#STRask - Can Christians Who Have Died Hear Our Requests for Prayer?

Episode Date: June 3, 2024

Questions about whether those in Heaven have a limited omniscience that enables them to hear our requests for them to pray for us, why Scripture comes before tradition for Protestants, and what people used for Scripture before Genesis was written. If moral perfection is a communicable property given to those in Heaven, wouldn’t it be reasonable to also speculate that limited omniscience is a communicable property, and so we can ask Christians who have died to pray for us? Why does Scripture come before tradition for Protestants? What did people before Genesis was written (Noah, Abraham, etc.) use for “Scripture”?

This is Amy Hall. I'm here with Greg Kokel, and you are listening to Stand to Reason's Hashtag STR Ask podcast. All right, Greg. All right, Amy. This first question comes from Brad. All right, Greg. All right, Amy. This first question comes from Brad. All right, Brad. Hi, Amy and Greg. In a recent podcast, Greg discussed moral perfection as a communicable property given to those in heaven. Wouldn't it be reasonable to also speculate that limited omniscience is a communicable property,

and thus the church militant can ask the church triumphant to join in prayer? Well, I don't think it's reasonable because of the nature of omniscience, okay? Omniscience entails complete knowledge of everything. Now, God didn't have a beginning, and he has no end. That means God is aware of every fact of existence. Now, I mean, if time has no end, and I know people say we'll go out of time into eternity, but things happen in eternity, so time is passing, then there are always new facts that are being produced that God would have known about the future, all right? And however we ground that, the fact is that God knows all these things. And it does not seem at all to me that finite creatures can possess what amounts to an infinite knowledge of an infinite number of facts.

And by the way, that might be an example of an actual infinite, and I know Bill Craig doesn't like that, but my concern is not with actual infinites, but actual infinites that are accomplished by successive addition. One, two, three, four, five, six. Okay, this would be God beholding all of history, which would be endless on both directions, because he never had a beginning, and he will never have an end, and we will never have an end. We are everlasting, even though we are not eternal beings. And therefore, you've got this

massive number of facts that would have to be possessed by every person. I don't see any reason why this would be possible. It certainly isn't – there's no biblical reason for that. And if this is what's required to justify – I don't even know why it would justify – what was the thing about prayers? The church asking the Christians who have already died to join in prayer. I assume that's what he's asking. Right.

Okay. Well, so the rationale to ask that, to me, doesn't sound at all. No justification. I think there is no biblical justification where the other one I think there is, and sharing in God's goodness. And there's no rational justification. I think it's incoherent. It's an impossibility. But if it's going to be pressed into service to this end, this is calling on the dead. It's called necromancy in the Old Testament. It's completely forbidden. And I know that people have suggested this, they push back, and they say, oh, oh, oh, this isn't the same thing.

Really? Why isn't it? You are calling on dead people to accomplish something for you. How is that different than what Saul did with the witch in Endor calling Samuel back? How is that? How is that? I mean, I know that it's easy to think of that kind of thing with noble intentions and in a certain sense to baptize it with kind of religious thinking, but it seems to me to be the very same thing. And in fact, what we are told by Jesus to do is to pray to the Father in Jesus' name, not pray to other saints. And this is a practical element here. There's a theological problem, philosophical problem—I already addressed that with us being

omniscient—a theological problem with praying to dead people, calling on them for help, and also, you know, a practical concern. What ends up happening— and I was raised Catholic, so I know how this works. I've seen it, is that people end up praying to dead folk instead of praying to the Father to accomplish something that Jesus said he would accomplish on our behalf. So what happens is Jesus and the Father get preempted by some dead saint. This is not good. There's nothing good about this. And I see a few problems with this, too, beyond even those. First of all, the moral perfection is going to happen at the resurrection. Would you say that now, as soon as people die, they're morally perfected?

Oh, I don't know how to answer that. Yeah, I mean, I don't even think we can say that they have moral perfection now. I think that's probably going to happen at the resurrection. Secondly, a capability like omniscience seems like a different kind of quality than a moral state. So a limited being can't be omniscient, but he could have his heart corrected so that it's perfectly good, even though it's expressed in a limited way. So the idea of being unlimited in some way is a different kind of thing than moral perfection, because anything can be morally perfected even in its limited state. Does that make sense? So those are—

There's a qualitative difference between the two different elements. Yeah. So for all those reasons, plus obviously the theological one, I think, is the biggest. There's no call to do that. And I agree with you, Greg, that if you have to go to something like this to justify it, that you're—if you have to reach that far. That's a reach, yeah. Okay, let's go to a question from Julie.

Why does Scripture come before tradition for Protestants? The Catholic people I talk to define tradition as the oral tradition carried by the people within God's covenant, which is the complete revelation of God, while Scripture is not the complete revelation of God. How do I respond to this? Well, that's a claim. That's a claim that they need to defend, okay? Here's the way I put it in the past, is Roman Catholics and Protestants make a different authority claim. But in a certain sense, the Roman Catholics or the Catholic Church agrees with the authority claim of Protestants.

Protestants say the Bible is the inspired word of God. Catholicism agrees it is. But then they add three other sources of inspired information, revelation. Okay? Church tradition, inspired tradition, holy tradition, and the teaching magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church, and also the Pope when he speaks from the chair, which doesn't happen very often. But those are three different things.

So they agree with our view as far as it goes. Then they add three others. This means that the burden of proof is on the Roman Catholic to demonstrate that their particular source of authority is actually inspired by God. And that's what's not done here. In the statement that was just offered, it's just the assertion. Well, we believe that holy tradition is the fuller revelation. Okay, how would you justify that? Why would I think that's the case? And if Scripture is inspired, what happens when the so-called Holy Tradition seems to contradict the Scripture?

Well, this is where Rome makes an authority claim over the Scripture. You're not understanding it right. We get the right to say what it means. That isn't what it means. But wait a minute. I can read, and I can study and research. And keep in mind that the epistles and the gospels were written in Koine Greek, not Attic Greek. In other words, not in the high Greek of the educated crowd, but in the ordinary language of the street person, if you will. In other words, it was written to be read by ordinary folk. Now, I understand with 2,000 years of time passing and different locations and customs

and also the translations, that some is more complicated to understand. I get that. But it doesn't mean I need to have an authoritative source like the Roman Catholic Church or any other church am I thinking, like the Antiochian Orthodox, all these Orthodox Churches, Russian Orthodox, Antiochian, the Egyptian, Coptic Church, they all make the same kind of claim. We are the true church, and we get to say what it means. And my sense is, well, look, there was written ordinary folk. Maybe we could just go there and figure it out. And a lot of things I think that's definitely true about. And we talk about that here, and we seek to justify the points we're making from the text itself so people can read the words and say, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Okay, I can read the

words too. And so I'm going to ask then the question, why is it some of your tradition, your holy tradition, does not seem to be justified by the text and goes contrary to the text. This happened, by the way, with the Jews all the time of Jesus' time. They had their text, and then they had their traditions. And lots of times, as Jesus pointed out, their traditions were against the text. Why do you keep your traditions, but you don't keep God's Word? And the issue of Korban was an example of that that Jesus pointed out, but there are lots of them. And what I've seen with Rome is a resurrection of all of those features of the Jewish, in

a certain sense, cult of worship, and I'm not using that word in a pejorative sense. It was just the way worship and theology and everything was done, the traditions of the elders. All of that was done away with by the New Covenant, and it's all been resurrected by various religious groups. All the same kinds of things. Now you've got priests when Jesus is our high priest, you know, for example, Hebrews. And so I don't have any reason to believe that that claim that they're making is sound, and it's their job to defend it because it's an additional claim they're making about an authority source where, with regards to our authority source, the Bible, they agree, the Rome Church agrees that that is inspired by God. And so I'm going to use that as a measure for any other thing that they have. So holy tradition would include things like Mariology, for example. Well, this is not in the New Testament, in the authoritative fact. It seems

like you find something very different in the New Testament with regards the authoritative fact. It seems like you find something very different in the New Testament with regards to Mary, a very important figure, no question, a very godly person, no question, but not the Queen of Heaven, which is what Rome has made her out to be. Now, this creates all kinds of other problems. There was a Queen of Heaven in the Old Testament, too. It was a pagan enterprise. Okay, now this is something that's kind of resurrected with Mary. It's sanitized because it's Mary in its New Testament. It seems better, but I don't think it is. So the justification has to come from those who are making the additional claim.

And Jesus, as you pointed out, he made a distinction between the traditions and the Scripture, and he always went to Scripture and said, don't use your traditions to nullify anything in Scripture. And the problem is, if you have two sources of authority, eventually one is going to have to take precedence over the other. In fact, even the way the question's worded, why does Scripture come before tradition for Protestants? Well, one of them is going to come before. And if it's tradition, if it's something that can be changed by the people who are in charge, that's more likely to shift with the wind and change in all sorts of directions. Whereas the Bible is the Word of God, as we all agree, the Catholics and the Protestants. It's objective.

It's unchanging. It's objective. It's unchanging. You cannot come in and come up with whole new ideas and developments and all sorts of things, as you said the Pharisees were doing and people at the time were doing, that Jesus condemned and said not to do. God has given us what we need. It's His inspired words, and we have them. And that is our ultimate authority. One of them will take precedence over the other. And so that's why Protestants say that Scripture has the ultimate authority. And what you'll notice is, I mean, just look at all the difference that made. I mean, look at the Reformation and the changes that happened, how people got back to what the Bible was actually saying. And, you know, people complain that, oh, there's all these denominations. But the truth is, in the plain doctrines that are the clearest doctrines that we need for salvation— That are core. salvation. The core doctrines. Thank you. That was the word I was trying to think of.

Any, the churches, the denominations that take the Bible seriously and have it as their primary authority will agree on all those primary things. It's when you get people who are adding other authorities in there and their own ideas into it, that's when they start to drift and get these other ideas. But we have this objective truth, and this is, I mean, I'm so grateful that we have that. We're not going to, you could have someone come in and say anything, and how do we know if what he's saying is from God or not? So let me underscore something you said, because it's been after now 50 years, more than 50 years as a Christian, and the great bulk of that time involved in some aspect of Christian apologetics and watching lots of developments, whenever you

have multiple sources of authority, my observation has been that the Bible ends up taking the back seat to the new authorities. Now, not that all of these groups that I'm going to mention are equal in terms of their legitimacy, but I'm just talking about a pattern. So you have Rome saying this about their different sources of authority, and my observation is, okay, now it's the tradition that will trump the Scripture, okay? And I talked about that already. Or you have, and you know about the LDS Church, they believe in the Bible, but the Book of Mormon, Doctrines of Covenants, the Pearl or Gray Price, these really have their front and center, you know,

and then the Bible is there to serve those. And there are contradictions or difficulties. Well, it's the Mormon doctrines or documents that carry the day there. You have Mary Baker Eddy and Christian scientists. You have the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Watchtower Society. You have the NAR, the New Apostolic Reformation. Okay, what's important about it? Well, those are people who are offering prophetic words as prophets now, in addition to the Scripture that have authority. And every single time you see this pattern develop, this is my observation, the Scripture ends up as the last in line, not the first in line.

Not judging the other things, but the other way around. And this is because we are fallen. So, our tendency is to drift away. So, when you start having your own subjective revelations or mystical experiences or whatever it is to give you truth, you will start drifting away. That's why, again, the objective truth is so necessary and keeps us on track. All right, here is a question from—this follows very well from what we just said—from Mark. What did people before Genesis was written—Noah, Abraham, general population, etc.—use for, quote, Scripture? So they didn't have this objective. Well, they didn't have Scripture. They didn't have the writings, as the Scriptures are, and what they had is general revelation.

They didn't have much. Now, it turns out that general revelation, at least back then, was adequate to help, to bring people to a place where they understood the true God. I mean, look at Melchizedek, who I think was a historical figure, not a Christophany or a supernatural individual person of Christ showing up in the Old Testament.

I think that Jethro, which is Moses' father-in-law, clearly was a believer, an Old Testament saint, though there was no scripture there because Moses hadn't written it yet. So, what they had was general revelation. They didn't have special revelation. So, there's a liability there. You can't know much about God from general level. You can know some, and Paul talks about that in

Romans 1, but it's characteristically not enough to help people get saved, because there's certainly not enough in the New Testament, New Covenant sense. But it's enough, though, to condemn them, and that's why Paul says they are without excuse. And in the case of Noah and Abraham, God was just beginning to reveal himself, so he did give special revelation to them, just like he did through the Scriptures, but that's all they had. They didn't know God the way we know him now, and I'm so, again, I'm just so grateful. But what's amazing is even in the case of, say, Abraham, who knew very little, I mean, I don't know how much tradition had passed down or how much he knew before God revealed himself. Yeah. But even he, when God revealed himself and didn't give him a whole lot of information, I mean, maybe he told him more things than are written down.

I don't know, but probably not much. He still trusted him that his promise that he would give him the promised land and that he would, you know. Great nation. Great nation. All these things. He trusted that. Great Nation. Great Nation, all these things.

He trusted that. And so in a way, that always makes me wonder, is that because he saw the angel of the Lord, that he saw this revelation of God and heard his voice, that he somehow encountered God in a way that revealed God's character to him immediately. I don't know, but for some reason, he knew God was trustworthy, even without all this evidence. And that's why he's the father of faith now, because it's so amazing. But someday we will all see God way more clearly than that, even. So it's interesting you pointed out that there was prior revelation, but there weren't prior scriptures. And so we have Noah and whatever was communicated by Adam and Eve, for example, down through time. And it's hard—we don't know all the details there.

But we have Noah's experience with God, we've got Abraham's experience with God, and that's got to have been— let's put it this way, it's reasonable to think that this was communicated, quantified in some measure, and then passed on down. That's called oral tradition. So they did have true revelation, but it was just very limited. Not Scripture. Yeah. All right. That's it for today. Thank you, Brad and Julie and Mark. We love hearing from you. You can send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or just go to our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kokel for Stand to Reason.