Our Saviour Lutheran Church • After Matins • Book of Concord

After Matins: The Saints

Augsburg Confession, Article XXI

PSALM Psalm 145

READING Isaiah 60:1–7

BOOK OF CONCORD Augsburg Confession, Article XXI

The Texts

"All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you."

"Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you."

Psalm 145:10–11 draws the distinction AC XXI requires. All your works shall give thanks to you, O Lord, and all your saints shall bless you. They shall speak of the glory of your kingdom. The saints are the ones who speak; the Lord's kingdom is what they speak about; the glory they declare belongs to God. The saints' function in Psalm 145 is entirely referential: they are voices, witnesses, heralds of the splendor and power that belong to the One they serve. The verse would be structurally destroyed if the saints were the object of thanksgiving rather than the subject of it. Isaiah 60's vision of all nations streaming to Zion's light carries the same structural logic. Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. The nations come to your light and kings to the brightness of your rising. The light belongs to the Lord; it has risen upon Zion; and Zion shines with a reflected brightness that draws the nations.

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Falsely Accused: What the Lutherans Retained

Augsburg Confession Article XXI opens, like so many of the Confession's articles, with a defense. The churches do not despise the saints; in fact they teach that they are to be honored. What the Lutherans were charged with was abolishing the cult of the saints entirely; what they actually did was distinguish between the honor that is genuinely owed to them and the invocation that Scripture nowhere commands. Melanchthon's Apology then sets out the positive case with the threefold honor: we give thanks to God for what He demonstrated in the saints' lives; we take encouragement from seeing grace exceed their sin; and we imitate their faith and virtues according to our own calling.

The Apology says the greatest honor we can give the saints is to let their lives prove that God's grace exceeds even their failures, which strengthens our own faith that grace exceeds ours. How does this evangelical reading of the saints' lives differ from the two extremes of hagiography (the saints as perfect models whose example we could never meet) and dismissal (the saints as historical figures irrelevant to present Christian life)?

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The Boundary: Invocation and Its Error

AC XXI's prohibition of invocation is not a case of Lutheran minimalism about the Church's communion with the departed. It is based on a precise argument: Scripture provides no command, no promise, and no example for invoking the saints as mediators. And beyond the absence of scriptural warrant, the practice requires attributing divinity to the saints, since it requires them to discern the simultaneous, silent thoughts of every praying mind in every location. The saints, however holy, are creatures; omniscience is not a creaturely attribute. To pray to them is therefore to ascribe to them what belongs to God alone.

The Apology identifies the medieval assignment of saints to particular jurisdictions as a continuation of pagan polytheism, each deity managing a specific department of human need. Isaiah 60 directs all nations to God's glory reflected from Zion. How does the principle of directing all prayer and confidence to God alone, through Christ as the one mediator, change what a congregation does when it faces specific crises: illness, financial catastrophe, a dying child, an unresolved conflict?

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The Pastoral Danger: Warming Up God

The Apology's most important pastoral observation about the invocation of saints is what it does to the image of Christ. Melanchthon writes that the practice transfers the confidence of mercy due to Christ over to the saints, and that when this happens people come to imagine that Christ is a severe and dreadful judge or tyrant, while the saints are more easily appeased and more readily moved to pity. The result is precisely the opposite of Isaiah 60's light: instead of all nations streaming to the glory of the Lord, terrified consciences flee from Christ and seek out intercessors who seem more sympathetic, warmer, more accessible.

The Apology identifies the invocation of saints as producing a distorted Christ, one who must be approached through intermediaries because He Himself is too severe and demanding. This is the theological consequence of any practice that interposes a more approachable figure between the frightened sinner and God. In what contemporary forms, inside and outside Lutheran piety, does this distortion appear: the assumption that God needs to be warmed up by someone holier than the petitioner before He will listen?

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The Payoff

Isaiah 60's vision ends with the nations bringing their wealth and their flocks to Zion's light, and all of it is directed toward the acceptable offering on God's altar, glorifying the house of His glory. Psalm 145's saints bless the Lord and speak of His kingdom's glory. The Augsburg Confession's Article XXI defends the same movement: the saints are honored as reflectors of the grace that made them what they are, and every honor given to them flows immediately through them toward the One from whom the light came. The invocation of saints interrupts that flow and makes the reflectors the destination; AC XXI's threefold honor restores it, so that Peter's restoration, David's repentance, and the Blessed Virgin's faith all declare the same thing Psalm 145's chorus declares: great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised.