THE SECOND COMMANDMENT

A few months back I posted a review of The Shack in which one of my main concerns was the lack of thought Christians seem to show about visual representations of God:

I think we struggle to grasp the importance of this as we live in a visual culture in which we assume that everything can and should be represented visually. But God the Father cannot be represented visually! At the end of the book, in a section titled, “the Missy project,” there is a stated aim to produce a film of the book. When this happens (as it undoubtedly will) we will have a false representation of God on our screens – false because God will be an Oprah Winfrey type figure, and blasphemous because it will be a graven image.

I took a bit of flack for this, but I am not the only one to think it.

My friend Phil posted me a link to the Reformation 21 blog which reveals similar concerns:

I always thought it was the Bible that was meant to interrogate the culture; but the order seems to be being somewhat reversed in recent times. For example, a few years ago, Mel Gibson's film, The Passion was all the rage in evangelical circles. One day, I was sitting in my office and a student called by to let me know he was taking the youth group at his church to see it and to ask if I had already done so. I said I had not, and we then entered a discussion about whether it was right to depict Christ visually on the big screen. At the end of the discussion, he said that he felt sorry for me because my qualms about the visual depiction of Christ were making me irrelevant to ministry in the modern church. Now I may well be irrelevant, although I think that time has proved Gibson's Passion to be pretty irrelevant as well. What shocked me in this encounter, however, was not that we had different views on the matter, but that the student could not even see that there was any question to be asked. For him, the question of the meaning, relevance, and application of the second commandment was not even a question. He just thought it was obvious that anything which generated interest in Jesus was a good thing; thus, my concerns about the visual depiction of Christ revealed me as an irrelevant old hack, a superannuated puritan who simply didn't get it. To me, this was a most dramatic symbol of how culture had come to set the theological agenda even within a conservative, confessional, reformed tradition, and to define the plausibility structures not simply of the answers but even of the questions. My question arose out of my concern to see what the Bible said to our cultural situation, and that refracted through centuries of discussion of this point; but this student did not even have the categories to see that there was any question to be asked.

The odd thing is, Phil sent this to me in January, but it only arrived in my email last week. This just confirms my theory that email has an evil will of its own at times.

Anyway, the whole piece is worth reading, and you can find it here.