Images of Christ, Second Commandment, and Nestorianism (Looking for sources)

[John The Baptist]

Hey friends,
There was a post in a previous thread which said the late R.C. Sproul had a Nestorian streak due to his acceptance of images of Christ. This reminded me of conversations I've had with a good friend who also accepts images of Christ (not in worship, but just generally). I accused him of using Nestorian reasoning because he is separating Christ into two different people by saying you can merely show the human nature in an image.

I had not read that anywhere, so I didn't push it too hard in my conversation with my friend. The comment about R.C. put me on the hunt and I started looking through my resources but could not find anything directly related to this topic. I looked through Turretin, VanMastricht, Charnock, Hodge, Beeke, and Muller, but I couldn't find anything with regards to this justification of images being Nestorian.

Please help... any resources? Whether I missed sections in the above works or other resources.

Specifically thinking about images of Christ, not the Trinity or God in His essence, and justification being that the human nature is what it pictured, not the divine nature.

Thanks!

 

[Charles Johnson]

Hey friends,
There was a post in a previous thread which said the late R.C. Sproul had a Nestorian streak due to his acceptance of images of Christ. This reminded me of conversations I've had with a good friend who also accepts images of Christ (not in worship, but just generally). I accused him of using Nestorian reasoning because he is separating Christ into two different people by saying you can merely show the human nature in an image.

I had not read that anywhere, so I didn't push it too hard in my conversation with my friend. The comment about R.C. put me on the hunt and I started looking through my resources but could not find anything directly related to this topic. I looked through Turretin, VanMastricht, Charnock, Hodge, Beeke, and Muller, but I couldn't find anything with regards to this justification of images being Nestorian.

Please help... any resources? Whether I missed sections in the above works or other resources.

Specifically thinking about images of Christ, not the Trinity or God in His essence, and justification being that the human nature is what it pictured, not the divine nature.

Thanks!

See the acts of the Council of Hieria / Constantinople, A.D. 754.

 

[mpinckard]

The Heidelblog has a resource page about images of Christ. See especially "Epitome of the Definition of the Iconoclastic Conciliabulum" (which is from the Council of Hieria) and the quotation from Thomas Watson. The Watson quotation is cited as coming from A Body of Practical Divinity, but I found basically the exact same quotation in his book on the Ten Commandments (see page 99; quite possible that he just said the same thing in two different places).

Edit: tried to hyperlink the text above to the Heidelblog resource page, but when I save this post it gets rid of the hyperlink for some reason. But it can be found at https://heidelblog.net/2018/08/resources-on-images-of-Christ/

 

[MW]

Ralph Erskine, Faith No Fancy, 69-70:

Christ's divine person is one. To conceive of two natures of Christ, is not to conceive of two persons, but of one divine person, subsisting in and of himself. But, to conceive of Christ as man, which is the conceiving of him not as God, or to conceive of his human nature as such, abstractly, which is to conceive of it by itself, though yet it have no being or existence in and of itself; this is the same with conceiving of it as a person, which is to destroy the unity, and so to annihilate the being of the person of Christ. Thus an imaginary idea of Christ as man, does, in effect, turn that which is being itself, into no being, and him that is all into nothing. It is big bellied with a monster of atheism.

An imaginary idea, according to Mr Robe's own concession, can have nothing but what is corporeal for its object and therefore nothing that is spiritual or divine. An imaginary idea then of Christ as man, can have no respect either to the divine nature of Christ, or the divine person of Christ, or the divine mystery of the union between the divine and the human nature, for none of these are corporeal objects. Why then, the imaginary idea must, according to Mr. Robe, be conversant only about Christ's corporeal humanity, if I may speak so; which yet it cannot be, without making that humanity like the imaginary idea itself, an imaginary nothing.