We worship God alone. We venerate icons, saints, and holy things. The difference isn’t just semantics, it’s the heart of how Orthodox Christians understand our relationship with the material world after the Incarnation.
Worship (the Greek word is latria) means the absolute honor and devotion we owe to the Holy Trinity. It’s what happens when we offer the Eucharist. It’s what we do when we pray “Our Father.” Worship recognizes God as the source of all life, the one on whom we depend completely. It involves sacrifice, total surrender, the acknowledgment that this Being is God and we aren’t.
Veneration is different. The Greek word proskynesis means bowing or showing honor, and dulia means the honor we give to holy people or things. When you kiss an icon of Christ, you’re not worshiping the wood and paint. You’re honoring the person depicted. The honor passes through the image to the prototype, as the Church Fathers put it. You’re not praying to pigment. You’re venerating Christ himself through his image.
Think of it this way. If someone showed you a photo of their grandmother and you said, “What a kind face,” you wouldn’t be complimenting the photo paper. You’d be honoring the woman. Icons work the same way, except they’re not just reminders, they’re windows. They make present (not physically, but really) the person shown. When we venerate an icon, we’re reaching through it to touch the saint, to ask their prayers, to remember their life.
This matters because most folks around Beaumont grew up hearing that any honor shown to images is idolatry. I get it. Exodus 20 is clear: no graven images, no bowing down to them. But here’s what changed everything: the Incarnation. God became flesh. The invisible Word took on a visible human nature. That means Christ can be depicted. And if Christ can be depicted, then honoring his image isn’t breaking the commandment, it’s confessing that the Incarnation really happened.
The Seventh Ecumenical Council dealt with this in 787. Iconoclasts were smashing icons and killing people who venerated them, claiming it was all idolatry. The Council said no. Icons can be honored with proskynesis, but latria, worship, belongs to God alone. The bishops weren’t inventing something new. They were defending what the Church had practiced from the beginning and grounding it in the theology of the Incarnation.
Here’s where Scripture helps. In Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas heal a man in Lystra. The crowds think they’re gods and try to offer them sacrifice. Paul and Barnabas tear their clothes and refuse. That’s the line. Sacrifice, the act of worship, belongs to God. But plenty of people in Scripture bow to honor someone without it being worship. People bowed to Jesus, sometimes recognizing his divinity, sometimes just showing respect. Joshua bowed before the angel of the Lord. Abraham bowed to the sons of Heth. None of that was idolatry because none of it replaced God.
The difference is intent and direction. When we venerate an icon of the Theotokos, we’re not saying Mary is divine. We’re honoring the woman God chose to bear his Son, and we’re asking her prayers. When we light a candle before an icon of St. Michael, we’re not worshiping an archangel. We’re remembering that the angels serve God and asking Michael to pray for us as we face our own battles.
St. John of Damascus wrote the definitive defense of icons in the eighth century. He said the honor given to an image passes to the one depicted. The material isn’t the point. The person is. And because we believe the saints are alive in Christ, venerating their icons is just another way of asking their prayers, the same way you’d ask your friend at coffee hour to pray for your kid’s surgery or your husband’s offshore rotation.
I’ll be honest, this is one of the hardest things for people coming from Protestant backgrounds. You’ve been taught your whole life that anything that looks like bowing to an image is idolatry. But Orthodoxy isn’t asking you to worship images. We’re asking you to see that after the Incarnation, matter matters. God took on flesh. He made the material world a means of encountering him. Bread becomes his Body. Water becomes the bath of regeneration. And images of Christ and his saints become windows into the kingdom.
If you visit St. Michael’s, you’ll see people kissing icons when they come in. They’re not confused. They know the difference between the wood and the saint. They’re doing what Christians have done for centuries, honoring the holy ones who’ve gone before us and asking their prayers. It’s not worship. It’s veneration. And it’s one of the ways we stay connected to the whole Church, the living and the departed, all of us together in Christ.
