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June 3, 2012 |
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If you have ever been in a Catholic church you will have noticed many striking differences from the Protestant churches you’ve been in. The first difference you likely noticed is that Catholic churches have statues and printed depictions of Jesus, the apostles, and Mary. Protestant churches have very little if any of these. If you have ever wondered why this difference exists, this lesson will explain why and how this came to be.
First we’ll look at how this difference came to be and that will take us into what the Bible says about it.
The roots of Christianity are Judaism. In fact Christianity is Judaism after the coming of the Messiah or Christ. Jesus would not have called himself a Christian – that would make him a follower of himself. He would have called himself a Jew. The apostles would have called themselves followers of Jesus but they still considered themselves Jews. They met with the Jews and worshiped with them.
Christianity spread via the Jewish synagogues, as the Bible says first to the Jew and then to the Gentile. At that time, the Jews had spread out across the world and had brought their religion with them and had built synagogues. On arriving at a new city the apostles would go to these synagogues first to preach their message that the Messiah had come. From there the message would spread to the Gentiles in the city.
This approach made sense also because the Jews already understood the basics. All they had to accept was that Jesus the Messiah had come, been killed, arose from the grave and what that meant. The Gentiles might have known a little about Judaism but mostly Christianity would have been new to them.
Judaism does not tolerate statues; they consider them idols as described in the second commandment from Exodus 20.
4 You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
So if Judaism abhors statues and Judaism is the foundation for Christianity then how did the Catholic Church come to have such an abundance of them? The Roman Catholic Church began, as you might imagine, in Rome. But very early on, even before it called itself a catholic (world-wide) church it had its foundation ripped out from under it. All the Jews were kicked out of Rome. This would have included Christian Jews. History isn’t exactly clear on when this happened, partly because it may have happened twice. But we know it happened during the apostolic era because it is recorded in Acts 18.
1 After this, Paul left Athens and went to Corinth. 2 There he met a Jew named Aquila, a native of Pontus, who had recently come from Italy with his wife Priscilla, because Claudius had ordered all the Jews to leave Rome. Paul went to see them, 3 and because he was a tentmaker as they were, he stayed and worked with them. 4 Every Sabbath he reasoned in the synagogue, trying to persuade Jews and Greeks.
With this foundation gone the Church of Rome began to change. Early in the second century we find their theology is changing and they are fighting about it with Christians outside of Rome. They also become very anti-Jewish, reflecting the anti-Jewish sentiment in Rome that resulted in the Jews being forced to leave Rome.
Detailed history is not available on the existence of Christian statues but the Catholic Church insists that such statues were common right from the very start. Statues were certainly very common in Rome. There were and still are statues to the whole pantheon of gods that Romans worshiped at that time. So, not long after the departure of the Jewish influence in the church, statues made their entrance.
Remember that the first Christian meetings would have been held in homes. So these statues probably began as home decorations and were incorporated into the church buildings as they were built. It would have been so natural for Gentile Romans who converted to Christianity to throw out the pagan statues in their homes and replace them with Christian statues. We saw the same thing happen with the Israelites in Exodus 32. Moses had been in the smoke and the lightning on the mountain for 30 days and the Israelites became afraid that they had lost their leader and intercessor with god.
1 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him."
The Israelites had come from a culture where idols were common and that was how people worshipped the gods they represented. So it would have been with the Gentile Romans.
That is how statues and other depictions got into the Church of Rome, which became the Roman Catholic Church, the mother of almost all other Christian churches that exist today. But if that is the case why don’t the Protestant churches also have these?
By the 1500s the Roman Catholic Church had become extremely corrupt. It had been given legal authority in many areas and used that to persecute and kill those people that didn’t agree with its teachings. There were very few Bibles and none available to the average person and literacy rates were low anyway. So the average person did not have a way to refute what the church was doing or teaching.
But there were some Bibles and there were some people who knew the church was wrong. But they feared taking on the church because of its great power. One person, called Martin Luther, dared to step out of this group and challenge the church. The church had developed the idea that the dead went to purgatory where they would perfect themselves prior to going to Heaven. Luther’s main complaint was the church’s selling of indulgences, which was a way for a person to pay a priest to pray a person out of purgatory and into Heaven.
Led by Luther those against the church began to speak against all of its many wrongdoings and wrong teachings and soon these people formed their own churches with practices and beliefs closer to the Bible. Most of them got rid of the statues because they felt, as the Jews had, that they were idols.
The Catholic Church calls them icons, symbols that represent something else. The church and its members are very sensitive to calling them idols with the inference that the church members are idolaters. They insist that no one worships them and that any prayers prayed to them go right up to Heaven. In fact they insist that they are aids to worship in that they bring the reality of those people to mind. They also consider them as having been education aids in the past for a largely illiterate population.
But that is the reasoning of man. We need to look at what the Bible says. The verses from Exodus 20 above are repeated here
4 "You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. 5 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, 6 but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Note carefully what this does not say. It does not say "do not make an image for any other god". It says do not make an image of anything – anything you believe is in Heaven, or anything you’ve seen in space, in the air, on the earth, or in the water, period. So the Protestant, and Jewish, understanding of this passage is that no image should be a part of the worship of God.
And the problem is not just with images that represent some other god, like a statue of Zeus. If you were to carve out a fish before your big fishing trip and pray to it so you would catch lots of fish, that would also be idolatry. Does this tell us anything about good luck charms?
Plainly the context of these verses is worship so we except things like photographs of our friends at the zoo and similar places.
In this commandment God also does not say "except for me, you can make images for me". So we see no exception for the worship of God.
We also get a deeper understanding of God’s intention from what he says later in Exodus 20.
24 "'Make an altar of earth for me and sacrifice on it your burnt offerings and fellowship offerings, your sheep and goats and your cattle. Wherever I cause my name to be honored, I will come to you and bless you. 25 If you make an altar of stones for me, do not build it with dressed stones, for you will defile it if you use a tool on it.
God does not want us to make anything for him. Nothing that we have done with our hands should detract from the worship that is God’s. An altar that is beautifully shaped and carved and inlaid is a glory to the men who made it. It obscures the glory of God when we worship him.
Also note what is missing from the entire Bible, both old and new testaments – descriptions of the appearances of people. This sets the Bible apart from all other books containing stories. We don’t know if Adam, Eve, Moses, Jesus, or Mary were tall or short, their hair color, eye color, body style, face shape or any other physical characteristic. This emphasizes that it isn’t about the man; it’s about the message.
This lack of descriptions means that when you see statues or any depictions of anyone from the Bible, you can confidently say "that isn’t what they looked like".
Despite the Roman Catholic Church’s protest that they aren’t idolaters, there seems to have been an attempt to hide the 2nd commandment. Around the 500s the Roman Catholic Church adopted a revised ordering of the 10 commandments. This change results in a difference of one in the numbering of most of the commandments relative to the Jewish order and to the order the Protestants restored after splitting from the Catholic Church. So the Sabbath commandment which is the 4th commandment for us is the 3rd commandment for them.
The change they made was to group the 1st and 2nd commandments (as we know them) together as one. To keep the count at 10 they split the 10th commandment into two. The effect of this is to de-emphasize the 2nd commandment and what it says about images and worship. This is most easily seen in versions of the commandments that are shortened to make them easier to remember. The shortened version of this combined commandment is "You shall have no other gods but me". Notice that the shortened version completely drops what we call the 2nd commandment.
Catholics respond to this by saying that anyone can still read the Bible and see the whole thing, so it obviously wasn’t an attempt to hide their idolatry. But back in the time when this change was made Bibles were very rare and the people were mostly not literate. As a result what they knew of the Bible was what they got from the pulpit.
Also, we have to look at the motivation for such a change. Why would they reject the Jewish ordering? Was there something about the 10th commandment as we know it that made it necessary to split it into 2 commandments? Here is the 10th commandment from Exodus 20.
17 "You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor."
The Catholic version breaks this into 2 commandments which appear like this when shortened.
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9th |
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. |
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10th |
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's goods. |
A look at the structure of the original verse shows this to be a contrived division. The verse begins by listing specific things that should not be coveted, house, wife, male servant, female servant, ox, and donkey. But then it makes a general statement, "or anything". A correct shortened version of this would be "Thou shalt not covet anything that belongs to your neighbor."
So the effect of this split is that the general statement "or anything" is lost. But this split also reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of coveting. Coveting is not about the thing coveted but about the heart of the coveter.
We come now to the question, why are idols bad? We’ve already covered some aspects of this, such as the effect on worship. The second commandment says only "I […] am a jealous God." But is there more to it? I think so.
The whole point behind God’s creation is to build a people of faith. Supporting that statement, we have verses such as Hebrews 11:6 which says "without faith it is impossible to please God". So the goal of HaSatan1 must be to weaken and eliminate faith.
If we define the Christian walk as Paul does in 2 Corinthians 5:7 as "For we walk by faith, not by sight", we see that sight can be a hindrance to faith. I think that’s the case here. Instead of being aids to worship, these "icons" tie people down to the physical world. When a broken leg is healed the person throws away the crutches and begins to exercise the leg again. But these crutches are ever-present and there is never a need to learn to walk without them.
Also, people become tied to the appearance of the person instead of the message. There is a parallel in our world with Albert Einstein. Everyone knows what he looks like but very few understand what he said.
Therefore icons are wrong for both these reasons; they tie our spiritual wings to the ground and they obscure the message behind the messenger.
1 Hebrew root for English usage "Satan" meaning "the accuser".