15 The idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of human hands.
16 They have mouths, but they do not speak; they have eyes, but they do not see;
17 they have ears, but they do not hear, and there is no breath in their mouths.
18 Those who make them and all who trust them shall become like them.
I tweeted this image while I was walking around Mt Eden taking photos. And I called it Idolatry. Because the Mountain is not sacred: it is a volcano (most of Auckland is) and it s beautiful. But not sacred.
Only God is Sacred. Only God. To make anything else sacred is to fall into the trap the Psalmist notes: that we will be dumb, deaf, blind, weak and stupid. Which brings me to the civil religion of New Zealand.
It is Maori, driven by the rituals of Marae — the traditions, which were Christianized by the missionaries prior to the British Empire acquiring the nation by treaty. (The Missionaries were Mensch. Between 1805 and 1835 there was a genocidal tribal war fought with trade muskets — the pagan Maori were driven by taboo (tapu) regulations and retribution (utu). The missionaries brokered a peace and organized a first constitution in 1835. The treaty was around getting the least malign colonial power to protect them from being colonized: the French, British and Americans were all looking, and the Confederation of Chiefs chose the Brits).
But in this post modern times the old Maori Gods are being mentioned and noticed. The idea that the land is sacred and a form of ersatz pantheism has come in. Most people do not care, for the prayers are muttered in Maori (which only 5% of the population is fluent in) and they do not care what the prayers are.
But I do. And I avoid these ceremonies. I find the introduction of tapu onto land offensive. It makes me understand why the reformed smashed the statues and painted their churches plain. For these fools do not understand that we have a great high priest, who is holy, just, right, wise, eternal and deeply merciful.
14Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast to our confession. 15For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who in every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. 16Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.
1Every high priest chosen from among mortals is put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. 2He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness; 3and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people. 4And one does not presume to take this honor, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.
5So also Christ did not glorify himself in becoming a high priest, but was appointed by the one who said to him,“You are my Son, today I have begotten you”; 6as he says also in another place,“You are a priest forever, according to the order of Melchizedek.”
Christ is above us, acting as our high priest, in the true temple of God: all the glory in this broken world is but a shattered reflection of the glory to come. We need to not worship the reflection of God we see in nature, in those works that approach perfection, or even the church itself. We worship the God that made all these things.
And as our societies become more and more pagan, we need to leave them to their civil religion, (the idols in NZ are Maori: elsewhere it can be the volk or rodina, or the constitution) and instead do our duty. Bring praise to God and God alone.
And they don’t understand the doors they’re opening by praying to things other than God.
I agree with you about the offensiveness of tapu and sacred land, but disagree that the (protestant?) reformers were motivated by the same thing.
Statues are really just like pictures. We look at them and we think of the person. Some people will even talk to pictures with the knowledge that the picture itself is not the person but provides a reference point for that person. Prayer to a statue is kind of like that, except that given the person being prayed to is in Heaven, that person can really hear you when you speak to them.
I think the reformers were trying to get as far away from direct contact with those in Heaven as possible because what they did was to destroy connections, and who wants anyone watching them when they do that?
And here I was trying to avoid the ikonoclastic controversy.
This fits in with a comment from yesterday by Brendan, but (on the Prod side
of the Tiber) there is a use of empty space to consider God — not the
forms or images or statues of the saints or ikons. The hard core
reformers worry even about the cross for all symbols can be worshipped.
In the same way they suspect Bach because you can worship his music.
The Orthodox and Romans do use images to encourage vneration of what the
image represents — so an image of Christ on the cross is to get people
to pray to Christ, and that of Mary and or the saints to remind people
of their lives and to (I disagree with this, not Catholic) ask the saint
named to pray for us.
This is very, very different from syncreticism. It is an internal debate: both sides are partially right.
But bringing in Tane Mahuta, or Jove, or Shiva, or Buddha –no.
Besides Buddha the man preached ageints worshipping him, did he not?
Some things are just unavoidable!
I don’t know what Buddha preached, thought I do know he believed we’d all get absorbed into great oneness, or something like that. He also preached we were on this almost endless cycle of reincarnation – completely stupid if you really stop to think about it – but so many people like it because it gives many second chances and immortality, of a type.
God wants us to worship Him – not for anything He needs, of course – but for us, so we will understand the right order of us to Him, and more besides. God is more than just empty space as His Son made the Invisible God, visible. Human beings, too, need that visibility, that physicality. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have bodies.
I see the ikonoclastic controversy a symptom of the desire of people to just be spiritual and not material, or to consider the material evil in some way, as the Gnostics did.
I’ll always remember when my youngest son was 5, nearly 6, and I was desperate for him to have faith in Jesus and in the Church (my family are converts), and the thing that worked for him was going into a cathedral (St Mary’s in Sydney), and coming across an almost life size crucifix on the wall as we were walking all around the church, and stopping and touching the feet of Our Lord with the nails in them, and saying, “So this is what they did to Him”. Something happened at that point, and for a small child, it needed to be real for him to get it.
Ben Hur. Did not show the Face of Christ. It was the most powerful film for the gospel I have seen.
The hebrews to this day do not have images or statues of saints nor do they have images of Gods.
You’re right, they don’t. Is your point that we should follow what they do, even though God to them is still invisible?
We will do well to heed the warning of the 2nd commandment and that of its implications. Israel was destroyed time and again until they finally learned that lesson.
And so this absence is testimony to that.
Only in the cases of the manifestation of Theophany. Or when David was shown in a vision the designs of the temple should there be images in worship.
Likewise there are no prayers to any patron saints to pray for them. But to God alone for God alone hears millions even billions of prayers at the same time. Due to his omnipresence. That which none of the dead saints are evidenced anywhere in scripture is reputed to hear and to ask God.
None of the people in the old testament or the new testament needed images to pray. Nor did they ask the dead to pray for them.
“We need to not worship the reflection of God we see
in nature, in those works that approach perfection, or even the church
itself. We worship the God that made all these things”
While I don’t know much about the Maori faith, if their form of animism is anything like Shintoism, than you should realize they do not worship the physical land as a God, or merely a reflection of God – God is everywhere. In nature, in the sky, in the air. Its just some invisible, uncontrollable force that is in all of us and in everything. Like the Force from Star Wars.
God is Omnipresent and Omnipotent.
& like in Shintoism, I assume the Volcano is “sacred” because before the days of Volcanology it was misunderstood and feared. Animistic religions are simple, primitive.
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Um, sacred or not – why would anyone want to step inside a volcano crater? Are they worried a James Bond-style villain will construct a lair inside it?
The sign reminds of those “Caution: Hot” warnings label on foam coffee cups.
Mt Eden blew about 40 000 years ago. the geology of the field means it won’t blow again: there will a new volcano where the scoria is less thick.
But the Auckland Isthmus is basically one volcano field. It will happen. But less frequently than 6+ earthquakes.
Very low chance of another volcano in Auckland in one’s lifetime: last one was 700 years ago. Mt Eden blew some tens of thousands of years ago, and is extinct: most of the cones in the Auckland isthmus are.
The one that should scare you is lake Taupo in the central north Island. That is a caldera: the volcano that was there is still active, and when it last blew (1200 years ago it deposited ash to around half a kilometer deep over a one hundred kilometer radius.
There are only five or six active volcanoes in NZ: we have a ski field on one of them. (Ruapehu).
The geology of NZ is as interesting as the geology of Japan.