While Protestantism may be focusing too much on the invisible, Catholicism has taken the opposite path in focusing too much on the visible. I am not against the visible revelations of God. Nor am I against a God whose revelations are sometimes invisible to us.
Why do you say that in Catholicism there’s too much emphasis on the visible? what do you define as too much, and how do you know? (honest questions)
You are wrong here. Creation fell in tandem with mans transgression. See the RCC #400. The visible creation you are surrounded with today most certainly can be a distraction and in point of fact is vying for your attention all the time. Pick your visible poison, all parts of a fallen creation……wealth, pornography, gluttony, a desire to horde beautiful things for oneself, the desire to just own, the noise of modern society etc. etc… Even our spirituality can be distracting us from the good if it is directed elsewhere. The spirit is not synonymous with the good though good can be found in the spirit.
Yes I am aware that creation was affected by the fall… I meant that it’s not evil
in itself. The Church doesn’t teach that. Even our nature is still good, it’s not absolutely corrupted. We have kept our human nature, though it got affected by the fall. Our nature is not sufficient for salvation, because we need grace, but this doesn’t make it inherently evil or entirely corrupted to something evil in itself
As for attachments to created things… that’s not because of created things themselves. It’s because of the sin in us. For example, Our Lord lived among created things here on earth and He wasn’t inordinately attached to anything. There’s nothing ‘wrong’ with the birds, sky, etc.
Yes spirituality can go the wrong way…but I don’t see any evidence that Catholic spirituality has gone the wrong way with images… simply because they help to bring people to God, rather than distract us from Him
We worship God in the spirit.
what would you say this means?
There are two ways to grow closer in communion with God, through the tangible made a tangible good through Gods revelations to man and the intangible through personal reflection and self-examination and communion with your fellow Christians on Gods revelations of the invisible. Anything else is a lie or a superfluous distraction of the world.
why wouldn’t the images of Christ, Our Lady, and the Saints be examples of a tangible thing made good through God’s revelation? After all, they show the example of the Incarnation or God’s work in His creatures.
Early Christians held their gatherings in fields or simple dwelling places. The world since has only distanced itself further from God not closer and the evolution of where we gather to worship has itself devolved into unnecessary worldly decorations and distractions. While the sacraments are a grace from God, the $10,000 dollar commissioned mural or statue that adorns your church is not and kissing the feet of the statue or kneeling before the mural is little more than an attempt at filling a spiritual emptiness inside you by empowering a lie, an artist’s personal interpretation of his personal impressions of his personal God. By definition if you need these things in order to be inspired to communion with God then you are using them as a crutch on which to hang your spirituality. You are not holding communion with God by kissing the feet of statues. These are empty hollow gestures.
the early Church forbid iconoclasm as a heresy. The early Church was for images.
Why do you assume there’s spiritual emptiness inside? why not seeing it as an expression of the love inside?
imagine you’re living far away from a beloved family member… sometimes you take their photograph and give it a kiss. Is that wrong? why/why not? how is it different to kiss an image of Our Lord?
images are not THE thing that our spirituality is based on. It’s just a help in prayer.
