As the Western world shifts to embrace a post-Christian culture, we might pause to remember from what we were delivered when Christian faith first took hold of pagan antiquity.   For this, we might quote someone at the beginning of Christian witness in the Roman Empire—the apostle Paul—and someone writing at the end of pagan rule in the early 4 th century—Eusebius.   If we wanted to play with the language of today, we might say that Christianity ‘cancelled’ the cultures of the Graeco-Roman world; but that would not be quite accurate.   Christians were persecuted and murdered during those first 300 years, but the Church steadily grew.   They witnessed to the culture and could not have cancelled it even if they wanted to do so.   Only once the first Christian emperor, Constantine, began to pass laws and favour the Church did any power come into play against pagan culture.   By that time, many, many people had embraced Christianity.   Today’s cancel culture, on the other hand, is all a

  The boldness of Christian prayer lies not in any merits of our own or in that of others but wholly in Jesus Christ our Lord.   Nor does it lie in some working up of faith on our part where God is held to the mat and forced to honour our requests because we have garnered such faith.   Indeed, such a false understanding of faith involves a ‘work of faith’ that therefore falls to our own merit and has its object on our request rather than a faith in God that acknowledges Him as the author of every good and perfect gift (James 1.17).   Our confidence is not in ourselves but in God.   We know that God is our Heavenly Father.   He wants us to come to Him, to make our requests before Him known (Philippians 4.6).   James encourages us to ask God for what we need, though with right motives (4.2-3). Our access is not through human merit but through Christ Jesus. For this reason, we traditionally pray in His name. Where did the idea of praying to dead saints come from in early Christianity?