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Perhaps the most pivotal encounter between God and humanity takes place in the wilderness of Sinai, when God calls Moses to meet him at the top of a mountain. This encounter takes place in dense cloud, for even Moses is not allowed to see God directly. But those who are waiting at the bottom of the mountain start to grow frustrated. They are looking for something a bit more solid, a bit more tangible, from the divine. So they ask their priest to build them a statue of a recognisably god-like figure that they can worship. And so there is something reassuringly permanent about the statue of the Golden Calf that the priest creates. The book of Exodus describes Moses’ reaction: “He took the calf, burned it with fire, ground it to powder, scattered it on the water, and made the Israelites drink it.” Statue-smashing has a long and complicated history, much of it growing from the issues involved in this Biblical narrative. Some will react to what happened in Bristol on Sunday as a frightening story of civil disobedience. Others will see it as a righteous response to the glorification of a wicked slave trader. And I understand both of these responses. But another perspective again involves the way in which the statue-smashing instinct of the Hebrew Bible has played such a formative role in our historic understanding, not just of the divine, but of the very purpose of criticism itself. Theologically speaking, the problem with turning God into a statue – or any other form of fixed representation for that matter - is that it feels like a way of capturing God, of making Him some sort of pet creature of our limited imaginations. Instead, those of us who are believers should always be in a state of permanent intellectual restlessness about the divine, refusing to invest too much in the various representations of God in which we find meaning and significance. God is always more than the way we picture Him. And it is also precisely those images of God that we find most compelling that we should also be most suspicious of. Iconoclasm is a renewal mechanism by which religion looks always beyond itself, beyond its own precious representations. And the issues at stake here go way beyond the narrowly religious. Because iconoclasm represents the origins of self-criticism itself. Karl Marx once said that the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism. And he was kind of right. Except - what he didn’t properly appreciate was that religion attacking itself has always been a fundamentally religious undertaking. It calls for a permanent revolution of the spirit. Which is why those who smash statues need to be continually on the look-out for the ones they erect to replace them.