Center for Biblical Theology and Eschatology
Eastern Orthodoxy, Icons, and Christology
by William J. Baldwin, June 6, 1995
Eastern Orthodoxy is self-consciously connected to the past. Its proponents pride themselves on their distinction from modern, rootless evangelicals who neither have nor seem to want a doctrinal connection with the historic church. Benjamin Williams and Harold Anstall make a typical comment in this regard: "Perhaps one of the most striking and unique things about Orthodox Christianity, especially in this age of rapid change and even change for its own sake, is its permanence and changelessness."[1] As far as they are concerned, the apostolic faith has been handed down, unchanged, in the East.
To the Orthodox[2], if I wish to critique their Christology, I may as well critique Chalcedon. Or Paul.
Indeed, to critique Chalcedon is the same as critiquing Paul. In a small volume subtitled An Elementary Handbook on the Orthodox Church, Father Thomas Hopko writes: "The dogmatic definitions . . . and the canon laws [of the Seven Ecumenical Councils] are understood to be inspired by God and to be expressive of his will for men. Thus, they are the essential sources of Orthodox Christian doctrine."[3] Nevertheless, I will not critique those sources directly. Rather, I will discuss the theology that contemporary Orthodox theologians derive from those sources; and I will compare that theology to Biblical (and credal) orthodoxy.
These seven councils -- which to the Orthodox bear the same authority as Scripture -- include Nicea, Chalcedon and Nicea II. This last council affirmed the propriety of icons in Christian worship.
That immediately produces a tension which the Orthodox recognize. Self-consciously Nicene and Chalcedonian, they must defend icons of Christ in a way that neither violates his divinity nor separates his natures. In my opinion they fail to make the case. What results is an implicitly anti-Nicene and anti-Chalcedonian Christology.
The paradigm argument against icons takes the form of a syllogism:
MP: Scripture prohibits making images of God.
mp: Christ is God.
Conclusion: Scripture prohibits making images of Christ.
To agree with the premises and reject the conclusion, one might argue that the syllogism equivocates on the word "God," using the term in one sense for the major premise and in another for the minor. In other words, Christ isn't God in the same sense that the invisible God is. The Orthodox have no desire to make such a claim. They insist on the validity of the Nicene Creed. At the incarnation, "[Christ] became a man, and thus He is at once fully God and fully man."[4]
Alternatively, one might argue that Christ is God, but he is also a man. The images, then, represent his human nature only. The Orthodox explicitly reject this option as Nestorian. Daniel Clendenin writes, "It is not solely [Christ's] human nature that is portrayed in an icon (separating the human nature from the divine nature would be Nestorianism); rather, 'the total divine-human person of Christ' is portrayed."[5] Clendenin rightly asserts that any attempt to portray only Christ's human nature does Nestorian violence to the union of that nature with the divine. He reminds the reader of Chalcedonian orthodoxy; Christ's two natures are "without confusion, change, division, or separation." And he concludes, "An icon, then, did not attempt to represent either the human or the divine nature alone, but instead the unity and totality of the natures in a single person" (p. 93).
John Meyendorff speaks even more boldly:
What appears on the image is the very hypostasis of God the Word in the flesh. In the Byzantine tradition the inscription around the halo surrounding the head of Jesus says "The One who is," the equivalent of the sacred name YHWH, the name of God, whose person is revealed, but whose essence is inaccessible. It is neither God's indescribable divinity nor His human nature alone which is represented on an icon, but the person of God the Son who took flesh.[6]
It is Yahweh, the eternal I AM, who spoke from the burning bush, whose form was not seen. The Orthodox insist that he is the one whose image is seen in the icon.
The Orthodox specifically assert that, whatever an icon means, it doesn't mean that Christ is not very God of very God. And, whatever an icon does, it doesn't separate his natures. But then the dilemma remains. An icon of Christ is an image of his person; and the person of Christ is divine. Therefore the icon is an image of God.
Precisely, the Orthodox reply. They are suspicious of syllogisms in general; but if they revised the above syllogism, it might look like this:
MP: Scripture prohibited the making of images of God.
mp: Christ is God.
Conclusion: There is no longer any prohibition against making images of God as he has revealed himself in his Son.
(And if the syllogism has a mystical feel to it, so much the better.) The Orthodox do not question that it was both impossible and wrong to make a picture of God in the Old Testament. John Meyendorff writes, "To paint an image of the divine essence or of God before His incarnation is obviously impossible."[7] He does not state why the task would be "obviously impossible". But the phrase "before His incarnation" indicates the answer: in the Old Testament, no one knew what God's image looked like.
Clendenin reinforces this thought: "John [of Damascus] and Theodore [the Studite] admitted that to fashion an image of the invisible God would have been either impossible or blasphemous during the Old Testament era."[8] The emphasis falls on the word "invisible." It was at least impossible to paint a picture of that which is invisible. And it was probably blasphemous as well since God had not chosen to reveal what his image looked like.
In their opposition to icons, the iconoclasts pointed to Deuteronomy 4:15,16 which grounded the prohibition of images in the invisibility of God: "So watch yourselves carefully, since you did not see any form on the day the Lord spoke to you at Horeb from the midst of the fire, lest you act corruptly and make a graven image...." Yet, as mentioned above, it is exactly that invisible I AM that the Orthodox purport to depict.
The Incarnation, they say, changes things.
Clendenin writes, "Whereas God spoke in a certain way in the age of law; in the age of grace he has spoken in a decisively new way (Heb. 1:1-2). The once invisible God assumed a human body and in so doing became circumscribable."[9] Jack Sparks quotes John of Damascus to make this point: "It is obvious that when you contemplate God becoming man, then you may depict Him clothed in human form. When the invisible One becomes visible to flesh, you may then draw His likeness."[10] Meyendorff looks to Theodore the Studite: "He who is formless appears with the shape of a man, and the Incorporeal enters into a body."[11] The second commandment, therefore, no longer applies. Clendenin concludes: "The commandment against graven images was construed as a temporal rather than a universal prohibition, one that was appropriate to the age of pagan idols but has now been superseded by the incarnation of God himself."[12]
It's an amazing leap of logic from the premise (God has revealed himself once for all in his Son) to the conclusion (we may now make images of God). Yet the Orthodox do not seem to notice that they have leaped at all. They barely attempt to explain how to get from the premise to the conclusion. To them, the conclusion is obvious.[13] And when they do attempt an explanation, they stumble into Nestorianism. This is almost inevitable. The only alternative is Monophysitism, of which they have an even greater horror. Yet one or the other error awaits them. To say that the Incarnation legitimizes icons is either to say that God's nature changed when he became a man and thus is now depictable. Or it is to say that God became depictable as a man but remained undepictable as God.
Jack Sparks concludes his thinking this way: "It is incredibly important that we Christians be allowed the latitude to depict Christ's humanity and work, because by His incarnation He revealed Himself in and through material creation."[14] On the subject of depicting Christ's divinity, Sparks remains silent. It's an eloquent silence. God became depictable as a man, but that doesn't make his invisible divine nature any more depictable. This tension trips Sparks into making a statement that at least has Nestorian overtones: the incarnation allows us to depict Christ's humanity.
Meyendorff offers this defense: "[The Incarnation] means that He was a man like all of us, and can be represented on an image."[15] He does not explain why that conclusion is more valid than this: "The Incarnation means that Christ was God, just like his Father, and cannot be represented on an image."
Despite protestations to the contrary, Meyendorff seems to divide the person of Christ into the human, which is depictable, and the divine, which is not. He describes the Incarnation this way, "With bodily eyes, the hypostasis of the Logos could be seen in the flesh, although its divine essence remained hidden; it is this mystery of the Incarnation which makes possible the sacred icons."[16] Meyendorff's need for a defense of icons drives him to speak of the Incarnation as a mystery in which seeing the flesh of Christ somehow counts as seeing his person, although the divine nature of that person is hidden. The apostle John, on the contrary, locates the mystery in the fact that when God became flesh, "we beheld his glory . . . as of the only begotten of the Father" (Jn 1:14). And the writer of Hebrews says that Jesus is "the exact representation of [God's] nature" (Heb 1:3). Meyendorff should say that an icon must visibly represent both the humanity and the divinity of Christ. It is not enough to say that the icon visibly represents a humanity that is united with an invisible divinity. That is not an approximation of the Incarnation. That is a denial of the union.
Clendenin turns to Theodore the Studite for support: "Theodore presses the analogy that if God condescended to be symbolized by a brazen serpent, 'how could it not be pleasing to Him and appropriate to set up the image of the bodily form which has been His since He became man?'"[17] Again, the statement is frighteningly Nestorian. The "bodily form" of Christ is being set up as an image. The divinity gets left out of the argument because it would wreck the analogy. It would make no sense to say that if God condescended to be symbolized by a brazen serpent, he would certainly set up an image of his divinity since he became man. The analogy simply doesn't follow.
That's the practical problem. Their analogy of the Incarnation only allows for the conclusion that Christ's humanity is depictable. The divinity doesn't fit that analogy; it just piggybacks in. The Orthodox conclude that since the humanity is depictable, and the divinity is indissolubly united to the humanity, the whole person must be depictable. Chalcedonian truth is rushed in after the fact to recast a Nestorian conclusion.
The Orthodox misunderstand the purpose and nature of the Incarnation. The Incarnation does not repeal the second commandment; it establishes it. When Hebrews calls Christ "the exact representation of [God's] nature," it is in a context of describing the uniqueness of Christ. God has spoken to us "in these last days," i.e. at the last, by a Son, rather than by a merely human prophet. Of which of the angels did God ever say, "this is the radiance of my glory, the exact representation of my nature?" (cf. Heb 1:1-5). Christ is the unique image of God, an image that by definition cannot be reproduced.
Paul bears the same message in Colossians: "And he is the image [eikon] of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For [hoti] by Him all things were created...visible and invisible" (Col 1:15,16). It was fitting that Christ should image the invisible God because it was through Christ that everything was created. No created thing could fulfil that task. Only the firstborn over all creation, through whom the worlds were created, could image the Creator. No one and nothing else meets this qualification for presenting the unique image of God to the world.
God forbade images of himself for two reasons: 1) That which is created cannot image the Creator in a way that merits worship. The second commandment therefore prohibits "any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the water under the earth" (Ex 20:5). This prohibition must still hold. Created icons cannot image God. To say that the Incarnation changes this is to suggest that Christ was created. And indeed his body was created. But to make of that body an image that is not united to the uncreated divine leads right back to a Nestorian division of the natures.
2) No one can adequately or accurately represent by an image the invisible God. This is the argument God uses in Deuteronomy 4:15ff. And it's still valid. The fact that God has chosen to represent himself visibly in the fullness of time in no way removes the limitations of men. John makes it clear that it is the prerogative of "the only-begotten God" to "explain" the God whom no one has ever seen (Jn 1:18).
The second commandment prohibits making images of God precisely because God was reserving that privilege to himself, the only one capable of doing it right. In the Old Testament, the saints waited for God to show his divine image. Now he has shown it. We have the report from those whose eyes have seen, whose ears have heard, whose hands have handled (1 Jn 1:1).
For a man to take a created thing such as canvas and unite it to the divinity so that it shines forth in the radiance of the invisible God -- that would be to arrogate to man a prerogative reserved to God. That would be to re-incarnate Christ in a different body. That would deny the finality and the sufficiency of the first incarnation. That would deny the reality of the resurrection, uniting the Son to corruptible matter once again. That is what the making of an icon does.
The Orthodox will argue in return that an icon does no such thing. The icon, they say, does not unite the divine God to the material of canvas or wood. Rather, the medium acts as a porthole on eternity. Stanley Harakas explains:
The icon deliberately changes the perspective and form so that it is not naturalistic. It does this so that it can point beyond the appearances of this world to the spiritual reality and truth of the holy person or event depicted in the icon. Thus the icon becomes a 'window to heaven' and helps us direct our attention to divine things.[18]
The icon doesn't re-incarnate Christ; rather, it points to his Incarnation.
This thought produces at least two problems: 1) It destroys the whole argument from the analogy of the Incarnation. God has revealed himself in his incarnate Son. It is an entirely different activity to make pictures that point to that revelation. Neither does the Incarnation make it reasonable or necessary that we should begin to make pictures that distort the physical appearance of God's image so that it might be visible to the eye of faith. The argument from Incarnation -- if it holds any force at all -- holds force by saying that graven images were forbidden until we knew what God in the flesh looked like. Now that we know, we ought to strive to be as accurate as possible.
Indeed, Ernst Benz quotes from "the so-called Epistle of Lentulus" a lengthy description of Jesus that gives details on everything. His height is "fifteen and a half fists." His hair is "nut-brown." His face is "without spots or wrinkles, and of healthy color." His eyes are "large" and "blue-gray." "The Byzantine Christ type is modeled after this description," he says.[19] But it ends up being that description in a fun-house mirror, distorted, elongated, flattened. The Orthodox know there's no value in depicting the humanity apart from the divinity. So they make the physical do double duty.[20]
There's a second problem in the thought that the Icon points to heavenly realities: Most of the icons depict Christ in his state of humiliation. But Christ is no longer in that state. There is no heavenly reality for such an icon to point to. Nicolas Zernov explains:
[Icons] depicting passages from the Gospels stress the approach to the New Testament that is so powerfully expressed in Orthodox worship, namely that the life of the Incarnate Lord breaks through the barrier of time and takes place in an eternal present.[21]
Zernov then ticks off the events to which he refers, "Christ's nativity, baptism, transfiguration, death and resurrection." This is not unlike the Roman eucharistic doctrine of the resacrifice of Christ. The East has the re-birth, the re-baptism, the re-transfiguration, and the re-resurrection of Christ every time the appropriate icon is contemplated.
The Orthodox do not fix their eyes on a Jesus who has both authored and perfected the faith, who has sat down at the right hand of God the Father. They do not look by faith upon an exalted Christ. He is humiliated again and again. They fix their eyes on a Christ who again and again takes a mortal body, who again and again walks this earth. But when Christ walked this earth, he said, "It is to your advantage that I go away" that he might send the Holy Spirit (Jn 16:7). Now we no longer worship as Thomas did, by falling at the feet of a Christ who walks this earth. Now we worship in Spirit and in truth as Christ promised. This is the significance of Christ's Ascension and Session. We no longer need elaborate physical surroundings such as were in the temple at Jerusalem and are at any Eastern Orthodox church. The simple elements of bread and wine are sufficient to provide us with a window on Christ.
Orthodox icons deny the reality of the Resurrection and the Ascension. If the Incarnation implies a right and duty to make icons of Christ, the Resurrection and Ascension rescind that right and duty. At the Incarnation, God took on a body such as we know and understand. We can draw it. Who can draw the body Christ has now? To be sure, it is the same body. But it doesn't look the same. Paul speaks of the difference between the "earthy" and the "heavenly" body as the difference between a grain of wheat and the stalk that grows from it. He does so to emphasize that we do not know with what kind of body we will be resurrected. This much we know: "As we have borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the image of the heavenly" (1 Cor 15:35-49). It is the heavenly body that Christ has now.
Again, John says, "Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we shall be. We know that, when he appears, we shall be like him, because we shall see him just as he is" (1 Jn 3:2). Even if we know what Christ looked like once, we don't know what he looks like now. An icon is a denial of that truth, a re-humiliation of Christ.
Jack Sparks clarifies the idea that icons point to Christ. He doesn't resolve the above problems, but he does introduce a new one. "In the image we see the Prototype. An icon of Christ reveals to us the Original.... Icons become for us windows to heaven, revealing the glory of God.... Thus, we bow before the icon of Christ, seeing through it Him and His Father."[22] This is not a description of an icon but of Christ himself! Christ is the one in whom the apostles beheld the glory of God (Jn 1:14). Christ is the one who while visible on this earth was nevertheless still "in the bosom of the Father" (Jn 1:18) so that when men looked at him they saw heavenly realities. Christ is the one in whom men saw both him and his Father. "He who has seen me has seen the Father," Christ declared (Jn 14:8). The Orthodox have taken the true image of God and attributed his properties to an idol.
Daniel Clendenin relates the following anecdote in Eastern Orthodox Christianity: "The story is told of a Protestant who asked an Orthodox Priest what it was that his church believed. The priest responded that 'it would be better to ask not what we believe but how we worship.'"[23] Fair enough. I'll close with that. Benz describes how the Orthodox believer begins worship:
[He] first goes up to the iconostasis, the wall of paintings which separates the sanctuary from the nave. There he kisses the icons in a definite order: first the Christ icons, then the Mary icons, then the icons of the angels and saints. After this he goes up to ... the icon of the saint for the particular day.... Here, too, he pays his respects by a kiss, bow and crossing himself. Then having expressed his veneration for the icons, he steps back and rejoins the congregation.[24]
The difference between Christ on the one hand and Mary and the saints on the other is one of degree, not kind. The Orthodox may deny this as vigorously as they wish. But when we ask how they worship, they confess that by their actions they neither understand nor acknowledge the uniqueness of Christ. A picture is worth a thousand words. That action is worth more to them than all the words of Nicea and Chalcedon combined.
| William J. Baldwin was an ordained minister in the Reformed denomination of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church (OPC) in southern California. He has a commitment to the centrality of the Gospel of Jesus Christ and a desire to nourish by that Gospel, strengthened to good works. Bill Baldwin studied under Meredith G. Kline, a professor at Westminster Theological Seminary in California. |
NOTES
- Benjamin D. Williams and Harold B. Anstall, Orthodox Worship, (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, 1990), p. 7. [Return to text]
- For convenience, this paper will refer to the contemporary Eastern Orthodox theologians and adherents simply as "the Orthodox" with a capital "O". [Return to text]
- Thomas Hopko, Doctrine, Vol. 1 of The Orthodox Faith (New York: The Department of Religious Education, The Orthodox Church in America), p. 20. [Return to text]
- Conciliar Press, What Orthodox Christians Believe, (Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, 1988) p. 3. [Return to text]
- Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective, (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994) p. 93. The quotation within the quotation is from Jaroslav Pelikan. See Clendenin's book for documentation. [Return to text]
- John Meyendorff, Byzantine Theology, (London & Oxford: Mowbrays, 1974) p. 158, italics mine. [Return to text]
- Meyendorff, p. 159. [Return to text]
- Clendenin, p. 86. [Return to text]
- Clendenin, p. 86. [Return to text]
- Jack N. Sparks, No Graven Image (Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, n.d.) p. 6. [Return to text]
- Meyendorff, p. 158. [Return to text]
- Clendenin, p. 86. [Return to text]
- I realize (and almost despair) that this argument holds no weight with the Orthodox. They hate the whole "Western" system of logic. Logic attempts to resolve unresolvable mysteries, they say. I reply briefly in my (our?) defense: Logic doesn't remove mystery, logic clarifies mystery. How would we know the doctrine of the Trinity except by logical deduction from disparate texts? Does logic make the doctrine less mysterious? Hardly. Rather, logic heightens the mystery by clarifying it. Mystery occurs (or at least blossoms) when painstaking study leads to conclusions we cannot fully comprehend. [Return to text]
- Sparks, p. 7, italics mine. [Return to text]
- Meyendorff, p. 158. [Return to text]
- Meyendorff, p. 159, italics mine. [Return to text]
- Clendenin, p. 86. [Return to text]
- Stanley S. Harakas, The Orthodox Church: 455 Questions and Answers, (Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Co., 1987), pp. 157,8. [Return to text]
- Ernst Benz, The Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1963), pp. 12, 13. [Return to text]
- Do I detect in this a hint of Monophysitism? A picture of a fully human looking Christ would not properly point to his divinity. So the human features are divinified and the divine attributes are corporealized and the two natures become confused. [Return to text]
- Nicolas Zernov, Eastern Christendom: A Study of the Origin and Development of the Eastern Orthodox Church, (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1961), p. 280. [Return to text]
- Sparks, p. 8. [Return to text]
- Clendenin, p. 79. [Return to text]
- Benz, p. 2. [Return to text]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Benz, Ernst. The Eastern Orthodox Church: Its Thought and Life. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., 1963.
Clendenin, Daniel B. Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective. Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994.
Conciliar Press. What Orthodox Christians Believe. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press.
Harakas, Stanley S. The Orthodox Church: 455 Questions and Answers. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Co., 1987.
Hopko, Thomas. Doctrine. Vol. 1 of The Orthodox Faith. New York: The Department of Religious Education, The Orthodox Church in America, 1988.
Meyendorff, John. Byzantine Theology. London & Oxford: Mowbrays, 1974.
Sparks, Jack N. No Graven Image. Ben Lomond, CA: Conciliar Press, n.d.
Ware, Bishop Kallistos. The Orthodox Way. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1993.
Williams, Benjamin D., Harold B. Anstall. Orthodox Worship. Minneapolis: Light and Life Publishing Company, 1990.
Zernov, Nicolas. Eastern Christendom: A Study of the Origin and Development of the Eastern Orthodox Church. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1961.