Wrestling With the Saints
In a discussion about praying to the dead, a Roman Catholic FB friend was critical of a Protestant FB friend. They went back and forth while I scooped popcorn into my mouth and enjoyed the show. Full contact theology is way more entertaining than MMA fights that inevitably become grappling on the floor, and you don’t have to pay for cable. Real theological debate is more lively, like the old Big Time Wrestling that my cousins and I used to watch on Saturday mornings.
The Roman Catholic guy went for the takedown:
The Catholic [sic] Church endorses both prayer for the dead to get into heaven and to the righteous dead to make our case before God. I know this is anathema to you because it is not in your Bible. It used to be, but Luther kicked Maccabees out of the Protestant Bible and called it a nasty name --- Apocrypha--- thing about which there is doubt. It was part of scripture at the Time of Jesus. It appears to me that Luther did that because he disagreed with its teaching. Can a murderer get rid of the 7th commandment? No. So, I have Maccabees. You have Luther kicking it out. Not sure what else you have saying Maccabees is bad. I am confident we will find out who is right on the last day.
At this point, I threw down my tub of popcorn with yellow grease, grabbed a folding chair, and jumped into the ring. For a moment I was back to my childhood with my aunts and cousins in a smoke-filled Akron Armory, watching men in tights pretend to fight each other to the roar of the drunken crowd.
But I didn’t fight dirty, unless telling the truth is considered out of bounds. I replied:
2 Maccabees is quoted in our Confessions three times, and is explicitly called "Scripture." Our confessions also quote the Book of Tobit (four times). The Apocrypha was published in all Lutheran Bibles until they began to speak English and bought Bibles from the Protestants. Russian Lutheran Bibles also include these books, and the Russian Lutherans refer to them as deuterocanonical.
Moreover, the passage you are referring to (2 Macc 15:14) says that the dead pray - not that we pray to them. We Lutherans certainly confess that the dead pray for us (Apology 21:9). Our issue is that there is nothing in Scripture indicating that we are to pray to them or that they can even hear our prayers.
The early church - and indeed the Roman Church until Trent - made a distinction between the Greek Old Testament books (which we call the Apocrypha, and which you call Deuterocanon) and the Hebrew - just as the early church (as do Lutherans) distinguish between the New Testament books known as the Antilegomena and the Homolegoumena. The early church did not draw doctrine solely from the witness of the Antilegomena or the Greek OT books (Apocrypha/Deuterocanon), whether from the Old or New Testaments, but required additional witness.
It was only at the Council of Trent - which the papal church refused to call until after Luther's death - that the deuterocanonical books were received as equal witnesses to the rest of Scripture.
And so it is the Lutherans whose treatment of Scripture aligns with the fathers, and it is Rome who changed and innovated.
I get that we are in disagreement, but as Christians we are called to be honest in stating what our opponents believe. The great St. Thomas Aquinas is a stellar example of this kind of precision in argumentation.
And then, after making an appeal to fight fair, I cracked him over the head with my chair, smashed his face into the turnbuckle, and held him down for the pin - but of course, the referee was distracted, and I only got a two-count. Some guy called “The Inquisitor” climbed into the ring, snuck up on me, and knocked me out cold. That’s the last I remember.
But my aunts and cousins thought it was a good show.