QUESTION (from Mina):
Why do we ask saints to pray for us if they are dead?
RESPONSE:
Why do we believe that Jesus can save us if he is dead? It all comes down to the resurrection. We believe that Jesus conquered sin and death and that he gives us a share in his risen life. The dead are not really dead, but alive.
Notice that even prior to his redemptive work, Elijah and Moses appeared with Jesus in the transfiguration. We read in Mark 12:26-27: “As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the Book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God told him, ‘I am the God of Abraham, [the] God of Isaac, and [the] God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead but of the living. You are greatly misled.”
Christians believe that the redemptive work of Christ merits a place for the saints in heaven with God. The whole meaning of the communion of the saints is that they (as the Church in heaven) are alive, loving and praying for the pilgrim Church on earth. They are still apart of us.
Filed under: Apologetics, Catholic, Questions, Religion, Saints |
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“Dead Saint” is an oxymoron – the Saints are alive with the Life of Christ, so unless one is to believe that Christ is a zombie or a vampire, or not raised from the dead, they cannot possibly be dead. The Holy Spirit is not the Spirit of death, but the Spirit of life.
People who think the Saints are dead seem to rest their case on isolated Bible verses, often from the OT – which is pre-Christian. What such people fail to do is to put together the message of the Bible on this topic as a coherent whole – IOW, they don’t think theologically about the message of the Bible. The Church, by contrast, does.