Exodus 20:4-5—"'You shall not make yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous god . . .'"
Deuteronomy 4:15-19—"You saw no form of any kind the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the fire. Therefore watch yourselves very carefully, so that you do not become corrupt and make for yourselves an idol, an image of any shape, whether formed like a man or a woman, or like any animal on earth or any bird that flies in the air, or like any creature that moves along the ground or any fish in the waters below. And when you look up to the sky and see the sun, the moon and the stars—all the heavenly array—do not be enticed into bowing down to them and worshiping things the Lord your God has apportioned to all the nations under heaven."
It is making an image to worship the depicted being that is idolatrous, for God has no physical form as the uncaused cause ("You saw no form of any kind"; Genesis 1:1, John 4:24); though a true deity could hypothetically fashion a body for itself, an uncaused cause is not corporeal, as it is what set in motion the causal chain that led to the creation of material substance in the first place. Hence, the idol capturing the form of a man or woman or any kind of non-human animal misrepresents the nature of God, making it unsuitable as an aid for direct worship. Exodus 20 outright says that idols should not be worshiped or shown reverence, so the context is not about making or appreciating images being otherwise evil, and Deuteronomy contrasting the forbidden images with the formless nature of God, along with the subsequent condemnation of worshiping celestial bodies, clearly establishes that image worship rather than designing any image is sinful.
Crafting a sculpture of a man or woman or any other lesser animal (Genesis 1:26-27) to depict creation apart from idolatrous motives is not condemned. Neither is allowing an artistic form of what one recognizes as something other than God to compel one to worship the uncaused cause, from which all contingent things directly or indirectly derive, Biblically immoral. Once again, every prohibition of images in the Torah is about images intended for use as idols. A sculpture of animal forms—and humans are indeed animals—designed for a purpose such as artistic expression or educational usage is not at all what the Ten Commandments or any corresponding portion of broader Yahweh's Torah laws declare evil.
To worship an idol is to worship the likeness of a contingent physical creature or object rather than the immaterial uncaused cause (Romans 1:22-25), the supreme being [1]. However splendorous the creature or natural world is, it falls far short of the divine glory. Idolatry of this kind, where the practice is intentionally done to treat nature and the animals within it if they are really divine, is inside and outside of Judeo-Christianity utter folly. By logical necessity, it is invalid. Biblical philosophy does not even have to be true for the practice to be stupid! Using a graven image as an object of worship is a baseless activity at best.
It is humans who actually carry the divine "image" (Genesis 1:27), yet worshiping people is not permissible because they are not God (Deuteronomy 13:6-10, 17:2-5) despite being god-like by virtue of being created by God to reflect his own image (Genesis 5:1-2, John 10:34-36). How much further removed from the likeness of God are graven images! The sin of idolatry still does not change the fact that an image like a sculpture does not have to be intended or actually used for idolatry. All images do not inherently fall within the category of a forbidden representation of something from the physical world. Exodus 20 itself does not leave this unspecified.
[1]. See here:
No comments:
Post a Comment