C. S. Lewis Till we have faces
Van Morrison till you find your original face
Desert Fathers conception of growing a soul as movements within paradox. The movement between kissing the icon and kissing your neighbor during the passing of the peace.
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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.
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