Gavin Ortlund on Icons (REBUTTED)

In this episode Jimmy Akin joins Trent to rebut a recent video from Gavin Ortlund claiming that the practice of icon veneration provides a big reason to be Protestant.

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Narrator:

Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Trent Horn:

Hey everyone. Welcome to the Council of Trend Podcast. I’m your host, Catholic Apologist and speaker Trent Horn. And in today’s episode I’ll be responding to a recent video, put out by Gavin Ortland, on icon veneration, which he says, is one big reason that everyone should be Protestant. And I won’t be rebutting this video alone, actually. Joining me for this rebuttal will be Catholic Answers Senior Apologist, Jimmy Akin, and here are actually, some of Jimmy’s initial thoughts on Gavin’s recent video.

Jimmy Akin:

I knew I would be disappointed by this video, just from looking at the thumbnail. I assume, that Gavin is doing a little bit of click bait here, which is understandable, because everyone has to work with the YouTube algorithm. But in the thumbnail, Gavin has this angry, weird expression on his face, and the word mark says, this alone will make you Protestant. What this means is clarified by the title of the video. Icon veneration is clearly an accretion, exclamation point. This presents us with a capsule summary of his overall argument. Icon veneration is an accretion, therefore you should be Protestant.

I have to say that, this is a bad argument, because it’s circular. I mean, what’s wrong with accretions? Who said accretions are something bad? The answer is that Protestantism says this, based on its solo scripture, sufficiency of scripture principle. Protestantism holds, that we need to have a pristine faith free of accretions, and stick to just what’s taught in scripture. But if I held to that principle, I’d already be a Protestant. So you can see why this argument is circular. It presupposes a Protestant principle, in order to arrive at a Protestant conclusion. As a result, the argument will not be convincing to anyone who doesn’t adopt a Protestant principle that accretions, whatever those are, are bad things. It’s thus, an unimpressive circular argument.

I was quite surprised when I began watching the video. And one of the first things that Gavin said was that the issue of icon veneration is either the biggest reason he’s a Protestant, or one of the top two reasons, and that’s very surprising. But really, icon veneration? That’s what makes you Protestant, rather than Catholic or Orthodox? I mean, in the hierarchy of truths, icon veneration is a tertiary doctrine at best, and Gavin ought to know that, since he’s the author of the book, Finding the Right Hill to Die On, about how to recognize the weight of different issues, and objectively, icon veneration is way down on the list. It’s not a hill to die on. I don’t know what other things are holding you back, Gavin, but if what you say is true, then dude, you’re actually really close to becoming Catholic or Orthodox.

Trent Horn:

In this rebuttal. We won’t be going through all of Gavin’s original video, but we will be commenting on some of the most important parts. I’ll also be going through Gavin’s historical sources in chronological order, and not strictly in the order that he talks about in his original video. So as we continue this rebuttal, keep in mind, it will consist of four parts. So part one, understanding the icon controversy. Part two, reviewing the historical sources. Part three, reviewing the Second Council of Nicaea. And then part four, examining the biblical evidence. So let’s get started.

Gavin Ortlund:

First section, what is venerating icons? The word icon just means image, but the thing we have to understand is that it has a technical meaning. So an icon is a work of art, usually two-dimensional, though there are some three-dimensional, and often, though not always, it’ll be a portrait of a singular person, sometimes Christ, sometimes Mary, sometimes another saint. I’ll put up a few pictures here, a famous icon of Christ, and then a famous icon of Mary, as well.

What we just have to get is that, icons are distinct from religious art, generally. They serve a special liturgical purpose. In Eastern Orthodox contexts especially, we’ll often hear them called sacred images, or windows into heaven. They have a kind of mediatorial role that I’ll explain here. This is the key concept, that we’ll reference again later, is that basically, behavior given toward the icon is considered to be transmitted to what the icon represents. Okay. From the object to its prototype. And this is why actions of veneration are appropriate for icons; prostration, deep kneeling, sometimes kissing or lighting candles. This is what we have in mind when we talk about venerating icons.

Now, this was the theology, not just a general use of religious art, but specifically, the veneration of icons that led to the Iconoclast Controversy. Venerating an icon is not the same as having a painting of the Apostle Paul preaching in Athens on your office wall, or having pictures in churches. Okay? It’s what we’re specifically talking about, is the veneration of icons, okay? That is the issue, and this is just so important to be clear about upfront, because over, and over, and over, people will appeal to other uses of religious art as a supportive testimony for the veneration of icons. So we’ll hear all the time, we’ll say there’s no veneration of icons in the early church. People say, but what about the catacomb paintings? And it just confuses the distinction between there. Now, you could make a case that the catacomb paintings, paintings on tombs in the catacombs early on third century, that those were venerated as icons. You could make that case, but you can’t just assume that.

Trent Horn:

First, I agree, that you can’t rebut Gavin’s arguments by simply pointing out early examples of Christian religious art. Enjoying religious art is not the same thing as icon veneration. And it definitely is not proof that early Christian venerated icons.

Second, icon veneration itself is not a doctrine. It’s a custom, or a kind of religious devotion, that developed centuries after the time of the Apostles, like many other devotions and customs. As a result, there’s no reason to think we’d find this kind of devotion in the earliest part of church history. We’d expect it to develop later, since the early church first had to sort out fundamental questions like, whether Christ is fully God and fully man, before it’s settled secondary questions. Like, is it okay to depict and venerate an image of Christ?

Finally, the church does not require Catholics to venerate icons or religious images. However, it does teach as a matter of doctrine, that there is nothing wrong with this practice, as long as it’s done appropriately.

Next, Gavin talks about what is at stake concerning the veneration of icons. And he talks a lot about the anathemas that were given at the Second Council of Nicaea. This was an Ecumenical Council held in the year 787, in response to those who condemned the veneration of religious images, or the iconoclasts.

First, Gavin discusses the issue of anathemas at the Council. Before we watch that section of Gavin’s video though, we need to more fully understand exactly what an anathema is.

Jimmy Akin:

The term anathema has a variety of meanings, and they’ve changed over time. One of the early meanings is a cursed thing, something that is accursed. And this is how St. Paul uses the term in Galatians, when he says that if anyone preaches a different gospel, you should let that person be anathema, meaning, treat them like an accursed person.

Based on this usage, by the second millennium, the term had come to refer to a type of excommunication that was done with a special ceremony. If you had committed an ecclesiastical crime that had an anathema as a penalty, then after repeated warnings, the bishop would bring you down to the cathedral, and pronounced the anathema on you. The ceremony involved the bishop and a bunch of priests. During the ceremony, the bishop reviewed how he had warned you multiple times and you still hadn’t repented. And then at the end of the ceremony, they would ring a bell, close a book, and the priests would throw down the lighted candles they were holding, which is the origin of the phrase, bell, book, and candle, if you’ve ever heard that.

Then after the ceremony, you were excommunicated. You were excommunicated by the ceremony. You were cut off from a lot of social interaction with other Christians, and you had no access to the sacraments, until such time as you repented of whatever it was you had done. And at that point, you and the bishop would go back to the cathedral, and they had another ceremony to lift the ex-communication, and you’d be restored to full communion with the church and with fellow Christians.

The penalty of anathema no longer exists in the Catholic Church. It was abolished with the release of the 1983 Code of Canon Law. Though regular excommunications, ones without the ceremony, do still exist. Here, in the time period that Gavin’s discussing, around Second Nicaea, we’re dealing with a middle period, and the term may not have had the full technical meaning that it would in later Canon Law, but it did still involve an exclusion from the Christian community, or ex-communication.

Trent Horn:

And now that we have this understanding of anathemas, let’s listen to Gavin’s discussion of the Second Council of Nicaea.

Gavin Ortlund:

Now, what are the stakes of this issue? Why is this so important? Essentially, the iconophiles won at the seventh Ecumenical Council, Nicaea II, Second Council of Nicaea. And that Council is considered infallible by the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well. At the end of the Council, the bishops present a series of anathemas against those who opposed their verdict.

Here’s a couple of them. To those who apply to the sacred images, the sayings in divine scripture against idols, anathema. To those who do not kiss the holy and venerable images, anathema. To those who call the sacred images idols, anathema. To those who say that Christians had recourse to the images as Gods, anathema. To those who knowingly communicate with those who insult and dishonor the sacred images, anathema. So it goes on. Those are just a couple. There’s a lot of anathemas. It goes on at length, and with lots of color, but those just few examples give you a flavor of kind of what is at stake in the minds of the bishops at that time with this issue. This is really important. Even, it’s amazing, it’s almost like if you know the term second degree separatism, which comes up in fundamentalist circles, you almost have something like that here with the anathema toward those who knowingly communicate with these people.

Now, what is an anathema? There’s a lot of confusion about this, because some try to downplay that, and they act like it’s not as serious. It’s a separation from the church, but not necessarily a separation from God. We hear claims like this. Historically, it meant separation from God as well. And that’s drawn from the paradigmatic usage of this in Galatians one, eight, and nine, and the other usages of this term in the New Testament, there’s five other usages, certainly at Nicaea II, that’s the understanding of the bishops. Let me show that.

In 784, the incoming Patriarch of Constantinople, he gives a speech, Tarasios. He’s giving a speech upon his nomination. He says, “An anathema is a terrible thing. It drives its victims far from God, and expels them from the kingdom of heaven, carrying them off into the outer darkness.” Throughout the speech, he’s basically saying, here’s why we need to have an Ecumenical Counsel to overcome division in the church, and he’s insisting that you have to have unity, and he even expresses a concern for himself. He says, “Lest I be subjected to an anathema and found condemned on the day of our Lord”

After the Council is over, the Patriarch and all of the bishops at Nicaea II, write a letter to the emperor, Constantine, and then also to his mother, Irene, we’ll talk about her a lot, summarizing their conclusions. And in the letter, they link the iconoclasts with the various heresies condemned by the first six Ecumenical Councils. They characterize them as conducting an insane war on piety, and they specify the result of their anathemas. Quote, “An anathema is nothing other than separation from God.” I could go on with some juicy quotes from this letter about God’s unbearable wrath for the iconoclasts, how God has scorned them, how they are like the Jews who opposed Christ. They lack the image of God. Their teachings are satanic statements, and on and on, you get the idea.

Jimmy Akin:

Gavin cites a remark by Tarasios the Patriarch of Constantinople, who presided with the papal legate at Second Nicaea. In the quote he gives, Tarasios says, that an anathema will drive you away from God, cut you off from the kingdom of heaven, and carry you into outer darkness. Tarasios also envisions the possibility that he himself might be subject to an anathema, and found condemned on the day of the Lord. Gavin also quotes from a letter, saying that an anathema is a separation from God. He takes these as showing that an anathema isn’t just a separation from the church, but is necessarily a separation from God. Presumably, that means, that being the subject of an anathema will, by itself, cause you to go to hell. However, the quotations he offers don’t show this.

In this period, an anathema did separate you from communion with the church, so it did involve an excommunication. And that was a serious thing, because it meant that you no longer had access to the sacraments. So for example, if you committed a mortal sin, you wouldn’t be able to go to confession until you had repented and had the anathema lifted. So you ran the risk of dying in a state of mortal sin. But it wasn’t the anathema itself that caused you to go to hell, and the quotations Gavin gives don’t show that.

When Tarasios says that an anathema drives you away from God, that’s true. By being expelled from the church, you are driven away from God. When Tarasios says, that it cuts you off from the kingdom of God. Well, that’s true. The church is the kingdom of God, and by being cut off from the church, you’re cut off from the kingdom of God. By being cut off from the church, you are also driven into the outer darkness outside the church, so Tarasios is right about that too. And he was right, that if he was subject to an anathema and cut off from the church, then Tarasios himself might be found condemned on the last day, if he died in mortal sin, for example.

Furthermore, the letter was right, in saying that an anathema is a separation from God, because it separates you from God’s church. All of those things are what anathemas do, understood as excluding you from the communion of the church, and from having access to the grace that flows through the sacraments of the church. However, what an anathema does not do is take you out of a state of grace. And this is something that the people in the time of Second Nicaea did, or should have recognized, because they knew that anathemas can be issued unjustly. It’s often claimed, that after the first Council of Nicaea, the great Trinitarian defender, Athanasius was excommunicated. The actual facts are debatable, but let’s just go with the idea he was.

If Athanasius was in a state of grace, prior to the unjust excommunication, then the excommunication would not reach into his soul, and rip out the sanctifying grace it held, causing him to become one of the damned. That’s something that is impossible for any human authority to do. Only God can give sanctifying grace, and only mortal sin can cause a soul to lose it. So anathemas do not cause you to become one of the damned. They did separate you from the church,, and thus cause a form of separation from God, since you now lacked access to the sacraments, but they did not reach into your soul, rip out sanctifying grace, and cause you to be damned. If Gavin thinks that they did, he’s mistaken.

Now, Gavin might claim that Tarasios believed anathemas did that. If so, it isn’t revealed by the quotations Gavin gave, as I’ve just illustrated. And that interpretation is not a theologically sensible way to read those quotations. But suppose for the sake of argument, that Gavin was correct, and that Tarasios believed that anathemas do reach into your soul and rip out sanctifying grace. If that’s what Tarasios or anybody else believed, then they were simply wrong. No church body has the power to do that, and no theologically coherent understandings of anathema would take them that way. An anathema excluded you from communion with the church, and thus, put a kind of barrier between you and God, since you no longer had access to the sacraments, but it did not cause a saved person to become a damned person.

Trent Horn:

So Gavin hasn’t shown why these anathemas are problematic, or why they should lead someone to being Protestant.

In the next section of his video, Gavin puts forward an argument for that position. So let’s examine it.

Gavin Ortlund:

So here’s the point, let this sink in. This is astonishing. An Ecumenical Council, regarded as infallible by both the Roman Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox Church, anathematized to hell, those who reject icon veneration. Now, some will want to say, “Well, the anathemas aren’t the infallible part of the Council.” That’s debated. Fine, leave that. Let’s grant that. The point remains.

Now here’s the shocking truth that is just amazing. The position anathematized at Nicaea II as a damnable heresy, is in fact, the universal resounding witness of the early church and the scripture. Not only does the veneration of icons not go back to the first century, the only question, is whether it originated in the sixth or the seventh century. And for hundreds and hundreds of years prior to that time, the early Christians are so clear and vigorous in their opposition to the veneration of icons, and to the use of images in worship in any way, that you can’t see this as a doctrinal development, because that’s a doctrinal U-turn. And Nicaea II is the triumph of a late patristic innovation, because it’s anathematizing what was once, it’s requiring something that was once shocking and unheard of.

Trent Horn:

Remember, that in Gavin’s original thumbnail for this video, he says, “The data on icons in the early church is one reason to be Protestant.”, a major reason. But why should we believe that? It’s not clear what principle Gavin is using to get from early church teaching on religious images, to saying a person should be Protestant. If the principle is, don’t belong to a denomination whose teachings contradict a view held universally by the early church fathers, well, then Gavin’s own Baptist denomination would fail that test. They believe in things like eternal security, believers baptism, and congregational church leadership, all of which contradict the father’s universal views on the possibility of losing salvation, baptismal regeneration, and the role of the bishop as the successor of the Apostles.

Now, a more modest argument would say that Catholicism is false, because the Second Council of Nicaea erred in its infallible teachings about icon veneration. Which would disprove the church’s charism of infallibility. But Gavin is willing to grant, that the infallible statements of the Council don’t do that. And when we look at the evidence, we see that this is indeed the case.

Here’s Jimmy’s take on that issue.

Jimmy Akin:

Ecclesiastical documents contain a mix of different types of statements, and it’s important that we recognize this. Some of the statements they make contain teachings, or doctrines, things that the faithful are required to believe. But other statements don’t fall into this category. They may include background information that supports, or clarifies the church teaching, or that gives historical information. But it’s only the doctrinal teaching statements that are authoritative, and only a subset of those are infallible.

Historically, there have been markers that tell you when something is infallible, but non-doctrinal statements are not infallible. For example, if a church document has material describing the history of something, the history is not a matter of church doctrine. And so, the historical discussions are not guaranteed to be accurate. It’s the doctrine that the document teaches that is authoritative and accurate. The Holy Spirit guides the church in matters of doctrine, but he doesn’t guarantee that churchmen are fully informed historians.

Applying this to the case Gavin is discussing, it may well be the case, that the fathers at Second Nicaea believed that the practice of icon veneration went back to apostolic times, and that view would simply be mistaken. But that’s a matter of history, not of doctrine. When it comes to the doctrine question, this is expressed at different points in the text of the Council. From a Catholic point of view, the most authoritative doctrinal parts of such historic church documents are typically archived in a scholarly work known as Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum, or Denzinger’s Handbook of Creeds, or simply as Denzinger’s. It’s a collection of excerpts from Papal and Conciliar documents, that were authoritative at the time they were issued, and it represents a mainstream view in the Catholic scholarly community, about what was and wasn’t authoritative. Denzinger’s so prestigious that it’s regularly used as the standard book of citations by the Vatican itself, so it’s quite prestigious.

When we look up Second Nicaea in Denzinger, we find that it has an excerpt from one of the Council’s documents dealing with icon veneration. It says, “In fact, the more frequently these…”, and here it means God, Jesus, Mary, and the angels and saints. “The more frequently these are seen through iconic representation, the more those who contemplate them are moved to remember, and long for their original models, and to give them salutation and respectful veneration. This however, is not actual worship.” And here, the Council uses the Greek word proskynéō. “Which according to our faith, is reserved to the Divine nature alone. But, as it is done for the figure of the glorious and life-affirming cross, the holy Gospels and all other sacred objects, “Let these images be honored with an offering of incense and light, according to longstanding Pius custom. For the honor rendered to the image passes onto the original, and he who venerates an image venerates the person whom the image represents.”

This statement is actually quite moderate. It specifically points out, that the veneration of icons is not actual worship, in the Council’s words. Instead, it is a form of honor that is displayed towards the image, but that is understood as being honor that is really being shown to the person that the image represents. And here, the Council quotes from Basil the Great’s principle, that the honor rendered to the image passes onto the original. So you may outwardly be making a sign of respect in front of an object, but the object is just a symbol representing a person. So you are actually showing respect to the person, and you are not giving actual worship to the object. This is the passage of the Council that explains the principles that they’re articulating, but this should not be understood as an infallible statement, because the document doesn’t use the right language.

Here’s how the passage ends. “Those therefore, who dare to think or teach otherwise, if they are bishops or clerics, we order to be deposed. If however, they are monks or layman, they are to be excommunicated.” So if you’re a bishop or a priest, you lose your job. And if you’re a monk or a layman, you get excommunicated. However, these ecclesiastical penalties do not represent the highest penalties the church can impose. The highest penalty was anathema, which was an excommunication on steroids, because of the ceremony. And so, it’s generally held, that the most authoritative parts of Council documents are where they issue anathemas. If a Council issues an anathema in regard to a matter of doctrine, it’s exercising the highest form of doctrinal authority that it can. And so, when an anathema is pronounced in connection with a matter of doctrine, because anathemas were also used for other non-doctrinal things, the anathema is generally considered infallible.

In the case of Second Nicaea, Denzinger also lists five statements containing anathemas. The two most important of these are, “We accept the veneration of images. Those who do not believe this way, we place under anathema. And, “If anyone does not honor these images made in the name of the Lord and his Saints, let him be anathema.

They also have a third statement, that insists it’s okay to narrate texts from the gospels using visual aids, but Gavin wouldn’t have a problem with that, since he said, that using images for teaching purposes is just fine. So these would be the parts of the Council that would generally be regarded as infallible. While the penalty of anathema no longer exists in church law, doctrinal principles contained here would still be infallible and binding.

Trent Horn:

So we see that the fathers at Second Nicaea could have erred in their historical beliefs about icon veneration, or issued disciplinary canons that are no longer in force. But the Council’s infallible teachings are still affirmed to this day. None of them contradict any other infallible Catholic teachings. Perhaps Gavin’s argument though, is that the teachings of Second Nicaea, fallible or infallible, do contradict what seem to be universal among the church fathers, and this is not a possible doctrinal development. Instead, this is an illicit doctrinal reversal, or a U-turn, which would invalidate the Catholic belief that the Holy Spirit guides Ecumenical Councils, even if not everything they teach is infallibly defined.

Here’s Jimmy’s thoughts on that.

Jimmy Akin:

In his video, Gavin displays a surprisingly simplistic understanding of how doctrinal development works. He says, that the veneration of icons can’t be an example of doctrinal development, because in his words, it would be a U-turn, meaning a reversal of direction. However, Gavin does not appear to understand how doctrinal development works. One of its most common forms is purification. When this type of doctrinal development happens, the church looks at a particular subject, and realizes that it contains different types of elements. Some of these elements are binding parts of the faith, but some are not. And so, a purification occurs, where the binding principles are retained, and the non-binding elements are removed.

Another common form of doctrinal development is extension, the extension of principles. When this happens, it’s realized, that principles that are a part of the faith can be applied in new ways, and a new synthesis or practice emerges. As a result of these two phenomena, doctrinal development can result in some quite striking forms that can, in fact, be described as U-turns.

For example, under the old law, if you wanted to be one of God’s chosen people, you had to get circumcised. You had to keep kosher laws regarding what you could eat, so no pork for you. And you had to keep certain holy days, like the Saturday Sabbath, and Yom Kippur. But we see doctrinal development taking the form of a U-turn in scripture itself.

In the New Testament era, it was realized, that these elements of the old covenant contained valid principles, but Christ fulfilled the law, and so, these things were no longer binding. They still represented spiritual principles that did apply, but now, to be a member of God’s chosen people, you didn’t have to be circumcised. You didn’t have to keep kosher, and you didn’t have to observe the Saturday Sabbath, or Jewish Holy Days like Yom Kippur. Going from, you have to be circumcised and keep the Jewish law to be a member of God’s people to, you don’t have to be circumcised and keep the Jewish law to be a member of God’s people, is a doctrinal U-turn. So we can’t say, this looks like a doctrinal U-turn, and that means it can’t be doctrinal development. We see this type of doctrinal development in scripture itself. So we have to be more careful and sophisticated, and ask whether, in a given case, there has been an accurately purified and set of elements, and…

Edit, not repeating all of that. So we’ll need another splice. Here we go.

So we have to be more careful and sophisticated, and ask whether a given case accurately purifies and extends the principles involved. When we do that, for the issue of icon veneration, we will see that it is a legitimate case of doctoral development.

Trent Horn:

In the next section, Gavin goes through the historical evidence, to show that opposition to icon veneration was, in his words, universally or resoundingly attested in the early church. Here’s how he puts it at the end of his video.

Gavin Ortlund:

Cardinal Newman famously stated that, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” We hear this quote a lot. The fact is, that when it comes to this issue, the veneration of icons, to be deep in history necessitates being Protestant, is to cease to be Roman Catholic, or to cease to be Eastern Orthodox. The witness of the early church is unanimously and resoundingly opposed to this practice, in complete consistency with the witness of scripture. All of them resoundingly unanimously, are against any sort of cultic usage of images, ever preying to an image, venerating an image, anything like that.

Trent Horn:

So let’s take a look at Gavin’s analysis of the historical development of icon veneration. As I noted earlier, I’m not going to go through Gavin’s video chronologically from beginning to end. Instead, I think it’ll be more-

PART 1 OF 5 ENDS [00:33:04]

Trent Horn:

… chronologically, from beginning to end. Instead, I think it’ll be more helpful to walk you through the various historical periods, and compare Gavin’s assessment of the writers during those eras to my own assessment based on the writings of scholars and these early Christian sources. So let’s start with the Church Fathers of the Apostolic Age, or those who wrote in the 2nd century.

Gavin Ortlund:

The early apologists, Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, all of this, they’re just ridiculing the pagans for their pagan practice of making images to be treated like deities. And their claim is, “They’re lifeless. Don’t pray to them. They’re not alive. They can’t hear you.” They say basically demons are active through them. Then they’re saying, “The true God is invisible. So we worship God, who is distinct from matter altogether.”

Trent Horn:

Those who venerate icons recognize that the deity or holy person is not in the icon, so they don’t treat it like a deity. That means Justin Martyr and Athenagoras’s criticisms of pagans cannot be applied to icon veneration. Before we look at what these fathers said, let’s dive a little bit deeper into the subject of idolatry itself in order to distinguish it from icon veneration.

Jimmy Akin:

We first have to understand what an idol is. It’s not simply a statue, or even a statue of a deity. In the ancient world that Israel was a part of, it was believed that the idol contained the deity. For example, in Egypt there was a special consecration ceremony that you would use to cause the God to dwell in its idol. If you had a statue of the Egyptian God Horus, for example, you’d do the consecration ceremony for the statue so that Horus would take up residence in it, and then you’d have a true idol of Horus. So idolatry, in the proper sense, is worshiping a statue because it contained a God. The statue became the God, and this understanding was standard in the cultures that Israel was in contact with.

The understanding also explains why we have this rhetoric in the Old Testament about idols being dead and lifeless. The Israelites noticed that, despite the fact pagans were worshiping idols, they didn’t actually have any power. They didn’t move, or speak, or work miracles. They were just dead objects. And thinking that there was a literal powerful deity inside one, that it was such a deity, was just foolish. So, the prophets mock that. The understanding of an idol as containing a God also explains why God prohibited them. He said, “Hey, I didn’t take on any visible form at the time we formed the covenant. So, don’t start making visible forms of me. I’m not going to inhabit those.”

So, what happened during the Christian era? Well, first, God did take on a visible form. Specifically, he took on human form when he became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth. So that changed things, and eventually Christians realized that it was okay to make depictions of God in the form of Jesus. However, unlike ancient idolaters, they did not believe that Jesus took up residence in these images. They recognized that an image of Christ is just a symbol. Jesus doesn’t live in it. That means that if you venerate an image of Jesus recognizing that he’s not inside of it, you are not committing what the Bible considers idolatry.

Trent Horn:

Here’s what Justin Martyr says in his First Apology, when he criticizes pagans. “Neither do we honor with many sacrifices and garlands of flowers such deities as men have formed and set in shrines and called gods; since we see that these are soulless and dead, and have not the form of God (for we do not consider that God has such a form as some say that they imitate to His honor) but have the names and forms of those wicked demons which have appeared. The artificers of these are both intemperate, and, not to enter into particulars, are practiced in every vice, you very well know; even their own girls who work along with them they corrupt.”

Notice Justin doesn’t say anything about how Christians worship without images, or even anything about Christian worship itself. All he’s saying is that idolatry is foolish because an idol is dead. It has no divine life, no matter what the pagans think. God transcends creation. He doesn’t exist within a material object that human beings create. I also like Justin’s dig at the people who make idols, saying they’re basically sexual perverts. Here’s what Humphries, a scholar that Ortlund praises earlier in the video, says about this. “When we approach Christian text from the 2nd and 3rd centuries, we must be careful not to over-interpret their strident anti-idolatry message as a critique of Christian images. Rather, the concerns of men like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria were primarily to criticize the making and venerating of images of the traditional Greco-Roman deities.”

When we look at Athenagoras, here is his criticism of paganism. “Are we to come and worship images? If, indeed, matter and God are the same, two names for one thing, then certainly. In not regarding stocks and stones, gold and silver, as gods, we are guilty of impiety. But if they are at the greatest possible remove from one another, as far asunder as the artist and the materials of his art, why are we called to account?” Notice that his criticism is that God is not physically located in matter, so it is not licit to worship material idols as if they contained a God. But Athenagoras says nothing about Christian worship of God or that a Christian should never venerate any image under any circumstance.

Now, some Protestants say Athenagoras condemned venerating something through an image because he said the following. “Since it is affirmed by some that, although these are only images, yet there exist gods in honor of whom they are made, and that the supplications and sacrifices presented to the images are to be referred to the gods, and are in fact made to the gods, and that there is not any other way of coming to them.” Once again, Athenagoras doesn’t condemn holy images or veneration. He condemns idolatry, because these are images of inferior, wicked deities that don’t exist. He says, “How, then, I ask, can we approach them as suppliants, when their origin resembles that of cattle, and they themselves have the form of brutes, and are ugly to behold?” So Christians can’t worship idols as Gods. But nothing has been said so far on the question of venerating images of Christ, the true God made man.

Gavin Ortlund:

There’s a passage in Irenaeus in Against Heresies where he’s observing a Gnostics group that honors images, and claims to have an image of Christ made by Pontius Pilate. And it doesn’t even seem to occur to him to argue against it. He’s just referencing it as a pagan holdover from paganism.

Trent Horn:

Here is what Irenaeus says about a group of Gnostics called the Carpocratians. “They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate and that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world; that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honoring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles.” This may represent the first Christian criticism of holy images, but the statement is ambiguous.

John Carpenter, a Protestant minister who opposes icon veneration, simply says that Irenaeus, quote, “implicitly disapproves of this practice.” One reason may be that this practice reinforced the Carpocratian’s denial of the deity of Christ by placing Christ at the same level as pagan philosophers, and that’s why Irenaeus disapproves of it. It may also be because of the Carpocratian’s claim to have an image of Christ from the time of Pontius Pilate that they use to support their erroneous claim of having apostolic succession. In fact, the 3rd century Church Father Hippolytus also criticized the Carpocratians. He said, quote, “They make counterfeit images of Christ, alleging that these were in existence at the time during which our Lord was on Earth, and that they were fashioned by Pilate.” Notice that his criticism is not the Carpocratian’s possession of images, or even of venerating them. Hippolytus just criticizes their claim that these are genuine. He says they’re counterfeit images of Christ, rather than true images of Christ.

Gavin Ortlund:

And then the pagan critics of Christianity in return consistently are making fun of the Christians for their lack of images. Here’s an example I’ll give. This is from a fictional dialogue written by the North African apologist Marcus Minucius Felix. He died in the 3rd century, mid-3rd century. He wrote this dialogue called Octavius, where it’s basically a Christian and a non-Christian dialoguing, and the non-Christian is attacking the Christians for their lack of images in worship. He says, “Why do they endeavor with such pains to conceal and to cloak whatever they worship? Why have they no altars, no temples, no acknowledged images?” Now, this is an odd question to ask, of course, if images are a part of Christian worship in some way.

But what’s interesting is Octavius, that’s the Christian in the dialogue, his response is basically to say, “Because God is invisible.” Just like Deuteronomy 4, like we’ll talk about. God is invisible, God is brighter than light. Therefore, we do not represent God in any way. There’s a conception, as John of Damascus will later argue, that the incarnation somehow has changed something. That was lost upon all the Antiochian Christians. Nobody had this thought of, “Oh, well, because of the incarnation, it’s changed now.” The contrast between Octavius and the Pagan critic is not between one use of images versus another. It’s between, “You have images in your worship. We do not in ours.”

Trent Horn:

We have to be careful in using this dialogue to understand the nature of 3rd century Christianity. That’s because the dialogue is slanted in a way to make Christianity as appealing as possible to certain pagan converts, especially those who had rejected idolatry. One academic study of early medieval art says of this dialogue that, quote, “The language and the arguments are carefully chosen to appeal to a cultivated non-Christian audience. There are no quotations from scripture, and nowhere in the dialogue is mention made of Christ. Minucius Felix’s remote godhead, which can neither be seen nor represented, is the god of a philosopher rather than the God who took human form in Christ.” In chapter 29, the Christian character in the dialogue makes a few indirect references to Jesus when he denies Christians worship a mere man who was crucified. But otherwise, the dialogue tries very hard to ignore the incarnation and repeatedly describes God as unseen and immaterial.

However, we know the characters in the dialogue are either ignorant or they’re not speaking literally, because they say Christians don’t have altars. However, by the middle of the 3rd century, when this dialogue was written, Saint Cyprian of Carthage was writing about priests serving at Christian altars. In letter 65 he says, “No one should call away to secular anxieties the priests and ministers of God who are occupied with the service of his altar and church.” In 2004, archeologists discovered a 3rd century church near the Megiddo prison in Israel that contains images of fish, symbolizing Christ, and a mosaic that says, quote, “The God-loving Akeptous has offered the table to God Jesus Christ as a memorial.” The word table probably refers to altar, as can be seen in 1 Corinthians 10:21. “You cannot partake of the table of the Lord and the table of demons,” referring to pagan alters.

One study of the Megiddo church points out that Christians used different words to refer to different kinds of alters. It says the following. “In early Christianity the altar was not called bomos, like the altars on which the pagans used to sacrifice, nor [inaudible 00:46:01], as it was later named because of its identification with the altar in the Temple, but trapeza, dining table. For here did the faithful celebrate the first rite, except for baptism, of the new religion, the breaking of bread and drinking of wine, as Jesus had instructed the apostles.”

So it may be the case that, in authors like Felix or Origen, we have them condemning images and altars. But what they are condemning are pagan altars and pagan images, since Christian churches at the time had both altars and images. Finally, even if Felix were opposed to Christians venerating holy images, which he doesn’t say, but let’s suppose he did, part of his motivation in doing that was to downplay the scandal of the incarnation to prospective pagan converts. So, the development of holy image veneration would be a legitimate way of countering this problematic attitude towards one of the central mysteries of the Christian faith.

Gavin Ortlund:

Same thing, exact same thing, in the dialogue between Origen and the pagan critic Celsus, or some people say Celsus. When Celsus attacked Christians for their lack of images, Origen did not dispute that. He says, “Christians, being taught in the school of Jesus Christ, have rejected all images and statues.” To explain this, he quoted the 2nd Commandment, and then he said, “It is in consideration of these and many other such commands that Christians avoid not only temples, altars, and images, but are ready to suffer death when it is necessary rather than debase, by any such impiety, the conception which they have of the most high God.” There are many passages in Origen I have located where he maintains that exact position. It’s difficult to fathom how he could have said that if, in fact, Christians did use images in worship. Now, Origen will sometimes be dismissed because of his theology, but he’s representing Christian practice at his time.

Trent Horn:

Notice once again the use of phrases like temples, altars, and images. We’ve already seen that Christian house churches and prayer halls in the 3rd century had altars and images, so Origen can’t mean they lacked these things in a universal sense. What he may mean is that Christians do not offer pagan sacrifices, and they don’t worship images as if they contained divine beings in the same way that pagans worshiped images. We also have to remember that, in this historical context, Christians were trying very hard to receive pagan converts and move those converts away from polytheistic idol worship. Given that, it’s understandable Christians would not associate with things that could even be perceived as being idolatrous, even if they were fine. For example, Origen says, quote, “We impress upon the minds of our first converts a contempt for idols and images of all kinds, and besides this, raise their thoughts from the worship of created things instead of God, and elevate them to the universal Creator.”

Although when answering Celsus, or Celsus, and arguing against idolatry, we see Origen leaning into hyperbole and exaggeration. In one section, Origen says the following. “Among the Israelites, no maker of images was permitted to enjoy the rights of citizenship. For neither painter nor image-maker existed in their state, the law expelling all such from it, that there might be no pretext for the construction of images, an art which attracts the attention of foolish men and which drags down the eyes of the soul from God to earth.” Of course, this isn’t true, because Israel employed artists to create images of the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant and the bronze serpent that’s described in Numbers 21, both of which Origen essentially ignores later in his argument.

However, in Origen’s other works we see he makes distinctions about how one ought to approach different images. In his work Exhortation to Martyrdom, for example, Origen says that people who bow before idols to avoid martyrdom don’t worship those idols. He says they merely bow to them. He also says that the Israelites in the Old Testament did something similar to idols of pagan deities, like Baal Peor, because Origen thought the Israelites could have never truly worship pagan gods after seeing the wonders the true God had performed. The Westminster Handbook to Origen provides this interesting comment on Origen’s distinctions regarding images. It says, “For Origen what is at stake here is the inner disposition and intention of the believer in relation to the veneration of images. While he was clearly not thinking of a Christian image cult per se, his opinion found an echo in the similar distinction later adopted by Byzantine iconophiles, who distinguished between the absolute worship to God alone (latreia) and the relative honor (timetike proskynesis) offered to the image of Christ and the saints.”

Gavin Ortlund:

His teacher, Clement of Alexandria, was even more aniconic. He basically said, “The Law of Moses taught us against sensible images.” He contrasts that with the worship of the true God, who is invisible. He seems to have a platonic preference for the invisible realm. So, he’s saying a familiarity with the sight disparages reverence for what is divine. So because images are associated with the material realm that you can see, he says, “Works of art cannot be sacred and divine.” Now, this is the contrast. Okay? It’s so common, it’s so ubiquitous, people are not even arguing for it. They’re arguing from it. It’s just taken for granted.

Trent Horn:

We’d expect Clement and Origen to have similar views on images, since they both come from the same school of theology in Alexandria. However, one study on Syrian icons says, quote, “If Clement is often considered an adversary of images, it is because he seems to have had pagan images specifically in view.” This was doubtless also the attitude of Origen. David Friedberg, in his study of iconoclasm, likewise says Clement had, quote, “Many related axes to grind on the subject of pagan image worship.” However, Clement of Alexandria was not universally opposed to art with religious themes. For example, in the Paedagogus, Clement gives advice for Christians who buy rings with seals, which you would press into wax as a way of signing and sealing a document. He says the following. “Let our seals be either a dove, or a fish, or a ship scudding before the wind, or a musical lyre. And if there be one fishing, he will remember the apostle, and the children drawn out of the water. For we are not to delineate the faces of idols, we who are prohibited to cleave to them; nor a sword, nor a bow, following as we do, peace, nor drinking-cups, being temperate.”

Clement supported religious art as long as it was somewhat vague in its symbolism. For example, Clement was not in favor of making images of angels. So when Exodus 25 describes God telling Moses to inscribe two cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant, Clement says, “This is an allegorical detail. It’s not literal, and the angels represent aspects of man’s rational soul.” But Friedberg notes that, while the members of the Alexandrian school may have had lots of theoretical objections to religious art, this did not translate to what common people believed. He says, “The surviving pictorial evidence from catacomb paintings to seals runs precisely contrary to the claims of the apologists. When it comes to writers like Tertullian and Clement of Alexandria, the keenness of the opposition arises from their discomfort and displeasure with established fact. Christians made images, even of their God, just like everyone else.

Gavin Ortlund:

Perhaps no one was quite as rigorous as Tertullian. He wrote an entire treatise on idolatry. Early-on he observes idolatry did not exist in the ancient times under the same form, since you didn’t have images within the temples and [inaudible 00:54:18]. Then he says, “But when the devil introduced into the world artificers of statues and of images, and of every kind of likenesses, that former rude business of human disaster attained from idols both a name and a development. Thenceforth every art which in any way produces an idol instantly became a fount of idolatry.” And he just goes on, citing a barrage of Old Testament passages to oppose the making and worshiping of idols. “For him to make them is as bad as to worship them.” I mean, even the people who are trying to be so evasive with the data will admit Tertullian was aniconic, and he’s very clear that the 2nd Commandment applies. There’s no change with the incarnation. We do not worship with means of images. In fact, he doesn’t even have allow for any use of them. He’s more on the rigorous side of the spectrum.

Trent Horn:

That’s one way to put it. To be frank, Tertullian was an extremist who believed that every image was an idol. He writes, “To establish this point, the interpretation of the word is requisite. Eidos, in Greek, signifies form; eidolon, derived diminutively from that, by an equivalent process in our language, makes formling. Every form or formling, therefore, claims to be called an idol. Hence idolatry is all attendance and service about every idol.” In other words, Tertullian believes that any piece of religious art was an idol. Tertullian wouldn’t even allow painters or sculptors to convert to the Christian faith unless they first gave up their artistic professions. It’s no wonder that Tertullian became so extreme that he was believed to have later left the church for the Montanust heresy.

According to stress of a study of attitudes toward images in the early church, quote, “Tertullian in North Africa mentioned only to condemn it fiercely the Christian custom of drinking from glasses adorned in gold leaf with the figure of the good shepherd. It should be understood that these were not Eucharistic chalices, but vessels made for convivial occasions, such as marriage feasts and funeral banquets. By this furious denunciation of a harmless religious picture, Tertullian may be classified as an utter opponent of religious art.” So far we’ve yet to find an early Christian witness who has a view similar to Gavin’s, which is that Christians can have religious art, but they should not venerate holy images of Christ or the saints.

Gavin Ortlund:

Sometimes, in opposing the occultic use of images, the early Christians will appeal to this contrast between the invisible realm and the visible realm. Heavenly versus Earthly things. So, God’s invisibility is associated with his purity. This is a theme in the early Christian writer Lactantius, who basically is following other early Christians and saying that cultic images are presided over by demons. And he’s saying to worship the true God, you lift your eyes up to the invisible. And he says, “Wherefore it is undoubted that there is no religion wherever there is an image. For if religion consists of divine things, and there is nothing divine except in heavenly things; it follows that images are without religion, because there can be nothing heavenly in that which is made from the earth. There is no religion in images, but a mimicry of religion. That which is true is therefore to be preferred to all things which are false; earthly things are to be trampled upon, that we may obtain heavenly things.”

Can anyone seriously imagine Lactantius speaking like this if the theology of Nicaea 2 had been alive in his day? Sometimes, in their criticism of cultic images, the early Christians almost sound as if they’re anticipating the later arguments made by the bishops at Nicaea 2. Arnobius, early 4th century. He’s writing a treatise where it looks like maybe the Christians were blamed for things for not worshiping images. So he’s very firm in his opposition to the usage of images in worship in any way, and he deals with this objection. When he anticipates the objection, they’re going to say, “Oh, but we’re not worshiping the image. We’re just worshiping the one the image represents.” And his response to this is, “What then? Without these, do the gods not know that they are worshiped? What greater wrong, disgrace, hardship can be inflicted than to acknowledge one god, and yet make supplication to something else – to hope for help from a deity, and pray to an image without feeling?”

And then he proceeds to just scorn and pour contempt upon this idea. He quotes a proverb to compare it to basically when you’re looking for a human opinion, but you ask an animal. He’s quoting a proverb, but that’s his metaphor. To say, “To pray to an image is like you’re trying to get a human opinion and you’re talking to an animal.” It’s dead. It can’t understand you, the image. So again, it’s unfathomable to think that Arnobius would be arguing like this if the theology of Nicaea 2, that what’s given to the image passes to the prototype, had been alive in his day. And that’s the linchpin of iconophile theology.

Trent Horn:

The theology of Second Nicaea wasn’t fully present in the 3rd century, just as the theology of First Nicaea wasn’t fully present in the 1st century. But during this period, we see a development in the understanding of how an image can represent something. For example, one of Arnobius’s objections is that pagans can’t have images of their gods because they have no idea what color hair or what color eyes their gods have. But later in the Writings of the Fathers we see a development, so that the image passing to the prototype, as Saint Basil put it a century later, can occur without requiring an exact duplication of the prototype image.

As we will discuss later, the image of Christ does not exist in the icon’s materials because there are many different kinds of images of Christ, with different colors and features. But all of these different icons reflect the one true image of Christ that corresponds to the prototype of Christ himself in Heaven. That’s why Saint Augustine could say, quote, “The physical face of the Lord is pictured with infinite variety, by countless imaginations.” Also, as I’ve been noting for a while here, this is all just condemnations of pagan idolatry and its belief that the gods are limited and exist in or through idols. As Jimmy explains, Catholic views on the use of images developed as the use of Christian images became more widespread.

Jimmy Akin:

So there was a doctrinal development in the form of The Purification. The essential element, don’t worship a statue thinking it’s a deity, was retained. But the non-essential elements were abandoned as people recognized that some things that were outwardly similar to idolatry are not actually idolatry, and there was an extension of principles. We have various ways of showing reverence for people, including Jesus, and you could legitimately express your reverence for Jesus using a symbol of Jesus while recognizing that he was not inside of it. So, you weren’t worshiping the symbol itself. Instead, you were referencing Jesus. Whatever outward sign of reverence you made with respect to the image was actually made to Jesus, who’s up in Heaven. So we have Saint Basil the Great’s principle that the respect shown to the image passes on to the person it represents, which he discussed in connection with showing reverence to images of kings.

Some in the Protestant community may not like this distinction, and that’s understandable, because it’s at odds with their preferred position regarding icon veneration. But that position is based on a faulty understanding of what idolatry is. It’s in the interests of Protestant apologists to be sloppy about the nature of idolatry, to not think carefully about what the biblical writers were actually condemning, and they may object to distinctions like this being made. But the distinctions are real, and if they want to argue against this, then they need to show why the Christian practice was wrong. Not just sloppily saying, “Well, it looks like idolatry to me. I can’t be bothered with the difference between thinking of an idol as a literal god and thinking of an icon is just a simple representing someone.” So the question is, given that the Christian practice is not idolatry as the biblical authors understood it, is whether extending the principles of respect in this way is legitimate. Can you show respect to a person by showing respect to an image representing the person?

Trent Horn:

This brings us to the end of our 3rd century sources, and so far we don’t have any condemnations of Christian veneration of images. All we have are condemnations of idolatry. Now, let’s examine what early Christian sources say about images in the beginning of the 4th century, starting with the only church council prior to the 7th century to even mention images or the Council of Elvira.

Gavin Ortlund:

We could go on. I haven’t even gotten to Canon 36 of the Synod of Elvira yet, early 4th century. It says, “Pictures are not to be placed in churches so they do not become objects of worship and adoration.” It’s like, “Okay, that seems pretty clear.” Right? But people will try to find all these ways to get around this.

Trent Horn:

Around the year 305, a local council of bishops met in Spain and produced a series of canons to regulate Christian life, covering topics like marriage and penances. One of the canons, number 36, deals with images in churches. I’ll put the Latin translation on the screen, because contrary to what Gavin says, this canon is not as simple as he makes it out to be. For example, Edward James Martin, in his book A History of the Iconoclastic Controversy, says, quote, “No great weight can be attached to this, the exact bearing of the canon being unknown.” And other scholars call it an obscure canon.

There is also an issue of how to translate the Latin in the canon. Some people translate it in the way that Gavin uses in his video. “Pictures are not to be placed in churches so that they do not become objects of worship and adoration.” But a more accurate translation of the Latin would be this. “It has seemed good that images should not be in churches, so that what is venerated and worshiped not be painted on the walls.” The 1960 edition of John Calvin’s Institute of Religion, published by Westminster Press, has a similar translation. “It is decreed that there shall be no pictures in churches, that what is reverence or adored be not depicted on the walls.”

The issue isn’t that something becomes an object of worship by being placed on a wall. The canon only says that what is venerated and what is worshiped should not be placed on a wall, but it doesn’t say why it shouldn’t be put there. We simply don’t know the reason. But we do know the canon was ignored, because you can find lots of early medieval churches in Spain that have religious images on their walls. Also, if this were a condemnation of idolatrous veneration.

Also, if this were a condemnation of idolatrous veneration, then why doesn’t the Canon universally condemn images in any holy place? A more plausible reason behind this cannon was that if the council was held in the early 300s, especially if it was held around the year 305, as most scholars suggest, then this was right in the middle of the persecution by the Roman Emperor Diocletian. That persecution was also firmly imposed by the Western Roman Emperor Maximian, who was a subordinate to Diocletian.

During this period, churches were burned to the ground and priests were killed. There were also acts of vandalism and violence directed at churches in general. In fact, Canon 52 of the Council of Elvira says, “Anyone who writes scandalous graffiti in a church is to be condemned.” It’s plausible that Canon 36 was a practical matter to keep churches from having holy things they venerated become easy targets of desecration because they were in a highly visible place like the walls of a church.

Finally, no regional church council, until the seventh century, condemns the veneration of icons. By that time, other regional councils like the Council of Trullo 692 had already firmly supported the existence of religious images in churches. Next, we will look at the history of the fourth century church, starting with the historian Eusebius of Caesarea.

Gavin Ortlund:

The church historian Eusebius seems to be of this mindset. At one point he writes a letter to Constantia, that’s Emperor Constantine’s sister. Evidently she had requested an image of Christ from him. Now, Richard Price in his commentary on this suggests from that that images must have been rare at this time. Images of Christ must have been rare at this time because you have a wealthy person trying to hunt one down like this. But what’s so interesting is Eusebius’s response, he rebukes her for this request. He talks about Christ’s divine nature, Christ’s human nature. He makes this whole appeal that you can’t depict either one. Depicting Christ in his human nature and in his glorified state is both impossible and unlawful. He basically is asking Constantia, “How can you even ask me this?”

He says, “Can it be that you have forgotten that passage in which God lays down the law that no likeness should be made either of what is in heaven, or what is in the earth beneath? Have you ever heard of anything of the kind either yourself in church or from another person? Are not such things banished and excluded from churches all over the world and is it not common knowledge that such practices are not a permitted to us alone?” Now, how do you even say it’s strong enough after? He’s saying it’s common knowledge. Okay?

By the way, Eusebius is the father of church history. His knowledge of the church in its early history is second to none. Can anyone take it seriously that venerating icons was an apostolic practice when you’ve got Eusebius saying that its common knowledge that images are banished and excluded from churches all over the world. That passage alone. Now some people dispute the authenticity of it. Again, precisely because it is so decisive.

But the best of scholarship in my book I referenced an important 1981 article that goes through all the internal evidence. All the external evidence says, “No, we have no reason to question that this Eusebius and we have many reasons to question that it’s spurious, it’s later.” That’s Richard Price’s view as well and others. It seems to be an authentic letter.

Just after this, he says he recounts another episode in which he had to confiscate an image of Christ and Paul. He says, “I took it away from this woman and kept it in my own house as I thought it improper that such things ever be exhibited to others lest we appear like idol worshipers to carry our God around in an image.”

In his church history, Eusebius makes reference to Christians paying homage to statues of Christ, Peter and Paul, and he says he’s not surprised because they’re acting out an old habit that they retained from their former Pagan world. Again, it’s just assumed that’s that’s what the Pagans do. Now some people will say, “Okay, yeah, there’s a lot of opposition to images in the context of worship, praying to images, venerating images, etcetera.” But they’re just opposing the pagan practice of that. Now I think anybody who is paying attention to these quotes will see that that’s a rather convenient evasive maneuver.

Trent Horn:

A few things about Eusebius. First, notice that in the image claim to be of Paul or Jesus, Eusebius does show honor to the image by keeping it in his home. If it were truly an idol, you’d expect him to throw it away. Instead, he’s just worried about other people mistakenly thinking Christians believe in Pagan idolatry or that their gods are located in the images themselves in regards to the statues of Christ.

Eusebius addresses this in a short passage about Caesarea Philippi, he basically says, “While I’m mentioning this city, you should know there is a statue in it of Christ and a statue of a woman with a hemorrhage that he cured because it was believed the woman came from that town.”

Eusebius then writes the following, “Her house is shown in the city and that remarkable memorials of the kindness of the Savior to her remain there. They say that this statue is an image of Jesus. It is remained to our day so that we ourselves also saw it when we were staying in the city. Nor is it strange that those of the Gentiles who of old were benefited by our Savior should have done such things. Since we have learned also that the likenesses of his apostles, Paul and Peter and of Christ himself are preserved in paintings, the ancients being accustomed as it is likely according to a habit of the Gentiles, to pay this kind of honor indiscriminately to those regarded by them as deliverers.”

Eusebius then switches topics and talks about James being the bishop of Jerusalem, but notice he’s just pointing out that this is a Gentile custom without saying it is evil or wrong or denouncing it. He even says the statue is a remarkable memorial and it’s not surprising Gentiles who benefited from Christ would do this.

The fifth century church’s historian Zaziman records how in the year 361, the Pagan Roman emperor Julian the Apostate tore down this statue of Christ and replaced it with a statue of himself. But as Zaziman puts it, “A violent fire from the heavens fell upon it.” We don’t see widespread opposition to honoring Christ with an image and the fact that Eusebius as calls it a Gentile custom wasn’t enough to dissuade St. John of Damascus in the eighth century from citing it in his defense of venerating religious images. This all makes Eusebius’ alleged letter to the emperor sister Constantia very odd. It’s also really suspicious that the letter is unknown in Eusebius’ works for 400 years until it’s first quoted during the iconoclast controversy. I think a healthy skepticism is warranted in regards to it, but if it is authentic, then it would represent one of the earliest Christian sources of opposition to holy images.

Notice though, once again, there would be a development here that even Gavin would not accept because he has no complaint with visually depicting Christ, just the veneration of those images. We’d also have to take what Eusebius says with a grain of salt because even though Eusebius says that, “Have you ever heard of any such portraits of Christ in churches?” Well, we know from archeological evidence that they were not uncommon, and even Eusebius is aware of these images in his own earlier writings, which once again makes this testimony somewhat suspect.

Now let’s take a look at the late fourth century historical witnesses who wrote after the Council of Nicaea.

Gavin Ortlund:

Robert Jensen notes iconic portraits of apostles, saints and Christ mostly appeared only toward the end of the fourth century. They’re still rare at this time and they’re definitely not venerated, but at least now there’s the possibility of that because you’ve got all this flood of Pagan converts coming into the church.

This is why we make the distinction here because now you’ve got a new situation what was previously just unimaginable that Christians would be bowing down to images now does need to be addressed here and there. Here and there people will cross the line and the use of images will cross over into a cultic use of images and when that happens, you find these crackdowns from various church leaders.

Trent Horn:

Notice though that Gavin has not shown that Christians before Nicaea considered it unimaginable to ever venerate a Christian icon. All he’s shown is that they criticized Pagans who worshiped idols depicting false gods. It may be the case that image veneration of Christians was not widespread or developed during this period. But that’s way different from saying Christians found this behavior to be unimaginable.

One specific piece of evidence that contradicts that conclusion is an episode from the Acts of John, which was written in the late second or early third century. It contains an apocryphal account of how a disciple of St. John named Lycomedes had a portrait commissioned of St. John that he put a lamp next to in honor of him. St. John opposes the image but not because it’s idolatrous or violates the second commandment. Instead, John simply says the image can’t truly capture his identity and the fact that he has an immaterial soul.

John says, “This that thou has now done is childish and imperfect. Thou has drawn a dead likeness of the dead.” This incident shows that in the early church there was not a universal recognition that the veneration of holy images was an act of idolatry based on the second commandment. Instead, in the rare cases where someone lived in a context where they could imagine commissioning portraits, there were philosophical disputes over whether this should be done. But if holy people could be depicted and appropriately honored, then it would make sense to venerate them through an image.

This is precisely the debate that would take place between Christians over the next few centuries after the Council of Nicaea. Let’s take a look at some of the writers that Gavin sites from the post-Nicaea period starting with Epiphanius of Salamis who wrote at the end of the fourth century and following with St. Augustine.

Gavin Ortlund:

For example, in the late fourth century, Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, relates this incident in a letter to John the bishop of Jerusalem, “I came to a villa called Anablatha.” Don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. Don’t know where it is. It’s somewhere near Jerusalem. “As I was passing, I saw a lamp burning there. Asking what place it was and learning it to be a church, I went in to pray and found there a curtain hanging on the doors of the said church. Dyed and embroidered, it borne image either of Christ or of one of the saints. I do not rightly remember whose image it was. Seeing this and being lath that an image of a man,” Loathe that we would say today. I think that’s how we pronounce that. Loathe, as in hesitant or against.

“That an image of a man should be hung up in Christ church. Contrary to the teaching of the scriptures, I tore it asunder and advised the custodians of the place to use it as a winding sheet for some poor person.” He goes on for a bit and he’s basically saying that he took it away. He is explaining, he sent a new curtain to John to replace the one that he destroyed and then he makes this request to John, “I beg that you will order the presbyter of the place to take the curtain which I have sent from the hands of the reader and that you will afterward give directions that curtains of the other sort opposed as they are to our religion shall not be hung up in any church of Christ. A man of your brightness should be careful to remove an occasion of offense on worthy alike of the Church of Christ and of those Christians who are committed to your charge.”

He is saying this usage of images in the church is against the teaching of scriptures. It’s against our religion. What’s interesting is he doesn’t seem to think that this needs to be argued for. His relationship with John is strained at this point, but he doesn’t seem to be anticipating that there could be resistance to this. He’s just kind of assuming this is what we do. This is what Christians do. This is unworthy of the church of Christ to have those there. Okay? Now there’s a bunch of other passages from Epiphanius where he has a similar view, but they’re sometimes disputed. Rather than get into that, I’m not going to go into those. I deal with that more in the book.

Trent Horn:

The case that Epiphanius opposed the existence of Christian images rests on a lot of dubious documents, including the one that Gavin sites. Even in the eighth century, there were claims that these writings through Epiphanius were apocryphal. One argument was that the area of Cyprus where Epiphanius was a bishop was heavily pro-icon veneration. Despite the traditions they would’ve received from Epiphanius, the members of the church in Cyprus were not invited to the 754 iconoclast Council of Hieria and St. John of Damascus said, “The proof that Epiphanius did not object to images is to be found in his own church, which is adorned with images to this day.”

The set of documents that record Epiphanius’ opposition to icons include a postscript to a letter addressed to John the bishop of Jerusalem, a treatise defending Epiphanius’ view on images, a dogmatic letter, a letter to the emperor, and finally, Epiphanius’ will, I’d recommend Father Stefan Brigham’s book-length treatment of Epiphanius and icons where he goes through each of these sources. 2043943334

Some of them are almost certainly forged since they contain word for word passages from the council of Hieria. Others might be authentic like the letter to John the bishop, but have a mistranslation in them. As a result, they only describe an idolatrous image in a church that the people mistakenly said was Christ or thought was Christ. I find it interesting that by the end of the fourth century when Epiphanius was writing images of saints were becoming very common even if they weren’t being venerated.

Yet, in Epiphanius’ encyclopedic treatment of heresy called the Panarion, Epiphanius does not condemn images in churches. He only talks about the carpocratians and even here, he just basically quotes what St. Irenaeus said about them without saying anything about the sect himself. This is very unusual given the response that Epiphanius had towards images in the letter he allegedly wrote to John the bishop.

But even if that letter were authentic, it may just represent Epiphanius’ overly conservative view on the matter that was out of step with most Christians at the time. The 19th century Protestant author, Philip Schaff, who was very critical of Catholicism called Epiphanius a, quote, “Narrow fanatic.” And said of the incident involving the church curtain he tore down the following, quote, “This arbitrary conduct, however excited, great indignation, an Epiphanius found himself obliged to restore the injury to the village church by another curtain. The prevalence spirit of the age already very decidedly favored this material representation as a powerful help to virtue and devotion, especially for the uneducated classes, hence the use of images, in fact, mainly preceded.”

Gavin Ortlund:

At one point Augustine is basically criticizing the Pagan use of images in worship and he’s saying, “They’re not alive, so we don’t pray to them because they can’t hear us.” He anticipates that someone will lay the same charge against the church because of the physical objects used for the sacraments. He says, “But it will be said, we also have very many instruments and vessels made of materials or metal of this description for the purpose of celebrating the sacraments, which being consecrated by these administrations are called holy in honor of him, who is thus worshiped for our salvation and what indeed are these very instruments or vessels, but the work of men’s hands.”

Okay, now listen to how Augustine counters the charge. He says, “But have they mouth and yet speak not? Have they eyes and see not? Do we pray unto them because through them, we pray unto God? This is the chief cause of this insane profanity that the figure resembling the living person which induces men to worship it has more influence in the minds of these miserable persons than the evident fact that it is not living so that it ought to be despised by the living.” It’s this whole idea of figural representation that the non-living thing is a point of mediation or transmission to the living that Augustine is opposing.

Trent Horn:

This passage comes from Augustine’s commentary on Psalm 115, which is a psalm about the error of idolatry. Of course we’d expect Augustine to condemn worshiping images and statues in this work. The Psalmist says, “Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands, they have mouths but do not speak, eyes but do not see.” Once again, we don’t have a condemnation of Christians venerating holy images. We have a condemnation of idolatry with a reason that wouldn’t extend to the lawful veneration of Christian images.

Augustine defends the practice of having holy vessels in the liturgy because Christians don’t treat these material objects as being the dwelling place of divinity. We can see this in the next line after what Gavin cites. Augustine says, the result that ensues is that described in the next verse, “They that make them are like them and so are all such as put their trust in them. Let them therefore see with open eyes and worship with shut and dead understandings, idols that neither see nor live.”

I’d also point out Augustine’s criticism of the Gnostic heretic, Faustus, who claims his gnosticism is superior to Paganism because it does not include Pagan aspects of worship. Augustine tells him, quote, “Everyone must see the folly of your boasting of superiority to the Pagans because they use altars and temples, images and sacrifices and incense in the worship of God, which you do not.”

According to Augustine, those things are not evil in themselves, so not having them is nothing to boast about. In the city of God, Augustine says, “The sacrifice offered by Christians in the Eucharist that has succeeded all the Old Testament sacrifices.” In one of his sermons, Augustine says, “That bread, which you can see on the altar sanctified by the word of God is the body of Christ.” Altars and images aren’t bad. Only the Pagan versions of these things are bad.

At this point, none of the sources cited in Gavin’s video condemned the Christian practice of venerating images. Tertullian may have had a rigorous view and rejected all images, and this may have even been the case with Epiphanius, but we also have evidence that the passage from Epiphanius is not authentic. It’s most likely that these pre-fifth century sources among the church fathers say nothing about icon veneration because the practice had not developed yet. Even though images of saints in Christ were becoming popular at the end of the fourth century.

Gavin doesn’t offer any citations from the fifth or sixth centuries, but in this time period, we see the following evidence for positive views of images and even the veneration of icons emerging. For example, the book images iconoclasm in the Carolingian says, quote, “By the fifth century specific works of Christian art had acquired functions beyond those of stimulating, elevating, commemorating, and teaching. Such works of art may useful be called icons.”

In his homily for St. Meletius, St. John Chrysostom said, quote, “At least what you did with names, this you practiced to. In the case of that man’s image, for truly many carved that holy image on finger rings and on seals and on cups and on bedroom walls and all over the place so that one didn’t just hear that holy name, but also saw the depiction of his body all over the place and had a double consolation for his loss.”

Robin Jensen in her book, Icons to Idols, says that St. Gregory of Nyssa gave a homily for the same saint and he taught that quote, “Meletius had the power to intercede with Christ for them from his place in heaven, and that gazing at his portrait would help viewers sense his presence as they prayed to him for aid.” She also cites a fifth century anonymous dialogue between a Christian and a Pagan where the Christian defends giving honor to the statues of Christian emperors while condemning Pagan idolatry.

In fact, a fifth century work by Theodoret of Cyrus says that statues of a saint named Simeon Stylites, who spent nearly 40 years living in aesthetic life on the top of a pillar, were kept in Roman homes for protection. He writes, “It is said that the man became so celebrated in the great city of Rome that at the entrance of all the workshops, men have set up small representations of him to provide thereby some protection and safety for themselves.” Some people say this text was added later during the iconoclast controversy, but at least by the sixth century, icons were viewed as being means for saints to intercede on behalf of others. We can see this in a mosaic Thessaloniki, Greece from this time period that has an image of St. Demetrios, which says, “My Lord, St. Demetrios aid us your servants and your servant Maria, whom you gave to us.”

It’s also in the sixth century that Theodore Agonostes is said to have claimed that an icon of Mary painted by the gospel writer Luke, was sent to the Empress Pulcheria in 438. Now, the idea that St. Luke painted an icon of Mary is probably a legend, but it does show positive reputations of icons in the sixth century as well as a belief in their apostolic roots.

Although there is an argument that this quote from Theodore was added by icon supporters in the 13th century. But overall, I don’t disagree with the section in Gavin’s video, which summarizes the scholars who study this issue as settling on the sixth and seventh centuries being the time when the veneration of icons becomes more established in church history. Though we could always have smaller disagreements about whether it is closer to the sixth century or closer to the seventh century. In any case, the next source Gavin sites comes from the seventh century involving Pope St. Gregory the Great.

Gavin Ortlund:

In this period you don’t have as many rigorous. Eusebius, you don’t have many rigorous. The basic position that comes to predominate seems to be images are acceptable for didactic or aesthetic purposes. That’s fine to have images in churches that can be useful, but you don’t adore them, you don’t venerate them, you don’t bow down with them, you don’t pray to them, etcetera. This can be seen in a very important flashpoint in the year 600 when Gregory, the first Gregory, the great bishop of Rome, is writing a letter to another bishop named Serenus, and this bishop has been an iconoclast in the sense of destroying, physically destroying the images.

Here’s how Gregory responds, “It has come to our ears that your fraternity seeing certain adorers of images broke and threw down these same images in churches and we commend you indeed for your zeal against anything made with hands being an object of adoration. But we signify to you that you ought not to have broken these images for pictorial representation is made use of in churches for this reason that such as our ignorant of letters may at least read by looking at the walls what they cannot read in books. Your fraternity, therefore, should have both preserved the images and prohibited the people from adoration of them to the end that both those who are ignorant of letters might have wherewith to gather a knowledge of the history and that the people might, by no means, sinned by adoration of a pictorial representation.”

Hopefully that’s clear. There’s another letter where he maintains the same position. He’s basically saying, “Don’t destroy the images because they serve a didactic purpose. They’re for teaching, especially for the illiterate. But also, don’t adore the images or anything made with human hands.” The contrast for Gregory is not between worship versus veneration, it’s between adoration and teaching. You use the images for teaching, not for adoring. Okay.

Jensen gives a helpful summary of the significance of this anecdote, “The exchange between Gregory and Serenus. The exchange between Gregory and Serenus shows that the Christian problem with holy images is far more complicated than simply a matter of general disapproval of pictorial art. It also gives a more nuanced view of the gradual but inexorable inclusion of iconography in Christian worship spaces. Narrative images were never an evident problem and so were accepted from the beginning. The emergence of saints portraits in the fourth and early fifth centuries posed new problems insofar as these eventually came to be regarded as objects of veneration and a widely accepted component of Christian devotional practice.”

Trent Horn:

Gregory lays out a moderate principle that is good. Don’t destroy Christian images, but also don’t adore or worship them. Gavin says, “Gregory doesn’t talk about veneration as if this is evidence of Pope saying, Gregory condemning the veneration of icons or images.” But the absence of the concept of veneration rather than divine worship doesn’t mean the Pope was giving a teaching on that issue. In Celia Chazelle’s article, Pictures, Books, and the Illiterate, Pope Gregory, the first letter to Serenus of Marseilles, she says, “The Pope may have purposefully left out other ways to treat images beyond just teaching purposes for practical reasons.”

She says of image veneration, quote, “If Gregory did think that artistic representations of sacred persons or events could be worshiped in this manner, he did not raise the issue with Serenus. For one, Gregory might have feared that defending the suitability of certain types of image worship would antagonize Serenus, whose taste in general for art was evidently limited. The Popes chances both of convincing the bishop to adhere to Roman lines and vending the conflict in Marseilles that so undermined Serenus’ ability to operate effectively in his sea would then be diminished. Gregory’s concern perhaps that the adoration, which educated Christians paid to the pictures impeded ignorant viewers from approaching them would only have added to his reluctance to mention a legitimate form of reverence.”

Finally, it’s interesting that while Gavin seems to approve of Gregory the great’s position on images, John Calvin actually rejected his stance. Calvin writes, “I know that it is pretty much an old saw that images are the books of the uneducated.” Gregory said this, “Yet the spirit of God declares far otherwise.” Gavin then talks about the iconoclast controversy of the eighth century leading up to the second council of Nicaea in 787. This involved people who wanted to destroy sacred images because they thought they were idolatroust and others who believed they could be lawfully venerated. Let’s take a deeper look at the second Council of Nicaea and its authority in the church.

Gavin Ortlund:

Before Irene, iconoclasm seems to have gotten the upper hand. You’ve got these long reigns of two iconoclast emperors, Leo the third and Constantine the fifth. In 754, there’s a large council, the Council of Hieria attended by 338 bishops. That’s a big council. That’s twice the size of Constantinople One, for example, an ecumenical council. More than that. This is condemning the iconophile position on Christological grounds. It’s basically arguing that images of Christ tend to either separate his human and divine natures leading to nestorianism or confuse them leading to monophysitism and in the definition of Hieria, which is preserved for us in the Acts of Nicaea II, the bishops are saying, “No, it’s the Eucharist that is the image of Christ, not icons.” And then for non Christological images, they’re saying they’re just Pagan and they’re saying they’re demonic. That’s Hieria, a big council. Hieria had claimed to be an ecumenical council.

Now, the bishops at Nicaea II are going to say, “No, no, no. Hieria was not ecumenical because it didn’t have representation from the five major patriarchates of the early church, the so-called Pentarchy.” Rome Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria. But problem is neither did Nicaea II, the supposed leggetts from the East were not actually representing the eastern patriarchs and that’s acknowledged now pretty widely. Richard Price talks about that. And then he says, “The oriental patriarchs did not know the decrees of Nicaea II and presumably did not recognize it as the seventh council, and indeed for centuries afterward, Nicaea II was not added to the list of ecumenical councils in Syria Palestine.

Trent Horn:

First, I don’t understand why Gavin wants to endorse the Council of Hieria because it didn’t affirm the Protestant view of images that Gavin holds, which is that they can be used for religious art. Instead, Hieria condemned all religious images of any kind. It says, “There shall be rejected and removed and cursed one of the Christian church every likeness, which is made out of any material and color, whatever, by the evil art of painters. Whoever in future dares to make such a thing or to venerate it or set it up in a church or in a private house or possess it in secret shall, if bishop, presbyter or deacon be deposed if monk or layman be anathematized.”

Second, I’m really surprised that Gavin leaves out a very large regional council that was held in 692 at Trullo with 215 bishops in attendance. This is also called the Quinisext Council because its purpose was to complete the disciplinary canons that weren’t listed for the fifth and sixth ecumenical councils.

Those canons were later accepted by the Pope in a compromise that allowed them to be binding in the Eastern churches, but not the Western churches. The summary of Canon 82 says this, “Thou shall not paint a lamb for the type of Christ, but himself.” Instead of banning all images or only allowing symbols like fish or lambs, the canon specifically said that Christ should not be depicted with the symbol of the lamb, but that he himself should be represented so that as the council says, quote, “All may understand by means of it, the depths of the humiliation of the Word of God, and that we may recall to our memory, his conversation in the flesh, his passion and salutary death and his redemption, which was wrought for the whole world.”

Third, here’s some of Jimmy’s thoughts on which council has a better claim to being ecumenical, Hieria or Second Nicaea.

Jimmy Akin:

The issue of how to determine whether a council is ecumenical has been a historically controversial one. However, through the process of doctrinal development, it has been clarified. From a Catholic perspective, the thing that makes a council ecumenical is the fact that it was recognized as such by the Pope, the successor of Peter, and so the fact that the Council of Hieria was not recognized as having ecumenical authority by the Pope is why it’s not an ecumenical council. While the second council of Nicaea was recognized by the Pope as having ecumenical authority, and so it is an ecumenical council.

Now, as a Protestant, Gavin doesn’t accept this principle, and so he would need to figure out some other way of telling which councils should be regarded as ecumenical and which should not be, but that’s the Catholic understanding of the matter.

Gavin Ortlund:

The Carolingian theologians had a lot of other problems with Nicaea II as well. They noted the abundance of for-

Gavin Ortlund:

… Nicaea II as well, they noted the abundance of forged, spurious and apocryphal documents upon which Nicaea II depended. Some of these were obvious. Some of them have been uncovered only more recently, but some of these were obvious even at the time. These are not legitimate documents. One example of this would be the supposed letters from Jesus to King Abgar of Edessa. Everybody at the time knew that’s not real. That’s that’s a forgery.

Trent Horn:

Since the science of textual criticism had not developed yet, the councils would sometimes quote sources that weren’t authentic, like writings falsely attributed to certain saints. But this also happened at the Council of Hieria too. So if you reject one council for that reason, you’d have to reject the other for the exact same reason.

In addition, the church recognizes that the teaching authority of the ecumenical councils comes from the Holy Spirit guiding the bishops that are present and preventing them from binding the church to an error in faith or morals and doing so in an infallible way. It does not guarantee the bishops will always have the right answer or that they will use the best reasoning or evidence to get to the right answer they do infallibly define. The Holy Spirit only guarantees that the bishops won’t teach the wrong answer to an issue they choose to definitively settle.

Gavin Ortlund:

Another concern from the Council of Frankfurt was the strained employment of scripture at Nicaea II. In the acts of the second session of Nicaea II, in Pope Hadrian’s letter, which the bishops approved, you find appeals like this. When making his great announcement of the coming of our Redeemer and the incarnation of the very son of God, he recommends the worship of his face according to the dispensation of his manhood by saying, “I shall seek, oh Lord, your face” and later, “All the wealthy of the people will supplicate your face” and again, “The light of your face is stamped upon us, oh Lord.” Now that’s Psalm 26:8, Psalm 44:14 and Psalm 4:7.

The Western theologians, probably like most of us today in reading through the Acts of Nicaea II, and I had many moments like this reading through, I’m just like, seriously, that’s not about icon veneration when the Psalms talk about seeing the face of God. So later, Protestants will do the same thing. They’ll just make fun of this. Here’s how Martin Chemnitz put it. He said, “Surely if some satirist had wanted to attack the teaching of the papalists about images [inaudible 01:41:28] and to set it forth to be ridiculed, he could not have induced scripture more ridiculously.” There’s a lot of misuse of scripture.

Trent Horn:

Remember that the use of these psalms was not part of the council. It was part of a letter from Pope Hadrian addressed to the bishops assembled at the council. I have not been able to locate the complete letter, but based on what Gavin says, it seems like the Pope was making an argument based on the spiritual sense of the text rather than its literal meaning. The Pope saw that the words of the psalms were fitting for the point he was making, even if his point was not the literal meaning of those psalms.

To give an analogy, a lot of American Protestants say we should pray for God to heal the United States of America, and to justify that they quote 2 Chronicles 7:14. It says this: If my people who are called by my name humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.

Now in the literal sense, this verse is not a promise that God will solve the problems of any country whose Christian inhabitants pray for it. This verse records a promise to King Solomon about God’s care for the land of Israel. But in a more spiritual sense, you could cite this passage and others like it to justify asking God to guide your nation towards good rather than evil.

So I would say the use of scripture passages in the debate over icons in the eighth century would fall under this spiritually fitting use rather than the use of the literal sense of the text, and so it should be given a similar flexibility in our understanding of how the texts have been used.

Gavin Ortlund:

There’s also misuse of the fathers. The big one is one I’ve mentioned several times already from Basil. There’s a statement that the honor shown to the images transmitted to the prototype. That was foundational. That was a linchpin for the theology of Nicaea II. In context, it has nothing to do with icon veneration. Okay? That statement is a theological argument about the trinity, the Father and the son, drawn from the analogy of the emperor and his image on a coin for instance. So the term image is often equivocated upon by the bishops at Nicaea II.

Trent Horn:

Let’s take a closer look at St. Basil the Great when it comes to images. Paragraph 2132 of the catechism says, “The Christian veneration of images is not contrary to the first commandment, which proscribes idols. Indeed, quoting the fourth century Father St. Basil the Great, the honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype, and whoever venerates an image venerates the person portrayed in it.

First, St. Basil was definitely in favor of creating images of holy people. In his Homily on the Martyrdom of St. Barlaam, who was killed during the persecution of Diocletian, Basil says, “Up I charge you, ye famous painters of the martyr struggles, adorned by your art, the mutilated figure of this officer of our army. I have made but a sorry picture of the crowned hero. Use all your skill and all your colors in his honor.

Another piece of evidence comes from letter 360 where Basil says of the apostles, prophets and martyrs, “I honor and kiss the features of their images in as much as they have been handed down from the apostles and are not forbidden but are in all our churches.” However, many scholars claim this passage is a forgery created during the Iconoclast Controversy. I’m just sharing it with you so you know that it exists, and you can make up your own mind about it because there’s forgeries on both sides of the debate.

But at the very least, St. Basil did not condemn religious art and he saw it as a way to honor the person that it depicts. Now he did say the honor paid to the image passes on to the prototype. But what about Gavin’s claim that this is taken out of context? Here’s the larger context. Basil is defending the Trinity saying that Christ and the Father both equally share the same divine nature, but both are distinct persons. There is one person, the Father, and another distinct person, the Son. Both are equally divine.

Basil then addresses a challenge to his view. He says, “If one and one, are there not two gods?” In response, Basil uses an analogy to artwork. He says, “Because we speak of a king and of the king’s image and not of two kings, the majesty is not cloven in two nor the glory divided. The sovereignty and authority over us is one. And so the doxology ascribed by us is not plural, but one because the honor paid to the image passes onto the prototype.”

In the ancient world, a picture of a king was honored just as the king is honored, but the picture is not another king. That’s why when Jesus was asked if Jews should pay the temple tax, he pointed to a Roman coin and said, “Whose likeness and inscription is this?” Mark 12:16 through 17 says, “When the Pharisees said to Jesus, Caesar’s, Jesus said to them, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s.”

St. Athanasius, a contemporary of St. Basil, gave a similar analogy in his arguments against the Arians. Athanasius said, “He who worships the image in it worships the emperor also, for the image is his form and appearance. Since then the Son, too, is the Father’s image, it must necessarily be understood that the Godhead and propriety of the Father is the being of the Son.”

Basil’s point was that just as an image and the original, or the prototype, receive one and the same veneration, the Father and the Son receive one and the same veneration because the Son is the perfect image of the Father. In fact, St. Basil goes on to explain the difference in his analogy. He writes, “Now what in the one case, the images by reason of imitation, that in the other case, the Son is by nature and as in works of art, the likeness is dependent on the form. So in the case of the divine and uncompounded nature, the union consists in the communion of the Godhead.:

As I noted earlier, Colossians 1:15 says, “Christ is the icon of the Father.” He is the perfect image of the Father by nature. However, artistic images do have a real relationship between the originals, even if it’s not a natural relationship. They have a relationship in bearing the same person through the same form, which the form is the arrangement of the materials in the image like the wood and the paint in resembling what they depict. This is important because when someone venerates an image of Christ, the image they venerate does not exist in the material of the icon. It doesn’t exist in the specific wood and paint of that icon because if it did, then you couldn’t rearrange the material in order to depict someone else. Instead, the image they venerate exists in the form of the image that the matter participates in.

Here’s how St. Theodore the Studite put it in the eighth century. He quotes St. Basil on the matter and then he says this: “The image of Christ is nothing else but Christ, except obviously for the difference of essence as we have repeatedly proved. It follows that the veneration of the image is veneration of Christ. The material of the image is not venerated at all, but only Christ who has likeness in it. Those things which have a single likeness obviously also have a single veneration. Therefore, Christ does not give his glory to another in his own image, in which rather he obtains the glory for himself, since the material is something other than the likeness. Doubtless, the same form is in all the representations, though they are made with different materials.

Theodore summarizes it this way: “Just as the Father and the Son share the same nature, but each is a different person, an image of the Son and the Son himself share the same person, but they each have a different nature.”

Okay. The reason I’ve gone through all of this is that you can’t just dismiss Second Nicaea and the Council’s citation of St. Basil by saying, well, St. Basil’s talking about the Trinity. He’s not talking about icon veneration. Right. Basil’s argument that Christ who is the perfect image of the Father, who receives the one veneration given to God, that analogy does not work unless you believe something else about images from his analogy. You have to believe that images can receive the one veneration given to the person the image depicts and don’t become some separate entity being venerated.

For example, if the king in an image you honor is not the same king who sits on the throne, that’s treason. Likewise, if the Christ in an image you honor is not the same Christ who sits at the right hand of the Father, then that’s idolatry. So we should not quote St. Basil as if he were defending icon veneration. It’s correct. That was not his focus. But we can point out that St. Basil the Great laid the foundation for future theological development of the veneration of icons, and he believed that the honor associated with images transferred in some way to the person in the image as when he asked that the best images be created of the martyrs, for example.

Gavin Ortlund:

Perhaps the most pervasive problem with the argumentation at Nicaea II that the Council of Frankfurt draws attention to is just the lack of Patristic support. So Richard Price talks about this. He uses the term The Golden Age to refer to the period between Nicaea I and the Council of Chalcedon, 325 to 451, and he says, “The real problem for iconophile cause lay in the poverty of support for their cause even in the golden age of the fathers. In the context of a debate that treated the fathers of the golden age as the primary authority, it was a serious weakness in the iconophile cause, that no single passage from any of these fathers gave an explicit stamp of approval to such veneration.”

Mike Humphreys notes the same thing. He talks about the florilegium. They came up with that at Nicaea II, basically a list of Patristic citations. What strikes a neutral reader of Nicaea’s florilegium is the relative paucity of its evidence. The compilers could not find any church fathers explicitly supporting icons.

Trent Horn:

It’s not uncommon for certain liturgical and devotional practices to develop long after the theology that undergirds the practices understood. For example, belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist can be found in the earliest apostolic fathers, but the practice of Eucharistic adoration did not develop until the 11th and 12th centuries. Prior to that, you have a development in custom and devotion of the Eucharist being reserved in a special place, usually for security purposes, and then being placed near the altar and finally exposed on the altar for lay people to adore Christ.

Likewise, the practice of venerating saints and seeking their intercession comes before the practice of venerating them through images, which isn’t described in surviving literature until centuries after the literature that talks about the veneration of the saints themselves and seeking their intercession.

But as we noted earlier, the lack of support for a particular devotion or custom does not mean it’s immoral because it takes time for customs to develop. And the previous church fathers that have been discussed don’t condemn the veneration of Christian images. They condemn pagan idolatry.

Now let’s take a look at how Gavin summarizes how the Western Church responded to the Second Council of Nicaea.

Gavin Ortlund:

So opposition lasts in the West for a long time. It’s not like just immediately after Frankfurt it dissipates. This more moderate Western position that icons should be neither destroyed nor venerated was maintained at a council in Paris in 825. That’s during the second wave of iconoclasm, ninth century, and then throughout the ninth century this is a live issue.

There’s another person from Orleans, Jonas, who’s writing a text responding to the iconoclast actions of a bishop named Claudius. There’s debate about this rumbling on. It’s not until 880, more than a century after Nicaea II, that there’s an official recognition by Rome of the ecumenical status of Nicaea II, but the more interesting thing is on the ground, there are centuries of resistance to the practice. And Martin Chemnitz talks about this in Germany, places like this. It’s illegal to adore images in certain regions of Germany into the 1100’s, mid 12th century. It’s only in 1140 that it becomes a part of canon law in the West.

Trent Horn:

So first, it takes time for the decision of an ecumenical council or the papal magisterium to be accepted throughout the world. Now sometimes there’s resistance and further clarification is needed. This still happens in the modern world, such as when Pope Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968 specifically on contraception, and the Canadian bishops in response issued the Winnipeg Statement that really undermined the teaching. But eventually, Pope Paul VI’s teaching became accepted among all the conferences of bishops, and even in 2008, the Canadian bishops issued a statement in full support of the encyclical Humanae Vitae.

In the ancient church and in the Middle Ages, this process of reception could take longer. This can be seen in the teachings of the First Council of Nicaea in 325. If you think about it, there was so much opposition to First Nicaea, it needed to be reaffirmed and clarified at the Ecumenical Council of Constantinople in 381. So it’s not surprising you’d find Western theologians having concerns about Second Nicaea, especially since some of them misunderstood the Eastern position on icons.

Bronwen Neil in his article, The Western Reaction to the Council of Nicaea II published in the Journal of Theological Studies says, “The Frankish reaction to the Council was based on a faulty Latin translation of the Acts, which is not extent,” and that, “The error which led to the most fatal misunderstanding among the Frankish theologians as to the iconophile position was the failure to distinguish between relative veneration, which can appropriately be offered to icons, and true worship appropriate to God alone. Both terms were translated by the Latin adoratae and its derivatives. Neil also says that Pope Hadrian “was in full agreement with the theological arguments put forward at the Second Council of Nicaea,” and the delay in formally approving them “can only be found in the context of the complex political relations between the powers of Byzantium in the East and the papacy in the newly established Carolingian kingdom in the West.

Next, Gavin offers a biblical critique of icon veneration and begins by noting how idolatry is frequently condemned in the Old Testament and how God praises those who destroy idols and pagan altars. Gavin admits, though, he’s not making an argument in this section, but the context he’s setting can prejudice people on the topic of icon veneration. It would be like a Muslim arguing against the incarnation by quoting all of the scripture passages of the Old Testament that repeatedly say God is not a man. Passages like Numbers 23:19 or Hosea 11:9, which says, “For I am God and not man,” or quoting, when Jesus says no one has ever seen God or that God is spirit in John 4:24.

Of course, the incarnation of the true God is different than the worship of false gods or the worship of human rulers who claim to be divine. So these prohibitions don’t apply to Christ. Likewise, icon veneration, not worship. So veneration of images of holy people is different than idolatry, though Gavin has a response to this kind of reasoning.

Gavin Ortlund:

What people will, of course, want to say is that it’s not idolatry to venerate icons. This is different and this is where the distinction between worship and veneration comes in.

Let me interact with that a little bit because my concern is that this distinction is completely alien to both scripture and to the consciousness of the early church. When the scripture condemns bowing to images, it does not ever make that or any comparable qualification. It’s the act of bowing down that is part of what is condemned in scripture, the second commandment but many other passages. Here’s Leviticus 26:1. It says, “You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it for I am the Lord your God.”

So what people will say is… Well, people say various things. One of the things people will try to say is, yeah, but these commandments were just against the pagan images, not necessarily against all images. But that very distinction is nowhere in the text.

Jimmy Akin:

Here Gavin is once again presupposing Protestantism in order to prove Protestantism. Specifically, he’s relying on the Protestant principle of sola scriptura. He’s assuming that in order for Christians to use a distinction, that distinction must be made in the biblical text, but that’s nonsense. It doesn’t matter whether the ancient authors recognized a distinction. What matters is whether the distinction is a real one. And if it is real, then it’s legitimate to point it out and to act on its implications. We thus do not need to ask whether the biblical authors made a distinction between worship and veneration. We need to ask whether the distinction between worship and veneration is real, and it is real.

In fact, Gavin is simply wrong that the biblical text does not recognize the difference between worship and veneration. The Bible clearly recognizes that worship is one thing. It’s the attitude the ancient Israelites needed to show towards the true God. But the Bible also recognizes forms of respect that fall short of divine worship. The 10 commandments themselves say honor your father and mother, and this is a form of respect that falls short of divine worship. The New Testament similarly says to show honor to whom honor is due, referring to human officials, and that also falls short of divine worship. So actually the Bible does recognize the distinction between worship and veneration. Gavin is simply wrong about this.

What the Bible may not do is apply this distinction to the question of whether one can legitimately venerate but not worship a symbol of Jesus or the saints. In the Old Testament, the Israelites were so tempted towards idolatry in the proper sense that the prophets issued strong warnings and condemnations of idolatry, and they didn’t consider the question of how the worship veneration distinction might be applied in a purely monotheistic environment. But once the Christian age began and after several centuries, Christians were no longer being tempted to worship pagan gods, the question presented itself again and it was recognized that you could show veneration or respectful gestures toward symbols without worshiping those symbols as gods. We thus see a legitimate extension of the biblical principle that worship is to be given only to God, but respect or veneration can be shown towards creatures.

For Gavin to object to this on the grounds that scripture doesn’t apply the distinction in this way is to presuppose sola scriptura, and that makes his argument circular, assuming Protestantism in order to prove Protestantism. And it’s a particularly shortsighted form of circular reasoning because Protestants themselves recognize that it is legitimate to take biblical principles and apply them in new post-biblical situations.

For example, the Bible doesn’t command Christians to use musical instruments in worship. It does establish in the Old Testament that there’s nothing wrong with using musical instruments when worshiping God, and almost all Protestant churches have recognized that it’s legitimate for Christians to do so also even though the New Testament that governs the faith and practice of Christians does not say to do that. And this is just one example among many in the Protestant community, but it reveals that Protestants acknowledge in principle that it’s legitimate to extend biblical principles to new post-biblical situations, and that allows us to do the same thing with the worship/veneration distinction. Gavin is simply being selective in which principles he’s willing to extend and which he isn’t. And this is a form of motivated reasoning intended to prop up the traditional Protestant aversion to icon veneration. It’s a selective, inconsistent application of the principles that Gavin himself acknowledges.

Trent Horn:

By Gavin’s logic, you couldn’t have religious art since the second commandment makes no distinction between images used for decorations and images used for worship. It just says, “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,” and then gives examples saying, “You shall not bow down to them or serve them.”

Of course, this was not an absolute prohibition because just five chapters later in the Book of Exodus, God commands that images of angels be put upon the arc of the covenant. But if we read the text in a rigid sense out of context, then we couldn’t have any personal religious art. So if Gavin would recognize a development in allowing personal possession of religious art or decorative religious art in churches that was previously not allowed because people were in danger of committing idolatry, then a similar development concerning the personal veneration of those holy images is on the table.

I’d also point out in Romans 14 that Paul says we have freedom in Christ. Paul said that Jewish Christians were still free to celebrate Jewish feast days. They just couldn’t demand other Christians celebrate with them. The presumption in Christian worship is that a devotion is permitted as long as it’s not prohibited. The examples of images God commanded to be made, which we’ll talk about here shortly, shows that the first part of the second commandment wasn’t universal or perpetual. And so this gives us good reason to think the second part does not universally condemn bowing or showing reverence to authentic holy images.

Gavin Ortlund:

Moreover, as with the early Christian apologists, it’s precisely the invisibility of the one true God that forms the basis for the prohibition of images. For example, in Deuteronomy 4 it says, “Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully since you saw no form on the day that the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire. Beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

The worship versus veneration distinction is not visible in scripture with respect to the use of images. Nowhere do you get the idea that it’s saying thou shall not bow down to images unless, of course, you’re venerating them. Then it’s fine. That distinction is a later innovation. Okay?

The metaphor I like to use to describe this is imagine a husband and wife living in a culture where kissing is a form of cultural greeting and the wife is jealous for her husband’s affections. So she says I don’t want you to be like the other people out there. Don’t ever kiss other women. And she says this repeatedly to him. Later when it’s discovered that he is frequently kissing other women, he replies, oh, but it’s just a kiss of friendship, not a kiss of romance. The wife would justifiably feel that this distinction is simply a way of getting around her request because the request was simply about kissing per se, and no such distinction was on the table at the time.

Similarly, God’s commandments simply prohibit bowing down to images as such, and there’s no distinction between worship and veneration, one kind of bowing to images versus another that’s visible in connection to those commandments of God.

Jimmy Akin:

Here Gavin is reading the biblical text in a fundamentalist way. He’s identified a divine command and is just urging us to apply that command without thinking about why God gave it and why the Israelites shouldn’t bow to images of pagan gods. I mean, just don’t do any bowing.

But since the time of Christ, Christians have realized that we need to think about why God gave the commands he did in the Old Testament so that we understand what their proper limits are. Someone taking Gavin’s attitude in the first century could say, God said don’t eat pork, so just don’t eat it. But St. Paul and others recognize that we need to think about the limits of that commandment. And when they did that, they realized that it didn’t apply to Christians after the time of Jesus. It contained principles that applied up to the time of Jesus in the Jewish community and those principles still apply in a spiritual sense today, such as avoiding morally unclean things, but Christ fulfilled the law, and so we no longer need to consider certain foods unclean. Thus we do need to think about the principles behind God’s commandments and understanding why they were given and what their limits are. We can’t adopt a fundamentalist just say no approach.

Gavin also gives an analogy where a wife tells her husband not to kiss other women, and in the context of the story, the wife has forbidden any kissing, even non-romantic kissing. So the husband would be violating her commandment if he gave non-romantic kisses to other women. But even then, the husband would need to think about the limits of his wife’s commandment. For example, did the wife really intend her husband never to kiss their own daughters? I mean, they’re female too. Was it really her intention that he never kissed them? Well, in the same way, we need to think about what God’s intention was in giving certain commands, and if we don’t, we’ll end up misunderstanding and misapplying his laws.

Trent Horn:

So in regard to Gavin’s analogy, a husband does not kiss his children like how he kisses his wife, but he does kiss his children in an affectionate way that he does not practice with women at the office. Likewise, Christians don’t give divine worship to icons, but some of them venerate icons with a respect that they do not give to non-Christian images.

What we’ve seen over the past several thousand years is a development in our ability to understand spiritual realities through physical images without falling into false conceptions of those realities. For example, in Western art, it’s not uncommon to depict angels as having a face and wings but no body in order to communicate through art that angels are immaterial.

Finally, scriptures prohibition on depicting God made sense when the Israelites were tempted to idolatry and God wanted to underscore that the divine nature of Yahweh is invisible and transcendent in contrast to the pagan deities. But since Christ became man, he literally made himself a physical image of the Father. That’s why Jesus told the apostles in John 14:9, “He who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Gavin Ortlund:

This is not to say that the distinction between worship and veneration or other forms of respect has no validity in any context. When a knight bows down to a king, for example, this can be an act of homage, not an act of idolatry. Bowing down to people has a different range of meanings throughout different human cultures, and it occurs in many places of the Bible, but that is disanalogous to an ongoing liturgical act of veneration directed to non-living objects.

Here’s how this was put at the Council of Frankfurt. It is one thing to adore a man, that is to greet him with the duty of a salutation and with the obeisance of politeness and reverence. It is another to adore a picture. For that we should show brotherhood, love and reverence toward our neighbors, we are taught by examples of scripture, but we are expressly forbidden to adore or to greet images. And they quote the second commandment there. And that’s true, that you find examples in holy scripture of people bowing down to other people. You never find examples of people bowing down to non-living objects in this liturgical act of reverence.

Jimmy Akin:

So Gavin makes a big deal about bowing, but this is just a matter of custom. Gavin seems to act as if bowing is somehow taboo, as if the physical act of…

Jimmy Akin:

Is somehow taboo as if the physical act of bending at the waist or bending your knees in this context was somehow wrong, but Gavin acknowledges that you can bow in front of a human being. He acknowledges that this happens in the Bible without censure. It isn’t the physical action that’s the problem. The physical action is just a symbol of what’s happening in your heart, and it’s what you’re doing in your heart that is really important. If you’re bowing in front of a person to show them ordinary human respect, that’s not a problem. And if you’re bowing in front of a picture of Jesus or kissing a picture of Jesus or kissing a picture of your wife, that’s fine too because the reverence and love in your heart that you are showing in this action is legitimate.

But if you’re bowing in front of an idol of Baal, that’s a problem because you are not supposed to be worshiping Baal. And if you bow in front of an image of Jesus thinking that it’s literally Jesus, then that’s a problem too because it’s not. Jesus is not literally there and your action does not correspond to reality. We thus see that the Christian practice of showing respect to images of Jesus or the saints is fine in practice as long as you recognize that these are just symbols and that Jesus and the saints are not literally there.

At this point, many Protestants may be inclined to entertain a kind of scrupulous worry. They may be concerned that something improper may be going on in the hearts of the people performing these outward actions. Maybe those people are thinking Jesus is really inside that hunk of plaster. If someone thinks this, then he’s wrong and what he’s doing is wrong, but you can’t just assume that that’s what’s going on in his heart. You shouldn’t be judging other people’s hearts, especially not without asking them what they’re doing in their hearts. What we see in this case is that the Christian veneration of icons is a legitimate doctrinal development.

If we think carefully about what idolatry meant in the ancient world and what the biblical authors were actually condemning, we see that the Christian veneration of icons is just not the same thing. And if we think about the extension of the principles of showing respect to images, we see that it is also legitimate to show a respectful attitude towards images as symbols of the person they represent, as Protestants themselves do.

Unfortunately, many in the Protestant community don’t think through these principles. They often take a broad brush approach and say that anything that is outwardly similar to idolatry must be idolatry without thinking about what idolatry actually involved in the ancient world and how it’s different than just showing respect in other contexts. It’s often pointed out that Protestants themselves do this. For example, it’s pointed out that a Protestant may kiss a picture of his wife if they can’t be together, and that’s certainly legitimate.

Furthermore, Protestants show respect to religious images. This happens for example, when they set up images of Protestant religious leaders like a bust of Martin Luther or John Calvin in a pastor’s office. The whole point of having a bust of Luther or Calvin in your office is to show respect for them. The same principle applies in setting up statues of them in front of churches or Protestant universities. It’s all about showing respect for the person and remembering them.

Also, notice that Gavin once again presupposes Sola Scriptura. He acknowledges that it’s legitimate to show reverence or veneration for people other than God, but he points out that scripture does not show this being done for symbols of people, like icons. And he points out that scripture does not show this being done in a liturgical context. Well, fair enough. But so what? Unless you assume that scripture must show every legitimate application of principles, this is utterly irrelevant.

In fact, even if they hold back on outward gestures, Protestants themselves display a respectful attitude towards symbols of Jesus and other religious figures. They even do so in a liturgical context as when they place crosses in Protestant churches as a sign of reverence for Jesus and what he did on the cross. So this is just the selective inconsistent application of principles again.

Trent Horn:

remember that the principle we should use is that a devotion is permitted unless it is prohibited. Just because scripture does not describe a devotion, that’s not enough to say the devotion or custom is immoral. Next, Gavin talks about the lack of veneration of images in the Old Testament. He talks a lot about whether the Ark of the Covenant was venerated and this could go either way. The Ark of the Covenant is venerated in the sense that it is given special honor that is not bestowed to other manmade objects. For example, no one was allowed to touch the Ark of the Covenant, or you would die if you did that. If Catholic churches said some images of Mary were so holy that no one was allowed to touch them, you’d bet Gavin would call that illicit veneration of an image even if it doesn’t involve bowing.

Or to give you another example, imagine that Catholics in an army brought out a picture of Mary before a battle or a picture of a saint, and the soldiers let out a mighty cry. And at seeing the picture, they were so enthusiastic that the other army thought that they were worshiping Mary or the saint as a goddess. Now the very least would call this veneration. Well, that’s what happens to the arc in first Samuel four, three through seven. That’s when the arc is brought out to fight the Philistines, and the arc ends up being captured. And while it’s in the Philistine camp, the Philistines discover that a statue of their God, Dagon, had fallen over and was lying prostrate before the arc, which along with the plague of boils, scared the Philistines into returning the arc.

In that example, God caused a pagan idol to essentially venerate the Ark of the Covenant, although one could argue that all of these cases involve veneration of God himself who happens to be present in the ark. But this explanation won’t suffice for a clear case of religious worship involving images in the Old Testament. That would be the bronze serpent that Moses made a God’s request that’s recorded in numbers 21. Here’s Gavin’s explanation about that and then a reply,

Gavin Ortlund:

What about the bronze serpent? Here’s another one where it backfires because first of all, it’s a unique one-off event. Second of all, it’s not venerated over and over. These things are appealed to that are not venerated. But the biggest problem is it was destroyed by Hezekiah, and he’s praised for destroying it precisely because it had become a snare to his people. Second Kings 18:4, Hezekiah removed the high places and broke the pillars and cut down the Asherah and he broke in pieces, the bronze serpent that Moses has made, for until those days, the people of Israel had made offerings to it. So this is a great example of what Protestants think happened. Something good happens and then people start to idolize it in various ways. And Hezekiah’s praised for destroying it.

Jimmy Akin:

This example does not backfire on Catholics or Orthodox as Gavin states. In fact, it does quite the opposite. In Numbers 21, God had sent a plague of serpents among the Israelites, and so he had Moses build a bronze serpent that they could look to and be healed of snakebite. The deliberate act of looking at the bronze serpent and trusting God to save you from the snake venom is a religious act. It’s an act of trust in God and it presupposes reverence for God. So here God authorizes a religious act in which trust and reverence are displayed in connection with a symbolic physical object.

In fact, in John 3 Jesus indicates that the bronze serpent was a type,, or symbol, of him, of Jesus himself. So we have a religious act of trust and reverence in connection with a symbolic object that typologically represents Christ, and all that is fine. What is not fine is what happened later in Israelite history. By the time of 2 Kings 18, the Israelites had begun to regard the bronze serpent as a deity. They gave it the name and since Nehushtan. And since nehash is the Hebrew word for snake, Nehushtan would mean something like Serpentor. So they’re worshiping their god, Serpentor, and making offerings to it. They’ve turned it into an idol and are committing idolatry in the proper sense. So King Hezekiah destroys it.

This perfectly illustrates the principle behind the Christian veneration of icons. Performing a gesture of trust and reverence with respect to a symbolic object that represents God and Christ, fine. Thinking that the object is a literal deity and making offerings to it, not fine. That’s exactly the principle involved in the Christian veneration of icons and the difference between it and idolatry.

Trent Horn:

Once again, examples aren’t meant to prove that scripture teaches the goodness of venerating icons. All they have to do is show is that it is not absolutely prohibited to create images, or to show God or holy people veneration through an image. The fact that God asks people to do this once is enough to show that venerating an image or respecting it is not intrinsically evil. It can become evil based on circumstance, but it’s not intrinsically evil in the same way that offering a sacrifice to something that isn’t God is intrinsically evil, or it’s something that’s so wrong, God would never command us to do it.

As I’ve noted also in other videos, some early Christians resorted to the superstitious practice of carrying amulets with them that contained ancient manuscripts of the Bible, and some church fathers oppose this. But that doesn’t mean showing respect for scripture or embroidering your favorite Bible verse on a t-shirt is wrong. Abusus non tollit usum. Abuse does not annul the proper use of something.

Gavin Ortlund:

Okay, let me just to finish off, let me address a couple of other objections from on this third section about the biblical teaching about icons. Some will say, they’ll try to make it sound less problematic by saying, “Oh, but wouldn’t you kiss the Bible?” However, although kisses can be an expression of veneration, they’re not always an expression of veneration. They can be an expression of affection or respect, or even in some cultures greeting, friendship. So if a Christian were to kiss a Bible, that’s not necessarily venerative, especially if it’s not a ritual practice in the context of worship. Basically, Christians should treat physical objects like Bibles or crosses or religious art with respect and with affection, but that’s not the same as venerating them seeing them as channels to heaven requiring such a practice on the pain of anathema.

Trent Horn:

Gavin is making a distinction without a difference. When you look at most dictionaries, they define veneration as showing great respect or reverence to something. When a Protestant kisses a Bible after reading the parable of the prodigal son, how is that different from when I kiss an icon depicting the parable of the prodigal son at a divine liturgy, for example, that has that particular reading from the gospels? So I would ask Gavin, is it acceptable to show the saints or God at least respect and reverence? Well, of course it is. The difference between Gavin and myself on this is that Catholics and the Eastern Orthodox believe that the members of the body of Christ are united to one another, and so we can offer that reverence to them as if they were here, and images are a helpful way for us to visualize that and better appreciate the reality of the one body of Christ and how the saints in heaven are aware of us on earth and want to intercede for us.

Gavin Ortlund:

Now, another thing people do is they try to frame icon veneration as an implication of the goodness of creation and above all of the incarnation, as though the iconoclast concern is somehow gnostic. People do this over and over. This is simply rhetoric. There is no difference with respect to our affirmation of the goodness of creation or the incarnation. We fully agree on that from neither principle does it follow that we should specifically bow down to non-living images. That just does not logically follow from the goodness of creation or from the incarnation. And the early church is an example of that.

Okay, here’s the ultimate Protestant concern on this third point is that I think there’s a naivety about how idolatry can sneak in. In actual practice, if you imagine a person who’s bowing down before a statue of Mary outside of a church asking for forgiveness, or a woman who’s lighting candles and kneeling before an icon of the Apostle John nightly in her home, is there any Christian anywhere in the first 500 years of church history who would not conclude that that is idolatry?

Externally, it looks the same. And internally it’s extremely hard to know when that line is crossed in the human heart, in the heart of a person engaging like this. Is it not easy for feelings of loyalty and hope and affection and trust to sneak in being given to this creature that should only be given to the creator. Given the dire mentality of scripture regarding idolatry, why are such practices not more concerning? For Protestants, this is just really strange to us.

Jimmy Akin:

I understand that it’s strange to Protestants because it’s not part of their tradition and they’ve heard sermons from their pastors dumping on the idea. Even Gavin’s own understanding here is problematic because he envisions a person praying in front of a statue of Mary for forgiveness when the most a Catholic or Orthodox person should do is ask Mary to intercede with God and ask God to forgive them. But Gavin is again looking at things from the outside, the externals. He’s hung up on the idea of the physical act of bending your body at the waist or the knee or bowing that that’s somehow wrong in this context, even though it’s not in others.

And when he turns to considering what’s happening in people’s hearts, he starts judging people’s hearts once again, worrying that people will start thinking of a symbol as the real thing. It’s understandable that he might have this worry since the tradition to which he belongs regularly preaches that idea.

But dude, four points. First, if someone does get confused and think of a symbol as the real thing, he’s wrong. Second, the fact that some people hypothetically might get confused does not mean that the practice itself is wrong and can’t be done, because third, many people who venerate icons are not confused on this point and recognize the image as just a symbol. That would be me, for example. And fourth, don’t judge other people’s hearts. Gavin may say that that’s not what he’s doing, but the fact he continues this argument in this vein talking about his worries about what people are doing in their hearts suggests that he is.

Trent Horn:

This argument is smuggling in some of Gavin’s Protestant tendencies. And we know in the early church Christians often ask the saints to pray for them. Gavin would probably consider this to be a kind of idolatry, but the early church didn’t. For example, one catacomb inscription says [Latin 02:29:10] or in English, Peter and Paul help Primos, a sinner. According to the Cambridge manual of Latin epigraphy, catacomb graffiti served many purposes including prayers to the saints for intercessions. Or consider the earliest liturgical prayer in church history, which is a request to marry. It says, “We take refuge beneath the protection of your compassion, Theotokos, God bearer. Do not disregard our prayers and troubling times, but deliver us from danger. Oh, only pure and blessed one.”

According to Stephen Schumacher, a scholar Gavin has quoted at length in previous videos, “Some Christians in Egypt had begun to pray to the Virgin Mary and asked for her intercessions already by the end of the third century.”

Also, if we base our decision on what would’ve scandalized Christians in the first 500 years of church history, we wouldn’t have music in church. When the organ was introduced in the sixth century to worship, it was very controversial because it was an instrument used by pagans in their debaucherous festivals. Even after it was allowed, the use of polyphony and other intricate musical elements remained very controversial. But over time, the church came to see through the teaching of the magisterium, that specific kinds of instrumental music and singing can have a proper place in the liturgy. Likewise, veneration through icons underwent a similar process of development that we should also accept.

Gavin Ortlund:

Now, I know people say, no, no, no, you’re thinking of it wrong. It’s not that bad. Well, look, I don’t know anyone’s heart. I don’t judge like this person or that person. I don’t know when idolatry is happening. But here’s what I do know. I read through the acts of Nicaea 2 and I notice that the prayers being commended there to saints via images are begging for forgiveness, assurance and salvation from the saint.

So here’s an example. This is a forged passage miscited as though Basil said this. He said, “I also accept the holy apostles prophets and martyrs, and in supplication to God, I invoke them that through them or rather through their intercessions, God in his benevolence may be merciful to me and that a ransom may be made and given for my offenses. I therefore also honor and venerate the figures of their images.”

Now, why would we not be worried about idolatry when the very particular benefits perceived to be received in connection with the veneration of and prayer to icons are precisely those things that the gospel teaches us? We already have straight from the hand of Christ. We don’t need another ransom, we don’t need another propitiation. We don’t need another source of assurance of salvation. We have that fully through Jesus Christ through simple faith in his gospel. So I get to a point where I say, my gosh, if these prayers being commended in the acts of Nicaea 2 are not idolatry, I simply don’t know what is.

Jimmy Akin:

Well, I really hate to say it, but Gavin just did. It appears that he simply does not know what idolatry is. The prayer he quoted expressed a hope that the intercession of the apostles, prophets, and martyrs would result in God being benevolent towards the person saying the prayer, and that is manifestly not idolatry. That’s the equivalent of one of Gavin’s congregants saying, “Hey, Pastor Ortlund, will you please pray that God will give me an assurance of his forgiveness?” If one of Gavin’s congregants made a request like that of him, the person would not be committing idolatry.

Asking another person to pray alongside you and hoping that God will listen to the prayers is not idolatry because you’re not thinking of the other person as a deity who will answer your prayers. And if you’re using a symbol of that person, you are not thinking of the symbol as a deity that will answer your prayers. So as surprised as I was to hear Gavin say this, it really looks like he does not understand what idolatry is. At a minimum he’s being very sloppy and uncritical in his thinking about it.

Trent Horn:

Once again, the concern is not the veneration of icons per se, but Gavin’s fundamental disagreement about the communion of saints and the efficacy of asking the saints to pray for us so we will attain salvation. This doesn’t work for Gavin for a variety of reasons. One of which is that Gavin believes that a Christian cannot lose his salvation, which was absent not just from the first 500 years of the church’s history, but from the first 1500 years. So I don’t understand Gavin’s desire to want to emulate the early Christians given that his Baptist theology contradicts doctrines that other Protestant scholars agree were universal in the early church like baptismal regeneration, or the possibility of losing salvation.

Second, the Bible talks about how we can help one another to be saved. For example, in 1 Corinthians 7, St. Paul says, “The unbelieving husband is consecrated through his wife. And the unbelieving wife is consecrated through her husband. Otherwise, your children would be unclean, but as it is, they are holy. Wife, how do you know whether you will save your husband? Husband, how do you know whether you will save your wife?”

Now, the church does not teach that marriage is some kind of magical arrangement that gets people to heaven, but the prayers of our spouses are powerful in helping us attain the grace we need to remain in communion with God in his church. As Paul says in Galatians 6:2, “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” Once you have that foundation, it becomes easier to understand what 2 Nicaea is saying about the helpfulness of seeking the intercession of the saints through veneration of icons depicting the saints. Well, that concludes our look at Gavin’s video. And here’s some closing thoughts that Jimmy had in regards to Gavin’s overall case.

Jimmy Akin:

I have to say that I was very disappointed in this video by Gavin. His thinking was at times fundamentalistic. He took a just say no approach, don’t even do anything that even outwardly looks like this. He did not thoughtfully engage with the concept of idolatry and what the biblical writers were actually condemning, and he didn’t consider how the biblical distinction between worship and veneration might be applied in a post biblical monotheistic context. It’s entirely natural that we don’t have records of icon veneration in the early church. In the Greco Roman world, idolatry was just as common as it was in the Old Testament period, and it took centuries before Christianity was so firmly rooted that people began to reconsider and apply the relevant principles.

When they did, they realized that one can perform religious acts with symbolic objects like the bronze serpent as long as one doesn’t consider the object a god, and they realized that it is natural to show respect to images of people who deserve respect. They realized that you can show respect to images as a way of showing respect to the person that they represent. As Basil The Great said, “The respect paid to an image of a king passes on to the king himself.” You’re really respecting the king by showing respect to his image.

So this was indeed a case of doctoral development in which solid biblical principles were applied in a new situation. As far as Gavin’s hyperbolic, this one thing will make you Protestant claim. No, it won’t. His argument is based on an assumption of Sola Scriptura, and so it is just circular reasoning. He’s assuming Protestantism in order to prove Protestantism. When you actually consider the biblical principles involved, you discover that making respectful gestures with respect to assemble is just not idolatry. And the principle of being respectful to symbols of Jesus and other religious figures is something even Protestants themselves do.

They just can’t acknowledge the legitimacy of this in a Catholic or Orthodox context because of their tradition. Finally, I have to say that I’ve become progressively disappointed with Gavin’s channel, and I was disappointed with this video in particular. For a channel called Truth Unites, you’d think that it would focus more on the uniting part on presenting a positive case for Christianity with which a broad swath of people could agree. I used to like this channel a lot. And even when I disagreed with Gavin, I appreciated the work he was doing. It was a positive channel. But it’s gotten into a rut and it’s become progressively more negative.

Instead of presenting the Christian faith in a positive way that is primarily appreciative of the contributions made by various groups of Christians, Gavin has become focused primarily on complaining about Catholicism and Orthodoxy with a corresponding justification of Protestantism. It’s understandable that this would be a part of what the channel does. There’s nothing wrong with Apologetics. Everyone advocates his own view, and since Gavin’s a Protestant that would be expected. But this has begun to consume the Truth Unites channel, and it risks becoming just another channel of Protestant polemics.

At the time of writing, 10 of Gavin’s last 12 videos have been devoted to complaining about Catholicism and Orthodoxy and justifying Protestantism. Here is a screenshot that I took while I was writing this, so you can see the recent trend on the channel. Gavin’s running the risk of this just becoming a Protestant self-justification channel rather than one about truth uniting people. I’d hate to see it degenerate into a channel that’s just primarily about critiquing other Christians.

Trent Horn:

Now when it comes to my perspective, I want to say that I do appreciate Gavin’s work, especially the work he offers as a Protestant apologist. I know sometimes in the past he has been uncomfortable, like he’s maybe a reluctant Protestant apologist. It’s not necessarily what he sought out, but many people look to him as carrying that mantle. And I appreciate it because his work is much better researched than other Protestant apologists and is presented in a much more irenic form. Now, I have agreements with it, and I also have fundamental disagreements.

So I would just encourage Gavin, I like that he continues to produce this kind of work, but I do think he may have to come to grips with the fact of is he a Protestant apologist or not? Is his channel devoted to a kind of humanism between Christians or does he want to focus on providing a robust defense of Protestantism?

Maybe Gavin will say he can do both. That’s fine. But yeah, I still appreciate that at least as an opportunity to provide a lot of clarifications and engage more of this substantive research. I’m really looking forward to the debate I’m going to have with him next month on Pints with Aquinas when it comes to Sola Scriptura, and hopefully he and I can have other nice back and forths and dialogues about the subjects we’ve engaged each other in these kind of rebuttal videos. So thank you guys for watching, and I hope that you all have a very blessed day.

Trent Horn:

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