Also, no Christian can deny that spiritual prayer is divine work which God alone effects, as it is written in Jeremiah 33[:6]: I shall manifest to them prayer and the worship of peace and truth. What God alone can do, no image can. You also may not say that the image of Christ brings you Christ, for that is not true. No man can come to me except that my Father draw him (John 6[:44]). All who come to Christ must be disciples of God and not be reminded or taught by images to come to Christ.
If you heap together all the images on earth, they still will not be able to offer a single sigh to God on your behalf.
Whenever I want to have an outward admonition and reminder, I should ask for the one which Scripture indicates, not the one which it hates and forbids. I would much rather fall with horse and cart into sore tribulation and distress than come to an image to be reminded of salvation. Isaiah denies that images are of use, yet they would have to be of some use if they were to lead us to God in true thoughts (Isaiah 44[:10]). That affliction outwardly teaches and admonishes and makes us reflect and causes us to know, invoke, and worship God is taught in Scripture: Defeat and vexation give understanding (Isaiah 28[:19]). For you have punished me and I have been instructed (Jeremiah 31[:18]). God chastises us and teaches us, like a father his son (Proverbs 3[:12], Hebrews 12[:6]). God wants us to cry unto him in the day of our trouble (Psalm 85[:7]).
But God does not want us to call on him when we see images. He wants us to hate them and flee from them.
In that day when the Lord is exalted, men will cast away their images and flee from them (Isaiah 2[:17–18], 31[:7]; Micah 5[:12]). From this it follows that images are indeed not books from which we should learn.
A Christian, therefore, can understand that pictures should not be called books. Books instruct. But images can not instruct, as Habakkuk says in chapter 2[:19]. Habakkuk says of a stone idol: Is it possible that it can teach? From that it follows, and there is no gainsaying, that images are not books. For if they were books or could teach what books do, then they would have to teach and instruct. From all this everybody can see that Gregory the pope has indeed taught in a popish, that is to say unchristian, way when he offers pictures to the laity on the pretext they are books.
Scripture compares images and idols to youths and says that in many places the godless commit whoredom with images as whores do with youths. I must be crude and obnoxious, but I am not ashamed to speak as Scripture speaks—straightforwardly. I have shattered their hearts, which have turned from me. I have torn out their eyes which have gone whoring after images (Ezekiel 6[:9]). Again: You have made for yourself images in the shape of men and have been impure with them (Ezekiel 6[:9]). The gold and silver which I have given to you for your ornament you have used to make images and have whored with them. You have taken your clothes and clothed those same images with them (Ezekiel 16[:17–18]). We do that in the case of [Carnival] clowns whom we certainly have no intention of regarding as alien gods, much less being told that they are our gods. However we are open in word and deed before the world to the charge that we take images for gods and give them names and venerate them. For we call the image of the Crucified One a lord god and now and again say that it is the Lord Jesus. We also venerate it as though Christ himself were present. The unholy popes and crazy monks have brought us to this. We also say that this image is St Sebastian and that one is St Nicholas, and the like. Thus we name them as the things God loves, and prove our guilt with our words and deeds that images are our gods; that our pictures are things with which our eyes commit whoredom. And it is true that all who venerate images or seek help from them or worship them are whores and adulterous women (Hosea 2, Ezekiel 16). (At this point I should have liked to settle accounts with a woman, one of the Devil’s whores. But I hope she will become open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Let this parenthesis be my second warning to her).* The Devil’s whores who give their gold and silver to images (so that one can make images in churches out of that which God gave them for ornament) are like the whores of whom Ezekiel speaks in the sixteenth chapter as we noted above. They make images and consort illicitly with them and cover them with their clothes and bring them precious incense, bread, wine, beer, chickens, geese, and horses. And, in addition, they bring them their children and sick friends, regarding which God says: Do you think this childish behaviour is of no consequence and insignificant? We have many writings of this sort which revile the worshippers of images as whores and adulterous women and conclude that churches in which images are placed and venerated ought in all fairness to be regarded as whorehouses.
* The reference is to someone in Wittenberg, not necessarily a woman, who wanted to protect and defend images.
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