Why Protestants dislike Images

WHY PROTESTANTS DISLIKE IMAGES
and the POST CHRISTIAN ERA

Post Modern culture is filled with images. Some think current culture is becoming non-literary and image oriented. Not true. It is the coming together of both word and image. A sign of the time is the merger of AOL Internet (mass communication) with Time/Life Magazines (literary) with Warner Brothers Pictures (visual).

Communication companies understand the importance of both word and image. The Church needs to understand this as well.

"Where do you want to go today?" The Microsoft Windows Operating System has little icons that take you there. The Microsoft logo is a flying window set in a heavenly blue sky. Of course Bill Gates "borrowed" this idea of visual icons from Macintosh. However, neither Steve Jobs (Macintosh) nor Bill Gates (Microsoft) can claim originality. For centuries the Eastern Orthodox Church has viewed its beautiful venerated picture icons (paintings) as windows to heaven. The parallel between the ancient Pre-Modern and the current Post Modern understanding of nonliterary graphic icons is astonishing.

Right up to the Protestant Reformation, just 500 years ago, visual images where very important to Christianity and to pre-literary culture. Suddenly the literary linear world of the Enlightenment took priority over image (word over image). Protestant Christians saw icons and statues as idolatry (graven images) and destroyed them. The Modern scientific era was born. An era that was defined by the printing press (the "word"). It believed that all knowledge could be reduced to black ink on white paper; That the world's problems could be solved by Modern Scientific methods of linear logic. No need of the "blaspheme" of images, myth, fantasy, and dreams. We renamed the Pre-Modern Culture "the Dark Ages" -we so despised its fairy stories, religion and myth. It was an over reaction, to be sure.

In recent times we have been experiencing a back lash that has brought an end to the Modern Era's scientific linear understanding of the world. We have entered the Post Modern Era (also called the Post Christian Era). The importance of image, fantasy, myth, color, dreams, and story telling are back again. And certain Modern-Era Christians are spitting angry.

There is this idea among non-mystical Protestant Christians that the spiritual and the material are two different very different worlds. One sacred and the other profane. The early Christians though differently. Orthodox belief teaches that the whole of God's creation, material as well as spiritual, is to be redeemed and glorified. On the first Christmas God took a material body, thereby proving that matter can be redeemed. God "deified" matter, making it "spirit bearing." Therefore, though in a different way, paintings of paint and wood (icons) can point to God. Image can proclaim the Word of God.

The unorthodox view of the material universe as non-redeemable is seen in certain Protestant suspicion of the arts -especially true of the Fundamentalists. They are sure that the whole of the material universe is evil and especially Hollywood.

This is why non-mystical Protestant churches have plain walls with few pictures. Overhead projections are generally limited to music lyrics and announcements. In mystical churches such as Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Episcopal (all pre-Modern in origin) there are tons of images and they are comfortable with myth, storytelling, art, dreams, and movies. In fact, Tolkien was Catholic and Lewis was Episcopalian.

I would say that the arts are key communication tools in Post Modern times. The arts are essential. After all, all artistic talent is a gift of God. It just needs to be used for the glory of God. I also believe that even when art doesn't honor God through deliberate human intentions, that it still points to God, due to the fact that all humans bear the image of their creator.

As C.S. Lewis points out, "We must not be nervous about 'parallels' and 'Pagan Christs' they ought to be there -it would be a stumbling block if they weren't. We must welcome them not, in false spirituality, withhold our imaginative welcome."

I encourage non-mystical Protestant churches to take the leap of faith into the Post-Modern era and explore the value of image, movies, story telling and other non-literary forms of communication.