The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan

Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)

Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)

The Four: A Survey of the Gospels

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom

From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John

Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture

Jane Austen
(A Biography)

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

« Previous Post | Next Post »
« Previous post in category | Next post in category »

Theology - Christology: Incarnation and Icon

David VanDrunen of Westminster West offered an interesting Christological defense of iconoclasm in an article several years ago published in the International Journal of Systematic Theology.

Christology, he argues, does not support the conclusion that we may make pictures of Jesus, but the opposite.  Because Jesus is still the Incarnate Son, because He is still fully human, He has all the specificity of true humanity.  He has specific facial and bodily features, and we don’t know what those are.  Any picture of Jesus is in fact a picture of someone else.  Even if we happened to stumble on a depiction of Jesus that resembled Him, we wouldn’t know.

But VanDrunen is missing something.

The eternal Son is still incarnate as the specific man, Jesus the Christ.  That’s true.  And it’s true also that this Jesus has specific features that we don’t know.

But Jesus has a triple, not a single, body.  His natural body is in heaven, but He has given us a Eucharistic body and a corporate body on earth.  He’s left behind His body as food, and His body as the church.

The second of these is particularly important.  When Jesus separates sheep and goats, the standard of judgment will be what each one did to the least of Jesus’ brothers, which is something done to Jesus.  We feed Jesus, clothe Jesus, visit Jesus, minister to Jesus, by serving the least of these.

Because Christ is the totus Christus, His face is not unknown to us.  We see His face in the face of His brothers, our brothers.  And that means that we can depict Jesus with any of the faces that are in fact His face to us.  And this justifies, too, the practice of depicting Jesus in culturally specific ways.  Jesus can be depicted as a black man (or an Asian, or a South Sea Islander), because  some of His brothers are black.

None of this, however, justifies veneration of icons.  We are to serve and bow before images of Jesus, but the images of Jesus we are to serve are the living, breathing, stinking, often troubled and often troubling images that sit down the row from us at church.