How I learned not to be afraid of artwork

Some thirteen hundred years ago, one of many Christian controversies arose when a movement called Iconoclasm swept the church. Iconoclasts were people who were alarmed at the proliferation of sacred art. The use of icons and statuary in religious worship worried the Iconoclasts - they saw in it the violation of the ten-commandment edict to make no "graven image."

Iconoclasm did not win out, at least not immediately. It survived in Islam, where art of any kind other than geometric patterns is haram (sinful.) And it resurfaced to an extent with the rise of Protestant movements in the 16th century (although it would later subside, as people began to realize that stained glass windows were not really all that insidious.)

But even today, some people remain wary of religious art. After all, the Old Testament is full of condemnations about worship in the "high places" and "golden calves." And I am a compulsive worrier, so the wary once included me. When I first heard of how East Orthodox Christians look more than fondly upon icons, but actually think worshipful thoughts as they gaze upon them, I worried. When I first saw people kissing crosses I worried. There was a powerful faith in these actions, but all I could see in my ever-fretful mind was God zapping and smiting people for doing it.

Is there not a risk of art becoming a golden calf? The risk may be there, but it does not hurt to look at the Bible itself, and the place and time the scriptures come from. That is what I always do when troubled by things.

The Bible was heavily revised during the age of King Josiah, king of Judah. The textual evidence is almost overwhelming (1 Kings 13:2 shows one obvious latter day interpolation.) And what was the experience of Josiah's subjects? Well, a hundred years earlier, their neighbours, the nation of Israel, had fallen to the Assyrians. Theologically, they wanted to explain how their nation had survived and their cousins next door had not. Josiah had nurtured a complex combination of religion and nationalism whose expression is still visible in Deuteronomy - a system of legal thought, prescribed festivals, humanitarianism, and in Deut 12:13, a single place of prescribed worship. Other books would make clear that this "place that the Lord will choose" was to be the Temple of Jerusalem, in Judah - the Temple of Solomon.

By doing this, the Judeans were also co-opting Hebrew religious worship. Anywhere that the Samaritans (the Israelite survivors of the Assyrian conquest, who to this day, do not recognize Jerusalem as the prescribed place of worship) worshipped is condemned in scripture. Particularly condemned is Omri, the Israelite king who had the audacity to establish a capital that was not Jerusalem (1 Kings 16:24)

So the point of all this is to keep in mind what a lot of the condemnation of Idolatry represents in the Old Testament - the Judaeans wanted a highly organized religion, unified to the state, centralized in the nation's capital. People outside this centralized religious belief were idolaters, plain and simple, whether they worshipped strange gods, worshipped idols, or just chose to make altars outside of the temple. It was a threat to the cohesion of the Jewish people to follow other practices. The sense of the Jewish people even today as a people worshipping in the direction of Jerusalem and the hope of a temple built anew has helped them to survive the many trials of history.

But Jews of Jesus' time were not iconoclasts. An archaeological dig in Capernaum, the city where Jesus' ministry was centered, has unearthed a synagogue whose walls were covered in paintings and images. It would seem that the iconography that was so present in the early Christian movement, scenes from the Bible depicted in frescoes and house churches, evolved naturally from the place and time that Jesus himself sprung from.

In Christian faith, believers are not oriented towards a temple in Jerusalem. We are oriented towards a saviour of flesh and blood. He was human. And because he was human, we can depict what he did and where he went, without making an idol.

And what a blessed thing for us - think of all the magnificent art that Christianity has produced, from Da Vinci's "Last Supper", to Michaelangelo's Cistine chapel, to even last year's "The Gospel of John" film, which I thought featured an excellent and moving performance by Henry Ian Cusick.

We don't worship these images. I certainly don't think the "Last Supper" is a deity, but it is inspiring. The beautiful yearning expressed in art (so exemplified by Michaelangelo's outstretched fingers of Adam) helps join us as a community of reverence, a reverence that hopefully lead us to the true God, the artist on whose canvas we are painted.