Why Only Gifted Artists Should Be Allowed to Paint Jesus

Unexpectedly, with a three hour layover from the Lancaster train until the Boston Bus in Philadelphia, I saw in the information kiosk that the Museum of Art (yes, Rocky ran up and down its steps) had a special exhibit called "Rembrandt and the Faces of Jesus." It was a collection of some of his most famous work, sketches and oils, though I didn't care as much for the sketches, as well as the Hundert Thaler (because it sold for so much) etching of Jesus saying "forbid not the little children to come to me." In that one picture is so much fine, and so much wonderful . . . a toddler some distance, reaching for Jesus, the tenderness of Jesus, all with the economy of line and Rembrandt's unique use of light. Modern evangelicals have generally taken clip art of Jesus drawn by so" me tech school grad thinking to use such pictures to ornament a bulletin. What Rembrandt did was something beyond and not counter to the second commandment. We don't know what Jesus looks like (though artists of his day went by a supposed Lentulus letter, sent to the Roman senate in the time of Jesus and describing what He looked like, but not discovered until 1474, and almost certainly a fraud), but Rembrandt strove for a biblical realism, using a young Jewish man from his neighborhood as a model and carefully doing his Bible study, instead of the Jesus-as-idealized-Greek-god depictions of his day. He portrayed a complexity of expressions, real human ones, across the face of Jesus and overturned how people painted Jesus, the Supper at Emmaus painted at the same time that the Westminster Confession was being finished in England. In the less famous but no less startling 1628 painting above, Jesus is in silhouette while those to whom he is revealed are illuminated. Rembrandt is not making a picture of Jesus for us to worship or to fix in our heads, "Oh, that's what Jesus is like." No, he is saying, Jesus was real, human; He had human emotions, and everywhere where He was (as he is in all of the later paintings and etchings), He is light! The further from Jesus you are in these works, the more you are in the dark.
The whole opposition to images of Jesus imputed to many Reformed people is, however, unjust. Cromwell tried to stop the destruction whenever he could, restraining the unruly soldiers of his New-but-not-so-Model Army. Similarly Calvin allowed that there might be some use for paintings like those of Rembrandt's. (I'll attach a paper I wrote for the now defunct New England Reformed Journal several years ago some day soon). But all Reformed folks were concerned for the use of images that God did not create. Jesus is the one who is the image of the father. The writers of the gospel, obedient to the Holy Spirit, saw no need to insert a drawing of Jesus, because THE WORD OF GOD IS ENOUGH. They saw the superstition of their day in which people who could not read or hear sermons interpreting scripture in their own language and turned instead to pictures of Jesus around them. Rather than give their students pictures, why not just return the Word that God said is all we need for life and godliness? They so desired the Word be first place. They did so because they cared less about their personal ecclesial power than they did for the people they saw dying without the gospel. A gospel added to is no gospel, they knew, and they wanted their people to have real and new life founded on His Word alone.
So, an afternoon of watching a Dutch master preach in his own style, I suspect, Calvin would not have been offended by, unless of course they ended up where they never had been or intended to be, in church as an aid to worship. But he didn't have time . . . he labored to study God's word and comment on as much as he could before the Lord called him home. In his calling, Calvin was as gifted and careful as Rembrandt . . . which is why Calvin's commentaries remain to this day "close to the bone" of what he was studying, careful not to over-theologize nor to be sure when he wasn't, to allow the Scriptures to speak for himself. So, I too, on the bus back on soggy roads, I turn from an afternoon of the Word carefully painted to my own study, not will the gifts of a Calvin or a Rembrandt, but with all I have to bring out the complexities, the life, and the reality of His living and blazing Word. . . . . .

In this, the more famous 1648 Supper at Emmaus painting, I'm intrigued at the similarity of Caravaggio's painting of the same subject; the two with the added servant who is unaware what is happening. . . .

For a helpful and not too long study of the second commandment issue, you might want to consider this nuanced PCA position paper on paintings of Jesus in and outside of worship.