The icon of the Holy Cross: 15 glances

1.

The icon portrays revelation: the crucifixion of the human Jesus as the appearance of the eternal God. The divine being is eternally cruciform, even as it is eternally radiant.

2.

The crucifixion of Christ is the secret of eternity, the true and only glory that shines forever from the abyss of nothingness.

3.

At the centre of Christian devotion is not a revealed doctrine, a religious ideal, or even a right way of life, but an embodied human person. Christianity began not with beliefs about Jesus, but with people who had known Jesus. They were affected by Jesus as we are affected by a powerful friendship, not as we are affected by reading a powerful book or encountering a new idea. "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled…" (1 John 1:1). The heartbeat of Christian faith is embodied encounter.

4.

The crucifixion is depicted here as realistically as is possible within the bounds of iconographic form. The human Jesus stretches out his arms across a rough-hewn wooden beam. His body is bent, his feet twisted, his hands pierced, his head turned down in sorrow.

5. 

Around this earthly historical cross shines an eternal heavenly cross. This budded cross is clean and perfect and unbloodied; its form is untouched by the harsh lines and distorted perspectives of the small internal cross. Its form is light itself, the light of eternity. Everything contingent, historical, earthly is suspended amid this timeless light, absorbed into the serene balance of perfect form. The budded cross is the true essential form, the Platonic reality, that projects the earthly crucifixion like a black shadow on to the wall of the cave of time.

6. 

The eternal cross is a theodicy. Death and hell are safely circumscribed within its shining frame.

7.

At the top of the icon, the glorious divine face of Christ peers through the curtains, high above the earthly historical cross of Jesus. Unlike the face of the crucified one, this Christ-face looks straight ahead, reminding us that its own impassive glory is the ultimate truth of the crucifixion. On either side, the saints gather reassuringly, springing like flowers from the barren wood of the cross. The saints model for us our own proper response to the spectacle of the crucified one. We are to respond with adoring humility and reverent submission. The presence of the saints makes the cross safe, familiar, and accessible. There is, the icon assures us, a proper human posture that corresponds to the event of the cross. The cross stands not merely over and against us but alongside us, in uninterrupted continuity with our religious piety.

8. 

Is not history – the history of Jesus – completely fixed and immobilised in this representation? Is it not suspended in eternity like a beautiful figure inside a glass ball?

9. 

Are we not left with the impression that the icon is wholly right in what it shows, yet somehow also wholly wrong? Its sole aim is to set forth Christ as the truth of eternity, the truth that shines forever, the truth of God. But by the very act of showing this, the icon allows the impassive majesty of eternal truth to eclipse the brute fact of the cross of history. 

10.

When I was a little boy, I lived in a vast sprawling mansion beside the sea on a tropical island in North Queensland. When I was grown up, I went back one day to the island and saw my childhood home: a little dilapidated fibro beach shack with a tin roof and cracked concrete floors, scarcely bigger than a backyard shed. All my life, the real earthly house had been eclipsed by the fantasy house which my memory had built for me as, year after year, I silently venerated my childhood. The fantasy house was beautiful: but it was fantasy.

11.

As though we cannot venerate Christ without immediately turning him into an idol, an eternal idea instead of an embodied person. As though religious piety produces an immediate and inevitable transformation of the cross into a smooth, perfectly balanced object, something easily grasped and held in the hand, an instrument not of judgment but of consolation.

12. 

Theological truth and spiritual fantasy are thus bound together in the icon, as closely related as wheat and tares or light and day. 

13.

You can see why Karl Barth so loved Grünewald's great and terrible painting of the crucifixion. In Grünewald, one finds a complete repudiation of Christian Platonism: a theology of the cross stripped bare of all theology of glory. Yet Grünewald's Protestant aesthetic has its own perils. Without something like a Platonic anchoring, are we not right on the brink of a steep descent into theological nihilism? In beholding the earthly historical cross devoid of all religious mediation, do we not find ourselves at the very doorstep of hell?

14. 

Or is that, perhaps, where we are meant to find ourselves when we behold the cross?

15. 

The truth of the icon – a truth that Grünewald all but obliterates – is that there is, for us, no means of access to Christ accept through religious veneration. Our only contact with Christ is through worship in the company of the living tradition of the saints – even if our worship immediately becomes indistinguishable from idolatry. We cannot have Christ without religion: that is the truth that the icon teaches. But – this is what the icon forgets – we can speak of "true religion" only as we speak of a "justified sinner" (Karl Barth).

The Virgin of Vladimir: seven glances

1. 

Behold the handmaid of the Lord! 

2. 

There are paintings you can look at for a time, until at last you have finished with them. The Virgin of Vladimir is not that kind of picture. You could look at it all your life, and you'd still only be getting started – or rather, you'd be getting even further away from sounding out its mystery. To look at an icon is to "fast with your eyes" (St Dorotheus). 

3.

Though the face of the Virgin at first absorbs all our attention, the small insistent face of the child is, in fact, older and wiser and more – how else to put it? – more eternal. This small face constitutes the real centre of the icon and the real source of its radiance. Reflecting his light, the Virgin shimmers. Her infinitely sad, infinitely strong face is pulled towards the commanding gravity of this centre.

Yet observe the child's face, turned upwards and pressed so eagerly against the face of the mother. Look at his expression. Is it not something strangely close to – worship? Indeed, if I met someone who did not know what it meant to worship, I could hardly do better than to point to this picture, to this child's face, and to say: "It looks like that."

On the one hand, there is a real religious danger here: the danger of allowing Christ's mother to become an independent centre of religious devotion. But on the other hand, there is something profoundly true and correct in the representation of this child's "worship" of his mother. For no other word comes close to evoking the extent of Christ's devotion to humanity. To speak of Christ's "love" is too hackneyed and half-hearted. When we talk of love, we tend to think of delirious teenagers locked in the obsessiveness of romance, or of a man seducing a woman into his bed, or maybe of an old married couple, contented and at peace. But we would perhaps be closer to the truth if we imagined Christ's devotion to humanity as analogous to the piercing clarity and conviction with which the fundamentalist offers his life to god before going out into the busy street and detonating himself.

I do not mean that Christ is devoted to God in this way, but to us. His single-minded preoccupation with humanity is a kind of madness, a lucid intoxication. To unworthy humanity he ascribes all imaginable worth. As though he valued us – literally, worshipped us – above all other things, even his own life, even the life of God. 

4.

The disturbing political and ideological role of the Virgin of Vladimir in Russian history is completely bound up with what is so pure and so instructive in it: namely, its veneration of the bond between this Child and his Mother. Look at the mother's invincibly tender clasping of her son, and you will understand the Russian people's invincible conviction of an absolute and unbreakable bond to the sacred motherland. For the Vladimir icon is a representation not only of Christ and the Theotokos but also of a transcendent bond between the Russian people and their Mother Russia. 

It is this that makes it possible to comprehend the otherwise quite bewildering way that "Russia" routinely appears in Orthodox theological writing not only as a legitimate contextual issue but as a proper doctrinal topic in its own right. The iconographer was, of course, reflecting this preexisting habit of mind, this tendency to elevate Russian belonging to a transcendent status; but it must still be said that the Vladimir icon – the most venerated image in all of Russia – has burned that conviction on to the Russian imagination for nearly a thousand years. You need only look at the icon to understand why nationalistic sentiment is so closely bound up with the hidden core of Russian religious life; why the history of modern Russian thought is essentially the story of the Slavophiles; and why, for a non-Slavic person, a complete and thoroughgoing conversion to the Russian Orthodox Church proves all but impossible.

5.

The theological intuition underlying the whole tradition of Russian iconography is that there are, really and essentially, only two human faces: the face of Christ, and the face of his Mother. All other human persons have their own peculiar distinctiveness, their own particular faces, to the extent that they participate in these forms. For the Orthodox, it is not Adam and Eve who are the prototypes of humanity, but the New Adam and the New Eve – so that the fundamental human relationship is not that of man and woman (Karl Barth) or husband and wife (John Paul II), but of mother and child. The single form of Virgin and Child is the prototype of every human form: "The divine image in humankind is disclosed and realised … as the image of two: of Christ and of his Mother" (Sergius Bulgakov). 

6.

The truth of this came home to me as I was writing these quiet reflections the other night. My wife and children were away for the weekend, so I had gone out alone to a jazz bar, to hear some music and try a bit of writing. It was approaching midnight, and I was drinking my beer and scratching away with my fountain pen in a crumpled notebook, with a postcard-sized copy of the Vladimir icon propped up on the table in front of me. A pretty girl came over and wanted to know what I was writing. "Are you a music reviewer," she asked. But I had to admit that I was writing about a twelfth-century religious painting. She asked about the picture, and listened to my explanation with keen interest. Then she leaned close to me – quite close – and began to seduce me. I was flattered, but also saddened as I looked into the sad eyes of the Virgin of Vladimir. As though the human body could become an instrument of promiscuity – something freely offered to a stranger in a bar – only by a careless defacement of Her face, Her holy form. "Her face is beautiful," said the girl in the bar as she peered through the haze at the icon on the table, casually brushing my arm. "Like a sculpture." 

When she said that, I loved her and saw that her own face, too, was lovely as a work of art. And so I blessed her with my eyes and walked out in the rain and went home, alone, thinking of how the lines of the girl's face had seemed – just for a second, beneath the smoke and shadows and dim lights – like a lovely, sad quotation of the holy face of the Virgin, radiant though fallen.

7.

"There is only one face in the whole world that is absolutely beautiful: the face of Christ" (Dostoevsky).

Will hell be empty? Rob Bell's Love Wins

Here's a piece I wrote for this week's edition of the Christian newspaper, Eternity:

Love Wins is a book about God. It raises the question: what kind of God do Christians believe in? That's an important question in a world where so many of us – both within the church and without – have been hurt by bad theology. Perhaps we were taught that God has two different personalities: God can switch back and forth between vengeance and mercy, so that we never quite know what to expect. Or perhaps we were taught to think of God as a watchful policeman, always ready to hand out infringement notices whenever we step out of line. Or maybe we grew up feeling that God is more ‘pure’ than ordinary human experience, so that parts of our lives – especially those non-spiritual, bodily parts – are disgusting and offensive to God.

There’s nothing trivial about bad theology. A diseased picture of God will inevitably produce symptoms in our thoughts and feelings, in the way we live and relate to each other, in our whole way of looking at the world. Family life, sexual life, friendship, work, leisure, creativity: all these parts of our experience are deeply shaped by the way we think about God. I often meet people who are still nursing wounds from the theology they imbibed as young children, people who are recovering from the worship of a bad god.

Rob Bell is writing for people like that. And his point is simple: Jesus shows us what God is like; Jesus shows us the triumph of God’s love for the whole human race. 

Thus Bell raises the question whether human rejection of God might finally be overcome by God’s love; whether hell might turn out to be empty; whether all, in the end, will be saved. The easy assumption that salvation is only for ‘us’, he thinks, is an evasion of the universal significance of the gospel. If Christ’s resurrection doesn’t somehow affect every single human being, then we haven’t really grasped the meaning of resurrection. You might compare it to a legal system: it applies either to everybody or to nobody – it’s not the sort of thing that applies to just some members of a society. In a similar way, Christ’s resurrection is significant either for everyone, or for no one. As Bell puts it, Jesus is ‘as narrow as himself and as wide as the universe’. He is the exclusive way to salvation, yet he includes all humanity within himself.

Some critics have questioned Bell’s orthodoxy – especially his emphasis on the universality of salvation. But the most striking thing about his approach is its deep indebtedness to Eastern Orthodox tradition. The Orthodox churches have always emphasised the universality of Christ’s work – not only his death and resurrection, but also his descent into hell. The Orthodox liturgy proclaims that hell was emptied by Christ: ‘Hell’s gatekeepers trembled before you; you raised with you the dead from every age.’ In another part of the liturgy, Orthodox Christians sing: ‘Rising from the tomb, you broke the bonds of Hades and destroyed the sentence of death, O Lord, delivering all from the snares of the enemy.’ 

The leading contemporary Russian theologian, Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev, explores all this in his recent book, Christ the Conqueror of Hell (2009). He shows that, in Orthodox tradition, Christ’s descent into hell has a universal significance. Christ breaks the power of hell and releases all its captives: ‘Christ’s saving of the dead and the exodus from Hades were not one-time events that occurred in the past without significance for the present. These are events that transcend time, whose fruits were reaped not only by those who were imprisoned in hell before Christ’s descent but also by future generations.’ 

Rob Bell seems to be referring to this Orthodox tradition when he argues that ‘at the centre of the Christian tradition since the first church have been a number who insist that history is not tragic, hell is not forever, and love, in the end, wins.’ Once you see Christ’s death, descent and resurrection from an Orthodox perspective – as something universal, even cosmic in scope; as something that reaches every human being without exception – then the real question becomes: How could anyone ultimately escape the reach of God’s love? 

As Archbishop Hilarion argues, the universal scope of Christ’s work doesn’t necessarily mean that all will be saved. But it means that even hell itself is no longer a place of separation from God. Christ has penetrated into the depths of hell, flooding its darkness with the light of love. Hell has become a site of divine activity, a venue of divine love. ‘If I make my bed in Hades, you are there’ (Psalm 139:8). Thus the torment of hell can only be understood as the torment of love. Hell’s power is abolished – but someone might still reject God to such an extent that even love becomes a torment, an unbearable ‘scourge’.

This Orthodox tradition is conveniently ignored by those critics who accuse Rob Bell of heresy. As though Eastern Orthodoxy is not sufficiently ‘orthodox’! As though the Christian creed confesses anything positive about hell – except that Christ ‘descended’ there before rising again!

From the perspective of Christian tradition, I don’t think there are any grounds for questioning the orthodoxy of Love Wins. As far as I can tell, Rob Bell really just presents the gospel: he tells of God’s victorious love, a love revealed in Jesus Christ, a love that is deeper than vengeance and stronger than death. 

The hostile reaction to Bell among North American evangelicals reminds me of the way some people responded to the great Reformed theologian, Karl Barth. Barth placed so much emphasis on God’s grace that his critics called him a universalist. But in Barth's view, both universalism and its denial are errors. The important thing is to uphold the absolute freedom of grace: if grace is free, then we should neither deny nor affirm universal salvation. It’s not our decision to make – ‘salvation belongs to the Lord!’ (Psalm 3:8). Yet Barth thought the ferocious condemnation of universalism exposed something pathological in the Christian mindset. When he was accused of promoting universalism, he once replied: ‘Strange Christianity, whose most pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free …, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might prove to be empty!’

If that is our greatest anxiety – that God might turn out to be too gracious – then perhaps we ought to heed Rob Bell’s celebration of triumphant love, universal love, a love ‘as wide as the sky and as small as the cracks in your heart that no one else knows about.’

Or to quote one of the great theologians of the Orthodox tradition, St Isaac the Syrian: ‘Like a handful of dust thrown into the sea are the sins of all humankind compared with the mercy and providence of God.’ 

If that’s true, then we can be sure of one thing: in the end, love wins.

John Zizioulas and George Hunsinger

This new work by Zizioulas will definitely be something to look out for later in the year. You can see the table of contents here.

And in other happy news, it looks as though George Hunsinger's long-awaited book on the eucharist should also be out before too long.

Encounters with tradition (6): from Restoration to Orthodoxy

A guest-post by Daniel Greeson

I grew up in a small sect (non-institutional churches of Christ) within the Stone-Campbell Movement, known otherwise as the “Restoration Movement.” My grandfather and father are both ministers within this movement and at the age of 16 or so I began the process of preparing for a life of preaching. I was that kid who sat in high school with a commentary on Isaiah and an open Bible, fiercely scribbling notes for my next sermon. I was shown a lot of grace those first few years at my home congregation and other congregations throughout the state of Arkansas.

It was during these formational years that I ran across C. S. Lewis and quickly devoured The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity. This was the first time I had seriously engaged with someone from outside of my tradition, and I came away having learned a lot and questioning a lot. In the group I grew up in, we were the only ones who had the Truth, and all other denominations were wrong about pretty much everything. It was also at this time that a girlfriend’s father introduced me somewhat hesitantly (I now know why!) to philosophy.

I was soon off to Florida College where I spent two years in the Biblical Studies program. Here, I was first faced with the problem of modern biblical criticism. I did not feel that biblical criticism was ever critiqued adequately at the college. Basically, biblical criticism was “liberal,” and therefore wrong. Similarly, my theology classes exhibited a poor understanding of the texts and a superficial engagement with other interpretive traditions. At this time, I began researching the history of the Restoration Movement, and I found a lot of disconcerting things (e.g. what the founders of the Restoration Movement actually believed and did!).

Outside class, I was exposing myself to folks like Yancey, Bonhoeffer, Brueggemann, Barth, and other evangelical voices. I have posted on a former blog of mine that Yancey saved my soul. It was Yancey who introduced me to Bonhoeffer, Barth, and other writers. And it was really St Paul and Yancey who taught me about grace. I also began reading about the “emerging church,” and I found a resonance with postmodern sensibilities. What was helpful was not Brian McLaren et al., but what they were reading. I began the summer after my sophomore year reading N. T. Wright, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Hays, John Howard Yoder, Lee Camp, Miroslav Volf, Lesslie Newbigin, Stanley Grenz, Marva Dawn, and others.

I transferred for my junior year to Western Kentucky University, majoring in Religious Studies and Philosophy. It was at Western Kentucky that I began making my break with the tradition of my youth. I soon ended up in a progressive evangelical church. It was here that I learned very quickly that I was not really as “progressive” or “evangelical” as I thought, and I became disillusioned with the emerging church. I discovered that it felt and reasoned a lot like liberal Protestantism.

So I began the process of trying to discern which tradition made the most sense to me, and which tradition I would feel comfortable ministering in (not that ministering is ever comfortable!). This seems a bit pragmatic now, and I freely admit that it was. I visited Disciples of Christ, Methodist, and Episcopal churches. But I felt at odds with what I found at each church, especially with a poor view of Scripture and of the basic orthodox Christian doctrines.

I was basically a sacramental and liturgically minded Anabaptist wannabe (kind of Hauerwasian, eh?). But when a friend said that he was prepared to stay evangelical even if it meant reforming almost every church he pastored, I knew that I needed to join a historical Christian tradition. I immediately turned to Orthodoxy (having already read Fr. Schmemann’s For the Life of the World), and began devouring books about Orthodoxy (Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, Vladimir Lossky, Fr. Georges Florovsky, Daniel Clendenin, Fr. Thomas Hopko, Frederica Matthewes-Green). I also attended my first Divine Liturgy, and after that experience – and talking with converts from Lutheranism and Anglicanism – I was on my way into a serious investigation of Orthodoxy. I have not been to another service besides an Orthodox Liturgy since.

Why Orthodoxy? I became Orthodox because I finally found a tongue in which I could converse and pray. It was a tradition that made sense of history, theology, ethics, and a sacramental life. In Orthodoxy I found all the positive points of my childhood faith (prayer, ethics, holiness, doctrinal focus) melded with the concerns of my newly found adulthood (philosophical and theological sophistication, beauty, and community). It was in an Orthodox church that I was able, for the first time, to worship God “in spirit and in truth.”

I did not become Orthodox to escape Western problems or to run into a cultural ghetto (God forbid!). I became Orthodox because I felt that I had encountered the early Christian Church. I became Orthodox because I had to repent to enter the kingdom of heaven. I became Orthodox because I found a spiritual father in my priest. I became Orthodox because I knew that through the grace of God one could actually become a saint. I became Orthodox because I became – in a real sense – contemporaneous with the Fathers of the Church.

I am grateful for all the Christian traditions that have shaped me. But I’m joyful about my entrance into the Orthodox Church, and I fervently pray for the salvation and unity of all.

“For the peace of the whole world, for the stability of the holy churches of God, and for the unity of all, let us pray to the Lord.” —The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom

Holy Theotokos

Kevin Edgecomb posts a Mariological hymn from the Orthodox church: Akathist Hymn to the Most Holy Theotokos. It’s an extraordinary hymn which demonstrates – as Kevin notes – that “Mariology is really only Christology when properly understood.”

Michael Pomazansky: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology

Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology: A Concise Exposition, 3rd edition (Platina: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2005), 434 pp. (with thanks to the publishers for a review copy).

Michael Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology (available now in a third edition with extensive new footnotes) has long been a significant textbook of conservative Orthodox theology. Pomazansky was born in western Russia in 1888, and he studied at the pre-revolutionary Kiev Theological Academy from 1908 to 1912. He served as a theologian and missionary in Russia and then, after the revolution, as a priest and editor in Poland and Germany. In 1949 he moved to the Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York, where he remained until his death in 1988 (just days before his 100th birthday!).

For Western Christians, encounters with Orthodoxy can be a bewildering experience. As Georges Florovsky once remarked, while Catholics and Protestants speak a similar language, there is fundamentally no “common universe of discourse” between East and West. This does not mean that understanding is impossible – but it explains the great difficulties involved in such dialogue, and it helps to account for the comparatively slow progress of ecumenical understanding between East and West.

In Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Pomazansky himself is more or less closed to Western influences: he refers to Catholic and Protestant ideas only where a polemical point is in order; and much of the book is concerned with implicit or explicit controversy with more liberal Orthodox theologians like Vladimir Soloviev and Sergei Bulgakov.

In spite of this, however, Pomazansky’s work provides valuable insight into the distinctiveness of Orthodox dogma in contrast to Western patterns of thought. Indeed, Pomazansky is at his best when he is engaged in critique of Catholic dogma (see for instance pp. 89-93 on the Filioque), or when he explains that an apparent similarity between Eastern and Western views is in fact masking a much deeper divergence.

His criticisms of “legal” patterns of thought in Western doctrine are especially incisive (and, to my mind, essentially correct). He rightly critiques Western doctrines which define redemption as “satisfaction of wrath,” for instance (pp. 213-15); and in an excellent chapter on sin, he criticises the Western tendency towards a “very legalistic, formal” doctrine of original sin and inherited guilt (pp. 162-69). Again, in a very fine discussion of Mariology (pp. 189-97), he notes that the Catholic dogmas of the immaculate conception and the assumption are logically derived from a misleadingly forensic doctrine of original sin.

In contrast to more progressive tendencies in modern Orthodox thought, Pomazansky’s is a highly conservative theology. Indeed, his entire conception of the theological task is one of conservation: dogmatics consists in “the confirmation in the consciousness of the faithful of the truths of the faith which have been confessed by the Church from the beginning” (p. 46), so that it is out of place to reveal “new aspects” or “new understanding[s]” of dogma (p. 47). Indeed, dogma itself cannot “develop,” since there is simply “nothing to add to the teaching of faith handed down” (p. 355). From a Protestant perspective, of course, one could easily connect such themes to a certain conception of divine eternity and immutability: “For God there is neither past nor future; there is only the present” (p. 67); “God is perfection, and every change … is unthinkable” (p. 72).

Nevertheless, even such conservative emphases give expression to the depth and beauty of theological reflection, for, in Pomazansky’s view, “theologizing is not an abstract mental exercise, … but a dwelling of one’s thought in Divine truths, a directing of the mind and heart towards God” (p. 48). And in its best moments, Pomazansky’s work is indeed characterised by a spirit of reverence and adoration – something one does not always encounter in a typical wissenschaftlich work of Protestant dogmatics! To believe in God, Pomazansky writes, means “not only to acknowledge God with the mind, but also to strive towards Him with the heart…. Christian faith is a mystical revelation in the human soul. It is broader, more powerful, closer to reality than thought” (p. 53).

Admittedly, one can find more exciting and more creative Orthodox thinkers – Lossky, Schmemann and Meyendorff, for instance; or, more recently, John Zizioulas and David Bentley Hart. But for a sober, serene and straightforward exposition of Byzantine dogma, Pomazansky’s Orthodox Dogmatic Theology remains valuable and instructive.

David Bentley Hart's beautiful theology

Gaunilo’s Island and Gower Street are currently blogging their way through David Bentley Hart’s masterpiece, The Beauty of the Infinite (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003).

I was talking with a friend today about Hart’s The Beauty of the Infinite, and I tried to persuade him that it’s one of the best books ever written by an American theologian. It really is an extraordinary book – profound, searching, beautiful, and often very humorous. In good Eastern Orthodox fashion, Hart is infinitely composed, beautifully serene – there is no Protestant anxiety, none of the darkness of Good Friday, but only the peaceful and radiant glory of the triune God.

In contrast to such light and serenity, Hart likes to shake his head at what he calls the “nihilistic” tendencies of Lutheran theology – e.g. “the ghastly Wagnerian opulence of Jüngel’s cult of Verwesung [decay] and the dark, late romantic coloratura of his unwholesome theological Liebestod [love-death]” (p. 373). If ever a book could persuade you to convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, this would be the one!

Anyway, here’s one of my favourite quotes from the book:

“God is, so to speak, infinite discourse, full of the perfect utterance of his Word and the limitless variety of the Spirit’s ‘reply.’ Here, in the most elementary terms, is Christian metaphysics: God speaks God, and creation occurs within that speaking, as a rhetorical embellishment, a needless ornament” (p. 291).

Essential ikons for theologians

Chris Tessone has a great interest in iconography, and I asked him to come up with a list of essential ikons. So here Chris offers his list of the top 10 (primarily Eastern Orthodox) ikons. For a more detailed version of this list, see the full post at Even the Devils Believe.

1. Christ Pantokrator—this stern Christ is a major archetypal ikon. There are many famous Christs Pantokrator, but this small one held by the monks of Mt Athos is one of my favourites.

2. A fascinating contemporary ikon is that of St. John Will-I-Am Coltrane from the website of St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church in San Francisco.

3. I myself am not fond of highly ornamented ikons. However, among such representations, the Theotokos Nikopoios is one of the most ornamented, with gold and precious stones.

4. The Theotokos Hodegetria, also located on Athos, is a striking representation of the Virgin and the child Jesus.

5. The Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow is a treasure trove of incredible ikons and should not be missed. One of the most famous is the 12th-century Spas Nerukotvornyj, or "Salvation Made Without Hands," originally from the Cathedral of the Assumption inside the Moscow Kremlin.

6. Iconography is not a dead art, so I would be remiss if I didn't offer one or two contemporary ikons in the traditional style: one of my favourite ikons of the Theotokos is this one by Italian iconographer Maria Mirea.

7. This St. Nikolas ikon is an example of contemporary Slovak iconography—it is from the Byzantine Catholic Church of Bratislava.

8. Now for a trio of great Russian ikons. First, Christ the Redeemer of Andrei Rublev: tt is a breathtaking image, which immediately comes to mind when I think of the word "ikon."

9. The Bogomater Vladimirskaja (Mother of God of Vladimir) is certainly one of the greatest ikons held in Russia, and many Bogomater ikons are based on it.

10. Also held in Moscow's Tretiakov Gallery, the Trinity ikon of Andrei Rublev, considered by many to be the greatest Russian ikon in history, or even the greatest work of art in history. I had the great fortune of seeing it up close and personal in the Tretiakov—it is an experience one does not forget.

Eastern Orthodoxy and theological study

“Western believers might learn from [Eastern] Orthodoxy that the ultimate context of academic study must be the Christian community at worship. Without the liturgical context of worship, theology becomes ‘scholastic’ in the worst sense of the word, rather than a guide to worshiping God in spirit and in truth.”

—Daniel B. Clendenin, Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1994), p. 149.

The lively God of Robert W. Jenson

Back in October a reader informed me of a new article about Robert W. Jenson in First Things. Since I don’t subscribe to the journal, I’ve had to wait a month for the article to become freely accessible.

It’s an excellent article: David Bentley Hart, “The Lively God of Robert Jenson” First Things 156 (October 2005), 28-34.

Hart rightly chastens American theologians for so far failing to take seriously enough their greatest and most creative theological thinker, and for failing to take pride “in the dignity his work lends to American theology.” Hart describes Jenson as a thinker “more theoretically audacious than almost all of his contemporaries.” He focuses on the distinctiveness of Jenson’s trinitarian theology, and describes it as a massive attempt “to grasp the uniqueness of Christ.”

Significantly, Hart (an Eastern Orthodox theologian) disagrees almost entirely with Jenson’s theological moves; but he nevertheless concludes: “I find it impossible to have done with Jenson’s work, or to cease returning to it as a challenge to refine and clarify my own understanding of the gospel.”