It is perilously easy to read your own practices and assumptions back into the history of the Church. This anachronistic impulse is universal, and much of the time it is merely funny and endearing, but when it is elevated to the point of dogma, and insisted upon as a religious duty, the problems that result can be serious.
As an example of mild anachronism, consider the portrayal (in countless Sunday School curricula) of Adam and Eve as a suburban, white American couple sans clothing. But this, in spite of the fact that everyone knows that Adam and Eve were Chinese, and that all the other races developed from this primal race. Or maybe not. But the likelihood of Adam and Eve looking just like your neighbors in next door Cleveland is remote.
But the more serious examples of anachronistic reading are found when one branch of Christendom claims that what they are currently doing is what has been consistently done from the time of the apostle Paul on down. There are certainly Protestants who do this; there are even some who claim that Paul, in an amazing miracle, used the King James Version of the Bible. “We do this, we are the apostolic band, and therefore it follows that the apostles used to do whatever it is we are currently doing.”
Having said this, there are two central arguments against the use of images in the worship. The first is that the Bible plainly says not to worship in this way. The second is that the early Church did not worship in this way. Claims that they did worship this way are simply anachronisms, comparable to the claim that the first Christians used to give an invitation to come forward at the end of the service to receive Christ. No, that particular technique was invented by Finney in the 19th century and to project it backwards in time cannot be sustained by the evidence. In the same way, to take the action of the Second Council of Nicea, which settled the use of images in worship, as normative for the whole church is to project onto the early Church practices which would have appalled them all. Differences between Christians who claim the early Church used icons and Christians who claim the apostles used the King James Version are differences of degree, not of kind.
The Protestant claim here is that Scripture flatly prohibits the worship of images in the Second Commandment. And, as I have said earlier, the Second Commandment trumps Second Nicea. The Second Commandment reads this way: “Thou shalt not make thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the waters beneath the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself unto them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me, and shewing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments” (Dt. 5:8-10).
As we can readily see by comparing Scripture with Scripture, this is not a prohibition of the making of images, but rather a prohibition of images that you then bow down to or worship. Images generally are fine, even images for decoration in a religious context — blue pomegranates, say. Cherubim on the ark of the covenant are just great also, because the whole point was to studiously avoid bowing down to them, and rather (like them) to bow before the mercy seat where there was no image at all. So the issue is not images. The issue (the only issue) is images as an aid to religious devotion. Don’t. Nyet. Nein. No.
The reason given for avoiding this practice is God’s jealousy. Now what is jealousy like, especially divine jealousy? Is a jealous husband likely to be mollified if his wife admits that she was physically batting her eyes at another guy, but nowhere does the Bible explicitly say that eye-batting constitutes unfaithfulness or adultery? No, jealousy is generally operative at the perimeter. Jealousy is activated by how it looks, and not just by what it may become later on.
The response is that all this was altered at the Incarnation. Jesus was a particular person, with particular features. Those who knew Him during His sojourn here on earth could recall what He looked like. The Incarnation (if it means anything) means that if cameras had been invented in that day, it would not have been unlawful to take a picture of Christ. He was really there. John emphasizes this in the opening words of his epistle. “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life” (1 Jn. 1:1). What they were seeing, and looking upon, was the icon of God, the Lord Jesus. Having said this, given the idolatrous nature of the heart of man, and all its devious little twistings, we may thank our God above that cameras had not been invented then. If they had, we would be dealing with every manner of cargo cult now.
The fact that God took on human flesh in the Incarnation (a miracle He was competent to perform) does not mean that we have the ability to recapture that miracle in any paltry representation of ours—whether done by shutter, brush, hammer and chisel, or an interpretative dance junior high troop performing Godspell. The fact of the Incarnate One two thousand years ago does not automatically protect any and all aspiring actors and artists from aesthetic impudence.
“Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life: but teach them thy sons, and thy sons’ sons; Specially the day that thou stoodest before the LORD thy God in Horeb, when the LORD said unto me, Gather me the people together, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children. And ye came near and stood under the mountain; and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness. And the LORD spake unto you out of the midst of the fire: ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice” (Dt. 4:9-12).
So in the older covenant, God revealed no form to the Jews, and made a special point of reminding them of it. There were other instances in the Old Testament where there were forms revealed (the angel of the Lord, Ezekiel’s wheels, the Ancient of Days, and so on) but when it came to the question of worship, God went out of His way to reiterate with them that there was no form shown to them on the mountain. In another instance, when the people had been told to “look to” the bronze serpent, over time this looking became devotional looking, and Hezekiah had Nehushtan destroyed. To which we should respond, good for old St. Hezekiah, patron saint of the righteous iconoclasts.
So what about my earlier claim that the use of images is anachronistic? This is all related. Consider again the history of God’s people. God gave them the prohibition of images at the time of Moses. This was obeyed throughout the days of Joshua, but Israel’s relationship with this commandment was pretty rocky thereafter. They struggled with this, their besetting sin of idolatry, for centuries. Finally, because of their idolatries, they were taken into Exile. Now, after the Exile, they finally had the prohibition of images in worship down. Other problems developed (of course) because not all idols are made out of wood, stone, or paint, and Jesus certainly rebuked the ideological idols of the scribes and Pharisees. But at least they were fierce about keeping material icons and idols away. And this they should have done without neglecting the weightier matters of the law.
Now after our Lord has risen from the dead, and the gospel began to be preached among the nations, the first nation to receive the word was the Jewish nation. And while the nation as a whole rejected Christ, many thousands of Jews believed in Him. St. James says that many thousands had believed, and they were all zealous for the law (Acts 21:20). They kept “the customs” (v. 21), and needed to be reassured that Paul did also. What do you think? Does anybody here think that these customs included candles and prayers in front of pictures?
It is granted that their zeal was focused at that moment on the question of circumcision, but here is a little thought experiment. Do you think that these Jewish Christians, zealous for the law, used icons in their worship services? If you do, your powers of imagination are far greater than mine. The epistle of James identifies the believing synagogue of James 2:2 with the church of 5:14. I have used this argument before when talking about the inclusion of infants in our churches. The idea of excluding them would have been absolutely alien to the believing synagogues in Judea.
In the same way, the veneration of icons in a Christian synagogue in 57 A.D. would have gone over like a big pile of greasy bacon at their men’s prayer breakfast. And this example provides us with an a fortiori argument because the bacon was even explicitly declared okay at the first great church council. That was one of the changes made between the covenants, and it took the decision of a church council to make it even halfway palatable.
My argument here is that the veneration of images was not one of the changes between the old covenant and the new, and if it had been one of the intended changes, it would have taken seventeen church councils to bring it about, with fifteen of those councils occurring while all the apostles were still alive and able to attend. And the New Testament would have been a lot thicker. The reason that the use of images in worship was not controversial in the first generations of the Church was because nobody was doing it. Centuries later, when they began to do it, the controversy came.
Not bowing down to an image was not just a matter of “oh, okay” obedience for the first Jewish Christians. Because of the history of the previous centuries, it had gotten to the level of a deep and godly prejudice, down in the bones. It was taboo, like kissing your sister. You just don’t do that.
This prejudice was picked up by the Gentile Christians. The believing Jews did not abandon their suspicion of images; rather, the Gentiles coming to faith embraced the Jewish loathing of them. This is the more remarkable because most of these Gentiles had grown up with the use of images in worship. The God-fearers among them had been attracted to the worship of the synagogue precisely on these grounds.
The gospel was preached to the Gentiles, with this feature of the Christian faith as one of the great selling points. “Forasmuch then as we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art and man’s device. And the times of this ignorance God winked at; but now commandeth all men every where to repent . . .” (Acts 17:29-30). And they did repent, and the Gentile world streamed to Christ as presented in the preached gospel and enacted Eucharistic meal. No images. It was some centuries before the innate human desire for a god who won’t talk back was able to mount a comeback.
For those who want to worship as the ancient Church did, I would urge them to do better than the eightth century A.D. Go much further back, go back to a believing synagogue in Judea, a synagogue that worshipped Jesus as the Messiah, in 57 A.D. If you can find a painting there that was used as an object of religious veneration, I would be happy to eat it. But I still would not bow down to it — because whether or not this particular argument is any good, my God is still a jealous God.