Image Is Everything
3 December, 2003 
james of the northwest, one of the orthodox bloggers i read, shares this quote from leonid.ouspensky’s Theology of the Icon:
[the Icon] belongs to the very nature of Christianity, since it is not only the revelation of the Word of God, but also of the Image of God, manifested by the God-Man. The Church teaches that the image is based on the Incarnation of the second person of the Trinity. This is not a break with nor even a contradiction of the Old Testament, as the Protestants understand it; but on the contrary, it clearly fulfills it, for the existence of the image in the New Testament is implied by its prohibition in the Old…the sacred image for the Church proceeds precisely from the absence of the image in the Old Testament.
while ouspensky’s comments are probably correct for traditional protestant theology, it seems post-reformation protestant theology is recapturing a fuller understanding of Christ as the image of God, something never lost by our orthodox brothers. the pendelum of image is swinging back. old fears of image-sans-meaning are waning. an appreciation of the power of image in a post-literate culture is driving protestants to a new-old understanding of image.
Jesus Fever, eh?
I would say that I have thought about the ‘image’ of Christ swinging back into view (not that it was lost, as you said) is relevant for our times. That is, the “Ark” (Christian culture) is definitely embracing the fulfillment that is ‘the image of Christ’.
It’s been all the rage in postmodern monastic wannbes to seek what once was expected. It’s been good to see…yet it’s still something that opens doors to false identities because it’s hard to relate to a past idealogy and way of faith in our culture today and even harder to be authentic while doing so.
Well, that’s been my experience at times.
Bald Man,
Good stuff. In what way do you see “the pendelum of image is swinging back.” ?
Ragamuffin wrote, “it’s hard to relate to a past idealogy and way of faith…”
Yes it is…until one decides to make it their own as many of us former Protestant, now Orthodox have done. For us of course Orthodoxy is neither an “idealogy” nor in the “past” but a living reality that we were shocked to find did not peeter out in some obscure part of Byzantium in the 14th century but has continued to this day.
But(like you said) that’s been *my* experience at times!
karl,
medeival catholicism, the object of the protestant protest, was highly image-oriented, a necessity in pre-literate europe when image - not word - communicated the truth. protestantism, then, began life with the pendelum over to one side. in fact, many older, “high church” protestant denominations seem to have maintained this image-orientation to some extent.
as the western world became increasingly literate the need for image as a means of communication evaporated. as protestant acrimony toward rome grew, the desire to further separate itself from anything “catholic” - e.g. image, icon, ritual - also grew (see the emergance of “low church” protestantism). toss in the intellectual/philosophical shifts of the last five hundred years, and you see how word became king, the sole means to communicate truth. the pendelum has now swung to the other side.
today we enter a post-literate culture. image is re-taking ground once lost to word. image is once again needed to communicate truth. thus, “the pendulem of image is swinging back.”
i suspect we might disagree on interpretation here, but i think the shift to a post-literate culture is one reason for the rising interest in orthodoxy. as i understand it, the orthodox church has remained “un-literate,” by which i mean it either skipped the literate transformation of the modern age, or it managed to hang on to image throughout the modern age unlike protestantism. the orthodox pendelum has remained on the side of image, and as the culture swings back to image, resonnance is found. protestantism, meanwhile, must re-discover what orthodoxy never let go of.