>> What we have a hard time accepting is the use of any statuary in any way associated with the divine worship <<
See, now THAT’S an honest comment. But Iscool didn’t say, “Catholics pray in the presence of statues in a way that is uncomfortably similar to the practices of pagans which God prohibited.”
>> God spent thousands of years conditioning Israel to reject the same. <<
He also didn’t say, “Catholics don’t interpret the bible the way the Jews do.” You want a discussion about whether Christians should follow the Jews’ Iconoclasty? Fine THERE’S a reasonable debate.
But you say, “No, we are fully aware of the rationalization.” That stubbornly insists that we aren’t merely praying in the presence of statues, but that we actually are praying TO statues. And that’s simply slanderous. A rationalization would have been if I tried to argue that it was, in fact, OK to pray to statues. But no-one’s making that argument. I’m saying we don’t pray to statues.
What did God prohibit? Obeying false gods. It’s not like the bible didn’t provide examples! If you want to see what praying to a statue looks like, Read the book of Daniel, which depicts the prophet having to prove to the Babylonians that their statue doesn’t come alive and eat their offerings or issue commands.
Do did God really spend thousands of years conditioning the Jews not to pray in the presence of a statue? Absolutely not. In fact, through Moses he commanded them to bow their heads to a statue of a seraph!
>> But even if you dismissed all of the above, there is a line crossed in the theory of transubstantiation, which makes out a wafer to be very God. This is an all or nothing proposition. If this object is not God, if in fact it is nothing but medieval alchemy falsely superimposed on a simple memorial by which we are to think of our Savior’s dying love for us, then any adoration offered it is by definition idolatrous, which no amount of rationalization can rescue. <<
Ah, this is a whole different argument. We do not pray to statues. We do pray to God in the form of the eucharist. And not just prayer, in the sense you will find archaic references to praying to saints. The word, “pray” archaically means to ask or supplicate; hence a court filing is actually called a prayer in many states, but in that sense, we’re talking full-blown worship. That type of prayer is called “adoration,” and oh, yes, that is exactly what the bible forbids us to do to false gods, or anyone else but God, Himself.
See, I don’t shrink away from controversy! When another thread turned to bones in a church, I told him all about how there’s remnants of dead people in churches far more than he knew! I won’t hide the truth! We Catholics adore the Eucharist! That’s one reason why we God Luther’s “consubstantiation!” How can something be God and bread at the same time? That’s why we reject some Protestant’s notion that Christ is present in the bread if the believer believes he is receiving Christ by consuming the bread: How can God be present or not present depending on a notion in someone’s brain?
But this is a topic where Catholics uphold what the bible actually says, and Protestants brush it away as mere symbolism! “THIS IS MY BODY. TAKE OF IT AND EAT”
You appear to interpret me as saying this, as if it were as simple as discomfort:
Catholics pray in the presence of statues in a way that is uncomfortably similar to the practices of pagans which God prohibited
Iscool didn't say that, and I didn't say that either. What I said was: "What we have a hard time accepting is the use of any statuary in any way associated with the divine worship." The command of God was not "you may build whatever you like as long as you keep your thoughts clear on who you're really worshiping." No, He forbade the creation of any image to which one might bow down in an act of reverence:
Lev 26:1 Ye shall make you no idols nor graven image, neither rear you up a standing image, neither shall ye set up any image of stone in your land, to bow down unto it: for I am the LORD your God.
Please note that this does not specify you can create such statuary as aids to worship of the true God, as if that escapes the problem. As both Iscool and I have pointed out, good intentions notwithstanding, if you make such an image, some will reverence it for more than what it is, mere wood or stone or even brass.
That would include images of God the Son as well as God the Father. But it's more than just images of gods. Idolatry in the NT, like all of God's commands, runs to the heart, and is not confined to ceramic saviors. It would include any being, or any object, being elevated above measure and put in some relation to a person where only God should be:
1Co 10:7-14 Neither be ye idolaters, as were some of them; as it is written, The people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play. (8) Neither let us commit fornication, as some of them committed, and fell in one day three and twenty thousand. (9) Neither let us tempt Christ, as some of them also tempted, and were destroyed of serpents. (10) Neither murmur ye, as some of them also murmured, and were destroyed of the destroyer. (11) Now all these things happened unto them for ensamples: and they are written for our admonition, upon whom the ends of the world are come. (12) Wherefore let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall. (13) There hath no temptation taken you but such as is common to man: but God is faithful, who will not suffer you to be tempted above that ye are able; but will with the temptation also make a way to escape, that ye may be able to bear it. (14) Wherefore, my dearly beloved, flee from idolatry.
That sequence recalls the incident with the golden calf in the wilderness. Notice how Paul brackets all of those misdeeds with idolatry. The interesting thing is, the children of Israel didn't explicitly reject God. They knew the golden calf was not the divine being in person, but only a representation. They knew some sort of deity or deities had helped them escape from Egypt, and they were even ready to throw a party for God, including an altar for sacrifice:
Exo 32:3-5 And all the people brake off the golden earrings which were in their ears, and brought them unto Aaron. (4) And he received them at their hand, and fashioned it with a graving tool, after he had made it a molten calf: and they said, These be thy gods, O Israel, which brought thee up out of the land of Egypt. (5) And when Aaron saw it, he built an altar before it; and Aaron made proclamation, and said, To morrow is a feast to the LORD.
But it was because their imaginations were carnal, that they pictured this supernatural force in physical terms they already understood, and so turned to the golden calf as their "visual aid."
Furthermore, for New Testament Christians, idolatry may encompass spiritual sins for which there is no physical representation of deity at all:
Col 3:5 Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry:
The reality is, we are all, owing to original sin, natural polytheists. We have many things in our heart that compete with God for our attention and become in some way substitutes for Him. This is why we should not tempt God by making images of anything supposedly deities in themselves, or mere channels to the world unseen.
SR: God spent thousands of years conditioning Israel to reject the same. Dangus: He also didn’t say, “Catholics don’t interpret the bible the way the Jews do.” You want a discussion about whether Christians should follow the Jews’ Iconoclasty? Fine THERE’S a reasonable debate.
It isn't exclusively Jewish to reject idols. It's a direct consequence of divine teaching, and it applies equally well in a Christian context:
Act 15:19-20 Wherefore my sentence is, that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: (20) But that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood.
But you say, “No, we are fully aware of the rationalization.” That stubbornly insists that we aren’t merely praying in the presence of statues, but that we actually are praying TO statues. And that’s simply slanderous. A rationalization would have been if I tried to argue that it was, in fact, OK to pray to statues. But no-one’s making that argument. I’m saying we don’t pray to statues.The statues aren't necessary to real prayer at all. Whatever sort of prayer that requires their presence, requires them for some reason unhealthy to prayer. You are not just accidentally praying where there just accidentally happens to be some statue. The statue is necessarily being incorporated into the act of prayer, else it's presence makes no sense. In Paul's teaching we learn that, while everything is lawful, not everything is expedient, i.e., that certain things are to be avoided, not just because the pagans did them, but because participating in them lends itself to spiritual evil, if not immediately to you, then very likely to someone around you.
What did God prohibit? Obeying false gods. It’s not like the bible didn’t provide examples! If you want to see what praying to a statue looks like, Read the book of Daniel, which depicts the prophet having to prove to the Babylonians that their statue doesn’t come alive and eat their offerings or issue commands.
Merely one form of idolatry. As explained above, there is a more general definition. Statuary of foreign deities is only part of the problem.
Do did God really spend thousands of years conditioning the Jews not to pray in the presence of a statue? Absolutely not. In fact, through Moses he commanded them to bow their heads to a statue of a seraph!
שׂרף (seraph) means burning snake, possibly because of the pattern of color on its skin, or because of the poisonous bites. If you read the passage in Numbers 21, there is no call to bow heads. Exactly the opposite. They were to look up to the brass snake, not bow. Jesus claims this brass snake as a typological representation of Himself.
Joh 3:14-15 And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: (15) That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
So we have to resolve this apparent conflict. On the one hand, God has said don't make images that represent deity. But we know this image does represent Christ. What is the difference between this and, say, a crucifix with Jesus on it? Several differences, but one most important: God commanded the creation of this image. Just as He commanded the creation of the ark of the covenant. Just as the Holy Spirit enabled Mary to give birth to Jesus. God does interact with the physical world. But only according to His own purposes. The burning snake on a pole was a prophecy, given by God, of Messiah being crucified. We were all bitten by the fiery serpent of original sin, and so all doomed to die. But if we only look up to Jesus, made to be sin for us, the sum of all innocence being crucified as if He were the sum of all evil, if we look to Him and not ourselves, we can be cured. The poison will not kill us.
But what of when we invent such images on our own? Images per se may not be against God's own divine prerogative as our Creator, but they are against His law for us as mere creatures. This "seraph" of yours, BTW, what became of it? It gradually became an object of worship in it's own right, and King Hezekiah, doing here what the Lord approved of, destroyed it, lest it be a spiritual snare to his people:
2Ki 18:1-4 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. (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. (3) And he did that which was right in the sight of the LORD, according to all that David his father did. (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.
Iconoclasm with divine approval. And as we have already shown, in the New Testament we also have the same rule, and though we are not saved by rule-keeping, because none of us can win that game, we are obligated to be faithful servants of Christ who love good and reject evil. And so we must reject not only idolatry in it's most blatant and obvious forms, but also where it lies hidden behind rationalizations and sophistry and the darkness of human desire for anything but God to be first in our thoughts and sentiments.
SR: But even if you dismissed all of the above, there is a line crossed in the theory of transubstantiation, which makes out a wafer to be very God. This is an all or nothing proposition. If this object is not God, if in fact it is nothing but medieval alchemy falsely superimposed on a simple memorial by which we are to think of our Savior’s dying love for us, then any adoration offered it is by definition idolatrous, which no amount of rationalization can rescue. <<
Dangus: Ah, this is a whole different argument. We do not pray to statues. We do pray to God in the form of the eucharist. And not just prayer, in the sense you will find archaic references to praying to saints. The word, “pray” archaically means to ask or supplicate; hence a court filing is actually called a prayer in many states, but in that sense, we’re talking full-blown worship. That type of prayer is called “adoration,” and oh, yes, that is exactly what the bible forbids us to do to false gods, or anyone else but God, Himself.
So then you concede that if your doctrine of transubstantiation is false, if your wafer really is, in every relevant sense, just a wafer, then the adoration of it would be what you admit to be idol worship. So you will understand why the inability of Rome to demonstrate the truthfulness of this cluster of teachings is an impassible barrier to those of us who wish to avoid idolatry.
See, I don’t shrink away from controversy! When another thread turned to bones in a church, I told him all about how there’s remnants of dead people in churches far more than he knew! I won’t hide the truth! We Catholics adore the Eucharist! That’s one reason why we God Luther’s “consubstantiation!” How can something be God and bread at the same time?
This is an odd objection, because all the time we evangelicals are pounded with allegations we doubt the miraculous because we do not accept the quasi-Aristotelian shell game that is transubstantiation. Yet here you object to "consubstantiation" (not so called among Lutherans, BTW, but rather "sacramental union") because you do not think God capable of creating such a relationship between divine and mortal substances? If God is free to divest the bread of all it's "bread-ness" while leaving no evidence of such a miracle in the so-called "accidence" of the bread (it's materially discernable traits), then why not a holy union of substances, or any other number of amazing relationships beyond our ability to comprehend?
So I would be cautious holding back from God any power of miracle. The only limitation is what God in His own creation forbids in the very nature of things, such as logical absurdities, a bird that can fly and can't fly at the same time in the same way, a number being itself and some other number at the same time and in the same way, a two-dimensional circle being a two-dimensional square on the same piece of paper, and so forth.
Just as amazing, no, MORE amazing, consider that God might wish us to partake of the bread and wine so that in our spirits, where the greatest miracles of all take place, God wishes us to remember the once for all sacrifice of Jesus on our behalf, and to apply to our once dead, now living hearts, the lessons of that redemptive love, to draw us closer to fellowship with Him through His Holy Spirit, and closer to our brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, which is His ecclesia, all of whom have an equal share in His atonement.
That’s why we reject some Protestant’s notion that Christ is present in the bread if the believer believes he is receiving Christ by consuming the bread: How can God be present or not present depending on a notion in someone’s brain?
Again, you are predicating what the Lord's supper might be based on a question for which you admittedly do not have an answer. We all agree that in one sense God is everywhere at all times. But not in all ways. Jesus the Son of God is seated at the right hand of God the Father, and intercedes for us in Heaven, which intercession we much need. But He will not be present on the earth in any corporeal form until He returns in the clouds for His bride, and to seal the judgment of the lost. If Jesus can say, where two or three are gathered in His name, He is among them, we know He is speaking spiritually, not of the divine omnipresence, but of His special, self-revealing presence to His children, by which we know His love experientially, and not merely historically.
But this is a topic where Catholics uphold what the bible actually says, and Protestants brush it away as mere symbolism! “THIS IS MY BODY. TAKE OF IT AND EAT”
No sadly, but the one who holds up what the Bible actually says will not judge the divine word carnally but spiritually. The carnal mind cannot apprehend the things of God. They are foolishness to him. They see metaphors where there are none and miss metaphors where they are fairly screaming to be heard. Jesus specifically told us why He gave us the Lord's Supper. It was not to confer on us eternal life for participation in a ritual. That gift of eternal life we know from many other Scriptures is the consequence of belief in the Son of God, and sealed with the Holy Spirit, not bread and wine, however reconstituted by Aquinas. But Jesus did tell us the purpose of our participation in this meal:
Luk 22:19 And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me.
Should He have said, "this do, or die in your sins?" According to Rome, yes. But not according to Jesus. The purpose given is remembrance. Jesus is very God. If we add to His words, and extend His purpose to include what He intentionally left out, we make an idol of our our religious imagination, and place ourselves at risk of missing the sweetest miracle of all, to walk obediently with our Savior.
Peace,
SR
