Tuesday, November 23, 2021

Carl R. Trueman on Luther's Prayer to St. Anne and Intercession of the Saints from a Reformed Perspective

Commenting on Luther’s prayer to Saint Anne and the longstanding belief among Reformed Protestants that intercession of saints is repugnant, Carl R. Trueman wrote:

 

The primary focus of Reformation polemics on prayer was the notion of the intercession of the saints. It addressed the idea that certain saints in heaven could plead on behalf of the living and gain favor with God for them. Ironically, a classic example of this medieval notion in practice comes from Martin Luther himself. When caught in a violent thunderstorm in 1505, Luther cried out: “Saint Anne, save me, and I will become a monk!” This was a fateful prayer because it led Luther to the Augustinian cloister in Erfurt, and the rest, as they say, is history. Luther’s prayer that day triggered events that would eventually lead him to refute the practice of praying to saints, yet at the time his response to the moment of crisis was entirely conventional. Saint Anne was the patron saint of miners (and, as it happens, of those caught in storms), the business in which Luther’s father was engaged, and in praying this way Luther represented the general practice of the time (looking to individual saints for help) and the specific piety of his own home.

 

I would add that we need to be careful before we dismiss all questions of the intercession of saints as unbiblical. The Bible is filled with examples of individuals interceding on behalf of others. There is Abraham in Genesis 18 praying for Sodom and Gomorrah, and Moses frequently interceding for the people of Israel as they sin during the desert wanderings. While we can read these Old Testament examples typologically, pointing toward the great intercession of the Lord Jesus Christ on behalf of his people, intercession on behalf of others continues both in example and precept in the New Testament. Paul remembers the churches constantly in his prayers. James indicates that the elders of the church are meant to pray for the healing of the sick. The idea of one Christian interceding with God on behalf of another is not an unbiblical idea. Most of you reading this book will no doubt have asked other Christians to pray with you and for you at various times.

 

Medieval Catholicism, however, made the saints themselves the object of intercession. There is a difference between someone praying to God on your behalf and praying to someone else, asking them to intercede for you. Nobody prayed to Abraham in order that he might intercede with God for them. Yet the prayer elicited by the thunderbolt that nearly killed Martin Luther in 1505 rests on a history of theological tradition and popular piety. In Luther’s mind, his physical safety depended on the intercessory intervention of Saint Anne, the patron saint of miners. Saint Anne, of course, was already dead and in heaven. Luther was locating the power of intercession in the person of a departed saint. Luther later came to reject this position because he felt that the theology that surrounded it derogated from the uniqueness of Christ. (Carl R. Trueman, Grace Alone Salvation as a Gift of God: What the Reformers Taught . . . and Why it Still Matters [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2017], 218-19)

 

In the footnote to the above, Trueman added that:

 

We might concede at this point that a construction can be placed on this intercession of the saints is not far from the Protestant practice of having other Christians pray for us. The real danger in the Roman position is not that it involves others praying on our behalf but that it is rooted in a notion of sainthood as something that only a subset of especially spiritual Christians possess. This would seem to make their prayers more effective because of some intrinsic quality that they possess and that derogates from the honor of Christ, which is why Luther came to oppose this notion in later years. (Ibid., 219 n. 1)