Is It of God or of Men?
It is said that Luther’s protector, Frederick the Wise, possessed 19,013 relics which earned the beholder 1,902,202 years’ remission of purgatory! Physical-man’s desire for material objects for use in worship leads to such absurdity.
Can we believe that God Himself, knowing the inevitable misuse and the decline of true religion it would produce, would have given mankind for an icon, a relic, the very shroud in which Jesus was buried? The same God who hid the body of Moses and hid the exact location of his grave, lest the Israelites should worship the body of Moses, and lose sight of the worship of God?
U.S. Catholic thus concluded its discussion of the shroud: "… Forgers do forge, and people have a great ability to rationalize and theorize their way toward what they would like to believe.
"Ultimately, it’s about as difficult to prove scientifically the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin as it is to document or explain the Resurrection itself. But the latter is an essential question, and the former is not."
– From an article by Lawson Briggs, “Ultimate Icon?”, appearing in Plain Truth magazine, December 1978 (Vol XLIII, No.10. ISSN 0032-0420), reprinted June 2, 2014,
on the web pages of the Herbert W. Armstrong Library
Why would the 1978 “reprint” of a sceptical “Plain Truth” article on the Shroud appearing in US Catholic, need to be reprinted in 2014. The quote in the above posting appears to add no information to our knowledge of the Shroud except some peculiar theological / biblical speculation, does not draw on any of the concurrent 1978 STURP investigations, nor of course on any subsequent investigations, not even the 1988 C-14 attempts to date it. Nor of course with its somewhat pathetically subtle damning inference “forgers do forge” does it seem to offer any suggestion on how these nasty forgers went about their nefarious work. And some 46 years we are still no wiser even now how they might have done it! A most peculiar reprint! One might presume that the Jesuits were behind it, shades of Herbert Thurston!
“Can we believe that God Himself, knowing the inevitable misuse and the decline of true religion it would produce, would have given mankind for an icon, a relic, the very shroud in which Jesus was buried? ”
Yes, absolutely He does. God doesn’t stop a blessing because of potential misuse. We have Free choice for just that reason, people have free choice to do all kinds of abhorrent things because that same free choice gives others the potential to do great things. And talking of relics, “God was performing extraordinary miracles by the hands of Paul, so that handkerchiefs or aprons were even carried from his body to the sick, and the diseases left them and the evil spirits went out”(Acts 19:11-12)
God did not hide the body of Moses, the people who buried him knew where they had placed him. The writer is publishing rubbish, the so-called “Tomb of David” is also a place of worship today.
I met Herbert W. Armstrong and listened to a talk he gave soon after I graduated, having begun reading the “Plain Truth” since I was fifteen years old. He was a soft spoken, well-intentioned man, but I would add, also misled. The WCG should be respected for their views, however what is being said by them does not coincide with what we know today.