The Color of Christ

On November 19, NPR's Fresh Air ran an interview with Edward Blum, co-author of The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America. I don't know Mr. Blum's theological training, but he offered a profound insight into idolatry when he said,

And so when the Klan wants to justify violence, when they want to justify exclusion, they don't have Biblical texts for it. They just don't have written texts. So they have to turn to image. And so the belief, the value that Jesus was white provides them an image in place of text.

In the American South, the white majority needed a version of Christianity which permitted it to oppress racial minorities, and used images, or more precisely idols, to create it. In medieval and contemporary Roman Catholicism, images of the Virgin Mary have promoted a popular Mariology utterly without support from Scripture. Of course, the phenomenon isn't limited to Klansmen and Catholics. As any presbyterian pastor who's removed images of Christ from a Church building can tell you, those pictures have a profound grip on all Christians' theological imagination.

In God's providence, an answer I recently wrote in my role as a doctrinal correspondent is featured on the hope page of opc.org this week, in which I discuss why God no longer gives supernatural revelations. That argument is firmly grounded in the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, which doctrine, it seems to me, also rules out any need for images. Just as new "revelations" tend to lead people away from the truth of the Gospel, so do idolatrous images of our Savior.

As Hebrews 1:1-2 says, "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world." Since the Son has spoken, and since his Word is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, what need have we of images?