294

RECOVERING THE
lfNTERCESSION OF THE
SAINTS IN THE REFORMED
TRADITION
By BELDEN C. LANE

WILL NEVER FORGET SITTING ONE AFTERNOON before a

wood carving of Our Lady of Guadalupe in the chapel of Christ in
the Desert, a remote Benedictine priory in northern New Mexico.
Having come to the monastery for an eight-day retreat, I was
dealing with the recent death of my mother and asking also what a
Presbyterian minister teaching at a Jesuit university had to learn about
contemplative prayer.
I sat with her for several hours - this mother affectionately known to
Mexican-Americans as La Morenita, 'the little dark one'. Wearing a
red dress with a dark blue cape studded with stars, she had hollow
cheeks, an aquiline nose, the tan skin of a Latin American woman. I sat
easily in her presence without talking, thinking how much it reminded
me of the hours spent in silence at my mother's bedside in the nursing
home before she died. We all seemed to be comfortably present to each
other in that moment - the mother I had loved and struggled with for
years, the Mother of God whose gaze continually led me to the wooden
carving of her crucified son nearby, and the motherless son who was
myself, having come to the desert searching for the unlikely solace of
fierce landscapes.
This experience would come to mind several months later as I sat
with a graduate class talking about Catholic devotional practices in
nineteenth-century American life. We were looking at old holy cards
and discussing the devotion of Catholic laypeople to particular saints.
One of the Protestant students in the class (out of an Evangelical.
background) was asked her opinion about all this, and she admitted it
seemed a bit strange, adding that she herself was not accustomed to
talking to dead people.
Suddenly in that moment we all recognized a point of significant
divergence between Roman Catholic and much of Protestant thought
about the saints. Some Protestants have long been prone to separate
 R E C O V E R I N G SAINTS IN THE R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N 303

33 Office de Taizg (Taiz6, 1964), p 369.

34 Mother Teresa of Calcutta and Brother Roger of Taiz6, Mary: mother of reconciliations (New
York, 1989).
35 Kathleen Norris, The cloister walk (New York, 1996), p 47. Her earlier book, Dakota: a
spiritual geography (New York, 1993), speaks of her love of rural Presbyterian churches and
Benedictine abbeys along the plains of South Dakota.
 R E C O V E R I N G SAINTS IN THE REFORMED T R A D I T I O N 295

radically the Church Militant from the Church Triumphant, viewing the
faithful departed within the latter as essentially so many 'dead people'.
B y contrast, as E W. Faber (of Oxford Movement fame) put it with
characteristic bluntness in the nineteenth century:

What strikes heretics [or Protestants] as so very portentous about us [is

t h a t ] . . , we talk of the other world as if it was a city we were familiar
with from long residence, just as we might talk of Paris, Brussels, or
Berlin. We are not stopped by d e a t h . . . [nor] separated from our dead.
We know the saints a great deal better than if we had lived with them
upon earth. 1

In the classroom that afternoon, I found myself identifying far more

readily with this former Calvinist convert to the Roman Catholic
Church than with many Protestants out of my own tradition. Having
often sat in places like the chapel at Christ in the Desert, feeling
perfectly at home praying with the Mother of God and my own
departed parents, I realized that 'talking to dead people' was something
I had long taken for granted.
I am posed with the question, then, as a Reformed theologian
significantly influenced by Catholic practice, of how to reconcile my
own exercise of prayer with the tradition out of which I come. This
article is an effort to re-examine attitudes toward the saints in the
Reformed tradition as it has come down to us from the sixteenth
century and is increasingly re-worked by contemporary theologians
and liturgists.
I want to argue that praying with the saints - recognizing them as
sharing a common intercession with us - is altogether consonant with
the emphasis in Reformed theology upon the Church as communio
sanctorum. 2 While obvious excesses in popular Catholic practice in the
sixteenth century led Calvin and others to minimize the role of the
saints in the life of prayer, any reasons for failing to develop a full-
fledged Reformed theology of the communion of saints today have
long ceased to exist. 3 While Reformed Christians like myself may
hesitate in speaking of prayer 'to' the saints - because of a concern to
maintain the mediatorial centrality of Christ - it is not only possible,
but even necessary, to speak of prayer 'with' the saints, inviting them
also to pray for us. 4

The saints in sixteenth-century Reformed thought

John Calvin, in sixteenth-century Geneva, remained very critical of
the idea of the intercession of the saints, even though he admitted that it
296 R E C O V E R I N G S A I N T S IN T H E R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N

was ,rooted in a correct principle, namely, 'that death is not destruction,

but a crossing over from this life to another'.5 He was willing to grant
that the love and caring of those who had departed this life 'is also
contained within the communion of the body of Christ' .6 In fact, in his
Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, he went so far as to concede:

By asserting the intercession of the saints, if all you mean is that they
continually pray for the completion of Christ's kingdom, on which the
salvation of all the faithful depends, there is none of us who calls it in
question. 7

The Second Helvetic Confession, punished by Heinrich Bullinger in

1566, made it very clear that the Church Militant and the Church
Triumphant 'both have fellowship and union one with another'. 8
Similarly, the Scots Confession of 1560 insisted that the Kirk trium-
phant be honoured and joined to those who still struggle in the present
life.9 Sixteenth-century Reformed theology, therefore, remained firmly
committed to the idea of the Church as a communion of saints.
What caused Calvin to reject the intercession of the departed faithful
in the prayer life of the Christian community were the abuses that he
witnessed within the cult of saints among unlettered people in his own
day. As he saw it:

Illiterate females and almost all the peasantry, in praying to Hugo and
Lubin, use the very form of prayer which was given us by the Son of
God. Thus a block of wood will be our Father in heaven, lo

Wanting to give supreme importance to the intercessory role of

Christ in the mystery of prayer, Calvin found himself caught between
his commitment to the shared communion of those who had died in
Christ with those who were still alive and his reaction to a perceived
threat of idolatry. It was the latter that drove him to an undue emphasis
on the withdrawn and stoical isolation of those who had died in the
Lord.
'Even though I grant they pray for us,' Calvin said, 'still they do not
abandon their own repose so as to be drawn into earthly cares.' He
argued that the saints are not caught up in 'particular desires', but
'yearn for God's Kingdom with a set and immovable will' .11 In effect,
Calvin stated that we should not bother them, but instead 'leave them to
enjoy their rest'. 12 This rigid, almost Neoplatonic separation of those
who had died from those with whom they continue to share com-
munion in the Body of Christ seems contradictory, however, to his bold
emphasis upon the communio sanctorum23
 R E C O V E R I N G SAINTS IN THE REFORMED TRADITION 297

Calvin's doctrine of the Church was, in general, a very strong one,

insisting on the inclusion of the elect throughout all a g e s . 14 With
Cyprian, he simply declared that one cannot have God as one's father
without also having the Church as one's mother. 15

For there is no other way to enter into life unless this mother conceive
us in her womb, give us birth, nourish us at her breast.., and keep us
under her care and guidance... Furthermore, away from her bosom
one cannot hope for any forgiveness of sins or any salvation... It is
always disastrous to leave the c h u r c h . 16

The Genevan Reformer's fear of excesses in the popular cult of the

saints in sixteenth-century Europe was what kept him from developing
the theologicalconsequences of the ecclesiology he held so dear.
Calvin readily urged the 'imitation' of the saints, but balked at the
idea of recognizing their intercession• Throughout the Reformed trad-
ition, great emphasis has always been placed upon the exemplary role
of the saints in modelling the devout life - from John Foxe's Book of
martyrs.and Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana to the very
recent evocation of the saints in Kathleen Norris' The cloister wa l k. 17
As early as 1566, Bullinger affirmed that:

We do not despise the saints or think basely of them. For we

acknowledge them to be living members of Christ and friends of God
• We also imitate them. For with ardent longings and supplications
. .

we earnestly desire to be imitators of their faith and virtues, to share

eternal salvationwith them, to dwell eternally with them in the
presence of God, and to rejoice with them in Christ. TM

Building on this sixteenth-century foundation for celebrating the

communion of saints in t h e Reformed tradition - and given the
development of twentieth-century Roman Catholic thought on the
same subject - it becomes obvious that the time has long passed for
Christians in the Reformed tradition to move beyond imitation alone, to
recognize also the important role of the intercession of the saints within
the communion of the faithful. 19

The reappropriation of the saints in twentieth-century Reformed

liturgy
Often in the history of Christian spirituality it is the exercise of
liturgy that leads us more fully into the doctrinal implications of the
faith we had long confessed, though not clearly enough understood.
 298 R E C O V E R I N G SAINTS IN THE R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N

Theologians describe this in terms of the traditional maxim, lex orandi,

lex credendi. The pattem (or law) of 'the way one prays' is constitutive
of the pattern (or law) of 'the way one believes'. 2o The Church's
liturgical and devotional practice is not simply a subsequent 'result' of
doctrinal convictions; it often moulds those theological understandings
themselves. Perhaps this is especially the case with respect to the
reappropriation of the saints in the liturgical life of twentieth-century
Reformed Christians. The communion of saints is sometimes 'prayed'
more effectively in Reformed circles than it is 'believed' (as a confes-
sional statement).
J. A. Ross Mackenzie has argued extensively for the inclusion of the
Virgin Mary in the worship life of Reformed Churches.21 He points to
the statue of the Mother of God in the cloisters of St Mary's Abbey on
Iona, where Reformed believers use antiphons drawn from the Gaelic
tradition in calling upon Mary to succour and shield them. 22 The
restored Iona community has been a source of renewed liturgy and
music within the Reformed tradition since its founding in 1938.
Similarly, Max Thurian of the Taiz6 community urges the use in
Reformed worship of the four most ancient feasts dedicated to Mary:
the Annunciation, the Visitation, the Purification (or Presentation of
Jesus in the Temple), and even the Entry of Mary into God's rest. 23 He
sees this as fully commensurate with Calvin's own emphasis on the
imitation of Mary. Calvin once affirmed, 'This is the greatest praise that
we know how to give h e r . . , that we avow her as our teacher and that
we are her disciples'. 24
Even within the Presbyterian Church (USA) there have been recent
calls for the reincorporation of the sanctoral cycle in Reformed wor-
ship. Craig Douglas Erickson argues for a return to the calendar of
saints on the grounds that 'praying the prayer of the church in the
company of the saints serves as a corrective to individualized piety and
its tendency toward theological narrowness'.25 A 'calendar of com-
memorations', he adds, would remind the Church 'that history is to be
taken seriously, that the Holy Spirit is boundlessly creative, that the
incarnation is indeed a reality'. 26 The Task Force on Daily Prayer of
the Presbyterian Church (USA) has actually developed such a calendar,
incorporating traditional canonized saints from both Eastern and West-
ern traditions, as well as others who have functioned as 'signs of God's
sanctifying grace' (from Calvin, Mozart and George Herbert to
Sojourner Truth and Toyohiko Kagawa). 27 This ecumenical calendar
offers some interesting juxtapositions, placing Aquinas, Yeats and
Dostoyevsky on the same feast day of January 28 and reminding us that
 R E C O V E R I N G S A I N T S IN T H E R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N 299

Thomas Merton and Karl Barth died on the same day, 10 December
1968.
Stanley Hauerwas argues that such a recovery of the saints also has
the effect of restoring prophetic power to the Christian community.
'Sainthood is about power,' he insists. 2s It is not about people being
'reduced to being saintly, people who are eternally nice'. As Peter
Brown demonstrates in his book The cult of the saints, early Christians
valued these extraordinary human beings as ' m e n and women of
power, capable o f protecting this small and relatively uninteresting
group of people called Christians'.Z9 These saints delineated a counter-
cultural spirituality able to revitalize the Church at its core. Whenever
irascible souls such as these are lost, the faith community also loses its
tartness and edge, As Methodist historian H. B. Workman once said,
Protestantism, in its deep suspicion of the cult of the saints, 'has too
often driven out the eagle to save the sparrows' .30
Two of the most interesting movements of liturgical experimentation
and theological renewal in twentieth-century Reformed thought are
found in the communities of Iona and Taizr, where the recovery of the
saints has gone hand in hand with the task of joining liturgy to justice.
George E MacLeod, a minister of the Church of Scotland, founded the
Iona Community on the eve of the Second World War as a way of
restoring life to Reformed worship and responding to social ills on the
streets of Glasgow. The community focused itself around the rebuild-
ing of the ruined thirteenth-century Benedictine abbey on the island of
Iona, off the western coast of Scotland. In its vision of renewed church
life, the community intentionally merged Catholic and Reformed sensi-
tivities, devotional discipline and political activity, a call to corporate
unity as well as to individual responsibility.
Evoking the witness of all the saints who had preceded them there on
the island of Iona, MacLeod said:

I only know that if we are to make it, then we must call back Columba,
who insisted the Faith had to do with history and not just with hysteria.
We must call back the Benedictines, who insisted on one Church (and
we must not be content with our miserable divisions as our witness -
God forgive us - to reconciliation! Why should men listen to our
advice on reconciliation till we ourselves unite?) Yes, and we must call
back the Reformers, with their insistence on personal commitment. 31

He knew that neither the unity of worship nor the power of justice
could be fully realized apart from the continued participation of the
saints in the life of the community. To this day, on every Wednesday, a
300 R E C O V E R I N G S A I N T S IN T H E R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N

pilgrimage is made around the island, stopping for prayer at Columba's

Bay, the Hermit's Cell, Dun I (the highest point on the island), and
Reilig Orain (graveyard for the ancient kings of Scotland, Ireland and
Norway). Contemporary peregrini thus share in the memory of the
wandering Celtic saints of centuries past.
Brother Roger Schutz, the son of a Swiss Reformed pastor and his
wife, first came to the tiny village of Taiz6 near the German border of
eastern France in 1940. Having jus t finished a dissertation on early
Christian monasticism at the University of Lausanne, he was seeking a
site for a community where people from France and Germany, from
Reformed and Catholic Christianity, could come together to address
liturgical and social issues. The result was an ecumenical monastic
community that moved over the years from sheltering Jewish refugees
in the early 1940s to attracting huge numbers of young people address-
ing questions of international injustice within a context of common
prayer. 32
Once again, as in the Iona Community, the Rule of Taiz6 sets this
life of prayer firmly within the communion of saints. The Virgin Mary,
the apostles and martyrs, and saints through all the ages are regularly
evoked within the daily worship of the community. The Office de Taizd
offers a brief calendar of saints, with readings and prayers, affirming
that:

The communion of the saints unites all Christians in a common prayer,

a common life in Christ. It joins the Church of today with the Church
in every age, the Church Militant here on earth with the Church
Triumphant in heaven. 33

Brother Roger has joined Mother Teresa in co-authoring a small book

of reflections and prayers about the Virgin Mar') and the poor. 34 The
presence of the intercession of the saints is a very important and
continuing reality in the life of the Taiz6 Community.
In my own experience at the Benedictine monastery of Christ in the
Desert, I was surrounded not only by the Virgin Mary and my recently
deceased mother, but by all the desert saints from John the Baptist to
Charles de Foucauld, from Evagrius of Pontus to the irreverent and
reluctant witness of Edward Abbey. It was perfectly obvious there that
we need those s a i n t s . . , to root us in our history, to keep us honest, to
connect us with the grand (and crusty) company of heaven.
Kathleen Norris is another Presbyterian (and a Benedictine oblate)
who is far more familiar with Benedictine monasteries than myself.
Her recent book, The cloister walk, is a reflection on her own lengthy
 RECOVERING S A I N T S IN T H E R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N 301

stay at the Institute for Ecumenical and Cultural Research at St John's

Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. Patterned after the sanctoral cycle,
her book is a delightful evocation of the saints. One day at morning
prayer in the abbey church, the words of St Bernard made her realize
the poverty of much of the worship she had known in the past. The
abbot of Clairvaux lamented that, 'the saints want us to be with them,
and we are i n d i f f e r e n t . . . Let us long for those who are longing for
us. '35 This, finally, is the heart of the mystery we call the communio
sanctorum - a family of people (both dead and alive) who long to be
with each other in the shared ,communion of prayer.

NOTES

1 F. W. Faber, All for Jesus (London, 1853), quoted in Ann Taves, The household offaith: Roman
Catholic devotions in mid-nineteenth-century America (Notre Dame, 1986), p 48.
2 Karl Barth stressed the notion of the Church as communio sanctorum in his Church dogmatics
(IV/2, section 67, part 2), pointing to Dietrich Bonhoeffer's Sanctorum communio as one of the
finest books he knew on the theology of the Church.
3 Calvin spoke of particular abuses of the cult of the saints in his treatise Against the worship of
relics (1543), mentioning, for example, the excessive veneration of the arm of St Anthony in
Geneva (later proven to be the leg of a stag) and part of the severed head of John the Baptist
maintained with great solemnity at Calvin's birthplace in Noyon.
4 Calvin himself questioned the intercession of the saints largely because of his commitment to
Christ alone as Mediator Dei. 'Regarding the saints,' he said, 'let us not even dream that they
have any other way to petition God than through Christ' (Institutes IlI. xx. 19-21). He feared also
that a distorted view of God as 'stem judge and strict avenger of iniquity' made recourse to the
cult of saints necessary so that God could be 'rendered exorable and propitious to us' ('Reply to
Sadoleto', in Tracts and treatises on the reformation of the Church [Grand Rapids, 1958], I, p 62).
5 John Calvin, Institutes III. v. 10. All translations from Calvin's Institutes are taken from the
edition in two volumes by John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles.
6 Institutes III. xx. 24.
7 Calvin, 'Reply to Sadoleto', Tracts and treatises I, p 47.
s Second Helvetic Confession, chapter XVII, paragraph 4. Translation from Arthur C. Cochrane,
Reformed confessions of the sixteenth century (Philadelphia, 1966). The highest authority among
Reformed confessions has generally been granted to the Second Helvetic (Swiss) Confession.
9 Scots Confession, chapter XVI. Translation from James Bulloch, The Scots confession: 1560
(Edinburgh, 1960).
lo Calvin, 'Antidote to the Council of Trent', in Tracts and treatises on the reformation of the
Church B/, p 46. In his Necessity of reforming the Church, Calvin criticized the practice of
'allotting a peculiar province' to particular saints, so that 'one gives rain, another fair weather, one
delivers from fever, another from shipwreck'. This, as he saw it, neglects the intercession of
Christ, confiding 'less in the Divine protection than in the patronage of saints' (Tracts and
treatises I, p 155).
11 Institutes III. xx. 24.
a2 Calvin, 'The true method of giving peace to Christendom and reforming the Church' (1547),
Tracts and treatises HI, p 322. In this context he is wresting with the fact that in the early Church
Chysostom, Epiphanius and Augustine had all approved of prayers for the dead.
13 With reference to the 'communion of saints' in the Apostles ' Creed, Calvin said: 'The saints
are gathered into the society of Christ o n the principle that whatever benefits God confers upon
 302 RECOVERING S A I N T S IN T H E R E F O R M E D T R A D I T I O N

them, they should in turn share with one another' (Institutes IV. i. 3). In his commentary on
Hebrews 12:1, he went on to celebrate the 'dense throng' of witnesses by which the Church is
intimately surrounded, declaring: 'The virtues of the saints are so many testimonies to confirm us,
that we, relying on them as our guides and associates, ought to go onward to God with more
alacrity' (Commentaries on the Epistle to the Hebrews [Grand Rapids, 1949], p 311). 'We ought
not to refuse the Lord's favour of being connected with so many holy men,' he added (p 307).
14 lnst#utes IV, i, 7.
15 lnst#utes IV. i. 1.
16 hzst#utes IV. i. 4.
17 Two books, each entitled Visible saints, by Geoffrey Nuttal (Oxford, 1957) and by Edmund
S. Morgan (New York, 1963) reflect on the exemplary understanding of the saints in English and
American Puritanism respectively.
18 Second Helvetic confession, chapter V, paragraph 4. Bullinger further added: 'We confess that
t h e remembrance of saints, at a suitable time and place, is to be profitably commended to the
people in sermons, and the holy example of the saints set forth to be imitated by all'.
19 The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, produced by the Second Vatican Council in 1963,
declared: 'Let the faithful be taught, therefore, that the authentic cult of the saints consists not so
much in the multiplying of external acts, but rather in the intensity of our active love. By such
l o v e . . , we seek from the saints "example in their way of life, fellowship in their communion,
and aid by their intercession". At the same time, let the people be instructed that our communion
with those in heaven, provided that it is understood in the more adequate light of faith, in no way
weakens, but conversely, more thoroughly enriches the supreme worship we give to God the
Father, through Christ, in the Spirit' (Lumen gentium, chapter VII, section 51).
2o Anthony J. Tambasco discusses this principle in the context of his relating Marian piety (lex
orandi) to Marian doctrine (lex credendi). Cf. What are they saying about Mary? (New York,
1984), pp 65ff.
21 Cf J. A. Ross Mackenzie, 'Hon0uring the Virgin Mary: a Reformed perspective', The Way
Supplement 45 (Summer 1982), pp 65-77, and 'Mary as an ecumenical problem' in Alberic
Stacpoole (ed), Mary's place in Christian dialogue (Wilton, 1982), pp 34-40.
22 j. A. Ross Mackenzie, ' "This Virgin for a good understanding": reflections on intercessors' in
Alberic Stacpoole (ed), Mary and the churches (Dublin, 1987), p 19. Cf Ronald Ferguson,
Chasing the wild goose: the Iona Community (London, 1988), p 190.
z3 Max Thurian, Mary: mother of all Christians (New York, 1964), pp 186-187. John Macquar-
rie's book Mary for all Christians, (Grand Rapids, 1990), summarizes some of the work of the
Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary (centred in Wallington, Surrey), providing also an
ecumenical office of Mary the Mother of Jesus (pp 139-160).
24 Sermon XI ('On the harmony of the Gospels'), Corpus Reformatorum vol 35, cols 120ft.
25 Craig Douglas Erickson, 'Reformed theology and the sanctoral cycle', Reformed Liturgy and
Music XXI, 4 (Fall 1987), p 229.
z6 Ibid., p 231.
27 'A calendar of commemorations', Reformed Liturgy and Music XXI, 4 (Fall 1987),
pp 233-245.
28 Stanley Hauerwas, 'On the production and reproduction of the saints' in Unleashing the
Scripture (Nashville, 1993), p 100.
29 Ibid., p 101. Cf Peter Brown, The cult of the saints (Chicago, 1981).
3o Quoted in the article on 'Saints' by Gordon S. Wakefield in The Westminster dictionary of
Christian spirituality (Philadelphia, 1983), p 350.
3~ George MacLeod, Sermon on the occasion of the Queen's visit to the Abbey in 1956, quoted in
Ronald Ferguson, Chasing the wild goose, p 93. Cf Ronald Ferguson, George MacLeod: founder
of the lona Community (New York, 1990), and Robert K. Gustafson, 'New directions for the Iona
Community', Quarterly Review 5 (Spring 1985), pp 49-58.
~z C~ S~ph~e G ~ i ~ , ' B ~ e r Roger ~ Taiz~: a co~temporar~ Christian mystic', Theology 9g
(1995), pp 289-296; Douglas A. Hicks, 'The Taiz6 community: fifty years of prayer and action',
Journal of Ecumenical Studies 29 (Spring 1992), pp 202-214; and J. L. G. Balado, The story of
Taizd (New York, 1981).