I am just getting started tonight! On the idea of the purpose of intercessory prayer, I think there is a solid Biblical teaching of both the necessity and benefit of prayer in general. It is taught by our Lord to follow a basic outline. Though I know the Lord's Prayer/Our Father is often repeated - and I don't have a gripe with it, I think Jesus was saying we should pray like this, rather than pray THIS prayer. Are we kewl so far? I wonder how many people read the next verses after Jesus gave that? Let's look:
Luke 11:5-8
Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
So, it is our "shameful audacity" or persistence that grants our petitions. The KJV uses the word "importunity". The next verses speak of "asking", "seeking" and "knocking" and the Greek tense makes them mean, "keep on asking", "keep on seeking", "keep on knocking". That seems to me to be all about the persistence of prayer. Another parable Jesus gave was about a man who was a judge in a city and he had a reputation as a guy who didn't fear God nor care about what other people thought about him. But a persistent widow kept hounding him to avenge her of an adversary:
Luke 18:1-5 "Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’ “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
So, I believe we have more than ample admonitions to pray, to pray often and to pray persistently. Add to that the requests to pray for each other, ourselves, our leaders and rulers, the world, etc., I get the idea that God really wants us to pray - even though he knows what we need even before we ask. I can't see how asking others to join us in this persistence towards our Father in Heaven is wrong. If some think this can even be requested of those who have already died, it's not for me to say other than bringing in the warnings of prayers to "call up" the dead. Hope you have a good night!
Make that our SHAMELESS audacity. ;o)
I have this vision of this short, stout, cylindrical, English woman swathed in black silk wearing a black straw hat with little artificial cherries and carrying a monstrous, huge umbrella, WITH a parrot’s head handle, which she waves in the judges face.
I love that parable! I bet people smiled when Jesus told it.
"Let us remember one another in concord and unanimity. LET US ON BOTH SIDES OF DEATH always pray for one another. Let us relieve burdens and afflictions by mutual love, that if one of us, by the swiftness of divine condescension, shall go hence the first, our love may continue in the presence of the Lord, and our prayers for our brethren and sisters not cease in the presence of the Father's mercy." - St Cyprian of Carthage, 3rd Cent.
In terms of the larger argument, though, I'm confused about where we are. If I seemed to be arguing against prayer, I did not intend it. I was trying to separate the 'dead' issue from the 'one Mediator' issue. Then I was asking how we are to think of the 'one Mediator' in the light of Paul's saying he wants members of the churches to do what seemed to me to be a mediatory sort of activity, and SEEMS to be basing that on there being one mediator.
For, PART of the argument against asking the intercession of the Saints was the "one Mediator" argument. But I think that that PART of the argument collapses in the face of our being asked to pray for others. (The "praying WITH them, not FOR them," seems weak when one considers that many for whom we are asked to pray are not Christians.)
But as long as I'm in "distinguo mode" it's important to divide the 'fringe benefits' of prayer from its basic intention, and its intention from what it is.
It IS good though to have clarified the question of TO WHOM the saints in heaven (as we think) go with our prayers. I have to say it simply never occurred to me that anyone thought that they would NOT go THROUGH Jesus to the Father.
(By "never" I mean "not since the mid-Seventies" when, I think, I got the basic 'jobs' of the three persons of the Trinity doped out.) To the Father, THROUGH the Son, WITH the Holy Spirit, would be the little proverb or maxim.
I forget what flavor Christian church you go to. I do know that for us, for the Episcopalians (the four or five who still believe), at least some Lutherans and Methodists, the doxological "Great Amen" at the end of the Eucharistic prayer is a big deal.
Through him [that is, Christ], with him, and in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.(The prayer is addressed to the Father.)
All: Amen!
But then, people do speak carelessly. Recently I asked a Catholic, NOT one who thinks theologically, to whom she thought the saints take our intercessions, and she said, "to the Father."
So I said, "Say more. More detail."
She said, "Well, through the Son to the Father."
So I can see how careless speech would give the wrong idea, and there's a lot of careless speech going around.
TO sum up,in this one little sector of the front, I am trying to distinguish the nature of intercessory prayer from the issue of "praying to the dead." And my contention is that, as regards the "essentia", what we ask the saints in heaven to do for us is, in our minds, no different -- in essence -- from what is asked of us when somebody puts up a prayer request on Free Republic.
If that's a little clear, then it seems that EITHER those opposed to the intercession of the saints in heaven have to show that WHOM something is being asked for changes the essentia of what is being asked, OR we can abandon the argument and move on to the problem of addressing prayers to the so-called "dead."