Michael Spencer has recently written a post concerning Christian art. It's worth taking a look at.In short, he's tired of images of Jesus, which portray Him as peaceful, comforting, and always ready to meet your needs. He likens it to a cross between Thomas Kincaid and Precious Moments, and he even calls it "Mountain Dew" spirituality. Hehe. I kinda like that.
Thus, he's decorating his classroom with more images of Christ on the cross. That way, he can preach Christ and him crucified. A noble intent, indeed! He summarizes:
I intend to make the point that this is what God is like. Not some trite admonition to smile and have a nice day, but the suffering of Jesus at the hands of religious and political thugs in a world that is broken, bleeding and full of constant contradiction and despair.
I think Spencer raises a great point! Too often we make our Christianity and our God too soft and cheerful. The concepts of God as King, Judge, or even Boss are far removed from our everyday thinking. I think this has turned many people away from Christianity. Why follow a God who is designed to serve us and brighten our day? Seems rather self-centered and pointless to me.
Thus, I think Spencer is bang on, when he says: A Jesus shaped faith values Jesus and his kingdom in all his different manifestations and accomplishments for us, but it remembers that the REASON the kingdom of God can come into one life or into all of history is because of the cross (emphasis added).
The problem is, however, that pictures of Christ solely on the cross don't tell the whole picture either. This is the biggest problem of Christian art, in general. Photographs and portraits can't grasp the essence of what it means to be human, or even the full the experience of a single human event, no matter how mundane.
How then can an image of Christ capture the essence of Divinity, or even the meaning and emotion of something as graphic, horrendous, and important as the Crucifixion?
This is one of the reasons that the Reformers rejected icons and statues. By attempting to capture divinity with a man-made representation, we inevitably lose divinity in the process. God and His works can't be reduced into something man can understand, let alone replicate.Thus, replacing pictures that reduce Christianity to "Happy-clappy Christianity of moralism, political rhetoric and cultural conformity," with pictures only of the Crucifixion, doesn't solve the problem. It simply substitutes one form of incomplete Christianity with another.
Indeed, the cross is not the whole story, which Rev. Spencer seems to understand. He wants to use pictures that retell the same story that the Bible tells. Good motivation.
However, the Bible's story includes God's Creation, expulsion of Adam and Eve, judgment against Sodom and Gomorrah, deliverance of Israel out of Egypt, long suffering with the kings of Israel, resurrection of Lazarus, the final judgment, and eternal life in paradise. Why no pictures of these mighty works of God or even an attempt to include some?
Also, why no pictures of Christ as the Good Shepherd, Prince of Peace, or our closest friend? While these may be overemphasized in our culture, they are still part of the story that the Bible tells. That is our God, as much as the crucified Jesus is.Therefore, while we need to recover an understanding of the horrific and gruesome aspects of Christ's suffering, I suggest that we should neither forget nor abandon our understanding of Christ as gentle, merciful, and compassionate. He is not just those things, as our modern Christianity sometimes suggests, but He is those things, nonetheless.
Thus, a full orbed understanding of our God needs to save room for the happy-clappy, joyous, exciting aspects of God's work throughout history, as much as it needs to rediscover room for the convicting, sorrowful, introspective aspects. This is our God. There is none else. There is certainly more than one facet on this heavenly Gem.
I hope that Rev. Spencer doesn't substitute one unbalanced, incomplete concept of God for another. I know that is NOT his intention, but it may be an inadvertent consequence of his well intended decorations.
All images courtesy of Morguefile.com.
3 comments:
Good post, BJ. Thought-provoking for me. "Happy-clappy"...your invention? Like it. Sorry Matt and I missed getting with you and Kim while you were here. Take care - B.
Thanks, B.
Sorry, can't take credit for happy-clappy. That was in the original. We missed catching up with you, as well. Hope all's well on the Western Front... er... wherever you are.
BJ
A very thoughtful post.
The prohibition on images of God in worship arise because God, being absolutely transcendent over creation, cannot be accurately portrayed with any of the things of creation. His utter difference washes out any attempted bridge to reach him with our symbols.
That all changes with the Incarnation. The Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea (787) was convened to defend the use of icons in worship against the first wave of iconoclasts. Iconoclasm arose in the Near East, and was coupled with a fear of the spread of Islam in that region, and a sense that God was punishing the Christian nations thereby for something they had done. The Council found that with the Incarnation, God himself crosses the unbridgeable gap. In doing so, His majestic transcendence is not diminished as the Muslims contend, but magnified because it transcends even the categories of transcendence and immanence. Nothing binds God, who is absolutely free. The Incarnation changes the matter of using icons because in the Incarnation God Himself takes on mere matter, human matter, human nature in order to present His love to humanity. God crosses the gap and He uses the stuff He gave us to do so. Who then can outlaw that we should do the same?
The rightful concern about lapsing into polytheistic pantheism, the worship of beings less than God, has lost its traction since the time of the Incarnation. It just hasn't happened. An old church lady with a statue fetish isn't the same thing, and she'd be the first to insist upon the fact. Since the time of the Incarnation, only two religious groups have grown through proselytization: Muslims and Christians. All other groups have diminished in their presence. Those who have traditionally put icons into their right relationship with God (means to an end) and those that have rejected them altogether have gradually all but overtaken those who use them wrongly. And our human need for humanly accessible things like icons is legitimate - that's how God made us, and it's why He took on our flesh.
The Second Council of Nicaea observed that those Christians that reject the use of icons on some principle put themselves on the issue solidly in the camp of Muslims and Jews, that is, those who reject the Incarnation and its implications.
An interesting note is that the Hebrew word used in the Decalogue to forbid "idols" is the same word used in the creation accounts to call human beings "images" of their Creator. When humans worship other images, we too easily forget the duty of charity to neighbor. This fact explains on some level why pagan societies have always been slave societies. Even with the use of images that has marked most of Christianity, this temptation is minimized by our Lord's constant exhortation to charity, and by his frequent self-identification with neighbor and the poor. Christians have it burned in our collective consciousness that we cannot rightly serve our Lord without serving our neighbors.
In short, the prohibition on images was a pedagogical tool for a people not yet ready for the fullness of revelation. But in these latter days, our Lord has revealed Himself fully to a people more fully prepared (Heb 1:1-2) and many of the older laws are permitted to fall away.
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