Advent Programme 1: “Their sound went out into all the earth, and their words unto the end of the world.”
“Their sound went out into all the earth,
and their words unto the end of the world.”
What are we to make of the saints? Where do they fit into the picture of Christian life? And how are we to understand the various commemorations of the saints in relation to the liturgical pattern of the Christian year? These are important questions which turn upon a number of different theological and ecclesiological concerns. At issue is the relationship between justification, sanctification, and glorification. The saints belong to that sense of our humanity as having an end in glory. “The glory of God is man fully alive,” as Irenaeus puts it, a powerful and arresting thought. The saints somehow speak to that idea of being “fully alive” which is nothing more than being alive to God, the fullness of life and glory. But the saints are by definition “the holy ones”. This connects to sanctification and thus to justification since their holiness and end in glory cannot be understood apart from God in Christ and Christ in them.
In the reformed traditions, illustrated, for example, in the calendar of the Anglican Canadian Prayer Book, and in the provisions for Saints’ Days, it is the figures from the New Testament who bear the sobriquet ‘Saint’. The only exceptions are St. David of Wales, St. Patrick of Ireland, St. George of England, St. Denys of France, and in brackets, signifying its historical obscurity, St. Anne the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The exceptions bear witness to the emergence of the national states and churches in the post-medieval period and to the popular devotion to St. Anne, looking back to the Patristic period and subsequent medieval developments associated with Mary. The calendar distinguishes between what are known as “red letter days” and “black letter days”, the former commemorating New Testament figures and certain festivals of Christ such as the Transfiguration or Candlemas, at once The Presentation of Christ in the Temple and The Purification of Saint Mary the Virgin. Red letter refers to their being written in red in both manuscript and early print books.
The reformed churches draw upon two things, the general New Testament view which sees the saints as belonging to the faithful community of believers, and the idea that holiness is our Christian vocation. They accept the idea of the New Testament saints as well as the common use of the term ‘saints’ for a great number of figures that belong to the pageant of the faith down to the reformed period and beyond but without an ecclesiastical process for the canonization of later figures in the life of the Church such as was developed in Roman Catholicism. There is in this a certain reticence about the application of the sobriquet ‘saint’. In English, for instance, one never speaks of Jesus as ‘Saint Jesus’ apart from some hymns and devotions which call upon “Holy Jesus”. Instead the term ‘saint’ refers to those who in some way or another embody certain aspects of our life in Christ.
The Communion of Saints is the company of prayer and praise in which we participate and to which we belong in our prayer and praise to God, with God, and in God. In short, we are never alone in our prayers. The saints are integral to our life in the body of Christ which they embody in an exemplary manner such that we remember them as one with us in Christ. They embody the different qualities of spiritual perfection which have their fullness and unity in Christ.
