Introduction
The Second Commandment has everything to do with the image of God. What does God look like? What does it mean for God to have a likeness, an image, a face? The First Commandment prohibits any other gods before the face of God, and the Second Commandment restricts how we conceive of that face.
Honoring God’s Image
After the flood, God commanded Noah to protect human life, and that those who shed the blood of man should likewise be put to death (Gen. 9:6). The reason given for this is that God made man in His image. If people bear the image of God, as God says they do, then their lives belong to Him and they may not be taken apart from His express warrant. It may seem strange to talk about protecting and honoring human life in conjunction with the Second Commandment. You might have thought this commandment is just talking about not making idols. Don’t make golden calves, people. But Jesus came to fulfill the law, He came to fill it up with glory, to fill it up with love for God, to show all the love of God in the law.
Carved Images
For God to speak of carving images ought to remind us immediately of God’s own image and likeness and that immediately turns us back to creation. God was the first one to carve an image: “God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness; let them have dominion of the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth…” Gen. 1:26-28) This means that when God created man and woman, He impressed His image on them. He impressed His likeness on them. Their bodies and souls, their language and work, their joy and thankfulness and creativity would all reflect the glory of God their Father. They would be the face of the God in the world, revealing Him, acting for Him and with Him to glorify the world, make it beautiful, and to fill it with more life, more glory.
The Fall: Idols & Icons
Of course sin enters the world and this mars the image. But this hasn’t eradicated the need for God to reveal Himself in the world. God created the world to be filled with living pictures of Him. In the early days after the Fall, God promised to send a son, a descendent of Eve who would kill the serpent and break the power of the curse of death. In those early days, the division between men was evident in the first sons of Adam and Eve: Cain and Abel worshipped differently and God accepted the worship of Abel and not Cain. And Cain grew angry and killed his brother and was cursed and driven from the land.
Conclusions & Applications
Jesus came to be the perfect image of God, to reveal God’s glory to us and to renew that glorious image in us. The promise of God is that as we worship Jesus, the perfect image of God, we are transformed from glory to glory by the working of the Spirit into that perfect image. And this necessarily means that we become more and more like what we worship. Man-made images, carved by sinful, fallen man will necessarily result in more marred images. Worship of God in Christ must mean ruling, creating, healing, blessing, feeding, teaching, and sacrificing for the lost and hurting. This is what God looks like.
Matthew N. Petersen says
I’m still confused. First, surely you leave the most important thing out of your concluding list: “Worship of God in Christ must mean praying: ruling…” Though you say “include” and don’t intend to give an exhaustive list.
But, and I wasn’t there, it seems you say we should have images, but then conclude that we don’t have an image. We have Christ, but we can only read about him, and not image Him, except as ourselves, and as broken.
Also, it seems this leaves the most important point aside. Images, whether right or wrong, are loci for prayer. In the ancient pagan religions, and among Christians with images, the image is the locus of prayer. We direct our prayer to the image, and this is their primary use. Other uses, like lighting a candle or burning incense or kissing, are images of our prayer. And surely we ought not make other human persons the loci of our prayer–that would be gross idolatry, and amounts to worship of self. When we kneel at Trinity, we are not kneeling toward you.
During the Old Covenant, the Jews did not have an image, but they did have a locus for worship–the temple. And toward their temples they were to direct and center their worship. God was located there. But we do not have a temple any longer.
And again, though it is true that the Church is the temple of the living God, the Church cannot be the locus of our worship like the temple was. Should opposite sides of the isle at church kneel to each other as to God??
And so it seems that the result of your position is that God is left without a locus for Christians, without a presence and a body–that is, God is left without an image. (Again, the Church does not work for this purpose.) If you were Catholic or Lutheran, you could, in their different ways, say that the location of God is the Bread and Wine. But this is also not open to you as Reformed.
So my question is, in worship where is the image of the Logos? Where ought we direct our worship? What is the proper icon which properly receives our veneration?
Matthew N. Petersen says
Or what about this: As I understand it, you do not object to images per se, but to “bowing down thyself to them, and serving them.” And though you have rightly pointed to other places where the image of God lies, you have only pointed to another place that must be treated similarly to an icon–we can have the image, but we may not worship it. So this does not get at the heart of the objection, to meet your opponents with “that isn’t the proper image, this is” you need to give something that should be worshiped, for that is what they are saying should be done to the icon. You have not replaced the abuse with the proper satisfaction of the urge if you do not provide an object of worship. (I know the Orthodox position is actually more complex than this, but it would be difficult to get into the nuances between worshiping, and using to worship here.)
Also, the Second Commandment is clear that worship of an image is worship of another God “For I the LORD your God am a Jealous God…” But whatever the use of icons is in worship, it is not idolatry simpliciter. It is worship of Jesus. It may be (and you would argue it is) forbidden worship, but it is not worship of a different person. Which seems to mitigate the force of the Second Commandment at least a little.
Finally, I believe many East Asians bow before text. Now that is clearly idolatrous, because it is false text. But could Christians bow before the written name of Jesus? If you would say that that is condemned by the Second Commandment, then you are agreeing that the “image” part is secondary, and the “worship” part is primary; and so you have still left us with no image or presence of God to direct our worship. On the other hand, you could say that it would be legitimate, but all the objections Jordan raises to images seem even more severe here. An Icon can and does speak back, at least as much as a static text can, because there is a person looking back at me. However, text by its definition cannot speak back. Whatever my conception of Jesus is, this it remains.
So again, is the command about “images” or about “worship of images”, and if the first, why shouldn’t we bow before written names of God, but if the second, where is the presence of God to which we should direct our worship? (It really is the second question that I am interested in having answered.)