By Rev Dr Sarah Hall.
This paper was presented at the Society for Ecumenical Studies study afternoon for All Saints Day, looking at contrasting perspectives from a Reformed and a Catholic view.
You can download this paper or read online:
To set my thoughts going on this topic, I posted to a Facebook group for URC ministers the following query: ‘Can anyone suggest names of Reformed saints? (From that tradition, not ‘saints who used to be sinners’!) And how if at all would you draw inspiration from them yourself?’
The answers varied considerably. One wag amongst my colleagues drew my attention to the patron saint of emails: St Francis of a CC. Others were doubtful about the whole question of saints. ‘Not even John Calvin!’ came one scandalised response – though he also noted that a deceased member of his congregation might be referred to as ‘one of the saints’. Someone else from a Northern Irish Presbyterian background remembered being chastised for referring to ‘St Paul’ rather than ‘Paul the Apostle’.
On the other hand, several colleagues suggested that not only New Testament but pre-Reformation saints including Margaret of Scotland, Columba, Cuthbert and Aidan were ‘ours’ too. Focussing on saints as martyrs, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Frère Roger of Taizé were suggested as modern exemplars, while other famous Christians to whom Protestants look for inspiration included Isaac Watts the hymnodist1 – after whom one of my own churches is named – and more recently George Macleod and Ray Davey, founders of the Iona Community and the Corrymeela Community respectively. Finally, a few people known personally were referenced: Mr Melville, a Sunday school teacher who never shouted while sharing faith with unruly teenage lads; a minister, Ken Jones, whose influence on one of my colleagues ‘as a growing follower of Jesus’ was gratefully remembered on the recent occasion of his death.
As is illustrated by this brief virtual vox pop – which is certainly no vox Dei – the Reformed attitude to the question of saints is ambivalent. The unwillingness of some of my colleagues to give anyone the title of Saint is a reaction against what is seen, whether accurately or not, as the Roman Catholic attitude to those Christians who have been recognised as ‘official’ saints by the Church after their deaths – hail St John Henry Newman! Veneration of the saints is seen, in this suspicious view, as taking away from the worship due to God alone. The difference between dulia: honouring the saints and seeking their intercession with God; hyperdulia: that additional degree of veneration accorded only to Mary, Mother of Jesus; and latria: the worship accorded to God alone is not generally recognised in the URC.
Even the idea of asking the saints in glory to pray for us, as one might ask a fellow Christian here below, is taken up by few Reformed Christians (though in the URC there are always exceptions; one of my former ministerial colleagues in Yorkshire was, until his retirement, a guardian of the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham). As nonconformists, we are disinclined to take hierarchy very seriously on earth, so are unlikely to follow standard operating procedures for the heavenly equivalent. And having – we believe, in dim unexamined race-memory – been kept by priests from direct contact with God, our preference, rather than going through official channels, is to cut out the middlesaint and go straight to Jesus.
But what do our theological forebears say? I am indebted for what follows on Reformed attitudes to the veneration of the saints to an article written by Belden C. Lane, a Presbyterian theologian who teaches on a Jesuit faculty at Saint Louis University2. Calvin believed that the love and caring of those who had departed this life ‘is also contained within the communion of the body of Christ’.3 In fact, in his Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto, he conceded: ‘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.’4
Calvin rejected any appeal to the intercession of the departed faithful as a valid practice, however, because of abuses witnessed 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.’5
In the highly charged times of the Reformation, whatever could be misunderstood was misunderstood. But as times change, old wounds heal and old adversaries get to know each other. As members of the United Reformed Church, as well as Reformed we are ecumenically inclined. And while my Walsingham colleague could be described as a theological outlier, Dr Lane is by no means the only contemporary Reformed Christian who has found that inspiration from canonical saints can nourish our love of God. Francis and Ignatius, to name but two, may not always be given their honorifics, but their charisms have helped a significant number within the URC on their spiritual journey. I rather suspect, however, that intercession of the saints remains a cultural as much as a theological sticking point, still uncongenial to the Nonconformist temperament because still suspected to be currying favour with those in authority.
So much for veneration. What, though, of celebrity culture? How could a vapid demonstration of worldly values by overwrought teenagers fixating on shallow and egotistical personalities have anything in common with the Christian’s quest for strength and guidance from members of Christ’s body? But as that rather biassed description demonstrates, my own experience of celebrity culture is pretty minimal. It seemed sensible, therefore, since several of us around this table may be in a similar predicament, to look to the sociological literature to inform us. This time my dialogue partner is Neal Gabler, a cultural historian and film critic.6 Gabler begins his argument by referencing a famous definition of celebrity by the cultural historian Daniel Boorstin: ‘a person who is known for his well-knownness’.7
But it is a certain sort of well-knownness: one, like obscenity, more easily recognised than defined. Her Majesty the Queen is not a celebrity but Princess Diana was. George Bush, Senior or Junior, was not a celebrity but Bill Clinton was. Donald Trump might be described as an anti-celebrity. And in our digital world, celebrities can be known purely by their online presence. One example is Youtube influencers – people who release home-made videos to the video channel Youtube whose offerings are watched by large numbers of people. The top 25 British Youtube influencers have over 4 million subscribers regularly watching their videos.8
What turns a famous person into a celebrity? Gabler asks. Their life-story. ‘What all these people… have in common is that they are living out narratives that capture our interest and the interest of the media.’9 And the narratives of celebrities such as Elvis Presley or John F. Kennedy continue through revelations and reinterpretations long after the stars themselves have departed. 10
According to Gabler, the basic narrative underlying all stories of celebrity is one of self-actualisation. ‘A celebrity arrives on the scene from circumstances not very different from ours. He enters the wondrous world of show business where he encounters his own trials and temptations from drugs to sex to career setbacks, and, having survived them, he returns to us via the media to pass on what he has learned, which is, basically, that he is no different from us.11
Here is a basic distinction between celebrities and saints. A celebrity life – if Gabler is correct – tells us a story of wish-fulfilment, for if they are no different from us, we might yet find our lives change to become like theirs. Saints, by their lives, retell a very different story, one of self-sacrifice: service, opposition to the powers of evil, suffering, death and resurrection.
Yet Gabler’s argument now takes an unexpected turn into theological language: ‘Seen in the context [of self-actualisation], the celebrity narrative… is the story of the people who have been sprung from the pack in a kind of new Calvinism. We suspect that however much they may protest against the idea of their exceptionality, those who live celebrity are the sanctified, the best, the most deserving.’12
Now it is the apparently secular sociologist drawing parallels between celebrity and sainthood. And there are real parallels to be drawn. One could argue, for example, that there are fashions in sanctity, as in celebrity. Young women are less frequently canonised for defending their virginity now than in the Middle Ages. Sts Christopher and Ursula have been demoted from official sainthood on the grounds of unhistoricity, though given the ongoing hazards of travel, the former, at least, may not lose his status as a secular celebrity. The Celtic saints have also regained popularity after centuries of obscurity due to their – more or less historically accurate – approach to ordinary life and the natural world. And while from Walsingham to Knock, Lourdes to Guadeloupe, Mary, mother of Jesus, will surely never lose her fans, the glow-in-the-dark statues and other devotional paraphernalia surrounding devotion to her look from the outside very much like celebrity souvenirs.
Back in the URC, if we Protestants still have our hang-ups about honouring our dead brothers and sisters as saints – unless their names happen to be Andrew or Columba – speakers or musicians famed on the Christian circuit get treated in a very similar way by those who attend their conferences and buy their books to their secular equivalents. Unless they disappoint their fans, as did megachurch pastor Rob Bell who, when his book Love Wins argued against hell as eternal conscious torment, was forced by his church to resign – an example of decanonisation?
Yet it’s not all bad. Since our God chose incarnation as a primary form of communication, we need not be surprised if positive as well as negative influences from the secular to the sacred can be made. It could easily be argued that David Attenborough or Greta Thunberg, in their powerful appeals for the care of creation, are secular ecosaints for our age, with green charisms equivalent to that of Francis in his time. Going back to another leitmotif of sanctity, martyrdom, it could be argued that the murdered humanist MP Jo Cox has acted before and after her death as a secular saint of reconciliation and love of both neighbour and enemy. God is at work, Christ is at play ‘in ten thousand places’, as Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem has it.13 And maybe we in the churches, when we are too sure of our own unassailable devotion to Christ, should be challenged by the fervour and commitment of secular fans.
Yet in spite of these connections, and though one sociologist has drawn on the language of Calvinism to describe celebrities as a sort of secular elect, self-selected as the most successful at entertaining the rest of us, I feel bound to resist his conclusion: that, like celebrities’ most ardent fans, we can only ‘imagine that we might have a narrative of our own some day, allowing us to join them’. For we already inhabit that narrative; through our baptism, we have already put on Christ14. As Bishop How’s hymn ‘For all the saints’ has it, ‘We feebly struggle, they in glory shine. Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine. Alleluia!’
One of Watts’ many hymns encompasses with brevity a Reformed view of ‘the saints’:
1 Give me the wings of faith to rise
Within the veil, and see
The saints above, how great their joys,
How bright their glories be.
2 Once they were mourning here below,
Their faces wet with tears;
They wrestled hard, as we do now,
With sins and doubts and fears.
3 I ask them whence their victory came;
They, with united breath,
Ascribe their conquest to the Lamb,
Their triumph to his death.
4 They marked the footsteps that he trod,
His zeal inspired their breast;
And, following their incarnate God,
Possess the promised rest.
5 Our glorious leader claims our praise
For his own pattern given;
While the long cloud of witnesses
Show the same path to heaven.
Footnotes
2 Belden C. Lane, ‘Recovering the Intercession of the Saints in the Reformed Tradition’, The Way, https://www.theway.org.uk/back/36Lane.pdf
3 John Calvin, Institutes III. xx. 24. All translations from Calvin’s Institutes are taken from the edition in two volumes by John T. McNeill and Ford Lewis Battles.
4 Calvin, ‘Reply to Sadoleto’, Tracts and treatises I, p 47.
5 Calvin, ‘Antidote to the Council of Trent’, in Tracts and treatises on the reformation of the Church III, p 46.
6 Neal Gabler, ‘Toward a New Definition of Celebrity’,
The Norman Lear Center, https://learcenter.org/pdf/Gabler.pdf
7 Daniel Boorstin, The Image, A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, 1962, republished Vintage, 1992
8 https://pmyb.co.uk/top-25-popular-uk-influencers-youtube/
9 Gabler, ibid, p5
10 Gabler, ibid, p8
11 Gabler, ibid, p14
12 Gabler, ibid, p15
13 Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’
14 Galatians 3:27
Possible questions for discussion
Q1: What attitudes to saints do the Reformed members of this group hold?
Q2: How significant is the attitude of Calvin or other classical Reformed theologians to URC standpoints on this issue today?
Q3: What value do we ourselves or members of our congregations place on celebrities? Why?
Q4: Are there Christian celebrities? Should there be?
Q5: What do celebrities or their followers have to teach us as followers of Christ?
Q6:What does the call to holiness mean to us?
Q7: Are miracles and official beatification and canonisation important to our understanding of who are ‘saints’?
Q8: In an age of ‘fake news’ what is the vocation of the celebrity (or anti-celebrity) and saint?