Click here for another good post by Matt Powell at Wheat and Chaff ,
concerning the increase in fascination about (and, God forbid, devotion to)
Catholic relics that has been spawned by the Passion.
I'm glad I've got folks like Matt to follow, who spend the time reading that I can't. His quote from Calvin's Institutes I reproduce here:
" ANY USE OF IMAGES LEADS TO IDOLATRY*
Adoration promptly follows upon this sort of fancy: afor when men
thought they gazed upon God in images, they also worshiped him in them.
Finally, all men, having fixed their minds and eyes upon them, began to
grow more brutish and to be overwhelmed with admiration for them, as if
something of divinity inhered there, Now it appears that men do not rush
forth into the cult of images before they have been imbued with some
opinion too crass-not indeed that they regard them as gods, but because they imagine that some power of divinity dwells there. Therefore, when
you prostrate yourself in veneration, representing to yourself in an image
either a god or a creature, you are already ensnared in some superstition. "
The danger in Gibson's Passion is not that people are made to think that Caviezel IS Christ... it is much more subtle than that.