This past week my First-Grade son, who goes to the local Catholic School, along with all of this first grade classmates, helped lead the Wednesday mass. This was the second time this school year that he and his class has done this, and thus it was the second time that I went in order to see him and support him.
While I am not Catholic, my wife and I send our son to catholic school, one because of the smaller class sizes and the more individualized learning he can get from that setting, and two because of the Christian education he receives at the same time. Since I am not currently serving in a church setting, this second aspect is particularly important to us, even though doctrinally what we believe as a family and what they teach at the school do not always match up. I was reminded of this week, like I usually am when attending Mass. As is the custom of the Catholic church, during the service they sought the intercessions of the saints, particularly Saint Hilary of Poitiers, whose feast day was that day, January 13.
Whenever I hear about the Saints, the faithful followers of God from ages past, in reference to praying to them, or receiving intercession from them I tend to cringe in my seat. As a Lutheran, I have always been taught, and believe for myself, that one does not need to pray to a saint in order for that prayer to be heard by God. It is the teaching of the Lutheran Church, as it is written in Scripture that, "there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all" (1 Timothy 2:5-6a, NRSV). Thus, the Lutheran Church Fathers wrote, "it cannot be demonstrated from Scripture that a person should call upon the saints or seek help from them."[1] As such, Christ Jesus is the only one to whom we need to pray in order for God to hear our prayers.
Because of this understanding, however, I feel that the example of the Saints has been largely ignored by the Lutheran church. Just because we believe that we do not need to pray to the saints for God to hear us, that does not mean that their witness and their example do not deserve our reflection. As the Lutheran Church Fathers also point out, “the saints are to be remembered so that we may strengthen our faith when we see how they experienced grace and how they were helped by faith.”[2] Today in the Catholic Mass that my son and his classmates helped lead I was reminded of this. You see, I had never heard of St. Hilary of Poitiers, nor did I know anything about him. And so, I decided to do just that, to learn more about him, and what he went through, and what he did that the church felt was so important as to canonize him as a saint.
Saint Hilary was born in the early part of the fourth century, somewhere around 315 C.E.[3] in Poitiers France.[4] Growing up, his family was not real religious, at least not in the way Christianity was beginning to be defined. Instead of believing in one God, Saint Hilary grew up believing in many gods, like many of the pagan religions of that time.[5] As he grew older, however, he began to feel as though believing in multiple gods that had oversight of multiple aspects of life just did not make sense to him. What did make sense to him was the belief that there was one God who oversaw all aspects of life; and so, Hilary of Poitiers converted to Christianity, and eventually was chosen by his local community to be their local faith leader, or bishop.[6] It was not until well after his death, around 368 C.E. that Hilary of Poitiers was canonized as a doctor of the church and received sainthood from Pope Pius IX in 1851.[7]
What did Hilary of Poitiers do to qualify him for sainthood one might ask? Around that same time that Hilary of Poitiers was leading his local church as bishop, there was this movement spreading around that was trying to teach that Jesus was not in fact truly God, but just merely a man who followed God and offered a new teaching about God; this movement became known as Arianism.[8] This movement gained so much momentum that even the holy Roman emperor became convinced that this was true and demanded that Hilary of Poitiers condemn the old teachings of Saint Athanasius which taught that Jesus was indeed truly God and the only means by which one can be saved.[9] After refusing to do so, however, Saint Hilary was exiled to Phrygia by the emperor. It was while in exile that Saint Hilary of Poitiers did most of his work writing about the divinity of Jesus, and the connection of all the aspects of God that we have come to know as the Trinity.[10]
Saint Hilary of Poitiers, what he went through and the truth he believed and taught about God, has helped to shape what many Christian faiths still hold to be true to this day. In the face of adversity, he stood up for what he believed in, for what he knew to be truth and never waivered from that no matter what happened to him. And while the founding fathers of the Lutheran faith did not adhere to the Catholic practice of praying to the saints, because they still held reverence and reflected on the life and work of the saints like Hilary of Poitiers, they too were able to proclaim what they believed to be truth in their own time. You see, this movement of belief about Jesus not being truly divine, never really went away. Arianism was still a Christian belief system in the 1500’s when Martin Luther amongst others were breaking away from the Catholic church. In fact, the Lutheran church fathers wrote their own teaching against this belief of Jesus not being fully human and fully divine, which at that time was being taught by a group called Calvinists. In the document the Formula of Concord of 1577, written to address controversy over what was written in the Augsburg Confession of 1530, the early Lutheran Church fathers wrote,
To explain and settle this dispute according to the guidance of our Christian faith, we teach, believe, and confess the following:
1. That the divine and human natures in Christ are personally united, and therefore, that there are not two Christs (one the Son of God and the other the Son of Man), but one single Son of God and Son of Man (Luke 1[:31-35]; Rom. 9[:5]).[11]
They continue on for twelve total Affirmative Theses and twenty Negative Theses outlining this belief in the true divinity and true humanity of Christ Jesus as part of the Trinity as a whole, much in the same manner of Saint Hilary of Poitiers.
Currently we live in a world that is full of division and controversy over what is true and what is not. It seems that the easiest way to navigate this minefield would be to not give voice to what we believe to be true. However, I do not think that this is the best way to navigate through the minefield. If the saints of old have taught us anything, especially Saint Hilary of Poiters, is that we can and should stand up for what we believe in, no matter what the negative consequence maybe, but we can do so with grace and love. This last part, the grace and love part, is what I feel we as a society have been lacking when it comes to voicing our differing beliefs about what is truth and what is not as of late, especially in regard to what is voiced on social media.
As I reflect on the life and work of Saint Hilary of Poiters this week, I am reminded that speaking up for what is true is as necessary part of what it means to have faith, even if it means being ripped from the life you knew and cast into one you did not expect. Despite all that, we know that we have faith in a God that is always with us and will always guide us no matter where life takes us. In the hymn For All the Saints we sing in verse four, “And when the strife is fierce, the warfare long, steals on the ear the distant triumph song, and hearts are brave again and arms are strong. Alleluia! Alleluia!”[12]
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[1]. “The Augsburg Confession: Concerning the Cult of the Saints,” in the Book of Concord: The Confession of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 58.
[2]. Ibid.
[3]. The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Saint Hilary of Poitiers,” Encyclopaedia Brittanica, January 02, 2020, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Hilary-of-Poitiers (Accessed January 13, 2021).
[4]. “Hilary of Poitiers,” RCL Benziger Saints Resource, 2017, http://saintsresource.com/hilary-of-poitiers/#:~:text=The%20story%20of%20St.%20Hilary%20helps%20us%20to,raised%20as%20a%20pagan.%20Pagans%20worshipped%20many%20gods (Accessed January 13, 2021).
[5]. Ibid.
[6]. Ibid.
[7]. Ibid.
[8]. Ibid.
[9]. Britannica, “Saint Hilary of Poitiers.”
[10]. Ibid.
[11]. “The Formula of Concord: VIII. Concerning the Person of Christ” in the Book of Concord: The Confession of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 509.
[12]. Text: William W. How, 1823-1897.
