the communion of saints

The Text

The clause that takes the doctrine of the church and tells the truth about its membership. The previous clause confessed the holy catholic Church; this clause names who is in it. The answer is more radical than most Christians casually praying the clause realize. The membership of the church is not exhausted by those visibly present at any given Sunday gathering, or by those still bodily alive on the earth at any given moment of history. The membership of the church includes the dead. It includes the saints of every generation who have gone before. It includes those who will come after. To confess the communion of saints is to confess that the body of Christ extends through time and across the boundary of death — that Abraham and Mary and Polycarp and Hildegard and Wesley and the unnamed grandmother who first told you about Jesus are, even now, one body with you, in the Lord who is the God of the living and not of the dead.

Translation Notes

Sanctorum — of the holy. A genitive plural, and grammatically ambiguous about gender. The form can be the genitive of sancti (masculine, the holy ones / the saints) or of sancta (neuter, the holy things / the sacraments). The Latin tradition has read both senses in the clause and has, at its best, refused to collapse them into one. Sanctorum communionem therefore means at the same time the fellowship of the holy people and the fellowship in the holy things — the persons gathered around the sacraments, and the sacraments by which the persons are gathered. The Eastern Orthodox tradition has tended to emphasize the second sense (the eucharistic koinōnia in the holy mysteries); the Western tradition, especially in the later medieval period, more often the first (the fellowship of canonized saints in heaven with the church on earth). The single Latin word does both.

Communio — communion. From com- (with, together) + unus (one): the state of being one-with. The Latin word is a translation of the Greek koinōnia, which is one of the most theologically dense words in the New Testament. Koinōnia is the fellowship of the apostolic community (Acts 2:42), the participation in the body and blood of Christ in the Supper (1 Cor. 10:16), the partnership of churches in the gospel (Phil. 1:5), the fellowship of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14), the participation in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1:4). To translate communio with the more sociological fellowship is correct but thin; the word names a real sharing in a real common life, not a sentimental sense of togetherness.

Saint — sanctus, hagios. Holy, set apart. In Pauline usage the word does not name a special spiritual elite but the entire Christian people. Paul addresses his letters to all the saints in Rome, in Corinth, in Philippi — meaning the whole baptized community. The post-biblical narrowing of the word to canonized exemplars is a later development of Christian language; the New Testament uses the saints (hoi hagioi) almost interchangeably with the brethren (hoi adelphoi) for the church as such. Both senses are legitimate. The clause holds them together: the saints are at once the whole church and the particular individuals in whom the Spirit’s work has shone most plainly.

The earliest Greek and Latin texts of the Apostles’ Creed do not have this clause. It first appears in the Western creedal tradition in the late 4th or early 5th century — somewhat later than most other clauses. Its addition was almost certainly a clarification of the previous clause: having confessed the holy catholic Church, the church then specified the communion in which that catholic body actually exists. The clause was therefore not a doctrinal novelty when it was added; it was a making-explicit of what was already implied.

Historical Context

The doctrine of the communion of saints reaches back, in substance, to the New Testament’s settled conviction that the church includes both the living and those who have died in Christ. The earliest evidence for the church’s commerce with its dead is the practice of celebrating the Eucharist on the anniversary of a martyr’s death (natale martyris, the day of the martyr’s birth into heaven), attested as early as the Martyrdom of Polycarp (c. 155). The practice was not invented as a substitute for funeral rites; it was the church’s confession that the martyr was now more fully alive than before, in the presence of the risen Christ, and therefore present at the eucharistic meal of the church on earth in a new mode.

The clause acquired sharper definition in the 4th–5th centuries. Augustine treats it extensively, especially in the Enchiridion and the City of God. The patristic synthesis distinguishes three states of the one church: the church militant (on earth, still in the struggle against sin), the church expectant or suffering (the souls of the faithful departed awaiting the resurrection), and the church triumphant (the saints already in glory). The three are one church because they are one body in Christ, united by the same Spirit, sharing in the same eucharistic life.

The medieval West developed this synthesis into the doctrine of the invocation of the saints — the practice of asking the saints in glory to intercede for the church on earth, much as one might ask a living fellow-Christian to pray for one. The practice was widespread by the 6th century and was articulated theologically by Aquinas and his contemporaries. The medieval expansion also included the doctrine of purgatory — the state of purification for the church expectant — and the practice of offering masses, indulgences, and almsdeeds for the dead.

The Reformation contested several of these developments while preserving the underlying doctrine. The Reformers, almost without exception, affirmed the communion of saints as a real fellowship of the church across the boundary of death; they rejected, in varying degrees, the invocation of the saints, the doctrine of purgatory, and the practice of masses for the dead. The 39 Articles of the Church of England (1563), Article XXII, rejected the Romish doctrine of purgatory and invocation of saints as fond things vainly invented; the Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article XIV, took over the same language. What the Reformers retained was the substance — the fellowship of the living and the dead in Christ; what they rejected was a specific medieval superstructure they judged to have overstated the doctrine.

The doctrine has had additional development in the 20th century. The ecumenical theology of the church as communion (the communio ecclesiology of Vatican II and of postwar Lutheran, Reformed, and Orthodox dialogue) has recovered the breadth of the koinōnia of which this clause speaks. The popular Methodist and Anglican practice of observing All Saints’ Day has revived attention to the clause in a register the Reformation had partly muted.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Martyrdom of Polycarp (c. 155); Tertullian; Augustine, Enchiridion §§109–110, City of God esp. Books XX–XXII; Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews

The patristic settlement on the communion of saints grew out of the church’s earliest cult of the martyrs. From at least the mid-2nd century, the anniversaries of the martyrs’ deaths were observed with the celebration of the Eucharist at the martyrs’ tombs. The theological warrant was Hebrews 11–12: the great cloud of witnesses surrounds the church on earth; the heroes of faith who have gone before are present in the eucharistic gathering. Augustine systematizes the doctrine: the church is one across the boundary of death; the prayers of the saints in glory are part of the prayer of the church on earth; the eucharistic offering is shared with the heavenly altar.

The patristic tradition was, however, careful to distinguish commemoration of the martyrs (legitimate) from worship of the martyrs (forbidden). Augustine’s discussion in City of God XXII is at pains to clarify this distinction against pagan critics who accused the church of substituting martyr-cults for the pagan cult of heroes. We do not build temples to the martyrs as if they were gods, Augustine insists. We commemorate them as those who have gone before us in the faith; we ask their prayers as we would ask a living brother’s; we worship the one God who has glorified them.

Strengths

• Anchors the doctrine in the earliest Christian liturgical practice and in the explicit biblical text of Hebrews 11–12
• The Augustinian distinction between commemoration and worship is theologically careful and pastorally usable

Weaknesses

• The Augustinian distinction was harder to maintain in popular medieval practice than in the patristic original
• Some patristic discussions of the precise interaction between the living and the dead went into speculative territory that the later tradition has been right to leave alone

Scholastic

Tradition: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 8 (Christ as head); II–II, q. 83.11 (on intercession of the saints); II–II, q. 88; Supplement, qq. 71–72 (on suffrages for the dead)

Aquinas treats the communion of saints under the doctrine of Christ as the head of the body. The grace of Christ flows from the head to all the members; the members participate in one another’s grace by virtue of their participation in the same head. The communion is therefore a real participation in the same supernatural life — not a metaphor of common feeling but a metaphysical fact.

Aquinas defends the practice of asking the saints in glory to pray for the church on earth: their charity is greater in heaven than it was on earth; they pray for the church more, not less, after their glorification; the saints’ prayers are part of the means by which God dispenses grace. Aquinas is, again, careful to distinguish the prayers offered to the saints (asking their intercession) from the worship reserved to God alone.

Strengths

• The mystical-body metaphysics gives the doctrine genuine theological depth
• The scholastic distinctions about the relation of the saints to the church on earth are careful and have informed Catholic teaching ever since

Weaknesses

• The medieval popular reception of the doctrine often blurred the careful scholastic distinctions
• The full scholastic apparatus presupposes a doctrine of purgatory the Reformation found insufficiently grounded in Scripture

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Smalcald Articles II.2; Apology of the Augsburg Confession XXI

The Lutheran tradition affirmed the communion of saints as a real fellowship of the church on earth with the church triumphant, while rejecting the invocation of saints and the doctrine of purgatory as inadequately grounded in Scripture. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession (1531), Article XXI, allowed that the saints in glory pray for the church on earth, but insisted that Christians on earth should pray to God alone, with Christ as the one mediator (1 Tim. 2:5). The Lutheran reform of the cult of the saints was therefore reductive rather than abolitionist: the saints remain part of the church, are commemorated with gratitude, are honored as exemplars of faith, but are not addressed in prayer.

Strengths

• Preserves the substance of the doctrine while addressing the specific medieval abuses
• The “one mediator” emphasis (1 Tim. 2:5) gives the reform a clean christological warrant

Weaknesses

• The Lutheran reduction has sometimes left popular Lutheran piety with a thinner sense of the church’s continuity across death than the patristic original
• The careful theological distinctions of the Apology have not always survived in popular Lutheran practice

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes III.20.20–27 (against invocation of saints); Heidelberg Catechism Q. 55; Belgic Confession, Article 26; Westminster Confession Ch. 26

The Reformed tradition went further than the Lutheran in reducing the medieval cult of saints. Calvin treats the invocation of saints at length in Institutes III.20.20–27 and rejects it without exception: the practice has no warrant in Scripture; it diverts to creatures the trust due to God alone; it implicitly denies the sufficiency of Christ’s mediation. The Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 55) supplies the positive doctrine: “What do you understand by the communion of saints?” A. “First, that believers, all and every one, as members of Christ, have communion with him and share in all his treasures and gifts. Second, that each one ought to know that he is bound to employ his gifts readily and joyfully for the benefit and well-being of other members.”

The Heidelberg’s reading is therefore strongly horizontal-ethical: the communion of saints is the present mutual participation of believers in Christ and the resulting obligation to use one’s gifts for the body. The vertical dimension (communion with the church triumphant) is not denied, but the working doctrinal accent has shifted toward the living church’s mutual life.

Strengths

• The Heidelberg’s account is pastorally and ethically powerful; it makes the doctrine immediately practical
• The Calvinist insistence on the one mediator preserves a christological clarity that the medieval tradition had sometimes muddled

Weaknesses

• The strong horizontal-ethical accent can leave the vertical dimension underdeveloped
• The Reformed reduction has sometimes been so thoroughgoing that the empirical Reformed observance of All Saints’ Day has been thin compared to other traditions

Roman Catholic

Tradition: Council of Trent, Session 25 (1563); Vatican II, Lumen Gentium Ch. VII (1964); Catechism of the Catholic Church §§946–962

The post-Tridentine Roman Catholic tradition has preserved the full medieval doctrine, with refinements. The communion of saints is the threefold communion of the church militant, expectant, and triumphant; the saints in glory pray for the church on earth and may be invoked; the church on earth prays for the souls in purgatory; the eucharistic offering is the central act of communion between the three states. Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium Ch. VII offers a substantial re-articulation that emphasizes the eschatological dimension — the church on earth as already participating in the heavenly liturgy — and reframes the invocation of saints as participation in a single worshiping community rather than the procurement of favors.

Strengths

• Preserves the rich liturgical and devotional inheritance of the church catholic
• The Vatican II reframing speaks the patristic substance in contemporary theological idiom

Weaknesses

• Popular Catholic piety has not always kept pace with the careful theological distinctions
• The doctrine of purgatory, while not arbitrarily invented, has a slimmer New Testament foundation than the Catholic tradition sometimes acknowledges

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Byzantine liturgical and iconographic tradition; John of Damascus, On Holy Images; the Synaxarion (calendar of saints)

The Eastern tradition has held the communion of saints liturgically and iconographically in a way the West has not always matched. The iconostasis — the screen of icons that separates the nave from the sanctuary in an Orthodox church — depicts the saints, the Mother of God, the apostles, and Christ in glory; the worshiper stands before this assembled communion at every liturgy. The Eastern conviction is that the whole church — past, present, and future, on earth and in glory — is liturgically present in every eucharistic celebration. The doctrine of the communion of saints is, in this tradition, not a separate theological topic but the basic shape of liturgical reality.

The Orthodox also more strongly emphasize the equality of all the saints — there is no Eastern equivalent to the developed Western practice of canonization as a juridical act. Local communities recognize their saints; the universal church receives them. The saints in glory are not a hierarchy of merit but a single chorus of the redeemed.

Strengths

• The liturgical embedding of the doctrine has preserved it from becoming a dry theological topic
• The egalitarian-charismatic recognition of saints resists the bureaucratization that has sometimes afflicted the West

Weaknesses

• The Orthodox lack of a sharp distinction between veneration and worship has worried both Reformed and Catholic theologians at various points
• The strongly iconographic mediation requires careful catechesis in cultures unfamiliar with the tradition

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Lumen Gentium (1964); World Council of Churches, Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry (1982); contemporary communio ecclesiologies

The 20th century has seen substantial ecumenical convergence around the doctrine of the church as communion (koinōnia). The recovery has emphasized the trinitarian foundation (the church’s communion is a participation in the communion of the Father, Son, and Spirit), the eucharistic center (the church is what it is because it celebrates the Lord’s Supper), and the breadth of the koinōnia (the church includes the living and the dead). The ecumenical theology has not resolved the differences over invocation of saints and purgatory but has clarified that the substance of the doctrine is held in common across the major Christian traditions.

Strengths

• Has restored the doctrine of communion to ecumenical centrality after centuries of confessional neglect
• The trinitarian-eucharistic framework gives the doctrine renewed theological depth

Weaknesses

• The convergence at the theological-commission level has not always reached the parish level
• Some ecumenical formulations have used the language of communion so widely as to blur its specific creedal sense

Wesleyan Voice

The Wesleyan tradition has held the communion of saints in a form characteristic of broad-church Anglican Reformation theology. The Articles of Religion (1784), Article XIV, rejected the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory, pardon, worshipping, and adoration, as well of images as of relics, and also invocation of saints, calling them a fond thing, vainly invented, and grounded upon no warranty of Scripture, but repugnant to the Word of God. Article XIV is the Wesleyan ratification of the broad Anglican Reformation stance. The Methodist tradition does not invoke the saints; it does not believe in purgatory; it does not pray to the dead.

What Wesley preserved with vigor was the positive substance of the doctrine. Wesley’s hymnody (with Charles) returns constantly to the communion of saints — most explicitly in the great Methodist funeral hymns, the love-feast hymns, and the watch-night hymns. The 1780 Collection devotes whole sections to “For the Society Meeting,” “For the Society Praying,” “For Believers Watching,” and “For the Society Parting” — the inner-Methodist life of the small-group meetings was understood as a participation in the wider communion of saints, on earth and in glory.

Wesley’s preaching of Christian perfection — the doctrine that the believer can in this life be brought, by grace, to love God with all the heart and one’s neighbor as oneself — is part of this same doctrine of the communion of saints. The saints of the New Testament are not a special spiritual elite; they are the whole Christian people, called to holiness. The Methodist confession of the communion of saints is therefore a confession of mutual obligation: as Wesley put it, “the Bible knows nothing of solitary religion.” To be a saint is to be in a body of saints, mutually obliged, mutually accountable, mutually encouraging.

The Wesleyan observance of All Saints’ Day (November 1) has, in recent decades, become a particularly important moment in Methodist liturgical life. The day commemorates the saints of every place and time, names the saints of the local congregation who have died during the past year, and confesses the church’s continuity across the boundary of death. The Methodist practice is consistent with the Reformation reform — no invocation, no prayers for the dead in the medieval sense — but rich in its commemoration and its conviction of the abiding fellowship.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: confess the communion of saints with full theological seriousness; pray for the church on earth, with thanksgiving for the church in glory; live as if surrounded by the cloud of witnesses, because we are; receive the saints of the past as living members of the same body; understand one’s own life as a contribution to the communion of saints of the generation yet to come.

Hymnody

The Methodist hymnody on the communion of saints is rich, particularly in its funeral and All Saints’ inheritance.

“For all the saints, who from their labors rest” (William Walsham How, 1864) is the single greatest English-language hymn on the doctrine. The 19th-century Anglican original entered every major Methodist hymnal and remains the standard All Saints’ Day hymn: “For all the saints, who from their labors rest, / Who thee by faith before the world confessed, / Thy name, O Jesus, be forever blest. / Alleluia! Alleluia!” The seventh stanza names the doctrine explicitly: “O blest communion, fellowship divine! / We feebly struggle, they in glory shine; / Yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.”

“Come, let us join our friends above” (Charles, 1759) is the most explicit single Wesleyan hymn on the communion of saints: “Come, let us join our friends above / Who have obtained the prize, / And on the eagle wings of love / To joys celestial rise… One family, we dwell in him, / One Church, above, beneath; / Though now divided by the stream, / The narrow stream of death.” The hymn is among the most beloved in the Methodist funerary tradition and embodies in song the doctrine the creed confesses.

“Hark, how all the welkin rings” (Charles, 1739, later altered to “Hark! The herald angels sing”) is not a saints’ hymn but participates in the doctrine through its naming of the heavenly host present at the Incarnation.

“Let saints on earth in concert sing” (Charles, 1759) is another concentrated Wesleyan statement: “Let saints on earth in concert sing / With those whose work is done; / For all the servants of our King / In earth and heaven are one.”

“Sing with all the saints in glory” (William J. Irons, 1873; not Wesleyan in origin but standard in Methodist worship) names the resurrection hope that anchors the doctrine: “Sing with all the saints in glory, / Sing the resurrection song!”

“I sing a song of the saints of God” (Lesbia Scott, 1929) is the popular children’s hymn that brings the doctrine into intergenerational worship: “And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, / And one was a shepherdess on the green… and there’s not any reason, no, not the least, / why I shouldn’t be one too.”

For the funeral service: the Methodist Service of Death and Resurrection (since 1980) draws explicitly on the communion-of-saints inheritance, including the recitation of names, the great litany of thanksgiving, and the eucharistic gathering of the bereaved with the departed in the body of Christ.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

What do we mean by we? This is the question the clause forces. We — when a Christian prays we believe in the creed — is not just the people in the room. We is not just the people in the denomination. We is not just the people on earth at this hour. We is the whole church, all places, all times, this side of death and that side. The communion of saints is the doctrine that fills out the pronoun. The body the Christian belongs to is wider, older, and stranger than the local fellowship of any given Sunday.

The clue is in the burning bush. When Moses asks the voice for a name, the answer comes through three patriarchs: I am the God of your father Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob. All three are dead, by any ordinary reckoning. They have been dead for centuries when Moses meets the bush. But the divine self-identification is in the present tense — I am, not I was. Jesus presses the point in the dispute over the resurrection (Mark 12:26–27): He is not God of the dead, but of the living. The whole Old Testament foundation of the doctrine of the communion of saints is here. The God who is the God of the living is, in being the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, declaring those three to be alive. To be in communion with this God is to be in communion with the whole company of those whom this God has made alive.

The New Testament names this company a great cloud of witnesses (Heb. 12:1). The Greek word translated witnesses is martyres — the same word from which we get martyr. The cloud is a cloud of martyrs in the broadest sense: those who have testified to the gospel with their lives and (in many cases) with their deaths. To say that the church is surrounded by a cloud of martyrs is, on first hearing, ambiguous. There are two ways to be surrounded. One is to be surrounded by enemies. The other is to be surrounded by allies. The Hebrews passage is unambiguous about which: the witnesses are cheering us on, urging us forward, running the race ahead of us. The image is not a courtroom but a stadium, and the cloud is the home crowd.

The clause has a two-way structure. It is the confession of those who have come before — gratitude for the grandmother who first told you about Jesus, the Sunday school teacher who first put a Bible into your hands, the friend who walked beside you in the hardest year of your life. It is also the confession of obligation toward those who come after — the children in the pew, the catechumens preparing for baptism, the strangers who have not yet been told. The communion of saints is therefore not only a doctrine of receiving a heritage; it is a doctrine of transmitting a heritage. The witness goes in both directions. You are a recipient; you are also a witness in your turn.

This is the part of the clause that has teeth. The communion of saints is not only a comfort; it is also a responsibility. Your life is not, on this confession, a private project. Your life is the present chapter of a story that began with Abraham and continues to the end of the world. What you do with the gospel that has been entrusted to you will, by the structure of this doctrine, shape the faith of the people who come after you. How are you discipling the people in front of you? — the question is not optional. Every Christian is, by the fact of confessing this clause, a witness; the question is only what kind. You will leave a legacy in the body of Christ whether you mean to or not.

The pastoral encouragement is also the pastoral demand. You are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses. Hold to it when the local church is failing, when the present generation seems to have lost the thread, when the public form of Christianity in your neighborhood embarrasses the gospel. The church is wider than the moment. The communion of saints includes Athanasius and the desert mothers and the Reformers and the Wesleys and the African American spirituals and the Latin American base communities and Polycarp’s last prayer and Hildegard’s visions and the unnamed catechist who taught your great-grandmother to pray. The church you confess every Sunday is older than the disappointments of the present.

And keep the Augustinian distinction. The communion of saints is commemorated, not worshiped. We give thanks for the saints; we do not pray to them. The Methodist tradition, following the broad Reformation, has been clear on this. But the reform was reductive, not eliminative: the doctrine itself stands undiminished. We celebrate the saints; we receive their witness; we live in the body they helped to build; we labor to add our own faithful contribution before we, too, take our place in the cloud.

To pray the clause is to consent, at last, to a self-understanding that the modern individualist imagination does not naturally yield. I am not alone, and I have not been alone since I was baptized. The whole church is with you when you pray. The cloud of witnesses is real. The God who is the God of the living has gathered, is gathering, will gather every faithful one into a single body. To confess the communion of saints is to take your place in that body — and to live as if the place were real.

Further Reading

• Exodus 3:1–15 — the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God of the living
• Mark 12:18–27 (and parallels) — Jesus on the resurrection and the living God
• Romans 8:38–39 — neither death nor life shall separate
• Hebrews 11–12 — the great cloud of witnesses
• 1 Corinthians 12 — the body of Christ
• Revelation 7:9–17; 21:1–4 — the multitude that no one can count
• Martyrdom of Polycarp (c. 155) — the earliest evidence of the cult of the martyrs
• Augustine, Enchiridion §§109–110; City of God esp. Book XXII
• John Chrysostom, Homilies on Hebrews
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 83.11; q. 88; Supplement, qq. 71–72
• Martin Luther, Smalcald Articles II.2
• Apology of the Augsburg Confession XXI
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion III.20.20–27
• Heidelberg Catechism, Question 55
• Belgic Confession, Article 26
• Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapter 26
• The Articles of Religion of the United Methodist Church (1784), Article XIV
• John Wesley, Sermon 39, “Catholic Spirit” (1750)
• John Wesley, Preface to A Collection of Hymns for the Use of the People Called Methodists (1780)
• Charles Wesley, “Come, let us join our friends above” (1759); “Let saints on earth in concert sing” (1759)
• William Walsham How, “For all the saints, who from their labors rest” (1864)
• Lumen Gentium (Vatican II, 1964), Chapter VII
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§946–962
• N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope (HarperOne, 2008) — modern Anglican treatment
• John Wesley Bowmer, The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper in Early Methodism (Dacre, 1951)