This is the forth post in a series on saints’ days in Protestant spirituality. In particular, it follows on from a post about the saints in the 39 Articles which you can read here.

If you’re a Reformed Christian who read my previous post, I hope it put some anxieties to rest. Whatever I’m talking about in my posts about saints days, I’m not talking about practices like venerating relics or icons, nor am I encouraging anyone to invoke the prayers of the saints. But if that’s the case, what might a Reformation attitude to the saints look like? So far as I’m aware, nothing in the Church of England’s formularies addresses the question. The presence of the saints’ days in the calendar is simply a brute fact. So to explain how Protestants do honour the saints, I’m going to look at the wider Protestant confessional tradition to see what might have motivated the English reformers to retain saints days in the calendar. In this post, I’m going to look at the very earliest Protestant confessions of faith, the Augsburg Confession¹ and the Defence of the Augsburg Confession².

Both these documents date to the early years of the Reformation. When the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire³ sat in 1530, the Emperor asked the Protestant states to present an account of their teachings and the reforms they were undertaking. It is still the most fundamental doctrinal basis for traditional Lutheranism today.⁴ In the early reformation, even many non-Lutheran Reformers were keen to take it as the basis for a pan-Protestant consensus and an altered version, which changed what was said about Holy Communion, was signed by several Reformed leaders. A cursory comparison of the opening articles of the Augsburg Confession with the 39 Articles makes it obvious how big an impact it had on Thomas Cranmer.

The Confession addresses the role of the saints in Article XXI, titled ‘Of the Worship of the Saints’. The first half of the article reads:

¹Of the Worship of Saints they teach that the memory of saints may be set before us, that we may follow their faith and good works, according to our calling, as the Emperor may follow the example of David in making war to drive away the Turk from his country. ²For both are kings. But the Scripture teaches not the invocation of saints or to ask help of saints, since it sets before us the one Christ as the Mediator, Propitiation, High Priest, and Intercessor. ³He is to be prayed to, and has promised that He will hear our prayer; and this worship He approves above all, to wit, that in all afflictions He be called upon, 1 John 2:1: 4 If any man sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, etc.

Beyond showing us that a Protestant approach to the saints has always rejected their invocation, all we get here is a rather general statement that it may be beneficial to remember the saints so as to follow their example of faith and good works, coupled with the (in my view, at least) rather unfortunate example of encouraging the Emperor to draw inspiration from David for his wars against the Ottoman Empire.⁵

Happily (for us) the Augsburg Confession wasn’t the last word. Catholic leaders at the Diet produced a refutation of the Confession (it’s usually referred to by the more high-falutin sounding name ‘the Roman Confutation’) and Martin Luther’s right hand man, Philip Melanchthon produced a defence (sometimes called the Apology) of the confession – a point by point refutation of the refutation!

When Melanchthon revisits Article XXI, he puts rather a lot more meat on the bones. The Defence is rather… discursive, so I’ll just quote the most relevant bit:

⁴Our Confession approves honours to the saints. For here a threefold honour is to be approved. The first is thanksgiving. For we ought to give thanks to God because He has shown examples of mercy; because He has shown that He wishes to save men; because He has given teachers or other gifts to the Church. And these gifts, as they are the greatest, should be amplified, and the saints themselves should be praised, who have faithfully used these gifts, just as Christ praises faithful business-men, ⁵Matt. 25:21, 23. The second service is the strengthening of our faith; when we see the denial forgiven Peter, we also are encouraged to believe the more that grace ⁶truly superabounds over sin, Rom. 5:20. The third honour is the imitation, first, of faith, then of the other virtues, which every one should imitate according to his calling.

In this ‘threefold honour’, we have the makings of a Protestant approach to the saints. In all my thinking about saints days, this paragraph is probably the main shaping influence. Here are a couple of things I love about it:

It’s wonderfully grace centred. The Augsburg Confession leads with the idea that saints are an example to imitate. I hope I have already shown, earlier on in this series, that that is a completely Biblical idea. But Melanchthon leads with thanksgiving. The saints are a gift of God’s grace, and the first right response to grace is gratitude.

But notice that the first thing we give thanks for isn’t the ministry of the saints themselves. We benefit from that in all manner of ways, whether from their teaching, or example, or the way they transformed society to be more godly or a hundred other ways. But Melanchthon wants us to begin our thanksgiving by saying ‘thank you, Father, for showing us so many times how merciful you are, how much you want to save mankind’. Before any saint is an example of virtue, they are a trophy of grace. It was so with Paul (1 Tim 1:15-16) and Peter (John 21:15-19). It was so with the Blessed Virgin Mary (Luke 1:47) and Mary Magdalene (Luke 8:2). It was so with Saint Augustine and John Newton. It was so with every saint who grew up in a godly home and never did anything scandalous. No matter how far you have fallen, or how hopeless a case you think you are praying for, God has already shown in one or many of the saints the power of his mercy to save someone just like that.

Relatedly, notice the emphasis on faith. At a pastoral level, the Reformation is a great recovery of the role of faith in enlivening our hope and empowering our love. The first thing we do to apply the lives of the saints to ourselves is to strengthen our faith in God. Even before we consider their good works, Melanchthon presses us to imitate their faith (c.f. Heb 13:7). This isn’t just Protestant in what it rejects about the cult of the Saints – it is thoroughly Evangelical in what it embraces of it.

Lastly, notice that it’s God-centred without doing away with the existence and goodness of the saints as creatures. Sometimes in our desire to give God all the glory, we can want to minimise and play down the role we and others play. There are good motives behind that impulse, but I don’t think it is biblical. Paul, for instance, clearly intends the Philippians to celebrate the example of Epaphroditus, not to view him as a passive instrument doing God’s will (Phil 2:29). If we who are of a more Calvinist bent really mean what we say about believing in both divine sovereignty and human responsibility, that surely must apply to good works as well as sins. Melanchthon gets the balance right by saying it’s appropriate to praise the saints (not in the sense of venerating them, but by speaking well of them to one another) and by proving it with the parable of the talents, where the good servants are only ever turning a profit on the Master’s money.

So that’s how the Lutheran confessions teach us to honour the saints. By now, I hope you’re seeing that there is a distinctively Protestant way to go about that which, far from veering into potentially idolatrous territory, constitutes a celebration of God’s grace at work in the Gospel. But lest we think this is just a Lutheran thing or that the Church of England is departing from Reformed principles on this point, we’re going to look at one last confession, the Second Helvetic Confession of 1566.

1. You can read the whole thing at https://bookofconcord.org/augsburg-confession/ ↩︎
2. Which you can also read at https://bookofconcord.org/defense/ ↩︎
3. Despite sounding like a series of meals fit for a king, the Imperial Diet was a periodic gathering of the nobility of the Holy Roman Empire to discuss matters concerning the various German states and to provide a forum for the Emperor to canvas opinion. ↩︎
4. In Poland, where I have Lutheran relatives, their denomination is actually called ‘The Evangelical Church of the Augsburg Confession’. ↩︎
5. I suspect that the Protestants picked this example, not because it was necessarily the best one they could think of, but because they were keen to demonstrate that they were still politically loyal to the (very much Catholic) Emperor, but I’ve not studied it in detail, so I don’t know. ↩︎