Truth Unites - Should Christians Pray to Saints?

Episode Date: September 10, 2026

Gavin Ortlund examines the Protestant case for praying to God alone, responding to biblical, historical, and practical arguments for asking the saints in heaven for their intercession.Truth Unites (https://truthunites.org) exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites, Visiting Professor of Historical Theology at Phoenix Seminary, and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville.SUPPORT:Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunitesFOLLOW:Website: https://truthunites.org/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truth.unites/X: https://x.com/gavinortlundFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/

Should Christians pray to those already in heaven to ask for their intercession? This is a huge area of Christian disagreement, and it's one that none of us can really avoid, because we'll practice one thing or another. So in this video, let's give a brief overview, very brief, of a Protestant view, because the question we're after here is, what is the truth? What should we do? What does God want us to do? Ultimately, it doesn't matter what I think. It doesn't matter what any one of us thinks. It matters what does God think.

And the Protestant position is pray to God alone. That is what God taught us to do in His Word. Let's give a lightning quick overview of the concern, and then we'll give three possible replies that will respond to a biblical counterargument, a historical counterargument, and a practical counterargument. And for non-Protestant viewers, may the Lord bless you, these conversations are hard to have over the years. I know this will be an area of disagreement, and hopefully this will explain why we disagree

in a charitable way, and I'll love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Okay, the fundamental rationale for not praying to our departed. fellow Christians. Any of them can be stated briefly. Christianity is a revealed religion. We have no authority in ourselves to determine our prayer life or our spiritual life in general. That's something we look to what God has said to determine. And nowhere has God ever taught us that we are to pray to or ask for the intercession

of saints in heaven or anyone else in heaven other than God. We can use both this language of pray to or ask for their intercession. Both phrases are used in various traditions. The word pray can be used a little differently, but we're here talking about this practice. Now, we should honor our forefathers and our four mothers in the faith. We should love them. We should imitate their faith. We are all one body of Christ, the church triumphant, the church militant, and it is plausible that they pray for us. More on that in a moment. But when we look to the period of divine revelation, we discover that asking for their intercession, us communicating to them, is nowhere taught or modeled anywhere in God's revelation to us, despite hundreds of

passages about the nature of prayer. Here's one way we can make this concern. Noah did not ask for the intercession of Abel. Abraham didn't ask for the intercession of Noah. Moses didn't ask for the intercession of Abraham. David didn't ask for the intercession of Moses. the latter prophets didn't ask for the intercession of David, the apostles didn't ask for the intercession of the Old Testament saints, Polycarp didn't ask for the intercession of the Apostle Paul, Iranias didn't ask for the intercession of Polycarp, and so on and so forth, until long after the period of divine public revelation is closed,

starting very modestly and then growing by a very slow process of accretion, this practice begins to seep into the church. and I'm going to emphasize as we talk later in the video how gradual that process is. We'll talk about medieval prayers in a moment. I'll end the video with that. But the point for now is to just demarcate and explain the Protestant position, which I think is very reasonable. We have to test later developments in church history by God's revelation to us, just as we test a lesser authority by a greater authority. All we want to do is pray as God has commanded that we should pray.

And the thing about this is we have so much treatment in the Bible about prayer and how our spiritual life is to work. You think of Abraham's prayer for Sodom or Moses's intercession for Israel or Hannah's prayer at the beginning of 1st Samuel or Solomon's prayer at the dedication of the temple in 1st Kings 8 or Hezekiah's prayer in crisis in 2 Kings 19 or Nehemiah 1 or Daniel 9 or the entire book of Psalms or the Lord's prayer or the high priestly prayer of John 17. or the church's prayer under persecution in Acts 4, or Paul's many prayers for the churches, like Ephesians 3, for example, and many others we could give. Every time, and without exception, prayer is unto God alone, and we have no biblical example of praying to or asking for the intercession of departed believers. And the question that that raises is, in light of the importance of this topic, and the abundance of the data in question and the length of the time frame in question,

thousands of years, how likely is it that praying to deceased believers was a practice among God's people, and yet no one ever mentioned it, and we have no evidence for that. But if it wasn't a practice, why not pray as God in his revelation to us taught us to pray? Okay, so that's in a nutshell, the Protestant position. There's other arguments as well that sometimes come in, but I'm trying to give what I think is at the core. All right, some counter arguments. Well, maybe it is in the Bible. A lot of people of, I'm going to phrase it like this, I think they read the later development back into the biblical text. And so, but let's work through just one example of a passage, actually just really one

principle to explain why I and other Protestants don't agree that that is actually in the text. So, for example, in Revelation 5-8, we have this reference to elders presenting the prayers of the saints to God. And sometimes we'll hear this conjoined with other appeals like the great cloud of witnesses in Hebrews 121 and other things like this. Now there's a lot to say about Revelation 5, but all that needs to be said is this much. This verse says nothing about our invoking the saints to ask for their prayers. As I said earlier, the historic Protestant concern was not to deny that those already with the Lord can pray for us. There is sometimes qualification about how much we know about that in the details, but the concern is we should not

pray to them. There's two different things here. Them praying for us, and us praying to them are two different things, but these get conflated so many times. Or it will be assumed that one entails the other, rather than argued that one entails the other. But Protestants have never really, I can't say never. Generally speaking, to my awareness, the historic Protestant concern has not been, well, we know the saints aren't praying for us. In the apology of the Augsburg Confession in the Lutheran tradition, quote, concerning the saints, we concede that in heaven they pray for the church in general. In the reform tradition, Zacharias Erson has put it like this. Quote, we readily grant that the saints in heaven do ardently desire the salvation of the church

militant and that their prayers are heard according to the councils of God, but that the saints know the misfortunes and business of everyone in particular, and that they hear the prayers which may be addressed to them, we deny, end quote. John Calvin in the reformed tradition said something similar, quote, but though I grant that in this way they pray for us, they do not, however, lose their quiescence so as to be distracted with earthly cares, far less are they to be invoked by us, and quote. Later in the Anglican tradition, Archbishop John Tillotson, quote, we do not deny that the saints in heaven pray for us that are here on earth because they may do so for anything we know,

but that they do so is more than can be proved. So again, in their language there you see, and in several statements there, you see the qualification of, let's not be overly speculative. We don't know all the details. God has not revealed all the details about this, but we're certainly not denying that that may transpire. What is clear is that is a different thing than us praying to them. And so texts like Revelation 5-8 are not relevant, unless you make an argument from that.

Revelation 5-8 is certainly not depicting the invocation of the saints. We would need some reason to think, well, we are to then communicate with them about this and ask for them to pray for us. That's the whole point in dispute. And even if we allow Second Maccabees 15 into the discussion, it's the same thing, because Protestants don't recognize this text as scripture to establish dogma, but nonetheless, even if we did, it's the same thing. It does not establish invoking the saints.

It addresses the saints, in this case, Jeremiah, praying for the church. Okay, here's a second counter argument. So I guess I need to stick to my guns because in these conversations with all love and respect, sometimes I sense the sociological pressure against us is far disproportionate to the evidential ground underneath us. And we're getting all this pressure like you need to submit to the church, but I need to say it this strongly, forgive me a fit offense. There is no biblical warrant that this practice ever was how God wanted us to pray. It's not there in the text of Scripture. Now, since one of the counterarguments will be, well, that's Sola Scriptura. You don't have to have everything clearly in the Bible,

even though that's not actually my argument. My argument was, if this is something that is licit, how likely would it be that there's no evidence of it? Different argument. Nonetheless, let's talk about church history, because another one of the counter arguments will be, yeah, but this has always been a practice in church history. And in response to that, what I want to argue is that actually, no, we have no clear examples of praying to the saints for the first 200 years of church history, and even then it begins very gradually and modestly, such that medieval praying to saints looks very different from patristic praying to saints. So you have something that slowly comes in after the fact, 200 years after the fact of, after like the apostolic era, and then,

after like Peter and Paul are dying and so forth. And then it's slowly building from there. And this is surprising because we have whole treatises on prayer written by prominent Christians like Turtullian, Origin, and Cyprian, but they never mention praying to deceased Christians or anything like that. Take Origin, for example. Several years ago I had a back and forth about this with Joe Heschmire. I will link to my final video in the video description here

if you want to check out my Fuller case on Origin, summatively engaging that. One of the things I pointed out there is that it's very easy to confuse the saints praying for us and us asking them for their intercession. I think I use the language of the arrow down and the arrow up. And you can't just assume the arrow down logically requires the arrow up. You need to argue for that, but these two things get pushed together. And this is sometimes what happens when people read a later practice, like praying to the saints back into someone like origin. Origin himself is very clear on this topic.

Pray to God alone. It's explicit, it's emphatic, it's over and over in his writings. You can see this example on the screen here. There's many passages where he says this. And that is how he is generally interpreted. So back in that correspondence, I gave some examples of this, like the Eastern Orthodox scholar John McGuckin, who in his entry to Origins on Prayer

in the Westminster Handbook to Origin, says origin is clear in this work that prayer ought to be addressed to God, the Father, alone. And then I referenced a similar position in Origin in his other works from this 2001 article, and you can read through that on the screen if you want to see, there's many more examples of that as well. In that video, I go through some of the nuances of Origins' view and how it's changing over time. Ultimately, I think it's very clear that although Origin uses the word prayer in different senses, when he's using it for communication to other Christians, it's living Christians on

earth, he nowhere depicts us communicating to the saints in heaven. And so, The upshot is trying to step back and always emphasize the big picture, because sometimes we make a point and we can get stuck in the weeds and miss the big picture. The big picture is we have several hundred years after the period of public divine revelation is closed as we are into church history, and still the idea that we communicate with other Christians who are in heaven is not a Christian practice from everything we can tell. Take Polycarp, for example. There is an incredibly high appreciation of Polycarp among early Christians,

but I'm not aware of anyone who's praying to him. Rather, the mentality is well captured in the martyrdom of Polycarp. Quote, we worship Christ as the Son of God. The martyrs, however, we love as disciples and imitators of the Lord, as is right on account of their unsurpassable benevolence toward their king and teacher, and we wish to become their companions and disciples. So we love the saints and martyrs and others who are with the Lord. We honor them.

We follow in their footsteps. We imitate them. But we're not talking to them. We're not praying to them. And then you start to see this practice coming in throughout the patristic era, starting in the late third century. Now, the most famous example of this, I actually want to say may well be dating much later. So let's just identify this first. This is from the famous sub-tum pricidium.

Words on the screen here, we fly to thy protection, O holy mother of God. Do not despise our petitions and our necessities, but deliver us always from all dangers, O glorious and blessed virgin. Now this prayer has often been dated to the third century, but many scholars are now arguing it comes much later.

So there's some scholarly discussion about whether a paleographic research suggests a date in the sixth or seventh century or even later, as you can see on screen. Similarly, Richard Price concludes that, quote, it would clearly be imprudent to regard this papyrus any longer as reliable evidence for the greater antiquity of this prayer.

Interestingly, the John Rylans Library itself, the institution that possesses this papyrus, notes the original fourth century proposal and then suggests fifth to eighth century is where a lot of people are putting the date now. Now, I don't have a position on this. I don't know. But I just want you to be aware of this because sometimes the subtuum pricidium is presented

as a third century prayer to Mary. In fact, that's common, which gives much greater impression of certainty than the scholarship warrants. It may well be later than that. Nonetheless, you do find some other scattered evidence of praying to saints or asking for their intercessions starting in the late third century, particularly at the Roman shrine associated with Peter and Paul, where you can see some scratched inscriptions left by Christian pilgrims there, saying on the wall, things like, oh, Peter, or O Paul, intercede for

us. People would write this on the wall there. But it's really in the fourth century that this practice expands dramatically and enters unmistakably into the mainstream preaching and devotional life of major church leaders. And then it continues to grow and more and more from there. Now, I'll deal with some medieval prayers to marry in a moment. Now, it's not my purpose to trace out all the subsequent development from there. Martin Kemnitz, from a Protestant perspective, gives I think a good treatment he's going through Augustin and Ambrose and noticing kind of some of the nuances of how it's unfolding from there. My point for this video is simple, and that is it takes 200 years before you find any documentation of this practice in church history. And even then, it's just very, you know, it's not

like it's in well-known liturgy or something like that, or widely attested. 200 years is a long time. 200 years ago was when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, John Quincy Adams was president, we were still four decades away from the Civil War. Think how much can happen in 200 years. And the key point that I want to make is this. Not everything that comes into existence among Christians, even some very great Christians, is necessarily correct. The church does not die, but there can be errors that come into the picture. And we have to measure later developments in church history by the superior light of Scripture because God has more authority than man.

That's the Protestant concern, I think that is very reasonable. All right, but here's a final objection. If we ask for the intercession of living Christians, why not ask for the intercession of deceased Christians, which as such is a fair appeal? And it's definitely a good response to some of the weaker arguments against praying to the saints. But I think there are two problems here. The most basic point would just be stemming out of everything we've said thus far. We cannot simply assume that communicating to a Christian on earth works the same as communicating to a Christian in heaven. The Christian in heaven is not there right next to you in the same way that the Christian.

Christian on earth is, and therefore we need to look to God's revelation for how we are to relate to those who are currently in heaven. But second, in their actual on-the-ground practice and consequence, asking for the intercession of saints in heaven often looks very different from asking for your Christian brother or sister to intercede for you in this world on earth. And this is a point that I made in an older video. I did have one video on this topic, like four or five years ago, something like that, and repeated it in a short from that video. But let me just reiterate and clarify this concern, because Jimmy Aiken made a response to me on this topic of praying to the saints. And one of my concerns with his response is he frequently will do about an hour or so

rebuttal video to a one minute short, even though the short is just an extract from a longer video and the longer video it's extracted from explicitly anticipates the critiques he gives. So this is not as productive because if he would just go to the longer video, he would see I'm addressing many of his arguments. So for example, in my longer video on this topic, I emphasize how praying to the saints has often played out on the ground historically. And I work through examples. And one of the concerns that I give is that frequently Mary will be petitioned to do certain things in medieval prayers especially that are actually the work of Jesus, like placating the wrath of God. Sometimes we'll even find, as you can see on screen,

medieval prayers asking Mary to placate Jesus. And this is an example of this on the ground consequence I'm raising a concern about. So I reference the word consequence in my short. And if you watch the full video, you see the broader context of what I'm referencing by. What is that consequence. Unfortunately, that gets shorn off if you just hone down and just rebut the one minute short. But the reason this matters is I want us to have a clear understanding of the gospel. Jesus does not need to be placated by Mary or anyone else. His work at the cross is sufficient such that he's not needing to be placated. He's the one who's interceding for us right now. Right now, Jesus is interceding for us. He doesn't need someone to go to him and placate or

appease him. Our sins are already forgiven at the cross. And praying to deceased Christians has historically tended to theology like this, where Mary or others can slide into the role of Jesus. Not only that, the emotional tilt of some of these medieval prayers to Mary is often quite extravagant. And I mentioned some of these titles for Mary in my previous video on this topic. Most effective remedy of the wounded soul. Fountain of Life and Favor. Fountain of Life and Favor. of salvation and grace, savior of the world, mediates of God and men, and fountain of mercy, which ceaselessly pours out rivers of copious grace, shining portal of heaven, etc. This is not even the most extravagant. You can find a lot that is very common. You also have a lot of language of

total, unreserved and exclusive dedication to Mary, like, I give myself to you alone, or to whom can I turn but you. You even find, in the medieval era, the salt, altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary that reworks the biblical Psalms by redirecting their language and praise toward Mary. So understand this. You've got the book of Psalms recast toward Mary as the recipient. The point to reiterate here is that is nothing like going to my living friend on earth and asking for their intercession. When I go to a Christian, when I go to see my friend at church and say, would you please intercede for me, I'm never saying to them, please placate Jesus, or I pledge myself to you alone and so forth, and so it's fair game for us to look at the on-the-ground reality of how

this plays out. And the dangers. Let me give another example. Quote, O mother of perpetual help, thou art the dispenser of all the gifts which God grants to us miserable sinners. In thy hands, I place my eternal salvation, and to thee I entrust my soul. Count me among thy most devoted servants, take me under thy protection, and it is enough for me. For if thou protect me, me, I fear nothing, not for my sins, because that will obtain for me, for me, the pardon of them, nor from the devils, because thou art more powerful than all held together, nor even from Jesus, my judge, because one prayer from thee, he will be appeased. You realize what the prayer is saying. It's saying, I don't need to be afraid of Jesus because Mary will appease him. Now, I am not claiming

that every Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox Christian speaks this way, or that this prayer reflects official dogma, I am making a historical point about what this devotional practice has generated on the ground. And the point is to respond to this appeal and say, this is not like asking Bob at church on Sunday to pray for me. We're dealing with two different kinds of practices altogether. And I just want people to be clear on the gospel, because I think sometimes it's amazing how in all our theological discussions, the simple gospel can be lost. Let me just, hammer this point home, hoping it's good news and reminder, Jesus does not need to be appeased. The cross of Christ has already fully dealt with our sins such that we experience him as never

needing our appeasement, himself the appeaser, the one who's made peace with us. While we were still sinners, he died for us, now we approach him and experience nothing but his favor and kindness insofar as we come through his work on the cross. And that is really good news because it means we can have assurance and confidence of our standing before God simply on the basis of his work for us. So I hope that this video provides a brief overview of a Protestant position and what I think is just so reasonable based upon the structure of Christianity, divine revelation, and now we respond to that. So the position is pray to God alone because that's what God himself actually taught us to do.