Category Archives: Fr Steven Bigham

A Note to Everyone Who Would Call Me an Idolater

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Many well-intentioned Christians believe that the 2nd commandment clearly teaches a prohibition against all images and artwork within the context of worship.

While there were, at various times in the Middle Ages, Christians known as “Iconoclasts” who opposed the use of artwork in worship, they never went to the extremes of today’s iconoclastic Christians and their opposition to any and all veneration in worship (e.g. the Iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th centuries, depending upon who they were, were in favor of the veneration of the Eucharist, the Cross, the Ever-Virgin Mary, and Relics of Saints, while some even came to eventually – and rather quickly – compromise to allow Icons within their churches, but not the veneration thereof), who hold views more akin to Islam than Christianity, denying even the Incarnation itself in some unfortunate instances.

So if the 2nd commandment is to be understood and believed, what is the content? What is the meaning?

Does this commandment prohibit all artwork and imagery? Surely not! I don’t think anyone is this extreme in their iconoclasm. If this were the case, one could even accuse God the Father of idolatry for the Son of God being Incarnate. The same could be said for human beings (I suppose one could make an exception and say that Christ and humanity are acceptable Icons or images of God, but nothing else). Still, one would be hard pressed to find someone denying the appropriateness or validity of all representative artwork, in whatever context.

An Icon of the Prophet Abraham on the walls of a Synagogue in Dura Europos, Syria (c. AD 244).

An Icon of the Prophet Abraham on the walls of a Jewish Synagogue in Syria (c. AD 244)

What about all artwork and imagery in the context of liturgical, Christian worship? This is where (even today’s) Iconoclasts make their stand. In other words, artwork is fine and dandy (some even allowing images of Christ or the Saints, along with Angelic beings), but just not in Church. Nor should such artwork in any way be part of one’s worship of or devotion to God.

If the latter is the intended meaning of the 2nd commandment, we should expect to find many examples in the Hebrew Scriptures of an adherence to this commandment by the Israelites. Not only this, but one should expect that God would make secondary commandments along these lines, ensuring that in all their worship, the Hebrew people were never in violation of the 2nd commandment.

However, what we find in the Hebrew Scriptures, or the “Old Testament,” is nothing of the sort; the exact opposite, on multiple occasions, in fact.

As Fr Stephen Bigham argues in his book Early Christian Attitudes Toward Images, there was not a “blanket” hatred of all images in ancient Judaism. On the contrary, there was a carefully understood distinction between images for the sake of idolatry and “liturgical artwork,” if you will. We see this distinction made throughout the Old Testament, and I’ll share just a few examples now:

The Ark of the Covenant
In this instance, the Lord is giving commandments regarding how the tabernacle is to be designed for the Hebrew people’s proper service to God. On top of the Ark, where the priests were to “encounter” the Lord Himself and receive His Word, He instructed them to “make two cherubim of gold; of hammered work you shall make them at the two ends of the mercy seat [...] There I will make Myself known to you, and I will speak with you from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim which are on the ark of testimony” (Exodus 25.18,22 LXX). This is commanded by the same God who gave the 2nd commandment to Moses, so either these two commandments are compatible or God has contradicted Himself. Either there’s a distinction between images of idolatry and images appropriate within the context of worship (but not as objects of worship), or the Old Testament is unreliable as a testimony to God’s commandments to His people. For liberals, the latter wouldn’t be a problem, of course. For those who hold the Scriptures in certain regard, the former must be the case. Let’s look at more examples.

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Iconoclasm, Jews, and All That Jazz

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I’ve begun reading through a book on Iconoclasm in the ancient Church called Early Christian Attitudes Toward Images by Fr Steven Bigham, PhD (Orthodox priest in Montreal, Canada).

This book deals with the various arguments made popular in the late 19th Century by liberal Protestant scholars on Icons and artwork in early Christianity; i.e. that Christians inherited the worship and attitudes of an Iconoclastic Judaism and, as a result, the early Christians were Iconoclastic and had no images to speak of (an-iconic). Not only that, but it is argued that images were a later innovation introduced into the Church by pagan and Hellenistic clergy.

What’s important to note is that these arguments were literally absent from the Church until the 19th Century, and were first propagated by liberal, Protestant (read: German) scholars — men that didn’t believe in the resurrection, an institutional Church or anything mystical or physical at all related to Christian Spirituality. In fact, the arguments proposed by the original Iconoclasts of the 8th and 9th Centuries were of a different stripe altogether, and the practices of these heterodox Christians in worship, for example, in no way resemble those of the more “modern day” schismatics that argue against Christian artwork.

Fr Stephen refers to the viewpoint throughout his work as the “hostility” view; i.e., the early Christians were “hostile” towards the use of images in worship, etc. Of the source of this viewpoint, he proposes two possible originators. Fr Stephen writes:

“Paul Finney sees its source in the liberal Protestant tradition, especially in the thought of Albrecht Ritschl (1822-89) [...] and his even more eminent disciple, Adolf von Harnack [...] they laid the foundations on which other Protestant scholars were to build. For liberal Protestantism, Christianity is essentially defined in moral and ethical terms. Jesus preached an ethical religion [...] Liberal Protestantism considers the introduction of art into the Church as but another aspect of the Hellenization, even the paganization, of Christianity.”
Fr Stephen Bigham, Early Christian Attitudes Toward Images, pp. 3-4

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