Posted on 09/10/2009 1:30:04 PM PDT by Colofornian
In 1916 a church asked the Salt Lake City Council to allow them to build a huge cross, "the symbol of Christianity," on Ensign Peak. "We would like to construct it of cement, re-enforced with steel, of sufficient dimensions that it can be readily seen from every part of the city," the request read.
That request came from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The cross was to honor the Mormon pioneers.
Even though the proposal was approved by the City Council, the monument was never built.
Today, there are no crosses on Mormon temples. Yet two are shaped like a cross. Mormon chapels do not have crosses, either. But many have prints of the crucifixion hanging on their walls. Michael G. Reed, who has a bachelor of arts in humanities and religious studies and a master of art in liberal arts from California State University, Sacramento, explored at a recent Sunstone Symposium what he called, in rather charged language, the "LDS Contempt for the Christian Symbol."
Reed also uses the word "contempt" for how Protestants feel about the cross -- 19th-century Protestants, that is. It turns out that cross "aversion" was a Protestant pastime in times past. Its source was anti-Catholicism. Reed quoted historian Ryan K. Smith, who said that from 1820 to 1850 the number of Catholics in the United States grew from about 195,000 members to 1.75 million members, the largest religious body in the nation. And Catholics used crosses.
And so the Protestants didn't. "To Protestant Americans, the cross was perceived to be a strictly Catholic symbol," Reed said.
So the Mormons got their "opposition" to the cross from the Protestants?
Not so fast, according to Reed. Mormons did not pick up their feelings about the cross from the Protestants. At least not entirely.
"While searching for evidence to support the assumption that early Saints had initially rejected the symbol of the cross, I couldn't find any," Reed said.
As a church of converts from other churches, it shouldn't be surprising if some attitudes crept into Latter-day Saints' attitudes. But Reed couldn't find any hints of the Protestant cross attitudes until around 1877. By that time, Protestants had already begun adopting the cross as their own symbol.
Instead, Reed found the cross all over Mormondom. It appeared as jewelry on Brigham Young's wives and daughters. It appeared in floral arrangements in funerals. It appeared as tie tacks on men's ties and watch fobs on men's vests. It appeared on cattle as the official LDS Church brand. Crosses were on church windows, attic vents, stained-glass windows and pulpits. They were on gravestones and quilts.
Even two temples, the Hawaiian and the Cardston, Alberta Temple were described in a 1923 general conference as being built in the shape of a cross. Reed said the cross "taboo" was grass roots and began around the turn of the 20th century.
In 1916, when LDS Church Presiding Bishop Charles W. Nibley asked the Salt Lake City Council to approve the church's plan to erect a large cross to honor the pioneers, he didn't anticipate any opposition. He was, according to Reed, "quickly criticized, and even accused of succumbing to Catholic agenda."
Anti-Catholic feelings quashed the effort.
Mormon missionary work in predominantly Catholic countries "was very challenging," Reed said. Mexican (and presumably Catholic) revolutionaries had executed a Mormon branch president and his cousin the year before. The two were told before they were shot, "If you will renounce your religion and confess before the Virgin Mary, we will spare your lives."
"As a result of conflicts with Catholics abroad such as this, smaller conflicts with Catholics in Utah had a tendency to get blown to greater proportions," Reed said.
Just two weeks before the LDS Church's cross proposal, Catholic Bishop Joseph S. Glass complained about Mormons dancing on Good Friday. He decried a "city of unbelievers" and called upon others to protest. "Are there not enough Christians in Salt Lake City to command some kind of general respect for the holiest day of the year?"
Reed said Bishop Glass' protest offended Mormons, who traditionally did not observe Good Friday. Non-Mormons also thought it was "arrogant" for the bishop to "impose his religious convictions upon others."
This controversy was "fresh on the minds of many Utah citizens who opposed the 1916 Ensign Peak proposal," Reed said.
Plans for a monument on Ensign Peak were reluctantly set aside for almost two decades. But it was only a year later, on July 24, 1917, that a This Is the Place monument in the shape of a cross was erected at the mouth of Emigration Canyon.
For 40 more years the symbol of the cross continued to polarize Latter-day Saints. "While some rejected the symbol," Reed said, "others continued to embrace it."
In 1957, a jewelry store in Salt Lake City advertised cross jewelry for girls. LDS Church Presiding Bishop Joseph L. Wirthlin called President David O. McKay to see if it was proper for LDS girls to purchase the crosses to wear.
Reed believes that President McKay "institutionalized" the LDS Church's feelings toward the symbol in his reply. President McKay expressed two reasons why he didn't think it was a good idea.
He told Bishop Wirthlin that the crosses were "purely Catholic and Latter-day Saint girls should not purchase and wear them. ... Our worship should be in our hearts."
According to Reed's reading of Gregory Prince and Wm. Robert Wright's book "David O. McKay and the Rise of Modern Mormonism," President McKay had developed some critical attitudes toward the Catholic Church when he served in the 1920s as president of the LDS Church's European Mission.
These attitudes ended when Catholic Bishop Duane Hunt met with President McKay about an LDS author's book that was highly critical of Catholics. President McKay began to "privately re-examine his own beliefs" about Catholicism, according to Reed.
Reed said that members of the LDS Church have rid themselves of "much of the anti-Catholic ideas of the past."
But even when the use of the cross is divorced from anti-Catholicism, Mormons, as a whole, still do not generally use the cross as an outward symbol of their faith.
In 1975, President Gordon B. Hinckley, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, spoke in general conference about the symbol of the cross. He recognized and respected how other churches view the symbol, and said, "But for us, the cross is the symbol of the dying Christ, while our message is a declaration of the living Christ."
"Contempt." "Aversion." "Opposition." "Taboo." Reed struggled throughout his presentation to find the right word to describe how Mormons feel about using the cross as a symbol. In a recent telephone interview, Robert A. Rees, an LDS scholar (and the "response" to Reed's presentation at the Sunstone Symposium), used the word "ambivalence" to describe Mormons' feelings toward using the cross as a symbol.
Not hostility, but a shifting ambivalence.
The attitude of Mormons toward the cross has changed over the years. Members of the LDS Church did not accept the 19th-century Protestant prejudice against the cross. Over time, some embraced the cross as a symbol and others avoided its use. Some even used it as a way to denigrate the Catholic Church.
Today members of the LDS Church concentrate on the body and blood of Christ more than the nails and wood. The cross may not be used as a special outward symbol any more than the crown of thorns, the whip and the spear, but thoughts of the cross and what it represents still cause Latter-day Saints to stand all amazed.
I also don't go along with the handling of the printed word as though the paper and ink were magic ~ clue, they are not magic.
The words have meaning as a construct in the mind. Unless you put them in there they do nothing.
The point I made, and I think it is still valid, is that Judaism was not always of the current opinion. Jews once used statues, pictures and even depictions of the human form for religious purposes ~ just like Christians, and the pagans before them. They evolved.
BTW, notice my explanations ~ I sensed that you were having some problems with ideomatic expressions ~ so what is it ~ you deal in 4, maybe 5 languages? I will be more patient.
Scattered fights in the 1830s and 1840s over the use of the cross highlight the beginnings of the symbol's Protestant career in America. Before then, the nation's Protestant churches had rarely encountered any Catholic competition, and their misgivings over the use of Catholic art followed basic Reformation patterns. These had emerged in the wake of Martin Luther's famed attacks on Catholic corruption in 1517. Despite the variety of new reformers and reformed churches that thereafter identified themselves as "Protestant," almost all affirmed Luther's main message--that God and his Scripture, not the church and its sacraments, were the sources of salvation and grace. Thus Protestant reformers took a different view of the symbolic materials used to administer and sanctify church sacraments, as these items could imply a need for priestly intercession or interfere with an individual's focus on scripture. Some reformers, Luther included, retained the use of certain "Catholic" symbols, including altars, crucifixes, and crosses, in the belief that traditional art was an aid to faith. But these reformers guarded against attributing any spiritual power to such implements. This perspective found support in the reformed churches of Germany and England. In contrast, other European countries became less hospitable to religious art. Protestants in Scotland, the Netherlands, and areas of England looked to Switzerland, where influential theologians like John Calvin denied the propriety of Catholic symbolism in church worship altogether. These reformers argued that erecting crosses, statues, and the like violated the Second Commandment prohibiting false idols, and they emphasized the sufficiency of scripture to attend to believers' needs. So in varying degrees, early Protestants complicated the use of church symbols. (7)
I don't think the First Borners and the Quakers are a fair sample of Christian belief, or even of Protestant belief.
The "No religious test" clause in the Constitution is aimed directly at the Quakers and their quaint methods for dealing with non-Quakers in public life, or even in public.
An article on the subject; they are some solid in-context Mishna sections.
Yup, it's like an Orthodox Cross, but with an extra patibulum at the top.
This has to do with a couple of things ~ the fur trade and earlier trappers from Russia who came West, and ~ the Alaska colony and earlier trappers from Russia who came East to what is now Fort Ross, discovered Finley, Ramsey and other American fur traders (who took Russian furs South to the Spanish in exchange for vegetables which they took North to be transhipped to Alaska).
The Russians quickly discovered where the Americans had lived and trapped and went there.
So, on the American frontier of the 1820s to the 1840s there were all sorts of crosses, even Russian crosses, in graveyards across the Lower Midwest, and they're still there. They are so unremarkable I think I may well be the first person to ever note their existence.
I'm just guessing that those fine gentlemen may not agree with the lessons of the Talmud (and somehow I just bet those judges knew all about the Talmud).
Crickets.....
Gee, number one, I didn't see that in Nana's post...of course, I don't try to read her mind.
Number two, when I was mormon, Joseph Smith was the center of the mormon religion...and I doubt very much a visit to a testimony meeting today would illustrate that has changed.
Quoting from memory, "I KNOW that the church is twooo and I KNOW that Joseph Smith is a prophet of God....crosses were completely forbidden....end memory clip. During sacrament prayers and at the end of prayers, you would hear "in the name of Jesus Christ amen"...and that was about all you would hear about Christ. Most hymns were about Smith, the church, persecution, etc. etc.
it neglects the act in the Garden of Gethsemane (where he took upon himself our sins)
...and the mormon religion sees Gethsemane as the "Atonement" rather than the crucifixion where he DIED for our sins.
Maybe instead of the CTR ring, mormons could start making and wearing "garden" jewelry....gold-plated shovel anyone?
>>”My point is the cross with Jesus on it, or the various saint statutes, look a lot like “graven” images to me.”
That is my opinion, also. As to muawiyah, I often find him to be a mystery, and his motives obscure.
DG
I dony know who you are and I dont like sneaky secret messages and I hacve no idea why it would have to be secret...
so I will answer the FReepmail that you sent me, unsolicited I might add...here in the sunshine...
Sunlight seems to go with crosses...
You wrote
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Re: Sunstone speaker attempts to explain LDS ‘aversion’ to cross
From Some hope remaining. | 09/10/2009 5:38:41 PM PDT read
“There is so little in that lyin’ mess that could not be commented on...”
If you say so...
Actual history seems to support at least part of the article, however — the cross was very controversial in Protestantism in the 1800s.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb050/is_4_70/ai_n28885951/
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Yes I say so, because it is true...
If mormons dont like the Christian cross, then they dont like the Cgristian cross...
Their rejection of the cross of Jesus cxhrist is important to God, but it does not effect my savation or my relationship with Jesus...
There are areas of mormonism that are anathema to me, and I feel feel to say so...
Like the rejection of the cross...aven though Jesus died on the cross to save us...
Whewre would we be if Jesus had refused to suffer and die on the cross ???
But He didnt refuse...
Before He died he told us to re,member His death on the cross until he comes again...
He has not come back yet and so we Christians remember Him and the cross...
Chrsietians, both Catholics and Protestants have placed crosses on their churches for 2,000 years....
during and after the Reformation Protestants didnt crease too honor Jesus by building Lutheran and Anglican Churches and Huguenot Temples withour crosses...
They kept plcing the cross they loved on and inside each new building, and in their stained glass windows...the Huguenots adopted the Cross of Languedoc as their emblem...mentioning the cross in their services and songs...
This article is nonsense, and sneaking around corners and sending FReepers you dont know secret messages is not going to change that ...
Please do not send me any more unsolicited FReepmails...
If you think you have something to say, please say it here in the open...
Tennessee Nana
To whom the preaching the cross is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18)
I am a Christian, but I wore a small gold Star of David necklace in college. I believe that I am a “child of Abraham” by faith in the Messiah, Jesus Chriat. I still have it, too.
My objection to the crucifix was because it portrayed Jesus as still on the cross and not resurrected.
1 Corinthians 15:12-20 (King James Version)
12Now if Christ be preached that he rose from the dead, how say some among you that there is no resurrection of the dead?
13But if there be no resurrection of the dead, then is Christ not risen:
14And if Christ be not risen, then is our preaching vain, and your faith is also vain.
15Yea, and we are found false witnesses of God; because we have testified of God that he raised up Christ: whom he raised not up, if so be that the dead rise not.
16For if the dead rise not, then is not Christ raised:
17And if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain; ye are yet in your sins.
18Then they also which are fallen asleep in Christ are perished.
19If in this life only we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable.
20But now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the firstfruits of them that slept.
SOMEwhere along the way, the PROTESTANTS managed, someHOW, to put a LOT of CROSSES in their churches without a lot of fanfare.
How DARE you point out these FACTS!
We want to forget them and just have a group hug!
—MormonDude(I just LOVE Christians!)
AMEN!
I do so wish that SO many Christians would actually find that out someday!
The motives? Probably age ~ the older you get the less meaning you draw from conflict.
No Orthodox church has any statues, much less life-size ones, specifically to avoid such reactions. We go for the two-dimensional icons, filled with theological content and painted in such a manner as NOT to be earthly-realistic, but to evoke concepts of a divine realm and to concentrate the mind in prayer. Such statues as you allude to would be an obstacle to prayer for many.
LOVE your tag line!!!! :)
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