Iconoclast heresy

[RandyPNW]

I tend to view the personality cult surrounding some Televangelists as a form of idolatry, and the absolute devotion to the KJV by KJV-only adherents as a similar idolatry. In a discussion I initiated here on CF, I observed that at least one or two members have explicitly referred to their Bible as God. However, I do not regard the Catholic Church as God, nor do I consider any Catholic doctrine or dogma to be an object of adoration and worship. While Popes are held in high esteem, they remain human, prone to sin and error. Although their Ex-cathedra declarations are deemed infallible, their other statements (which make up the vast majority of what a pope says and writes) are fallible, just like the writings of any other author.

The Pope's claims "on his throne" are fallible too because he is fallible. The reason the Apostles could produce documents that are trustworthy and true is because Jesus spent 3.5 years (we think) with his Apostles, ensuring they established the foundation of the Church on something solid.

But the Pope could be a good one or a bad one. And even the good one is susceptible to error, at any time. If he represents Scriptural truth properly he isn't passing on error. That we can rely on. But making pronouncements about how great his doctrinal statements are is self-serving, and proclaiming as infallibly true things about Mary that is obviously absurd does not speak well of Catholic claims to "spiritual superiority."

Some Catholics, it is true, do not hold to some of what I perceive to be Catholic errors. I do not, myself, hold to everything my denomination teaches as "fundamental" to that denomination.

And I agree with you that some offer too much "worship" to their favorite teacher or televangelist, although "worship" would be much too strong a word. I do feel that too much is accepted as true from those we tend to favor as our favorite religious teacher. I try not to do that myself.

 

[Xeno.of.athens]

The Pope's claims "on his throne" are fallible too because he is fallible. The reason the Apostles could produce documents that are trustworthy and true is because Jesus spent 3.5 years (we think) with his Apostles, ensuring they established the foundation of the Church on something solid.

But the Pope could be a good one or a bad one. And even the good one is susceptible to error, at any time. If he represents Scriptural truth properly he isn't passing on error. That we can rely on. But making pronouncements about how great his doctrinal statements are is self-serving, and proclaiming as infallibly true things about Mary that is obviously absurd does not speak well of Catholic claims to "spiritual superiority."

Some Catholics, it is true, do not hold to some of what I perceive to be Catholic errors. I do not, myself, hold to everything my denomination teaches as "fundamental" to that denomination.

And I agree with you that some offer too much "worship" to their favorite teacher or televangelist, although "worship" would be much too strong a word. I do feel that too much is accepted as true from those we tend to favor as our favorite religious teacher. I try not to do that myself.

It is surprising how confidently you speak about Catholicism as though you are well-versed in it, yet the substance of your messages strongly suggests otherwise. What leads you to assert such familiarity with Catholicism?

 

[Xeno.of.athens]

All Protestants. All Protestants reject the claim of the Catholic Church to be the supreme and only legitimate organization representing Christianity on earth, and the Pope's claim to represent Jesus himself. Need I say more?

Please say no more of that kind of thing, it is wrong and does no credit to anyone.

 

[RandyPNW]

Please say no more of that kind of thing, it is wrong and does no credit to anyone.

If I'm saying something wrong, I'll be happy to apologize. How is what I said wrong? I just asked the question on the internet:

"Do Catholics believe in Catholic supremacy and that the Pope is the vicar of Christ on earth?" This is the answer I received:

Yes, Catholics believe that the Pope is the "Vicar of Christ on Earth," meaning he acts as the earthly representative of Jesus Christ, and this signifies the Catholic doctrine of Papal Supremacy, where the Pope holds full, supreme, and universal power over the Church; essentially believing the Pope has the highest authority within the Catholic Church.

click

It seems that what I stated is a standard belief?

 

[RandyPNW]

It is surprising how confidently you speak about Catholicism as though you are well-versed in it, yet the substance of your messages strongly suggests otherwise. What leads you to assert such familiarity with Catholicism?

I was raised a Lutheran Protestant from birth. We are generations in Lutheranism, coming from Scandinavian and German backgrounds. As such, our beliefs are very much based on Luther's experience with the Catholic Church, who tried to murder him, and burned his works. I've read books on Luther's life, and have gone through Lutheran Confirmation classes. Being thoroughly Protestant gives me a pretty negative view of Catholicism. On the other hand, my Catholic friends have been better people than most, and we don't treat each other like we're living in the 16th century!

 

[The Liturgist]

All Protestants. All Protestants reject the claim of the Catholic Church to be the supreme and only legitimate organization representing Christianity on earth, and the Pope's claim to represent Jesus himself. Need I say more?

I am not disputing that. I am saying you’re the first Protestant I’ve met which accuses the Roman church of idolatry based on its adherence to the Magisterium - sadly many Protestants, ill-informed, falsely accuse the Roman Catholic church of idoaltry with regards to its compliance with the Seventh Ecumenical Synod in Nicaea in the year 787, which requires iconography and prohibits the destruction of icons and holy relics, which are also venerated by the Orthodox (which has also caused people to falsely accuse us of idolatry).

However the two largest Protestant denominations, the Lutherans and Anglicans, do not accuse Rome of idolatry, and are to a large extent venerate icons themselves, and this is also the case with several smaller Protestant denominations, and all High Church Protestants. These include Methodists, Calvinists of the various Reformed Catholic persuasions, including Presbyterians and Congregationalists, the Moravians, basically, most Protestant churches with stained glass windows are not only non-iconoclastic but in some cases actually iconodulist, which is very good. I was raised in an iconographic or iconodulist Methodist church with beautiful stained glass windows, which were variously based on Romanesque, Byzantine and Renaissance designs. Indeed they were actually rather better than the more abstract stained glass windows at the LCMS church home to the Lutheran parochial school I attended, which at the time was on the low church end of the LCMS spectrum, but now has become definitely on the evangelical Catholic end - @MarkRohfrietsch will be pleased to note they offer auricular confession in addition to traditional liturgics, but unfortunately they still haven’t done anything about the rather lame stained glass windows, which look very dated and 70s, depicting faceless angels. I am not a fan of that look.

I should try and find some photos of the stained glass windows of these two churches at some point.

At any rate, it should hopefully be clear now that what I am saying I haven’t encountered before this thread are Protestants accusing Rome of idolatry for having a magisterium and seeking to get its members to conform to it.

Insofar as Rome largely fails at this, but the Orthodox church is very successful in promoting Orthodox, I have to object to this, since such a false accusation would really hit us hard. It would hit the Confessional Lutherans with their Book of Concord even harder, and likewise those Calvinists who follow detailed confessions such as those of Westminster, Hiedelberg, the Beglic confession, and so on.

 

[The Liturgist]

And I agree with you that some offer too much "worship" to their favorite teacher or televangelist, although "worship" would be much too strong a word.

Not in all cases. When we look at some of the Prosperity Gospel preachers, various “Celebrity Pastors” (the two words ought to be mutually exclusive), and certain founders of Restorationist sects, they are adored, which is a problem, since adoration and latria are the two things reserved to God according to Scripture and the Fathers. God alone is worthy of all adoration and sacrificial worship.

It is difficult to see people responding in the affirmative to the solicitations by some Prosperity Gospel preachers for money for a private jet or other luxuries as anything other than worship, akin to the worship afforded to the Baghwan Rajneesh by members of his cult, who would purchase him a new Rolls Royce constantly, their goal being for him to have a fleet of 365, one for each day of the year, as well as ensuring he wore the finest clothes and had the best wrist watches and so on.

The Prosperity Gospel preachers encourage a similar cult of personality among themselves, which I believe constitutes active sacrificial worship.

Of course, the Propserity Gospel celebrity preachers represent a minority of Protestantism, but some of them in the Word of Faith movement have been, by tuning it down a bit, becoming more mainstream. I have particular concerns about Joel Osteen, and I strongly objected to the Charismatic-Evangelical Mark Driscoll, but he managed to take himself out of the equation through a scandal of moral failure which destroyed his credibility and led to the collapse of the Mars Hill multi-campus “church” in Seattle (I put “church” in quotation marks, since it was really five churches which had his sermons broadcast to the outlying church from the central church).

It is very important to avoid a cult of personality forming around clergy. This is why I strongly advocate the wearing of vestments, as they obscure the identity of the clergy and make them more interchangeable.

The first Christians who intentionally rejected vestments, that we have on record, were the Byzantine iconoclasts of the 8th century, who instead of wearing vestments, wore very finely tailored, expensive and luxurious attiure, very much like the Prosperity Gospel pastors of today. They wore Byzantine bling-bling instead of the ascetic vestments of the clergy. This was also in violation of the canons of the Quinisext Council, which are binding on Eastern Orthodox clergy, although Rome rejected them, but has some equivalent canons, which among other things require clergy to wear clerical attire rather than secular attire. Some might scream “Clericalism!” In response, but the point was to enforce humility - the choir dress of Byzantine clergy is extremely plain and simple, consisting of a black cassock with no clerical collar, a black robe (exorasson) or grey vest (kontorasson) which presbyters and other higher ranking clergy are required to wear over the robes, and simple headwear, which in the case of monks includes veils covering the back of the head, similiar to the cowls worn by Coptic Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox monks known as the Helmet of St. Anthony, which are stitched together with a triple-stich pattern similar to the one used for prayer ropes, which symbolizes the Holy Trinity, and decorated with crosses.

 

[The Liturgist]

That may be legitimate if the heart is right.

In Orthodoxy, since we can’t know if the heart is right, we have to make sure that our worship practices will, for those receptive to repentence, not product idolatry, and so our practices of iconodulism have been very thoroughly analyzed to ensure we aren’t doing this.

In addition to the official analysis of icons and their veneration performed by the Seventh Ecumenical Synod in 787 AD, which as an Eastern Orthodox I am obliged to follow, and furthermore the very detailed explanation of iconography and the rationale for its veneration provided by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware and Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, memory eternal, and more recently by Archpriest Andrew Stephen Damick, which I would be willing to furnish you with, so you can understand precisely where we are coming from.

I have also as a Protestant taught the veneration of icons, and many Protestant churches I am happy to say do venerate them. The goal should be to embrace the Orthodox model, I think, in which the entire faith of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christian is understood iconographically. Man is created in the image of God - therefore we are an icon of God, and for this reason we must love each other, and we also do not perform cremation or abortion or euthanasia or sexual immorality because this would be violence against the icon of God. In our relations with others we are called to make ourselves an icon of the Holy Trinity - God consists of three coequal, coteternal persons in a union of perfect love. Thus we are called to be an icon of that in our relations with our family, our neighbors, the members of the Church, and mankind as a whole. Everything is understood in Holy Orthodoxy in an Iconological context.

The Oriental Orthodox are a particularly fine context of this. I have mentioned before, as has my friend @dzheremi, be the beauty of the Cross-veneration tradition in Coptic and Armenian Orthodoxy. The Copts put crosses over everything, using them as the main decorative element in the woodcarvings in their church, and writing a cross on paper before writing everything else (often a Jerusalem Cross, which consists of one large Greek cross with four smaller Greek crosses in each quadrant, or a simplified version which is a Greek cross with the smaller crosses replaced by dots). In Egypt, infants also receive a tatoo of a cross on the back of their hand, inboard of the thumb and just past the wrist, or on the back of the wrist, as a precaution due to the unconscionable ban on adoption, which is from Shariah law but which is imposed even on the Christians of Egypt, which forces the Coptic Orthodox church to operate a large system of orphanages, since children who become orphans cannot be adopted by their next of kin due to the cruel, savage nature of the Islamic religion, which is here manifested in the Egyptian legal system even on Copts, despite the fact that the majority of Egyptian Muslims are not only relatively tolerant of Copts, but were shown to be moderate by their swift overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood after the government of Mohammed Morsi quickly began implementing Shariah law and discriminating against the Copts, despite promises to the contrary in the election campaign. These cross markers, which are also used by Bosnian Catholics, help to prevent forced conversions to Islam and provide at least a partial defense against false accusations of apostasy from Islam, which in Egypt could result in murder, and in other Islamic countries, Christians are routinely falsely accused of either converting to and then apostaszing from Islam, or of desecrating the Quran, without evidence, so that they can be stoned. This has been happening with alarming frequency to the sizable Anglican and Roman Catholic Christian population in Pakistan, and I have also heard of it happening in Nigeria, in the northern states which are under Islamic control (Nigeria has a federal system of government, since the south of the country, like with Ghana and most of the neighboring states, is predominantly Christian, whereas the more arid Northern provinces are majority Muslim).

The Armenians have their kachkars - carved sculptures of the Cross, which are not used only as gravestones but also as icons of the Cross in a more general context, and which the genocidal Azerbaijani government is destroying en masse in those Armenian lands they have conquered (the Turks have been doing this since at least the genocide in 1915, which several countries, unfortunately even the US and Israel, have refused to recognize - there should be a campaign to get these recognized in the US and Israel, because the 1915 genocide against the Armenian, Syriac and Pontic Greek Christians in Turkey directly inspired the Nazi holocaust of Jews, and basically the goal of the SS in implementing the holocaust was to do a genocide like that of 1915 but in a more thorough, systematic, comprehensive and efficient manner, with less dependence on the local population, who could not in most cases be counted upon to execute the Jews, just as in the Ottoman Empire the genocide relied on mercenaries known as Bashi Bazouks, who had been conducting similiarly brutal attrocities for centuries, including a smaller scale genocide in Bulgaria in 1875, which so appalled the Western European powers and Russia that it led to them joining forces to remove the Ottoman Empire from control over the province of Roumelia, which included Bulgaria, Romania, and the Balkans, and also if I recall this was when the Ottoman Empire lost control of those portions of Greece, such as Crete and Thessalonika, which it had not lost during the initial Greek Revolution in the early 19th century.

At any rate, I would be very happy to send you various books on Orthodox theology as it relates to icons, that you can peruse in a leisurely manner (I myself do not usually like to read books straight through but prefer to peruse them when the format allows for it - I love encylcopedias for this reason and would describe the encyclopedia as my favorite genre), as I think you might find that highly edifying and reassuring at least as far as Orthodoxy is concerned.

I will defend Roman Catholics from false criticism, and also any criticism which could also apply to the Orthodox, but I am not Roman Catholic and I do disagree with them on the issue of Papal Supremacy and Papal Infallibilty. Also, while I find Scholastic Theology to be very interesting, it is distinct from Patristic theology, and I think that Orthodox theologians have never really embraced anything equivalent to a new theological paradigm, rather, we have merely, at different points, changed the approach used for studying Patristics (hence the Neo-Patristic concept one associates with the Russian Orthodox emigres in Paris, who were liberal, by Orthodox standards, which is to say very conservative and traditional, but not as conservative or traditional as their counterparts in ROCOR or the Serbian Orthodox Church, and which one also sees in such figures as Alexander Schmemann, memory eternal, and indeed Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, but not in Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, memory eternal or Fr. Seraphim Rose, memory eternal.

 

[The Liturgist]

I was raised a Lutheran Protestant from birth. We are generations in Lutheranism, coming from Scandinavian and German backgrounds.

Me too, interestingly - also Methodism, since several of my Scandinavian and German ancestors embraced it, as well as nearly all of my Anglo-Caledonian-Hibernian ancestors and my Dutch ancestors, who had been among the original Baptist immigrants to North America in the 1630s. But I am predominantly, and culturally, Swedish-American and Austro/German-American (it appears that our Germanic ancestors were predominantly Austrian, Bavarian, Saxon, Prussian and Baden-Wurttemburger (which I guess would be historically Franconian) descent. The only region in Germany where my last name is common, as far as I can tell, is Saxony. When asking about it elsewhere in Germany the usual response was “Here the gassmann is the man who comes to your house to check the gas meter…” Which I think my German-Canadian friend @MarkRohfrietsch would find greatly amusing.

Say have either of you been to Germany? I desperately want to go back but my health problems are such that I’m worried about doing it alone, and I also want to make a pilgrimage to certain particularly beautiful churches scattered around the country, and see the restored Frauenkirche in Dresden - the last time I was in Dresden, in 2003, the restoration was under construction.

I also remember the amusing sight, in Dresden, of an actual communist holding a Soviet flag and handing out pamphlets, and wearing a beret. I wish in retrospect I’d had my picture taken with him as that would have been hilarious, especially in the 2000s. Also sadly when I was in Dresden the Schwebebahn was being restored - it is one of two vintage suspended monorails in Germany, the other more famous one being the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which is much larger, but what makes the Dresden Schwebebahn interesting is that it is also a funicular, the type of cable car such as the famous Angel’s Flight in Los Angeles or the Monongahela and Duquesne inclines in Pittsburgh, and the Fenelon Place Elevator in Des Moines, where one car is pulled up by the weight of the other descending car (many aerial tramways also work on this basis, but a funicular is either on rails or an equivalent, such as the suspended Schwebebahn in Dresden). Alas I had to content myself with the more conventional nearby Standseilbahn funicular (actually Standseilbahn is the German word that means funicular).

 

[The Liturgist]

Yes, but you are not worshipping Christ as if he is in the image. I think some people use icons that way illegitimately, by treating the image as if it is Christ himself, treating it as a holy object when the object itself is just wood or stone, or something else.

It is true that I am not worshipping the image as a manifestation of Christ, which is the theory of Hindu idols, that they are actually the gods they depict, or avatars / manifestations thereof. This theory is alien to Christian theology, in which God is not manifest in inanimate objects. However, the icon is a holy object by virtue of depicting Christ, in the same way that Christians are holy objects, by virtue of worshipping Christ. Holiness means that something is set aside for worship, and so it applies, to varying degrees, to everything in the Church, especially including the people, whether clergy or laity, but also the church building, the altar, the icons, the candles, the whole works. In addition, we want to make other things holy as well, and part of the process of converting people to Christianity is to persuade them to set themselves aside for worship, to make themselves holy, to store up treasure in Heaven rather than accumulating earthly riches that will perish.

Thus while it is true that the icon is wood, wood is created by God, and we then write the icon on the wood (icons are written, not painted), as a visual representative of the Gospel, and this applies whether the icon is of Christ our True God, or His mother, our glorious lady Theotokos and all the saints, or both - which is frequently the case as many icons depict various scenes from the Bible, while still others depict scenes from the history of the early church, such as the martyrdom of St. Ignatius in the Colliseum, where he was fed to lions around the same time St. John the Beloved Disciple became the only one of the Twelve to die of natural causes.*

*I suspect that the unique status of St. John, including our Lord’s love for him and his adoption by the Blessed Virgin Mary, is because he was significantly younger than the other Disciples. Our Lord holding him, for example, at the last supper, and the fact that he joined with his older brother St. James the Great, suggest to me that he was an adolescent. Now, some say that he was made the adopted son of the Blessed Virgin Mary in order to care for her in her older age, and this is undeniably the case, but it does not also rule out the fact that he was still young, and unlike his brother, who was clearly older, and who would also soon be the first of the Twelve to be martyred - indeed, perhaps because of this fact, our Lord realized he would need someone to care for him emotionally as a mother as well, in order to be able to deal with it. This also explains why he wrote his Gospel about twenty years after St. Matthew the Apostle, and the evangelists St. Luke and St. Mark, who are believed to have been members of the Seventy, and St. Mark was also the owner of the house that contained the Cenacle, and St. Luke painted the first icon of the Theotokos and was her physician in Ephesus, where she lived with St. John, who became the bishop of that city.

Since Judaism considers boys to have attained adulthood, from a religious perspective anyway, once they have gone through their bar mitzvah at thirteen years of age or thereabouts, I would expect St. John was as young as 13 when recruited by our Lord. Many others share this view, and it has also been argued that all of the disciples were teeanagers, since this was the typical age of disciples recruited by rabbis during the period, with St. Peter and Judas Iscariot being the oldest - some experts in Judaism suspect Judas was at least twenty when he betrayed our Lord and committed suicide, since only those who are at least twenty are regarded as fully responsible for their sins. And since he was the treasurer of the group, his being among the oldest makes sense. One also suspects St. Peter, based on his leadership, would have been the oldest, and St. Matthew, who had been a publican, was also among the older members of the group.

Given the short life expectancy of the time, this explains how St. John was still alive into the 90s, and how those who had survived were actively carrying on ministry into the late 60s and early 70s, until each of them in turn was martyred.

 

[The Liturgist]

Some have treated icons as if they have god-like powers, ie treat them as if they are some representation of God Himself.

Some icons do consistently perform miracles, but the miracles are performed not by the icon as an independent entity, which it is not, but by the glorified saint, who has been saved through Theosis and thus participates in the uncreated energies of God (see St. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, who explained the incarnation as “God became man so that man could become god” - which does not mean we become God with a capital G in the sense of being added to the Holy Trinity, but rather that we are deified, not in the sense of apotheosis, in the sense of becoming a deity worthy of worship, but rather in the sense of godliness, since, those of us who are godly, that is to say, we worship God, we believe in God, we humble ourselves before God and we aim to conduct ourselves as our Lord would conduct himself, like WWJD, and this is made possible through faith in God which leads to the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, who together with our Guardian Angel helps us to resist sin and do good things, but God deserves the credit for the good in us, which is the result of our cooperation with God, since on our own, we would not be able to escape the evil, the ancestral sin that has become the tragic inheritance of mankind since the Fall), and in salvation we are granted life everlasting, like God, and are glorified through our faith in Him.

Thus, some icons, particularly of the Theotokos, are known for myrhh streaming and other miracles ,just as the relics of some saints, such as St. Nicholas, stream myrhh (these relics were stolen from the Orthodox, but continue to stream myrhh, and the Roman Catholics have fortunately been very gracious in accomodating Orthodox pilgrims to the church where his relics are located, in Bari, Italy, and providing us with the holy myrhh, and I do feel as though the theft of various relics by the Venetian Republic was God working in mysterious ways, given the Muslims have developed a tendency to destroy relics and icons whenver the opportunity presents itself.

Indeed i am now very worried about the safety of the relics of the Three Holy Hierarchs at the Cathedral of St. George in the Phanar district in Constantinople, which is where most of the remaining Greeks in the country, and a disproportionate number of bishops of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, remain. This cathedral has never been fully destroyed following the damage inflicted onto it by a pogrom in the 1950s, and I really wish the Roman Catholics had retained posession of these icons, or had given them to the Church of Greece rather than the Ecumenical Patriarchate, because Erdogan has shown us that he cannot be trusted to protect the integrity of the Christian heritage in Turkey, as demonstrated by his recent conversion of the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque, which involved covering up the beautiful Byzantine marble floors with carpets for purposes of accomodating prayer. Thankfully the icons of Christ our True God in the ceiling survive for now, but the site is critically endangered. And if Erdogan thoguht he could get away with bulldozing the Cathedral of St. George and throwing all of our relics and icons into the Bosphorus, along with all of our faithful as well, I suspect he would.

And unfortunately, due to the austerity measures imposed on Greece in recent years (which if Greece had retained the Drachma it could have escaped with such severity, by revaluing the currency, a freedom lost by Eurozone countries), it no longer has the ability to defend itself against the massive Turkish military, let alone to launch a counter-strike.

 

[The Liturgist]

Nevertheless, I'm over-awed by beautiful Christian art in the great cathedrals. i envy those times when the State was fully Christian.

Beautiful cathedrals are still being built by the Orthodox even now. I think you would be overawed by the beauty of the brand new Cathedral of St. Moses the Black (well, not brand new, it was completed a bit over a decade ago), at the Coptic Orthodox monastery of St. Anthony in Yermo, California, or by the stunning architecture of the Greek Orthodox monastery of St. Anthony the Great in Florence, Arizona. When walking around these places it is impossible to believe that in 1990, they were empty patches of desert.

The relative lack of inspiring Roman Catholic and Episcopalian architecture in recent years comes down to a matter of poor aesthetic taste by contemporary bishops. For example, I think the whole world was disappointed by the dismal architecture of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Angels in Downtown Los Angeles.

There are a few cathedrals with modern architecture that I like, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright built a beautiful cathedral for the Greek Orthodox in Atlanta in the 1950s, and I like the architecture of the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church which was built during the ministry of the late Dr. James Kennedy, memory eternal, who I think was the leading moral theologian in the Western church after the repose of Pope John Paul II until his own repose in late 2007, following an incapacitating heart attack just after his beautiful final sermon for Christmas in 2006. I saw him preach once, and of the Calvinist preachers of recent decades, he is my favorite, to a large extent. I also liked Rev. Schuller, memory eternal, and Archbishop Fulton Sheen, memory eternal.

The tragedy of so many ugly modern churches is that they have turned most Christians off to modern architecture. Indeed brutalist cathedrals such as the Roman Catholic cathedral in Las Vegas, with its strange icon of our Lord, the Episcopal Cathedral of Christ the King, now closed, in Portage, Michigan, which I will depict in a thumbnail, and the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral in the UK, which was one of several buildings where a damaged cathedral from World War II was not rebuilt, but instead left in ruins and replaced by a very ugly new structure built adjacent to it as a sort of ill-advised anti-war protest (there is another example of this in West Berlin, the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, although it is not as bad, in my opinion, but after WWII, Berlin has unfortunately become home to one of the world’s finest and most complete collections of every ecclesiastical architectural style that could be described with the adjectives “ugly” “modern” “brutalist” “postmodern” “deconstructionist” and “iconoclastic.”

These buildings I regard as a form of architectural iconoclasm.

Compare the now abandoned Episcopal Cathedral of Christ the King in Portage, Michigan, with the Cathedral of St. Moses the Black:

Cathedral of Christ the King, now sold to some random evangelical church, in Portage, Michigan.

St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Monastery - take a look at this 2021 Photo Album (one photograph does not do it justice):
April 2021 Photo Album

 

[RandyPNW]

I am not disputing that. I am saying you’re the first Protestant I’ve met which accuses the Roman church of idolatry based on its adherence to the Magisterium...

You better read my statement again. I stated what you're not "disputing." Making one's self or making one's own denomination the exclusive "voice of God" is troubling and in fact a form of idolatry. We don't go to images to hear God. We don't go to the Catholic Church, nor to the Pope. We go to God Himself.

When Catholics, the Pope, or any denominational authority speaks for God, it should be recognized that they are not the exclusive "voice of God." That would be identifying one's self with God.

I'll have to read later... It's Sunday.

 

[ViaCrucis]

You better read my statement again. I stated what you're not "disputing." Making one's self or making one's own denomination the exclusive "voice of God" is troubling and in fact a form of idolatry. We don't go to images to hear God. We don't go to the Catholic Church, nor to the Pope. We go to God Himself.

When Catholics, the Pope, or any denominational authority speaks for God, it should be recognized that they are not the exclusive "voice of God." That would be identifying one's self with God.

I'll have to read later... It's Sunday.

While I do not accept Rome's claims, I understand why those claims are made. They are not idolatrous, I think they are mistaken.

If, in fact, Jesus founded His Church, and if that Church is the [Roman] Catholic Church, then it wouldn't be idolatrous or wrong to say that they are the one true Church. In theory this would be absolutely correct. For one, it wouldn't be a denomination, it would be THE Church. Not a denomination, a sect, or any other such thing--just THE Church, the One Jesus instituted in the Gospels.

Now, again, I don't except Rome's claims (or, rather, all of Rome's claims). But if Rome's claim to being the exclusive institutional reality of the Church of Jesus Christ, the Church catholic and apostolic, is true then it would simply be true.

So, in principle, claiming to be Jesus' Church is hardly idolatrous. In fact, in an ideal world, where Christianity has not splintered off into myriad factions, that would be the case: There would be a single communion of all the Faithful sharing life and faith together here in the world, and all Christians would be partaking of that.

The existence of a splintered Christianity is a bad thing. Jesus prayed, in His High Priestly Prayer, that Christians be one. Throughout the Scriptures the unity of the Church is preached; to be united together. Factionalism is condemned. So that we are all divided and splintered into various traditions, denominations, and communions is something to be lamented. There should be only one organized Christian Church, a single communion of the Faithful, partaking in the gifts and life of God together in the unity and peace and joy of the Holy Spirit. That I can't share the Table with Catholics and Orthodox, and they can't share the Table with me--that's a travesty, we should grieve this.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[The Liturgist]

Making one's self or making one's own denomination the exclusive "voice of God" is troubling and in fact a form of idolatry.

I’ve never heard any Protestants other than yourself call that a form of idolatry, at the denominational level, at least. And I don’t think its right to accuse Roman Catholics of idolatry for following the magisterium of their denomination - if you do that, you would have to accuse traditional Lutherans of idolatry for following the Book of Concord, or Presbyterians of idolatry for following the various confessions of faith, et cetera.

It is worth noting that prior to the movement towards ecumenical reconciliation in the late 19th and early 20th century, most denominations had at least a partial exclusivity in terms of their view towards salvation. And everyone believes their church or denomination is correct.

Additionally, if we look at ecclesiology, St. Paul does clearly establish that the Church is the Body of Christ, so Roman Catholics, who mostly believe the Roman Catholic church is the church, a view also held by many other denominations, and one which I cannot condemn in the case of any apostolic church, since it is true that historically there was just one Christian Church, and it wasn’t until the Council of Chalcedon that a long-term schism occurred which had the effect of creating questions as to which church was the church*, which could have been avoided, but alas, that happened, and another larger schism between East and West happened starting in 1054, when the Orthodox resisted Papal Infallibility and despite doing everything in their power to avoid a schism, were unable to prevent Rome from excommunicating them and starting the Great Schism which persists until the present.

So in the case of any member of the ancient churches, there are valid reasons each of them have for believing that their church is the rightful successor to the unified pre-schism church. And regarding this as idolatry is simply wrong, since the Nicene Creed literally says “I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church”, and the two largest denominations, the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, officially believe that refers to a single visible church. The question is really over how one defines Catholicity, but I cannot accuse someone of idolatry for adhering to the model of Catholicity that reflects the reality of the early church, which had no denominations and no semi-permanent schisms.

It is also extremely unhelpful in terms of Catholic-Protestant ecumenical reconciliations to accuse Roman Catholics of idolatry over something like this.


* Fortunately that schism has now been largely healed, the occasional anti-Oriental Orthodox article one usually sees coming from Greek Orthodox writers for some reason, such as Nicholas Marinides), but among the Orthodox churches where it matters, namely, the Antiochian Orthodox and Syriac Orthodox, and the Coptic and Greek Orthodox churches of Alexandria, both of which are based in the same country, and nominally, the same city (although the Coptic Church is functionally based in Cairo, but still has a large presence in Alexandria, which is where most of the remaining Alexandrian Greeks live), ecumenical agreements have been made that make the schism effectively a thing of the past, especially in Syria. And the shared suffering of the Syrian churches with the abduction of the Syriac and Antiochian Orthdoox Metropolitans of Aleppo, and the persecution both experienced at the hands of ISIS, has really helped to further the bond between these Orthodox churches. And as for the Copts and Alexandrian Greeks, they tried to reunite in the 19th century, but their reunion was thwarted by the Khedive, the Albanian Muslim viceroy (nominal viceroy - he was in fact sovereign) of Egypt, who feared the power of a reunited Christian church in his domain - these days he wouldn’t have as much to fear given that while there are still ten million Copts, the population of Alexandrian Greeks has dwindled to around 100,000.

 

[The Liturgist]

There would be a single communion of all the Faithful sharing life and faith together here in the world, and all Christians would be partaking of that.

Indeed, and this was the case until 453 AD in the East, and more generally until 1054 AD. Some would say it started at Ephesus in 433 AD, but the “Nestorian Schism” is really much more complicated and was much more intermittent.

 

[RandyPNW]

I’ve never heard any Protestants other than yourself call that a form of idolatry, at the denominational level, at least.

My goodness! Why do you thnk the Protestants broke from the Catholic Church, over mild disagreements?

 

[The Liturgist]

My goodness! Why do you thnk the Protestants broke from the Catholic Church, over mild disagreements?

Not at all. There were numerous legitimate complaints, such as the 95 theses of Martin Luther, and some illegitimate complaints as well, like Pope refusing to grant King Henry VIII an annulment. I simply haven’t heard anyone other than you call the RCC’s view of itself idolatrous.

And if you’re going to react to my post with my goodness, perhaps you should take a look at that of @ViaCrucis. Whereas I was a Protestant minister, he still is a Protestant theologian, of some skill, I might add.

 

[RandyPNW]

Not at all. There were numerous legitimate complaints, such as the 95 theses of Martin Luther, and some illegitimate complaints as well, like Pope refusing to grant King Henry VIII an annulment. I simply haven’t heard anyone other than you call the RCC’s view of itself idolatrous.

And if you’re going to react to my post with my goodness, perhaps you should take a look at that of @ViaCrucis. Whereas I was a Protestant minister, he still is a Protestant theologian, of some skill, I might add.

Really I'm happy you have some credentials. But I don't understand what you mean by saying, "the RCC's view of itself?" I've never been talking about the RCC's view of itself!

And I might add, when Luther posted his 95 Theses, it was well before things got "out of hand." Luther attempted to discuss the matter, debate the matter, and reconcile with the Church. Ultimately, Luther had to conclude that the Church was hardened in its errors, and unwilling to budge. That's when the "Antichrist" label came in. Luther concluded that the Pope had sold out to a false Gospel, which in his eyes would certainly be a form of "idolatry."

To this day, the RCC's claim of ecclesiastical superiority, if I can call it that, seems idolatrous in some measure. The Bible says that we all have one head, Jesus Christ. But if the Pope claims to be the one Head over the Church, that appears to be "over the top" to me?

 

[The Liturgist]

Really I'm happy you have some credentials. But I don't understand what you mean by saying, "the RCC's view of itself?" I've never been talking about the RCC's view of itself!

And I might add, when Luther posted his 95 Theses, it was well before things got "out of hand." Luther attempted to discuss the matter, debate the matter, and reconcile with the Church. Ultimately, Luther had to conclude that the Church was hardened in its errors, and unwilling to budge. That's when the "Antichrist" label came in. Luther concluded that the Pope had sold out to a false Gospel, which in his eyes would certainly be a form of "idolatry."

To this day, the RCC's claim of ecclesiastical superiority, if I can call it that, seems idolatrous in some measure. The Bible says that we all have one head, Jesus Christ. But if the Pope claims to be the one Head over the Church, that appears to be "over the top" to me?

What I’m saying is that the idea that Roman Catholics are committing idolatry by regarding the Roman Catholic Church as the One Holy Catholic and Apostolic church is not one that I have encountered before, and as an Orthodox and former Protestant I find it quite wrong, as did @ViaCrucis, who is a Lutheran.

Furthermore, the Pope does not claim to be the one head over the entire Roman Catholic Church - rather, the Roman Catholics do believe that Christ is the head of the Church. The Pope is his Vicar, based on apostolic succession.

The only aspect to this I disagree with is the idea that there would be only one bishop with full apostolic succession and all the powers the Pope has, since historically, in the early church, the Pope did not have that much power, and apostolic succession is something held by a great many bishops, for example, all Orthodox bishops, according to the model of St. Cyprian of Carthage (which requires doctrinal orthodoxy for apostolic succession to be valid), and even more people if we follow the model of St. Augustine of Hippo, which simply requires that there be a valid ordination. Thus, we can say that according to the Augustinian model, almost all of the churches with an Episcopal polity in Europe and North America, such as the Church of England, the Church of Sweden, the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark, the Church of Finland, the Old Catholic churches such as the Polish National Catholic Church (which is predominantly Polish American and operates mainly in the US) and the Norwegian Catholic Church (which operates primarily in Europe), the two of which comprise the Union of Scranton, after the PNCC was expelled from the liberal Old Catholic Union of Utretcht for refusing to embrace the liberal theology of those Old Catholic churches, and many other churches, including even the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Chruch in America, and probably the Moravians, have apostolic succession according to an Augustinian model.

But I see no basis for accusing Roman Catholics of idolatry simply because they regard the Pope as the supreme bishop and the highest ranking bishop, and the only one who is the vicar of Christ, as opposed to regarding all of their bishops as vicariously representing Christ (which in Roman Catholic sacramental theology, is the view of what the Priest does during the liturgy - acting in Persone Christie, and this is a view widely shared by other traditional liturgical churches, and I see nothing idolatrous about it whatsoever).