—based on what we know about Israelite beliefs and practices regarding the dead—we have evidence that it goes back centuries before that.

Asking the Living For Intercession

GAVIN: All right, but here’s a final objection. If we ask for the intercession of living Christians, why not ask for the intercession of deceased Christians? Which as such is a fair appeal, and it’s definitely a good response to some of the weaker arguments against praying to the saints.

I want to compliment Gavin on acknowledging this. The fact that we can ask fellow Christians here on earth to be our prayer partners is a powerful argument that we can ask our fellow Christians in heaven to be our prayer partners, too.

But Gavin has two rejoinders to this argument. Here’s the first:

GAVIN: We cannot simply assume that communicating to a Christian on earth works the same as communicating to a Christian in heaven. The Christian in heaven is not there right next to you in the same way that the Christian on earth is, and therefore we need to look to God’s revelation for how we are to relate to those who are currently in heaven.

Gavin doesn’t articulate this one that clearly, but what is clear is that he thinks we can’t communicate with those in heaven the way we can fellow with Christians here on earth. It’s also clear that he thinks that—as a result of this—we need to look to God’s revelation to tell us whether it’s okay to communicate with them.

From that we could infer one of his premises and a conclusion:

1. We can’t communicate with people in heaven the way we can people on earth.
2. Therefore, we need to consult God’s revelation to see if it’s okay to communicate with them.

But that’s not an argument. We’d need at least one more premise to flesh it out into one.

The argument is underdeveloped enough that I don’t want to try to fill in what such a premise would be, but simply considering what we have of the argument reveals that it isn’t a successful one.

Consider communicating with a Christian in this life who isn’t right next to us the way another Christian on earth is.

GAVIN: not there right next to you in the same way that the Christian on earth is.

The relevant factor isn’t whether they’re right next to me or not. The relevant factor is whether they will learn what I want to tell them.

In this life, I could call a distant Christian on the phone and tell them in real time. Or I could write them a note and leave it where I know they will find it.

As long as they receive what I want to communicate, that’s what counts for communication.

And I don’t need to go rushing off to God’s revelation to find out if it’s okay for me to call them on the phone or leave them a note.

The mere fact that I can’t communicate with them the way I can a person who’s right next to me doesn’t require that.

So as long as one of the departed receives my message, that’s what counts.

And we know they do receive our messages—for example—in cases of apparitions. If your departed wife shows up in a spontaneous After Death Communication and you tell her something, then she knows it.

We also have good evidence that the same is true of those in heaven. Like in Revelation 5, where the saints in heaven are interceding based on our prayers.

So they’re aware of prayers we’ve made, even when we weren’t speaking to them. That gives us good evidence that they would be aware if we did speak to them directly.

Even if we’re wrong about that, that wouldn’t make it unreasonable to ask for their intercession.

That would be like leaving a note for a person where I thought they’d find it. Even if they didn’t actually come and find the note, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to leave one.

But—bottom line—if it’s okay for me to say something to a distant person in this life, such as by using a phone or a note, then it should be okay to say something to a person who’s distant in the afterlife.

It’s all just communication, and that’s what reason tells us—unless God overrules common sense and says, “No! You must not tell people something by phone! You must not tell people by notes! You must not tell people by speaking when you have good evidence that they’ll get the message!” then it’s reasonable to do so.

So this argument fails.

Now here’s Gavin’s second rebuttal.

 

“It Looks Different”

GAVIN: But second, in their actual on-the-ground practice and consequence, asking for the intercession of saints in heaven often looks very different from asking for your Christian brother or sister to intercede for you in this world on earth.

So that’s the premise Gavin’s going to explore, but before we get to it, Gavin mentions something else.

GAVIN: I did a one video on this topic like four or five years ago, something like that, and repeated it in a short from that video. But let me just reiterate and clarify this concern. Because Jimmy Akin made a response to me on this topic of praying to the saints. And one of my concerns with his response is he frequently will do about an hour or so rebuttal video to a one-minute short even though the short is just an extract from a longer video, and the longer video that it’s extracted from explicitly anticipates the critiques he gives. So this is not as productive because if he were to just go to the longer video, he would see I’m addressing many of his arguments. So for example, in my longer video on this topic, I emphasize how praying to the saints has often played out on the ground historically. And I work through examples.

I think Gavin’s memory is fuzzy here. I’ve only posted three videos where I’ve responded to a short Gavin made.

The first was in Episode 38 of the podcast, where I interacted with his short on the subject of assurance.

The second was a one-off video where I interacted with a short he did on praying to the saints.

And the third was in Episode 97 of the podcast, where I interacted with his short about relics.

So the only video I’ve done where I interacted with a short of his on the subject of the saints’ intercession was the one-off I did.

But that wasn’t an hour long. It was less than two minutes long, and half of it was replaying Gavin’s argument.

The problems with his argument were so obvious that in the second half of the video, I just repeated his script exactly—except for one word I changed, and then I added two sentences at the end:

It’s like Paul says right here in 1 Thessalonians 5:25: “Brothers, pray for us.”

Dang! That’s not what St. Paul was supposed to say.

So that demonstrates I can be concise when the point is obvious. When I spend longer, it’s because the person raises points that there is a lot of evidence against.

But it also suggests that this isn’t the video Gavin was thinking of. It’s not one where I spent anything like an hour on a video he made 4 or 5 years ago.

He may be confusing it with Episode 97, but that one was about relics—not the intercession of the saints.

And, as I explained in Episode 97:

Now, one of the things about shorts is that they are new, self-contained works, and so it’s legitimate for the audience to interpret them as self-contained works.

You’re putting them out there to represent your views on a subject, you chose to represent your work the way the short does, and you know that the vast majority of the people who watch the short will never go back and watch the full video.

A few of them may, but the large majority of them won’t. So you have to make sure that the short accurately represents your views and that it stands on its own.

If you don’t—and the short misrepresents your views in some way—then that’s on you.

Publishing a short is like publishing an article that’s excerpted from a book. You can count on people reading the article, but you can’t count on them reading the book, so the article needs to stand on its own, and criticism of it is legitimate.

Now, it so happens that I did watch Gavin’s longer video on relics that his short was based on, and he didn’t raise the rebuttal he makes here in it.

He did raise the argument he’s advancing here in his earlier video about praying to the saints, but I didn’t raise it in my less-than-two-minutes short.

I responded to the single argument he made in his short, and I can scarcely be faulted for responding to what he did say in the short but not what he didn’t say in it.

If our roles were reversed, I wouldn’t criticize Gavin for responding to an argument I made in a short by saying “Hey, you should have responded to this other argument I made elsewhere!”

I would understand that Gavin doesn’t have time to respond to everything I’ve ever said on a subject, so it’s fair for him to select what he has time to respond to.

Though maybe he’s not making that criticism, because it looks like Gavin may have just been confused about the video I made.

Gavin also apparently had a memory slip in his relics video—where he referred to the non-existent 26th session of the Council of Trent and said that Trent didn’t acknowledge superstition regarding relics, when it actually did.

So—as I said in Episode 97—it might be a good idea to check things you’re going to criticize before hitting record—rather than relying on fuzzy memories.

But now let’s deal with the rebuttal Gavin makes, which is that asking the saints for their intercession can look different than asking a living saint to pray for you.

He elaborates this argument by saying:

GAVIN: And one of the concerns that I give is that frequently Mary will be petitioned to do certain things in medieval prayers especially, that are actually the work of Jesus, like placating the wrath of God. Sometimes we’ll even find, as you can see on screen, medieval prayers asking Mary to placate Jesus. And this is an example of this on-the-ground consequence I’m raising a concern about.

GAVIN: But the reason this matters is I want us to have a clear understanding of the gospel. Jesus does not need to be placated by Mary or anyone else. His work at the cross is sufficient such that he’s not needing to be placated.

In this part of the video, Gavin refers a few times to the gospel, and he needs to be very careful here, because the concept of the gospel is widely misunderstood.

People—especially in the Protestant tradition—talk about the gospel a lot when they’re using the word incorrectly.

That’s something I talked about in Episode 27 of the podcast, so you can check that out for more information.

Gavin—in keeping with the Protestant tradition—also has a bee in his bonnet about poetic language about Mary placating Jesus. That’s something he brings up regularly when he discusses this.

I’m considering making a video about the error that’s involved in this reasoning and how it misrepresents Scripture. If you’ve like me to do such a video, let me know in the comments.

In any event, Gavin’s larger point is that when people ask for the intercession of the saints, they sometimes say things he doesn’t approve of.

And let’s just grant that he’s absolutely right about all the criticisms he makes about particular statements in these prayers.

Let’s just stipulate that those are all abuses, and people should not say or think them, because stipulating that will let us see the flaw in Gavin’s reasoning.

GAVIN: The point to reiterate here is that is nothing like going to my living friend on earth and asking for their intercession. When I go to a Christian and when I go to see my friend at church and say, “Would you please intercede for me?” I’m never saying to them, “Please placate Jesus” or “I pledge myself to you alone” and so forth. And so it’s fair game for us to look at the on-the-ground reality of how this plays out and the dangers.

Okay. Fair game is fair game. Let’s look at how this argument can be framed.

P5. If people ask the saints for their intercession, some will say things they shouldn’t.

P6. People shouldn’t say things they shouldn’t.

C3. Therefore, people shouldn’t ask the saints for their intercession.

Does that argument work? Let’s consider a parallel.

P5’. If you let people preach the gospel, some will say things they shouldn’t.

P6’. People shouldn’t say things they shouldn’t.

C3’. Therefore, people shouldn’t preach the gospel.

Or how about this one?

P5”. If you let people eat food, some will overeat.

P6”. People shouldn’t overeat.

C3”. Therefore, people shouldn’t eat food.

You can see the problem. This is a terrible argument.

Even if Gavin is absolutely right that people have said all kinds of things they shouldn’t when asking the saints for their intercession—and I’m happy to grant that, because people have said all kinds of things they shouldn’t—this does not prove that the practice itself is wrong.

Saying things to Mary or the saints that one shouldn’t—and it really is Mary that is the concern here, because people don’t tend to say extravagant things to other saints—would be an abuse.

But the abuse of something does not invalidate its proper use.

That’s something that has been recognized going way back. There’s an old Latin saying: Abusus non tollit usum, or The abuse does not take away the use.

So you can’t appeal to abuses of the invocation of the saints to take away their proper invocation—any more than you can appeal to people preaching false gospels to take away the legitimate preaching of the gospel or any more than you can appeal to overeating to stop people from eating at all.

The fallaciousness of this reasoning is so clear that it goes back to the Greeks.

If you read a textbook on logic and informal fallacies, you’ll find this listed under Aristotle’s Fallacy of Accident, where you treat an accident—like the abuse of something—with the thing itself.

So Gavin’s argument on this is just fallacious.

I’m all for stamping out theological abuses, but that doesn’t invalidate the things that they are abuses of.

 

Conclusion

Gavin finishes up by saying:

GAVIN: So the position is pray to God alone because that’s what God himself actually taught us to do.

Well, that may be the position, but it’s not what God himself has actually taught us to do.

We’ve already seen that there are no explicit statements in Scripture that say “Don’t ask the saints for their invocation” or even any explicit statements that say “Pray to God alone.”

Even if there were, they’d be referring to divine prayer—not the simple person-to-person asking that we do all the time.

There also is no way to derive this teaching from Scripture by good and necessary inference because there is no collection of passages you can put together that require this as a conclusion.

All one can do is make an inductive argument from silence, and it’s not even a good argument from silence, because there are other passages from which one can draw the very natural conclusion that you can ask the saints for their intercession.

From the New Testament, we know that:

1. Spirits in heaven are willing to intercede for us.
2. Spirits in heaven do—in fact—intercede for us.
3. Spirits are expected to manifest to the living.
4. The living are expected to test these spirits.
5. The living are expected to talk to these spirits.

And—while you’re talking to a good spirit—it’s perfectly natural to draw the conclusion that we can thank them for their intercession and ask them to keep it up.

It’s to avoid this conclusion that Protestant pastors basically never preach about the intercession of the saints.

When it comes to the historical evidence for the practice, we can show it in the surviving written record in the early A.D. 200s, which means it would have been put to paper in the A.D. 100s, and it is very probable that the practice itself goes back into the apostolic age.

In fact—given what we know about pre-Christian Judaism—it almost certainly was occurring for centuries before that.

And we don’t even need that to be the case. All we need is for this to be a reasonable inference, and it is a reasonable inference!

As often pointed out, if I can ask a fellow Christian here on earth to pray for me, then there’s no reason I can’t do the same with a fellow Christian in heaven.

The mere fact that some people might abuse this practice when it comes to heavenly Christians does not mean I can’t talk to them any more than the mere fact you could say something bad to a Christian here on earth means you can’t talk to Christians here on earth.

So, Gavin is mistaken. God has not taught us not to ask the saints for their intercession, and doing so is imminently reasonable.

Now, as I said earlier in the video, I’m glad that Gavin pointed out that various Protestants have no trouble with the idea that the saints are interceding for us.

I would go a bit further and point something else out.

I’ve long thought that—if I were Protestant—I wouldn’t really have a problem with others asking the saints for their intercession. It might not be my thing or my tradition’s thing, but it’s certainly not something God has forbidden—and so it’s something that would be permitted under Christian liberty.

And it’s not just me that would conclude that. In the year 2000, the German Lutheran-Catholic dialogue issued a document called Communio Sanctorum or The Communion of the Saints, and in it they said:

Communio Sanctorum 243

Together we bear witness to the communion of saints that in the risen Christ includes both the living and the dead (Rom 14:7-9). In the manner in which we express this communion in worship services and in personal spiritual lives, differences exist between our churches. 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.

I’d say that’s a reasonable minimum, and if I were still Protestant, I might join the other Protestants we mentioned at the beginning of the episode in actually going further by asking the saints . . . for their intercession.

* * *

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Thank you, and I’ll see you next time

God bless you always!

 

VIDEO SOURCES:

Gavin’s video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZI6LU4BcYp8

Geoffrey Wainwright’s speech: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q8DFWpW9Rw