Clarence Oddbody: Saints preserve us!

Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Saints preserve us!

If you are a Christian and believe other Christians can pray with you and for you,

and

If you believe those Christians live on after death[1],

and

If you believe the departed continue to exercise worshipful behavior after death as they did in life,

and

If you believe that some sorts of human behavior penetrate the divine realm and vice versa (prayer, grace, etc),

then

I see no immediately obvious objection that some folks who've passed on may still be available for prayer requests.[2]

[1]
This means different things to different folks. For Baptists, it means having been a born-again believer; for Catholics it typically means having been baptized and in full communion at the time of death (full communion includes belief). For the purpose of this syllogism, all I'm asking is if you believe each postulate at each step in some form or fashion.

Interesting chart here... "Comparison of Christian Denominations' Beliefs", including "Means of Salvation."

[2]
A "prayer request" in the Baptist tradition is typically a concern vocalized in a small group asking others who are listening to pray on the speaker's behalf or the behalf of someone else; the request can be (and often is) for someone not present or unknown to the rest. Some Baptists maintain very long prayer request lists and pray for the same people and needs daily, often for years, especially if the need is for salvation or a slowly deteriorating health issue.

These prayers are not rote, but they are often very similar one day to the next. If you listen to them (the prayers are often public), they are intimate and conversational.

All of this is to lay some foundation for the concept of "communion of the saints," which refers in part to this type relationship Christians have to each other and to Christ, both in this world and the next.

Where Baptists part company with their Catholic brothers is in believing the relationship continues in like manner after death; ie, that you can talk to the dead, they listen, and they in turn can talk to God, who also listens, like a spiritual game of telephone.

There is no more evidence for this than the parting of the Red Sea or the miracle of wine at Cana; it has some limited biblical support (Maccabees, Hebrews and Revelation), but the practice is largely church tradition as far as I can tell; even so, it's a very old tradition, and endurance has merit when discerning such matters (see my recent post here) .

Related: there's an element of goddess worship that characterizes Marian devotion. It doesn't trouble me, but it's there, and that is all most folks outside Catholicism see. However, just because A looks a lot like B doesn't mean A = B.

Example 1: I remember going through mail order catalogs as a child and encountering microwave ovens. They looked remarkably like the portable TV sets of the day, which were expensive and rare. How sad, I thought, to expend so much energy making something look like a TV set that is not a TV set.

Example 2: I remember being introduced to bagels. I have since learned to like them, but as a child wondered why in the world someone would go to so much trouble to make something that looks like a donut but is not a donut.