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In all honesty either one is blasphemy. We do not worship a symbol nor do we worship the cross. We worship Him who died on a cross the subsitute for sinners. More than that to look at the cross alone is to miss the greatest truth of the cross. It is to miss that death could not hold Him who put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. I don't worship a dead savior I worship the living God in the Lord Jesus Christ who right now sits on the throne ruling until He makes His enemies His footstool. He who sits on that throne in absolute sovereign power and authority is my elder brother who loves me and gave Himself for me.Hi guys, just been doing a bit of thinking and was wondering; do you prefer the use of a Cross or Crucifix and why?
This is not a debate, merely a request for opinions
God bless you all.
In all fairness, most people who wear these things don't worship them. And personally I don't see anything wrong with wearing such a symbol. As long as it remains a symbol. But if it is going to be "used" then it should be thrown away. Nothing can add to God's grace, let alone a symbol.In all honesty either one is blasphemy. We do not worship a symbol nor do we worship the cross. We worship Him who died on a cross the subsitute for sinners. More than that to look at the cross alone is to miss the greatest truth of the cross. It is to miss that death could not hold Him who put away sin by the sacrifice of Himself. I don't worship a dead savior I worship the living God in the Lord Jesus Christ who right now sits on the throne ruling until He makes His enemies His footstool. He who sits on that throne in absolute sovereign power and authority is my elder brother who loves me and gave Himself for me.
The Lord gave us only one symbol of His death and that is the bread and the wine. Crosses and crucifixes are nothing but man made substitutes for truth.
If they were to find the very wood that the Lord was crucufied on the best thing they could do with it is burn it.In all fairness, most people who wear these things don't worship them. And personally I don't see anything wrong with wearing such a symbol. As long as it remains a symbol. But if it is going to be "used" then it should be thrown away. Nothing can add to God's grace, let alone a symbol.
It certainly would be bad if people worshiped the cross the way Israel worshiped the brazen serpent, saying prayers to it, but literally, I've never even heard of people doing that.If they were to find the very wood that the Lord was crucufied on the best thing they could do with it is burn it.
The people of Isreal kept that brazen serpent from the time of Moses until Hezekiah.
2Ki 18:1 Now it came to pass in the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, that Hezekiah the son of Ahaz king of Judah began to reign.
2Ki 18:2 Twenty and five years old was he when he began to reign; and he reigned twenty and nine years in Jerusalem. His mother's name also was Abi, the daughter of Zachariah.
2Ki 18:3 And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that David his father did.
2Ki 18:4 He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan.
Hi guys, just been doing a bit of thinking and was wondering; do you prefer the use of a Cross or Crucifix and why?
This is not a debate, merely a request for opinions
God bless you all.
I'm interested to know how a Roman Catholic "uses" a cross. What does it help you do?
Here's only one problem I have with your explanation. You have jumped from the term "the cross" as a description of the act of Christ's sacrifice to save his elect to "the cross" as a symbol formed by constructing wood. I humbly state that I believe there is equivocation being committed on your part, and a logical jump from Christ's saving and the Holy Spirit sanctifying us through His grace (and showing that grace through physical acts) to sanctifying matter by shaping it into the form of what we believe Jesus' cross looked like.If I may give my own answer:
In the Judeo-Christian tradition, we believe that the thing you're wearing right now, that body of yours, we believe it's indispensable to your being. "Essential", if you will. Obviously your current one is soulish and will need to be reconstituted, but having one is indispensable nonetheless.
If you're bold enough, you may go so far as to say that you *are* a body. That you cannot hope to encounter anything at all, or perform the Divine Service for which you were created, without your body, being that you are one.
If we have accepted these things, that human existence, and Divine Service to God, involve the body, then what a human being does with the body matters. These acts must have the possibility of being of eternal and
essential significance to God and men and creation.
Therefore, when the Scriptures speak of the workings of the inner man, inner wisdom of the heart, the spirit, the soul, these *must*, in the sanctified man, shine forth bodily. And so we cannot embrace dualistic dichotomies between "the soul" and "what is done in the body". Nor can we interpret "heartfelt prayer" to mean "intellectual process" contrasted to what is material, set aside as merely "meaningless ritual" or "stuff made by hands that is therefore garbage".
For the Apostle says: "Whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God."
And "present your bodies a living and holy sacrifice, acceptable to God, which is your Rational Divine Service."
Now that we have that out of the way, what does the Cross do?
The Cross is made of matter, the symbolon (coming together) through which the salvation of the world, material and spiritual, was performed by Christ. It re-capitulates all of the saving acts of Christ, and his ruling power, and his kingship. So to form a Cross from matter is to sanctify matter through its use in the name of Christ, which is something that is worthy and proper for humans to do.
Now, you have a Cross, which is the symbol and re-presentation (meaning it actually makes present) the ruling and conquering power of Christ. So the Cross is used for the crushing of adverse powers, the sanctification and blessing of matter, the proclamation of the Reign of God, the blessing and coming together of humans in Christ, the call to repentance, the remembrance of the Sacrifice, and many other things that we can attain to through Christ and by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, to the glory of God our Father.
I invite you to investigate the history of ideas, the philosophies and cosmologies available to the Jews and Christians of the first millennium. I think you will find that the understanding of symbol and representation you are espousing here post-dates that time period.A symbol is a like a shadow, not an actual presence of something, but a form of language that tells our minds what we are to associate our thoughts with when we sense the shape of that form of matter.
I don't think it actually makes present. A representation makes a presentation only in a figurative sense. It presents it in the sense that a movie might recreate history before televisions existed. A movie does not actually present history in the sense that we see actual history before our eyes, it only recreates what happened in the sense that the "shadow" of the movie makes you think about the history the film represents to the viewer.
I believe this is a complicated issue that would require its own thread.I believe we exist apart from our bodies, too. Jesus reminded the Pharisees that God is the God of the living, not the dead. So Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob are alive in some sense, even though the final resurrection hasn't taken place yet. They don't seem to be physically alive, but they are alive in the sense that they are cognitive of things. Elijah and Moses appeared to Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration and yet their bodies have not been resurrected (though I'm not sure what the disciples were seeing, it probably wasn't the prophets' resurrected bodies). So they can still exist without their bodies, which kind of proves at least a dichotomy of soul and body, don't you think?
I don't see Christ as the image of the Father in the same sense that I spoke about shadows.I invite you to investigate the history of ideas, the philosophies and cosmologies available to the Jews and Christians of the first millennium. I think you will find that the understanding of symbol and representation you are espousing here post-dates that time period.
Just as you wouldn't expect a first century Jew to hold to a heliocentric cosmology, you cannot expect a first century Jew to have adhered to notions of symbol and representation that do not appear until the turn of the millennium with the advent of a particular form of philosophical realism.
I personally don't see how any Christian could believe that when the Scriptures talk about Christ as the Image of the Father, they mean that he is a mere disconnected figurative reference to the Father.
I believe this is a complicated issue that would require its own thread.
It is worth noting that Elijiah was taken up into heaven bodily, and it was believed that Moses's body was recovered by angels. So the two who appeared with Christ had their bodies, according to the tradition of the time.
I prefer to understand the state of the reposed as one of somehow entering into an incarnate state in the Coming Age, which will be realized chronologically at the Second Coming. So I deny any form of "soul sleep" and agree with you that the reposed are not dead.
In any case, the incarnate human has no other experience of reality apart from that which is delivered bodily, and sanctification comes to the entire man. If you are interested, check out what St. Irenaeus of Lyons has to say about how the entire man, and not merely a part, is made in God's image.
Plato, Aristotle, the continental philosophers. For my St. Irenaeus recommendation, Against Heresies Book V.Any particular books you want to recommend that will guide my reading on the subject? Thanks.
I don't see Christ as the image of the Father in the same sense that I spoke about shadows.
I am interested. I am going to bookmark this page and save it for readings that will interest me. Any particular books you want to recommend that will guide my reading on the subject? Thanks.
I am not advocating the adoption of Neoplatonism. But the fact is, the philosophy and cosmology contemporary and immediately following Christ was largely neoplatonic. The Scriptures were composed, largely, by Hellenistic Jews. So if we want to understand what words like symbolon meant to the people of the time, we can't simply read our modern understanding back into the text. That's anachronistic.Using a philosophical framework of categories and causes borrowed from Aristotle John of Damascus argued the Second Commandment was abrogated by the Incarnation of Christ.
Sure we can. This discussion does not have to do with icons, by the way, it had to do with the use of the Cross.We cannot forget the polemics against the use of images that predate the Reformation such as the works of Claudius of Turin, the Council of Frankfurt and Libri Carolini.
Baseless conjecture that is only contradicted by historical and archaeological evidence.It is true that once the State and church became one it tried to make Christianity more palatable for the Greek pagans by allowing images
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