Robert Jenson on invoking the saints

It has long seemed plain to this Protestant that the invocation of saints’ prayers must be possible and if possible surely desirable. I certainly can ask a living fellow believer to pray for me. If death severed the fellowship of believers, I could not of course ask a departed fellow believer to pray for me. But the New Testament hardly permits us to think that death can sever the fellowship of believers — and the eucharistic prayers also of Protestant bodies explicitly deny that it does. Thus there seems to be no reason why I cannot ask also a departed believer to pray for me. And if I can do it, there will certainly be contexts where I should do it. Thus there should be no problem about asking Mary in her capacity as sancta, Saint Mary, to pray for us.

Those of the Reformers who thought otherwise needed to produce more stringent arguments than any I am aware of their adducing. Simply saying with Melanchthon that there is no scriptural mandate to address individual saints, will not do. Magisterial Protestant churches live by all kinds of practices, perhaps most notably infant baptism and the authority of the New Testament canon, for which no scriptural mandate exists, and which can be justified only by chains of argument far longer than the one just developed for invoking saints. On infant baptism Luther’s final word was simply that this had long been the practice of the church, and that he saw no decisive argument against it. One must wonder why the same cannot be said about invocation of the saints. — Robert W. Jenson, “A Space for God”