Thanks for the info. I'm not really looking for merch, though; more for ideas that help to bring people closer to our Lord - though I also won't turn down and beneficent miracles that come along.

Even though in my religious background, we tend not to use physical mementos of Jesus or other religious figures, I take a non-iconoclastic view of the Catholic and Orthodox use of such tokens. I don't agree that they are idols, except in certain parts of Mexico where Christianity has crossed with indigenous beliefs. As wikipedia says:

"The concept of archetype was redefined by the early church fathers in order to better understand that when a person shows veneration toward an image, the intention is rather to honor the person depicted, not the substance of the icon. As St. Basil the Great says, "The honor shown the image passes over to the archetype." He also illustrates the concept by saying, "If I point to a statue of Caesar and ask you 'Who is that?', your answer would properly be, 'It is Caesar.' When you say such you do not mean that the stone itself is Caesar, but rather, the name and honor you ascribe to the statue passes over to the original, the archetype, Caesar himself." So it is with an Icon."

Christianity today is far more troubled by idolatry towards abstract rather than material idols, concepts that actually do acquire veneration status in their own right rather than as transparent archetypes. I did a devotional about this a few weeks ago, based on Luke 18: 18-27. Here's the nub of the matter:

"What ... can we call this romanticism? Sentimentality is another name for it. When it represents a small thing as something inflatedly bad, rather than good, we call it ‘superstition.’ In Judeo-Islamo-Baha’io-Christianity (‘the religions of the book’), there is an ultimate name for this turning-small-into-grand psychological tendency, which is idolatry. The small thing that gets turned into a fake god doesn’t have to be made of wood or stone. It can be an abstraction. Ephesians 5:5: “For this you can be sure of, that no fornicator, nor unclean person, nor avaricious person – who is an idolater – has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God.” The greedy person turns the things he desires into idols – and these do not have to be material things. They can be psychological shibboleths like comfort, safety, security, and, as seen in the evening news, ‘closure.’ Sometimes reducing the complexity of life is the biggest idol of all. Why should a rich young man complicate his life by giving away his financial security blanket? Why should the pastor bless a black man marrying a white woman? Why should people, in general, re-evaluate loves that haven’t been thought of as loves for hundreds of years?"

Ironically, only idolatry about idolatry demands that an idol be something tangible. One needn't look for imagery when one seeks idols.

As for "Jesus' work had barely begun when he was a boy; it's the last 3 years of his life where the things he began as a boy finally came to fruition," you are quite correct when it comes to the temporal Jesus. But the eternal Jesus began his work with the creation of the world, as the first part of the book of John makes clear, and the eternal Jesus, working now not as a 2010-year-old senior citizen but as something less limited, has assimilated all his human ages into one being. Thus he is no more 30 years old than 12, no more 28 than 2.

In his temporal form he was learning at 12, and now he may know all. There's a theological debate there that I won't get into.

Anyways, I don't think you need limit yourself to infant and man as was conventionally done in protestantism. There's no real basis for it.




• ( http link ) Love that is ever so big, but too small
[Anonymouse]