"For by so much more frequently as Jesus is seen in artistic representation,
By so much more readily are people lifted up to His memory… And to a longing after Him."
-The Second Ecumenical Council of Nicaea

Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Problem

Images are dangerous. They have to power to warp the mind and transform the way one thinks. This fact was clearly demonstrated to me a couple years ago, when I was a youth minister at a small church in Michigan. During Lent, the youth group prepared a “Living Stations of the Cross” to be performed Good Friday evening for the church community. As we were practicing, many youth were challenging my choice of how to block out each  station. Upon exploration of this unusual adversity, I realized these protest were coming out because my blocking did not match up with The Passion of the Christ (2004). For a majority of these teenagers, when they thought of the events surrounding the passion, they do not envision the Gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John but rather the Gospel according to Mel.

This cinematic hermeneutic is not a unique  phenomenon. Likewise when many the youth’s parents read the Gospels, images of Robert Powell frolicking with his disciples in Zeffirelli’s film Jesus of Nazareth (1977) come to mind. Before that film, perhaps it was Jeffrey Hunter or Max von Sydow of King of Kings (1961) and The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) fame respectively.

  Of course, this mental picture of Christ is not only shaped by film but other visual imagery as well. For many people today, Warner Sallman’s Head of Christ painted in 1941 is the definitive image of Jesus. Each of these depictions of Christ has an inevitable impact on the Christian who relates to it, and by impacting how Christians view Christ, it impacts how they view the world.

It is of little wonder there has always been a strand of Christianity that has been highly suspicious of images. The earliest Christians inherited an aniconic tradition from Judaism. But along with the Hellenistic gentiles, images found their way into Christian piety. Religious  iconography,  however, did not come without a fight… literally. In debates about the proper use of icons within Christianity, bloodshed was often a way to make an argument heard. The iconoclastic controversies of the eight century required an ecumenical counsel to settle, and despite the fact veneration of icons was dogmatically defined as acceptable, the battle continued. At the dawn of the twelfth century, the Cistercians, a Benedictine reform movement broke away from Cluny, the major monastic system of the time. The Cistercians rejected the ornate nature of the Cluniacs, and forbade all statues and pictures from being displayed in their monasteries. With the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century, Ulrich Zwingli led the iconoclastic way by attacking the “papist” tradition of worshiping images and destroyed many priceless works of art.

The debate continues to this day; however, things have changed dramatically. Iconoclast of the past often rejected all form of images “in the shape of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters beneath the earth.” (Exodus 20:4) In the twenty first century, it is nearly impossible to exist without embracing secular imagery. And here is the kicker; whereas, in the past the use of both secular and sacred images has been met with suspicion for the power they possess, secular images are now accepted without question.

Post-modernity is image driven. Media is the new church that requires our reverence and expects our adoration. We constantly consume the signs and symbols that assaulted our senses. Media feeds the post-modern mind a mystical meal consecrated by television, music, movies, magazines, billboards, books, videogames, radio and the internet. The icons we now venerate are on our laptops, and every week we vote for our favorite idol by dialing 1-866-I-D-O-L-S. We live in a society that is known for its celebrity worship and religious viewing of reality TV. In post-modernity, the power of the image has been pimped to the point where voyeurism is not a perversion but the modus operandi.

Paradoxically, the image has become defiled, while at the same time it is being deified. No longer do images point to a deeper reality, but images are reality the post-modern mind points to. The pseudoreality of postmodern imagery is idolatry at the deepest level. We are no longer worshiping the creator, but rather the created. So in this cave of post-modernity, can we possibly free ourselves from the digitally enhanced, technologically superior fifty-two inch plasma HDTV images “so real you can almost reach out and touch them” on the wall? Can there possibly be salvation from this “American Idolatry?”

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