Revisiting the Patristic Theology of the Icon. Part 2: The Modern Theology of the Icon: Is it Orthodox?

As the Byzantine iconomachs worried about the inability of the image to hold together the divinity and the humanity of Christ, so contemporary conversations around the image exude anxiety about the image holding together immanent encounter and transcendent meaning.

The third articulates the intertwining of iconoclasm and iconophilia represented by Christ the Image that is determinative for the Christian imaging tradition and echoed at some level in all images.

Icons are something like sacraments in materiality: they participate in what they represent and communicate the sacredness to the believer.

Iconoclasm is a complex term today, in part because the images iconoclasm targets have diversified and changed over time, from material and concrete images to increasingly immaterial and abstract ones.

Ever since the first Council at Nicaea in 325 C.E.—which declared Jesus to be “fully God”—and the Council at Chalcedon in 451 C.E.—which entrenched the doctrine of the Trinity into Christian theology—Roman Orthodoxy had transformed a large portion of the Christian Near East into heretics.

The second identifies a peculiarly modern thorniness to the entanglement of iconoclasm and iconophilia, generated by the institutions and cultural forms that shape image relationships in modernity.