The Ten Commandments 3
Clearing the Field for God’s Self-Imaging: Christian Faith and the Second Commandment
You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statures, will say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!” . . . “what other great nation has statues and ordinances as just as this entire law that I am setting before you today.” Deuteronomy 4: 6-8
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You shall not make for your self an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God and a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20: 4-6)
Introduction: Do We Need the Second Commandment Today? The Iconoclasm of Post Modernity.
In last fifty years our visual culture, in which images play such an important role, has been subject to intense criticism. The criticism is that opinion makers –politicians, advertisers, news editors, pundits and television producers –use images deceptively, undermining truth and weakening the critical judgment needed by a democratic society. The indictment is that in our modern, visual cultures, images are too often used to misinform, mislead and manipulate.
The indictment of images in our visual culture is widespread and offered at many levels. Educators teach parents and children to test advertising and political images for their truth-value or lack of it. College students, in courses about popular culture, study ads and other images to unmask the subtle techniques advertisers and politicians use to plant images of “identification ideals” in relation to their products or themselves . Courses in political science examine how Hitler, Stalin and Mao developed a cult of adoration and blind obedience, partly by constantly presenting huge images of themselves in every street and building. Critiques of our debt-ridden, conspicuous- consumption society indict marketers for using images to promote the consumption of environment- violating RVs, heart-clogging Big Macs and child-crippling toys. Pundits unmask political leaders hiding their real intentions and policy results behind images of the American Flag or scare-images of bomb-packing terrorists. Other social critics castigate the entertainment industry for dumbing- down citizens with images of vile-mouthed rappers, inane starlets and orchestrated “reality-TV”. Educators and child psychologists warn how video games can reduce internal barriers to overt violence in adolescents. Images have a very poor reputation in our modern visual culture; educated people have developed intense suspicion of them. To be media and image “savvy” is considered a necessary survival skill in our modern western societies.
Behind this suspicion of images in our visual culture is awareness of their power. Pictures are powerful. An image or pictures makes something that is really absent present to consciousness. This power of pictures can be harmless or even positive. What red-blooded American could be against images of family? To look down on tourist photos seems snobbish. To disdain high quality art prints would be lowbrow.
However, images have the capacity to attach themselves to our memories, gluing themselves by some sort of neural epoxy. Some image so meld into the reality of what they represent that seeing the image presents us with the reality. That reality may be horrifying. Many modern mass- mediated images are violent: pictures of fires, floods, earthquakes or of terrorist attacks, protests or murders. These images can remain in the subconscious ready, given the right stimulus, to reemerge of their own power. Erotic or violent images can possess the mind, plaguing it like a virus for years. Responders to catastrophes and veterans of war report their difficulty in repressing the images of shattered bodies, floating corpses, agonized faces. These images lie dormant in the brain, to leap forth unexpectedly and disturbingly. These images haunt their dreams.
Images define identities. Attached to Coke, cigarette ads and pop stars , images can inject people with “life-style brandings”, pictures which help orient, establish and stabilize a persona or an identity in an age when many people don’t know who they are. In our culture, many try to remake themselves; to undertake an identity makeover. They look for image of what they might become. Ours is also an age in which many people are afraid and also bored. Many teen-agers are jaded, having experienced everything in one way or another, often through images more impressive than the realities behind them. They face a very clouded and uncertain future. Aggressive, fierce, brutal, vicious images provide a jolt of excitement, a frisson, a moment’s getaway from boredom, a moment’s distraction from an undertone of ache. These images feed on each other, one violent image creating the appetite for another a bit more violent. Images can invade and colonize consciousness.
Barbara Stafford1 thinks that critics of our visual culture associate the image with something primitive, something merely biological, not mental, namely, the eye. The primitiveness of the eye, contrasted to the thinking brain, lends the eye to deception and manipulation. “I love pictures” is as self-deceptive as “I love to smoke.”
This power of pictures to by- pass our egos —our center’s of self-control, our rational wills and our critical intelligence— their ability to operate at pre-rational or irrational levels, evoke this critique in the name of mind and reason. In the place of hot images, so able to deceive, the knowledge class urges critical observation, distanced analysis and word-cooled scrutiny. That structuralism ruled social analysis just as our culture, like none in the past, became a visual, is not surprising. Educated people believe that images function now to seduce and control people. In the name of reason, these people critique our visualized culture in the name of freedom, defined as self-determination and autonomy.
Our society’s high evaluation of self-determination and autonomy is, obviously, closely tied to the extreme individualism in our western societies. “No one should tell me how to live or what to think. “ The individual is more important than the group. We tend to assume that organizations, like governments or churches, exist for the individuals who belong to them. Chinese and African cultures, where the group is more important than the individual, are opaque to many western people. A few members of the ’68 generation formed communes to live out an alternative to the oscillation between individual isolation and state force which repulsed them in the larger culture. These communes, however, usually ended as their members discovered the authoritarian leadership style of their own leaders. But the communes were a radical reaction to a radical individualism in the dominant culture.
Probably this suspicion of the role images play our culture is part of a more general wariness. No one trusts anyone else, especially in the public spheres of our visual culture. Despite saying with our lips that we live in a Lockean or Rouseauian social contract, bound together by a common consent, people actually seem to act and think they live in a Hobbesian “state of nature,” a condition of “war of all against all.” Certainly competition pervades the most formative of our society’s structures, the market economy. People suspect every else of trying to blind them with images.
At a still deeper level the individual’s turning inward to himself or herself is part of the loss in faith in the over-arching, community- making narratives that formerly shaped our common western culture. In the words of Jean Francois Lyotard, 2 the great narratives, of the past have lost their binding and community making power. The biblical story, which shapes Judaism and Christianity, lost its society-forming power. Today, the Bible is hardly known, even by college educated people. Les grandes recits seculaires –the modern narratives of Enlightenment Reason, of Hegelian Idealism, of Marxist and Maoist Liberation have also lost their hold over people’s minds and hearts. . Bereft of the great narratives that bind people into communities and societies, people have withdrawn into their ethnic and individual identities, into what Lyotard calls and advocates: paralogie, parallel discourses. Each social island speeks its own language. Each island people should tolerate, indeed, appreciate the polytheism of discourse. In reality, however, from these these islands people promote and proclaim their interests by projecting images of themselves out toward the other islands. They view the self-presenting and self-promoting images from the other islands as competitive and aggressive, with suspicion and wariness and branding them as “ideological.” What French philosopher, Paul Ricoeur, called a “hermeneutics of suspicion” sullies the atmospheres of our separated selves.
In this cultural context of image suspicion, do we need the Second Commandment? Aren’t we suspiciously alert to the dangers of images, aware of their destructive power? In this essay, our answer starts with the recognition that the Second Commandment forbids making images of God, not just of us. We need the Second Commandment to remind us not only that God should not be imaged, but also that God cannot be imaged by us. We need the Second Commandment to free us to receive God’s self-imaging in Jesus Christ and to free us to become shaped, in the trying way of faith, into our true image by the Holy Sprit. We need Israel’s Second Commandment to free us from the fields of our dreams, so that we can discover the Promised Land.
The Second Commandment in the New Testament
In an earlier essay in this series, we announced a platform principle for interpreting the Ten Commandments. The intention is to interpret the Decalogue in a Christian perspective. This means that Jesus Christ, as truly human and truly divine, as the Word of God made flesh, as the mediator between God and humans, as the one whose death and resurrection reconciles us to God, is the center from which we engage and ponder the Decalogue. The writers of the New Testament “read” the First Covenant texts (The Old Testament) believing that new light shone on the “Law and the Prophets” when they are read in the light of Jesus Christ, who is “the true light.” 3 In these essays we hope to stand in that tradition.
As we have said before in this series, our interpretative approach to the Decalogue is explicitly theological, not historical. That doesn’t mean we ignore what historians of the Bible can teach us about the Ten Commandments. But it means that our ambition is not to present the distanced surmises, conjectures and, for the moment, “established facts”4 of the scientific historian but insights that build up the human heart and enlarge and strengthen the insights of Christian faith.5 To do this we follow the ancient Christian practice of reading the Old Testament in the light of the New.
In the previous essay on the Fist Commandment, we noted how vital the First Commandment was in Jesus’ teaching. Jesus quoted the First Commandment and combined it with another verse from the Old Testament, the commandment to love the neighbor (which might be a summary of the second Table of the Decalogue.) to construct The Double Commandment, the Summary of the Law. Jesus quoted the First Commandment literally.
In contrast, however, the New Testament presents no instance in which Jesus verbally repeats the Second Commandment. No Gospel writer shows Jesus quoting the Second Commandment. No author outside Gospels indicates that Jesus referred to the Second Commandment. Hence, we do not have a direct “word of Jesus” about the Second Commandment, as we do with the First Commandment. Does this mean that the Second Commandment is a ‘dead letter’ in the New Testament? Digging below the surface we soon find rich resources.
A general reference to Decalogue appears in the Gospel story of the Rich Young Man. (Matthew 19:16-30) In this story, “someone” comes to Jesus asking, “what good deed must I do to have eternal life.” After Jesus challenges the asker by saying “why do you call me good? There is only one who is good,” Jesus declares, “If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.” Thus Jesus clearly refers to the Decalogue as a whole, if not repeating the Second Commandment specifically, as Jesus does repeat Commandments from the Second Table of the Decalogue in answer to the young man’s further question: “Which ones?”
When we look into Paul’s writings, or writings attributed to him, in the New Testament, we find important references to the subject matter of the Second Commandment, namely idolatry and idols.
In the Acts of the Apostles,(Acts 17:16-30) the author (by scholarly consensus, also the author of the Gospel of Luke ) describes St. Paul as being “deeply distressed to see that the city was full of idols.” Paul’s distress is doubtless grounded in his Jewish faith, informed by the First and Second Commandments. Paul, however, at Athens’s Areopogus (either a council or a hill west of the Acropolis) did not directly attack Greek idol worship in the name of the Second Commandment. Rather, he made one of the altars, dedicated to and inscribed “to an unknown god” the starting point for a sermon about God “who made the world and everything in it, he who is Lord of heaven and earth [who] does not live in shrines made by human hands. . . [nor are the Athenians] to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, and image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.” (Acts 17: 16-31). Clearly, in this sermon, Paul is “starting where his listeners are”; Paul does not explicitly refer to the Second Commandment, but that Commandment stands as the background for his sermon.
When we turn to Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the relevance of the Second Commandment is more directly clear. In the first chapter, Paul summarizes the gospel he proclaims. In that context he emphasizes the sinful state of humanity, the sinfulness that makes God’s forgiving grace in Jesus Christ both necessary and good news. Paul’s discussion of human sin (all have fallen from the glory of God) is the context for discussing idols.
Paul’s talk here about idols is significant because he provides his readers with a theological explanation for their origin. Paul offers a “genealogy” of idols. The root of idols is the human heart closed to the knowledge of God available in creation. Idols come from culpable ignorance about God. Paul thinks , along with authors of the Psalms and Proverbs, that the creation itself, that which God has made, reveals the power and glory of God. This reflected knowledge should bring forth humanity’s worship and obedience. Instead everyone denies to God the worship and honor due him. More than that, humans create gods of their own sinful imagination and image these idols from creatures, both human and animal. Paul’s teaching here is that the creation and worship of idols is a deliberate and culpable turning away from the one true God, an apostasy and sacrilege. All specific sins of human beings flow from this primordial sacrilege and apostasy, which leaves humanity without any right relation to God (a state of unrighteousness/un-rightness).
This transfer of worship from God to idols has terrible consequences: Humanity’s mind becomes subject to non-being6 and humanity’s heart is darkened. The consequence of sinful non-recognition of God is not only a crippling of the human mind and heart. It also evokes God’s judgment. The content of that judgment, Paul says here, is that God allows humans to suffer the consequences of having “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature than the Creator. . . . “ Later in this essay, we discuss the destructiveness of idols.
In his First Letter to the Corinthians, Paul also discusses idols and idol worship. The context is a nuanced pastoral reflection about food offered to idols and later sold for in the general market. The pastoral problem, discussed in I Cor. 8, is how believers who are not distressed by eating such food should relate to other believers who think that eating such meat dishonors God. Paul’s starting point in addressing this question is the shared Christian belief that idols are unreal, for God alone is God. However, some believers are offended in their consciences when other believers buy and eat food that had been offered to idols and later sold in the market place. Although all agree that idols are nothing, the food, which has been offered in this false worship, is for some believers spiritually tainted by its involvement in sacrilegious idol worship. Thus, Paul’s whole discussion of eating food offered to idols presupposes the Second Commandment.
We have seen that the Second Commandment, as received from the faith of Israel, was very present in the mind of St Paul. However, we have seen also that it was not central to the teaching of Jesus, as was the First Commandment. Let us move now to a much deeper level of the New Testament witness.
The Revolutionary Re-imaging of God
We need to move from the level of explicit reference to the Second Commandment and from the explicit theme of idolatry to the basic issue of representing God. This is the basic issue that the Second Commandment addresses.
Can anything concrete and created image God? The Bible’s answer is yes. The wisdom of God and the power of God are reflected in the cosmos God has made. Paul, as we just saw, teaches that. Human being, as male and female, are created in the image of God. Genesis Chapter 1:27 teaches that. God’s will is embodied in God’s Torah, God’s Law. The whole Bible teaches that. What the Bible nowhere teaches is that an object constructed by human hands can authentically image God. To construct such an object and to worship God in and through such objects is, the Bible teaches, sacrilege.
Given that rock-bottom faith conviction, the New Testament makes an astounding claim. Although nothing humans make can truly image God, God has authentically imaged Himself in one person, Jesus of Nazareth. The New Testament asserts God has presented Himself in a creaturely form, in whom humans can behold God’s reality and glory. A number of New Testament texts designate Jesus as the image of God. Among the most important are the following:
He (Jesus) is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation…For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell…. (Colossians 1:15, 19.)
And (you) have put off the old nature with its practices and have put on the new nature, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator [i.e. Jesus Christ]. (Colossians 3:10)
In their case the god of this world has blinded the minds of unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the likeness of God. (II Cor.4.6)
He (the Son of God) reflects the glory of God and bears the very stamp of his nature, …” ( Hebrews 1:3.)
And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father. No one has ever seen God; the only Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has made him known. (John 1: 14, 18) 7
These verses document how the New Testament witness does affirm that God can be imaged and that that image can take the form of a human being. Does this mean that the New Testament confession of Jesus Christ as Lord involves the violation of the Second Commandment? In the view of Islamic theology, the answer is very likely “yes.” For the Koran, assigning God a “partner” or a “son” is to commit the one sin Allah cannot forgive, i.e., schirk, namely idolatry, giving God a partner, thus denying Allah exclusive homage. 8
The Christian doctrines of Jesus Christ as the Incarnation of the Word and the doctrine of God as Holy Trinity are important because they formulate the truth that Jesus Christ images God but not so as to violate the Second Commandment. These Christian basic doctrines explain that the Second Person of the Trinity, the Word or Son, possesses the divine nature in its fullness. Thus, the Word that assumes the human nature of Jesus into unity with itself is fully divine; the Word is not a second God but the One, True God. But these doctrines do not contradict the Second Commandment for the following reasons.
First, Jesus Christ as the image of God is portrayed as God’s action. The New Testament never describes Jesus, as human being, claiming for himself divine status. Jesus does not proclaim himself or promote himself as an adequate image of God. We have already noted how, in his reply to the Rich Young Man, Jesus points not to himself but to God. In the parody and satire against idols in the prophet, Isaiah (chapter 44), the prophet emphasizes how an idol is made by humans. This is the same emphasis in the Second Commandment. The Commandment forbids humans creating images of God. But in the New Testament, and in the doctrines of Incarnation and Trinity, God is said to image Himself in Jesus Christ. Thus the New Testament retains the emphasis on God’s freedom and sovereignty that is such a central aspect of the Second Commandment prohibition of image making and idol worship.9
Thus, for example, the New Testament’s witness to Jesus as the Word made flesh is completely different from Augustus or Nero who declared they were divine and should be worshipped. In the Fourth Gospel, where Jesus is presented as speaking in God’s name, in such passages as “I am the way, the truth and the life,” the context of the Gospel makes clear that the “I” who speaks is the divine Word made flesh in Jesus, not Jesus the human being, as such. God comes to humans in Jesus Christ; Jesus is not an idol, a human construct.
A second feature of the New Testament and doctrinal theme of Jesus as the image of God is the divine condescension involved in this divine action. Jesus does not image God’s power and glory in any direct or obvious way. As St Paul wrote in Philippians 2:5: “Have this mind among ourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who thou he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. “ God’s image takes an ignoble form, the form of the suffering servant.10 A paradox of the Christian teaching about Jesus Christ is that in Jesus Christ, God imaged himself in a mortal man, indeed, a man who died a criminal’s death.
The Epistle to the Hebrews also accents the theme of Jesus sharing human weakness and temptation. Nowhere in the New Testament, even in Mark’s
Gospel that strongly emphasizes Jesus’ healing and nature miracles, is Jesus presented as one of several or innumerable a human manifestations of the divine. Jesus is not Hari Krishna.
The First Letter to Timothy contains interesting passages in regard to affirming the uniqueness and deity of God, despite honorific titles assigned to Jesus. Thus, in I Timothy 6:1ff., we read:
I charge you to keep the commandment unstained and free from reproach until the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ; and this will be made manifest at the proper time by the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kinds and Lord of Lords, who alone has immortality and dwells in unapproachable light, whom no man has ever seen nor can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.
Clearly, the early Christians did not perceive the affirmation of Jesus as Lord as compromising the sovereignty and transcendence of God. The intention of the Second Commandment, God’s requirement that His freedom and sovereignty in self-communication, is honored.
A third feature of God’s self-imaging in the New Testament is that God’s self image, Jesus Christ, is the kind of image which can shape other people. Thus, God’s self-image, Jesus Christ, has divine creative and redemptive powers. The New Testament certainly picks up the Old Testament theme of human being as created in the image of God. ( Genesis 1:27). In the New Testament, however, Jesus Christ is described as the ideal that we should and can, by God’s grace, become. Paul, in Romans 8:29 says: “For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the first-born among many brethren.”
In the New Testament, Jesus is the image of what we should become and the reflector of God’s glory that we should share. Note that this New Testament teaching differs radically from another way of speaking about Jesus as image. As inheritors of this later interpretation, we need to free ourselves from its instincts if we are to hear what the New Testament and Christian doctrine actually teach. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was common to speak of Jesus as the ideal example of some human trait, which every human being already had. Jesus images our best features, for this point of view. A very thoroughgoing and influential version of this is Friederich Schleiermacher’s idea that Jesus is religiously important because his God –awareness was especially constant and intense. By sharing or entering into the Spirit of Jesus, present in the Christian community’s piety, we could intensify our God consciousness and enhance the richness of our human subjectivity and creativeness. Jesus was, for this view, a clearer example of what each of us already is. By getting closer to this ideal image of ourselves, we strengthen what we already are. This view of Jesus as example and image is widespread, especially in the churches shaped by the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement, i.e., the so-called “main-line” churches. 11
The New Testament makes a radical claim, when the Second Commandment is assumed as background. God does have a human image: Jesus Christ. However, the New Testament does not contradict the Second Commandment. This image is God’s self-image; not a human-made idol. The human aspect of this image is emptied or empties himself of all divine power and glory. Jesus Christ, as God’s self-imaging, shapes us into its likeness; in Jesus Christ we are not validating or stabilizing something we already are. The New Testament teaching that Jesus Christ is the image of God is both radically new yet also honoring the heritage of Israel. It is new wine in old bottles, which does not break the bottles.
The Second Commandment in the First Covenant
A. The First and the Second Commandment
In this series of essays, we treat the relevant verses as a Second Commandment; however, we can also understand it as a specification of the First Commandment, the drawing of an implication of it. 12 When the Second Commandment is read in the context of the Decalogue itself, one sees immediately its close relation to the First Commandment. The First Commandment forbids having any other gods besides Yahweh. The gods of the surrounding nations, however, are worshipped in their images. Consequently, if Israel is to have “no other gods beside Yahweh” Israel’s worship must be image-free. Making images of a god and idolatry are, in the framework of the first two Commandments, synonymous. As would would expect, the Second Commandment is logically coherent with the First. We anticipate that the remaining two Commandments of “the first Table”, i.e., not taking the Lord’s Name in vain and keeping the Sabbath, also connect closely with the first two Commandments.
B. Deuteronomy 4 as Interpretation of Second Commandment
Chapter Four of Deuteronomy is a key text for understanding the meaning of the Second Commandment in the context of the Hebrew Bible. We can read it as a biblical interpretation and commentary on the Second Commandment.13 This commentary on the Second Commandment is presented as a speech of Moses to his people just before they, though not Moses himself, enter the Promised Land. In Deuteronomy, Chapter 4, 15-18 Moses emphasizes that God was not seen but heard. Moses reminds Israel that when God gave the Ten Commandments, they did not see God; they only heard God’s voice. “Then the Lord spoke to you out of the fire. You heard the sound of words but saw no form; there was only a voice.” (Deut. 4: 12-13. See also vv. 15-18) On Mount Horeb, when God gave the Ten Commandments, there were visible things: fire, smoke, and darkness. But no image of God appeared.
Israel, therefore, when they dwell in the Promised Land, should never construct an idol for themelves, no “form of any figure.” Moses’ speech identifies in great detail the creatures that must not form the basis of an image of God: likeness of male or female; any animal, no heavenly body (Deut. 4: 16-19). Nothing in creation can image or should image God.
The other nations have gods that can be worshipped in such images. Israel, however, relates to God differently; God has taken the initiative in choosing Israel and has “brought you out of the iron-smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very own possession, as you are now.” (Deut. 4: 20) The contrast between activity and passivity appears important here. The gods of the nations are vital forces given in creation and the cosmos. By fashioning images of these forces, and executing religious actions to the gods therein represented, the peoples of the nations establish life-giving contact with the forces of nature. Through the images their worshippors can tap into the vitalities of the world.
With Yahweh it is different. Yahweh takes the initiative, chooses Israel as His own people, intervenes on their behalf by freeing them from slavery in Egypt and establishes a covenant relation with them. Yahweh will be Israel’s God; Israel will be Yahweh’s people, living according to God’s Torah, God’s Way or Law. Idols serve to harness cosmic or natural forces to the survival or expansion needs of a people; Yahweh acts to yoke a people to His purposes.
The listing of figures of man and women, animals and heavenly bodies as forms for idols and objects of worship recalls the creation account in Chapter one of Genesis. Possibly , the notion of God as Creator of the world, and therefore also the belief that God is free and transcendent in relation to the world, play a role in Moses’ speech in Deuteronomy 4. Later Jewish theology (e.g., in Deutero-Isaiah , Is. 40-55 and in the Psalms) and Christian theology developed the idea of the radical difference between God, as Creator, and the world as creation. God and the world are incomparable.
Unlike the natural forces—human beings in their sexual differentiation, animals, and heavenly bodies– God is the Creator and everything else is created. God, so later theology explained, created by an act of absolute origination; the world is not a reduced form of divine being; the cosmos is not semi-divine, not an overflow of divine substance, not throbbing with sacred energy.14 The distinction between Creator and creature is absolute. In this relationship, God is active and creatures are passive; God creates; creatures receive their being from God.15 Therefore, no images of God should be created because God’s nature cannot be imaged. God’s nature, as Creator, is absolutely different from the being of every creature. In the technical language of later western theology, God is a se, from Himself; creatures are ab alio, from another. The creation can reflect, indirectly, God’s Being and Power, but nothing in creation is intrinsically divine, semi-sacred, so to speak. 16
Christian theology later expresses the theological point when it teaches that God’s essence cannot be seen even in the sense of being grasped by the mind. Abstract nouns and adjectives can be predicated of God: God is love; God is almighty, all- present, etc. But these predicates are based not on the mind comprehending God’s essence but by referring to God’s actions, God’s self-disclosure in history. Believers affirm that God is powerful, love, etc. ,not on the basis of a mental comprehension of God’s but on the basis of experiencing God’s power and love in God’s actions in relation to the world.
Moses’ speech, presented in Deuteronomy 4, contrasts God’s presence by speaking and God’s presence by visible form. God is different from any other god in that God makes himself known by speaking. God makes Himself known in His Word.17 God is with Israel, but not as static, creaturely reality, which can be pictured in some a created image. God is with Israel by events in which He speaks, judges, saves, and guides. God is Lord in his actions; with Israel in His word. Humans cannot “station” God, so to speak by making an idol. Israel must await God’s address; a new event of God’s relating Godself to Israel. Thus, if one meaning of the Second Commandment is that God cannot be imaged, a second is that God should not be imaged. To make and image of God falsifies how God is present with his Chosen People.18
In stressing God’s being with Israel through speaking, not through visible form. Moses’ speech also underscores the distinction between a God who calls a people to God’s service and a people calling, through worship of idols, divinity into their service. In medieval times, magic was widespread. Magic in all its forms is using various instruments—incantations, effigies, potians, to harness supernatural power to good and evil ends. Not surprisingly, therefore, medieval interpretations of the Second Commandment found in it a prohibition of magic. 19
Third, as the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy clearly implies, to follow other gods, gods who can be imaged, is deadly. “You have seen for yourselves what the Lord did with regard to the Baal of Peor—how the Lord your God destroyed from among you everyone who followed the Baal of Peor, while those of you who held fast to the Lord your God are all alive today.” (Deut. 4: 3-4). Ba’al, in the Hebrew Scriptures relates to the terrible practice of burning children as a sacrifice. 20
These verses clearly say that God punished those who followed other gods with death. God is a jealous God; God does not tolerate idolatry. Those who turn to images, and therefore to imitable gods, who are not Yahweh, tempt the wrath of God. However, also true is that to follow false gods is deadly because idolatry leads to inhumanity. To worship a being as god who is not god is illusion and falsehood. The general principle might be that when people elevate something creaturely to the status of deity, they attack the bases of their life. Idolatry is not just a harmless intellectual mistake. Idolatry kills.21
Recent idolization of political leaders offers an example of the link between idolatry and death. Obvious examples are Maoism, Stalinism, National Socialism and Italian fascism. At the center of all these movements was a human elevated to the status of a god and idolized as such. Interestingly, these personality cults were promoted by the pervasive distribution of pictures. Mao’s giant image still presides over Tiananmen Square where hundreds if not thousands of protestors were mowed down by their own people.22 These leaders and representatives of a quasi-religious ideology produced the most murderous century in human history. Thus, the third significance of the Commandment against images is that an image of idols is death dealing.
As an aside, we want to note that images of creaturely beings, i.e., images not intended to represent deities, can also be destructive. We have in mind certain “ideal human images.” Our culture is full of such ideal images. Psychologists describe the ideal person, e.g., the well-balanced person, the integrated personality, etc. The result can be that no one feels really human, because no one meets these psychological ideals. Advertisements portray the ideal female figure or male physique. The result: thousands of men and women hate their bodies; they spend millions on cosmetic surgery, because they have internalized these (corporately produced) ideal standards. Parents project an image, by their punishments and rewards, of the ideal child they expect their offspring to become. Often this ideal suffocates real children. Even at the human level, ideal images can be destructive. So much more so can images of supposed divine beings.
C. Josiah’s Reform and the Prophetic Critique of Idol Worship
In addition to Deuteronomy 4, another Second Covenant text relates directly to the Second Commandment. A striking event in the story of the First Covenant is the reform of Josiah. The authors of 2 Kings report Josiah’s reform in chapters 21 and 22. According to the account, an ancient text was found in the temple in the 18th B.C. This “book”, i.e., scrolls, contained God’s conditions for the covenant. According to the account this “book of the covenant” shocked Josiah into the realization of how far “Judah”, i.e., the tribes of the southern kingdom, centered in Jerusalem, had departed from God’s requirements for the covenant. Josiah’s sense of guilt before the God of the covenant led to his radical reform.
These reform actions are described in 2 Kings 23. The reforms included a public reading of the “book of the covenant” in the presence of “all the men of Judah and all the inhabitants of Jerusalem and the priests and the prophets, all the people, both small and great.” (2 Kings, 23.2f.) Then Josiah “made a covenant before the Lord to keep his commandments and his testimonies and his statutes.” (2 Kings 23: 3). Next Josiah commanded that all the vessels now located in the Temple for the worship of Ba’al, Asherah and “all the host of heaven” be carried out and burned outside of Jerusalem. The idolatrous priests “ the kinds of Judah had ordained to burn incense in the high places in the cities of Judah and about Jerusalem,” were deposed. Also deposed were priests who burned incense to “Ba’al , to the sun, and the moon, and the constellations and all the hosts of heaven” (2 Kings 23. 5 ff.) . Next Josiah brought out the Ashereh from the house of the Lord,
Carried it to the brook of Kidron, burned it and “casts its dust on the graves of the common people.“ Following this, he “broke down the houses of the male cult prostitutes which were in the house of the Lord, where the women wove hangings to the Ashereh.” (2 Kings 23: 6ff.) Next Josiah “defiled Topheth, which is in the valley of the sons of Hinnom, that no one might burn his son and daughter as an offering to Molech” (2 Kings 23.10ff). Josiah also ordered the keeping of Passover, which had been abandoned as a religious practice for generations. The report of Josiah’s reforms concludes, “Moreover Josiah put away the mediums and the wizards and the teraphim and the idols and all the abominations that were seen in the land of Judah and in Jerusalem, that he might establish the words of the law which were written in the book that Hilkiah the priest found in the house of Lord.” (2 Kings 23: 24f).
Clearly, a driving impulse behind these reforms was the Second Commandment. This Commandment would fully explain Josiah’s double-sided turn. On the one hand, Josiah turned toward the God of the Covenant in renewed devotion and obedience. On the other hand, Josiah turned against the false worship that had come to occupy Judah’s religious life. 23
Josiah’s reform demonstrates the abiding effect of the Second Commandment on the life of Israel, long after the giving of the Law. Above all, his reform exemplifies the basic pattern of faith in God. Further, his reform exemplifies that Israel’s life of faith is not a static, “steady-state” condition but a dramatic, dynamic history of unfaithfulness and repentance, a repentance evoked by a renewed encounter with God’s Word, not God’s image. In this sense, the account of Josiah’s reform exemplifies the basic pattern of faith, also for the Christian believer.
D. Religious Images as Self-Referential –Israel’s Golden Calf
By making images of God, humans attempted and attempt to localize and define the divine. Images of God respond to the experience of the hiddenness or absence of God. Images fill a religious need; making images is a way people try to secure and intensify their vitality. We have already in this section pointed out that God makes Himself known by speaking. Thus, we said, one of the meanings of the Second Commandment is that it helps us remain open to God’s defining Himself, both in Jesus Christ and in our own religious experiences. Remaining open, however, is difficult when God seems absent or hidden. Precisely this is dramatized in the story of the Golden Calf in Exodus 32.
Localizing and defining God is but a short step from trying to secure God, to harness God or to call God into our service. The images of the household gods , of the city gods, of national gods in cultures around the world function to stabilize society and secure its protection and its expansion.24 Here images of the divine tend toward reducing God to a function serving an individual or corporate wish, need or purpose.
However, religious images of any kind, not just images of God, including can have a perverse function. Statues and pictures of Mary or of “the saints” can easily become self-referential, directing our attention to ourselves, not God. This happens because their purpose is to awaken, focus and intensify our piety, our religious subjectivity. These religious images function to help us reach up to and out to God, to commend our selves to God. In relation to these images, we are not receiving but pushing ourselves toward God. 25
Christian faith does call us to be active in relation to God. We are to pray, to obey and to love God with our whole heart, mind and strength. But these are responses to something prior, i.e., God’s initiative, God’s actions toward us. The prohibition of images of God can alert us to the dangers of our self-constructed religious images as well when these images become separated from God’s initiative in relating to us. 26
One theme of the Golden Calf account is Israel’s impatience at the absence of God. The people, tired of waiting for God’s Word collected their gold rings from which Aaron made the golden calf. The golden calf was created to fill a spiritual void, the void of the invisible and apparently absent God.
Immediately following the creation of the golden calf, Aaron plans a religious festival “to the Lord” and constructs an altar for burnt offerings and sacrifices “of well being.” Following this liturgy, “the people sat down to eat and rose up to revel.” 27 The golden calf energized, focused and evoked Israel’s religious piety and enthusiasm. The worship of images always involves intensifying of our natural vitalities.
Although Aaron made only one golden calf, he refers to it by saying, “these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. (Exodus 32: 4). This suggests a second feature of idol worship: polytheism. Michael Weinrich28 suggests that religious idols always generate the idea of many gods. The reason is that every human –made image of a god points to its creaturely limits and evokes the need for another image to complement and correct it. Thus a male image of God evokes the demand for a correcting and completing female image of God. An animal depiction of God calls forth a more sublime image, perhaps one of the celestial bodies like the sun or star or moon. The god of wine (Bacchus) requires its complement in the god of grain (Ceres). 29
The story of Aaron and the Golden Calf contains important themes related to the Second Commandment. The story belongs to the Old Testament’s own commentary on the prohibition of graven images. The story, obviously, is a flat violation of the Second Commandment. This is a salutary reminder of how easily and quickly religious people can engage in practices that obviously violate their professed beliefs! The story connects the making of idols with the pain of the experience of the absence or hiddeness of God and thus with what might be called religious impatience. The story holds an interesting, though undeveloped linking between idolatry and polytheism. Finally, the story dramatizes the link between the making and worshipping of idols and the intensification of corporate life.
Conclusion
Our study of the Second Commandment has adopted an avowedly Christian point of view. We have studied the Second Commandment from the standpoint of Jesus Christ as the true image of God. We have “read” the Second Commandment in the light of Jesus Christ who came not to negate the Law but to fulfill it.
This Christian standpoint has helped us remember that God indeed is reflected in creation, in human righteous action and in man and woman, as created in the image of God. Without losing sight of the truth that between God, the Creator and between creatures, no adequate analogy is possible, we have placed at the center the Christian belief that God has made himself known in Jesus Christ.
This belief has shed a surprising light on the Second Commandment. This Commandment, seen in the light of Christian faith in Christ as the Incaarnation of the Word of God, has kept the field of religion free for God’s self-identification, God’s own self-imaging in Jesus, the Incarnate Word. The Second Commandment, therefore, served God’s purposes, coming to fruition in Jesus Christ, by holding back the people of Israel, from replacing God with something that is not God. In this way, the Christian Church is radically beholden to the faith of Israel and to the People of that faith.
This faith of the People of the Covenant, the People who seek to obey the Second Commandment, continues to be life giving to Christian faith. For, as we pointed out, especially in the last section of this essay, Christians are as ready to violate the Second Commandment, orienting their faith to their self-constructed images of God, as any people ever were. The Christian community needs constantly to hear the prohibition to produce images of God. Only by hearing this Prohibition, a hearing which the People of Israel keeps alive for themselves and for the Church, can Christians hope to stay open to God’s own self imaging in Jesus, the Christ.
David Scott, Ph.D.
Murnau, Germany
September, 2005
1 Barbara Maria Stafford, in Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (Cambridge: 1996).
2 In his book, La Condition Postmoderne.(Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979)
3 The numerous specific quotations and allusions to the Hebrew Bible by the different authors of the New Testament demonstrate what I mean here.
4 “Established facts” is in quotes not from disrespect to the pain-staking labors of historians but in recognition that what one generation counted as “established fact” is often revised by later historians. An example of revision of “established fact” is the relatively recent historical consensus that the Shang Dynasty actually existed and was not a mythic construction of later Chinese writers.
5 Dietrich von Hildebrand, in What is Philosophy (Milwaukee: The Bruce Publishing Company, 1960) points out and criticizes how much our modern notion of “real knowledge” is defined by the modern, natural scientific ideal of neutral, mathematically expressible hypotheses and laws. This “ideal” rules out the enlarging of the human heart that comes from contemplating beauty or experiencing a righteous and holy life as not knowledge. See the helpful comments by Austin G. Murphy, O.S.B. “Re-Reading the Johannine Prologue” Pro Ecclesia XIV (Summer, 2005): 315.
6 Romans 1:21: “they became futile in their thinking, and their senseless minds were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” If the human mind needs reality to feed on, i.e., something real to activate and release the knowing process, then for the mind to be constitutionally reoriented from reality to non reality is a devastating condition. The devastation is not simply that the mind has nothing real to feed on, or only something half real. The real devastation is that the mind thinks that non-reality is reality; it is entrapped in its own illusions. Plato’s myth of the cave, in the Seventh Book of the Republic, concerns this. In a more modern medium, the cult movie “Matrix” portrays a society trapped in the illusion that the digitally produced world was the real world. “Matrix”’s affinity to Buddhist and Hindu teaching about the falseness of our consciousnesses is imaged by one of the scenes in the movie.
7 A very helpful essay about God’s revelation and communication has been referred to in a previous note; i.e. Austin g. Murphy, O.S.B. “Re-Reading the Johannine Prologue” Pro Ecclesia XIV (Summer 2005): 306-323.
8 See Koran, Sure 4, 116 “Allah does not forgive that one places other gods, idols, next to God. “
9 In this regard, Christian believers should be careful in saying “Jesus is God.” What the New Testament, and the Trinity doctrine say is that the Word, the Son, the Second Person of the Godhead, became human as Jesus of Nazareth. The teaching of Chalcedon is that in Jesus of Nazareth, two natures are united in one person. To say, therefore, “Jesus is God” literally taken, asserts that a human creature (Jesus) is the divine nature (God). This is a flat, logical contradiction, not a paradox. It equates a creature with God. That is not only a contradiction in terms. It is also the formula for idolatry and violating the Second Commandment. To say “Jesus is God” is also to contradict orthodox Christian teaching.
10 See the Suffering Servant Songs in II Isaiah, 421ff; 49:1-6; 50:4-11; 52:13-53:12. Many New Testament scholars think Jesus found in these passages a divine prophesy of his role in God’s providence.
11 “Main-line” is, of course in quotes, because the so-called mainline churches —-Episcopal, Presbyterian, Lutheran— are declining denominations in North America. Further, members of these denominations less and less occupy important social roles. They no longer constitute any kind of elite in the United States. Furthermore, the sociology of the main line churches has greatly changed during the last fifty years. No longer do upwardly mobile Americans shift from the Baptist and Methodist churches into the Presbyterian or Episcopal Church as their assets and social prestige increase.
12 One of the strongest arguments for considering this as a distinct Commandment is the literary structure of the Hebrew l’o. Like the other moral Commandments, this one also begins with the Hebrew character for “not.” I owe this point of my former Old Testament colleague, Professor Murray Newman.
13 Maria-Theres Wacker, “Eine fruehjuedische Theologie der bilderlosen Verehrung JHWHs: Dtn. 4:1-40” in Joerg Schmidt, Von den Bildern befreit zum Leben: Wahrheit und Weisheit des Bilderverbotes (Wuppertal: foedus-verlag, 2002) gives an informative discussion of Deuteronomy 4 as an interpretation of the Second Commandment. We draw our ideas from her essay.
14 The first creation account (Genesis 1) refers to a preexisting chaos which God orders. This conception of a preexisting void and abyss was common to the ancient worldview. However, even in this first account, the phrase, “And God said, let there be light, a dome in he midst of the waters, etc.” points in the direction of an absolute difference between God and creatures. As the note to vv. 3-5 in the New Oxford Annotated Bible says, “Creation by the word of God expresses God’s absolute sovereignty and anticipates the doctrine of creation out of nothing (creation ex nihilo ), stated in 2 Macc 7:28). Some ancient philosophy, e.g., that of Plotinus (A.D. 205-270?), saw the world as an overflow of the divine fullness of being (pleroma). This conception interesetingly can lead to two radically different evaluations of the world. One conception is that in some sense the cosmos is sacred, since it is an overflow of deity. This conception is popular today, e.g., in some New Age theologies. The second conception is radically dualistic: deity is spiritual. In the world, spiritual deity is tragically trapped in vile matter and must be released by various religious practices.
15 Note that the distinction actor/ passive refers only to the distinction between God as Creator and every thing else as creature. This active /passive relation does not apply to the relation between God and creatures apart from the fact of creation. That is, once beings are created, they can enter into an active relation with God. Medieval theology expressed the distinction between God and creatures in the distinction between absolute and contingent being. Thomas Aquinas also distinguished between a creature’s existence and its essence. In their existence, creatures are wholly dependent on God. Creatures have different degrees of potential agency, depending on the kind of soul possessed by a creature. This absolute distinction between the being of God and of creatures has always challenged the problem of speaking about God, especially speaking of God based on an “analogy of being.” Karl Barth’s polemic against standard RC theology, and even against his fellow Reformed theological colleague, Emil Brunner, turned on this issue. See Barth’s book, Nein, his reply to Emil Brunner’s doctrine of imago dei,
16 Much religious thinking, by contrast, assumes precisely that the world is semi-sacred. This is the teaching in New Age movements.
17 The Bible does affirm that God can be known through creation and through righteous actions by human beings. Paul’s Letter to the Romans affirms that the things God has made reveal God’s power and divine nature. Also, the Wisdom literature, e.g., Psalm 8:4; 104; 147 affirm that God’s wisdom and power are reflected in the creation. And, of course, the Genesis creation account describes man and woman as created in the image of God. Note, however, that Paul in Romans states that God’s power and divine nature are invisible in themselves and “have been understood and seen through the things he has made.”
18 Friederick Mildenberger, contemporary German theologian, nicely makes this point. See his Biblische Dogmatik: Eine biblische Theologie in dogmatischer Perspective Bd. 2 Oekonomie als Theologie (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1992):68 ff. This same point is made by M. Weinrich and M. Josuttis in their two essays collected in “Von den Bildern befreit zum Leben: Wahrheit und Weisheit des Bilderverbotes” {Freed from Images for Life: Truth and Wisdom of the Prohibition of Images] hrsg. Joerg Schmidt (Wuppertal: foedus verlag, 2002):17-58 I have drawn several points from these two publications. See also Christian Link, “Das Bilderverbot als Kriterium Theologisches Reden von Gott” Zeitschrift fuer Theologie und Kirche 74 (1977): 58-85.
19 St. Bonaventura explains the meaning of the Second Commandment as including (in addition to theological errors, which are mental fictions) prohibition against making pacts with demons. Such pacts can involve verbal incantations, magical use of inscriptions, burning sacrifices. Reading Bonaventura here in the modern context easily calls to mind the use of words and logos in advertising. See his Collationes de decem praeceptis, Collatio II, 17-29.
20 The prophets vilify this practice, connected with a locale near Jerusalem, the Vally of Hinnom. See , for example, Jeremiah 7:30-32 and 19: 4-5.
21 In Paul Tillich’s theology, idolatry as the elevation of the creature to the status of deity was an important concept. Tillich wrote especially in the contexts of European fascism. Our contemporary culture is marked by ever higher rates of despondency, depression, teenage suicide, movements to legalize killing oneself, massive and legalized destruction of unborn children, mostly not for reasons of health or safety. In many countries, probably including western nations, the foundations for natural life are being undermined by environmental degradation. Present young adults, in many modern societies are not having children, foisting an enormous financial burden on those relatively few in the next generation. Surely there is a connection between this “cult of death” or the “cult of non-life” and the modern cult of “market capitalism.” Market capitalism is credited with some divine attributes –inevitable, all-present, life-promising—promising material security and even democracy.
22 Jung Chang, author of the beautiful account of her family during the Great Cultural Revolution, Wild Swans, has just published, with her husband, Jan Halliday, a biography of Mao, detailing an accurate account of the tyrant responsible for over 70 million deaths of his own people. It’s title is Mao: The Unknown Story .
23 Jesus proclamation, summarized in Mark 1:15, was “The time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe in the good news.” The same double turn we see in Josiah’s reform is repeated; turning toward the Rule of God and, repenting, i.e., turning away from former idols. This double turn is a paradigm of faith as an action (fides qua creditur) in distinction from faith as “the faith” (fides quae creditor) , the content of what one believes. Observe the contrast between this biblical paradigm of faith and one modern and influential description of faith, that of Paul Tillich. Tillich defined faith as “ultimate concern.” This was a generic concept of faith, making faith something that everyone had or did. Everyone has some ultimate concern. It was a subjective, psychological understanding of faith, rather than the biblical view which stresses an act of voluntary turning to God from idols.
24 St. Augustine’s great work, The City of God, was prompted by the charge that Christians, by not sacrificing to the local city gods, were undermining the welfare of Rome, which was being attacked by barbarian tribes.
25 Karl Barth’s interpretation and critique of human religion builds on this idea. See his Church Dogmatics, I/2 paragraph 17: God’s Revelation as the Aufhebung (elevation, transformation, correction ) of Religion
26 Zwingli, the third great Reformer of the sixteenth century, was especially hostile to religious images of this kind. One reason he gave for his critique was their cost, which in his period of church history was enormous. The cost of adorning churches, with their many altars for masses for the dead, involved a corresponding impoverishment of the poor. His second critique of religious images in churches was their power to capture the attention and divert attentiveness from God’s Word during worship. Rather than being open to receiving God’s Word, worshippers were too easily absorbed by pictures and statues in the sanctuary. He referred to New Testament passages denouncing idolatry (e.g. 1 Cor. 5:10; Gal. 5:19; I Pet. 4:3) as support for his critique. See his Ein kurtze und christliche inleitung, 1523 WW I 654f.
27 This account in chapter 32 of Exodus reminds me of my childhood memories of a Portuguese social and religious festival celebrated each year next to our family home in Rhode Island. . Images of Mary and perhaps other saints special to the Portuguese community were paraded on litters through the fair grounds; money was raised by selling Portuguese baked goods; there were many booths where handcrafts were sold, and there festive eating and drinking. The rest of the year, this sandy lot stood empty and unused.
28 See the reference in footnote 13.
29 Given the recently published statement about Mary by the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, (The Theological Statement on Mary; “Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ”) it will be important to keep the biblical and theological critique of religious images in mind. Vatican II did avert the further development of the teaching in Roman Catholic circles that Mary was co-redemptrix and co-mediatrix, a theological development strongly urged by some religious congregations and lay Marian solidarities. In its best theology, Roman Catholics and other Christians see Mary as an image of the Church, of a believing and obeying response to God’s initiative. How narrow the step from seeing Mary as a symbol of our response to God’s imitative to seeing that response as a necessary element in God’s being able to act in relation to us is visible in the ideas of Mary’s response as on a level with God’s initiative in salvation. . The faith response becomes an image of God. In the excitement of a new enthusiasm about Mary, we should not forget Jeremiah ‘s critique of the cult of the “queen of heaven.” (Jeremiah 7:16-18; 44: 15-18 )