A few weeks ago, I posted a summary of Van Drunen’s argument against depictions of Jesus. I wrote:

“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.”

John Barach replied (the rest of this post is from him):

Isn’t this as much as saying that unless we make a picture of Jesus that is 100% accurate, it’s a picture of someone else and that therefore we shouldn’t make pictures of Jesus? If so, does that really follow?

First, a picture of a person that is not 100% accurate may still be a picture of that person. All you need to do is scribble a little square of mustache and a flap of dark hair and you have a caricature of Adolf Hitler. Of course, it isn’t accurate, since there are no other features at all, but it’s still recognizably a picture of Hitler.

Even the painter who painted Cromwell “warts and all” likely didn’t paint him 100% accurately — and because Cromwell was a living being, Cromwell changed even in the moments after the painting was finished, likely changing color a bit as he went outdoors and got on his horse and rode away, so that the painting was no longer a representation that was “100% accurate.” But it was still a recognizable portrait of Oliver Cromwell.

Second, and more importantly, why does it matter if the picture is 100% accurate? The goal of a picture of Jesus is not to show us exactly what he looked like. It is simply to represent a historical situation, to illustrate. Thus, the artist shows us a body being taken down from the cross or a man in a boat talking to people on the shore . . . or, as in an old Reformed Bible, a man carrying a sheep on his shoulders, clearly representing Jesus, the Good Shepherd. By extension, we also have “pictures” of God that consist, Van Til-style, of a circle representing the Creator hovering over and separate from another circle representing the creation.

Should the fact that we don’t know what Peter looked like prohibit us from drawing a picture of Peter’s denial of Jesus? If I don’t know what Homer looked like, besides that he was blind, am I prohibited from drawing a picture of Homer chanting the Odyssey? If I sketch a big round man with unkempt hair and wearing a tweed suit and call that a picture of G. K. Chesterton, am I lying if it isn’t 100% accurate?