PTM WEEKLY UPDATE -- OCTOBER 13, 2008
"The Head of Christ" by Warner Sallman, 1941 A false Image of Jesus?
Q. My heart aches in realizing that as much as I find your teachings on the gospel of grace a treasure to be shared with others in Bible study, PTM has yet to refrain from using a false image of Jesus to illustrate an otherwise intriguing magazine article. On the cover of your September/October 2008 issue, your art director beautifully faded out a picture of Jesus -- and I wrote expressing my joy that PTM is not going along with the flow of portraying Jesus any which way. Christ's divinity cannot be reflected in an artist's concept of what Jesus may have looked like. If God wanted us to know Jesus' physical appearance this would have been made crystal clear in Scripture. May I respectfully suggest future artwork depicts Christ only in a faded or silhouette form.
A. I appreciate your concern -- and you are certainly entitled to your view. However, there are other ways to approach this issue:
1) Some believe that the biblical prohibition against making idols means those who follow and obey the God of the Bible will not engage in any artistic depiction of humans at all -- and perhaps not even animals, or still life -- of God's creation. They believe that such depictions could lead to idolatry. This same thinking is used to prohibit most of the fine arts, of music (some churches ban music), of drama (it is vain, is deceptive, encourages sin, etc), movies, dancing, all fiction literature -- especially fantasy. PTM does not embrace such views, seeing them as imbalanced, bordering on silly and religious legalisms. Such attempts to "avoid" idolatry become, themselves, a religious fixation and paranoia, so that idolatry becomes a reality, by the careful adherence to some specific way of keeping oneself pure and untainted (according to some non-biblical tradition or idea).
2) Specifically -- to depictions of Jesus. There are, and have been, Christians who object to any depiction of Jesus, because it may lead to idolatry -- it might lead to people praying to and worshiping a piece of art or sculpture. I know this religious drill -- my parents removed the images of Jesus out of one of my early childhood Bibles with a razor blade, so I would not look at what Jesus might have looked like.
No one knows what Jesus looked like. Any depiction of Jesus is a guess. No photographs exist. What he looked like is immaterial to who he is and was, and what he means to us -- but that does not mean that an artistic depiction of Jesus is problematic, or beyond that, a sin. It is a proven fact that many depictions of Jesus have been, and are, greatly informed by the cultural reality of the artist -- so that one can view fine art and see a 13th century German Jesus, a 15th century Italian Jesus, etc. What does that prove? Among other things, it proves that we, as humans, simply can't capture the fullness of Jesus in any artistic representation, and that our attempts are usually filled with subjective bias. Does it prove we shouldn't even try? Well, if that's the case we better stop doing many things which are flawed and imperfect on the basis of our humanity -- including praying and serving others. There is no new covenant prohibition that would lead us to avoid illustrating a story about Jesus, or what he did. Such attempts are not representations of the divinity of Jesus -- only his humanity.
3) We did, on our current September/October cover, veil the face of Jesus -- not because we believe we must, but because we didn't want a depiction of Jesus to become the story -- or to to in any way detract from our cover story -- which was conveyed primarily in cover text.
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