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Japanese Yes, Protestants believe in saints, and they use the word the way the New Testament does, for every believer in Christ. Paul addressed his letters “to the saints” of whole churches. What Protestants do not do is pray to saints or canonize them, though Lutheran and Anglican churches keep calendars that remember Christians of the past.
Paul gave the name to ordinary people: he called the Corinthians saints in the opening lines of a letter that goes on to rebuke them for their quarrels. Holiness, as he used the word, is what God calls a whole people to, “together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:2). So when a Protestant hears the word “saints,” he can look along the pew on Sunday morning.
What does the Bible mean by “saints”?
The Greek word is hagios, “holy,” and in the plural hagioi, “holy ones.” Reference works agree that the New Testament uses it of all believers, almost always in the plural, and usually of a whole congregation rather than of one exceptional Christian. Paul opens Romans “To all those in Rome who are loved by God and called to be saints” (Romans 1:7), and First Corinthians “to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 1:2). Ephesians and Philippians begin the same way (Ephesians 1:1; Philippians 1:1).
When Paul called the Corinthians saints, he was not praising how they lived. The same letter goes on to report “quarreling among you” (1 Corinthians 1:11) and a case of “sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that is not tolerated even among pagans” (1 Corinthians 5:1). Luke uses the word of living Christians too, when Ananias objects that Saul has done evil “to your saints at Jerusalem” (Acts 9:13).
Do Protestants pray to saints?
Protestants do not pray to saints, and the confessions of the Reformation say so in plain words. The Augsburg Confession (1530) allows the memory of the saints “that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling,” and then adds that “the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor.” Behind that sentence stands 1 Timothy 2:5: “there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus.” The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England call the “invocation of Saints” a “fond thing vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture” (article 22). The Westminster Confession, which Presbyterians hold, gives religious worship to God “and to him alone; not to angels, saints, or any other creature” (21.2), and the 1689 Baptist Confession repeats the sentence. It is here that Protestants part from Catholic and Orthodox practice, prayer to Mary included.
The Lutherans did grant one thing, in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: the saints in heaven “pray for the Church universal in general,” as they did while they were alive. Even so, the Apology declines to call on them.
Are there Protestant saints?
Some Protestant churches keep calendars of saints, and the same Apology names three ways to honor one: thanksgiving, the strengthening of faith, and “the imitation, first, of faith, then of the other virtues.” Lutherans have kept such a calendar since the Reformation, and both current worship books, the Lutheran Service Book (2006) and Evangelical Lutheran Worship (2006), carry one. The ELCA remembers Johann Sebastian Bach on July 28, Dietrich Bonhoeffer on April 9 and Martin Luther King Jr. on January 15. In the Church of England, the Common Worship calendar ranks its days as Principal Feasts, Festivals, Lesser Festivals and Commemorations, and among its names are William Tyndale (October 6), Francis of Assisi (October 4), Martin Luther (October 31), John Calvin (May 26) and John and Charles Wesley (May 24). All Saints’ Day on November 1 is a principal feast there, as it is in the Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer, which also provides for commemorations of other Christians.
How is that different from Catholic canonization?
A Protestant calendar is a list of people to remember, set by a church’s own synods and worship books, while canonization is a judgment about a person in heaven. By canonizing, the Catholic Church is “solemnly proclaiming that they practiced heroic virtue and lived in fidelity to God’s grace,” and it proposes the saints to believers “as models and intercessors” (Catechism 828). On the way, a cause passes through four titles: Servant of God, Venerable, Blessed and Saint. A martyr can be declared Blessed without a miracle. Anyone else needs one confirmed miracle to be beatified, and a second, after that, to be canonized. The Catechism also teaches that those in heaven “do not cease to intercede with the Father for us” (956), and that is the step the confessions will not take. The Orthodox churches glorify a saint by a decision of their synod, after the faithful have already been venerating the person, and the Orthodox Church in America notes that miracles are “not an absolute necessity.”
What does “the communion of saints” mean?
Catholics and Protestants both keep the phrase, which comes from the Apostles’ Creed. The Catechism explains that “after confessing ‘the holy catholic Church,’ the Apostles’ Creed adds ‘the communion of saints,’” and concludes that “the communion of saints is the Church” (946). The Westminster Confession gives a chapter to it: “All saints, that are united to Jesus Christ their Head, by his Spirit, and by faith, have fellowship with him” (26.1). Where they differ is in how far that fellowship reaches. Catholic teaching includes asking the prayers of the saints in heaven, while the Reformed confessions keep the communion between Christ and his people, and among believers on earth. Either way, when we say the Creed we are speaking of the people Paul wrote to, quarrels and all, those “called to be saints” (1 Corinthians 1:2).
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