March 2004

In thinking through the historical controversy between Protestants and Roman Catholics over the Second Commandment and its application to pictures of Jesus, I've tried to bring the principal contributions of that controversy to bear on Mel Gibson's, The Passion of the Christ, cautioning my own congregation and readers carefully to consider that the method and purpose of this movie is not primarily to teach, but rather to lead the viewers to worship our Lord in the midst of His Passion. Thus, I argue, this is the very thing our Reformation fathers denounced as a violation of the Second Commandment: We are not to use images of any Member of the Trinity as helps in worship.

It's interesting that most Protestants have, in the present, argued in defense of Gibson's movie with almost exactly the same arguments as Roman Catholics used against Protestants at the time of the Reformation.

So what ought we to conclude from this?

Yes, the Reformers might have been wrong and it may be new light has come to Protestants today that allows us to see the errors of the Reformers' position. If so, then the following excerpt from a Roman Catholic priest, himself citing Pope John Paul II, will not be cause for alarm, but rather hope.

Here follows a summary of the historic Roman Catholic position on this matter. And if you can't read it all, at least read the second-to-last paragraph in which Cardinal Castrillon says he'd be willing to exchange a few of his sermons for scenes from The Passion of the Christ--it's a telling quote to end on, isn't it? And for the record, I remain convinced the reformers--not Roman Catholics or Orthodox--are rightly dividing the Word of God in this matter.

(Note: Although early on in the Reformation Luther was critical of the images of the Roman Catholic church, later he came to tolerate, and even embrace, those images. So although most Protestants have rejected images in worship, Lutheran practice is closer to that of Rome herself.)

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a towering prophet of the twentieth century and, whether recognized or not, the world today owes him a great debt of gratitude for his (at times) almost-singlehanded work documenting and exposing the murderous tyranny of communism in the Soviet Union. Without his voice and pen, it's hard to imagine President Reagan giving the June 8, 1982 "Evil Empire" speech to the House of Commons.

From the time Solzhenitsyn set foot on American soil, the reception our nation granted him was somewhere between diffidence and hostility.

On June 8, 1978 Solzhenitsyn gave the commencement address at Harvard University. Titled, A World Split Apart, Solzhenitsyn had the chutzpah to bite the hand that fed him.

Ministering in a university community, the culture of the academy permeates life. Before moving to Bloomington, Indiana (where Indiana University's 35,000 students comprise half the population of 70,000), we lived in a rural Wisconsin dairy farming community.

By way of contrast with rural Wisconsin, Bloomington's most noticeable trait is pride. Thinking about this, many explanations come to mind but one of my favorites is the imperviousness of the academic world to the weather.

In an earlier post, I wrote:

When Mr. Gibson makes a celluloid icon and calls Christians to express their devotion to the Lord Jesus by venerating that icon, Mr. Gibson is doing precisely what we reformed folks have accused his communion of doing for almost five hundred years, now--he is being an orthodox Roman Catholic encouraging the veneration of images of God.

To which another World blogger, Dean Abbott, responded:

When and where, exactly, did Mr. Gibson call Christians to express their devotion to the Lord Jesus by venerating that icon?

There is no citation because I'm not quoting Gibson on this, but only summarizing what is self-evident concerning his motivation in making The Passion of the Christ: this movie is an act of religious devotion to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and through this, his celluloid medium, Gibson is calling his viewers to the same devotion.

Jim Caviezel, the man who plays Jesus in Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, recently had a personal audience with the Pope. But first, a little background information on Caviezel: