If a husband sleeps with an artifical replica of his wife when she is away is this a sign of his devoted love for her? Am I guilty of denying the “embodiedness” of marital love by calling such a practice a perversion?
Can you imagine a such a husband, when confronted, claiming his accuser must have a low view of the family?
Doug Wilson said the same thing and I think, in our context (one in which the plain text of the Bible doesn’t seem to make te case) it is the best argument I’ve yet heard.
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10467036/
Mark,
Just a few thoughts…
First, my prior post regarding the manner in which an average, uninformed Orthodox priest would interpret your rejection of iconographic veneration as heresy was a hypothetical one. Hopefully you understood that I was not making this accusation and that the hypothetical priest would have been as erroneous in his understanding of Reformed sensibilities in this area.
Second, your analogy is flawed in nearly every way. Iconography springs from an enriched theology of the Resurrection and our anticipatory liturgical participation in the Resurrection. Andrew Louth makes summarizes these historical roots nicely:
“…Christian conviction of the Resurrection meant that those men and women whom Christians depicted in art—besides Christ and his mother, the patriarchs and prophets of the OT, and the apostles and martyrs of the NT—were regarded not as dead, but as having passed to the fullness of the risen life. Consequently they were depicted as alive in the age to come, and icons came to be seen as pointing from this world to that.”
Most of this, then, spins around the different ways that Orthodox and Reformed traditions resolve liturgically the tensions of our realized eschatology.
Your analogy, in classical Reformed style, resolves the tension by emphasizing the real absence of Christ and the saints in our worship. The wife is absent and the representation of her is objectified as though it replaces her living presence.
In the case of Orthodox theology and praxis, however, the eschatological tension is resolved doxologically in God being present through our participation (koinonia) in the Divine Liturgy of heaven. The Orthodox Liturgy is iconographic through and through because it embodies and anticipates the final Resurrection. Thus the celebrant priest is an icon of both the Father and of Christ (Roman Catholics say “alter Christus”); the bishop’s throne inside the iconostasis is an icon of the judgement seat of Christ, etc.
Icons, then, are not objectified as objects of worship because they are not ends and do not point to themselves. Rather they point beyond themselves to the eschatological reality that intrudes into the present through the mediation of the Holy Spirit.
Of course, none of this mandates the use of icons and one is perfectly free to reject the practice. My concern, however, is that we understand the principles of Orthodoxy as they appear from the inside. Your analogy fails to do that.
Maybe you ought to try and meet with a learned Orthodox priest and see if your understanding of iconographic worship rings true. I know a guy in town and could get you his name.
Blessings and Peace, for I regard you as a true brother in Christ.
Michael+
Michael, no one is questioning that they have theological rationalizations for what they do. Nor is anyone denying that these rationalizations allow them to be viewed as faithful Christians in an important sense (my original comments were aimed at Protestants who knew better, if you recall).
But if the husband claims his wife is spriritually present through the doll, he is simply deluded. It is still a perversion.
The orthodox priest is the true icon of Christ in the divine liturgy. My exhortation would be: Kiss him, speak to him, not to dead, artificial images. The Spirit promises to make believers, not their pictures, into rivers of life in the Spirit. Let God’s true icons minister His presence, not impersonal things crafted by man’s ingenuity.
And none of this touches on necromancy–I never mentioned the saints. If I try to talk in my prayers to you, you won’t hear me, but somehow the dead are able to hear us? Not a word of this is in Scripture.
In both cases, the intercession and the ministry of grace of actual flesh-and-blood people is being exchanged for pictures and ghosts.
Michael, I’ll be happy to meet any Christian, but I’ve participated in orthodox worship (though, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have done so) and read their material. My respect for such brothers is not going to make me fail to hear the scariest warning in the decalogue. The whole point of second commandment is to say that we cannot use images to reach God. Viewing them as pointers beyond themselves does not get out from under what is actually prohibited.
If treating RC and EO as Christians is used to treat going over to those sins lightly then we will see a resurgence of the Thornwellian hyperbole among Bible-believers rather than a rational position.
Oh, and I return the brotherly affirmations in full, Michael.
Yeah, I’m still not sure that you are getting my meaning. Or perhaps I misunderstand yours.
If you are willing to concede the iconic function of the celebrant, your original analogy would necessitate the worshipper who kisses him becomming an adulterer, no? The priest in this case isn’t even an artificial blow-up doll but, to borrow a line from Gene Hackman, “some whole other body.”
Icons certainly are not Sacraments, though they do have a “sacramentality” in the sense that they form part of the linguistic discourse of the Church which is THE fundamental Sacrament. If one wanted to borrow the vocabulary of speech-act theory, icons might be described as locutions. In that sense, they mediate the communication of persons. Again, they are not ends, but means.
The reverence expressed toward icons may, perhaps, be analogous to the reverence we express toward the printed text of the Scriptures. Classical practice (even in Reformed circles) leads us to hold the Scriptures aloft as we process into the Church and we raise the text as we proclaim “the Word of the Lord” at the end of its reading. Even if this is not the practice at Providence, certainly we wouldn’t label these as instances of “bibliolatry.”
I’ll let this be my last word on the subject, but I guess that I may have unwittingly fallen into that group of Protestants who you think ought to know better. I’m not a full-fledged iconodule, but I have moved a good ways in that direction over the years. I have found myself fairly impressed by Maximus the Confessor on this particular topic and have a great reverence for Nicea II and its explicit affirmation of iconography.
Perhaps this is one of many reasons that I am better off in Anglo-Catholic cirles than in the PCA where I was originally ordained.
Blessings,
Michael+
What if the guy just keeps pictures of his wife and deceased loved ones around for the memories and inspiration? Is that ok? And if you think kissing a picture is sick and perverse, you’ve never known anyone in a long-distance relationship. 😉
That said, I don’t buy that icons are conduits of persons, whether dead Christians or Christ himself. Using flowery eschatological language to extract it out of a platonic metaphysic just doesn’t work for me. I guess that’s why I’m a Protestant…I like to see the chapter and verse.
Also, there’s something to calling a spade a spade. You have all this complex, nuanced theological language that takes a PhD in philosophy and deep knowledge of classical Greek to comprehend all to explain why you’re not really worshipping the icon. But the fact is that bowing down, dancing, carrying in procession, kissing, praying to, and weeping before an icon looks and sounds like worship. That’s why we keep calling it “worship.”
Lastly, the ancient pagans didn’t objectify their carved images in the way you claim an image must be objectified to be an idol. They actually regarded them a lot more like you regard icons, as means to communing with whatever deity they represented. I think you would find few if any Philistines who believed the giant statue of Dagon actually created the world.