HistoricalChristian.Faith

Does the Second Commandment forbid all religious images?

Type: supporting argument (off-timeline) · Assessment: contested — the prohibition is strong and well-grounded where it targets images of God and images that are bowed to and served (Deut 4:15–16; the Nehushtan precedent), and weak where it is stretched into a blanket ban on sacred imagery as such, since God himself commanded the ark's cherubim, the temple carvings, and the bronze serpent. Whether the veneration of icons counts as the forbidden “bowing and serving” is the unresolved crux — and that turns on the latria/dulia distinction weighed separately. · classic proponent: John Calvin.

Related arguments: the charge of idolatry — see also Is the veneration–worship (dulia/latria) distinction a real difference?

The claim

“The majesty of God is defiled by an absurd and indecorous fiction, when he who is incorporeal is assimilated to corporeal matter…” And of the scholastic escape: “It is absurd for them to expect that the subtle device of a name” — the split between dulia and latria — “will exculpate them.”

— John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.11, online here. The Reformed contention is that the Second Commandment (Ex 20:4–5) is a standing moral law, not a ceremonial relic; that it forbids not merely idols of pagan gods but the making of any image for religious homage; and that calling the homage “veneration” rather than “worship” does not remove it from the prohibition.

Who advances it

The objection is the anchoring case of the whole Reformed rejection of images, but it is not a sixteenth-century novelty. A strand of early Christian aniconism runs behind it: Origen, answering the pagan Celsus, states flatly that “Christians and Jews are led to avoid temples and altars and images by the command” against other gods, and will die rather than defile their conception of God by such an act. From that patristic wariness the line runs through the medieval Byzantine iconoclasts to Calvin, who gave it its fullest theological voice in Institutes I.11–12, and thence into the confessional Reformed tradition — the Heidelberg Catechism (Q. 96–98) and the Westminster Larger Catechism (Q. 109) both read the commandment as forbidding “the making any representation of God… and the worshipping of it, or God in it or by it.” The practical result was the stripping and whitewashing of the Reformed churches.¹

The evidence for

The plain text bans making and bowing. The commandment is not a single clause but two: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath… Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them” (Ex 20:4–5). On the proponent's reading the two clauses are of a piece: the prohibited making is making for the prohibited bowing and serving. Since the icon is precisely an image made to be bowed to, kissed, and honoured with lights and incense, it falls under the second clause whatever one calls the act.²

Deuteronomy 4 names the ground. The strongest single proof-text is not Exodus but Moses' exposition of it: “Ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the LORD spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire: lest ye corrupt yourselves, and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure” (Deut 4:15–16). The reason images of God are forbidden is that God showed Israel no form to copy: to picture him is to picture a falsehood. This is a targeted argument — it bears with most force against images of God/Christ in his divinity — and it is where the Reformed case is at its sharpest.³

Nehushtan: Scripture's own precedent. The decisive internal-biblical move is the bronze serpent. God himself commanded Moses to make it (Num 21:8–9); it healed by God's power; it was preserved in the temple. Yet centuries later, when Israel “did burn incense to it,” the reforming king Hezekiah “brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made… and he called it Nehushtan” — a mere “piece of brass” (2 Kgs 18:4). Augustine reads the episode exactly so: the serpent was “preserved intact in memory of the miracle but afterwards was worshiped as an idol by the unfaithful people until King Hezekiah… destroyed it.” The Protestant conclusion: a sacred object of impeccable, divinely-commanded origin still became idolatry once it was venerated, and the godly response was to destroy it, not to distinguish its honour.⁴

Early Christian reticence about images of the divine. The proponent can appeal past the medieval defenders to an earlier layer. Origen tells Celsus that Christians shun “images” on principle; and in his homily on this very commandment he expounds it as forbidding not only the idol proper but “a likeness of all things that are in the earth, and in the waters, and in heaven.” That figural Christian art is hard to attest before the third century, and that several early writers are wary of picturing the divine, is a real datum on this side of the ledger.⁵

Adversarial assessment

What holds. As a reading of what the commandment primarily targets, the objection is on firm ground. The second clause really does forbid bowing to and serving images, and Deut 4:15–16 really does ground the ban on images of God in the fact that Israel saw no form — so an image presented as God, or given the devotion due God, is squarely condemned. The Nehushtan precedent is genuine and pointed: it shows from within Scripture that even a God-commanded sacred object can decay into an idol through the cult that grows up around it, and that the remedy can be destruction. And the early church's caution about images of the divine is a real historical fact the defenders must accommodate, not wish away.

Where it is overstated. The objection overreaches when the first clause is read as a blanket ban on making religious images as such, for Scripture itself refutes that reading. In the same law, God commands the two golden cherubim over the mercy-seat — sculpted figures placed in the very Holy of Holies, at the focal point of Israel's worship (Ex 25:18–20). Solomon's temple, built by divine sanction, was carved throughout with “cherubims and palm trees and open flowers” and held two olive-wood cherubim ten cubits high (1 Kgs 6:23–29). And the bronze serpent was commanded before it was abused. A God who forbade all cult imagery would not command these; so the commandment cannot be banning the making of sacred images per se. Its target is narrower — images made to be worshipped, images of false gods, and images of the God who showed no form. The defenders' distinction between the licit image (cherub, serpent-as-given) and the illicit one (the serpent-once-incensed, the golden calf) is drawn by the biblical text itself.⁶

Where the real dispute lies. Once the blanket reading is set aside, the argument does not resolve — it relocates. Both sides agree the commandment forbids bowing to and serving an image as one serves God; they disagree over whether the proskynēsis the icon receives is that forbidden act, or a lesser relative honour (dulia) that passes to the prototype. Calvin denies the distinction outright — the “subtle device of a name” cannot exculpate what is functionally worship of a thing; the defenders, from John of Damascus to Bonaventure, insist the honour terminates on the person depicted, not the wood and paint. That crux is not settled by the Decalogue's wording alone, and it is weighed on its own page. The Nehushtan precedent cuts here too, but is double-edged: the serpent was destroyed only when Israel burnt incense to it — i.e. gave it the cult of a god — which the defenders can read as proof that the line falls at worship, not at presence or honour.⁷

Assessment

Contested. The Second-Commandment objection holds decisively against one thing — an image of God presented as God, or an image given the worship due God alone — and Deut 4:15–16 plus the Nehushtan precedent make that a strong, well-grounded case, sufficient on its own to condemn any image-cult that crosses into latria. It fails as a blanket prohibition of sacred imagery, because the same divine law commands the cherubim, the temple carvings, and the serpent; extended that far it contradicts its own author, and the honest reading narrows its target to worship, not manufacture or presence. What remains genuinely undecided is the middle case the whole controversy turns on: whether the veneration offered an icon is the forbidden bowing-and-serving or a distinct relative honour. That question is not answered by this commandment's text and is adjudicated separately under the latria/dulia distinction — which is why the objection, as a total case against image-veneration, rates contested rather than sound or weak. Calvin's own overreach — treating the ban as covering all visible representation, against the counter-commanded cherubim — is flagged on his detail page; the sharper Deuteronomy-4 form of his argument is the one that survives.

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