“In another instance, when the people had been told to ‘look to’ the bronze serpent, over time this looking became devotional looking, and Hezekiah had Nehustan destroyed. To which we should respond, good for old St. Hezekiah, patron saint of righteous iconoclasts” (Papa Don’t Pope, pp. 110-111).
We Cannot Duplicate It
“The fact that God took on human flesh in the Incarnation (a miracle He was competent to perform) does not mean that we have the ability to recapture that miracle in any paltry representation of ours—whether done by shutter, brush, hammer and chisel, or an interpretive dance junior high troop performing Godspell” (Papa Don’t Pope, …
Though He Did Look a Certain Way
“We don’t know what Jesus looked like, thank God” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 100).
On Painting the Hypostatic Union
“To pick up a brush with a claim you can reproduce what happened is to deny what happened” (Papa Don’t Pope, pp. 99-100).
Identifying Where the Problem Is
“Those who object to portraits of Jesus should not have various Christological heresies assigned to them. It is as if a ham-fisted painter tried a portrait of my best friend, and I complained the painting had no soul. The painter could not reply that I was saying my friend had no soul. But we are …
In An Especially Pernicious Form
“We know this because when Paul discusses the golden calf incident, he calls this worship of YHWH idolatry . . . (1 Cor. 10:7-8). So the apostle Paul condemns a certain form of YHWH worship as idolatry. What? Because of the presence of the calf, not because of the absence of an invocation of YHWH. …
Receiving Worship is also Idolatry
“In biblical vocabulary, false gods are not the same thing as non-existent gods” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 95).
Tricksy Idols
“The heart is deceitfully wicked, and is fully up to the challenge, for one example, of fashioning even iconoclasm into an idol. When that happens the idol leers from his intellectual shelf in the temple of reason, as much as if to say, ‘Get me now.’” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 94).
Striving Idols
“For my purposes here, I am understanding idolatry as placing a created thing where only the uncreated God should be. This clearly happens whenever images are used in prayer, but images need not be involved. Idolatry is more subtle than that” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 94).
For Obvious Reasons
“The boundaries of true authority matter to the submissive heart” (Papa Don’t Pope, p. 87).