Icons & Statues: The Point?

Sometimes anti-Catholics/anti-Episcopalians (anti-Anglican for that matter) cite Deuteronomy 5:9, where God said concerning idols, "You shall not bow down to them." Since many Catholics sometimes bow or kneel in front of statues of Jesus and the saints, anti-Anglicans confuse the legitimate veneration of a sacred image with the sin of idolatry. 


Though bowing can be used as a posture in worship, not all bowing is worship. In Japan, people show respect by bowing in greeting (the equivalent of the Western handshake). Similarly, a person can kneel before a king without worshipping him as a god. In the same way, an Anglican who may kneel in front of a statue while praying isn’t worshipping the statue or even praying to it, any more than the Protestant who kneels with a Bible in his hands when praying is worshipping the Bible or praying to it. 


We use statues and icons (Greek word for image) to focus our thoughts and prayers.  During a plague of serpents sent to punish the Israelites during the exodus, God told Moses to "make [a statue of] a fiery serpent, and set it on a pole; and every one who is bitten, when he sees it shall live. So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it on a pole; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live" (Num. 21:8–9). 

One had to look at the bronze statue of the serpent to be healed, which shows that statues could be used ritually, not merely as religious decorations.

Anglicans use statues, paintings, and other artistic devices to recall the person or thing depicted. Just as it helps to remember one’s mother by looking at her photograph, so it helps to recall the example of the saints by looking at pictures of them. Anglicans also use statues as teaching tools. In the early Church they were especially useful for the instruction of the illiterate. Many Protestants have pictures of Jesus and other Bible pictures in Sunday school for teaching children. Anglicans also use statues to commemorate certain people and events, much as Protestant churches have three-dimensional nativity scenes at Christmas.

If one measured Protestants by the same rule, then by using these "graven" images, they would be practicing the "idolatry" of which they accuse Catholics/Anglicans. But there’s no idolatry going on in these situations. God forbids the worship of images as gods, but he doesn’t ban the making of images. If he had, religious movies, videos, photographs, paintings, and all similar things would be banned. But, as the case of the bronze serpent shows, God does not even forbid the ritual use of religious images.

It is when people begin to adore a statue as a god that the Lord becomes angry. Thus when people did start to worship the bronze serpent as a snake-god (whom they named "Nehushtan"), the righteous king Hezekiah had it destroyed (2 Kgs. 18:4). 

This is an excerpt from my previous blog post "The Anglo-Catholics: What We Believe".  "...While some of us use icons, pictures and/or statues of Saints, Martyrs and events to focus our thoughts and

prayers, we do not pray to the Saints or venerate icons or other images. Neither do we ask Saints to intercede for us with God. We pray to God directly. We do not need to have our prayers go through a priest, being able to talk with God directly. We may ask the congregation to add their prayers to ours when we are in need. We also offer thanks to Saints for the example of their lives..."

I hope this helps you understand the purpose of Icons, Pictures, and Statues in the Church.