This is the second post in a series on saints’ days. The series introduction can be found here.

What kind of images come to mind if I say that someone is a saint? My guess is that you probably think I’m referring to someone of superhuman virtue, probably with a rich prayer life and a knack for dropping profound aphorisms. When we put ‘saint’ in front of someone’s name, we are effectively declaring them a super-Christian, someone whose spiritual experience ranks a tier above what we mere mortals are capable of. Depending on your background, you may even think that I am talking about someone who can act as a heavenly patron, someone whose prayers I might ask for – since they are so much closer to God than I am.

The first objection many Evangelicals are likely to raise to the idea of a day commemorating a saint is that the Bible simply doesn’t use the language of sainthood in that way. Depending on the translation of the Bible you prefer, you will find that ‘the saints’ are mentioned repeatedly in both the Old and New Testament.¹ It’s a translation of a Hebrew word and its Greek equivalent which both mean ‘holy ones’ (our word ‘saint’ comes in turn from the Latin word for a holy one, ‘sanctus’). But a quick search on Bible Gateway (other Bible reference websites are available) reveals that in virtually every case, the term is used to refer to all God’s people, who are holy and set apart for him.² The Bible does not recognise a separate category of super-Christian above and beyond the rest. If you are a Christian, dear reader, then in Biblical terms you are a saint.

This is an important truth and one which the Church of England’s calendar may nod to in the way that it avoids referring to people from more recent times such as, say, Thomas Cranmer or William Wilberforce, as St Thomas or St William.³ As we will see, there are other ways the Church of England acknowledges this explicitly. So if you don’t like using the term ‘saint’ for the people we commemorate in the calendar, I can respect that.
Nonetheless, I think that the concept that we use the word ‘saint’ as a shorthand for is Biblical, valuable, and worth keeping.

A great cloud of witnesses

Scripture certainly has a category for people who are exemplary and worthy of remembrance and imitation. Hebrews 11, for example, is premised on the idea that the heroes of Scripture are, together, a great cloud of witnesses who spur us on to faith and endurance (John Piper, in an article I read not long after I became a Christian, called this chapter ‘a divine mandate to read Christian biography’.) Paul, likewise, commends himself as a model for imitation (1 Cor 11:1, 2 Thess 3:9) and instructed the Philippians to ‘keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us’ (Phil 3:17). This isn’t a question of some category of super-Christian, but it would be foolish to deny that some people make far greater progress towards Christian maturity than others and are, to that extent, able to inspire us and worth imitating. It’s noticeable that these examples do not detract in the least from Christ. The cloud of witnesses encourages us to fix our eyes on Jesus (Heb 12:2) and we imitate Paul as he imitates Christ (1 Cor 11:1).

Likewise, there are people in Scripture who serve as touchstones for the content of our faith. Of course, in an absolute sense, only Christ and the Apostles and Prophets take this place. But the New Testament also teaches believers to ‘remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life and imitate their faith.’ (Heb 13:7). Though the Prophetic and Apostolic witness in Scripture is the only absolute touchstone for our faith, those who passed the faith on to us – whether immediately or over the course of the centuries – can act as a relative touchstone for our faith. No stream of Christianity is seriously able to avoid this for any length of time. In the Reformed tradition, even those who seem most ardently opposed to ‘saints’ as a category will tend to look to John Calvin, or the Puritans, or perhaps the Dutch Neo-Calvinists or Van Til, as touchstones for what is orthodox.

So whether you feel comfortable using the term saints, I hope you can see the value in having a category for people who are especially exemplary in their conduct and/or whose teaching can act as a touchstone for our own understanding of the faith. I want to suggest three more ways in which having a category for the saints enriches our faith and helps our churches.

The saints help us maintain perspective

The saints give valuable perspective on our own contemporary church scene. Every congregation has a ‘way they do things’, possibly even ‘a way we’ve always done things’. Likewise, any good church will have ideas which are particularly central to its identity and which all the members are expected to agree with.

Of course, every church needs those things in order to avoid practical and theological anarchy. But without a sense of perspective, there is a risk that we assume the approach of our culture (both national and ecclesial) is the only right approach. Similarly, it can be easy to assume that because an idea is very important to people in the circle of churches I move around in, it must be a basic part of mature Christian thinking. When I look back on my church experience at university, there is a lot that was good that I’m thankful for. But there was also very little room to dissent from a set of practices and theological beliefs which are barely older than my parents. Things were presented to me as ‘the’ Evangelical view which were actually quite minority positions in Evangelical history. The subtle shift from ‘Scripture alone’ to ‘Scripture on its own’ made space for the man leading that church – for it was he who told us what Scripture meant – to become a demagogue.

Of course, I’m not trying to say that if we had just kept a few saints’ days none of that would have happened. But by connecting us into the wider church throughout history and across cultures, more of us might have been able to see at the time that our consciences were being bound to a set of cultural mores, doctrinal shibboleths and, frankly, personal opinions, which did not represent how most Bible-believing Christians past and present understood and practised their faith.

The saints broaden our horizons

Beyond offering us perspective, the saints broaden our horizons. Looking at the variety of people in the calendar, I am confronted with people who are not like me. There are plenty of priests, yes, but also poets and politicians, mothers and martyrs, aristocrats and ascetics. There are people whose social background or cultural outlook are radically different to my own. And every one of them shows us something of Christ. There are some I warm to easily, who inspire me personally. But there are others who I don’t ‘get’ immediately and arguably they are the ones with the most to teach me. If nothing else, as a Pastor, it’s invaluable to have a broader range of examples to draw on in teaching than just theologians and other pastors.

The saints show us Christ in our culture

Lastly, the saints help us contextualise our faith. When I was at theological college, I went to a seminar (well, I watched it on Teams, as was the fashion of the time) about cross-cultural contextualisation in a missionary setting. In it, a well-meaning woman from New Zealand explained how her missions team in India and Pakistan had advocated swapping the symbol of the cross for the symbol of a short handled broom. Many people in her context were hostile to the symbol of the Cross, which they saw as inherently Western, but the short handled broom still spoke (she said) of the humility of Christ and was a more culturally appropriate way of representing Christ in those cultures.

There are a number of issues with this as an approach. For one thing, as a close friend of mine who has Indian heritage pointed out, Christianity has actually been in India for at least as long as it’s been in Britain (let alone New Zealand), and the speaker’s well-meaning attempt at contextualisation entailed distancing herself from the often persecuted Churches who had suffered under the sign of the cross for centuries before Western missionaries ever thought to go there. For another, Christians do not believe in a Platonic ideal of humility which is equally manifested in the cross and the short handled broom, they believe in a particular historical event; Christ’s death on the cross.

Ultimately, Jesus is neither Western nor Indian – he’s Jewish. That’s one reason why contextualisation is such a challenge; doing justice to Jesus means not erasing his Jewish culture and identity to make him merely an ideal human being. But the saints can be found in every time period and wherever Christianity goes, it creates saints. Jesus is not Indian or Pakistani, but there are plenty of Indian and Pakistani saints. And to the extent that Christ is formed in each one of them, they provide a genuine window into Christ which still genuinely belongs to their culture. That’s true of individuals, but the saints also act as a way to get a handle on the bigger story of how God has been at work in a given nation or culture. Their stories are part of the story to which we too are heirs.

So that’s my case for the saints as a category. What I hope I have shown is that whatever term you use for it, Saint as a particularly exemplary figure or a touchstone for orthodoxy is a useful category. Rightly understood, they point us to Jesus and the Gospel, they give us perspective and broaden our horizons and they show us Christ in our own cultural context.

1. The ESV uses the word 82 times but the NIV doesn’t use it at all, favouring glosses like ‘God’s holy people’. ↩︎
2. Perhaps the closest we come to an exception is Matt 27:52, where it does seem more natural to read it as referring to exceptionally holy people from the past. But if ever an exception proved a rule, it was this one. ↩︎
3. The BCP’s calendar seems remarkably inconsistent in which people are referred to as ‘S. Such-and-such’ and which are simply ‘Such-and-such’. I haven’t been able to discern a rationale for who is called what, except that Biblical figures seem always to be ‘S. Such-and-such’. ↩︎