Grace and Prayer for the Dead
Recently, someone ask me whether I thought Orthodoxy was a grace-filled religion. What prompted this was that she thought the fact that we pray for the dead implied that God's grace was somehow insufficient for the dead and thus they needed our prayers. I realized that her and my understanding of God's grace might have some differences, so I wants to say a few words about this. Ephesians 1:3-4 says: Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. So God has all these spiritual blessings in the heavenly places that He wants to give us, and He wants to give them to us "in Christ". This "in Christ" is VERY significant. Paul over and over in his letters says that the Church is the "body of Christ": For the husband is the head of the wife eve...