Do You pray for the dead?
Gramps49 wrote: »
This is very tragic news. Four family members of Darren Bailey, a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois in the 2026 election, have died in a helicopter crash in Montana. Bailey’s son, Zachary, his wife, Kelsey, and their two young children, Vada Rose, 12, and Samuel, 7, died in the crash. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/23/darren-bailey-illinois-crash-helicopter-00619907
We do need to keep the family in our thoughts and prayers.
@ChastMastr replied:
🕯 and for the deceased as well.
This exchange brings up something that has been on my mind for a while; namely, should Christians pray for the dead, specifically do you pray for the dead? Would love to hear the theological reasoning behind it.
Don't know about the Orthodox traditions, so I will let @Gamma Gamaliel or others explain that.
The Roman Church appears to have prayers for the dead tied to the doctrine of purgatory.
Lutherans will commend the dead to God's care, but I do not think it goes beyond that.
More evangelical denominations pan the idea it seems.
Note to @ChastMastr when I mentioned praying for the family, I left the door open for prayers for the deceased since they are a part of the larger family, in my mind.
Comments
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prayer_for_the_dead
The dead are in Gods hands.
I see funerals as being for the living.
I find Rohr's view that the function of prayer is to change yourself makes sense.
So praying for the dead allows one to reflect on how your memory and understanding of that person's life can help you grow in your and your community's life.
"True prayer is an outflowing of love; if I love someone, I will want to pray for them, not necessarily because they are in difficulties, not necessarily because there is a particular need of which I'm aware, but simply because holding them up in God's presence is the most natural and appropriate thing to do, and because I believe that God chooses to work through our prayers for other people's benefit, whatever sort of benefit that may be. Now love doesn't stop at death – or, if does, it's a pretty poor sort of love!"
And more specifically on why Protestant theologians have traditionally frowned on the practice:
"Once you get rid of the abuses which have pulled prayer out of shape, there is no reason why prayer should stop just because the person you are praying for happens now to be 'with Christ, which is far better'. Why not simply celebrate the fact?"
And I will admit I bristle a bit at the suggestion that not continuing to pray for loved ones who have died shows a “pretty poor sort of love.”
This raises the question, though, whether praying for the dead, as such, actually does celebrate the fact. Can that fact not be celebrated by giving thanks to God that those loved ones have been made perfect in the divine presence, and by rejoicing that we are still joined with them in the communion of saints?
Isn't giving thanks for them also praying for them?
All of us ,living and dead, are indeed in God's hands.
Me too.
Our Place's FatherInCharge is always exhorting his little flock to pray for the soul of someone or other, but I'm never quite sure what he thinks God will do, or what, indeed, we should be asking him to do.
Holding someone in remembrance, and commending them into God's hands, is surely enough - but I'm afraid I have no real belief in the efficacy of intercessory prayer, anyway.
I don't see how giving thanks equates to intercessory prayer - could you unpack the idea a bit, please?
Maybe I'm getting confused here...
Asking you to help my friend with something he needs is not the same thing as thanking you for helping my friend with what, because of what you’ve done, he no longer needs. The focus has shifted from what my friend needs (what I asked of you “for” him) to gratitude for what you have done. Both prayers may be grounded in my love for my friend, but only the first one is a prayer “for” him and his wellbeing. In the second one, the prayer of thanks, I’d say more that I’m praying “with” him.
I’d agree with the second sentence. But I don’t think the first sentence—“If there is no sense in praying for the dead, there is equally no sense in praying for the living”—necessarily follows, because it turns on whether we believe the dead need or prayers or not. If there’s not a belief in purgatory—and in my tradition there is not—then at best, prayers for the living and prayers for the dead would seem to have very different purposes.
Speaking personally, my style of praying for others is typically to “hold them in the light of God,” to speak metaphorically. That is to say, rather than praying for specific outcomes, I tend to pray that God will be present, will comfort and bring peace, will heal (though that healing may take different and unexpected forms, and may not include physical healing), and will, well, hold them. And that they will know they’re being held.
My belief is that my loved ones who have died are eternally bathed in the light of God. My prayers of holding them in the light of God while they were living have been fulfilled. They no longer need my prayers.
Well, they are still the subject and topic of the prayer whether it is intercessory or not.
I also wonder whether it's closest to praying for someone you are close to who you are no longer in contact with - which is something that's ever rarer in the modern world, but does still occur in times of war and so on.
As for praying for them, as if they were in need--I don't know enough about their situation to do this, really, but I don't think God would take offense, even if I were wrong. If he thought it necessary, he might let me know I didn't need to worry. But I wouldn't expect it to be a problem in his eyes unless I was really distressing myself over it in a major way, or spending huge amounts of time and effort, etc. on something unnecessary. Then he might intervene.
Thanks. ISWYM.
We are the ones who need to pray. It is good for us to remember before God our neighbours, be they, to our eyes' 'living' or 'dead'.
Yes, and it was somewhat remiss of me to omit the central quote of the passage above (which for avoidance of doubt was taken from the NT Wright book, and would have been written at a time when he was much more traditionally Reformed than perhaps he was later) which, it seems to me, express something of the sentiments you express above:
But maybe I’m the one being too narrow in what I think of as being prayers for as opposed to about someone else.
Either way, perhaps it would need to make sure we’re all on the same page about exactly what kinds of prayers we’re talking about, or we risk talking about different things.
But I'm not sure 'praying for' is limited to purely intercessory prayer, so much as whenever someone is the subject of the prayer which is surely the case whenever you are 'holding' someone 'before God'.
Or to put it a little differently, to my mind “praying for” is pretty much limited to intercessory prayer because in my experience people only use “praying for” when they mean “interceding on behalf of.” Calling what Wright describes “praying for the dead” is requiring “praying for” mean something different from what I, in my experience, hear people use it to mean.
Of course, the Apocalypse does indicate the saints are praying for the church on earth. I am hard pressed to see how our prayers influence their prayers.
I will respond as I did on the previous thread. I pray for the dead because I love them.
That doesn't mean that @Nick Tamen's love for his dear departed is any less than mine, of course.
It makes sense to pray for the dead or to invoke the prayers of the Saints within the Orthodox paradigm. So I do so.
If I was Reformed or some other kind of Protestant, I wouldn't.
But I'm not, so I do.
That's all I have to say on the matter. Nothing to do with Purgatory. Everything to do with love.
The idea of Purgatory as a place of transition on the passage between human life on earth and the possible bliss of an afterlife in Heaven is an attempt to explain what we really don't know too much about.
It is,however, to my mind,a mistake to think that when we pray for our 'beloved dead' we are only thinking about liberation from Purgatory.
Like all of our prayers ,be they of petition,of intercession ,of thanksgiving or of praise,they are acts of love towards God and our neighbours.
Here is the opening collect of the first Mass for All Souls Day
Merciful Father,
hear our prayers and console us.
As we renew our faith in your son whom you raised from the dead,
Strengthen our hope that all our brothers and sisters will share in his resurrection.