I was asked the other day to explain my habitual use of the honorific “St.” — e.g., St. Paul, St. Augustine (of Hippo) — as a Protestant. (Asked, to be clear, in a non-hostile way!) Here is my response, edited and expanded from its original format.

Normally, in practice, I use that honorific for those recognized as saints in the pre-Reformation Latin church. The main group are those who are saints of the ecumenical or undivided church — the apostles (St. Paul), the early martyrs (Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas), the fathers (St. Augustine of Hippo) and mothers (St. Macrina the Younger) of the church, and so forth. The Anglican Communion also recognizes as saints a number of medieval Latin figures (St. Thomas Aquinas), inherited at the time of the break with Rome. By contrast, I think I do not normally speak of anyone post-Reformation as St. so-and-so — though if discussing someone who, while not so recognized by the Anglican Communion, is reckoned a saint by Rome or the Eastern churches, and the case for whose saintliness seems eminently reasonable, I would probably use it out of respect (e.g., St. Thérèse of Lisieux).

Of course, all of us in the Christian churches are “saints” in the dialectical Pauline sense — “sanctified, called to be saints.” When I speak of “the saints” I normally have this group in mind. But along with this understanding the church has, always and purely retrospectively, recognized certain men and women in Christian history as having been friends and servants of Christ in a distinctively discernible way. In service of our own life of imitating and being conformed to Christ, they are worthy of learning from, studying, and even in a limited sense imitating (in the degree that they themselves were faithful imitators of Christ). This is a sub-species, essentially, of having strong Christian friends: since I really am something like the weighted average of the five people with whom I spend the most time, should I not spend substantial time with those whose lives most strongly testify to the power of Christ at work in them? Not, of course, that this means the marginalization or exclusion of spending time in prayer and Bible reading, i.e., spending time with Christ Himself — the point is that these influences do not compete or even operate on the same plane. The church’s recognition of these men and women, and special use of the term “saint” for them to denote that in their own individual ways they were (are!) what we all are called and being reshaped to be, seems perfectly appropriate. In this sense, the use of “St.” is a way of disciplining my speech to obey the fifth commandment: honoring my fathers and mothers in the faith.

Now, as far as I can tell, the characteristic spirit of the saint is summed up by St. John the Baptist: “He must increase, and I must decrease.” The saints are to be honored as paradigmatic imitators of Christ, not worshipped as Christ Himself. In church history there are many ways that it seems clear to me that the honor due the saints has been at minimum over-extrapolated and at maximum blasphemously elevated. I am hardly unaware of them, and am wary of these accretions and abuses in the degree that seems to me appropriate in each case. Take as an example the practice of asking the saints for their prayers. A simple form of this is, I take it, perfectly unobjectionable and even reasonable in itself: the saints, we confess, are not dead but alive in Christ (cf. Matt. 19), and certainly no Protestant would (or should) object to asking your friends to pray for you or join you in your prayers. But in certain quarters this is expanded into the notion that one should ask the saints for their intercession rather than Christ for His, because Christ is far off and unapproachable whereas the saints are gentle and friendly, and their closeness to the throne guarantees one’s prayers a better hearing. To this I must say Nein! There is one mediator between God and humanity: the man Christ Jesus. Through Christ (who dwells in our hearts by faith) we have access to the Father — not, through the saints who dwell in our hearts by faith we have access to Christ and thus to the Father. (And so on and so forth with the standard and correct Protestant rebuttal texts.) The sole mediacy of Christ is not to be compromised for the sake of showing his friends pious respect. I suspect the saints themselves, with their fully redeemed vision of Christ, would shudder at this notion!

Nevertheless, I also take abusus non tollit usum to be an essential principle of the spiritual life. Nothing, be it ever so holy by God’s grace, that makes contact with and exists within the fallenness of this world is proof against abuse: not the words of Scripture, not the sacraments, not the Church’s authority to bind and loose. (I take this to be one of the core insights and impulses of Protestantism — which is why I am content to remain one.) This does not degrade Scripture’s holiness, the sacraments’ efficacy, the keys’ power. God’s persistent business throughout the history of humanity appears to be working for good what we meant, ever so misguidedly, for evil.

This leads to a larger question of theological taxonomy: What is the nature and authority of the tradition (for a tradition it eminently is) that is the recognition of saints? I would place it in a tertiary and subsidiary category. It belongs to the tradition as a guide to the right understanding of church history, not even principally to the right understanding of Scripture. This requires some exposition of my take on the relevant categories.

The primary, and in that sense sole, authority is Holy Scripture, which stands alone. No two-source theories here. Let me be clear: Scripture is a traditioned thing. It does not, and makes no pretensions to, fall from the sky complete (presumably in the King’s English), nor does it purport to have been dictated to its human authors such that it is in principle untranslatable (unlike the Quran). God gives it through, alongside, and for the normal processes and procedures of human existence and experience. The difference is that it is recognized by the eyes and ears of faith — the community of faith — as being no mere human word but as really being the Word of God, the words for which God takes definitive responsibility. This is confirmed to us in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ Jesus — all of which take place, in the richest possible sense, “in accordance with the Scriptures.” For this reason the communities that received the Word, in generation after generation, thought it necessary to make it a textually fixed thing: not so that it could be a “dead letter” but so that it could be, for all subsequent generations, “living and active,” that every day, as long as it is called “today,” the Word could speak its own independent “today.”

The secondary category, then, contains those traditions that belong to the rule of faith: they are the boundary markers of the Church catholic as being (in Webster’s phrase) the domain of the Word. The rule of faith is not Scripture, but to read Scripture in contravention of the rule of faith is to cease to interpret the Scripture as part of the Church, and (as Scripture testifies) there is only one Church. The nature of its authority is that it is handed down along with Scripture to orient us rightly to Scripture, ruling out certain readings (and the practices that depend on them) and ruling in others. Its authority is dependent on Scripture’s precisely because it appeals constantly and ultimately to the revelation of God revealed in Scripture through the mind and work of the prophets and apostles. Within this framework, there is an obvious need for elements that are not themselves Scripture but are commentary upon it. So the traditional catechism contains the Apostles’ Creed alongside the Decalogue and the Lord’s Prayer because it is the ancient baptismal confession. Similarly the creeds and conciliar judgments of the undivided church lie in this category. Abandon them and, well, God might not abandon you — He is notoriously and scandalously gracious — but you abandon the Church. They are in this sense articles of faith.

The tertiary category is really a subsidiary category of tradition: traditions that are venerable but do not belong to the rule of faith. This includes many liturgical practices like the sign of the cross, kneeling for confession, appending the antiphon Gloria Patri to the Psalms and the refrain “The Word of the Lord / Thanks be to God!” to other readings of Scripture, and the honorific “St.”. Many of these are, or grow out of, genuinely ancient practices — Tertullian speaks of the signing with the cross in the early third century, and in their writings the Fathers are always saying things like “as the most blessed and holy Cyril writes…” which is a logical precursor to calling him “St. Cyril.” The point is that they are distinctive disciplines of speech, thought, and gesture. When I pray a Psalm or read a portion of Scripture, especially one whose words make me uncomfortable, it is good for me to end by reminding myself of the divine origin and purposes of the Biblical text. When I am speaking words that remind me (often against my instinctive will) of my sinfulness and implore God to have mercy on me, it is good to adopt a bodily posture that accords with this self-humiliation. I am very happy to adopt and submit myself to such practices, especially under the guidance of my church as it adopts them. But they are at most expressions of belonging to the catholic tradition, not themselves definitive markers of that tradition’s boundaries.

Finally, there is obviously much disagreement — even within the large and unruly Protestant camp — over the boundaries between these categories. I cannot hope to resolve it here, only to sketch my own present view of these matters. As the above discussion indicates, I have little interest in — or envy of — a magisterium that would permanently render all such judgments for me. (As the life of the current Christian body ostensibly ruled by a magisterium indicates, it actually does not in practice.) This is because the Bible, and the church’s proclamation that seeks to think the Bible’s thoughts after it, do not seem meant to give us an exhaustive manual for responding correctly to life’s problems and questions. The Bible would look very different if it were (more like, say, the Quran and the Hadith in Islam). Instead, Bible, proclamation, and tradition are together all meant to make us wise for, and regarding, the salvation that is in Christ Jesus (2 Tim. 3:15).