The Power of Pictures in Christian Thought

The Use and Abuse of Images in the Bible and Theology

Anthony Thiselton, Anthony C. Thiselton

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780281078868
• eBook ISBN: 9780281078875
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

A biblical, historical and theological investigation into the tendency of literary images to either enlighten or mislead, and how we can learn to distinguish between the two.

Part One considers key philosophical and aesthetic evaluations of literary images and symbols. The power of pictures is widely appreciated, as in the adage 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. Sometimes Christian discourse can be smothered by endless prose, which demands much inferential reasoning. There is, however, a contrary argument. An isolated visual representation can be misleading if it is improperly interpreted. For example, some mystical visions are interpreted as direct instructions from the Holy Spirit, as happened with the Radical Reformers, who advocated the Peasants' Revolt. Hence theories of symbol, metaphor, and visual representation must be examined.

Part Two discusses visual representation in the Old Testament, the teaching of Jesus, pictures and analogies in Paul, and the Book of Revelation. This shows the range of authentic visual representations. In contrast to biblical material, we find throughout Christian history abundant examples of misleading imagery which is often passed off as Christian. A notorious example is found in the visual representation and metaphors used by Gnostic writers. Almost as bad are some visual representations used by the medieval mystics, Radical Reformers, and extreme charismatics - all of which lack valid criteria of interpretation, relying instead on subjective conviction. Similarly, sermons and prayers today can be enriched with pictorial images, but some can be misleading and unhelpful for the life of the Church.

Part 1

PHILOSOPHICAL, HERMENEUTICAL AND LITERARY

1

The power of pictures, visual images and symbols

One picture is worth a thousand words

It is often said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Probably this axiom first appeared in exactly this form in 1911 in a newspaper in America.¹ The slightly different phrase, ‘One look is worth a thousand words’, appeared at a similar time in 1913.² The exact original phrase reappeared in 1918 in an advertisement for the San Antonio Light.³ The Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) had earlier written, ‘The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book.’⁴ Dawn Grider provided visual representations of Jon Egah’s sermons by drawings of the cross, the empty tomb, hands raised in worship, and so on. The images provide concepts more instantly than pages of complex words, whether spoken or written.

More than this, pictures are instantly memorable. Many regular Christian worshippers may not be able to explain the contrast in Paul and Luther between faith or grace and ‘works’. But, as Timothy Dudley-Smith writes, they ‘know exactly what they mean by singing:

Nothing in my hand I bring,

Simply to thy cross I cling’.⁵

He then quotes R. W. Dale of Birmingham as saying, ‘Let me write the hymns of a Church, and I care not who writes the theology.’

Visual representations seem immediately to solve the problem of inadequate attention-spans. We can either glance at a picture or contemplate it over time. Pictures often convey emotions, and may appeal to deep-seated commitments, as when many people may identify with brand images or national flags. This applies not only to food or groceries, but also to institutions ranging from universities to corporate manufacturing companies. Pictures may make us feel patriotic, excited, disgusted or curious. These may be divided, at least in part, by generational differences. Magazines are notorious for exploiting pictures and images, often to attract allegiance and purchasing habits. They provide readers with immediate self-involving focus. We may take a flag for granted, until we find ourselves in foreign parts, or in the midst of a war.

Whatever the complexities of the relation between printed or written prose and visual images, we cannot but notice the difference between telling and showing; between hearsay report and eyewitness testimony, and between speaking about a subject and beholding its content directly. Furthermore, these two styles of representation appear to belong to two different cultures and generations. One is the world of books and the academy; the other is the more popular culture of images, today partly separated by ageing, youth and generational differences. Today’s generation grows up with mobile phones, digital tablets and television; yesterday’s generation often had rooms full of books and encyclopaedias. It is tempting to perceive one as the legacy of the past, and the other as the promise of the future. The American politician Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) called his political party ‘the Party of the Future’, on the ground that some people see everything good as future, and everything bad as past.

The arrival in force of the digital era reinforces many of these arguments. Martin Veravsky has argued that reading a book of 500 pages may take 30 hours, whereas a film of the book would normally convey its content within about two hours. It will provide more information per minute than the written book. The film also normally combines the two senses of seeing and hearing, whereas the written word appears to use only one of the senses. Students today have generally ceased to amass libraries of books as their parents used to do, and spend their time consulting visual media in varied forms. The significance of these remarks applies not so much to efficiency in the use of time, as instant access. What is significant is being able to grasp content as a whole in a moment. Several writers compare the Greek concept of vision with the Hebrew prioritizing of the ear. In spite of blatant oversimplification and dated, serious misunderstandings and flaws, Boman emphasized this basic contrast in his book Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek.⁶

Visual representation is often more memorable than lines of print. Even among those who are not theists or Christians, the Johannine imagery of the Good Shepherd and the Vine, and the Lucan images of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep remain unforgettable as visual images for many.⁷ The book of Revelation depicts the tree of life, and God’s wiping away tears from every eye. We shall exemplify many more memorable physical images in Part 2, below.

Photography has greatly enhanced the expansion of visual imagery and experience. The film critic André Bazin claimed concerning the nineteenth century, for the first time ‘An image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man . . . Photography affects us like a phenomenon of nature’.⁸

Nevertheless many argue that pictures and visual images cannot fully convey meaning without the context or tradition of verbal texts which surround them. Martin Jay in his impressive volume, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, has provided one of the most striking and accurate accounts of the relation between visual perception and the printed or written word, together with critiques by a host of philosophers and historians of culture.⁹ He pays careful attention to both sides of the debate.

Jay notes the ubiquity of visual metaphors, which may be either an aid or an obstacle to our knowledge of reality. This judicious doublesightedness constitutes a theme of our book also. On the one hand, many cultures have been ‘dominated by vision: microscopes, telescopes, cameras and cinema’.¹⁰ On the other hand, Judaism expressed suspicion of idolatry, and Islamic thought rejected figural representation. The Iconoclastic Controversy of the eighth century and the Cistercian monasticism of St Bernard constitute counter-movements to visual representation. In the modern period, Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida also represent this strong counter-movement. In France, Jay points out, a preoccupation with fashion, cinema and pictures seems to have become reversed.¹¹ Thus the French philosopher Jacques Ellul (1912–94) has developed a strong argument against visual images in his book The Humiliation of the Word.¹² He writes as a member of the French Reformed tradition. He argues that technology has downgraded the written word, and led to the visual often having priority over the conceptual. Hegel comments, ‘The situation of the word in our society is deplorable.’¹³ Ours, he says, is a culture in which sight has triumphed over the experience of hearing.

While we provide detailed exploration of biblical examples in the second part of this book, an initial glance at pictorial metaphors in the Bible readily makes the point. The Methodist scholar Vincent Taylor underlined the power and memorable influence of the phrase ‘the blood of Christ’ for Christians of several traditions. He wrote:

To explain the allusions to ‘blood’ as synonyms for ‘death’ is mistaken. One can hardly fail to be conscious of a loss of meaning if instead of ‘being justified by his blood’ (Romans 5:9), we read ‘being justified in Christ crucified’.¹⁴

Taylor provides a multiplicity of such examples, and more recent authors could be also be cited. More recently Fleming Routledge has commented on ‘the blood of Christ’. She quotes George Hunsinger:

Christ’s blood is a metaphor that stands primarily for the suffering love of God. It suggests that there is no sorrow God has not known, no grief he has not borne, no price he was unwilling to pay, in order to reconcile the world to himself in Christ.¹⁵

One of the best-known historical examples of this emphasis on the visual comes from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, first published in 1563, as Acts and Monuments, but subsequently published as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs over several further editions, notably in 1570, 1576 and 1583. The influence of this book was massive, especially after Elizabeth I (1558–1603) ordered a copy of it to be placed in every cathedral in England. Many parish churches followed suit, with the result that in most churches the three books officially on display were the Bible, the Book of Common Prayer and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. The latter traced the persecution of ‘Protestant’ believers from the time of John Wycliffe (1330–84) through the reign of Catholic Queen Mary (1553–8), whose reign the book described as ‘horrible and bloody’. It aimed to expose the wickedness of Catholic ‘idolatry’, and to describe in the most lurid fashion the suffering of the Protestant martyrs.

The key to the book’s influence and success, however, depended largely on its numerous woodcuts provided by Foxe’s printer, John Day. These 153 or so visual illustrations depicted the suffering of martyrs burned at the stake (including Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer). Many were tortured in various ways of the utmost cruelty, and many suffered unspeakable humiliations. The power of this vivid visual representation became an unchallengeable model of the principle of the power of pictures.

Visual representation from Plato to Descartes and today

The reverse was the case, Jay argues, from Parmenides and Plato to Descartes. Erich Auerbach (1892–1957), the eminent German philological and literary critic, adopted the opposite approach to that of Ellul in his book Mimesis, in which he discusses visual representation from the ancient world to modern times. He wrote, ‘Clearly outlined, brightly and uniformly illuminated, men and things stand out in a realm where everything is visible.’¹⁶ He is here discussing Homer, and Jay notes Hellenic affinity with the visible form, from Parmenides to Plato. In Plato, he argues, ‘truth’ was embodied in the eidos, or eternal timeless idea, in contrast to the empirical world. His image of the cave and its shadows illustrates the value and limitations of perception through the senses. For Plato theōria (Greek for contemplation) ‘created an opportunity for the philosopher to see behind the spectacle to the true beauty’.¹⁷

The Greek privileging of vision, Jay continues, led to Aristotle’s notion of metaphor as ‘to see our likeness’.¹⁸ In spite of early Christianity’s suspicion of images, the Incarnation stood at the centre of Christian faith as the embodiment of God in human form. Aristotle also regarded Greek phantasia as something imagined, a mental picture or a vision. Verity Platt comments, ‘Phantasia is thus represented as . . . the power of the mind itself to visualize and communicate with god.’¹⁹ In the mediaeval era Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), Dante (1265–1321) and Meister Eckhart (1260–c.1325) stressed the importance of visual representation. Aquinas quotes Augustine as saying that the mind acquires knowledge of corporeal things through the bodily senses, and similarly the mind can know bodily things also.²⁰ He...

Table of contents

• The Power of Pictures in Christian Thought: The use and abuse of images in the Bible and theology
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• About the author
• List of abbreviations
• Part 1: Philosophical, Hermeneutical and Literary
• Part 2: Biblical Pictures, Symbols and Images
• Part 3: Communication in History and Today
• Bibliography
• Index of principal biblical references
• Index of names
• Index of subjects