I was on Baby Duty today, so I spent some time listening to Bloggingheads dialogs, including Kerry Howley and Richard Rodriguez:
There’s a lot of good stuff in here, but I almost hesitate to post about it, because it’s practically guaranteed to bring out the worst sorts of commentary. There’s a bunch of stuff about race, gender, and identity which was really interesting, but will undoubtedly set “Uncle Al” off. The biggest problem, though, is that the most interesting comments had to do with religion.
Rodriguez spends a bit of time talking about Catholicism in comparison to evangelical churches, and he made a comment that probably isn’t entirely new, but struck me as interesting. He noted that Catholic churches always have a crucifix with a representation of Jesus on it, while evangelical churches always have just a cross. He said that Catholics are perpetually on Good Friday, emphasizing the suffering and death of Jesus, while evangelicals are perpetually on Easter Sunday, emphasizing the resurrection.
As I said, I thought this was one of the most interesting parts of the discussion. I’m not sure I completely agree, but there’s probably something to that, at least based on my limited exposure to evangelical churches.
Of course, what I’d really like to hear is Fred Clark‘s take on this. It seems to resonate with some of the things he’s said in his exhaustive discussions of Left Behind and the misguided theology of LaHaye and Jenkins. The whole “Rapture” notion seems like an attempt to have Christianity without the suffering.
Of course, I don’t have an email address for Fred, and can’t find one on his blog. And he has an active enough comment community that I’m not sure dropping a link in a comment would actually get his attention. So I’ll post it here, even though I’m almost certain to get some really juvenile comments in response (I’ll leave it out of the Politics channel, in hopes of avoiding the worst of the culture warriors).
Anyway, I’m not convinced anybody is actually reading blogs at the moment, given that we’re in this half-week of limbo between Christmas and New Year’s.
It isn’t just evangelical churches, it’s pretty much all protestant churches who have the cross rather than the crucifix. At least every one of them I’ve been into, and that’s a fair few.
MKK
That’s an interesting observation by Rodriguez, although I will have to accept it as anecdotal since I haven’t really spent time in a bunch of evangelical churches. My only observation is that evangelicals talk a lot about being “saved” and accepting Jesus as “Savior” and tend to actually read directly the Bible more, or at least parts of it that they like. I was raised Catholic and we went to Mass every week. I attended Catholic school from K thru 12 (!). But we hardly ever read from the Bible directly in school; it was a lot more of St. Augustine this, and St. Paul that. That is, the idea was here were all these people throughout the centuries who were closely reading Bible, let’s check out their interpretation a bit instead of just jumping right into what is basically a pretty obscure text with a lot of context that the modern person would not appreciate without further knowledge.
Interesting observation about the cross-with-body and cross-without-body signifying different emphases. I’d sort of noticed the trend, but hadn’t attached any deeper significance to it.
I’m not sure it’s correct but I’m not sure it’s not, either. It’s certainly interesting.
Never heard of this guy before – what an amazingly rich interview. I’d love to get high school kids to hear it.
“Mexicans work with such gusto and efficiency because they don’t take their identity from their work…”
Made me laugh, because I was once accused of being racist for making a similar observation. But it was based on practically every Mexican I’ve ever known, working much harder than almost anyone around them.
I could feel the sadness in his reflections on the church and sexuality. His recognition of life as suffering also has a place in Buddhism. I never heard of him and he has a lot going on.
One reason Protestant churches have no crucifix is that Zwingli and Calvin were very un-hip to representations of Jesus in the place of worship. They went around breaking priceless works of art to prevent idolatry (while building the foundations of modern bibliotry).
But of course, yeah, it occurred to them that the empty cross could symbolize resurrection, too. Maybe nobody could figure out a catchy enough icon of an empty tomb.
My only observation is that evangelicals talk a lot about being “saved” and accepting Jesus as “Savior” and tend to actually read directly the Bible more, or at least parts of it that they like. I was raised Catholic and we went to Mass every week. I attended Catholic school from K thru 12 (!). But we hardly ever read from the Bible directly in school; it was a lot more of St. Augustine this, and St. Paul that.
That’s pretty much my experience of Catholicism as well. There were Bible readings as part of the Mass, of course, but they were drawn from a fairly limited set, and over a period of several years, you could watch them repeat. And I’m pretty sure there were whole books that never got mentioned.
On the bright side, at least they didn’t attempt the logical contortions needed to pretend that every word was literally true as translated.
Interesting observation about the cross-with-body and cross-without-body signifying different emphases. I’d sort of noticed the trend, but hadn’t attached any deeper significance to it.
Again, pretty much my reaction. I haven’t been in that many Protestant churches, but once it was pointed out, I said “Oh, yeah…”
I’m not entirely sure I agree with Rodriguez’s broader claim, but I think there is something there.
Jim Macdonald would be another person whose opinion (from the Catholic side) I’d be interested in hearing on this.
Interesting interpretation of the body-on-the-cross vs. the empty-cross symbolism, but I think it reads too much into it.
The fact is that Catholic churches are filled with statues of all sorts and other representations of human forms, e.g., statuary of saints and Mary and the apostles on stained glass windows, etc. Most of those human images (including some statues and murals of Jesus) aren’t suffering–indeed, the typical statue in a Catholic church looks to be in some sort of blissfully serene heavenly contemplation of the divine. There are also various depictions of humanoid-looking angels and cherubs who look quite contented as well.
By contrast, the typical protestant church (whether evangelical or mainstream protestant) is devoid of any human images–I think there’s a deliberate aversion among most protestant denominations towards anything that might smack of worshipping a “graven image” in protestant churches. Protestant churches are generally just much “plainer” spaces than Catholic churches–they aren’t given to ornamentation, and human images, whether suffering or happy or sad or contemplative, are out of place in them.
From my fine art school days, I recall that Jesus on or off the cross is actually a point of distinction brought about by Lutheran churches, and then solidified by the Catholic church after the Counter-Reformation.
One of Luther’s complaints was all the glitz and glam the Catholic churches had been understandably introducing – no t.v., no radio, no wealth, why not view all the spectacle at Mass? Luther simplified things, went back to the Bible only, and Protestantism kept bare wood pews and pulpits, and bare crosses so as not to worship false idols in the form of Jesus statues. So: when there was sculpted images or paintings, they tended to be wood altars instead of gilded ones.
A part of the Counter-Reformation was a debate on all the glitz and glam; in the end it was decided to increase it. Put the foot of God down, so to speak. More sculptures, more frescos, more bits of various saints on display. The Renaissance and Baroque traditions in Italy and Spain really brought this out.
This is consistent at least with the (not so right-wing, but not by any means liberal) evangelical churches I grew up attending. The decor was fairly simple: unadorned crosses, abstract geometric patterns in stained glass; maybe a dove, or abstracted tablets indicating the Ten Commandments, or a rainbow. As Mary says, images of humans were pretty rare. (Though there were a lot of them in Sunday School educational materials.)
Actually a note – I think that the entire Roman Catholic bible (maybe with a couple misses) is read at servicess over a period of three years, Then it repeats. You would have to go to daily mass to get all of it though. Remembering from long ago youth.
Uncle Al hates to disappoint. What resolved religious warfare in Northern Ireland? The leftmost dregs of the Catholic bell curve eventually killed themselves off, allowing the rightward tail with brains modulating faith to make some empirical headway.
Proper Catholicism is Eastern Orthodox – mysticism untainted and unthreatened by technological advance. Everybody goes to heaven, there to bathe in the infinite radiance of God’s eternal love. The faithful exult in it, the unfaithful burn in it.
Homosexual pedophilic throat-slashing Church of Rome and its hogshead of schisms – forever fearful of empirical falsification and human joy – is obscene Islam-lite. Evangelical psychopathologies – Eastern Ortodox mysticism with a buzzer up its collective ass – are no more capable of hewing wood and drawing water.
Every priest says, “Hodie mihi, cras tibi.” Only a fool believes in post-mortem escrow closing.
depp=true
Chad, Fred Clark’s email address is about 3/4 of the way down his right hand sidebar: slacktivist chez hotmail point com.