Aren’t statues and icons forbidden images?

01Your verse first

“Thou shalt not make to thyself a graven thing”

“‘You shall not make for yourselves an idol, nor any image of anything that is in the heavens above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: you shall not bow yourself down to them, nor serve them, for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and on the fourth generation of those who hate me,”

Read fairly: God forbids making images and bowing to them. Statues in churches and people kneeling before icons look like exactly what the commandment forbids.

Catholics agree idolatry is forbidden. Look at what else God commanded.

02The Catholic reading

Images God commanded

Already in the Old Testament, the Catechism says, God ordered or permitted images that pointed toward salvation: the bronze serpent, the ark of the covenant, and the cherubim.²

“The LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a venomous snake, and set it on a pole. It shall happen that everyone who is bitten, when he sees it, shall live.’ Moses made a serpent of bronze, and set it on the pole. If a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked at the serpent of bronze, he lived.”

Jesus Himself pointed to that serpent as a sign of His own cross.⁹ Solomon’s Temple had cherubim and palm trees carved on its walls.¹⁰

Then something happened that changed what an image of God could be.

03The turn

The image of the invisible God

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation.”

The Old Law forbade picturing God because Israel saw no form of Him at Horeb.¹

In Christ the invisible God became visible: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”¹² By becoming incarnate, the Catechism says, the Son of God introduced a new “economy” of images, and the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 defended the veneration of icons on that basis.³

So what is happening when a Catholic kneels before a statue?

04The real disagreement

Where we think it lies

Not whether idolatry is wrong; both sides agree on that. The question is whether honor shown to an image stops at the image or passes to the person it shows.

The Church answers that “the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype.” It’s a “respectful veneration,” not the adoration due to God alone. Religious worship isn’t directed to images in themselves, as mere things, but to images as leading us on to God.⁴

A family photograph is a fair comparison. Nobody kisses a photograph of their mother because they think the paper is their mother.

The God who forbade idols also said: make two cherubim. He knew the difference.