The Image of God in the Face of Longing by Derek Weiss

“We have taught our images to be free ; are we glad?
  are we glad to have brought convenient heresy to Logres?”

-Charles Williams, “Bors to Elayne: on the King’s Coins,” in Taliessin Through Logres

A Christian response to popular culture must touch on the all-pervasive obsession of that culture with images, and particularly with the Image: the Image of God – that is, the image of people. Technology, once the respected servant of necessity but now a slave of desire, has allowed an unprecedented promulgation of images in the forms of advertising /entertainment. People tell fewer stories, but consume more images. Films are considered “sensational” and “mind-blowing” because of special-effects. Newspaper and magazine articles get shorter, while the pictures within get larger.

Yet the one type of image that has grown to dominate others is that type which manipulates the sexual desires of its viewers. Pornography is a source of tremendous damage to Christian men and women, and it is no longer easily avoided: magazine stands feature prominent displays of splayed, air-brushed, nearly-nude women and men. These images lie: the look in the half-open eyes of the woman says, “Come to me, all you who thirst, and I will give you satisfaction. You do not have to work for my love, but will simply have it. I will make you a God.” Yet these images do not produce satisfaction when viewed, but a more deeply consuming desire for more images, or, worse, a desire to be an image of these images: something rather than someone; something other than a child of God: then follows eating disorders and steroid-culture and credit cards maxed-out from spending on “the right look.” We desperately try to shed the Image of God in which we are made in order to be remade in the image of the image of popular culture.

This should concern Christians, for Christianity is, at its Root, about The Image: The Image of the Invisible God, Our Lord Jesus. (Col. 1:15) If Christians claim to follow The Image that is Lord over all other images, and The Image that we ourselves are images of, we must be able to provide thoughtful criticism of popular culture’s use of images, and an alternative.

We can provide better than an alternative: we can point the way to the maker of images, the Image of the infinite and loving God. When Our Lord presented Himself as a human, He re-declared all humans to be essentially good. As the Athanasian Creed states the mystery, Christ is one Christ, “not by conversion of the Godhead into Flesh, but by taking of the Manhood into God.” Our Lord Jesus is the great re-iteration of the very first thing said about humans in scripture: “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness,” and soon after, “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed, it was very good.” (Genesis 1:26; 31a)

What does it mean to be in the image of God? To the original hearers of Genesis, the terms “image” and “idol” were virtually synonymous (cf. 1 Sam. 6; Ez. 7:20; Daniel 2-3). If you wanted to know what the god Baal looked like, you would go to Baal’s temple and look at his image/idol. Likewise, if you want to know what the Lord God of Genesis looks like, look at His image: humans. In other words, when you look at a human being, you are seeing an image, or a likeness, of God. If you want to see what God looks like, look at another person. “Truly I say to you, to the extent that you did it to one of these brothers of mine, even to the least of them, you did it to me.” (Mat. 25:40) This is why St. James points out that it is ridiculous and wrong to bless God while cursing those who are made in the likeness of God. (Ja. 3:9)

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We see in popular culture, saturated with images, a question and a longing: The question is, “Who am I in the image of?” The question is heard in the chinging of the cash registers of a billion-dollar fashion industry, which is mostly shallow imitation. It is heard in the convulsive vomiting and groaning stomachs of the ten percent of women who suffer from eating disorders in North America. It is seen in the empty eyes of thirty-five year old women and men, in the prime of their lives, who feel completely unlovable because of a few extra wrinkles or pounds, or a receding hairline.

Most of these people choose to make themselves in the image of culture. Since the breakdown of the religious worldview in the west and the rise of Postmodern thinking, many have accepted that there is only culture. I exist in reference to culture and nothing more. My image is therefore not worthy of reverence, but should be consumed by others as I consume others. In the terms of Martin Buber, I am not a Thou but an it. I am a cog in the wheel of cultural consumerism: Marilynn Monroe to Madonna to Britney Spears to who? To another product, but not another person. If I can have the physique of him, if I can have a girlfriend who looks and dresses like her, if I can be like them, I will have an image that I know, somewhere deeper and sacred within me, I must have.

But that image is a lie, for that her, the “perfect woman” with the “perfect look,” does not exist. The image of Jessica Simpson spread invitingly on the cover of Maxim Magazine is not the person of Jessica Simpson: Firstly, because the image does not accurately represent what Jessica Simpson looks like (makeup and perhaps mutilation [plastic surgery] beforehand, lighting and positioning techniques during the shoot, and airbrushing and “trimming” later – all meant to offer an object of desire); Secondly, because Jessica would not, in person, look at me that way, and I not at her with my unabashed, lusting gaze. I am not her husband or boyfriend. The only person whom I have the strength to lock eyes with in that way is my own love, and even then it is dangerous. Images, if they do not lead to a truth beyond them, are destructive. That image of Jessica is mere entertainment and only entertainment: Jessica is not entertainment, but a person.

Or is she? The Christian may answer yes, because Jessica is made, like all of us, in the Image of God. In the image of God a person is freed to be themselves, because they are made in the image of one who is beyond culture, beyond mere reference. All long to relate to the Omnipotence, the Infinitely Varied, the God of Ten Trillion Galaxies, who would have them be who they are to Himself; and also to themselves and to others. This is the image redeemed: the image where we find Jesus.