Scripture and God in Christianity

which ascend to the light, there come forth all sorts of hideous reptiles and a host of rats and
mice....There probably never was an age in which Christendom was free from this " Christianity",
just as there never will be one in which it shall have been overcome." 776
Jesus Christ the incarnate God was also the son of Mary. Incarnation and then the early Church
Father's usage of terms like 'the Bearer of God' 'Theotoka or Mother of God' promoted worship
of Mary, a mere human being. "But Mary obtained her chief, her positively dogmatic significance
from the fact that the dogma of the Incarnation became the central dogma of the Church." 777
Nestorius cried in vain to Cyril and to the Church in general, "Do not make the Virgin into a goddess."
It is an outrageous innovation. But, as observes Don Cupitt, "It brings out an odd feature of
Christianity, its mutability and the speed with which innovations come to be vested with religious
solemnity to such an extent that any one who questions them himself regarded as the dangerous
innovator and heretic." 778 Nestorius was declared a heretic and Mary was exalted above
all creatures, above Cherubim and Seraphim and got the position at the right hand of the Son.
The reason, as is clear from the statement of John of Damascus, is that " The name `Bearer of
God' represents the whole mystery of the Incarnation. The Holy Spirit purified Mary with a view
to the conception." 779 She was worshipped, called upon in prayers for support and help and her
pictures and images were worshipped. Commenting on this development Harnack observes, "Pictures
of Christ, Mary and the saints, had been already worshipped from the fifth (fourth) century
with greetings, prostration, a renewal of ancient pagan practices. In the naive and confident conviction
that Christians no longer ran any risk of idolatry, the Church not only tolerated, but promoted,
the entrance of paganism. It was certainly the intention to worship the divine in the material;
for the incarnation of deity had deified nature (ousia)" 780
In addition to the above mentioned problems, the doctrine of Incarnation taken literally could
lead to God's depiction in concrete corporeal human images. Don Cupitt rightly observes that "If
it is the case that in the incarnation God himself has permanently assumed human nature, and can
legitimately be depicted as God in human form, then eventually the ultimate mystery of deity will
be conceived anthrpomorphically, and the pagan notion of a deity as a superhuman person with
gender will be restored. In due course this happened, aided by the traditional Father-Son imagery."
781 In the East the Church showed reservation in this matter and permitted only the depiction
of the Deity in a human form different from the human form of Christ in the standard iconography
of scenes like Baptism, where a hand emerges from the cloud to release the dove upon
Jesus' head. But after the sixteenth century, under the influence of the West, images of God appeared
in the East. The West has been less conservative in this regard. The anthropomorphic images
of God became very common in the West after about 1100. 782 Don Cupitt is quite right in
protesting against these developments: "It is my contention that the doctrine of Christ as God's
divine Son has here humanized deity to an intolerable degree. The strangeness of it is seldom noticed
even to this day. A sensitive theologian like Austin Farrer can dwell eloquently upon a medieval
icon of the Trinity, and a philosopher as gifted as Wittgenstein can discuss Michelangelo's
painting of God in the Sistene Chaple, and in neither case is it noticed there could be people to
whom such pagan anthropomorphism is abhorrent, because it signifies a 'decline of religion' in
the only sense that really matters, namely, a serious corruption of faith in God." 783
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