You may misread me Mad Dawg, my only stirving is for the Bible, and what it instructs Christians to do in this life. It is not my idea that such things as praying to Saints, are neccessarily some sort of deviance in the Faith in Christ as Lord and Savour.
Rather, it’s that the Bible doesn’t support it.
Faith in Christ is a gift in this fallen world, “if” one believes and asks in prayer for a departed loved one to intercede on your behalf, I don’t find that some sort of heinous conclusion to draw, rather that it is not a sound Scriptural teaching, and it falls upon the Holy Spirit to guide one into such a prayer.
If there were baptisms for the dead, then sound reason would presume that there also could be prayers to the pious and departed.
That being said, I would put forth, that it is better to pray to our High Priest and Advocate before the Father who died once and for all.
Pacium in Christi Mad Dawg
Look: it is clear as can be that we all have our feelings rubbed raw. DM thinks something I posted in an effort to be efficient but light-hearted was full of negative language and like asking him if he'd quit beating his wife (as opposed to tying her up and dousing her with Holy Water, which we all agree is good clean fun.)
But you asked something like if someone was looking for excuses to disregard Scripture?. "Looking for excuses," does not sound all warm and fuzzy.
About praying to saints you write:
I don’t find that some sort of heinous conclusion to draw, rather that it is not a sound Scriptural teaching, and it falls upon the Holy Spirit to guide one into such a prayer.Okay. But yet we pray together, and we DO ask people, those who have not "departed" and those who are on the other shore, to pray for us. In a strict logical sense I suppose time spent praying to Augustine is NOT time spent praying to the God and father of us all. And yet we are reassured when we here that others will be praying for us. Is there a contradiction here? I don't know. That's not a rhetorical question.If there were baptisms for the dead, then sound reason would presume that there also could be prayers to the pious and departed.
That being said, I would put forth, that it is better to pray to our High Priest and Advocate before the Father who died once and for all.
But, I would guess the Calflick fall-back position is that we see God making promises to the Church, and describing the church as having organic rather than homogenous structure, so that not all are teachers and not all are clowns like me and so forth. All the same spirit, lots of different gifts.
So, en-passant/i>when you say the all your concern is for Scripture, we'd answer that as Moses wrote of Christ, so also the NT writes of His body, the Church, and there in those writings we find grounds for, well, a different approach to Scripture.
The one thing that interests me about it is that just as the Israelites must have been a tad queasy walking between walls of water which, as far as they knew, "only" the promise of God was keeping from flooding back in and overwhelming them, so we look at the bozos who have been bishops, cardinals, Popes, and local alcoholic and perverted Fr. So-and-so, and sometimes get a tad queasy also.
But the walls are holding. The vessels are still earthen and not only undistinguished but visibly flawed, yet the treasure is still treasure, and God's promises are still reliable.
Et cum spiritu tuo, padre!