Should we pray for the dead?

Question 11043.

Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming.

So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one. The clear answer is that Scripture gives us no warrant for praying for the dead, and some fairly firm reasons against it. The gentle part is that the instinct behind it is love, and love is not the enemy here.

Where the practice of praying for the dead comes from

The single text usually cited is 2 Maccabees 12:39-45, where Judas Maccabeus takes up a collection and sends it to Jerusalem so that sacrifice might be offered for fallen soldiers found to have been carrying idolatrous tokens. The passage explicitly commends making atonement for the dead.

That text is not Scripture. The Apocrypha was not part of the Hebrew canon received by Jesus and the apostles, and the New Testament never quotes it as authoritative. It contains statements at odds with canonical Scripture, and this is one of them. Its Roman Catholic canonical status was fixed at Trent in the sixteenth century, which is rather late to be settling the boundaries of the Old Testament.

The practice grew alongside the doctrine of purgatory, and the two support each other. If there is an intermediate place of purification where the departed can be helped, prayers and offerings make sense. Remove purgatory and praying for the dead loses its function entirely, which is why I address whether purgatory is biblical as a separate question.

What Scripture says about the state of the dead

The decisive issue is what happens at death. Scripture presents it as a settled transition rather than a provisional one. Paul says he would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord, which is not the language of a waiting room.

Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” Today. No interval, no process, no assistance required from anyone still breathing. And in the account of the rich man and Lazarus, Abraham says a great chasm has been fixed so that none may cross from one side to the other.

Hebrews 9:27 states it plainly: “it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment.” If judgement follows death directly, then praying for the dead is either unnecessary for those in Christ or ineffective for those who are not. I set out the state of believers after death more fully in what happens between death and resurrection.

But what about 2 Timothy 1:18?

The one place someone might find a hint of praying for the dead in the New Testament is Paul’s wish that the Lord grant mercy to Onesiphorus on that Day, in 2 Timothy 1:16-18. Some argue Onesiphorus had died, since Paul greets his household rather than the man.

The text does not say he died. Paul may simply be writing to the household because Onesiphorus was away, perhaps still travelling on Paul’s behalf. Building a doctrine on an inference from a greeting is a fragile business, and it is telling that this is the strongest New Testament candidate available.

Even if he had died, Paul expresses a wish rather than making a request that could alter anyone’s standing. Wishing someone well on the day of judgement is a long way from the developed practice of offering prayers and masses to improve their condition.

Why praying for the dead undermines the gospel

This is the part that matters most to me. If a believer’s standing before God rests on the finished work of Jesus received by faith, then nothing can be added to it afterwards, by them or by us. Paul says there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. Not less condemnation. None.

And if an unbeliever dies without Christ, then Scripture holds out no second opportunity and no mechanism by which the living can alter the outcome. That is a hard truth and I do not enjoy writing it, but softening it would be a false kindness that costs the living their urgency.

Praying for the dead, however well meant, quietly implies that the matter is not settled. It suggests that Christ’s work needs supplementing, or that judgement is negotiable after the fact. Neither is true, and both do damage to how we understand what faith alone actually secures.

What to do with the grief instead

The impulse behind praying for the dead is almost always love, and love does not need to be repented of. It needs redirecting. You can still speak to God about the person you have lost. Thank him for them. Tell him what you miss. Grieve openly in his presence, as the psalmists did at length.

You can also pray for the living who remain, which is a genuine and immediate need. Families after a bereavement fracture with alarming regularity, and prayer directed there does real good.

And you can let the loss sharpen your urgency for those still living without Christ. The reason praying for the dead is closed to us is precisely the reason evangelism now matters so much. There is a window, and it is this one.

Speaking pastorally to those who have done it

If you have prayed for someone who died, you have not committed some grave offence that requires special absolution. You were grieving, and you turned towards God rather than away from him. That instinct was right even where the theology was muddled.

What I would gently say is this: let the practice go, and let the comfort come from a better place. For a believer who has died, the comfort is that they are with the Lord already and no prayer of yours could improve on that. For one who died without faith, the comfort must rest in the character of the Judge, who will do right, and in the fact that you do not know the final transactions of another person’s heart.

That is not evasion. It is the honest limit of what any of us knows, and God has not asked us to carry more than that.

Praying for the dead and the Reformation

This was one of the sharpest issues of the sixteenth century, and for good reason. The sale of indulgences, the multiplication of masses for the departed and the whole economy that grew around praying for the dead were what finally made the Reformers immovable. It was not a dispute about etiquette; it was about whether the work of Jesus is finished.

Luther’s objection in the Ninety-Five Theses was not chiefly that the money was being misused, though it was. It was that a system had grown up in which the eternal condition of a soul could be improved by transactions among the living, and that this obscured the gospel entirely.

That is still the issue. Hebrews 10:14 says that by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. If that sentence is true, then praying for the dead cannot add anything to a believer’s standing, because there is nothing left to add.

What we can properly say at a funeral

Ministers feel this pressure acutely. A family expects words of comfort, the deceased may have shown no evidence of faith, and honesty and kindness pull in opposite directions. The temptation to drift into something that sounds like praying for the dead is real, and it usually comes from compassion rather than conviction.

What I try to do is speak truthfully about God rather than confidently about the deceased. I do not know the final transactions of another person’s heart, and neither does the family. God is the righteous Judge who will do what is right, and I can say that with total confidence while claiming nothing I have no warrant to claim.

Then I preach to the living, gently and without ambush. A funeral is one of the few occasions when people who never attend church are thinking honestly about death, and Ecclesiastes 7:2 says it is better to go to the house of mourning than to the house of feasting, because the living will lay it to heart.

So, now what?

If you are grieving, keep talking to God about the person you loved. Just talk to him about your grief and your memories rather than about their standing, which is in far better hands than yours.

If you have come from a tradition where praying for the dead is normal, take the time to read Hebrews 9 and Luke 16 slowly and ask what they assume. Most people who leave the practice do so because a text finally landed rather than because someone argued them out of it.

And let the closed door do its work. There is nothing you can do for the dead. There is a great deal you can do for the living, and most of us have someone in mind already. Who is it?

“And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time.”

Hebrews 9:27-28 (ESV)