I was recently helping an Iranian lady prepare for her asylum court hearing and asked her a question that sometimes comes up: “How often do you pray?” She replied that she prays many times a day—for her family, her personal circumstances, and for the political situation in Iran. But she also shared that she was worried that she might not be praying enough—understandable for a person who has come out of Islam, which requires a certain number of prayers each day (Sunni Muslims: five times; Shiites: three times daily). The Christian Iranian man whom I had invited (with the lady’s permission) to help me interpret, chimed in: “Are you familiar with Islam’s practice of ‘qadha prayers’ or ‘rental prayers’? If a person may not have prayed *enough* in his or her lifetime, the family can pay large amounts of money to the local mullah. He will then pray and “make up” for the prayers that the deceased person may have missed. These gifts, it is taught, might move Allah to be more gracious when considering whether to allow that person into paradise. “As Christians, we can be certain of our salvation because Jesus took all our sins upon Himself,” I explained. It also struck me that this scheme is similar to that of the Medieval Church, which taught that if the family of a deceased paid a priest to speak private Masses on behalf of their loved one, it would shorten that person’s time in purgatory. The Apology of the Augsburg Confession critiqued this horrible practice—an insult to Christ who has already secured salvation for all who are baptized and believe in Him: “Our adversaries have no references and no command from Scripture for defending the use of the ceremony for freeing the souls of the dead. Yet they receive unlimited revenue from this” (Ap XXIV, §89). Some of our Lutheran Fathers were familiar with Islam. They must have had a good chuckle when they heard about that religion’s “rental prayers”—a false teaching with which they were only too familiar.
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