Becoming a Graven Image Culture
Further Meditations on the 2nd* Commandment
Further thoughts on the 2nd1 Commandment: what it means to not just to worship idols, but to represent them in the world. Stick around for a book club announcement!
On Becoming the Emissary of the Gods
In the previous installment, we looked at how the dynamic of graven images means two things: visibility and representation, not only how the gods are made visible, but what kind of visibility they get. The sheer weakness of the gods, as we saw last time, is that the gods are constitutionally unable to make themselves visible, and thus require their worshippers to not just create images, but to become the images of the gods. The idols get into circulation ultimately in the bodies and lives of the worshippers.
This leads us into the next question: what does it mean for the idols to have representation?
What kind of representation do they have in the world? And how does it work?
Before we start, it’s worth noting how little attention this particular verse gets in major catechetical treatments. The Catholic Catechism? One page. Thomas Aquinas? Idolatry is closer to superstition and thus not worth much space. Luther’s Larger Catechism? One page. If you want sustained treatment of this commandment, independent from “do not have other gods” commandment, one must turn to John Calvin, who treated it in a sermon all its own.
As far as why there’s such little treatment, I have two hunches, one historical and one theological. The historical hunch is that, following the 8th century debates over icons, the “graven images” element is not as much of a concern among Christians, insofar as God comes to us in the person of Jesus Christ2. God has a face, a face which can be depicted, rendered, adored.
But the theological hunch is that if you treat “graven images” as a subset of “idolatry”, and seeing “idolatry” as primary a matter of worship, it just seems to follow for most of them that if you’re not engaging in idolatry, you’re not making an image. Graven images take care of themselves. I take this in some ways to be akin to the argument that “if you worship God, the moral life takes care of itself”, a position I think is really mistaken.
In the majority of treatments, because “graven images” is part of the 1st commandment, the whole process by which an idol becomes visible gets swallowed up in the question of what it means to worship an idol. In the process, we lose an account of how representation of the gods happens. This seems like a mistake, for two reasons:
Focus on worshipping the idols ignores the larger question of how the idols become routine beyond explicit liturgical worship. Consider Acts 19, in which we are given an account of the silversmiths of Ephesus who get monumentally upset at the deconversions to Artemis worship that is happening. This story is significant because, like Simon the Magician in Acts 8, we get to see some of the dynamics behind the idols, namely the economics. Acts 19 puts this front and center, foregrounding the economic downturn that follows the turn away from Artemis:
23 About that time there arose a great disturbance about the Way. 24 A silversmith named Demetrius, who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought in a lot of business for the craftsmen there. 25 He called them together, along with the workers in related trades, and said: “You know, my friends, that we receive a good income from this business. 26 And you see and hear how this fellow Paul has convinced and led astray large numbers of people here in Ephesus and in practically the whole province of Asia. He says that gods made by human hands are no gods at all. 27 There is danger not only that our trade will lose its good name, but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be discredited; and the goddess herself, who is worshiped throughout the province of Asia and the world, will be robbed of her divine majesty.”
The point to be seen here is that idolatry circulates and becomes visible not just in the specific shrines but as an entire industry. The worship of Artemis doesn’t just depend on one particular locus of worship, but upon a whole worship culture which creates financial incentives for said worship to continue. The same dynamic is present in Paul’s treatment of Gentile idolatry in Romans 1: the images of God have become ensconsed in practices of sex, violence, and cultural norms. As we said last time, the problem with graven images is that the gods become visible in us.
The process by which the image becomes visible, through the bodies and habits of the worshippers, are subject, then, to endless representations. Unlike the Scriptures, which have discrete canonical stories, the gods were subject to endless retellings and amplifications, through the poets and plays of the era. And with those endless retellings came new and novel representations of the virtues of the gods. Granted, most of these virtues depicted are negative: don’t be like Zeus’ lust; don’t be like Chronus and eat your own children.
But the point is that the process of representation of the gods—as seen in Acts—takes place as a cultural presumption, not as a liturgical one. The gods, having been made visible in and through an economic process, now are presupposed as what the culture is. Being a graven image means in turn that the culture becomes an ongoing, mutating retelling of what it is to be a people who worship Artemis, or Baal, or Zeus, not through the temples, but in homes, commerce, and national identity.
Focus on idolatry alone misses the way in which the vices of the gods multiply over time. In Calvin’s treatment of the commandment from Deuteronomy 5:8-10, much of his energy is spent on 5:9-10, which has to do with God’s jealousy and the punishment of graven images over generations. It’s a curious choice, unless we suppose that what’s at stake with graven images is, as Acts suggests, the way a culture is shaped.
In Calvin’s treatment, the world is divided into those who God blesses and those who he does not. Those who are the worshippers of God know God as he truly is: “the perfection and fountain of all wisdom, of all virtue, of all integrity and righteousness.3” As Calvin says here, “There is no wrath in God4”, no violence in God’s essence. Rather, anger is what happens when this true God is rejected, leaving nothing but a fall back into nothingness. This fall does not just affect the initial sin, but all those who will inherit the presumptive culture of those who engage in idolatry.
For Calvin, the whole world is under judgment because of sin, and so, anything short of letting the world collapse under its own weight is gracious. I’m going to put a pin in the question of election here, because I think what he’s getting at is more interesting: that the effects of graven images are known over the third and fourth generations. There’s an important distinction that has to be drawn here between guilt and blame: that one can extend and expand the presumptions of bad things even if one is not responsible for them originating5.
To take one example: when racism takes root in a culture like America, it does affect what Americans do, including those who never owned slaves or don’t actively participate in actions which discriminate according to race6. The effects of the initial sin is spread insofar as I sustain a situation which would have been otherwise had chattel slavery not been an originating sin. The actions which I take, which continue to perpetuate segregated cultural and economic networks, are those which constitute blame, but not guilt. Guilt would be for those who started the fire; blame is for those, through their own actions, expand the harm done by the initial sin.
For Calvin, this distinction between the idolaters and the non-idolaters creates a distinction between the way of God and the way of the idols which in turns makes public what a non-idolatrous life looks like. The idolatrous are folded into a providential act of God making known what the worship of God looks like, by contrast. There’s a way to make this case without building in election of some and not of others, of course: one can just as easily say that this is just how idolatry works—that it replicates through our actions because it is now just part of the culture, and that seeing this requires us to look beyond our own provincial place in the world. But you get the idea.
Once we see the process of engraving, it allows us to not only name things for what they are—blame-making processes of idolatry—but it also gives us some tools for being able to say what might be a remedy. Yes—stop worshipping idols—but attend to the effects that these idols have had and continue to have culturally. Attend to the ways in which they root themselves in our actions and presumptions. And above all, be willing to say that we are blameworthy in the work of representation. For a people committed to the notion that sin replicates itself in the bodies of humanity, to the degree that it becomes a tyrant over humanity (Romans 8), this shouldn’t be news.
Book Club Announcement: As we move toward the deep Fall, it’s time to stake out what our next book club selection will be. Here’s a few options, and if we go with MacIntyre, it’ll look a bit different, as indicated in the choice:
Tell me where we’re going! This is for supporting subscribers, which you can always become here:
Yes, yes—I’m following the Reformed numbering because it allows us to see daylight between idolatry and graven images.
For more on the icon debates among Christians, and why icons were declared to be venerated, but not worshipped (for obvious reasons), see two primary texts: 1) The 7th ecumenical council on the use of icons, and 2) John of Damascus’ Defense Against Those Who Oppose Holy Images. The history of icon use takes place against the backdrop of the rise of Islam in the Middle East, with Muslims forbidding any representation of God. Christians, holding to the incarnation, taught that depiction of the Son, the Second person of the Trinity, was right and good. It’s worth noting that this was largely a conversation occurring in the Middle East portions of Christendom, and thus, the impact of this position was lesser on the European constituents. Thus, it’s understandable that by the 16th century, Calvin wants to offer a qualified defense of keeping the graven images clause intact.
John Calvin’s Sermons on the Ten Commandments, ed. Benjamin Farley, 1980, p. 77.
Ibid., 69. In this, Calvin is just reporting the news from aeons of Christianity. We talked about John Cassian’s treatment of anger in God here.
I’m borrowing this from Ian MacFarland’s helpful treatment of original sin in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology.
I want to signal that race is frequently also a matter of class distinctions. See Jonathan Tran’s Asian Americans and the Spirit of Racial Capitalism.
Interesting observations. I appreciated hearing this commandment analyzed in a somewhat different way.