The Other Council of Nicaea

What 'The Chosen,' Latter-day Saints, and an 8th-Century Debate Teach Us About Seeing Jesus

Jonathan Roumie playing his role as Jesus Christ. (Courtesy of The Chosen)

Confession time: I hadn’t ever planned on watching The Chosen.

Truth is, I’d never heard of the show until an Latter-day Saint (or ‘Mormon’) acquaintance mentioned it in passing. “Oh, you’d love it,” he insisted. I nodded politely and promptly forgot about it. I don’t watch much television, and I was vaguely aware there were controversies swirling around some Jesus series.

That was enough to keep it off my radar.

Then came that one time I met the show’s director, Dallas Jenkins, at an event in Utah. Still, that didn’t change my mind. I’d seen the first episode of the first season and a few snippets out of polite obligation before meeting Dallas. He seemed like a nice enough guy, passionate about his work, but I had books to read, papers and sermons to write. TV Jesus could wait.

But the recommendations multiplied. A close friend. A family member. Each conversation carried the earnest, “You really need to watch this.”

It was actually a pastoral counseling session that finally broke through my resistance. A congregant, eyes reddened, confided something I never thought I’d hear: “I don’t think I really believed in Jesus until I watched The Chosen.”

What?

That’s when I knew I had to watch it.

I’m all caught up now.

My conclusion? I can see exactly why this show has attracted both the admiration and the angst it has.

The Return of the Icon Wars

The Chosen has drawn praise from across denominational lines, but it hasn’t escaped controversy, especially among evangelicals. Some raise concerns about its behind-the-scenes ties, such as its production relationship with Angel Studios, a company with deep roots in Latter-day Saint circles. Others point to a pride flag spotted on set and worry about doctrinal drift. But underneath all these debates lies a deeper unease, one that has stirred Christians for centuries: Should anyone portray Jesus Christ at all?

That’s the real fault line. The concern isn’t just about the show’s dialogue or artistic choices. It’s about mere human embodiment of the divine incarnation. Can any actor—no matter how sincere, no matter how skillful—play the Son of God without bending the viewer’s imagination away from the Word made flesh and toward a particular face, voice, and gesture?

The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve realized we’ve been here before.

In 787 AD, another controversy was tearing through the church, and it centered in Nicaea. No, not the Nicaean council of Trinitarian fame—the other Council of Nicaea. This one wasn’t debating Christ’s divinity, but whether Christians could make images of Christ at all.

The iconoclasts, as they were called, believed that any visual representation of the divine was inherently blasphemous, a violation of the second commandment against graven images. Because Jesus is truly God, to paint Christ’s face is to reduced the infinite to the finite. Carve his likeness, and you’ve committed idolatry.

But the iconodules (literally, “image-venerators”) disagreed. Since Christ became visible, he could be visibly represented. More than that, images actually helped believers connect with God, especially those who couldn’t read. Icons weren’t barriers to worship; rather, they were doorways.

“Christ Pantocrator,” 6th c. icon from Saint Catherine’s Monastery (Sinai). A preserved example of the type of Christ image that Byzantine Emperor Leo III condemned during the iconoclast controversy, which led to the Second Council of Nicaea (787).

Here’s what both sides agreed on: the danger was real. Even the iconodules insisted that images must serve Scripture, not compete with it. They weren’t advocating artistic free-for-all, but measured use of visual aids that pointed beyond themselves to the truth of the Gospels.

So, essentially, Nicaea II asked: Does an image of Christ draw the heart toward Him or away from Him? Does it clarify or confuse? Serve or supplement?

This debate has since raged for generations, despite being ‘officially’ settled in the seventh ecumenical council (the iconodules won). Still, later rulers destroyed countless works of art. Monks died defending their painted prayers. Families split over painted wood and colored glass. Iconoclasts hurled bricks through British cathedral stained glass. Yankee Puritan chapels were built as painfully plain as possible.

Sound familiar? It should.

The debates surrounding The Chosen echo that same tension. Can the sacred be made visible without being diminished? Can portrayal serve reverence or will it always risk replacing it?

I’m convinced the questions raised at Nicaea II haven’t gone away; rather, they’ve just migrated from paintings and sculptures to digital screens.

Seeing Christ: Then and Now

I’ve been particularly fascinated watching this play out especially because of the Latter-day Saint element. Here’s a faith tradition that has rarely shied away from visual theology, e.g., angel Moroni weathervane for the Nauvoo temple, astronomical symbols on the Salt Lake temple, and C.C.A. Christensen’s religious artwork. Today, you’ll find religious murals in meetinghouses, logos featuring the Christus statue, and church magazines that regularly feature artistic depictions of biblical scenes. Yet, to be frank, from my perspective it seems The Chosen, an evangelical-produced series, has stirred many Latter-day Saints in ways that even their own static art has not.

The logo of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints featuring the Danish Lutheran artist Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Christus statue (1833).

The difference, I think, is movement. And dialogue. And the terrifying intimacy of watching someone be Jesus rather than simply depict him. The Chosen makes Jesus approachable in ways centuries of religious art never quite managed, at least not to us moderns.

So, it’s a bit surreal to see how strikingly stark the reception is between Latter-day Saints and evangelicals. Many of my fellow evangelicals—especially those concerned with biblical fidelity—reject the show outright. Meanwhile, many Latter-day Saints I know have embraced it, not just as good television but as something spiritually meaningful. They talk about Jesus like they’ve read Gentle and Lowly.

Some evangelicals see this and leap to conspiracy, as if The Chosen is some crypto-Mormon plot to infiltrate evangelical circles (or, at least, it’s proof-positive that something’s afoul with BigEva). “I am the Law” was, supposedly, the smoking gun. (Hint: It’s not.)

Admittedly, as a pastor, here’s what I find actually troubling: the number of people—whether evangelical or Latter-day Saint or Roman Catholic or whatever—who seem to encounter Jesus for the first time through a television show rather than through the Gospels themselves. That’s not The Chosen’s fault. No, that’s an indictment of how we’ve been teaching the Bible. If people need Jonathan Roumie to make Jesus real to them, then perhaps we should ask why our exposition of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John has left Jesus feeling distant and abstract.

But that’s not the concern I’m hearing from most evangelicals, not the self-reflective kind we should be having. Rather, it’s the “The Chosen is a Trojan horse” argument because ‘Mormons’ like it. I think this is foolish. To assume that shared appreciation of The Chosen between evangelicals and Latter-day Saints equals theological alignment is a category error. The Gospels stand on their own, and they often portray outsiders—women, centurions, Samaritans—recognizing Christ. We shouldn’t be surprised if others resonate with this portrayal of Jesus, even if their own Christology diverts from traditional orthodoxy, e.g., Mormonism’s aversion to things like Trinitarianism, Christ’s homoousion nature, and theotokos. Let’s not confuse doctrinal purity with evangelistic sterility.

What I see is perhaps much simpler and far more powerful. I see the Lord using this show to introduce all viewers to a Jesus who is “gentle and lowly in heart” (Matthew 11:29). Not as a caricature, but as a living, moving, speaking presence who heals and touches and weeps and loves.

Yes, people can and should encounter that Jesus in the Gospels first and foremost. That’s where He’s revealed most clearly, not to mention most inspiredly, infallibly, and inerrantly. I’ll triple-down here, just to avoid being misunderstood: I believe only the Bible is God-breathed (see 2 Timothy 3:16), and only in the Bible do we have Christ’s words without error (see John 17:17). So, to be crystal clear, I’m not arguing that Scripture is the only place someone can begin to encounter Jesus; rather, it’s the only place we can be confident we are encountering Him as He truly is.

But if merely reading the Gospels were always sufficient, we wouldn’t need to exegete them. We wouldn’t gather weekly to sit under exposition. We wouldn’t write commentaries, lead small groups, or train pastors to teach the Word with clarity and conviction.

The concern that The Chosen might “replace” the Gospels misunderstands how evangelical Christianity has always operated. We’ve never claimed that Scripture needs no explanation, no illustration, no imagination, only that it needs no addition (i.e., sola Scriptura). There’s a difference. Good presentations of the Gospel don’t add to the Word of God in an authoritative sense. Every evangelical preacher risks “adding” to the Gospel the moment they provide context. But “adding” and “illuminating” are not the same thing. Rather, good portrayals of the Gospels open their message to the hearer. The best preaching, for example, gives the Gospels shape, tone, and application.

So does good art, when rightly ordered under the authority of God’s Word. And this is where The Chosen fits—not above Scripture, not beside it, but beneath it, as a subordinate work of Christian imagination. It’s also where The Chosen gives its audience the responsibility to be a Berean and ‘see if these things are not so’ in the show by searching the Scriptures.

As Nicaea II shows us, if God is invisible (see 1 Timothy 1:17), and no one has seen the Father (see John 1:18), then Christ is the visible image of the invisible God (see Colossians 1:15), the Word made flesh who dwelt among us (see John 1:14). His incarnation invites us to imagine—not invent, but imagine—the Son of God not only as transcendent but immanent. Not just as glory in heaven but as a man with dirt on his feet.

In that sense, a physical depiction of Jesus is not an attempt to limit the divine, but to acknowledge that the divine willingly limited Himself for our sake. The Chosen, then, is not a new gospel or even a supplement to the old. To his great credit, Dallas has been extremely clear on this point. Rather, it’s an imagination-stirring reflection on what it might have felt like when “Jesus wept,” when He touched the leper, when He let the little children come to Him (my favorite episode).

That reflection, however, must remain subordinate to the Bible and never function as a theological lens in its own right. Its value lies not in what it reveals, but in how it stirs us to return to what has already been revealed.

So, the question is whether those imaginative portrayals of Christ help anyone hear the Word more clearly.

Word and Image in Reformation Thought

The Reformers, too, understood this tension. Martin Luther strongly warned against idolatry, but he believed it was primarily a matter of the heart, not the eyes. “When they [images] are no longer in the heart,” he wrote, “they can do no harm when seen with the eyes” (LW 40:84). He permitted crucifixes and paintings of Christ as long as they were not adored. For him, images could instruct, comfort, and help the faithful (especially for the illiterate) so long as they did not become objects of misplaced trust.

John Calvin, by contrast, was more cautious. He argued that any depiction of Christ violated the Second Commandment. Even the Incarnation, he believed, did not legitimize human representations of Jesus because to represent Christ’s glorified body was to confine the divine. For Calvin, even sincere attempts to picture Christ risked distorting Him.

In my opinion, this places Calvin out-of-step with Nicaea II, and is, perhaps, why the most vehement criticism from The Chosen comes from Calvinistic evangelicals, especially Reformed Baptists. I’m not trying to throw shade. I’m a huge fan of Calvin and consult him often, but it’s ok to disagree with him every once in a while.

Anyway, here’s where both men agreed—idolatry is not ultimately about visible things; rather, it’s about invisible desires. A painting is not an idol until a heart makes it one (see Ezekiel 14:3). Even in Exodus 32, the golden calf wasn’t an idol because it was gold; it was an idol because Israel trusted it. As Paul puts it, “we walk by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7), but that’s not a ban on seeing. No, it’s a warning against replacing faith with sight.

So, Should We Watch?

For me, then, the question isn’t whether it’s right or not for The Chosen to depict Jesus. The question is whether it replaces Him, distorts Him, or draws hearts toward or away from the Jesus of the Bible. That’s the Lutheran logic worth retrieving.

We should be cautious, absolutely. But we should also be consistent. If we reject every dramatized or imaginative engagement with the Gospels on the grounds that ‘the text should be enough,’ we’ll need to carry that logic a lot further than we probably want. So long, C.S. Lewis and The Jesus Storybook Bible. Goodbye, commentaries. Farewell, expository sermons. While we’re at it, toss out missionary storytelling and Sunday School flannelgraphs, too. What’s left is a kind of bare-bones hermeneutic dressed up as faithfulness, but it’s not how the church has historically treated the Word. The standard isn’t “Did this dramatize?” The standard is: “Does this clarify Christ, or obscure Him?”

We should, of course, prefer the page to the screen 100% of the time. The Chosen is no substitute for the Gospels. And you should be cautious about creative portrayals. That’s wise. But let’s not pretend that caution is the same thing as maturity, or that reverence for the text demands rejection of every effort to help others feel what that text reveals. Because at some point, this skepticism starts sounding less like discernment and more like a retreat into a kind of 19th-century common-sense rationalist Biblicism that fears anything outside black ink and white paper.

And besides, if the goal is to get people into the Gospels, The Chosen has shown to be a pretty effective on-ramp. There’s something compelling about the visual and audio portrayal of a messiah-carpenter with a Galilean accent saying, “Follow me.”

The Chosen isn’t perfect, but neither were the icons that survived the iconoclastic destruction. What matters is whether they serve their purpose: helping us see more clearly, love more deeply, and follow more faithfully.

No image can ever fully capture the Lord Jesus Christ, but some may cause us to look again at the One who truly saves.

From where I sit, The Chosen is doing exactly that. I don’t particularly love the show, to be honest, but I don’t hate it either. And Dallas has been clear that his show isn’t the main act, but rather a creative finger pointing.

If it’s pointing to Jesus—and pointing clearly—then I say, let it point.