Statues and Relics
“Idolatry is a perversion of man’s innate religious sense. An idolater is someone who ‘transfers his indestructible notion of God to anything other than God’” Catechism of the Catholic Church 2114.
As a Catholic, I have been labeled an idolater because of my Biblical view on relics and statues. What people fail to realize is that the initial use of relics and statues began with God’s commandment. This is conveyed throughout the Bible, in the Old and New Testament. We will begin by reading of scripture in the Old Testament that elaborates on the uses of these God given tools in relics.
Relics in the Bible
In 2 Kings, we see that coming into contact with the bones of Elisha restores life (13:20-21). Why does the relics of a dead man’s remains bring a corpse back into the full animation of life? Second Kings 13:20-21 reads, “Elisha died and was buried. At the time, bands of Moabites used to raid the land each year. Once some people were burying a man, when suddenly they spied such a raiding band. So they cast the dead man into the grave of Elisha, and everyone went off. But when the man came in contact with the bones of Elisha, he came back to life and rose to his feet”. Notice that nowhere in scripture is Elisha’s body consecrated but is still blessed in such a way that it reanimates dead flesh.
Moving into the New Testament, we see in the book of Acts that infirmities are cured by St. Peter’s shadow (5:15-16). Again, nowhere in Holy Writ do we find St. Peter’s shadow being blessed or consecrated but by the very nature of God in the individual does the individuals relic emit God’s power (think amount the illumination emitted from Moses’ face after the forty day fast on Mount Sinai). Acts 5:15-16 reads, “As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by evil spirits, and all of them were healed.” Is it idolatress that the citizens of the town gathered not to see St. Peter and the apostles but to believe in the healing touch of his shadow? We see that their beliefs were true. It tells us that “their sick and those tormented by evils spirits, and of all them were healed.” All of them were healed. Furthermore, none of them were rebuked by any means for their belief in the relic of St. Peter’s blessed shadow. How interesting is the verse that precedes this. Acts 5:14, “Nevertheless, more and more men and women believed in the Lord and were added to their number.” These people believed in the Lord, the people who sought St. Peter’s shadow for it’s healing ability. This tells us that people who believed in St. Peter’s healing relic [his shadow] weren’t pagans or apostates but Christians.
As we continue in Acts, we see even in the absence of St. Paul, that his relic when applied to an ailed person, can heal. Acts 19:11-12 reads, “So extraordinary were the mighty deeds God accomplished at the hands of Paul that when face cloths or aprons that touched his skin were applied to the sick, their diseases left them and the evil spirits came out of them.” We know that St. Paul wasn’t present when the people were healed by the relics he touched; it would be whimsical to say that St. Paul was always present or in contact with the face cloths [plural] and aprons [plural] while they were used to heal the iniquities in people.
Statues in the Bible
We’ll start off with the opposing argument; Exodus 20:4-5, “You shall not carve idols for yourselves in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth; you shall not bow down before them or worship them. For I, the LORD, your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for their fathers’ wickedness on the children of those who hate me, down to the third and fourth generation”. This is simply prohibiting the worship of anything that isn’t God. The text indicates this when it says, “shape of anything in the sky/earth/waters” meaning other created life (such as the Golden Calf with is actually the ancient Egyptian god Apis). However, we do see God Almighty commanding men to build statues in Exodus 25:18-19, “Make two cherubim of beaten gold for the two ends of the propitiatory, fastening them so that one cherub springs direct from each end”. This seems like it would be in direct violation of “do not carve idols…in shape of anything in the sky”. Yet God commands to do it.
Next we turn to Numbers 21:8-9, “and the LORD said to Moses, ‘Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and if anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he will recover.’ Moses accordingly made a bronze serpent and mounted it on a pole, and whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he recovered.” God commanded that man put his faith into God’s healing power via a bronze serpent on a staff. God uses different vestiges to do His work.
As we go further into Scripture, we see in 1 Kings 6:23-29 that the Tempe was to be adorned and engraved with “cherubim, trees, flowers” and in 1 Kings 7:25-45 “bronze oxen, lions, pomegranates”. So much statues. So much images. Yet all by the fiat of God.
It is only when an image, relic, or statue is placed above the Almighty God does it become graven to use. But if it is used to edify and point us toward the omnipotent God does it become a vessel of God’s grace.
We know this because the Cross which bore the Son of Salvation is seen as a tool which draws people closer to Christ. We know there is much glory given by God through the Cross (Mt 10:38, 16:24, Lk 9:23, 14:27, 1 Cor 1:17-18, 2:2, Gal 5:24, 6:14, 20:20, Phil 3:18, Col 2:14, etc.).
“We do not worship, we do not adore, for fear that we should bow down to the creature rather than to the creator, but we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore him whose martyrs they are” Jerome, Ad Riparium, i, P.L., XXII, 907 A.D..
“The one who redeemed us from the darkness of idolatrous insanity, Christ our God, when he took for his bride his holy Catholic Church . . . promised he would guard her and assured his holy disciples saying, ‘I am with you every day until the consummation of this age.’ . . . To this gracious offer some people paid no attention; being hoodwinked by the treacherous foe they abandoned the true line of reasoning . . . and they failed to distinguish the holy from the profane, asserting that the icons of our Lord and of his saints were no different from the wooden images of satanic idols.” Second Council of Nicaea, 787 A.D..
Yours,
Drew Castel.
