What About Graven Images?

A painting of Christ knocking at a door

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth; we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.”

John 1:14

Walk into a Catholic church and the first thing many visitors notice is what a Kingdom Hall and most Protestant chapels have carefully excluded: images. Statues of Mary and the saints, a crucifix over the altar, windows full of figures, perhaps a relic beneath the altar stone. To millions of sincere Christians — and to every Jehovah’s Witness — the sight reads as an open violation of one of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image.” The charge is among the oldest against the Church, it comes with a companion accusation — that Catholic catechisms renumber the commandments to hide the offense — and it lands with special force on a former Witness, who was taught from childhood that the statues themselves settle the question of which religion is false.

The hero image above is part of the answer this page will give. It is a picture of Christ — and the reader who feels nothing wrong in looking at it has already conceded more than the objection can afford. The verse beside it says why: the God who once had no form has taken one. Whether that changes what the commandment forbids, what the same Torah that gave the commandment did with cherubim and a bronze serpent, who really numbers the commandments the way Rome does, and what Scripture itself shows about relics — all of that is the business of the two panels below.

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Protestant & Watchtower View

Jump to the Catholic View ↓

The objection begins where it should: with the commandment itself, quoted whole. “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God” (Ex. 20:4–5). Making, bowing, serving: three verbs, all forbidden. A church full of carved figures, with candles burning before them and worshipers kneeling toward them, appears to be doing all three.1

The God Who Showed No Form

Nor is the command arbitrary. Moses reminds Israel of its reason: “you saw no form” at Horeb — God spoke from the fire precisely without a shape, lest His people corrupt themselves by making one (Deut. 4:15–16). The God of Israel distinguished Himself from every pagan neighbor exactly here: their temples held statues, His held an empty mercy seat. Worship, on this view, is to be driven by the ear — the word preached and heard — not the eye.2

The Renumbered Commandments

The companion charge concerns the catechism. Catholic (and Lutheran) enumerations fold the image prohibition into the first commandment and recover the count of ten by splitting the command against coveting in two. The effect, critics observe, is that a child memorizing the Catholic list never meets “you shall not make for yourself a graven image” as a commandment of its own — the ban most embarrassing to Catholic practice is the one that vanished from the numbering.3

A Distinction Without a Difference

Rome answers with a distinction: adoration (latria) belongs to God alone, while images and saints receive only veneration (dulia). The objection is that the distinction lives in textbooks, not in pews. The peasant kissing the statue’s foot, the procession carrying the image through the streets, the miraculous powers attributed to this particular Madonna rather than that one — these are, in observable practice, worship. And Scripture shows that a worshiper’s intentions do not sanitize the act: Aaron built the golden calf and proclaimed “a feast to the LORD” (Ex. 32:5) — the idolaters thought they were honoring the true God through the image, and three thousand died for it.4

The Early Church Knew Better

History supports the objection. The council of Elvira in Spain, around the year 306, ruled that pictures ought not to be in churches, “lest what is worshiped and adored be depicted on the walls” — evidence that the pre-Constantinian Church shared Israel’s instinct. And when images later multiplied, it was Christians themselves — the Byzantine iconoclast emperors and their bishops — who fought for a century to remove them. The controversy was settled at Nicaea in 787 not by exegesis, critics note, but by imperial politics and a restored empress.5

The Relic Trade

Relics complete the indictment. Medieval Europe venerated enough fragments of the true cross, Calvin jeered, to fill a ship’s hold, along with rival heads of the same saints and vials of the Virgin’s milk. Whatever theory stands behind the practice, the practice itself bred fraud, commerce, and superstition on a scale the Church did not control — and a devotion that generates that industry, the Protestant concludes, is not a devotion God commanded.6

Endnotes
  1. Exodus 20:4–5, RSV; the parallel is Deuteronomy 5:8–9. ↩
  2. Deuteronomy 4:15–18. ↩
  3. Compare the enumeration in the Catechism of the Catholic Church (§§2083–2557) with the Reformed numbering in the Westminster and Heidelberg catechisms, where the image prohibition stands alone as the second commandment. ↩
  4. Exodus 32:1–6, 28. The Heidelberg Catechism presses the point: God will not have His people taught by images, but by the living preaching of His word (Q. 96–98). ↩
  5. Council of Elvira, canon 36; on the iconoclast controversy, see any standard history of the Byzantine church. ↩
  6. John Calvin, A Treatise on Relics (1543). ↩

Catholic View

Grant the grievances first. Relic frauds were real, and the trade in them was a scandal; the Council of Trent, with the Reformers’ charges on the table, ordered the bishops by name to root out superstition and profiteering from the veneration of images and relics. Elvira’s canon is real. And the peasant whose devotion has drifted from honor into magic is not a Protestant invention; he is a catechetical failure the Church herself has legislated against for centuries. None of that is the question. The question is whether the commandment forbids what the Church actually teaches and does — and the first witness against that reading is the rest of the Torah.

The Commandment That Kept Company with Cherubim

Read the sentence whole: make, bow, serve — the three verbs describe one act, the manufacture of a god to worship. That the ban was never on religious imagery as such is proved by the Lawgiver Himself, in the same books: two golden cherubim of hammered work were commanded for the very ark of the covenant (Ex. 25:18), cherubim were woven into the tabernacle’s curtains and carved through Solomon’s temple with oxen and lions — a building God filled with His glory rather than struck with lightning — and when Israel was dying of serpent bites, God commanded Moses to make an image, a bronze serpent, and told the people to look at it and live (Num. 21:8–9). Then, centuries later, when that same serpent had become an object of offerings, King Hezekiah smashed it, and the Scripture praises him (2 Kings 18:4). There is the whole Catholic doctrine in one Old Testament object: the image commanded, the image used for blessing, and the image destroyed the moment it was worshiped. The line runs not between having images and refusing them, but between honor and adoration — exactly where the Church draws it.1

Who Hid the Commandment? Ask Luther

The renumbering charge has a short answer with a Lutheran accent. The Hebrew text numbers nothing; Scripture calls the Decalogue “the ten words” and leaves the dividing to us, which is why three counting traditions exist — the Jewish, which makes “I am the LORD” the first word; the Augustinian, followed by Rome, which reads the image clause as explication of “no other gods” and finds two commandments in the long coveting text of Deuteronomy; and the division used by the Reformed churches. Augustine proposed his division a thousand years before anyone had a statue controversy to hide. And the decisive detail: Martin Luther’s own Small Catechism — the formation text of Protestantism’s first church — numbers the commandments exactly as Rome does. If the numbering buries idolatry, Luther buried it too. Meanwhile the Catholic Catechism prints Exodus 20:4 in full, twice, and devotes an article to what it forbids — an odd way to hide a verse.2

“You Saw No Form” — Until You Did

The strongest Protestant argument is Deuteronomy’s: Israel saw no form at Horeb, so Israel must portray none. The Catholic answer is that the argument proves exactly as much as it says, and no more. Israel could not portray the unseen God without inventing Him — every image would have been a lie about a form He had not taken. But “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us… we have beheld his glory” (John 1:14). Christ is “the image [eikōn] of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15); “he who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). The God who once had no form has taken one, and was seen, touched, and remembered by eyewitnesses. That is why the Church of the seventh ecumenical council — Nicaea II, in 787, three centuries before East and West divided — ruled that images of Christ and His saints may be venerated: to refuse every image of Christ, the council saw, is quietly to doubt that He truly came in the flesh. The fathers’ principle, quoted to this day in the Catechism from St. Basil, guards the practice from the abuse: “the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype.” Honor a picture of the King, and it is the King you honor; burn one, and it is the King you insult — a logic every nation with a flag already understands.3

Bowing, Kissing, and the Golden Calf

Does the pew abolish the distinction? Then it abolishes it everywhere. A Protestant who kisses his Bible, weeps over a photograph of his mother, or would be sickened to see the flag burned is not worshiping paper, emulsion, or cloth; he knows, without a theology lecture, that regard passes through an object to what it stands for. Scripture treats bowing the same way: Solomon bows to his mother Bathsheba (1 Kings 2:19) and Israel bows before the ark — honor, not adoration, and no prophet objects. As for the golden calf, it convicts the wrong defendant: Aaron’s feast failed not because the intention was impure but because the calf was made to be the god who brought Israel out of Egypt — a manufactured object offered sacrifice as divine. That is latria given to a creature, the exact thing Catholic teaching forbids toward every image, saint, and angel; the Mass has never once been offered to a statue. The calf is not a counter-example to the Catholic distinction. It is the case the distinction exists to condemn.4

What Relics Are, and What Scripture Does with Bodies

Strip the frauds away — the Church prosecutes them too — and ask what the practice itself claims: that the bodies of the holy are honorable, and that God is pleased to work through matter that has touched His friends. That is not medieval; it is biblical data. A dead man thrown into Elisha’s grave “touched the bones of Elisha” and “revived, and stood on his feet” (2 Kings 13:21). The sick were laid where Peter’s shadow might fall (Acts 5:15). “Handkerchiefs or aprons were carried away from his body to the sick, and diseases left them” (Acts 19:12) — Paul’s work clothes, functioning precisely as relics, recorded by Luke without a word of censure. A religion whose God raises the dead through a prophet’s bones has no principled quarrel left with the reverent keeping of a martyr’s. The quarrel is with abuses — and there the Church, at Trent and since, is on the objector’s side.5

Elvira, and What the Catacombs Were Already Doing

One local Spanish synod did restrict church pictures — and in the same generation, the Christians of Rome were painting Jonah, Daniel, the Good Shepherd, and the raising of Lazarus on the walls of the catacombs, over the very tombs of their martyrs, wherever persecution gave them walls of their own. The archaeological record does not show an aniconic early Church that later fell; it shows Christian art as old as Christian burial, one cautious council notwithstanding. The iconoclast century proves the same thing in reverse: it took imperial decrees and a persecution to remove the images the faithful already loved — and when the dust settled, an ecumenical council of the undivided Church had defined why they were right to love them. Veneration of the saints themselves — the praying, the interceding, the communion behind the statues — is its own question, answered on the Communion of Saints page; this page’s conclusion is narrower: the commandment Rome is accused of breaking is the commandment Rome’s own Scriptures, cherubim and serpent and handkerchiefs included, will not let mean what the accusation needs.6

The full essay walks the whole question: the commandment in its own context, the images God commanded, the three numbering traditions with Luther’s catechism laid beside Rome’s, the Incarnation and Nicaea II, the golden calf, and the biblical record on relics. Download it from the summary below — and the comments are open, anonymously if you prefer.

Endnotes
  1. Exodus 25:18–20; 26:1; 1 Kings 6:23–35; 7:25–36; 8:10–11; Numbers 21:8–9; 2 Kings 18:4. ↩
  2. “The ten words”: Exodus 34:28; Deuteronomy 4:13. Augustine, Questions on Exodus 71, for his division; Luther’s Small Catechism (1529) follows the same enumeration. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§2083–2141, quoting Exodus 20:4 in full and treating the image question directly at §§2129–2132. ↩
  3. John 1:14; Colossians 1:15; John 14:9. Second Council of Nicaea (787); Catechism of the Catholic Church §2132, quoting Basil, On the Holy Spirit 18, 45: “the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype.” ↩
  4. 1 Kings 2:19; Joshua 7:6; Exodus 32:1–8 — note verse 4: “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” ↩
  5. 2 Kings 13:21; Acts 5:15; Acts 19:11–12 (RSV); cf. Matthew 9:20–22. Council of Trent, Session XXV, on removing “all superstition” and “all filthy lucre” from the veneration of relics and images. ↩
  6. Council of Elvira (c. 306), canon 36; on the catacomb frescoes of the third century, see any standard survey of early Christian art — the Jonah cycles and Good Shepherd of the Catacombs of Callixtus and Priscilla among the earliest. ↩

Summary

The commandment forbids manufactured gods, and the Lawgiver proved it with His own decor. The same Torah that says “you shall not make… or bow down or serve” commanded golden cherubim for the ark, wove them into the tabernacle, filled Solomon’s image-carved temple with the divine glory, and prescribed a bronze serpent for Israel to look upon and live. When that serpent was later worshiped, Hezekiah destroyed it — and Scripture praises him. Image commanded; image used for blessing; image smashed the moment it received worship. That is the Catholic distinction, drawn by the Old Testament itself.

Ask Luther who hid the second commandment. The Hebrew text numbers nothing — Scripture counts “ten words” and leaves the dividing to us, which is why Jews, Catholics, and the Reformed all divide differently. Augustine’s division predates any statue controversy by a thousand years, and Luther’s own Small Catechism numbers exactly as Rome does. The Catholic Catechism prints the graven-image clause in full and devotes an article to it — a strange way to bury a verse.

“You saw no form” was true — until the Word became flesh. Israel could not portray the unseen God without inventing Him. But Christ is “the image of the invisible God,” seen, touched, and remembered. The seventh ecumenical council — of the undivided Church, centuries before East and West split — drew the conclusion: to refuse every image of Christ is quietly to doubt the Incarnation. And its guardrail still stands in the Catechism, from St. Basil: the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype. Anyone who kisses a Bible, keeps a photograph, or salutes a flag already understands.

The golden calf convicts the wrong defendant. The calf was made to be the god who brought Israel out of Egypt — sacrifice offered to a manufactured divinity. That is precisely what Catholic teaching forbids toward every image, saint, and angel; the Mass has never been offered to a statue. The calf is not a counter-example to the distinction. It is what the distinction condemns.

Relics are a biblical category, and the abuses were prosecuted — by the Church. A corpse revived at the touch of Elisha’s bones; the sick laid in Peter’s shadow; Paul’s handkerchiefs carrying healing, recorded by Luke without censure. A God who works through a prophet’s bones leaves no principled objection to honoring a martyr’s — and the frauds Calvin mocked, Trent ordered rooted out by name.

For a more complete essay on this topic, download What About Graven Images? (.docx) or (.pdf)

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