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my non catholic friends and other websites have given me these arguments and id like to see what the response/argument from a catholic. here goes
“And when He had taken the book, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell down before the Lamb, having each one a harp, and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints. 9 And they sang a new song, saying, “Worthy art Thou to take the book, and to break its seals; for Thou wast slain, and didst purchase for God with Thy blood men from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. 10 “And Thou hast made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.” 11 And I looked, and I heard the voice of many angels around the throne and the living creatures and the elders; and the number of them was myriads of myriads, and thousands of thousands, 12 saying with a loud voice, “Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power and riches and wisdom and might and honor and glory and blessing.” 13 And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying, “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.” 14 And the four living creatures kept saying, “Amen.” And the elders fell down and worshiped,” Rev 5:8-14
Let’s look at this section of scripture from the Roman Catholic perspective and then analyze their position.
Verse 8 says speaks of the “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” Verses 9-10 speak of a new song sung in heaven. Verse 11 speaks of those around the throne of God and verse 12 says that they were saying “Worthy is the Lamb…” Verse 13 mentions every created thing in heaven and earth saying, “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.”
We have no problem with those in heaven hearing what is said on earth. Many Christians deny that this is possible, but it seems to be clearly taught here. Does this justify the Roman Catholic teaching of praying to those who are in heaven? Not at all. Let’s take a look at the verses.First, regarding verse 8, can the prayers be authored by those who are already in heaven? It doesn’t say. There are different interpretations on exactly who the saints are because their identity can’t be precisely demonstrated; after all, Revelation is a highly symbolic book. Therefore, if it cannot be conclusively demonstrated who they are, then it cannot be conclusively demonstrated whose prayers they are, either. Nevertheless, verse 9 says “they sang a new song.” Who is the “they”? It would have to be either the the four living creatures and/or the 24 elders since “prayers of the saints” don’t sing, “creatures” and “elders” do the singing.
In verse 11-12 the angels, the creatures, and the elders who were all around the throne (which means they are in heaven) were praising God directly. In verse 13 it says every created thing in heaven and earth was praising God, then the elders fell down and worshiped, v. 14.
Second, just because those in heaven can hear the prayers of those on Earth does not mean that is okay to pray to saints. If they can hear the prayers of people it is because God grants that to them. Think about it. Can those in heaven hear the prayers uttered without speech? Can they read minds? It is only God who knows all things and only God can grant anyone to hear or know what the prayers are of those who pray in silence. Let’s not give the saints superhuman powers similar to omniscience. Nevertheless, all the text is saying is that they can hear the praise and worship of God. It does not say that they are to be prayed to, nor does it imply praying to them is permitted. All it says is that they can hear the prayers and praise. There is nothing suggesting that those on Earth are requesting the prayers or intercession of those in heaven. Nothing like this is in the text or even hinted at.
Third, even if the case can be made that prayers are authored in heaven, and that those prayers are mingled with the prayers of those from Earth, it still does not justify those on Earth praying to those in heaven. At best, all that we can say is that the prayers of those in heaven and the prayers of those on Earth are mingled. To say any more than that is to read into the Scripture what is not there.
Fourth, can the saints in heaven hear every prayer of every creature all the time? The Roman Catholic Church prefers to say that it’s possible; otherwise, it would not be possible to legitimately pray to Mary. The standard Protestant objection is that praying to the saints implies a type of omniscience on the hearers’ part. The Roman Catholic Church replies that we do not know what the state is of those in heaven and that we should not therefore conclude that they cannot hear all of our prayers. But this is an argument from silence. In other words, we don’t know what it is like so we conclude it’s possible. It is an argument based on what do don’t know, not what we do know. This is a very, very weak way of trying to present a position. Ultimately, it is an admission by the Roman Catholic Church that the Scriptures do not teach in any direct way their dogma of praying to the saints. The Roman Catholic Church must infer it from scripture and read into the text in order to support its error.
Because this is a commonly asked question, along with other false assertions made against the Catholic Church by sects that have only been around for two or three hundred years, I’ve posted the information below from Karl Keating’s Catholic Answers web page. It will save on my having to type out the reply. One of the issues, (from my perspective) is that Protestant detractors of the Catholic Church tend to isolate texts outside of the context. Whereas the Catholic Church looks at the Bible as a whole, not simply a book of rules, but as the Story of how God revealed Himself to us, and the action of Salvation.
[b:1p7dntlx]Praying to the Saints[/b:1p7dntlx]
The historic Christian practice of asking our departed brothers and sisters in Christ the saints for their intercession has come under attack in the last few hundred years. Though the practice dates to the earliest days of Christianity and is shared by Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, the other Eastern Christians, and even some Anglicans meaning that all-told it is shared by more than three quarters of the Christians on earth it still comes under heavy attack from many within the Protestant movement that started in the sixteenth century.
[b:1p7dntlx]Can They Hear Us?[/b:1p7dntlx]
One charge made against it is that the saints in heaven cannot even hear our prayers, making it useless to ask for their intercession. However, this is not true. As Scripture indicates, those in heaven are aware of the prayers of those on earth. This can be seen, for example, in Revelation 5:8, where John depicts the saints in heaven offering our prayers to God under the form of “golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.” But if the saints in heaven are offering our prayers to God, then they must be aware of our prayers. They are aware of our petitions and present them to God by interceding for us.
Some might try to argue that in this passage the prayers being offered were not addressed to the saints in heaven, but directly to God. Yet this argument would only strengthen the fact that those in heaven can hear our prayers, for then the saints would be aware of our prayers even when they are not directed to them!
In any event, it is clear from Revelation 5:8 that the saints in heaven do actively intercede for us. We are explicitly told by John that the incense they offer to God are the prayers of the saints. Prayers are not physical things and cannot be physically offered to God. Thus the saints in heaven are offering our prayers to God mentally. In other words, they are interceding.
[b:1p7dntlx]One Mediator[/b:1p7dntlx]
Another charge commonly levelled against asking the saints for their intercession is that this violates the sole mediatorship of Christ, which Paul discusses: “For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim. 2:5).
But asking one person to pray for you in no way violates Christ’s mediatorship, as can be seen from considering the way in which Christ is a mediator. First, Christ is a unique mediator between man and God because he is the only person who is both God and man. He is the only bridge between the two, the only God-man. But that role as mediator is not compromised in the least by the fact that others intercede for us. Furthermore, Christ is a unique mediator between God and man because he is the Mediator of the New Covenant (Heb. 9:15, 12:24), just as Moses was the mediator (Greek mesitas) of the Old Covenant (Gal. 3:19‚Äì20).
The intercession of fellow Christians which is what the saints in heaven are also clearly does not interfere with Christ’s unique mediatorship because in the four verses immediately preceding 1 Timothy 2:5, Paul says that Christians should interceed: “First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all men, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life, godly and respectful in every way. This is good, and pleasing to God our Savior, who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:1‚Äì4). Clearly, then, intercessory prayers offered by Christians on behalf of others is something “good and pleasing to God,” not something infringing on Christ’s role as mediator.
[b:1p7dntlx]”No Contact with the dead”[/b:1p7dntlx]
Sometimes Fundamentalists object to asking our fellow Christians in heaven to pray for us by declaring that God has forbidden contact with the dead in passages such as Deuteronomy 18:10‚Äì11. In fact, he has not, because he at times has given it for example, when he had Moses and Elijah appear with Christ to the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt. 17:3). What God has forbidden is necromantic practice of conjuring up spirits. “There shall not be found among you any one who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, any one who practices divination, a soothsayer, or an augur, or a sorcerer, or a charmer, or a medium, or a wizard, or a necromancer. . . . For these nations, which you are about to dispossess, give heed to soothsayers and to diviners; but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you so to do. The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brethren him you shall heed” (Deut. 18:10‚Äì15).
God thus indicates that one is not to conjure the dead for purposes of gaining information; one is to look to God’s prophets instead. Thus one is not to hold a seance. But anyone with an ounce of common sense can discern the vast qualitative difference between holding a seance to have the dead speak through you and a son humbly saying at his mother’s grave, “Mom, please pray to Jesus for me; I’m having a real problem right now.” The difference between the two is the difference between night and day. One is an occult practice bent on getting secret information; the other is a humble request for a loved one to pray to God on one’s behalf.
[b:1p7dntlx]Overlooking the Obvious[/b:1p7dntlx]
Some objections to the concept of prayer to the saints betray restricted notions of heaven. One comes from anti-Catholic Loraine Boettner:
“How, then, can a human being such as Mary hear the prayers of millions of Roman Catholics, in many different countries, praying in many different languages, all at the same time?
“Let any priest or layman try to converse with only three people at the same time and see how impossible that is for a human being. . . . The objections against prayers to Mary apply equally against prayers to the saints. For they too are only creatures, infinitely less than God, able to be at only one place at a time and to do only one thing at a time.
“How, then, can they listen to and answer thousands upon thousands of petitions made simultaneously in many different lands and in many different languages? Many such petitions are expressed, not orally, but only mentally, silently. How can Mary and the saints, without being like God, be present everywhere and know the secrets of all hearts?” (Roman Catholicism, 142-143).
If being in heaven were like being in the next room, then of course these objections would be valid. A mortal, unglorified person in the next room would indeed suffer the restrictions imposed by the way space and time work in our universe. But the saints are not in the next room, and they are not subject to the time/space limitations of this life.
This does not imply that the saints in heaven therefore must be omniscient, as God is, for it is only through God’s willing it that they can communicate with others in heaven or with us. And Boettner’s argument about petitions arriving in different languages is even further off the mark. Does anyone really think that in heaven the saints are restricted to the King’s English? After all, it is God himself who gives the gift of tongues and the interpretation of tongues. Surely those saints in Revelation understand the prayers they are shown to be offering to God.
The problem here is one of what might be called a primitive or even childish view of heaven. It is certainly not one on which enough intellectual rigor has been exercised. A good introduction to the real implications of the afterlife may be found in Frank Sheed’s book Theology and Sanity, which argues that sanity depends on an accurate appreciation of reality, and that includes an accurate appreciation of what heaven is really like. And once that is known, the place of prayer to the saints follows.
[b:1p7dntlx]”Directly to Jesus”[/b:1p7dntlx]
Some may grant that the previous objections to asking the saints for their intercession do not work and may even grant that the practice is permissible in theory, yet they may question it on other grounds, asking why one would want to ask the saints to pray for one. “Why not pray directly to Jesus?” they ask.
The answer is: “Of course one should pray directly to Jesus!” But that does not mean it is not also a good thing to ask others to pray for one as well. Ultimately, the “go-directly-to-Jesus” objection boomerangs back on the one who makes it: Why should we ask any Christian, in heaven or on earth, to pray for us when we can ask Jesus directly? If the mere fact that we can go straight to Jesus proved that we should ask no Christian in heaven to pray for us then it would also prove that we should ask no Christian on earth to pray for us.
Praying for each other is simply part of what Christians do. As we saw, in 1 Timothy 2:1–4, Paul strongly encouraged Christians to intercede for many different things, and that passage is by no means unique in his writings. Elsewhere Paul directly asks others to pray for him (Rom. 15:30–32, Eph. 6:18–20, Col. 4:3, 1 Thess. 5:25, 2 Thess. 3:1), and he assured them that he was praying for them as well (2 Thess. 1:11). Most fundamentally, Jesus himself required us to pray for others, and not only for those who asked us to do so (Matt. 5:44).
Since the practice of asking others to pray for us is so highly recommended in Scripture, it cannot be regarded as superfluous on the grounds that one can go directly to Jesus. The New Testament would not recommend it if there were not benefits coming from it. One such benefit is that the faith and devotion of the saints can support our own weaknesses and supply what is lacking in our own faith and devotion. Jesus regularly supplied for one person based on another person’s faith (e.g., Matt. 8:13, 15:28, 17:15‚Äì18, Mark 9:17‚Äì29, Luke 8:49‚Äì55). And it goes without saying that those in heaven, being free of the body and the distractions of this life, have even greater confidence and devotion to God than anyone on earth.
Also, God answers in particular the prayers of the righteous. James declares: “The prayer of a righteous man has great power in its effects. Elijah was a man of like nature with ourselves and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth. Then he prayed again and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth its fruit” (Jas. 5:16‚Äì18). Yet those Christians in heaven are more righteous, since they have been made perfect to stand in God’s presence (Heb. 12:22-23), than anyone on earth, meaning their prayers would be even more efficacious.
Having others praying for us thus is a good thing, not something to be despised or set aside. Of course, we should pray directly to Christ with every pressing need we have (cf. John 14:13‚Äì14). That’s something the Catholic Church strongly encourages. In fact, the prayers of the Mass, the central act of Catholic worship, are directed to God and Jesus, not the saints. But this does not mean that we should not also ask our fellow Christians, including those in heaven, to pray with us.
In addition to our prayers directly to God and Jesus (which are absolutely essential to the Christian life), there are abundant reasons to ask our fellow Christians in heaven to pray for us. The Bible indicates that they are aware of our prayers, that they intercede for us, and that their prayers are effective (else they would not be offered). It is only narrow-mindedness that suggests we should refrain from asking our fellow Christians in heaven to do what we already know them to be anxious and capable of doing.
[b:1p7dntlx]
In Heaven and On Earth[/b:1p7dntlx]The Bible directs us to invoke those in heaven and ask them to pray with us. Thus in Psalms 103, we pray, “Bless the Lord, O you his angels, you mighty ones who do his word, hearkening to the voice of his word! Bless the Lord, all his hosts, his ministers that do his will!” (Ps. 103:20-21). And in Psalms 148 we pray, “Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord from the heavens, praise him in the heights! Praise him, all his angels, praise him, all his host!” (Ps. 148:1-2).
Not only do those in heaven pray with us, they also pray for us. In the book of Revelation, we read: “[An] angel came and stood at the altar [in heaven] with a golden censer; and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne; and the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God” (Rev. 8:3-4).
And those in heaven who offer to God our prayers aren’t just angels, but humans as well. John sees that “the twenty-four elders [the leaders of the people of God in heaven] fell down before the Lamb, each holding a harp, and with golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints” (Rev. 5:
. The simple fact is, as this passage shows: The saints in heaven offer to God the prayers of the saints on earth.
An additional thought, since you have brought up the Millerite/Adventist/Jehovah Wittness invention that those who are dead in the grave are in an uncontious state, and cannot or will not gain contiousness until the Second Coming.
In three Gospels we read about the Transfiguration of Jesus on the Mount, St. Matthew (17:1-6), St. Mark (9:1-
, and St. Luke (9:28-36), and an illusion to the event is made in the Epistles by St. Peter (2 Peter 1:16-18) and St. John (1:14), two of the privileged witnesses, make allusion to it.In the Transfiguration we see Moses and Elias. Moses the Scriptures tell us had died before being able to enter into the Promised Land. So here we see someone who’s body is dead, yet he is able to be seen, and aware of his surroundings, a soul glorified by God, Elias (Protestants usually spell his name Elijah) Who went up to heaven in a firey chariot, (If God could do it for Elias, who was called rightous why could He not do it for Mary, but that is another issue for another time).
. The simple fact is, as this passage shows: The saints in heaven offer to God the prayers of the saints on earth.- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.