Fundamentalist objection to statues?

[patrick457]

Crucial to the development of Eastern icon theology is an anonymous 5th-6th theologian who wrote under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite (Pseudo-Dionysius). Pseudo-Dionysus’ writings aimed at a synthesis between traditional Christian dogma and Neoplatonist thought. The intimate union between God and the soul and the progressive deification (theosis) of man is, he felt, to be obtained in a process of unknowing in which sense perception and intellectual reasoning are abandoned.

Pseudo-Dionysius’ theory contributed to the veneration of images, since he regarded the sensuous world as an emanation (idea courtesy of Plotinus) of the divine. According to him, God created the visible universe to act as His own, immense icon. A vast “code” of visible symbols, deliberately placed by God in the world, linked humanity to an invisible God. The physical, visual aspects of human worship were part of that great code - hence, he great emphasis on the liturgy and the sacraments. God was far above human imagination, but God drew the human race toward Him through a proliferation of visible symbols.

We can compare bishop Hypatius with pseudo-Dionysius. While both of them seem to use the same language and ideas (suggesting that Hypatius was himself influenced by Neoplatonism), their outlook is actually fundamentally different. Pseudo-Dionysius envisions ascent for all believers through the earthly and heavenly ‘hierarchies’; his ‘sacramental’ view of the cosmos sees material helps as lower but still indispensible stages in the ascent. Hypatius, meanwhile, believed that material adornment are provisionally granted for the “imperfect”; the strong, the spiritually-perfect - among whom Hypatius naturally counts himself - do not need these, and there is no indication that he thought that the “perfect” ever passed through a stage where they needed such helps.

Hypatius’ idea of God granting concessions for “the weak” - for example, the command to make cherubim on the Ark, animal sacrifice, the use of pagan names for constellations within Scripture, or the leading the wise men through a star as temporary accomodation for their astrological errors - is rooted apparently in an ancient patristic exegesis of Deuteronomy 4:19 (“And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the LORD your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven”). In St. Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho (chapter 121), Justin’s Jewish character Trypho claims that God allotted the sun, moon and stars to the heathen; Justin does not comment on this, but himself later claims that God gave the sun for the heathen to worship (chapter 121).

Both Clement of Alexandria and Origen elaborated on this idea, arguing that God “apportioned” in some way the heavenly bodies to pagans as revealing a divine pedagogic method. They both declared that God assigned them the heavenly bodies so that they may not fall away to atheism and gross idolatry of material objects, but rather to provide them to rise up to true religion. Origen in particular declares that the worship of heavenly bodies, while of course being inferior to the worship of the true God and the Logos, is much better than devotion to material idols. St. Athanasius in the 4th century also emphasizes the pedagogical role of the heavenly lights in leading men to knowledge of their Creator. They all agree in one thing: the imperfect were apportioned the “material light” in order to rise eventually to the immaterial light of the divinity. The true Israel of course needed no such preparation.

 

[patrick457]

A handful of other works from the pre-Iconoclastic period mention the symbolic defense of Christian images. They mostly come from the adversus Iudaeos literature of the 7th century, and two of them are preserved in the acts of the second council of Nicaea in 787. The writings of John of Thessaloniki and Leontius of Neapolis belong to the first half of the 7th century, but may well have been written after the Arab conquests of the same century.

The two fragments of John of Thessaloniki concern a discussion between a pagan and a Christian, and a Jew and a Christian. In the first fragment the pagan says that like the Christians and their images, the pagans do not worship their idols, but through them they honor the incorporeal powers. Here it is taken for granted that the symbolic argument is part of the Christian tradition. In the second gragment the symbolic argument is used to contradict the Jew who objects to images because of the prohibitions of the Old Testament. This time the Christian says that the purpose of images is to act as a reminder (hypomnēsis).



In his Apology against the Jews, Leontius of Neapolis repeats the defence of Christian images as reminders. He argues that Christians do not really worship the wood of the Cross; on the contrary, so long as two pieces of wood are so placed as to form a cross, a Christian honors it as a “type”, and a reminder of what was done for us on the Cross, but if they are separated they are burned - which of course would be absurd if Christians considered the wood itself as God. So when we kiss the royal seal it is not the clay or parchment that we reverence, but the symbol of the king. If in the absence of a father his children will kiss with tears his staff or his cloak, shouldn’t we also kiss the Cross as Christ’s staff, revere the manger at Bethlehem as His home, and pay homage to Nazareth as His hometown and the Jordan River as His bath? He makes the point that the Jews reverence the Book of the Law, and yet they do not worship its leather and ink, but the words of God written in it. A similar argument was made in The Trophies of Damascus, another anti-Jewish treatise written in the second half of the 7th century.

Of the third writer, Stephen of Bostra, we know nothing except that he wrote yet another anti-Jewish work simply titled Against the Jews around the beginning of the 8th century, which was quoted by St. John of Damascus as a prooftext for the veneration of images. The core of Stephen’s argument is that God ordered the tabernacle to be decorated with cherubim “fashioned by human hands;” Stephen then asks his hypothetical Jewish audience: “Will you call them idols? What will you say to Moses and to Israel, who venerated (proskynēsanti) them? Veneration (proskynēsis) is the outward sign (symbolon) by which honor (timē) is given.”

The abbot of St. Catherine’s Monastery at Mount Sinai, St. Anastasius, wrote a work in defense of the Chalcedonian definition called the Hodegos (aka the Viae Dux). He had apparently used an image of the crucifixion to solidify his argument (contra Monophysites) that Jesus suffered and died only in His human nature, and argued that images were more reliable witnesses to the past than texts are and conveyed the reality of the past better.

http://previews.agefotostock.com/pr...bd1cfd43a3fb3bf84e66d2b2dff5/DAE-97025820.jpg

 

[Huiou_Theou]

If you are talking about the cherubim at the Mercy seat, note what is it that the Lord God said He would do there? Don’t you know that it was presumed that the temple or tabernacle is the place in the world amongst the Children of Israel where the Presence of the Lord their God was in those days. Certainly one would bow to the Presence of God, but to the presence of the cherubim at the Mercy seat no, absolutely not.

:clapping:
Exactly my point, even if you thought I was arguing something else.

The following are all the cases in Revelations where the elders fell down, each and every case they worshiped God because of the Presence of God. Not because there where angles present in the Presence of God. Where do you get this stuff?

I never said we would worship in heaven BECAUSE there were angels.
Please re-read my quote; There is no way to bow down before God without bowing down int he presence of the angels.

God is not going to dismount his throne for you, so that you may bow down to him in private.

Rv:4:10: The four and twenty elders fall down before him that sat on the throne, and worship him that liveth for ever and ever, and cast their crowns before the throne, saying,

Rv:5:8: And when he had taken the book, the four beasts and four and twenty elders fell down before the Lamb, having every one of them harps, and golden vials full of odours, which are the prayers of saints.

Rv:5:14: And the four beasts said, Amen. And the four and twenty elders fell down and worshipped him that liveth for ever and ever.

Here it could be said the angels are the ones that fell on their faces and worshiped God.

Rv:7:11: And all the angels stood round about the throne, and about the elders and the four beasts, and fell before the throne on their faces, and worshipped God,

All of creation will worship God; although, the angels holding up the throne obviously don’t fall down and worship – they do it in another way.

 

[Huiou_Theou]

so many gods to bow down before

I only see one God to bow down in front of. The one riding on the Cherubim;
But if you say so … then they are your gods to bow down before, whether you like it or not; they aren’t my gods in any worshipful sense.

For many lifetimes, your people bowed down in prayer toward the temple – toward those very angels of Gold; every day at the hours of prayer.

Do you deny this?