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Why Making Images of God Is a Form of Idolatry | John Calvin · Reformed Thinking

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  Try to picture Infinity. Not, you know, a symbol, not a
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  vast ocean, but like, actual Infinity.
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  Right, you really can't do it you.
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  Can't. If you ask an artist to paint
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  Infinity, they might draw a Figure 8 symbol or maybe a
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  really long horizon. But.
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  The problem is they aren't painting Infinity.
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  No, they're drawing a shape that points to a concept we can't
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  actually wrap our minds around. Because I mean the canvas itself
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  has borders. Yeah, the paint has physical
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  limits. Right, the second you try to put
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  frame around the limitless, you shrink it down into something
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  fine. The physical medium itself
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  becomes a reduction. You take something totally
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  boundless and well, you lock it into a confined, manageable
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  space. And that's a fundamental
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  contradiction. It is welcome to reformed
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  thinking. Today we are taking a deep dive
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  into the source material to apply that specific
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  contradiction to theology. Because it really is a huge
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  issue. It is our mission today is to
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  examine a staggering, incredibly persistent human phenomenon.
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  We are looking at our relentless, almost obsessive
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  desire to make the invisible God visible.
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  And we are doing this through the lens of John Calvin's
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  Institute of the Christian. Religion we are.
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  Specifically, we're focusing on why it is unlawful to attribute
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  a visible form to God. So if you're joining us on this
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  deep dive, it helps to know where we're coming from.
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  Our theological cards are on the table for you.
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  Yeah, no secrets here. Both of us approach this text
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  from a Protestant Reformed perspective.
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  We adhere to the Westminster Confession of Faith.
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  We do, and we don't read Calvin as just some, I don't know,
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  antique piece of history. No, we read his work as an
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  incredibly sharp diagnosis of human nature.
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  It aligns perfectly with our core convictions about who God
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  is and how God dictates He should be worshipped.
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  So our sources cover a massive amount of ground.
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  Today we'll look at Calvin's scriptural arguments against
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  physical representations of God. We'll also watch him completely
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  dismantle historical counter arguments, like the medieval
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  idea that images act as books for the uneducated.
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  Oh man, his take on that is amazing.
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  And then we are going to look at just how far image veneration
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  went during the Second Council of Nicaea in 787.
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  It got pretty wild. It really did.
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  But let's start with the core theological logic.
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  Why does any visual representation inherently
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  contradict the nature of God? Well, Calvin builds his entire
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  case straight from the Old Testament law.
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  He starts right at the 10 commandments.
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  Right, the second commandment. Yes, God says you shall not make
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  for yourself a graven image, nor any likeness.
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  But Calvin points out that God adds very clear reasons for this
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  prohibition. He doesn't just say don't do it,
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  no. He explains why Calvin brings up
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  Deuteronomy chapter 4. Moses is speaking to the
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  Israelites about the moment God spoke to them at Mount Horeb.
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  Right out of the fire. Yeah, and Moses says you heard a
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  voice, but you saw no form. There was no body.
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  So the lack of a visual was actually the point.
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  Absolutely. Therefore, Moses warns them,
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  take heed to yourselves so that you don't get deceived into
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  making any likeness. God's majesty is sullied.
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  It's totally corrupted when the incorporeal is made corporeal.
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  So it's kind of like trying to put a category 5 hurricane in a
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  matchbox. That's a good way to put it.
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  It's not just too small, it's a lie about what a hurricane
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  actually is. A hurricane is raw, untamable,
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  massive kinetic energy. And a Matchbox is small, static
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  and completely under your control.
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  Right. So by claiming the matchbox
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  represents the hurricane, you are actually lying about the
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  hurricane. It's a lie, but Calvin would
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  argue it's actually much worse than that.
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  How so? Well, a matchbox is still made
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  of matter. God isn't material at all.
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  You're trying to capture the infinite uncreated creator in
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  the medium of creation. Oh, I see.
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  The matchbox diminishes the reality of the storm to the
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  point of total absurdity, and that absurdity is precisely what
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  the prophets mocked in the Old Testament.
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  They did a lot of mocking. They did.
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  Calvin sites the prophet Isaiah, who uses spectacular sarcasm to
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  expose this whole process. Isaiah's description of the idol
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  maker is honestly hilarious. It really is.
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  He describes a guy who goes out to the forest and cuts down a
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  tree, and with half of the wood the guy builds a fire to warm
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  himself. Very practical.
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  Right. He uses some of the coals to
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  bake his bread and roast his meat, and then with the leftover
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  block of wood, literally the scrap material, he carves a God.
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  The Leftovers. Yeah, he sets it up and falls
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  down prostate before it to pray. You can really see the cognitive
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  dissonance Isaiah is pointing out.
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  There for sure. He's basically asking, do you
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  hear yourselves? You just burned the other half
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  of your new God to cook your dinner.
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  It makes no sense. Isaiah wants to wake people up
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  to the complete irrationality of idolatry.
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  Reducing the immeasurable invisible spirit to a puny bit
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  of wood or stone is a fiction. A really unfitting fiction.
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  Yes, and what stands out here is that Calvin shows this isn't
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  just a Jewish critique of paganism, it's a universal
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  truth. Even outside the Bible.
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  Right. It was recognized even by Pagan
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  philosophers who actually paid attention to their own logic.
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  He brings in Seneca, right? Yes, Calvin quotes the Roman
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  philosopher Seneca, as cited by Augustine.
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  What did Seneca say? Well, Seneca looked around at
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  Roman religion and observed that people take the most vile,
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  ignoble matter and fashion gods out of it.
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  Like base metals and clay? Yeah.
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  He said if these statues actually received breath and
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  came alive and confronted us, we would consider them monsters.
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  They would look like confused, terrifying beasts, like a guy
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  with a bird head or a woman with 100 arms.
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  Terrifying. And yet people bow down to them.
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  This brings up something Calvin notes about the Apostle Paul,
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  too. Right in Acts.
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  Yeah, when Paul Paul was in Athens standing on Mars Hill in
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  Acts 17, he wasn't talking to Jews who had the Torah.
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  He was talking to Greek philosophers.
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  The Stoics and the Epicureans and Paul uses this exact same
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  logic. He says, since we are the
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  offspring of God, we ought not to think that the divine being
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  is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by the art and
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  imagination of mortals. That really destroys the common
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  argument that the prohibition against images was just a
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  temporary cultural rule. You mean the idea that it was
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  only for the Israelites? Yeah, because people claim they
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  were especially prone to superstition.
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  People try to argue that the Jews needed training wheels, but
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  we don't. But Paul applies it to the
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  Greeks. He applies the prohibition to
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  the intellectual elite of Athens.
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  The truth that God cannot be represented by physical matter
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  is universal because it stems from God's eternal essence.
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  When you try to do it, you engage in what Calvin famously
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  calls reducing the immeasurable God to a 5 foot measure.
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  A5 foot measure. You want a God you can manage, a
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  God you can put on a shelf, a God you can look at right at eye
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  level. It's totally a control tactic.
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  It is, but I want to push back a little here on behalf of anyone
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  reading the biblical text closely.
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  OK, let's hear it. Because if God strictly forbids
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  any visible form, and if seeing a form misrepresents his
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  incorporeal nature, why did God himself use visible forms in
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  Scripture? That's the logical next
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  question. I mean, we see a pillar of smoke
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  and fire in the wilderness, we see a burning Bush, we see the
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  Holy Spirit descending in the form of the dove.
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  And what about the cherubim carved on the Ark of the
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  Covenant? Aren't those visible
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  presentations commanded or utilized by God himself?
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  Calvin completely anticipates that defenders of statues and
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  images often point to those specific biblical moments and
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  say, look, God uses physical objects, so we can too.
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  It seems like a fairpoint on the surface.
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  It does, but Calvin provides a brilliant reversal of this
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  argument. He argues that these specific
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  signs were divine accommodations designed to do the exact reverse
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  of what an idol does. Reverse.
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  Yeah, I always invite human curiosity and give the illusion
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  of capturing God. God's signs and Scripture were
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  designed to restrain human minds.
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  OK, how does smirk restrain a mind?
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  Think about the nature of a cloud or thick smoke it
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  obscures. Oh, I see.
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  When God descended on Mount Sinai in fire and smoke, the
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  smoke acted as what Calvin calls a bridle.
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  They kept the minds of the people from penetrating too far.
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  It blocked their view. Yes, it was a visual barrier
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  communicating that God is present, but his essence is
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  incomprehensible and hidden. Even Moses was told he couldn't
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  look upon God's face and live. Precisely, the physical signs
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  told the Israelites. I am here, but you cannot Pierce
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  through to my raw glory. The sign itself communicates A
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  boundary like a big do not pass sign.
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  Exactly. Whoa.
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  Yes, absolutely. What about the dove at the
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  baptism of Jesus? Calvin addresses that directly
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  to the Holy Spirit appeared under the likeness of a dove,
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  yes, but what happened next and. Flew away.
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  It vanished almost instantly. Calvin points out that the
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  fleeting nature of the dove was the whole point.
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  By offering a symbol for just one moment, the faithful were
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  admonished to believe that the Spirit is in vowel.
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  They were taught to be content with His grace and to seek no
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  permanent outward physical representation.
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  If God wanted them to have a statue of a dove to venerate,
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  the Jove would have turned a stone and stayed there, but it
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  vanished. It's a momentary signpost, not a
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  destination, right? But the trickiest one for people
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  defending images is always the Ark of the Covenant.
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  God explicitly commanded the Israelites to carve 2 golden
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  cherubim to sit on top of the mercy seat.
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  They. Always bring that up.
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  People who want statues of Saints in their churches point
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  to this and say, look, God commanded religious sculpture
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  right there in Exodus. Calvin calls the people making
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  that argument raving Mad Men. Wow, he really doesn't mince
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  words. He never does.
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  Calvin asks. What did those statues actually
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  mean? What was their function?
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  They weren't just decorative, no.
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  The text in Exodus says the cherubim were constructed with
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  their wings outspread, covering the mercy seat.
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  Covering it The Ark. Itself was shrouded by a veil
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  hidden deep inside the Holy of Holies, where no one could go
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  except the High Priest once a year.
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  And even then, he had to bring a cloud of incense to further
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  obscure his vision. Yes, the cherubim were formed to
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  veil the mercy seat, barring human eyes in all senses from
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  beholding God. They weren't designed to invite
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  the gays, they were designed to block it.
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  They're basically holy bouncers. That's a great image.
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  They stand guard, covering their own faces as the seraphim do in
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  Isaiah's vision. They signify that the splendor
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  of divine glory is so great that even angels are restrained from
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  a direct gaze. Right.
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  You completely miss the point if you take statues designed to say
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  do not look and use them as justification to carve statues
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  of Saints so you can stare at them.
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  Yes, and to build on that, Calvin adds A theological
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  capstone. He notes that the cherubim
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  belonged to the antiquated tutelage of the law.
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  The Old Covenant system. Right.
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  They were part of a pedagogical system for a specific period in
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  redemptive history and age. He refers to as childish, using
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  Paul's language in Galatians. So that era of physical
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  rudiments has passed. It has now, in the era of the
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  New Covenant, dragging those elements in to justify modern
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  practices makes no biblical sense.
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  I've always wondered about the timeline here because if you
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  read the Apocrypha, like the book of Wisdom, it suggests
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  idolatry started as a grief. Response.
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  The mourning father theory. Yeah, a father mourns his dead
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  child, makes a statue of him to remember him by, and eventually,
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  over generations, that statue starts getting worshipped as a
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  God. Does Calvin agree with that
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  timeline? It sounds plausible, but Calvin
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  actually tears that timeline apart using Genesis.
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  Oh really? He acknowledges that the worship
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  of dead mortals became a huge accelerant for idolatry later
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  on, but he insists the root disease started way earlier.
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  Earlier than the grief statues. Yes, he points out from
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  Scripture that idols were common long before the practice of
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  consecrating the dead to cold. Give me an example.
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  Well, he brings up Rachel stealing her father Laban's
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  household idols. He brings up Joshua, testifying
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  that Tara, the father of Abraham, worshipped false gods.
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  OK. So this is happening very soon
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  after the flood, right? The the timeline from the Book
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  of Wisdom just doesn't hold up to the biblical record.
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  So if it isn't grief, what is the engine driving this?
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  This brings us to 1 of Calvin's most famous and penetrating
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  quotes. He diagnosis the human mind as a
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  perpetual factory of idols. A perpetual factory.
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  It never shuts down there. There are no holidays on the
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  assembly line of the. Human heart.
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  It's continuous because man's mind is full of pride and
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  boldness. It dares to imagine a God
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  according to its own capacity. We want something we can
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  understand. Right.
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  The mind gets uneasy, it feels disconnected.
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  So the mind begets the idol and the hand gives it birth.
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  We conceive of an unreality, and then we try to express that
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  inward conception through outward physical work.
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  Let's look at the ultimate case study for this the golden calf.
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  That's the perfect example the. Israelites are at the base of
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  Mount Sinai. Moses is up on the mountain
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  getting the law. He's gone for 40 days.
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  And they get restless. They do, they go to Aaron and
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  say, make us gods who may go before us.
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  As for this Moses, we do not know what has become of him.
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  Such a wild pivot it. Is now the common misconception
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  is that the Israelites suddenly decided they wanted to worship
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  an Egyptian cow instead of Yahweh.
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  Right, like they just switched religions overnight.
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  Yeah, the Calvin points out that their psychology was much more
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  complex and twisted than that. They didn't forget the plagues.
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  They didn't forget the parting of the Red Sea.
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  They knew the eternal God had liberated them.
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  So what was the issue? Their flesh was uneasy without a
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  physical symbol. They wanted the liberating God
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  to go before them in a tangible, visible form.
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  They needed to see it. Yes, when Aaron finished the
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  calf, he didn't say here is a brand new Egyptian God for you.
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  He said These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out
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  of the land of Egypt. Wow, they were trying to
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  localize Yahweh. They wanted to confine the God
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  of the universe into a golden statue they could see and
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  manage. And Kelvin highlights the
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  psychological trap here. Once a visible form is made, it
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  becomes impossible for the human mind to separate the idol from
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  the deity. The two just merge in the mind.
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  Yeah, people claim. Oh, we know the statue isn't
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  actually God. It just represents him.
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  But Calvin says that's a lie we tell ourselves.
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  It is because as soon as you fashion a physical form, your
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  mind inevitably binds God's presence to it.
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  You fasten God to the object. That's why people end up bowing
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  down to it. If you truly believed it was
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  just a dead piece of wood, you wouldn't pray to it.
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  You wouldn't treat it with solemn reverence, No.
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  Whether it's the Israelites with the golden calf or pagans who
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  believe they're true gods lived in heaven but use statues to
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  access them, the delusion is the same.
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  They all fall into the trap of believing that divine potency
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  somehow dwells in or operates through the physical object.
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  It's a craving for proximity, but a proximity on our terms.
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  If the prophets made it abundantly clear that these
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  physical statues were teachers of falsehood, we have to ask how
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  the medieval church got away with reintroducing them.
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  They couldn't just ignore the Bible entirely.
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  Right. They had to invent a loophole,
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  and that loophole came from Pope Gregory.
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  Yes, he coined the phrase that images are the books of the
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  uneducated. A very famous defense.
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  The argument is essentially, look, these peasants can't read
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  Latin, they can't read the Bible.
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  So we put up stained glass and statues, and those act as visual
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  textbooks to teach them the faith.
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  It sounds pragmatic, almost pastoral on the surface.
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  You can see why it caught on. Yeah, the literacy rates were
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  incredibly low. But Calvin launches an absolute
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  demolition of this defense. Pope Gregory's defense feels to
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  me like a university deciding to teach an advanced, nuanced
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  history course using a grossly inaccurate, heavily
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  fictionalized comic. Book.
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  That's a spot on analogy. The university justifies it by
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  saying while the students struggle with dense historical
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  texts, so this comic book will help them learn.
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  But if the comic book is full of historical errors.
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  False characterizations and fabricated events.
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  It doesn't actually educate the students, it actively misinforms
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  them. They would be better off knowing
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  they are ignorant then walking around confidently believing a
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  lie. That aligns perfectly with
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  Calvin's argument. Drawing on the prophets, he says
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  whatever is learned of God from an image is entirely false.
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  He quotes Jeremiah 10, which says the wood is a doctrine of
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  vanity. He quotes Habakkuk 2, which
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  calls a molten image a teacher of falsehood.
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  So they aren't just bad books. The prophets don't say images
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  are poorly written books. They say they are books filled
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  with lies. They set images in the true God
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  as total contraries. So if the text is false, what
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  exactly is it teaching? Calvin gets pretty fiery about
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  the specific images the Roman Catholic hierarchy the papists
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  in his day were using, doesn't he?
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  He offers a blistering critique. He looks at the statues of
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  Saints and virgins that filled the churches in the 16th century
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  and points out that they're dressed with such obscenity and
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  luxury that brothels show more modesty.
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  He says if anyone modeled themselves after these statues,
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  they would be fit for the lash. So his challenge is, if these
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  are supposedly the books of the holy uneducated masses, could
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  you at least make them look somewhat decent?
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  It's a massive failure on 2 fronts.
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  Theologically, they represent God falsely, and practically
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  they were depicting grotesque moral standards.
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  I want to bring up a loophole that existed in the Eastern
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  Church. The Greek Christians thought
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  they had solved this problem. The flat icons.
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  Yeah, they said OK. No statues, No 3 dimensional
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  graven images. That's idolatry.
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  But flat pictures, icons painted on wood, Those are completely
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  fine. It's quite the distinction.
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  How does Calvin handle that distinction?
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  He refutes it entirely. He calls it a foolish scruple.
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  A foolish scruple. The biblical prohibition against
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  making a likeness covers Craftsman of any kind.
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  Whether you are using a chisel on marble or a brush on a flat
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  piece of wood, you are still attempting to depict the divine
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  majesty through physical means. Which is an insult to God.
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  The medium doesn't validate the idolatry.
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  A2 dimensional idol is still an idol.
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  If statues and paintings are out, and if the uneducated
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  masses truly do need to learn, what does Calvin say should be
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  the books of the uneducated? You can't just say, well let
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  them stay ignorant. Not at all.
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  Calvin argues that the only reason church leadership relied
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  on statues to do the teaching was because the leaders
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  themselves were mute. Mute, meaning they weren't
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  talking. They had stopped preaching the
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  gospel. Calvin points to the true method
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  of instruction, the preaching of the Word.
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  The pulpit. He references Paul telling the
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  Galatians that through true preaching, Christ is depicted
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  before their eyes as crucified. You don't need a wooden cross to
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  understand the atonement if the minister is actually explaining
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  that Christ died to bear our curse and reconcile us to God.
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  1000 Wooden Crosses can't teach you the doctrine of
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  justification by faith. Only the Word can do that.
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  Right. And Calvin adds that God did
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  institute living symbolical images for the church.
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  What are those? Be a physical science given to
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  us by Christ himself. Baptism in the Lord's Supper?
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  Yes, these are the physical elements God ordained to
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  intensely grip our eyes and our senses, accompanied by the
• 19:24
  preached Word. We don't need to forge new
• 19:27
  images through human ingenuity when God has already provided
• 19:30
  precisely what we need to accommodate our weakness.
• 19:33
  When the educational defense falls apart.
• 19:35
  When it's clear that these statues are teaching falsehoods,
• 19:38
  the defenders pivot. They always have a backup plan.
• 19:41
  They move into the realm of technical theological language
• 19:44
  to excuse their behavior. They see people kneeling,
• 19:47
  praying and kissing statues and they have to explain it away.
• 19:50
  They introduce a distinction between two Greek words, latria
• 19:54
  and dulia. Let's breakdown latria and
• 19:57
  dulia. What do these terms mean in
• 19:58
  practice? The defenders claim that latria
• 20:01
  is the supreme worship that belongs exclusively to God.
• 20:05
  Dulia, on the other hand, just means service, veneration, or
• 20:08
  honor. OK, so how did they apply that?
• 20:10
  So their argument was we aren't giving latria to the statue.
• 20:13
  We know it's wood, we're only giving it dulia.
• 20:16
  We are honoring the Saint it represents, acting as servants
• 20:19
  to the image, not worshipping it.
• 20:21
  We are just honoring it, not worshipping it.
• 20:23
  It sounds like a clever legal defense.
• 20:26
  Your honor, my client didn't steal the car, he just subjected
• 20:29
  it to unauthorized long term vehicular relocation.
• 20:34
  Calvin absolutely mocks this Greek word play.
• 20:37
  He says it's like a murderer or an adulterer trying to escape
• 20:40
  guilt by giving their prime a different name.
• 20:42
  You can't change the nature of an action just by slapping a
• 20:46
  different label on it. He points out that the Greek
• 20:48
  word latcherin literally means to worship, so when they say
• 20:53
  they give it duly instead of latria, they are essentially
• 20:56
  confessing that they worship the images, but without worship.
• 20:59
  It's a logical contradiction. Because the actions are
• 21:01
  identical to Pagan idolatry. Everyday historical reality for
• 21:05
  me. How does this actually look to
• 21:07
  the peasant in the Pew? Think about the lived experience
• 21:10
  of a 14th century peasant. They are told there's a
• 21:12
  distinction between latria and dulia, but what do they actually
• 21:15
  do? Right.
• 21:16
  What are their actions? They walk into a cathedral,
• 21:18
  light a candle, kneel on the stone floor before a wooden
• 21:22
  carving of Saint Christopher, and pray for safe travel.
• 21:25
  They leave an offering. Sounds like worship to me.
• 21:27
  They take a long, arduous pilgrimage just to see a
• 21:31
  specific statue in a specific town, even if they have a
• 21:35
  replica of that same statue back home, Calvin says.
• 21:38
  You don't do those things unless you superstitiously believe the
• 21:41
  object use you or has some localized power.
• 21:44
  Human behavior betrays human belief.
• 21:47
  You can write all the theological treatises you want
• 21:49
  about the difference between latrie and dulia, but the
• 21:52
  peasant bowing before the statue of a St. is treating it like a
• 21:55
  localized deity. To trace this historically,
• 21:58
  Calvin points out a massive, undeniable fact.
• 22:01
  For the first 500 years of the Christian Church, the buildings
• 22:05
  were entirely empty of images. 500 years, That's a long time.
• 22:09
  A very long time. That's the entire Patristic era,
• 22:11
  the era of the Great Councils, the era of Augustine.
• 22:14
  No images. What did early house church
• 22:16
  worship actually look like? It's vital to understand the
• 22:19
  contrast. In the first few centuries,
• 22:21
  Christianity was an illegal, persecuted religion.
• 22:25
  Christians met in catacombs, homes or simple, unadorned
• 22:27
  halls. They didn't have massive budgets
• 22:29
  for art. True, but when pagans looked at
• 22:32
  them, they thought Christians were atheists because they
• 22:34
  didn't have statues. Roman temples were packed with
• 22:37
  towering marble deities, gold incense and physical spectacles.
• 22:41
  And what did the Christians have?
• 22:43
  Christians just had the reading of Scripture, prayer, singing
• 22:46
  and the Lord's Supper, Calvin says.
• 22:48
  The early church fathers didn't lack images because they were
• 22:51
  ignorant or lazy or poor. They deliberately kept them out
• 22:54
  because they recognized the danger.
• 22:57
  O How did the transition happen? How do we get from empty rooms
• 23:01
  to cathedrals packed with gold leafed statues?
• 23:05
  It was a gradual shift that really accelerated after the
• 23:07
  Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity in the 4th century.
• 23:10
  When it became mainstream. Suddenly, the church is flooded
• 23:13
  with Pagan converts who are used to physical objects of worship.
• 23:17
  Over the next few centuries, church leaders slowly caved to
• 23:19
  the cultural pressure. It was a slippery slope.
• 23:22
  Very slippery. What started as simple painted
• 23:24
  murals depicting historical events slowly evolved.
• 23:28
  Murals became mosaics, mosaics became flat icons, flat icons
• 23:32
  became reliefs, and release became full 3 dimensional
• 23:35
  statues. And the theology changed with
• 23:38
  it. Calvin argues it was only when
• 23:41
  doctrine began to decline, when the purity of the ministry
• 23:44
  degenerated, that images were introduced under the guise of
• 23:47
  adornment. It was a symptom of a deeper
• 23:50
  theological decay. I think we need to make a quick
• 23:53
  clarification here, just so we don't paint Calvin as a complete
• 23:56
  killjoy Good idea. He doesn't hate art.
• 23:59
  He isn't saying that all sculpture and painting are
• 24:01
  inherently evil. Right, not at all.
• 24:03
  He explicitly calls sculpture and painting gifts from God.
• 24:07
  He seeks a pure and legitimate use of them.
• 24:10
  He just sets strict limits based on the biblical texts.
• 24:13
  Art is wonderful for depicting histories, past events, or
• 24:16
  physical bodies for pleasure and observation.
• 24:18
  So you can paint a landscape. Yes, or a portrait of a person
• 24:22
  or a historical scene. But you must never attempt to
• 24:25
  depict the divine majesty. Keep the invisible God out of
• 24:29
  your physical medium. Because doing so degrades God's
• 24:32
  glory and inevitably leads the human heart into superstition.
• 24:36
  To prove just how dangerous the slippery slope is, Calvin points
• 24:40
  us to the Second Council of Nicaea Hell in the year 787.
• 24:44
  This is a wild story. It is now.
• 24:46
  This is 800 years before Calvin's time, but the madness
• 24:50
  of this council perfectly illustrates what happens when
• 24:53
  institutions decide they want their idols and then try to
• 24:56
  twist Scripture to justify them. It's a dark, almost comical
• 25:00
  chapter in church history. Let's look at the context.
• 25:03
  Empress Irene of the Byzantine Empire convened this council.
• 25:06
  She was the one in charge. She was a massive proponent of
• 25:09
  image veneration. The Empire had been fractured by
• 25:12
  the Iconoclast controversy. That's the people smashing
• 25:15
  icons, right? Right.
• 25:16
  And Irene wanted to mandate the veneration of images once and
• 25:19
  for all. So she gathers these bishops,
• 25:22
  and the sociopolitical pressure to rubber stamper theology is
• 25:26
  immense. I can imagine you don't want to
• 25:28
  upset the Empress. Calvin uses a refutation written
• 25:31
  by Charlemagne a few years later to expose the arguments made by
• 25:34
  the bishops at this council, and the way they handled Scripture
• 25:37
  is shocking. It's shocking to see religious
• 25:40
  leaders contort the Bible to mandate practices they already
• 25:43
  want to do. It's like they decided on the
• 25:44
  conclusion first. We want to worship images.
• 25:47
  Right, and then they did a keyword search in their Bibles
• 25:50
  for anything related to seeing, looking, or physical objects.
• 25:54
  John the Legate of the Easterns quoted Genesis 1.27.
• 25:58
  God created man in his image, and from that he concluded that
• 26:02
  churches must have physical statues.
• 26:04
  What That verse is about human beings reflecting God's
• 26:08
  character, not a mandate for ecclesiastical arts and crafts.
• 26:11
  It gets worse. He also quoted the Song of
• 26:14
  Solomon. Show me thy face, for it is
• 26:16
  beautiful to justify statues. That's poetry about a bride.
• 26:20
  Yes, another Bishop trying to prove that images should be
• 26:23
  placed on altars quoted Jesus saying no one lights a Lantern
• 26:27
  and puts it under a bushel. Jesus said do not hide your
• 26:29
  lamp. Therefore, we must put statues
• 26:31
  of Saints on the Communion table.
• 26:33
  The gymnastics required to make that leap are staggering.
• 26:36
  You read the transcript of this council and you're baffled by
• 26:39
  the defense's logic. And to justify the veneration,
• 26:42
  the actual bowing down to these objects, they pointed to Jacob
• 26:45
  setting up a pillar in Genesis, or Jacob bowing to the top of
• 26:48
  Joseph's rod. They took historical
• 26:50
  descriptions of patriarchal actions and weaponized them as
• 26:53
  commands for image worship. But Calvin notes that it didn't
• 26:56
  start with just bad hermeneutics.
• 26:59
  It escalated into outright blasphemy.
• 27:01
  Yes, Theodoshius the Bishop of Amorium, pronounced an official
• 27:06
  anathema. Meaning a formal curse that
• 27:08
  essentially kicks you out of the church and condemns you, right?
• 27:12
  He pronounced this against anyone who is unwilling to adore
• 27:14
  images. Another Bishop literally blamed
• 27:18
  all the military and social miseries of Greece on the fact
• 27:21
  that they hadn't been worshipping images enough.
• 27:23
  Flaming national tragedy on a lack of idolatry You couldn't
• 27:27
  invent a more complete inversion of the Old Testament prophets.
• 27:30
  It's completely upside down. The prophet said Israel fell
• 27:33
  because they worshipped idols. This Bishop says Greece is
• 27:36
  falling because they aren't worshipping idols enough.
• 27:38
  It's 180° turn from biblical theology and then you have
• 27:42
  Constantius, the Bishop of Cyprus.
• 27:44
  He publicly declared that he was going to show toward images the
• 27:48
  exact same worship and honor that is owed to the life giving
• 27:51
  Trinity. He gave statues the same honor
• 27:53
  as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
• 27:55
  So much for the careful distinction between latry and
• 27:57
  dulia. He just threw the Greek word
• 27:59
  play right out the window. He admitted what was actually
• 28:01
  happening in practice and perhaps the most shocking
• 28:04
  statement came from John the Leggett again.
• 28:06
  What did he say? He declared on the record that
• 28:09
  it would be better to admit all the brothels into the city than
• 28:13
  to deny the worship of images. That is breathtaking.
• 28:16
  Better to fill the city with institutionalized prostitution
• 28:19
  than to take down a wooden statue.
• 28:22
  The council concluded by determining that those who
• 28:24
  oppose images are worse than heretics and worse than the
• 28:28
  Samaritans. They legally mandated idolatry
• 28:30
  and cursed anyone who adhered to the 1st 2 commandments.
• 28:33
  Galvin uses this council to say, look at where the logic of
• 28:37
  images inevitably leads. It leads to the total
• 28:40
  abandonment of biblical reason and the mandate of blasphemy.
• 28:43
  It's a terrifying case study in institutional drift.
• 28:47
  When you start trying to manage the unmanageable God, you
• 28:49
  eventually go mad. You really do.
• 28:52
  Let's recap the trajectory of what we've covered today.
• 28:55
  We started with God's strict prohibition.
• 28:58
  The finite can never represent the infinite.
• 29:00
  Any attempt to put a category 5 hurricane in a matchbox is a
• 29:04
  lie. A total misrepresentation.
• 29:06
  From there, we looked at the psychological route.
• 29:09
  Our minds are a perpetual factory of idols, constantly
• 29:13
  looking to localize God because our flesh is uneasy with the
• 29:16
  invisible. We want what we can see.
• 29:19
  We saw how institutions tried to justify this with the books of
• 29:22
  the uneducated defense covering up the fact that they had
• 29:25
  stopped preaching the word the. Bull beds went silent.
• 29:28
  We saw the linguistic shell games of Latria and dulia, and
• 29:32
  what that actually looked like for a peasant on the ground.
• 29:35
  And finally, we saw the historical disaster of Nicaea,
• 29:38
  where leaders bent scripture to validate their own superstitious
• 29:41
  cravings to the point of outright blasphemy.
• 29:44
  You know, reading Calvin on this topic forces a mirror right up
• 29:47
  to our own faces. It does.
• 29:49
  It's easy to look at the Second Council of Nicaea or the
• 29:52
  Israelites with the golden calf and feel superior.
• 29:55
  We might think, well, I don't carve wood.
• 29:57
  I don't bow down to statues of Saints in my living room.
• 30:00
  We think we're past all that. But the mental impulse that
• 30:03
  drove them is the identical impulse inside of us.
• 30:06
  The perpetual factory of idols is still running.
• 30:09
  Which leaves you with a final thought to chew on.
• 30:12
  If Calvin is right about human nature, and the biblical record
• 30:15
  strongly suggests he is, we are always trying to shrink the
• 30:19
  incomprehensible God into a manageable 5 foot measure.
• 30:22
  We can't help ourselves. So what mental images or
• 30:25
  ideological statues are you building today?
• 30:29
  We might not use wood and stone, but how are you trying to make
• 30:32
  the invisible, untamable God fit neatly into the confines of your
• 30:35
  own human logic, your political preferences, or your cultural
• 30:39
  comfort zones? That's a challenging question.
• 30:41
  Because an idol made of concepts can obscure the true God just as
• 30:44
  effectively as an idol made of gold.
• 30:46
  Thank you for joining us on Reformed Thinking for this deep
• 30:49
  dive into the source material. We'll see you next time.