Emperor Constantine<\/a> had a dream in which he saw a vision of the Cross in the sky with the words written in Greek, “In this sign you shall conquer.” With this divine prompting the Roman pagan removed the Imperial Roman eagle from the standards and shields of his army and replaced it with the sign of the Cross as they prepared for battle and onto subsequent victory. This event paved the way for the Christian message to be proclaimed in the Roman Empire and throughout the world.<\/p>\nConstantine’s decision is being undone today by the leaders charged with guarding the inheritance. The leaders of the Christian churches are removing the Crosses willingly, not the “secular world” as represented by the state. It’s an internal gutting of the first order without help from “the world” and the ensuing irrelevancy and impotance is heralded as compassion and progress.<\/p>\n
Sadly, the more the leaders dilute the “Good News” message, the more a person becomes estranged from reality and the healing that the Gospel provides. It shifts a person’s focus onto himself and not onto the Person of Jesus Christ; a descent into the captivity of narcissistic self-obsession instead of ascending into the freedom of Christ as the writer of Hebrews taught, “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross, despising shame and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God” (Hebrews 12:2).<\/p>\n
By removing the Cross from the space of worship, we parch that sacred space and make it mundane. Church becomes no different than entering a WalMart or McDonalds. Refusing to lift up the Cross, the Church of Sweden tragically deprives the people of the diversity they claim that their action preserves.<\/p>\n
Breaking With History<\/h3>\n
Brunne’s action would be inconceivable to the Apostles and early Church Fathers. They would never have removed the Cross from a Christian church. Even the eighth century iconoclasts, after banning and removing icons from the churches for over a century, still kept the symbol of the Cross.<\/p>\n
This is not rocket science. If you take away the symbol, you destroy the message.<\/p>\n
The Good News of the Gospel announces that the Cross is the door to the empty tomb. Brunne’s action affirms H. Richard Niebuhr’s insight and perhaps sad prophecy about the religious drift of the West in the last century, “A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.” <\/p>\n
In a way Brunne and her fellow travellers are the iconoclasts of a New Age. Instead of banning icons they want ban the central symbol of the Christian faith. Their actions threatens more than a distortion of the Christian faith, however. They seek the eradication of the Christian faith altogether.<\/p>\n
But what about the Christians who passively sit by? “When the Son of Man comes, will He find faith upon the earth?” (Luke 18:8). That question is for us to answer.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\n
John G. Panagiotou is a contemporary Christian theological writer who is a graduate of Wheeling Jesuit University and St. Vladimir\u2019s Orthodox Theological Seminary. He can be reached at johnpan777@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The proposal to remove the cross from a Christian church, while ostensibly a gesture of accommodation to faiths other than her own, is nothing less than the collapse of Christianity within the institutional structures of that church.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":14175,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1897],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14174"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14186,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14174\/revisions\/14186"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14175"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aoiusa.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}