Albert Mohler, commenting on the new and temporary display of the Shroud of Turin in Italy, where 1.5 million people signed up to view it:
The “happiness and relief” found in these relics is empty and delusional. Christians are to find happiness and relief and infinitely more in Christ alone. The obsession with relics comes at a grave cost — the confusion of the Gospel, the marginalization of Christ, and the subversion of the Bible’s sufficiency.
The leadership of the Roman Catholic Church has failed its members and betrayed the Gospel by embracing and allowing various forms of the veneration of relics, and this particular feature of Catholic piety and theology cannot be isolated from the larger project of Catholic doctrine.
But Dr. Mohler doesn’t let evangelicals off the hook:
Evangelical Christians observing the veneration of relics by Catholics are rightly horrified by the practice, but may be wrongly satisfied that nothing like this marks evangelical piety.
This temptation should be checked by the realization that many evangelicals fall prey to similar modes of thinking.
Read the whole thing, especially if you’re excited about the so-called discovery of Noah’s Ark. Of course, archaeological discovery is a good thing in and of itself, but we must be careful not to think that this will somehow prove the faith or give us new confidence in God.
For those who want more info on the Shroud of Turin, N.D. Wilson did some experiments a number of years back that show how this could have been faked.