Hebrews 7:25 says that Jesus alone is “able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him” because he alone is our substitute and our representative before God. Mary did not obey and die for us. St. Christopher did not obey and die for us. Further, Mary, St Anne, and St Christopher are not God incarnate. Jesus is. They do not love us more than Jesus. They did not lay down their lives for us nor did they take them up again for our justification. The government is upon Christ’s shoulders, not the shoulders of saints (Isa 9:7).
Since the garden humans have faced the temptation to listen to an authority claiming to compete with God’s authority. Since the beginning voices have questioned, “has God really said?” Since the beginning voices have raised doubts about whether there is really one way to God? In Adam’s case that way was perfect obedience to God’s holy law, which Adam was capable of rendering since he was created in righteousness and true holiness. Mysteriously he chose not to render that obedience and, in so doing, plunged himself and all of us into sin, death, and darkness.
After the fall God graciously came to us and offered us a substitute, a Second Adam (Romans 5), the Last Adam (1Cor 15:45), who would obey for us, whose obedience and death would be credited to all those who believe (Gen 3:14–16). He would do what the first Adam refused to do. He would obey in the place of everyone the Father gave to him (John 10; ch. 17) and he would lay down his life to secure their redemption and that salvation and acceptance with God is received through faith alone in Jesus the Mediator. The entire history of redemption was a preparation for the coming of the Mediator.
Progressively we learned that Cain, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and David were not that mediator. They were all sinners. Of that list, most of those put their trust in the Mediator for their salvation (Hebrews 11). Time and again we found that the man who might have seemed to have been the hero, the Redeemers, was, in fact, another of the redeemed.
So it is no surprise that gradually through the history of the church after the close of the apostolic age some Christians gradually began to look for other mediators. The late patristic church began to turn memorial feasts held in honor of believers who had died into something more. Over the years, as Jesus came to be considered more and more remote and solely in regard to his royal office (as distinct from his priestly office), we began to lose sight of the fact that he alone is our Mediator, the God-Man, who was tempted in every respect as we are yet without sin (Hebrews 4:15).
He alone has power and authority to help the helpless, he alone has the right to stand before the Father on our behalf, to make our prayers known, to represent us before the Father. This, of course, is one of the great messages of the book of Hebrews. Just as Jewish Christians in the mid-60s AD had been tempted to turn away from Jesus and back to Moses, the medieval church too needed a great reminder that Jesus is the only way.
The medieval church accumulated a great number of saints days, imposed a church calendar in which each day was assigned a saint, and Christians began to seek help and intercession from Christians (saints) who had been declared by the church to have special standing. Eventually this came to include the Virgin Mary. It should be noted, however, that much of what the Roman communion today confesses about the blessed virgin was hotly controversial among orthodox Christians in the medieval church and, indeed, was promulgated as dogma only in the 16th and 20th centuries. The Roman communion is a Tridentine (i.e., from the sixteenth-century Council of Trent) communion. What we see in the Roman communion today, which is often represented as the ancient catholic practice of the church, is not actually patristic or biblical or, in many cases, even medieval.
In the Reformation, the Protestants and particularly the Reformed repudiated all competitors to Jesus as Mediator (including intercession with God).1 In the Belgic Confession (1561) the Reformed confessed:
Suppose we had to find another intercessor. Who would love us more than he who gave his life for us, even though “we were his enemies”? And suppose we had to find one who has prestige and power. Who has as much of these as he who is seated “at the right hand of the Father,” and who has all power “in heaven and on earth”? And who will be heard more readily than God’s own dearly beloved Son?
So then, sheer unbelief has led to the practice of dishonoring the saints, instead of honoring them. That was something the saints never did nor asked for, but which in keeping with their duty, as appears from their writings, they consistently refused (Belgic Confession, art. 26).
The Reformation restored biblical and ancient Christian doctrine and practice by returning to Jesus alone (solus Christus) as the only Mediator between God and man. If this seems like a radical thing to say, then the Apostle Paul was a radical:
For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus…. (1 Tim 2:4),
This unequivocal declaration is flatly contrary to the Roman dogma that the blessed virgin is a mediatrix. She is not. She is blessed not because she hears our prayers (she does not, death confers glorification but neither omniscience or omnipresence) but because the Lord blessed her by allowing her to become, in the language of Definition of Chalcedon (451 AD) the Godbearer (θεοτοκος). Our Lord Jesus, in his holy incarnation, took his humanity from the virgin Mary. In the Apostles’ Creed (not actually written by the Apostles but which is received by the churches as a summary of apostolic doctrine) Christians confess that Christ was “conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary.”2