Iconoclasm and Bibliolatry

Two Heresies That Feed Off One Another


My great & good friend, Jeff Duntemann, recently wrote in his Contrapositive Diary:

Holy Faces

"The stations [of the Cross, in his parish church] are painted icons, deliberately lacking any suggestion of a third dimension (so that they cannot be mistaken for the biblically prohibited “graven images”)"

To which I replied:

Piffle, Poppycock, and Bibliolatry!

The Seventh and last Ecumenical Council [again in Nicea, 792 AD] was very direct about the fact that we do not worship images, but use them as an aid to remind us of whom they picture:

Seventh Ecumenical Council

The 1918 Catholic Encyclopedia says:

"But there is a difference not of principle but of practice between East and West, to which we have already alluded. Especially since Iconoclasm, the East dislikes solid statues. Perhaps they are too reminiscent of the old Greek gods. At all events, the Eastern icon (whether Orthodox, Nestorian or Monophysite) is always flat — a painting, mosaic, bas-relief. Some of the less intelligent Easterns even seem to see a question of principle in this and explain the difference between a holy icon, such as a Christian man should venerate, and a detestable idol, in the simplest and crudest way: "icons are flat, idols are solid." However, that is a view that has never been suggested by their Church officially, she has never made this a ground of complaint against Latins, but admits it to be (as of course it is) simply a difference of fashion or habit, and she recognizes that we are justified by the Second Council of Nicaea in the honor we pay to our statues just as she is in the far more elaborate reverence she pays to her flat icons."

Iconoclasm vs Veneration

The condemnation of images in church is yet one more Protestant heresy, perpetrated by blue-nosed wowsers who know nothing of Church history, and hate what they do not understand.

The Encyclopedia continues:

"Images then were in possession and received worship all over Christendom without question till the Protestant Reformers, true to their principle of falling back on the Bible only, and finding nothing about them in the New Testament, sought in the Old Law rules that were never meant for the New Church and discovered in the First Commandment (which they called the second) a command not even to make any graven image."

Thus Sola Scriptura Bibliolatry feeds Ignorant Iconoclasm, and vice-versa.

Harrumpf!