Blood & Stone: Violence in the Bible & the Eye of the Illustrator

Cross Currents, Summer, 2001 by Barry Moser

As an illustrator, I am required to imagine these events. Indeed, I am required by the narrative mandate of my art to re-present them. And in doing this I must see them clearly, and with no faintness of heart, no averting of eyes. I cannot allow myself the mummery of fabrication and equivocation. Nor will I, as an artist, allow sweetness and light to burrow in where bitterness and darkness dominate story, plot, and theme. I must remind my audience of exactly what I see in what I read. When I consider the slaughter of the Egyptians in Exodus, I must imagine just how God smote them, how they were attacked, scourged, struck, and killed by God's destroyer. I must behold the horrible ways in which the destroyer killed those innocent children, children who were guilty only by virtue of their birth. My eyes must never fail to see the horrific details -- Were they suffocated? Were they bludgeoned? Were they disemboweled? Were they screaming out for their mothers? Their fathers? (Exod. 12:23).

I have been criticized, and will continue to be criticized, I imagine, for making images for the Bible that are too dark. Criticized for having gravitated so much toward death and blood. It has been said that the exceptionally dark tone of my images is inappropriate for, say, the Pauline epistles that focus so strongly on God's miraculous gift of grace. That by passing over the miracles and parables of the Gospels I missed the critical dimensions that have been central to the Bible's longevity, impact, and meaning for humanity. [6]

And perhaps this is right. I don't know. But I do know that Paul (or Apollos) tells us there is no forgiveness of sins without the shedding of blood (Heb. 9:22). Faith, hope, and love may be the cardinal virtues, and they may be the enduring message, but for me the over-riding theme of the Bible is blood and stone--the blood of sacrifice and the stone of redemption. It is the eternal and onmipresent conflict between good and evil. The tension between light and dark. And I would much rather bear the burden for descrying and witnessing to the blood and stone I see within those hallowed pages than to be accused of eviscerating the text with piety or betraying it with sweetness and vacuity. The Bible, whether we like it or not, is full of sound and fury, not saccharine fluff. Full of a fire and ferocity that share at least equal time with love and redemption. And reading it we ought not avert our eyes, because by not averting our eyes we come more painfully face to face with the truth and goodness that thrives a midst the fierceness.

Flannery O'Connor once said that moral judgments are part of the very act of seeing [7] and that everything has its testing point in the eye. [8] And so we must use our eyes, our senses, to experience fully the mysterious mix of dark and light in the pages of the Bible. Too many limners (and readers and exegetes) of Holy Writ have shied away from the violence and difficulties of the real text and instead of wrestling with the terrible and eternal verities that are within its pages, have fed us "Bible Lite." [9] A marrowless version sanitized of pointed meaning and significance that is fit only for pallid minds, a watery substitute for the real thing -- a wolf merely scalded, not the main ingredient of a garlicky wolf-stew.