Church as we know it can sometimes be a bit weird and jarring. A few weeks ago at church, we heard an encouraging sermon on the second commandment (Exod 20:4-6). We heard that God cannot and must not be represented by or worshipped through images because images can only ever distort and misrepresent God. Yet the sermon was preached in a 150-year-old Cathedral building containing a plethora of accumulated religious imagery. As we listened to the sermon with our ears, our eyes were easily drawn towards a wooden statue of St Michael the archangel holding a gilded Bible, numerous large stained-glass windows depicting Jesus, a banner sewn with Mary and the baby Jesus, various crosses, and other striking images. Understandably, a few questions were raised after the sermon about the seeming disparity between what was heard and what was seen by the congregation.
The second commandment does not seem to be a blanket ban on the use of any concrete image in the spiritual life of God’s people. Just five chapters after he utters the second commandment, God himself commands that golden statues of angels be made to cover the ark (Exod 25:18-22). A little later, he commands that a fiery serpent be made so that people who were afflicted with a plague of snakes could look at it and live (Num 21:8-9). In the New Testament, water baptism and, perhaps, the Lord’s Supper also appear to involve a kind of imagery.
So what do we make of the second commandment? I offer here four principles about how we can honour the intention of the second commandment when it comes to our use (or abandonment) of images in Christian gatherings, and in Christian worship and obedience more generally. These aren’t intended to be comprehensive, but they may serve as a starting point for discussion.
The first principle is that God’s word must always be given pride of place in our worship, no matter where and when. God is known through what he says, not through any pictures we may make of him (e.g. Deut 4:9-19). It follows that, as we speak and obey his word, God will make himself known to us in his glory and splendour. The clear proclamation of God’s word, by itself, will go a long way towards relativizing the importance of images, and will remove many of the problems that we might otherwise encounter when God’s word is not spoken clearly. Who, having tasted the pure delight of knowing God truly through his word, would desire to go back to a bland and futile attempt to apprehend his glory through mere images?
The second principle in evaluating the use of images in our Christian lives is to consider their purpose. Why is an image being used? The cherubim in Exodus 25:18-22, for example, seem to have been used to show that God’s glory in the tabernacle and ark was essentially hidden. They actually discourage, rather than encourage, worship of God through created things. In our own lives, we should be discerning about the purpose of any particular image in the Christian life. For example, if we use children’s Bibles or drawings for the illiterate that depict Jesus, why are we doing it? Are the images there in order to represent God for the purpose of worshipping him through the image? This would be wrong. Or are the images there to illustrate the reality that Jesus was a human (because he is drawn just like the other human beings in the story)? Or is it just a quick illustration to guide the readers towards focusing on God’s word—such as the images from Two Ways to Live that I often use to explain the gospel? Then it could be all right. One way to determine what the purpose of something is to ask what would be lost if we took it away. The more upset somebody is at the idea that a picture could be removed, the more likely it is that the image is being used for an idolatrous purpose.
The third principle is related to the second: it concerns the context of the image. The bronze snake that God commanded Moses to make, for example, later had to be destroyed because it had become an idol to which the people of Israel were making offerings (2 Kgs 18:4). An image that was necessary in one context became unacceptable in another. The same is true today: we may accept the argument, for example, that in medieval times, stained-glass windows were good and right because they used a common pictorial symbolic language to depict events in the life of Jesus. But even if we do accept this argument, all we have gained is interesting knowledge about medieval history. The question that matters is what do the stained-glass windows achieve in our context? Are they merely there for educational purposes? Or are people using them as a way of gaining access to God somehow? Has there been that (some say, inevitable) ‘leakage’ where a simple image ends up actually representing God to the hearts and minds of God’s people?
The final principle follows from all the above. It is the principle of love. Those who are Christians—who are gripped by the gospel of God’s love to us in Jesus’ death—will want to do everything for the sake of others, not just ourselves. This applies to what we do with images. We could use Romans 14, for example, to argue that those who tend towards an auditory learning style (that’s you, if you like to learn through listening and discussing) should take into account people like me who learn a lot better with diagrams and pictures. However, 1 Corinthians 8-10 pushes us towards another important application of the principle of love in Christian fellowship. There, we learn that love is expressed when we curtail our own freedoms in order to help a Christian brother or sister by removing any temptations towards idolatry. So from 1 Corinthians 8-10, the onus of love may well be on us visual learners to strip away and remove images from our lives and fellowship. Even though the images may hold no temptation for us (we’re merely using them for an entirely innocent purpose), we may decide to get rid of them for the sake of our brother who struggles against the tendency to turn those images into idolatrous worship of God.
Lionel, as I may have said to you in person, I always liked the Annie Vallotton line drawings in the Good News Bible.
In illustrating the Gospels, she always pictured Jesus from behind, or from the side, or from a distance, so that she never drew his face, and we were never drawn into speculating about what he really looked like.
There was no focus put on his appearance, and so the pictures were perhaps helpful for the sort of situations you mentioned Lionel, e.g. with those struggling with literacy, but attention was not drawn away from the text, in the way that some more elaborate visual images can do (whether in stained glass or video)!
A couple of ccomments:
1) It would not seem methodologically correct to apply the second commandment to the New Testament in any sense.
2) It would not seem appropriate in particular to apply it to Jesus AS God (so the Annie Vallaton illustrations which do not depict Jesus’ face probably do not do so to be faithful to the second commandment, but for some other reason—probably just a reluctance to suggest that anything is known about how he looked).
3) It would seem inappropriate to apply it to any imagery other than an image of God himself. The two parts of the 2nd commandment would seem to be a hendyadis, so that the first part actually refers to anything that is actually WORSHIPED as God, rather than any THING.
So really, the 2nd commandment would seem not to have anything to say to any Christian in modern times, except to someone who might go against 2000 years of Christain tradition and attempt to depict God (Jehovah?) by means of an image.
A clarification:
Insread of “depict” in my last line read “worship”.
Lionel,
Please further correct “depict God (Jehovah?) by means of an image” to “worship an image of God (Jehovah?)”.
Nigel, I see your point – although there is a connection (albeit a complex one) between the second commandment and Jesus, because Jesus is the image of God (Col 1:15), and we are being renewed in knowledge after this image (Col 3:10). I wonder what might that imply about images of the image of God? Any thoughts?
Lionel,
I wouldn’t be inclined, exegetically, to see any link at all with Col 1.15, except an accidental linguistic one with the KJV and those English translations which follow it. The MT has peşel (for want of the sub linear dot symbol!) ‘hewn idol’, and the LXX has eidōlon ‘idol’ in v.4a and only homoiōma in v.4b, while the NT has eikōn. The NT’s avoidance of homoiōma for the image of God theogoumenon may be telling in this respect. The use of eikōn in Rev almost certainly alludes not to Exo 20.4, but to the Pauline(?) notion, by then established, of Jesus as the eikōn of God.
Tselem, which would seem to be an exact Hebrew equivalent of eikōn,
is possibly used elsewhere in the OT for a graphic representation of a deity, but it is very unlikely that this is in view in Col 1.15. Tselem is also used in Gen 1.26,27 and 9.6 for man as the ‘image’ of God. Is it possible that these are in view in Col 1.15, ‘man’ now understood as the Son (v.13)?
NB Col 3.10 is not relevant in the present connection, since it refers to a believer as not to the Son. 2 Cor 4.4 is more apropos.
Hi Nigel – actually at this point I wasn’t thinking directly of Exodus 20:4 but of Deuteronomy 4:16. There, the word eikon (LXX) is used to translate Hebrew Semel, which is used in parallel with Pesel. Deuteronomy 4:16 (LXX) also uses the word homoioma. Interestingly, the language is reminiscent of the creation narrative which refers to humanity being made in the image of God (“image”, “likeness”, “male or female”, etc.), but the point is that idols, specifically images of humanity, are forbidden.
I agree that Paul is referring to the creation narrative when he speaks of Christ as the image of God (and human beings “in Christ” as being remade in the new image of God). However, there is a link in the OT between this idea and the prohibition against idolatry. Paul is not making a direct point against idolatry in Colossians, but surely there are implicit connections there that are worth pondering?
PS there are also connections between the “image (eikon) of humanity” and idolatry in Jewish writings close to Paul, e.g. Wisdom of Solomon 13:16, 14:15-17, 15:4-6.
The problem with LXX Deut 4.16 in this context is that it does not actually parallel Exo 16.4, though it is clearly reminiscent of it, and seems not to refer to idolatry. You may have had MT in mind, in which the reference to idolatry is present. LXX 4.16 seems, interestingly, to be a (redactional?) reduction of the original prohibition of idols as objects of worship in Exo 20.4 to a mere prohibition of graphic representations of creatures—unless we take the hendyadis in Exo 20.4 to be paralleled and alluded to by means of Deut 4.20 (but that would be forcing the issue in my view). So I still don’t see any connections ponder on. I’m a bit on the back foot in this respect, because you haven’t actually mentioned what connections you yourself have in mind, apart from the shared word ‘image’.
The point I was originally making, probably too briefly, was that the prohibition in Exo 20.4 of idols as objects of worship would not seem to have any bearing on graphic representations of Jesus Christ, or indeed on any Christian liturgical graphic representation—and I would be so bold as to extend that even to Orthodox iconography. (Interestingly, I have just discovered that even the pioneer missionary to Tonga, John Thomas, a most rigorous sniffer out of all things idolatrous, came to see and acknowledge that even the heathen Tongans did not imagine that their gods dwelled within their idols or pray directly to them, but held that they were merely symbols of spiritual realities external both to the idols and to the idol houses.) Surely the key issue here is direct worship of a graphic representation of the deity, and setting aside the prior complex question of whether and how one of the Ten Commandments can validly be applied to a NT reality, to posit a link between Exo 20.4 and Christ as the image of God would seem inescapably to suggest what is hardly tenable, namely that the early Christians dared to think of Christ, even if only in some derived sense—and even if mediated and ameliorated by “eikon” in Deut 4.16 or Wis. of Sol. or both—as the “pesel of God”.
My notions of proper exegesis are not so atomistic as to exclude the use of verbal allusion or ‘implied reference’, especially where the allusion involves an unusual or uncommon combination of words or expressions, but I also believe that an allusion or implied reference of one text to another can only be regarded as intentional when the author states or implies in some other clearly recognisable way that it is so, and this would be especially so in the case of a one word allusion such as ‘image’. A good example of a single word OT allusion which we would have no exegetical warrant to see as such if the context had not given us that warrent is Mat 13.9: “Listen, then if you have ears”. The text gives us that warrent in 13.14,15. No such warrant is given in Col 1.15 that I can see, and I think that in the case of such a profoundly important theologoumenon such a warrant is mandatory: nothing less is sufficient for its establishment and defense. The whole question is complicated further, in my view, by the fact that even when a NT writer alludes to an OT text, we might not subscribe to the precise nexus involved, though we may fully appreciate and even wonder at it (a case in point is Mat 2.15 and Hos 11.1). So even if Paul in Col 1.15 intended an allusion to Exo 20.4 in some way, we, in hindsight as it were, might not see it exactly so.
Nigel – there are at least 3 issues that require comment:
Why don’t we deal with these one at a time?
As to issue 1: I find your exegesis of Deu 4:16 baffling – I need to hear more of your reasons for the conclusion you have come to. I don’t agree that “it seems not to refer to idolatry”, and I don’t read it as “a mere prohibition of graphic representations of creatures”. As far as I can see, the verse clearly refers to idolatry, unless you are referring to a text of which I am unaware. Granted, the translators haven’t chosen eidolon to translate MT Pesel. Instead, they have chosen the substantive glyptos. No redactional theory, however, is needed to account for this translation. Glyptos is almost (if not entirely) synonymous with eidolon and often means a worshipped object (e.g. Psa 96:7, 2 Chr 28:2, Hab 2:18 LXX, etc.) – i.e. the verse refers to idolatry.
Looking at the context, I take Deu 4:15-19 to be saying: “Because you never saw a likeness for God (verse 15), don’t make an [carved] idol, i.e. the likeness of any creature (verses 16-18), and don’t worship heavenly bodies (verse 19).” When you said “unless we take the hendyadis in Exo 20.4 to be paralleled and alluded to by means of Deut 4.20 (but that would be forcing the issue in my view)” – do you mean Deut 4:19? If so – the hendiadys is also present in Deut 5:8, which in my opinion supports this very possibility and wouldn’t be forcing the issue at all.
So even in the LXX, there is a strong verbal and contextual connection between images of creatures (including human beings) and false (idolatrous) worship.
Lionel,
I agree that the hendyadis is clearer in Deu 5.8. However, I probably should not have got sidetracked into Deu at all, because what I was originally trying to point out was that I find it difficult, exegetically, to see a link between prohibitions of idolatry and Christian liturgical graphics—for want of a better expression—since it doesn’t seem to be the case that such graphics are actually objects of worship. How about we clarify this first, since it was the original issue, and you have not yet clarified that for me after several posts!
Nigel, sorry for not being clearer about the connections I had in mind. I realise that I do need to clarify in what I’m trying to achieve by referring to Colossians.
Nevertheless, I wanted to deal with the first point first because your objections have been made on exegetical grounds. Hence exegesis is an important first step. If you agree that Deuteronomy 4:16 LXX uses the key word eikon in the context of idolatry and also of the creation narrative, let’s keep talking. Otherwise – I suspect any conversation we do have would be going around in circles because we wouldn’t be agreed on the basic meaning of a text that I see as quite important.
Do you mean that I would have to agree that eikon in LXX Deu 4.16 alludes somehow to that word in the creation narrative as a precondition to your sharing your view? I suffered excruciating agonies from both Bruce Chilton and Max Wilcox for making such connections! But let’s say for argument’s sake that it does!
Nigel – I’d like to have a brotherly discussion with you, but your comment sounds very patronising – as if you’re willing to condescend to humour me, even though I’m making some basic unspecified exegetical error that is obvious to you because of your privileged discipleship at the feet of certain great names.
So I hope you understand why I’m reluctant to continue this discussion online when we could just as easily catch up after church on Sunday. I’d be happy to outline my thoughts on the connection with Colossians in this thread if anybody else out there is following along and wants to hear? Otherwise, Nigel, I’d prefer just to chat in person.
Lionel,
Sorry! That was intended as a diplomatic way of saying that it doesn’t seem necessary, or logical, for there to be agreement between two persons on exegesis of a text, or exegetical principles, before one shares with the other how they understand that text. Certainly no one has ever required that of me before, and I have never required it of anyone myself. How likely is it anyway that any two persons would agree fully in their hermeneutics? It sounded to me like you were saying that you were not prepared to share your view if I was not going to agree with it! Also, I don’t see that not to have so agreed would have led us to go round in circles, as you suggested. I think I would have listened to your exegesis and views and tried to understand them as a package, probably without further response. As for my reference to Chilton and Wilcox, that was not so much name dropping as an attempt to express the fact that my approach to hermeneutics is not cavalier, but arrived at only after very embarrassing experiences at the hands of such scholars. I’m sure you have also learned from great scholars. So, again, I’m sorry if it sounded patronising. It was not intended to be. What I learned from such scholars, and from my own hermeneutical struggles, was that it is simply not safe methodologically to base an argument on so fragile a textual entity as a minimal verbal allusion when there is no accompanying warrant for it given in scripture itself. Incidentally, one of the most embarrassing corrections I received was when it was pointed out to me, quite contrary to my understanding at the time, that in an extended text one such allusion has little extra evidential force by being considered cumulatively in the light of another. Such methodological rigour!
Please post this clarification, but I look forward to discussing further the matter of idolatry in Christian liturgy after church tomorrow.