I find his argument against icon veneration to be very strong.

I find his argument against icon veneration to be very strong. The historical evidence that the earliest Christians did not venerate icons, and actually condemned the practice, is irrefutable. Any of the responses that try to challenge this point have been terrible and have to mutilate the patristic writings.

The thing that seems arguable to me is whether icon veneration can be understood as a legitimate development in some way, which I think is a more subjective thing. I would be willing to defer to the Catholic Church on this matter, but as Gavin shows, the development of the practice is condemned by Nicaea II itself.

I don't really see a way out of this. Either it did not develop, which is clearly disproved by the historical evidence; or it did develop, which is condemned by Nicaea II.

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  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Another idea I've seen is that Catholicism can receive Nicaea II, but not in the same way the East received it. This seems a bit strange to me. For one it was a council of Eastern bishops and was not confirmed by the Pope until 100 years later (council held 787, papal confirmation 880). Secondly all of the Eastern practices regarding icons are accepted within Catholicism via the Eastern Catholic churches.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I don't understand how you idiots use Roman political councils to define your orthodoxy. Doesn't seem kind of dumb and wrong to you?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        If the council is correct then it's correct. Also being accepted so widely does count for something, particularly for the first three ecumenical councils, which did acquire something like universal acceptance.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          So when Rome killed Christians and made it small, that was bad.
          But when Rome killed Pagans for fake Romanized Christianity that's okay.

          There's plenty of evidence the councils were not widely accepted. There's plenty of evidence of document destruction and vicious persecution.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          The first ecumenical council was not widely accepted. Even Constantine abandoned it.
          Theodosius had to reinvigorate it, he also bound ecumenical authority to Constantinople and therefore the Emperor. He reiterated the basic premises of Nicaea all over again but 80 years later. He made all other religions (except Judaism) illegal. He tortured and imprisoned heretics. He burned libraries full of formerly catholic, now heretical documents.

          That's not apostolic truth, brother. It got poisoned hard.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Need some evidence and not just hearsay

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Also the argument from the practice of the Oriental churches doesn't help either. Despite being out of communion with the Chalcedonian churches, they're still (generally) in the same geographic region and subject to the same historical trends. Ideas can easily cross-pollinate, both between Chalcedonian and Oriental churches, and between the Oriental churches themselves. I would be interested in seeing an actual examination of how this occurred, though. I read a paper recently about how confession of sins to a priest was not accepted within Coptic Orthodoxy until the 1200s, for example. It's easy to look back today, and it will seem like everyone does the same thing, so therefore it has ancient veracity, but that's not really the case.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/292/
      >Auricular confession was first introduced to the Copts in the twelfth century by Marqus ibn Qunbar (+ 1208 A.D.), a controversial priest who attempted to promote several Melkite customs, and secondly by Kyrillus ibn Laqlaq (+ 1243 A.D.), a controversial patriarch who was judged by his own bishops in an official synod. Although both attempts had faced fierce opposition from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, their literary works have promoted the practice of confession among the Copts ...

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Copts were doing this forever.
        The only reason for the anti-Arian movement was because Copts worshipped Serapis as Jesus. The clarifications that catholicization had achieved, which were making it to the ear of Constantine, threatened Alexandria's syncretic bullshit.
        The reason Arianism failed was because of some heretical former Serapis cult member who replaced him with Jesus, and didn't like the way catholic reckoning of doctrine downgraded Serapis.

        This is also the reason for the communion. The grain of the Nile was literally the substance of Osiris's (Serapis) body, since Osiris was a subterranean giant whose blood artery was the Nile. The grain was his body. Whether you ate it for food or spirit. The communion was just a special acknowledgment of the gift of grain.

        Luke-Acts is a very late, certainly Alexandrian work. It derives from rumors of the Basilides school. Luke is literally the israeli Lukuas/Andreas rebel who slaughtered thousands in the Kitos uprising. For Luke-Acts to venerate this figure as apostolic is proof of how much time had passed.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          I'm not interested in this sort of nonsense, sorry.

          So when Rome killed Christians and made it small, that was bad.
          But when Rome killed Pagans for fake Romanized Christianity that's okay.

          There's plenty of evidence the councils were not widely accepted. There's plenty of evidence of document destruction and vicious persecution.

          The first ecumenical council was not widely accepted. Even Constantine abandoned it.
          Theodosius had to reinvigorate it, he also bound ecumenical authority to Constantinople and therefore the Emperor. He reiterated the basic premises of Nicaea all over again but 80 years later. He made all other religions (except Judaism) illegal. He tortured and imprisoned heretics. He burned libraries full of formerly catholic, now heretical documents.

          That's not apostolic truth, brother. It got poisoned hard.

          >So when Rome killed Christians and made it small, that was bad.
          "We spring up in greater numbers the more we are mown down by you: the blood of the Christians is the seed of a new life." --Tertullian
          >But when Rome killed Pagans for fake Romanized Christianity that's okay.
          I would not say that it is. But I do believe there is such a thing as a catholic tradition. I'm not willing to throw that out and start from scratch. The Holy Spirit guides and preserves the church in some capacity.
          >There's plenty of evidence the councils were not widely accepted.
          I said "acquired ... something like", which I think is accurate.
          >Even Constantine abandoned it.
          Which according to you is irrelevant, so okay?
          >That's not apostolic truth
          The Nicene Creed is.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >But I do believe there is such a thing as a catholic tradition.
            To clarify, that's lowercase catholic on purpose. I'm referring to a sort of broad orthodoxy that can be shared among Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and many Protestants.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            >To clarify, that's lowercase catholic on purpose. I'm referring to a sort of broad orthodoxy
            Which was robust and existed before the Roman councils.
            And was closer to the apostles as well.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            So Roman creeds and politics are your apostles.

            Don't you think God would punish you for believing in bullshit merely because you were born that way when there's plenty of evidence of how ridiculous it is?

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I don't think there is anything ridiculous about the Trinity at all. It is taught in Scripture. The Creed is merely a manner of formulating the Scriptural concepts.

            >To clarify, that's lowercase catholic on purpose. I'm referring to a sort of broad orthodoxy
            Which was robust and existed before the Roman councils.
            And was closer to the apostles as well.

            And was also Trinitarian.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Leap of logic.
            The Trinity of Nicaea II is not necessarily the Trinity as spoken of in the Bible.
            The robust presence of Arian bishops is proof of that.

            The Roman emperor made Arianism a heresy, but before that it was a consensus. You could call it mistaken, but they were certainly clever enough even back then to know if their position was anti-apostolic and anti-biblical.
            There's no such evidence it was.

            The Roman Emperor and Alexandrians simply preferred a different view of the Trinity, and enforced it with violence and book burning, not persuasion.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            If you're an anti-Trinitarian I don't really care to argue with you anymore, sorry.

            Even if it is an accretion that doesn’t make Protestantism not false. Literally any apostolic tradition is going to be closer to what the apostles had than any non-apostolic tradition.

            >the church developed
            >hencethus, my denomination is correct
            why are protties like this

            Are you being deliberately obtuse? The only model of development that anyone would accept is an organic one, in which a concept which already exists is understood to a greater depth (consider the growing specification in the dogma of the Trinity). It is not something that is universally condemned, that then becomes okay. You can use that sort of development to justify literally anything, e.g. homosexuality -- the church just came to a greater understanding of human dignity so we are able to realize previous condemnation were wrong, blah blah. Secondly, as I stated earlier, Nicaea II claims that icon veneration is the ancient faith of the church, which rules out this kind of development to begin with, and is also demonstrably false on a historical level. You aren't helping anyone with this kind of pathetic response. If you are the "historical" church, then your church needs to withstand historical scrutiny, and it doesn't.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            > this sort of nonsense
            You believe in your tradition more than you believe in God.
            If St. Peter, Paul and Jesus all came down to to tell you Luke-Acts is wrong but Mark and Matthew are okay, and the Roman councils were bad, you'd simply tell them they don't have proof and you believe in a different Jesus.

            Your god is your tradition, not God. You have no room in your heart for any alternative. So why argue over evidence.
            Your position is fixed. There's nothing to talk about.

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The cult of martyrs was a fifth century grift that is what made Christianity mainstream among former pagans.
    Jerome and Theodosius, then Augustine, helped the israelites buttfrick Christianity.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Even if it is an accretion that doesn’t make Protestantism not false. Literally any apostolic tradition is going to be closer to what the apostles had than any non-apostolic tradition.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Literally any apostolic tradition is going to be closer to what the apostles had than any non-apostolic tradition.
      The point under dispute is whether this is actually an "apostolic tradition" or not, and there is no evidence that it is. All evidence is to the contrary.

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    >the church developed
    >hencethus, my denomination is correct
    why are protties like this

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