First of all Danoh, you stole that story - let's be honest. Second of all, it doesn't have a dang thing to do with Catholics and artwork.
ECT Graven Images
- Thread starter Catholic Crusader
- Start date
Wow. I though I could at least have a civil conversation with you, but you just spew out hate and lies like the others. Thats a shame
Not true. That is YOUR take on my words. If anything, you called me a liar and I was fine with that.
First: It's not RCC. The Latin Rite (Roman) is only one rite among amany in the Catholic Church. We are called the Catholic Church, not RCC. I'd appreciate it if you people would respect that.
Second: As usual, the answer is right online for all to see,
but people are often just too lazy to look. Here:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c1a1.htm
III. "YOU SHALL HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME"
2110 - The first commandment forbids honoring gods other than the one Lord who has revealed himself to his people. It proscribes superstition and irreligion. Superstition in some sense represents a perverse excess of religion; irreligion is the vice contrary by defect to the virtue of religion.
Superstition
2111 - Superstition is the deviation of religious feeling and of the practices this feeling imposes. It can even affect the worship we offer the true God, e.g., when one attributes an importance in some way magical to certain practices otherwise lawful or necessary. To attribute the efficacy of prayers or of sacramental signs to their mere external performance, apart from the interior dispositions that they demand, is to fall into superstition.41
Idolatry
2112 - The first commandment condemns polytheism. It requires man neither to believe in, nor to venerate, other divinities than the one true God. Scripture constantly recalls this rejection of "idols, [of] silver and gold, the work of men's hands. They have mouths, but do not speak; eyes, but do not see." These empty idols make their worshippers empty: "Those who make them are like them; so are all who trust in them."42 God, however, is the "living God"43 who gives life and intervenes in history.
2113 - Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, "You cannot serve God and mammon."44 Many martyrs died for not adoring "the Beast"45 refusing even to simulate such worship. Idolatry rejects the unique Lordship of God; it is therefore incompatible with communion with God.46
2114 - Human life finds its unity in the adoration of the one God. The commandment to worship the Lord alone integrates man and saves him from an endless disintegration. Idolatry is a perversion of man's innate religious sense. An idolater is someone who "transfers his indestructible notion of God to anything other than God."47
References:
41 Cf. Mt 23:16-22.
42 Ps 115:4-5, 8; cf. Isa 44:9-20; Jer 10:1-16; Dan 14:1-30; Bar 6; Wis 13:1-15:19.
43 Josh 3:10; Ps 42:3; etc.
44 Mt 6:24.
45 Cf. Rev 13-14.
46 Cf. Gal 5:20; Eph 5:5.
47 Origen, Contra Celsum 2,40
G 11,861.
MORE:
IV. "YOU SHALL NOT MAKE FOR YOURSELF A GRAVEN IMAGE . . ."
2129 - The divine injunction included the prohibition of every representation of God by the hand of man. Deuteronomy explains: "Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a graven image for yourselves, in the form of any figure. . . . "66 It is the absolutely transcendent God who revealed himself to Israel. "He is the all," but at the same time "he is greater than all his works."67 He is "the author of beauty."68
2130 - Nevertheless, already in the Old Testament, God ordained or permitted the making of images that pointed symbolically toward salvation by the incarnate Word: so it was with the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim.69
2131 - Basing itself on the mystery of the incarnate Word, the seventh ecumenical council at Nicaea (787) justified against the iconoclasts the veneration of icons - of Christ, but also of the Mother of God, the angels, and all the saints. By becoming incarnate, the Son of God introduced a new "economy" of images.
2132 - The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment which proscribes idols. Indeed, "the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype," and "whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it."70 The honor paid to sacred images is a "respectful veneration," not the adoration due to God alone:
Religious worship is not directed to images in themselves, considered as mere things, but under their distinctive aspect as images leading us on to God incarnate. The movement toward the image does not terminate in it as image, but tends toward that whose image it is.71
References:
66 Deut 4:15-16.
67 Sir 43:27-28.
68 Wis 13:3.
69 Cf. Num 21:4-9; Wis 16:5-14; Jn 3:14-15; Ex 25:10-22; 1 Kings 6:23-28; 7:23-26.
70 St. Basil, De Spiritu Sancto 18,45
G 32,149C; Council of Nicaea II: DS 601; cf. Council of Trent: DS 1821-1825; Vatican Council II: SC 126; LG 67.71 St. Thomas Aquinas, STh II-II,81,3 ad 3.
Since God does speak he is by definition not an idol ... so
Can you provide scriptures where God instructed the making of a brass serpent?
Can you provide scriptures where God instructed the making of the ark and mercy seat?
Can you provide scriptures where God instructed the making of images of Jesus?
Can you provide scriptures where God instructed the making of images of Jesus' mom?
Defining God's commands as idolatry is false religion.
That sort of ignorant post is the result of picking a couple of words and yanking them out of context. Whats next, are you going to go to Psalm 91:4 ("He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings") and claim that the Bible says God has feathers & wings?
Get serious will you, either that or just don't respond to me.
That's a mouthful, CC.
But it still doesn't tell us what your church thinks idol worship looks like in practice.
Give us a true example of someone (a real person, not a hypothetical) that your church condemned as an idol worshiper, and what they were doing that made it obvious that it was idol worship.
But it still doesn't tell us what your church thinks idol worship looks like in practice.
Give us a true example of someone (a real person, not a hypothetical) that your church condemned as an idol worshiper, and what they were doing that made it obvious that it was idol worship.
Does a dove have feathers and wings?
Oh good grief! I gave you the most precise answer you'll ever get. If you don't see the answer there then that's because you just don't want to see it.
"..... Idolatry not only refers to false pagan worship. It remains a constant temptation to faith. Idolatry consists in divinizing what is not God. Man commits idolatry whenever he honors and reveres a creature in place of God, whether this be gods or demons (for example, satanism), power, pleasure, race, ancestors, the state, money, etc. Jesus says, "You cannot serve God and mammon"......"
That's the nut of it.
As in any mediator between these Two...
1 Timothy 2:5 For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;
Absolutely.
Yes.
Ask Mr. Religion
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Yes.
If the image causes us to worship the Lord it is a violation of the second commandment, and if it does not, it is a violation of the third. It is impossible to have them without transgression.
It is sometimes argued that images of Christ are only depicting His humanity and are, therefore, not a violation of the 2nd Commandment. But to argue like this is a form of Nestorianism that fails to treat the Second Person of the Trinity as a single Person (not two where it's OK to depict one but not the other). In other words, we cannot depict the humanity of Christ and argue that we're not depicting the Son of God. We cannot depict His humanity and say: "...but that's not God."
Scripture records some authorized imagery. Maybe Rome has a special memo from God? :AMR:
If we reduce the question to allegedly pictures of Our Lord,
1) It is, necessarily, a false representation, since He provided us no portrait. Nor the Apostles any description.
2) If the picture is intended to inspire devotion unto its "true representation," then it is a manifest idolatry of the kind, being a human invention.
3) If the picture is not intended to inspire devotion, it is a vain imagination. It presents Our Lord in such a way as not to inspire adoration.
4) If the picture is intended to picture only the human nature of Jesus, then it partakes of the Nestorian heresy that divides the hypostatic union, seeking to separate what is forever and unchangeably united.
2 Cor. 5:16 is important. "Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer."
Regarding Christ solely according to the flesh is an essentially humanistic apprehension of Christ. But He was not so, and is not so. Our Lord is not to be regarded in any kind of divided sense, but as the theanthropos, the God-man; and any reduction or division of our apprehension of Him is a step backward. This is the sense in which His glory is robbed.
If we consider for just a moment the path the original disciples took, in their appreciation of the Jesus they knew personally, so their private mental impressions and remembrances of Him—assuming they indulged such after His Ascension—would not partake of the lie of a false image. These witnesses of his divine majesty (2 Pet. 1:16) invite us with them in the pages of the Gospels. As they move from viewing Jesus as a man, then a great and admirable man, then as the greatest man ever, and finally as God Incarnate, we are brought along by those same degrees into the right perception of Jesus. So that, henceforth with Paul we say, "Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer."
The Word made flesh has given us his Word in which we are to understand the Incarnation. Images and pictures, never adequate to represent divinity, are no more fitting now than they ever were. Jesus Christ, the Living Word, is the "image (ikon) of the invisible God," Col. 1:15. His self-revelation cannot be improved upon, and any attempt at an unauthorized depiction must fall short of the glory of God, who is rightfully jealous of His glory, hence the second commandment.
If a visual is absolutely required, one cannot improve upon the bread and the wine.
Like I said, Romanists hate the second commandment.
AMR
Iconoclasts hate icons.
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God, notwithstanding, of course. :AMR:
AMR