Do you believe in the communion of saints?
“Do you believe in the communion of saints?”
Yes, the physically alive saints on earth.
The ones Scripture refers to when it says, “pray for one another.”
That is wonderful communion among the saints.
Scripture nor the Apostles ever taught us to pray to the physically departed.
Do you believe in the communion of saints?
There is only one answer to that. One does not know the Father...…………………..
Mat 6:6 But when you pray, go away by yourself, shut the door behind you, and pray to your Father in private. Then your Father, who sees everything, will reward you.
God may stoop down to our wrong understandings, but it is very obvious the BETTER thing is to talk directly to Him.
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Can you point to the Scriptural reference for that phrase?
Certainly, since Scripture teaches it, along with its manner and manifest limits. Thus the question is, do you believe in going way beyond Scripture and contrary to what constitutes the basis for doctrine, and instead believe something based upon the novel and unScriptural premise of ensured perpetual magisterial infallibility?
Where did the Lord or anyone but pagans ever example or teach the heretical belief of praying to created beings in Heaven ? Never in the gospels, not in Acts and the epistles which reveal how they understood the gospels.
Not in the whole of Scripture, despite the Spirit inspiring the recording of over 200 prayers , and of this being a most basic practice, and despite there always being plenty of created beings to pray to, and occasions for it since the Fall, yet the only prayers or offerings in Scripture to anyone else in the unseen spiritual heaven is by pagans, including to the only Queen of Heaven seen in Scripture.
Failing to find even one example of PTCBIH, and with instruction on who to address in prayer to Heaven only being that of to the Lord, Caths must resort to eisegetical extrapolation, presuming those in Heaven can not only hear/understand all prayers from earth, mental or oral (which only God is shown able to do), but that we are to address them, though again the Holy Spirit never mentions even one example of doing so.
Meanwhile, from what I recall, any two-way communication btwn created beings in Heaven and earth required both to somehow be present in the same location, and was not that of asking them to intercede to God for them, and was very rare.
Note that elders and angels offering prayers (Rv. 5:8; 8:4,5) in memorial - like as in Lv. 2:2,15,16; 24:7; Num. 5:15; 16:9, "an offering of memorial" cf. Num. 16:9, - is not that of them being addressed in prayer, nor does it indicate that they had heard them previously, nor is it described as being a regular postal service, but it is one of the things which is a preclude to the final judgments upon the earth, testifying to the persecutions of the saints by the devil and world that it fit to be punished.
For when "He maketh inquisition for blood, he remembereth them: he forgetteth not the cry of the humble. (Psalms 9:12; cf. Genesis 4:10) and before judgment God brings forth testimony of the warrant for it, which includes the cry of those martyred souls under the altar in Rv. 6:9, and with odors representing prayer, akin to Leviticus 6:15, "burn it upon the altar for a sweet savour, even the memorial of it, unto the Lord." (Leviticus 6:15)
Note, do not attempt the sophistry of arguing "nowhere is it forbidden," or extrapolating it out of prayer for each other here, or that "with God all things are possible" which are all specious arguments for a most basic Cath practice that surely would be exampled and taught in Scripture if indeed it was what believers believed in.
And the list goes on .