/lit/ - Literature

Reminder

beep boop

>>22643623
Destroying idols is based but Muslims are not

>>22447336
This is pathetic and I don't have patience to deal with this anymore so I won't be responding again if this is the level of argumentation I'm dealing with.

1. Images in catacombs prove nothing. Christians did make some amount images in the early period. But there is no evidence at all of cultic veneration. The dogma of iconophiles is not "making a picture is okay", it's specific religious usage of these pictures in which honor or prayer is given to the image which then passes to who is represented by the image. There are other usages of images, e.g. education or decoration. But you have to conflate these as if they're the same thing, when they are not. Someone making an image does not mean they bowed to it, prayed through it, etc.

2. Tertullian is talking about the image of a sheep or a lamb. Early Christians who made images had a tendency to use allegorical representation, such as the Good Shepherd in the pic you posted, because they shied away from directly representing the subject. The Good Shepherd is not a direct picture of Christ but a depiction of an allegory utilized in a parable. Of course everything I said in point 1 applies here as well.

3. I note with Justin you are not providing quotes (you did not properly source the others either, so you are not doing your own research, just pasting from some apologetics site). I suppose I should take the use of the cross "as a symbol" to mean Christians prayed to paintings? This gets back to point 2, in which allegorical images were utilized but not direct ones. You appeal to the slander of pagans, so what do pagans say? You can find pagan objections directly addressed in other writings, such as Arnobius which I just posted, in which pagans slander Christians for not utilizing images and statues. Also confer Origen in pic related. The quotes are from an apologetic written against pagans, and he is addressing a pagan objection Christianity, that it is false because they do not use images.

There is zero evidence of cultic veneration of images among early Christians and all available evidence is to the contrary. There is not a single scrap of writing from any early father which supports praying through a statue or a painting, and everything they wrote condemns such behavior as pagan. If you believe that iconodulia was an early Christian tradition, you choose to live in a fantasy world rather than facing the truth. Have a good day.

>>22428998
>We are just like the ancient Christians trust me bro

>>21674944
Simplest way of refuting it is to show that anything it proclaims as an infallible dogma is something that was condemned by the early church, which applies with the veneration of images. There's no evidence of this practice until the 600s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ytYX4dXpRo

What went wrong?

Pope Gregory the Great (d. 604), Letter to Serenus, Bishop of Marseilles

”Furthermore we notify to you that it has come to our ears that your Fraternity, seeing certain adorers of images, broke and threw down these same images in Churches. And we commend you indeed for your zeal against anything made with hands being an object of adoration; but we signify to you that you ought not to have broken these images. For pictorial representation is made use of in Churches for this reason; that such as are ignorant of letters may at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books. Your Fraternity therefore should have both preserved the images and prohibited the people from adoration of them, to the end that both those who are ignorant of letters might have wherewith to gather a knowledge of the history, and that the people might by no means sin by adoration of a pictorial representation.”

Also cf. Origen (pic related)

>>21422970
>is actually the original Church founded by Jesus Christ and the object of the Gospel is a real thing that is not only the basis of the Church but of the soul. The basic fact is true apologetics for Christianity has taken a massive slumber from 500-1900 and its resurgence is causing a lot of people to be upset