RELIGIOUS ICONS, SYMBOLS -THEY MAY COMFORT BUT DO THEY MISLEAD?

 Icons are essential components of the Christian faith as it was established by the councils of both East and West. 

Iconography gave an identity to the medieval Roman state and church. It was seen as means to teaching the truths and messages of Orthodox Christian beliefs as well as part of prayers and devotions of the faithful in the liturgy 

Liturgy is the customary public ritual of worship performed by a religio

What is the symbol of the Protestant Reformation?

The most common symbol in Protestant churches is the cross, which symbolises the centrality of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Most Protestant crosses are not crucifixes (i.e. do not have the body of Jesus portrayed on the cross).

STATUES AND HALLOWED GROUND

 a pedagogical tool abound:

The iconoclasts argued that God was invisible and infinite, and therefore beyond human ability to depict in images. Since Jesus was both human and divine, the iconoclasts argued that artists could not depict him in images.

The basis for the deliberate destruction of pictures and sculptures in Christian churches at the time of the Reformation was the idea that to make and use images for Christian worship AND THIS was contrary to the word of the Bible; in particular, the second of the Ten Commandments: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven IMAGE...

The “Iconoclastic Controversy” over religious images was a defining moment in the history of the Eastern Roman “Byzantine” Empire. Centered in Byzantium’s capital of Constantinople (modern Istanbul) from the 700s–843, imperial and Church authorities debated whether religious images should be used in Christian worship or banned

It is, he says, always something that is representational. That stands in contrast to a text which, with a single word, can shift from representation to reflection.

In the context of religion, pictures represent deities who have no direct presence in the physical world; these deities are not held to be absent (let alone non-existent), but in need of a picture in order to become visible. 

The concept of the religious symbol also embraces an abundantly wide variety of types and meanings. Allegory, personifications, figures, analogies, metaphors, parables, pictures (or, more exactly, pictorial representations of ideas), signs, emblems as individually conceived, artificial symbols with an added verbal meaning, and attributes as a mark used to distinguish certain persons all are formal, historical, literary, and artificial categories of the symbolical. If one looks for a definable common denominator for the various types of symbols, one could perhaps choose the term “meaning picture” or “meaning sign” to best describe the revealing and at the same time the concealing aspects of religious experience. The symbol (religious and other) is intended primarily for the circle of the initiated and involves the acknowledgment of the experience that it expresses. The symbol is not, however, kept hidden in meaning; to some extent, it even has a revelatory character (i.e., it goes beyond the obvious meaning for those who contemplate its depths). It indicates the need for communication