The problem with idols

If you were going to create a piece of art to represent God, how would you make it? Would you use humble materials like mud and berries on a piece of scrap plywood? Would you incorporate the finest resources like gold and platinum and diamonds? Would your art be a painting? A sculpture? Something entirely different? For millennia, human beings have felt the urge to express their understanding of the divine through different media. Art, song, drama, literature, and architecture are all ways that people have attempted to encapsulate God. Some of these succeed in disclosing an aspect of God's transcendence and become well-known representations. Others don't work so well and disappear from memory.

There is a twofold problem with creating any representation of God: 1) it can never do God justice, and 2) we always forget that. God is always more beautiful, always more grand, always more powerful, always more other than anything we can create. That shouldn't surprise us, of course, not only because we are not God but, more importantly, because God is not created. God is the Uncreated One, the source of all being. With the surreal exception of M. C. Escher's "Drawing Hands," the creation cannot create the creator. God cannot be comprehended much less encapsulated in a work of human hands. Any attempt to represent the Creator is doomed to fail. But that's only half of the problem.

The other half is that human beings so quickly become enamored with something they can see that they forget that it isn't actually the thing that they can't see. The Israelites have known for thousands of years that, as soon as someone creates any sort of image, statue, or other physical representation of anything human beings are doomed to worship it—to ascribe to the image properties of the transcendent. This is the golden calf in the wilderness. This is the idol worship that the prophets condemned. This is the abomination that the pagan rulers set up in the Jerusalem temple.