Suppose that a king is making his way through the towns of his kingdom after defeating a great enemy feared by all. In each town, he stands in the courtyard near a statue of himself, so that the townspeople know where to find him. They may come salute him to show honor, and perhaps ask him a question or thank him. Suppose further that in one of the towns the people who come salute and speak to the statue rather than to the king, while he is standing there.

I hope we could all agree that the king is right to take offense at this behavior. After all, he has availed himself to the townspeople, and yet they choose to interact with his statue instead of him. In choosing to interact with the statue when the king himself is otherwise available, the people are choosing the statue over the king, and it is in virtue of this prioritization of a lesser image over the real thing that is an insult to the latter.

It may surprise us that the people insult the king while trying to do the exact opposite, but this is not something new. As I discussed in my post “Cooperation with evil,” there is a difference between the desire that motivates an action and the final intention that characterizes that action. Desire is a psychological feature of the agent, while intention is the form of the action. The latter includes but is not necessarily exhausted by the former. To reuse an example I gave in that post, when Alice intends to punch Bob under the description of testing her strength she might not desire to perform an action which causes pain as one of its effects, but she cannot avoid intending to do so because punching is exactly this sort of action. Or, to use the example which motivates O’Brien and Koons’ “Objects of Intention,” if a doctor intends to abort a healthy fetus they may not desire to murder an innocent human, but they nevertheless intend such a murder. Applying this distinction to our story, we can say that the townspeople desire to honor the king but the action they actually intend does the opposite of this, because it prioritizes the statue of the king over the king himself.

Now, all of this is analogous to one of the reasons scripture gives for rejecting the worship of God through images: in both the Old and New Testaments, God makes himself specially accessible to his people like the king does for the townspeople, so that desiring to worship God through images is like the townspeople desiring to honor the king through his statue. As a result, it seems to me, just as the townspeople mistakenly dishonor the king, those who worship through images are mistakenly committing idolatry.

Starting in the OT, perhaps the first instance of the opposition between idols and the way God had made himself accessible (in the tabernacle, and later the temple) comes in the way the book of Exodus is laid out. The first half of the book covers the redemption of Israel from Egypt (Ex 1–18), and the making of the covenant at Sinai (Ex 19–24). The second half is mostly dedicated to the giving (Ex 25–31) and the fulfillment (Ex 35–40) of the instructions for the tabernacle and its priesthood, which govern how God will come near to the people. This second half is interrupted, however, by the golden calf incident and its initial fallout (Ex 32–34), drawing attention to how it is opposed to the manner in which God is making himself accessible to Israel for worship, as discussed in the surrounding material. Despite initially referring to a plurality of gods in the golden calf incident,^[1] the people really sought to worship God himself. After all, only one calf was made and they identify the object of their worship as they who brought them out of Egypt (32:4), echoing how God had identified himself to them earlier (19:1–6, 20:2). It seems that the Israelites were still shaking off the baggage of life in Egypt at this point, in which Aaron helps them by reminding them of the name of God and encouraging them to direct their worship to him (32:5–6). So, by the end of this passage, the Israelites are worshiping the true God through the calf, a reading confirmed by Nehemiah’s recounting of the incident (Neh 9:18). So, then, Exodus frames the golden calf incident in such a way as to highlight that the people were rejecting God’s way of making himself approachable (the tabernacle) in favor of the less direct alternative of worshiping him (man-made images).

The next passage to consider is Deuteronomy 4. As we saw in my previous post, Moses is here encouraging the Israelites to avoid the sins of the nations around them, especially idolatry, and to hold fast to the covenant God has made with them. Notice what he says, however, at the outset of this plea:

Keep [these statutes] and do them, for that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’ For what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the LORD our God is to us, whenever we call upon him? And what great nation is there, that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today? (Deut 4:6–8, emphasis mine)

In the bit that I have emphasized, Moses draws particular attention to the fact that God has made himself near and accessible to his people, unlike the gods of the other nations. Thus, one of the reasons for rejecting the idol practices of the nations is precisely the nearness of God not enjoyed by those other nations.

A little further on in Deuteronomy, this point is made as explicitly as possible, when God says the following:

These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the LORD, the God of your fathers, has given you to possess, all the days that you live on the earth. You shall surely destroy all the places where the nations whom you shall dispossess served their gods, on the high mountains and on the hills and under every green tree. You shall tear down their altars and dash in pieces their pillars and burn their Asherim with fire. You shall chop down the carved images of their gods and destroy their name out of that place. You shall not worship the LORD your God in that way. But you shall seek the place that the LORD your God will choose out of all your tribes to put his name and make his habitation there. (Deut 12:1–5, emphasis mine)

As is clear from the final two sentences, the Israelites must not worship God through images because he has made himself specially accessible in the tabernacle he has put in their midst.

The prophets also have something to say on this matter. In Habakkuk we read the following:

What profit is an idol when its maker has shaped it, a metal image, a teacher of lies? For its maker trusts in his own creation when he makes speechless idols! Woe to him who says to a wooden thing, Awake; to a silent stone, Arise! Can this teach? Behold, it is overlaid with gold and silver, and there is no breath at all in it. But the LORD is in his holy temple; let all the earth keep silence before him.” (Hab 2:18–20)

Notice how, among other things, the idol is contrasted to God in his holy temple, the place and manner in which he has made himself specially accessible to the world.

Finally, we can look to the opening verses of Micah. Here God witnesses from his temple against the world (1:1) for their idolatry. He warns that he will come out of his temple to destroy their places of worship (“high places”, 1:2) and idols (1:7). So we have this picture of a God who has made himself accessible coming up from his place and destroying all the alternatives that distort true worship.

The contrast between idols and the way in which God has made himself accessible pervades much of the OT language about both. From straightforward comparisons that we have discussed to more implicit ones, such as when bowing down to the temple is spoken of positively (PS 138:2) in contrast to the negative evaluation of doing the same to images (Ex 20:5). We cannot hope to survey all of this in one blog post, so we will have to suffice with the examples above. Let us now turn to the NT.

As we saw in the previous post, proponents of worship through icons have long pointed to the incarnation as a watershed moment that legitimated some form of worship through images. But as I pointed out, this would at best address only one of the reasons given in scripture for rejecting worship through images, namely their form. The other reasons, based on their human-made nature, their lifeless matter, and their purpose, would remain untouched. The present issue we are discussing has nothing to do with the form of the images. We may suppose, for instance, that the king in our story is generally happy with honor being shown to him through his statues when he’s not around. The negative outcome would remain the same precisely because he now is around, and yet the people choose to honor him through the statue anyway. Instead of form, the problem here has to do with purpose: like the king, God makes himself more directly available for the purpose of worship, and like the people, those who choose worship through images are choosing a less direct option over the option offered by God.

I make this clarification because while the incarnation might lessen the problem of form (my previous post notwithstanding), it only worsens this problem of purpose. After all, God makes himself more accessible to his people in the incarnation (John 1:18; Matt 11:27; 12:5–8; Mark 2:18–22), and after the ascension even more so when he sends Christ’s Spirit to indwell us (1 Cor 3:16–17; Rom 5:5; 8:12–17; cf. John 4:23–24). And the more accessible God is, the more insulting it is to turn to indirect means of worshiping him. So, then, the NT only strengthens the OT rejection of worship through images based on the fact that God has made himself specially accessible for worship.

Now, just as the townspeople choose the statue over the king, so too does worship of God through images amount to honoring that image over God. As we saw above, it is not enough that these images represent God or that the person desires to worship him through them, because God has availed himself for a more direct form of worship. Thus, even if we desire to worship God through an image, we cannot help but worship the image instead, which is idolatry.

What if we desire to merely venerate the image as a means to worship God? Would this avoid the charge of idolatry? It seems to me that such a distinction only helps if there is no desire to worship whatsoever. In the king story, this would be equivalent to the townspeople not coming to the courtyard and simply honoring the statue of the king they have in their homes. In this case, there might be something problematic with them not going to see the king when he has availed himself to them, but it would be a different problem to the one we’re considering. By contrast, if we venerate the image as part of or as a means to worship, then the distinction is of no help. This would be equivalent to the townspeople coming to the courtyard and perhaps laying flowers down at the statue. While this is different from saluting and talking to the statue, the townspeople would still be choosing the statue over the king, who is right there. That is, even though the worshiper does not desire to worship the image, they are still choosing the image over God in an act of worship, and are thereby committing idolatry.

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[1] The translation of the Israelites’ words is complicated by the fact that the plural elohim is used even when referring to God in the singular. Thus, they might have said “This is your God, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” However, the word translated “these” is plural (whereas the relevant words for God are usually singular), so it might well be the case that they intended to refer to a plurality of gods. This is further complicated by the fact that there was only one idol, which also suggests singularity. It’s likely that the Israelites themselves didn’t fully understand who they were referring to, which is what compelled Aaron to guide them.