A picture has been making the rounds of a bishop holding what appears to be the skull of Saint Agatha while a crown is placed on a reliquary containing her remains.

It is the kind of picture that gets a reaction.

If you grew up Protestant, especially in the kind of church where there weren’t statues, icons, saints’ feast days, or relics, seeing a bishop holding a human skull in a religious ceremony can look pretty shocking.

And lately more Protestants are encountering things like this online. Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have both gained a lot of attention, especially among younger Christians interested in church history, ancient worship, the Church Fathers, the creeds, and traditions that claim a direct connection to the apostles.

I actually think some of that curiosity is healthy.

Modern evangelicalism can sometimes act like Christianity started fifty years ago. Learning church history can humble us. Reading Christians from other centuries can expose blind spots in our own traditions. There are beautiful things in the historic Catholic and Orthodox traditions that Protestants should understand rather than immediately mock.

But there is another danger too.

Something doesn’t become apostolic simply because it is ancient.

And something doesn’t become biblical simply because Christians have practiced it for a very long time.

That is where I want to look at this picture of Saint Agatha’s skull.

Not to make fun of Catholics or Orthodox Christians, but to ask a very Protestant question:

What does Scripture actually give us reason to do?

First, Catholics Aren’t Worshiping a Skull

Let’s get that out of the way.

Catholic and Orthodox Christians do not believe the bones of a saint are God. Their theology distinguishes between worship given to God alone and honor or veneration given to the saints.

They believe Christians who have died remain alive in Christ and part of the communion of saints. They also believe the bodies of those saints mattered because they belonged to people united to Christ, indwelt by the Holy Spirit, and awaiting bodily resurrection.

That is the actual difference.

Source note: The Catechism of the Catholic Church distinguishes the worship owed to God from the veneration of saints and includes relics among historic expressions of Christian devotion. See Catechism §§954–957, 1674–1676, and 2131–2132.

So I don’t think the question is, “Are Catholics secretly worshiping bones?”

The better question is whether Christians have biblical warrant to invoke departed saints or incorporate their physical remains into our devotional life.

That is where I remain firmly Protestant.

Scripture Certainly Teaches Us to Honor Those Who Came Before Us

There is nothing unbiblical about honoring faithful Christians who have died.

The Bible itself takes burial seriously. Abraham carefully buries Sarah. Joseph gives instructions concerning his bones. Israel remembered its fathers. Christianity doesn’t teach that the body is a worthless shell that gets thrown away when the “real” person leaves.

We believe in the resurrection of the body.

And Hebrews 13:7 actually tells us to remember our leaders, consider the outcome of their lives, and imitate their faith.

I think Protestants could probably do more of that.

We should know Polycarp. We should know Perpetua and Felicity. We should know Athanasius and Augustine. We should know the Reformers and missionaries and faithful Christians who suffered for Christ.

We should also remember the saints much closer to home—the older man or woman in our own church who prayed faithfully for forty years, served quietly, suffered well, and showed everybody around them what it looked like to follow Jesus.

There is nothing wrong with remembering the saints.

The question is what remembering them authorizes us to do.

Scripture Also Puts Boundaries Around Our Relationship With the Dead

The Old Testament repeatedly warns God’s people against looking to the departed for spiritual help.

Leviticus 19:31 warns against mediums and necromancers. Deuteronomy 18 prohibits “inquiring of the dead.” Isaiah 8:19 asks:

“Should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living?”

Now, asking Saint Peter to pray for you is not identical to consulting a medium. Catholics and Orthodox Christians would rightly object if we pretended those were exactly the same practice.

But I still think the biblical direction is important.

God continually directs his people toward himself.

When God’s people need help, wisdom, protection, healing, forgiveness, or spiritual power, the direction is toward the living God.

And when we get into the New Testament, that access becomes even more direct.

We have Christ as our High Priest. We have an advocate with the Father. We have the Holy Spirit. We are told to come boldly to the throne of grace. We pray for one another, gather together, lay hands on people, anoint the sick, break bread, baptize, preach the Word, and exercise spiritual gifts.

The New Testament gives us a very rich spiritual life.

What I don’t find is the apostles teaching Christians to address departed believers or seek spiritual benefit through their remains.

But What About Elisha’s Bones?

This is where we need to be honest with Scripture, because there is one story that sounds a whole lot like a relic miracle.

In 2 Kings 13:20–21, Elisha has died and been buried. Later another man dies, and when his burial party sees Moabite raiders coming, they throw his body into Elisha’s tomb.

The man’s body touches Elisha’s bones.

And he comes back to life.

That’s in the Bible.

So I don’t think Protestants should argue that God could never work through the remains of a dead saint.

Apparently he can.

And really, Scripture is full of God using physical things. Jesus healed with mud. Peter’s shadow fell across the sick. Acts 19 tells us that handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul were carried to sick people, and they were healed and delivered.

Christianity is not anti-physical.

We baptize people in water. We lay hands on people. James tells elders to anoint the sick with oil. We eat bread and drink wine at the Lord’s Table.

So the question isn’t whether God can use a bone.

Elisha answers that for us.

The question is what Israel does with Elisha’s bones afterward.

And the answer is basically nothing.

There is no command to return to his tomb. Nobody starts distributing pieces of Elisha throughout Israel. There is no instruction to seek healing there.

God performed an extraordinary miracle.

Scripture doesn’t turn that miracle into an ordinary practice.

I think that distinction is important.

The Bronze Serpent May Be an Even Better Example

Numbers 21 gives us another physical object God used in a powerful way.

Israel had sinned, poisonous snakes came among the people, and God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and place it on a pole. Those who looked at it lived.

God didn’t merely allow this object.

He commanded it.

God really used it for healing, and centuries later Jesus even referred to it as a picture of his own crucifixion.

Then Israel kept it.

And eventually something happened.

By the time of King Hezekiah, the people were burning incense to the bronze serpent. So in 2 Kings 18:4, Hezekiah smashed it to pieces.

That has always struck me.

The history of the object wasn’t fake.

God really had used it.

But something God genuinely used had become something God’s people related to in a way God had not commanded.

That’s a category worth having.

The fact that God once worked through an object does not automatically mean that object should become part of the ongoing devotional life of God’s people.

A miracle can be real without becoming a practice for the Church.

“But the Early Church Did This”

This is probably the argument that is most compelling to people who have recently become fascinated with Catholicism, Orthodoxy, or the ancient Church.

And there is some truth to it.

Christians began honoring the remains of martyrs very early.

One of the clearest examples is The Martyrdom of Polycarp, from the second century. After Polycarp was killed, the Christians gathered his bones, treated them with great honor, and placed them somewhere they could later gather to remember his martyrdom.

That is early.

Protestants shouldn’t pretend otherwise.

Source note: See The Martyrdom of Polycarp, chapters 17–18. The Christians of Smyrna describe gathering Polycarp’s bones and preserving them while also explicitly distinguishing their love for the martyrs from the worship they gave to Christ.

But even here, I think we should be careful with the argument from antiquity.

Early Christians weren’t always unanimous about where these boundaries belonged.

By AD 754, during the Byzantine debates over icons, 338 bishops gathered at the Council of Hieria and rejected the making and veneration of religious images. They weren’t Protestants. In fact, they still had a much more developed view of the saints and their intercession than most Protestants would.

That isn’t my point.

My point is simply that there was discussion inside the early and medieval Church about these things.

Source note: The Council of Hieria met in AD 754 during the Byzantine iconoclast controversy and included 338 bishops. Its conclusions were later rejected by the Second Council of Nicaea.

Thirty-three years later, in AD 787, the Second Council of Nicaea rejected the iconoclast position and defended the veneration of religious images. It also dealt explicitly with relics, requiring relics of saints to be placed in churches where they were absent.

Source note: See the Second Council of Nicaea, AD 787, especially its definition concerning religious images and Canon 7 concerning relics.

Eventually Nicaea II became recognized by Catholics and Orthodox as the Seventh Ecumenical Council.

That’s worth knowing.

But I don’t think we need to make the history prove more than it proves.

It doesn’t mean the early Church was Protestant.

It also means we shouldn’t imagine that every question about images, relics, and the saints was perfectly settled from the days of the apostles onward until Martin Luther suddenly questioned everything.

Christians had been wrestling with some of these boundaries for centuries.

And that brings me back to Scripture.

Old Does Not Automatically Mean Apostolic

I understand why tradition can be compelling.

Especially when somebody first begins reading church history.

You suddenly discover an entire Christian world you weren’t taught about. You find liturgies older than your country. You read bishops who lived only a few generations after the apostles. You see traditions that have existed for 1,500 years and compare them with the church down the street that started in a movie theater twelve years ago.

That can be humbling.

It should be.

But age alone cannot settle the question.

The Church Fathers are important.

Church councils are important.

Christian tradition is important.

I don’t think Protestants should treat 2,000 years of Christian history like it has nothing to teach us.

But the Protestant conviction is that all of those things remain accountable to the Word of God.

That isn’t because we think we’re smarter than everyone who came before us.

It’s because God’s Word stands over the Church—including our church.

And that means tradition can help me read Scripture. It can challenge me. It can show me where my interpretation might be strange or historically novel.

But tradition can’t finally answer a question that Scripture does not authorize simply by saying, “Christians have done this for a very long time.”

So Where Do I Land?

I want more church history in our church, not less.

I want our people to know the creeds.

I want us reading ancient Christians.

I want us appreciating the Church that existed long before our denomination, our worship music, or our church building.

And I want enough humility to look at something unfamiliar, like the relics of Saint Agatha, and first ask, “What do these Christians actually believe they are doing?” instead of immediately screaming “idolatry.”

But after understanding the practice, I still want enough Protestant backbone to ask another question:

Where did Jesus and the apostles teach the Church to do this?

God can work through physical things.

Absolutely.

God can apparently even work through the bones of a dead prophet.

But I don’t see the apostles turning the remains of saints into devotional objects. I don’t see Christians being instructed to invoke departed believers. I don’t see relics becoming part of the pattern of Christian worship established in the New Testament.

What I do see is an extraordinarily direct invitation to God through Jesus Christ.

We have the Son.

We have the Spirit.

We have the Word.

We have prayer.

We have baptism and the Lord’s Supper.

We have the gathered Church.

We have brothers and sisters praying for one another.

We have the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

And we are invited to come boldly to the throne of grace.

So when I see the skull of Saint Agatha, my reaction doesn’t have to be ridicule.

And it doesn’t have to be fascination simply because the practice is ancient.

I can honor the history, understand what another Christian tradition actually believes, and then open my Bible and ask whether this is something Christ gave his Church.

That is a deeply Protestant instinct.

And I think it’s still a good one.