Icons, Idolatry, and the Ten Commandments

On social media, I often see questions about icons, especially their use in Eastern Orthodoxy. And I wile back, I saw a Reformed Christian claiming that they necessarily contradict the Ten Commandments. In this post, my intention is simply to explain how icons differ from idols, and how claiming that the use of icons is idolatrous is a misuse of the the commandments. My claim is not that iconic idolatry does not exist – we cannot know what the individual makes of icons – but that there is nothing in the use of icons as such that tells us it is idolatrous. I will also make some connections to why I think iconography, and imagery in general, is central but for a more thorough Christian Platonist treatment, read Fr. Thomas Plant’s post “The Iconic School.”

What prompted this, was a question posed on a Facebook page on Anglican theology, where someone asked whether or not the use of icons is sinful, citing the Ten Commandments. After I asked the person to explain, they simply answered “the second commandment,” whereupon I pointed out that they didn’t explain their position, they just restated it in other words. I also made the point that the second commandment is “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain,” using the numbering which is normal to my Lutheran tradition. The intention was to provoke an answer to the effect that the prohibition against taking the name of the Lord our God in vain is the third commandment and that the second is the prohibition against idols. The point was to show how the difference in theological tradition colour the way in which we read the biblical text.

The person follows the Reformed or Calvinist numbering of the commandments, but that is not self-evident. Depending on which biblical text you use (Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5), there are fourteen or fifteen imperatives in the text, yet there are ten commandments, not fourteen or fifteen (cf. Deuteronomy 10:4). This means that some of these imperatives have to be grouped together. The Reformed numbering group together all the coveting passages into one commandment, the 10th (Exodus 20:17; Deuteronomy 5:21), while the Roman Catholic and Lutheran numbering split that into two commandments. In the Lutheran tradition, following Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, the distinction is made between your neighbour’s house (9th) and his wife, servants, animals, etc. (10th),¹ while the Roman Catholic tradition makes a distinction between your neighbour’s wife (9th) and his house, servants, animals, etc. (10th).² Now, despite being Lutheran, I think the Roman Catholic divisions make more sense from Scripture.

In Deuteronomy 5:21, which presumably was written after Exodus 20:17, there is a change in the coveting passages. It now distinguishes the wife from possessions and staff: “Neither shall you covet your neighbour’s wife. Neither shall you desire your neighbour’s house, or field, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbour.” This makes it more explicit that these are indeed two different commandments, not one. And since there is a difference between your wife and your possession or staff, it makes sense to follow the Roman Catholic division, which also seems to just be the natural reading of Deuteronomy 5:21.

What the Lutheran and Roman Catholic tradition has in common, however, is that they group together the verses on the One God and the prohibition on images, as the first commandment (Exodus 20:3-6; Deuteronomy 5:7-10). There are good reasons to follow this division and those are directly relevant to the question of icons.

As already noted, it makes sense, Scripturally, to separate the Reformed 10th commandment into the 9th and 10th. But furthermore, in both Exodus 20:4 and Deuteronomy 5:8, the word used for ‘image’ is not tzelem, which means ‘image’ in general, but pesel, which mean ‘idol.’ We see this in the International Standard Version (ISV), the New American Bible (NAB), the New American Standard Bible (NASB), the New Living Translation (NLT), and the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV), which all translate the word as ‘idol.’ But some modern translations, such as the Good News Translation (GNT) and the the New International Version (NIV), translate the word as ‘image’ (thus blurring the distinction betweem tzelem and pesel).

In order to say that Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 5 outlaw the making of images, you need to establish that all images are idols. Otherwise, you beg the question. I reject that premise and hold that neither of these texts outlaw the making of images. They outlaw the making of idols. The Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions, therefore, say that the first commandment is that you are to have no other gods than the One true God and that you therefore cannot have idols, because having other gods besides the One true God is literally what idolatry is. Furthermore, if images were outlawed outright, also in religious settings, God would have been commanding Moses to sin, since He commanded Moses to make statues or figures of both the cherubim (Exodus 25:17-22) and the bronze serpent (Numbers 21:8-9). These, particularly the first ones, were unambiguously used in religious setting. The fact that someone later started to treat the bronze serpent as an idol, prompting king Hezekiah to destroy it (2 Kings 18), does not mean that it was an idol from the get go. God did not command Moses to make idols. So there is no general prohibition against images in Scripture, carved or otherwise, even in worship.

Having said that, I often hear that some, predominately Eastern Orthodox Christians, treat them as idols, as they bow to them. Bur as we see, in Joshua 7:6, Joshua and the elders of Israel bowed before the ark of the covenant. Were they worshipping the ark? No, they were worshipping God. Likewise, people are not worshipping icons, even if they were to bow down before them. If that worship, then Joshua is also guilty of idolatry and so are the sons of Jacob, as they bowed down to Judah (Genesis 49:8). Judah wasn’t God either.

So no, you cannot say that the Ten Commandments outlaw icon since they do not outlaw images in general, only idols, and since most people do not bow down to icons as if they are divine. If someone does, that’s idolatry, but I’ve never in my life met anyone who does.

1. Martin Luther, Small Catechism, I,9-10. For a translation (with introduction and notes), see The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, eds. Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2000), 345-375. For a critical edition of the Latin and German originals, see Die Bekenntnisschriften der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche, vollständige neuedition, ed. Irene Dingel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2014).

2. For a more thorough treatment, see The Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2052-2557.