Firstly, I would like to note that the film did not include my favorite depiction of Jesus, that of "Buddy Christ", from the movie Dogma. I see Buddy Christ's omission as an extremely irresponsible act on the part of the filmmakers of "Faces of Christ", and so I have done my part to remedy this mistake by adding the image you see here.
To be honest I have very little taste for the religious art that I have been exposed to. At art galleries I generally make a quick retreat away from the many images of Christ, Madonna, the disciples and so forth. To be sure, many brilliant artists have contributed to these portrayals and it is staggering to think about how universal such images are and how frequently they are produced. The narrator touched on the reason for this when he noted that we desire to have the spiritual become concrete in a way that we can easily relate to. The correlative problem is that it is difficult to reveal the divine in this way without causing it to lose everything that makes it HOLY in the first place. I find that a lot of religious art makes Christ seem even more mysterious and distant than he is in any other setting. Part of this may be the stylistic approach of the artists. Scenes of Christ from many time periods follow a pretty typical formula that tends to look contrived.
The questions my mind is revolving around are chiefly these:
Is it possible to produce religious art (or written works for that matter) that enhance the divinity of god? Do all our efforts only serve to limit and distort Christ by attempting to express that which cannot be expressed? If the original intent of religious art was to help the illiterate, is there any reason to still keep it and treasure it? Am I just an unappreciative and cold human being (slightly kidding)?
I have a lot of other thoughts on this but they simply feel to disorganized to be written now.
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