What about Images? Prayer aids or idols?

Have you ever stood before a sunset so magnificent that words failed you? Perhaps you've held a newborn baby and felt overwhelmed by the perfection of tiny fingers and toes. Or maybe you've walked through an art museum and found yourself inexplicably moved to tears by a painting. In those moments, did you feel like you were touching something beyond the physical—as if the beauty itself was trying to tell you something deeper?

We live in a world caught between two extremes. On one side, we have those who worship creation itself—from crystals and nature worship to the more subtle idolatry of materialism and consumerism. On the other, we find those who, in their zeal to avoid idolatry, strip away all beauty, all imagery, all physical reminders of the divine, leaving us in stark, austere spaces that seem to deny the very goodness of creation itself.

But what if both extremes miss the point entirely?

 

The Danger of Destroying Windows and Statues

The word "iconoclasm" literally means "image breaking." Throughout history, various movements have sought to destroy religious images, statues, and artwork, believing that any physical representation of the divine inevitably leads to idolatry. The logic seems sound enough: if people might worship the image instead of God, then remove the image altogether. Problem solved, right?

Yet this approach contains within it a dangerous seed—the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, which taught that the physical world was inherently evil and only the spiritual realm was good. When we begin to see creation itself as the problem, rather than our disordered relationship with it, we've already taken the first step away from orthodox faith.

Consider how Scripture itself speaks of creation's relationship with the Divine. The Psalmist declares, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands" (Psalm 19:1, NIV). Isaiah tells us that "the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands" (Isaiah 55:12, NIV). Even Jesus said that if his disciples were silent, "the stones would cry out" (Luke 19:40, NIV).

If trees can clap and stones can cry out in praise, then surely the problem isn't with physical things themselves. The problem lies elsewhere.

 

The True Nature of Idolatry

Jeremiah 2:26-28 reveals what's at the heart of idolatry. The prophet delivers God's judgment against Judah for its infidelity, specifically for its foolish exchange of the Creator for the created: "They say to wood, ‘You are my father,’ and to stone, ‘You gave me birth.’ " The language here—addressing wood and stone as the source of life, identity, and protection—is shocking because it transfers the words and devotion that belong only to the Creator God, Yahweh, to inert objects.

The people have committed the ultimate demotion of the Divine and the ultimate promotion of the mundane. The verse explicitly condemns their posture: "They have turned their backs to me and not their faces." This signifies rejection of the covenant because their attention is focused on the created object. Idolatry is not the object's existence, but the usurpation—worshipping a created thing as if it were the Creator.

This passage is in sharp contrast with the innumerable texts that speak of how the same trees and stones praise God!

Isaiah 55:12: "For you shall go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." 

Luke 19:40: "He [Jesus] answered, “I tell you that, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out.”" 

Psalm 98:8: "Let the rivers clap their hands; let the hills sing for joy together." 

Psalm 19:1: "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork." 

Psalm 148:7, 9: "Praise the Lord from the earth, you great sea creatures and all deeps... mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars!" 

This tension speaks to a core theological issue: Scripture speaks of BOTH the goodness of created things and the foolishness of those who make idols of them. The PROPER function of all images, icons, or even trees and the beauty of a human body, is to direct us to God Himself, to serve as windows into the Divine Mystery.

 

The True Nature of Sin

Ezekiel 28, often understood as describing both the King of Tyre and, symbolically, the fall of Satan, provides a crucial insight. The prophet writes: "Your heart became proud on account of your beauty, and you corrupted your wisdom because of your splendor" (Ezekiel 28:17).

The problem wasn't beauty itself, but the corruption that came when these gifts, meant to point beyond themselves to their Source, became endpoints in themselves. When the creature began to see its derived beauty as self-originating, that's when sin entered.

This same pattern appears in humanity's fall. When our first parents saw that the fruit was "good for food and pleasing to the eyes, and also desirable for gaining wisdom" (Genesis 3:6), their error was in pursuing these goods apart from God's will. St. Augustine captured this brilliantly when he wrote, "He loves Thee too little who loves anything together with Thee, which he loves not for Thy sake" (Confessions, X.29). The problem is never the thing itself, but our disordered love—what Augustine called "cupiditas"—that stops at the gift rather than ascending to the Giver.

An Iconoclast runs a risk of denying the goodness of God's creation. Consider the beauty of a woman. That beauty should be a marvelous occasion to praise the author of beauty, but when we see in that beauty instead an object to desire and seize, it becomes lust. The possibility of lust does not, however, change the true purpose of beauty: it speaks to our sinful problem, not a problem inherent in the beautiful woman. Her beauty is still good.

 

Iconoclasm: A Potential Heresy

Iconoclasm isn't just "bad theology," it's potential heresy, because in the denial of the beautiful, in the denial of the gift in created things, we scorn the author of beauty, the Giver Himself. If we uphold texts that warn against idols, or the things made with human hands, or even trees and stones, but fail to see the innumerable texts that speak of the same things in their function of proper worship, we confuse the use with the abuse. The abuse does not deny the use; the corruption of the good does not destroy the original good. 

If we believe that a created thing is fundamentally and irredeemably corrupted by abuse, we begin to worship a "god" who dwells solely in the realm of either ideas or emotions, bending us "inward" even more, making gods of our own hearts and minds. Images actually protect us from this kind of self-idolatry, recognizing the goodness in created things—the "iconography" of the things that are made, whether by God directly or through the talents that God gave us. We are rescued from the temptation to worship a God whom we confine to our heads. God does dwell in our hearts, now, but this came about in and through the Incarnation, in and through a physical encounter! 

 

Icons as Windows

This is why the Eastern Christian tradition speaks of icons not as objects of worship but as "windows to heaven." An icon functions properly when it becomes transparent to the divine reality beyond it.

Think of it this way: when you look through a clean window, you don't focus on the glass itself. The glass serves its purpose precisely by directing your gaze beyond itself. But a dirty window, or one turned into a mirror, defeats its own purpose. It stops being a window and becomes a wall.

Every created thing has this iconic potential. When a musician offers their talents in worship, the music becomes a vehicle for encountering God. The skill of the musician, the beauty of the melody, the power of the harmony—none of these are evil. They become problematic only when we stop at admiring the musician's talent rather than letting the music carry us into worship.

 

The Divine Precedent

Those who would condemn all religious imagery must wrestle with an uncomfortable fact: God Himself commanded the creation of religious images. In Exodus 25:18-20, God instructs Moses to make golden cherubim for the ark of the covenant. In Numbers 21:8-9, He commands Moses to craft a bronze serpent that would become a means of healing for the Israelites.

The bronze serpent provides a particularly instructive case. For generations, it served its purpose as a reminder of God's saving power. But by King Hezekiah's time, we read that "He broke into pieces the bronze snake Moses had made, for up to that time the Israelites had been burning incense to it. (It was called Nehushtan.)" (2 Kings 18:4).

What God had commanded as good became corrupted not because the object changed, but because the people's relationship to it changed. Hezekiah's destruction of it was necessary not because the image itself was evil—God had commanded its creation!—but because it had ceased to function as a window and had become a wall.

 

The Ultimate Icon

All of this discussion of images and windows finds its ultimate fulfillment in the Incarnation itself. As St. Paul writes, Christ is "the image of the invisible God" (Colossians 1:15). The Greek word here is "eikon"—icon. In Christ, the invisible becomes visible, the intangible becomes touchable, the infinite enters the finite.

This theological truth was the central argument used to defend the veneration of icons during the turbulent period of Iconoclasm, culminating in the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 AD (the Seventh Ecumenical Council).

The Council definitively declared that the act of painting and honoring an icon of Christ, the Virgin Mary, or the Saints was not only permissible but necessary to affirm the reality of the Incarnation. Their argument hinged on this premise:

Before the Incarnation: God was entirely invisible and incorporeal. To attempt to depict God in his pre-Incarnate nature was indeed impossible and thus forbidden by the Old Testament law ("You shall not make for yourself an idol," Exodus 20:4). The problem wasn't that God couldn't become physical, it's that He hadn't yet. Every attempt to honor God through an image He had not prescribed devolved into idolatry because God hadn't yet fully integrated a physical body into Himself.

After the Incarnation: The invisible God took on a visible body. The abstract, uncircumscribed Word was "circumscribed" (limited) within the physical dimensions of a human being. Since Christ was truly and fully human, with a face and body that could be seen, touched, and painted, it became possible to create an icon (a true image) of Him.

This play out profoundly in the Gospels. After the resurrection, lest people think Jesus is a ghost, He proves He is not by both inviting Thomas to put his hand into his wounded palms and side, and by eating food: ghosts do not eat food. Then, we have the ascension. Christ didn't shed his flesh when He ascended. He ascended bodily into heaven. The flesh that God Himself inherited from a humble Virgin, from a human girl, now sits at the right hand of God the Father.

The ascension of Christ is not about Jesus "leaving" so much as it's about Him becoming more present, it's not about Him leaving creation, but about uniting creation--humanity itself--to heaven. That's why Jesus said he'd left to "prepare a place," (see John 14:2ff) and why His second coming is depicted as a bridegroom, who'd already been "betrothed" to His bride (the Church), coming to complete the marriage (in the Jewish context, marriage happened in two stages, and for us, the first stage is complete, and we're awaiting His fulfillment of the second stage) that heaven and earth might forever be united. See this mystery expounded upon by Paul in Ephesians 5.

The Second Coming isn't about a destruction of creation, it's about a glorification of creation, it is a one-in-flesh marital union of creation with heaven itself. As the icon of God, Jesus shows us the truth of our ultimate hope. It's not that the material world is evil. On the contrary, it's that what God declared good in the beginning, was declared good again in Christ (the image of the Spirit hovering over the water in Creation and the Father speaking goodness is repeated in Jesus' baptism, where the Father calls the Son beloved and the Spirit descends as a dove). Thus, we both await the final glorification of bodies (1 Corinthians 6:19-20), but now the entire creation groans in anticipation of her final redemption, a redemption that's already secured in the betrothal of Christ, that will be manifest when He returns in a true triumph, in the marriage feast of the Lamb. The verse of creation "groaning" (Romans 8:22) is an image of a woman giving birth, the product of the spousal union between Christ and the Church is the salvation of all of creation, the union of heaven and earth, a mystery that was inaugurated (betrothed) in the Incarnation, in the virginal birth, and will be consummated in the final union between Christ and His bride in the marriage feast of the lamb (Revelation 19:6-9).

The Fathers of the Council argued that to reject the image of Christ was, in essence, to reject the reality of His humanity—it was a step back toward the ancient heresy of Docetism, which claimed Christ only seemed to be human. Therefore, the icon became a "proof of the Incarnation."

This is why iconoclasm, taken to its logical extreme, becomes heretical. If we say that physical things cannot properly point us to God, then what do we do with the Incarnation? As St. John of Damascus argued in the eighth century, "I do not worship matter, I worship the Creator of matter, who became matter for my sake" (On the Divine Images, 1.16).

This "new economy of images" is profoundly incarnational and eschatological. That is to say, it's spousal. It's the recognition that the first-stage of marriage is secured, we are betrothed, and a confidence that the second stage of marriage, the consummation and the marriage feast, is coming soon.

The Word became flesh not to condemn flesh but to redeem it, to restore it to its proper function as a vehicle of divine encounter. Every human face now carries the potential to show us Christ, for He has taken on our humanity. Every image that serves as a window into God's mystery, far from being an idol (that would be a grave abuse), is gazed at in anticipation of when heaven and earth become one, when the bridegroom and the bride, Christ and the Church, birth a new world where we are literally one-in-flesh with Christ, who is also God.

 

Living Iconically

So how do we live in this tension, avoiding both idolatry and iconoclasm? How do we appreciate beauty without worshiping it, use images without abusing them?

First, we must cultivate what we might call "iconic vision"—the ability to see through things to their Source. When you encounter beauty, practice the discipline of thanksgiving, immediately lifting your heart to the One who is Beauty itself. As St. Bonaventure taught, creation is a book in which we read of God, but we must learn how to read properly.

Second, regular self-examination helps us identify when good things have become ultimate things in our lives. Ask yourself: What would I be devastated to lose? What do I think about most? Where does my mind go in idle moments? Is my gaze upon an image directly my eyes to the mystery of the Bridegroom, is it reflecting my participation in the body of Christ, and recognizing that in this body I am but a member? (This is why images of saints can also be helpful, not because they glorify the human being depicted, but because they remind us of how Christ manifested His presence in the life of people like us, who were made in God's image, and realized His truth in their lives in a remarkable way, a way that He intends for us to express in our lives as well). These questions can reveal where windows have become walls in our spiritual lives.

Third, embrace rather than fear the physical means of grace God provides. Whether it's the natural beauty of creation, the crafted beauty of art and music, or the sacramental beauty of worship, or even the beauty of another human body, these are gifts meant to draw us deeper into divine mystery. To reject them out of fear, or on account of our sinful abuse of such things, is to focus on the plight of our sin rather than on the promise of our redeemer and Bridegroom who calls all these things His own, who bids us to see through them to their Maker.

Finally, remember that you yourself are called to be an icon. Made in God's image, restored in Christ's image, you are meant to be a window through which others glimpse divine love. Your acts of kindness, your words of truth, your life lived in beauty and wisdom—all of these can become transparent to God's grace. You are re-born not to reflect the image of the first Adam, who fell into sin, lured by the beauty of both his wife and eye-pleasing fruit to heed the voice of the serpent, but to reflect the image of the second Adam, Christ Himself.

The challenge isn't to choose between the physical and the spiritual, between beauty and holiness, between creation and Creator. The challenge is to let each created thing fulfill its deepest purpose: to be a window, not a wall; a means, not an end; an icon that draws us ever deeper into the inexhaustible mystery of the God who made all things good and makes all things new.

The next time you stand before that magnificent sunset, hold that newborn baby, or feel moved by a piece of art, don't suppress the feeling and don't stop at the feeling. Let the beauty do what beauty was always meant to do—carry you beyond itself into wonder, into worship, into the presence of the One who is "altogether lovely" (Song of Songs 5:16, KJV).

For in the end, the opposite of idolatry isn't the absence of images—it's the presence of true worship, properly directed through all things to the One who is above all, through all, and in all.