The same reader comments, regarding the 10 commandments below:

I'm still a patch uncerty about 2 and 3. I can see where you are coming from (and the points are true and sensible) but i cannot see how they bear out in the words of the commandments themselves, seems fairly cut and dry to me.

Again, the question is a good one, I think.

The answer is in the way we read the words. Words import a background understanding - their surface meaning "to us" depends on what we import. The Isrealite background meant that they read the words in a way significantly different to us, who have 2000 years' background in a Greek philosophy of "God-ness" and 500 years of anti-Catholic concern against "images". Put them together, and you have our modern reading which says "don't try and represent my God-ness with your images". We read the words as a denial that anything creaturely can properly represent God-ness. This seems completely 'natural' to us.

But I think the Hebrew background suggests another meaning: a history of man created in God's image, to whom the creation would bow, makes the words mean "don't try and represent YHWH with another image, to which you will bow." Put positively, "you be my images".

The difference between these meanings is substantial. The first is a philosophical concern about how the essence of divinity can be represented by anything creaturely; the second is a concern to ensure that Israel actually does her job. The first gets us into endless, non-productive arguments and fractured an entire Christian community; the second tells us that the results of the first are very, very wrong. In other words, it actually applies to our lives, and not just to our philosophical intellects, self-immunised from any challenge to their fruit because they defend 'the truth'.

I think there is too much in the Christian tradition - especially in the tradition of the Reformation - that has become philosophised. We're constantly encouraged not to think that theology is dry and boring. But there's a reason we think it is - it actually is. So, the sooner we can recover the proper meanings in the story, we'll discover a rich and vibrant challange like "don't you dare replace yourselves as My image!". Maybe only then can we pull ourselves out of this never-ending defense of intellectualised 'truth', stop the insane fracturing of the church, and actually recover what it really means to be the people of God. And maybe THEN people would be attracted to the king instead of being repelled what his followers are like.