According to the Report of this year’s Lambeth Conference, “the vast majority of people in the Anglican Communion, while rejecting the crudities of the medieval conceptions of purgatory, are quite sure that the fact of death does not remove the need for and the appropriateness of praying for the departed that God will fulfill his perfect will in them; and that such prayer is both natural and right.” If this is really so, then we certainly would not feel disposed to dispute the Report’s further assertion that “there is evidently need for a fresh study from the Bible of the whole question.”
Last year saw the publication in London of the Report of a select committee of the Church of India, Pakistan, Burma, and Ceylon entitled Principles of Prayer Book Revision. The compilers of this Report (which is not without its virtues) seek to justify the inclusion in their Church’s proposed new Prayer Book of prayers for the departed on the grounds of sentiment: in particular, “the instinct of natural piety—or Christian charity—which rebels against the idea that those whom we have loved enough during their earthly pilgrimage to have them regularly in our prayers must be excluded from them because they have died.” This, we are assured, “amounts to a recognition that the ruthless surgery of the Reformers in excising all prayer for the departed from the Prayer Book, however much it may have been justified in the sixteenth century, is no longer tolerable, now that the more flagrant abuses connected with the Romish doctrine of Purgatory have ceased to be a threat to true religion.”
It is misleading, however, to speak of the Reformers as having practised “ruthless surgery” in this matter. In point of fact, the decision to exclude all prayers for the departed was reached only gradually, as is shown by the fact that such prayer was still to be found in the first (1549) Prayer Book of Edward VI, and was finally excluded only in the second (1552) book. The reason for this exclusion was not merely the abuses of Rome, but primarily the conviction, reached through a close study of Holy Scripture, that prayer for the dead is altogether without sanction in God’s Word. This being so, in the interests of truth, the fathers of the Reformation could not permit themselves to be governed by sentiment.
It is, moreover, unwise, not to say dangerous, to allow sentiment, however pious, to dictate what is and what is not legitimate in Christian worship. On this basis, all teaching concerning God’s wrath and judgment should be expunged and universalism embraced, and the cross of Christ evacuated of its holy moral force. Natural piety is then elevated to a saving virtue.
To imagine that doctrine can be divorced from practice is also thoroughly unrealistic. The Report, however, in acknowledging that the inclusion of such prayers “involves a change of Anglican practice,” adds that “it does not necessarily follow from this admission that it involves a change of doctrine.” In view of the fact that it was on doctrinal grounds that prayers for the dead were originally excluded, it is difficult to see how their introduction can fail to involve a change of doctrine.
The doctrine of the New Testament is plain enough, namely, (1) that those who have died in unbelief are past praying for, since they are on the farther side of that great gulf which none may cross over (Lk. 16:26; cf. Heb. 9:27); and (2) that those who have fallen asleep in the Lord are now with Christ (Phil. 1:23), at home with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:7), and therefore not in need of our prayers. In Holy Scripture, which contains so many exhortations to prayer, the silence concerning prayer for the dead is not merely significant, it is conclusive. Had Christ and his Apostles approved the practice, it is certainly strange that it should not have been commended in a passage such as 1 Thess. 4:13 ff. where Paul is writing expressly “concerning them that fall asleep.” Here, as elsewhere, however, the teaching of calm and confident assurance regarding the well-being and security of those who fall asleep in Christ only serves to show how incongruous prayer for the dead is in the scriptural view of things.
The complete silence of the Apostolic Fathers regarding this practice must also be taken into account. To say that “from the middle of the second century onwards there is irrefutable, nay overwhelming, testimony from the catacombs and other Christian epitaphs of the Christian belief that the prayers of the living avail for the dead” does not demonstrate the correctness of the practice, for it is well-known that from the second century onwards many false beliefs and practices gained currency, and even in some cases official sanction, within the Church. Shades of Tract XC rise before us when we read that Article XXII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of the English Church, while condemning the Romish doctrine of purgatory, “leaves it open to Anglicans to believe that some other form of purification may await redeemed but imperfect souls after death”! The New Testament knows no other means of purification from sin than the blood of Jesus Christ, which cleanses from all sin (1 John 1:7). By his one offering Christ has perfected forever those who are sanctified (Heb. 10:14).
“The only purgatory wherein we must trust to be saved,” says the Anglican Homily concerning Prayer, “is the death and blood of Christ; which if we apprehend with a true and steadfast faith, it purgeth and cleanseth us from all our sins, even as well as if He were now hanging upon the cross.… This then is that purgatory wherein all Christian men must put their whole trust and confidence, nothing doubting but, if they truly repent them of their sins, and die in perfect faith, that then they shall forthwith pass from death to life. If this kind of purgation will not serve them, let them never hope to be released by other men’s prayers, though they should continue therein unto the world’s end.… Let us not therefore dream either of purgatory, or of prayer for the souls of them that be dead; but let us earnestly and diligently pray for kings and rulers, for ministers of God’s holy word and sacraments, for the saints of this world, otherwise called the faithful, to be short, for all men living.”
The true Christian attitude regarding the faithful departed is thus one of joy and complete confidence, knowing that for them to die is gain (Phil. 1:21), and that those who have died in the Lord are indeed blessed (Rev. 14:13). So far, then, from being a gain to the Church, prayer for the dead brings in a note of doubt and uncertainty concerning the bliss and well-being of those who have fallen asleep in Christ, and thus tends to rob the believer of one of the most precious emphases of Holy Scripture. It is a practice which dishonours Christ and the fulness, perfection, and sufficiency of his work of redemption for us sinners.
