Saints
Why don’t protestants venerate saints? The reasons they give don’t add up. Can it lead to idolatry? Lots of things can lead to idolatry. You can idolize pastors or musicians. That is no reason to ban something. Is it because it is not in the bible? The bible talks at least as much about saints as it does small group ministry. Yet they have no problem with that. What is the real reason?
Suppose a protestant church tried to venerate some saints. What would happen? First of all there would be huge debate about which saints should be venerated and what should be the process for deciding. So their model of church is really lousy at making decisions so they have to try and minimize decision-making. Rejecting the saints means they get to pass on thousands of debates which would leave them snookered over and over again. Their only solution is schism so it would be a disaster from that point of view.
The other issue they would have is it would highlight how much protestant Christianity changes from generation to generation. I know in the Christian Reformed church there is precious little that has not changed since I was a child. So it would be very hard to venerate anyone from that time and that is less than 50 years ago.
CS Lewis died in 1963. Could he be a protestant saint? He was strongly opposed to contraception. He believed in purgatory. He could not pass the kind of scrutiny that Catholics apply to saints. So what do you do? Lower the standard and accept a lot of people? That does not seem right. The only thing you can do is to accept nobody. So you may as well try and turn it into a virtue. To say we don’t have saints because we are so holy rather than saying we don’t have saints because we are dysfunctional.
The church does recognize a danger in venerating somebody who is not in heaven. They get around this problem by waiting for miracles to be verified and studying the life of the person in great detail. But at the end of the day we still need the gift on infallibility to insure the canonized person is in heaven. So they can avoid this danger only by God’s special grace.
Protestants would get this wrong all the time. Some denominations love to make grand assurances of salvation to many people. They don’t believe in purgatory so they would have no rationale for saying they should not be saints. But people know intuitively that not everyone is a saint. That there are special Christians whose holiness continues to bless us even after they have died. But they are special. Protestants have no room in their theology for that. We know on a human level that a person can have a great effect after his death. We think of Martin Luther King and Abraham Lincoln. There is no reason to think such a thing is not possible in the spiritual realm as well. It is counter-intuitive. It is not biblical. It goes against historical Christianity.
[...] Uhm, it might be a way to define themselves as not-Catholic? [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:16 am
The reformers were all about justification and papal authority. So matters directly related to one of those two make sense to me. On the surface the saints don’t seem related to either. I don’t think they just wanted to make themselves more non-Catholic.
June 23rd, 2009 at 8:37 amI’m surprized Ken didn’t chime in here. Must be distracted.
June 23rd, 2009 at 9:25 pm