Small examples of protestant ‘churches’ infiltration into Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches:

Ukrainian Lutheran Church
Marthoma Syrian Church
– it’s offshoot, the St. Thomas Evangelical Church
Georgian Baptist Church
Armenian Evangelical Church
Ethiopian Tehadiso
Romanian Baptist Church

..Unfortunately for our dilemma, not all of Calvin’s acquaintances agreed with his conclusion. The two Italians, Peter Martyr Vermigli and his disciple Girolamo Zanchi – both friends of and influences on Calvin and Ursinus – do not believe that images of Jesus are inherently sinful. Vermigli says only that images of saints and of Christ should not be placed within churches where they become temptations to idolatry, but they may be used in private and public settings. He affirms that these images “may bring an honest pleasure, which may have some utility joined with it, if they represent those things which are monuments and examples of piety.”6 Zanchi, in many ways the “second Ursinus” (he succeeded Ursinus’s chair of theology at Heidelberg), readily disagrees with the charge of Nestorianism brought up by Ursinus, saying, “It is not impious to paint [an image of] Christ, insofar as he is man, as long as the image is not worshipped.”7 He continues, “The human soul cannot be painted either, but are not the forms of human bodies painted?”8 Zanchi argues here that if we apply Calvin’s (and Ursinus’s) logic regarding images of Christ to the human person, then we will have to conclude that no depiction of human beings is permissible either, since the soul cannot be painted.

So, we are left with a mixed message from some of the most prominent Reformers regarding the making of images of Jesus. Yet, how could there be disagreement on such a fundamental question?

This is not an issue of adiaphora. The making of images of Jesus, according to Calvin, is an act of idolatry, and strictly forbidden by God. Therefore, those who commit such acts are willful sinners at worst and Nestorians at best. We are left to wonder how what Calvin perceives as idolatry could be viewed by Vermigli, Zanchi, and others as an act of piety.

[Great example of a place where there is a multiplicity of views and no universal agreement, and as he says, is *NOT* adiaphora]

Titel:  I sjukdom och nöd. Offerkyrkoseden i Sverige från 1600-tal till 1800-tal
Författare:  Weikert, Monica
Utgivningsdatum:  2004
Universitet:  Göteborgs universitet/University of Gothenburg

Roma Sancta (1581).

Gregory Martin
Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1969

September 13, 2018 | Financial Times | by Kate Maltby.

Thomas Cromwell: A Life, by Diarmaid MacCulloch, Allen Lane, RRP£30, 728 pages

Rättfärdiggörelsen i kyrkans liv
HALLONSTEN, GÖSTA

De lutherska kyrkorna i Sverige och Finland har i hög grad bevarat det katolska arvet. Nutidens ekumeniska samtal med den katolska kyrkan gör det möjligt att lägga många kontroversfrågor åt sidan och ytterligare utveckla denna gemenskap.

Höst och vår i ekumeniken
HALLONSTEN, GÖSTA