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)