Reformed Spirituality: An Aniconic Spirituality
Exodus 20:1-6
Then God spoke all these words: “ I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the Lord your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
Reflection
In September 1523 in a sermon preached in Zurich, a learned Hebraist called Leo Judt pointed out a long-forgotten truth. There were two ways of numbering the ten commandments. The Western Church had assumed that today’s reading was the first commandment. Judt pointed out that for Jews, it was two. ‘You shall have no other gods but me’ was the first, and the second was ‘You shall not make for yourself an idol’.
Judaism was, of course, vehemently opposed to idolatry – think of Isaiah’s scornful and satirical dismissal of the idols of Babylon (Is 44:12-18; 45:20-25; 46) – and equally vehement in its witness to God’s power and freedom. God was so utterly beyond the power of the human mind, or the genius of the human imagination that any attempt to control him, capture him, picture him or imagine him was impossible. God was God’s own interpreter. If God is thought about in this way, images become a hindrance to God’s communication of himself. The technical term for avoiding the visual in theology is ‘aniconic’. We have seen that Judaism was and is aniconic. So is Islam, and so for a time was Eastern Orthodox Christianity, although the role of icons was firmly restored in 843.
The great strength of this aniconic way of thinking is that it makes everything relative to the might and wonder of God. The American Reformed theologian Richard Niebuhr put it well when he wrote, ‘The converse of dependence on God is independence of everything less than God.’ It is all too easy to let other things take the place of God, be it people we love and admire, systems of thought and political allegiance, or the accumulation of knowledge. As its best, the Reformed emphasis on God’s wonder and majesty lends perspective to the rest of life.
Prayer
Lord
save us from ourselves
when we believe we have the answers
when our systems seem infallible
when we are convinced of our own goodness
and the truth of our causes.
Remind us then
that you are God
and that salvation is to be found
only in your everlasting arms.
Amen.