There’s a book I read a few years ago by a Presbyterian art history professor at a seminary (unfortunately I can’t now find the book or the professor), who did a study on Evangelicals and Eastern Orthodox in California.

I can’t help thinking about how he found that Evangelicals use the same language when describing the liturgical function of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ movie during the Easter season as the Eastern Orthodox generally use for icons (though Evangelicals wouldn’t recognize it as such). It was so similar you would have thought John of Damascus directed the film.

But I don’t bring that up to poke at broader Evangelicalism, because I don’t think that it necessarily follows at all from a Reformed perspective that a visual aid for the eye draws the interior prayerful mind to idolatry. If this were so, wouldn’t traditionally Reformed folk abstain from laying eyes on Jesus in The Passion for reasons beyond his His popish and caucasian depiction?

A moving icon is not a difference in kind, and evidently in broader Evangelicalism at least, not a difference in function. The same could be said of passion plays and Ixthus fish on cars, I suppose? Maybe even the word ‘Christian’ itself? That’s my concern – that it’s realistic to envision an argument being made for the consistent application of this perspective on the Commandment #2 that goes well beyond and even in conflict with what the most iconoclastic of Reformers would intend. And, as I see it, the only way to have a restrained view of #2 would be to distinguish between the imagination and the perception of the senses, which from my Presbyterian understanding is all the iconophiles have been saying since the earliest disputes on this matter, even if, in historic practice, idolatry clearly has clearly occurred.

I would invoke Saint R. C. Sproul on this matter by way of some iconophile quote of his, but I’m sure you folks see what I’m getting at.

Always thankful for your podcasts. They really are the gold standard. Nothing compares!

All the best,
Matt

Coldwell has a piece here on the intent of the WLC 109:
https://www.naphtali.com/articles/chris-coldwell/the-intent-of-westminster-larger-catechism-109-regarding-pictures-of-christ%e2%80%99s-humanity/

Baldwin has a piece on EO icons:
http://web.archive.org/web/20080513110045/http://bettercovenant.org/papers/eastern_orthodoxy.htm

And perhaps most interesting, this is the RPCES Report from 1981, which is behind the near total disregard for the confessional view of images in the PCA:
http://pcahistory.org/findingaids/rpces/docsynod/332.html
(And this also accounts for the disturbing fact that the Covenant College chapel has images of Christ in the stained glass windows).

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