Near the beginning of the first part of his Apologia Against Those Who Decry Holy Images, John of Damascus gives the following response to those who deny the legitimacy of using images in worship of God. I quote the passage at length, and have inserted what I believe to be the passages of scripture he is referencing:

Now adversaries say: God’s commands to Moses the law-giver were, ‘Thou shalt adore the Lord thy God, and thou shalt worship him alone, and thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing that is in heaven above, or in the earth beneath.’ [Ex 20:4]

They err truly, not knowing the Scriptures, for the letter kills whilst the spirit quickens—not finding in the letter the hidden meaning. I could say to these people, with justice, He who taught you this would teach you the following. Listen to the law-giver’s interpretation in Deuteronomy: ‘And the Lord spoke to you from the midst of the fire. You heard the voice of His words, but you saw not any form at all.’ [Deut 4:12] And shortly afterwards: ‘Keep your souls carefully. You saw not any similitude in the day that the Lord God spoke to you in Horeb from the midst of the fire, lest perhaps being deceived you might make you a graven similitude, or image of male and female, the similitude of any beasts that are upon the earth, or of birds that fly under heaven.’ [4:15–18] And again, ‘Lest, perhaps, lifting up thy eyes to heaven, thou see the sun and the moon, and all the stars of heaven, and being deceived by error thou adore and serve them.’ [4:19]

You see the one thing to be aimed at is not to adore a created thing more than the Creator, nor to give the worship of latreia [adoration] except to Him alone. By worship, consequently, He always understands the worship of latreia. For, again, He says: ‘Thou shalt not have strange gods other than Me. Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing, nor any similitude. Thou shalt not adore them, and thou shalt not serve them, for I am the Lord thy God.’ [Ex 20:3–5; Deut 5:7–9] And again, ‘Overthrow their altars, and break down their statues; burn their groves with fire, and break their idols in pieces. For thou shalt not adore a strange god.’ [Ex 34:13] And a little further on: ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself gods of metal.’ [34:17]

You see that He forbids image-making on account of idolatry, and that it is impossible to make an image of the immeasurable, uncircumscribed, invisible God. You have not seen the likeness of Him, the Scripture says, and this was St Paul’s testimony as he stood in the midst of the Areopagus: ‘Being, therefore, the offspring of God, we must not suppose the divinity to be like unto gold, or silver, or stone, the graving of art, and device of man.’ [Acts 17:29]

… The Scripture says, ‘You have not seen the likeness of Him.’ What wisdom in the law-giver. How depict the invisible? How picture the inconceivable? How give expression to the limitless, the immeasurable, the invisible? How give a form to immensity? How paint immortality? How localise mystery? It is clear that when you contemplate God, who is a pure spirit, becoming man for your sake, you will be able to clothe Him with the human form. When the Invisible One becomes visible to flesh, you may then draw a likeness of His form. When He who is a pure spirit, without form or limit, immeasurable in the boundlessness of His own nature, existing as God, takes upon Himself the form of a servant in substance and in stature, and a body of flesh, then you may draw His likeness, and show it to anyone willing to contemplate it. Depict His ineffable condescension, His virginal birth, His baptism in the Jordan, His transfiguration on Thabor, His all-powerful sufferings, His death and miracles, the proofs of His Godhead, the deeds which He worked in the flesh through divine power, His saving Cross, His Sepulchre, and resurrection, and ascent into heaven. Give to it all the endurance of engraving and colour.^[1]

As I read him, his argument can be summarized as follows:

1. A consequence of Moses’s teaching in Deut 4 is that were God to take on a form then it would be legitimate to worship him through images of that form.
2. In Jesus, through the incarnation, God took on a human form.
3. Therefore, it is legitimate to worship God through images of Jesus’s human form.

I submit that both of these premises, interpreted in the sense needed by the argument, are wrong.

Starting with the first premise, the passage John is relying on is Deut 4:1–40, with a particular focus on verses 15–20. The overarching plea from Moses is that as the Israelites come into the promised land, that they would remember the things God has done for them and not turn away from the law that he has given them and the life and covenant with God that it secures (4:1–8). He proceeds to remind them about the day God appeared to them on Mt Sinai (Ex 19), and notes that they saw no form but only heard God’s voice (4:9–14). Among other things, this is meant to underscore the importance of the law, which is God’s words, and which if followed secures God’s continued presence so near to them (4:6–8). Moses is afraid that they will turn to follow the ways of the nations around them rather than continue in the ways of God encoded in the law (cf. Lev 18:1–5). Thus, he moves on to warn them against idolatry. John seems to conflate the two parts of this section (Deut 4:15–20), which I will label to make it easier to see:

(A) Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.

(B) And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

(A’) But the Lord has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, …

(B’) … to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.

As far as I can understand him, John sees no difference between (A) and (B), and yet there seems to be a clear difference: (A) must be concerned with the worship of God through images, for otherwise the point that they saw no form at Horeb would be irrelevant; while (B) is concerned with the worship of the luminaries, which ancient people thought were divine beings but which the bible holds up as created along with everything else (Gen 1:14–19). The connection of the last sentence to the preceding two warnings is also noteworthy. Israel will be tempted make idols, which characteristically involves using metal from the furnace (A),^[2] but God is the one who brought them out of the furnace (A’).^[3] And Israel will be tempted to serve the host of heaven, something given to all the nations of the world (B),^[4] but God has selected them as his special people (B’). In both cases, the temptation to be like the other nations is diametrically opposed to God’s covenantal actions and purposes for Israel, and this serves to further underscore the importance of Moses’s warnings.

Let us now focus on (A), which is the basis for the first premise in John’s argument. The trouble with John’s interpretation is that it misconstrues the logic of Moses’s exhortation. For Moses, the relevant implication is:

(A1) If you saw no form of God, then you may not worship God through images of any form.

But John’s argument requires:

(A2) If you saw a form of God, then you may worship God through images of that form.

As is well known, (A1) does not entail or presuppose (A2), and to assume that it does is to deny the antecedent.^[5] Thus, Deut 4 does not provide the required support for John’s first premise.

Now of course, someone might object that I’m nitpicking the logic of what is clearly meant as a rhetorical plea to people not trained in logic—in my experience, even first year math students fall into such thinking. To a large extent, I agree. Moses is pleading with people who are strongly tempted toward some form of idolatry, and he is trying to make the stupidity of this temptation as obvious as he can. But this in turn means that we have no reason to assume that (A) captures all the nuance of the problems with worshiping God through images. There may well be multiple reasons why such practice is idolatrous, and Moses is highlighting the one which he thinks will be most rhetorically forceful to his present audience. The point about logic is just meant to make this clearer for us to understand.

And indeed, in addition to the form, the biblical authors take issue with the fact (1) that such images are made by human hands but are used in the worship of the Maker of all things (eg. Jer 10; Hab 2:18–20; Hos 8:1–6), (2) that these images are made out of lifeless materials over which humans have dominion but are used to in the worship of the Ruler and Living God over all creation (eg. Is 40:9–20), and (3) that these images are used to worship God in an alternative and less direct way than he has made available to mankind (Hab 2:20; Deut 12:1–5; Mic 1:1–7; Is 44:21–28).^[6] In other words, images used for worship are problematic because of their form, their efficient cause, their matter, and their purpose. In every way, the use of images is antithetical to the things which make God worthy of worship, and therefore should not be used in worship. Moses’s point in (A) focuses on the form, but even in this chapter he either explicitly mentions or otherwise intimates the other issues: in (A’) he understands image making as inverting the true relation between God and man; he repeats the prophetic characterization of nations’ idols as “gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell” (4:28); and he had earlier emphasized the nearness of God compared to the gods of the other nations, which you will recall are the idolatrous practices in view (4:6–8).

So, even if the incarnation made the form of images unproblematic, there would still remain the other issues with using them in worship. Indeed, we even see these sorts of issues being raised by Paul in his address at the Areopagus:

Being then God’s offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. (Acts 17:29–31)

Three things are worth noting in this passage. First, Paul says that since we are made by God (are his “offspring”), it is inappropriate to associate him with things that are made by us (“an image formed by the art and imagination of man”) out of material over which we have dominion (“gold or silver or stone”), since these are antithetical to our true relationship with him. Second, he is talking about the true God here, not the Gentile deities (cf. 17:23). And third, his complaint is not about the forms that the Gentiles typically use, but with the very process (efficient cause) and materials (matter) of image making in the first place. If the incarnation was sufficient to legitimate the use of images in worship, Paul would have pointed them toward Jesus as the prototype they should use for their images, without needing to criticize the use of images as such. This is especially true in light of the fact that Paul goes on to speak about the man Jesus, who will judge the world and who was raised from the dead.

But let’s turn to the second premise in John’s argument, to see if the incarnation even affected the problem of the form of images used for worship. There is clearly a sense in which the premise, as stated above, is true, but this is not the sense needed for the argument to work. The import of Moses’s statement that “you saw no form” must be that the divine nature has no form, rather than simply that God had not chosen to reveal himself by some form. This is because God did choose to reveal himself by some form, namely the fire and smoke which first appeared on Mt Sinai, which later led Israel through the wilderness, and to which Moses makes repeated reference in Deut 4. Add to this that God had appeared to Moses in the burning bush (Ex 3:1–6) and to the patriarchs in human form (eg. Gen 18), and it is clear that Moses must be making a point about the divine nature rather than the ways in which God makes himself visible to his people. God as such is the only valid object of worship, not God as revealed in this or that form. Since, then, the divine nature has no form, it is improper to worship it by means of an image of any form.

Thus, when we come to the second premise, what we need for the argument to work is that the incarnation somehow gave human form to the divine nature itself. But this is false. The incarnation does not change the divine nature, but rather adds human nature alongside it in the second person of the Trinity. We worship the man Jesus, yes, but we do so because of his divine nature, for only God as such is worthy of worship. His human form does not change the divine nature, but makes it accessible to us. In the same way, we can say that Mary is the mother of God because of his human nature. Hopefully this makes it clear that my point is not in danger of falling into Nestorianism, but is merely a way of avoiding the confusion of Christ’s natures.

The second premise of John’s argument is also false, then, because the incarnation did not change the divine nature. That is, the incarnation did not give a human form to the divine nature as such, and therefore it is still improper to worship God through images of any form. Consistent with this is the careful way in which the NT speaks of Jesus as the revelation of God. In the prologue of his gospel, the Apostle John closes with, “no one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known.” (John 1:18) But how does he make him known? Throughout the gospel it becomes clear that the primary way by which Jesus makes the Father known is by teaching the truth about him and doing his works. Thus, towards the end of the gospel, when this question comes to the fore, we read the following:

Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. (John 14:8–11)

Philip asks Jesus to show them the Father, to which Jesus responds that whoever has seen him has seen the Father. But notice that when he cashes out what this involves, he points not to his visible human form, but to his teaching (“The words I say to you I do not speak of my own authority”) and to his works (“… or else believe on account of the works themselves”). These are precisely the things to which Moses pointed back in Deut 4, in place of seeing a form of God. Rather than a change in God’s revelation—from formless to formed—we should think of Jesus as the fulfillment and completion of God’s revelation, which he has given since the beginning.

Summing up, John of Damascus’s argument in defense of the use of images in worship is mistaken both in how it understands Moses’s words in Deuteronomy, as well as how it applies these words to the incarnation of Jesus. Moses’s rhetorical plea based on the form of God is neither the only problem with this use of images, and Jesus’s incarnation did not give a form to the divine nature. As we close, those more familiar with this issue might wonder why I have made no mention of the distinction between veneration (or dulia) and worship/adoration (or latria). The reason is that, as far as I can tell, this distinction is just irrelevant to the biblical critique of the use of images for worship. As we have seen in this post, the problem is not with the attitude of the worshiper with respect to the image, but with the association of the image with God in the act of worship itself. That is, the problem is the theology of figural representation, wherein the image is taken as a representation of the prototype (God) in the act of worship, so that whatever is given to the image passes to the prototype. This connection between image and God in worship is what misrepresents and dishonors God, and the precise attitude of the worshiper is secondary to this deeper issue.

---

[1] John Damascene, On Holy Images, trans. Mary H. Allies (London: Thomas Baker, 1898), 6–9.

[2] The ESV unhelpfully translates the Hebrew term psl as “carved image,” which may give the mistaken impression that Moses is speaking about specifically wooden idols. However, the word really just means “image.” Humans are made in the psl of God (Gen 1:27), Micah’s mother went to a silversmith to make a psl of God (Jdg 17:3), and the Psalmist refers to the golden calf (Ex 32) as the Israelites trading the glory of God for the psl of an ox that eats grass (Ps 106:20).

[3] The motif of a furnace appears in other places in the OT. The prophets tend to raise in the context of idolatry as well, perhaps reflecting on this original usage of the term (Is 31:6–9; 48:1–11; Jer 10–11).

[4] I have seen some speculation over whether this tacitly endorses the other nations’ worship of the luminaries, but this is wrongheaded. The point of Gen 1:14–19 is to show that these luminaries are mistaken for gods, whereas in fact they are part of creation like everything else, created by God for the benefit of all creation. That is Moses’s point here. This is further supported by the fact that he says that they have been given to all the peoples under the whole heaven, which would include Israel.

[5] For those not familiar with this, in general a statement A → B (if A, then B) does not imply ~A → ~B (if not A, then not B), but only ~B → ~A. In the present case, this is because there are multiple things that imply B, so that if ~A, it might still be the case that C is true as well as C → B.

[6] For a lengthier discussion of some of these passages, see “The Idolatry of Icons.”