Posted on 08/30/2003 6:54:36 PM PDT by Destro
How an Icon Brought a Calvinist to Orthodoxy
By Robert K. Arakaki
A Journey to Orthodoxy
Conciliar Press - It was my first week at seminary. Walking down the hallway of the main dorm, I saw an icon of Christ on a student’s door. I thought: "An icon in an evangelical seminary?! What’s going on here?" Even more amazing was the fact that Jim’s background was the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination. When I left Hawaii in 1990 to study at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, I went with the purpose of preparing to become an evangelical seminary professor in a liberal United Church of Christ seminary. The UCC is one of the most liberal denominations, and I wanted to help bring the denomination back to its biblical roots. The last thing I expected was that I would become Orthodox.
Called by an Icon
After my first semester, I flew back to Hawaii for the winter break. While there, I was invited to a Bible study at Ss. Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Church. At the Bible study I kept looking across the table to the icons that were for sale. My eyes kept going back to this one particular icon of Christ holding the Bible in His hand. For the next several days I could not get that icon out of my mind.
I went back and bought the icon. When I bought it, I wasn’t thinking of becoming Orthodox. I bought it because I thought it was cool, and as a little gesture of rebellion against the heavily Reformed stance at Gordon-Conwell. However, I also felt a spiritual power in the icon that made me more aware of Christ’s presence in my life.
In my third year at seminary, I wrote a paper entitled, "The Icon and Evangelical Spirituality." In the paper I explored how the visual beauty of icons could enrich evangelical spirituality, which is often quite intellectual and austere. As I did my research, I knew that it was important that I understand the icon from the Orthodox standpoint and not impose a Protestant bias on my subject. Although I remained a Protestant evangelical after I had finished the paper, I now began to comprehend the Orthodox sacramental understanding of reality.
After I graduated from seminary, I went to Berkeley and began doctoral studies in comparative religion. While there, I attended Ss. Kyril and Methodios Bulgarian Orthodox Church, a small parish made up mostly of American converts. It was there that I saw Orthodoxy in action. I was deeply touched by the sight of fathers carrying their babies in their arms to take Holy Communion and fathers holding their children up so they could kiss the icons.
The Biblical Basis for Icons
After several years in Berkeley, I found myself back in Hawaii. Although I was quite interested in Orthodoxy, I also had some major reservations. One was the question: Is there a biblical basis for icons? And doesn’t the Orthodox practice of venerating icons violate the Ten Commandments, which forbid the worship of graven images? The other issue was John Calvin’s opposition to icons. I considered myself to be a Calvinist, and I had a very high regard for Calvin as a theologian and a Bible scholar. I tackled these two problems in the typical fashion of a graduate student: I wrote research papers.
In my research I found that there is indeed a biblical basis for icons. In the Book of Exodus, we find God giving Moses the Ten Commandments, which contain the prohibition against graven images (Exodus 20:4). In that same book, we also find God instructing Moses on the construction of the Tabernacle, including placing the golden cherubim over the Ark of the Covenant (Exodus 25:17–22). Furthermore, we find God instructing Moses to make images of the cherubim on the outer curtains of the Tabernacle and on the inner curtain leading into the Holy of Holies (Exodus 26:1, 31–33).
I found similar biblical precedents for icons in Solomon’s Temple. Images of the cherubim were worked into the Holy of Holies, carved on the two doors leading into the Holy of Holies, as well as on the outer walls around Solomon’s Temple (2 Chronicles 3:14; 1 Kings 6:29, 30, 31–35). What we see here stands in sharp contrast to the stark austerity of many Protestant churches today. Where many Protestant churches have four bare walls, the Old Testament place of worship was full of lavish visual details.
Toward the end of the Book of Ezekiel is a long, elaborate description of the new Temple. Like the Tabernacle of Moses and Solomon’s Temple, the new Temple has wall carvings of cherubim (Ezekiel 41:15–26). More specifically, the carvings of the cherubim had either human faces or the faces of lions. The description of human faces on the temple walls bears a striking resemblance to the icons in Orthodox churches today.
Recent archaeological excavations uncovered a first-century Jewish synagogue with pictures of biblical scenes on its walls. This means that when Jesus and His disciples attended the synagogue on the Sabbath, they did not see four bare walls, but visual reminders of biblical truths.
I was also struck by the fact that the concept of the image of God is crucial for theology. It is important to the Creation account and critical in understanding human nature (Genesis 1:27). This concept is also critical for the understanding of salvation. God saves us by the restoration of His image within us (Romans 8:29; 1 Corinthians 15:49). These are just a few mentions of the image of God in the Bible. All this led me to the conclusion that there is indeed a biblical basis for icons!
What About Calvin?
But what about John Calvin? I had the greatest respect for Calvin, who is highly regarded among Protestants for his Bible commentaries and is one of the foundational theologians of the Protestant Reformation. I couldn’t lightly dismiss Calvin’s iconoclasm. I needed good reasons, biblical and theological, for rejecting Calvin’s opposition to icons.
My research yielded several surprises. One was the astonishing discovery that nowhere in his Institutes did Calvin deal with verses that describe the use of images in the Old Testament Tabernacle and the new Temple. This is a very significant omission.
Another significant weakness is Calvin’s understanding of church history. Calvin assumed that for the first five hundred years of Christianity, the churches were devoid of images, and that it was only with the decline of doctrinal purity that images began to appear in churches. However, Calvin ignored Eusebius’s History of the Church, written in the fourth century, which mentions colored portraits of Christ and the Apostles (7:18). This, despite the fact that Calvin knew of and even cited Eusebius in his Institutes!
Another weakness is the fact that Calvin nowhere countered the classic theological defense put forward by John of Damascus: The biblical injunction against images was based on the fact that God the Father cannot be depicted in visual form. However, because God the Son took on human nature in His Incarnation, it is possible to depict the Son in icons.
I was surprised to find that Calvin’s arguments were nowhere as strong as I had thought. Calvin did not take into account all the biblical evidence, he got his church history wrong, and he failed to respond to the classical theological defense. In other words, Calvin’s iconoclasm was flawed on biblical, theological, and historical grounds.
In my journey to Orthodoxy, there were other issues I needed to address, but the issue of the icon was the tip of the iceberg. I focused on the icon because I thought that it was the most vulnerable point of Orthodoxy. To my surprise, it was much stronger than I had ever anticipated. My questions about icons were like the Titanic hitting the iceberg. What looked like a tiny piece of ice was much bigger under the surface and quite capable of sinking the big ship. In time my Protestant theology fell apart and I became convinced that the Orthodox Church was right when it claimed to have the fullness of the Faith.
I was received into the Orthodox Church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy in 1999. On this Sunday the Orthodox Church celebrates the restoration of the icons and the defeat of the iconoclasts at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in AD 787. On this day, the faithful proclaim, "This is the faith that has established the universe." It certainly established the faith of this Calvinist, as the result of the powerful witness of one small icon!
Robert Arakaki is currently writing his dissertation on religion and politics in Southeast Asia at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He attends Saints Constantine and Helen Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii.
You are entirely mistaken on this. It is precisely conflicts over St. Augustine, especially the Protestants OVER reliance on him, that was the cause of the Reformation (and also the Jansenist heresy).
Again, the Catholic Church does not follow St. Augustine in our understanding of original sin, on predestination, on the necessity of faith for good works, etc. That is why Catholics and Protestants will never come to an understanding on justification. Until you understand this, you'll never get a good grasp on Catholicism, but continue incorectly thinking we believe in a parody of it coming to little more than Calvinism with a Pope, Sacraments, and Saints.
And here we get to the nub of the matter. When the Greeks re-encountered the Latins after the dark ages, they found them frequently hanging all theology upon St. Augustine. What they apparently still do not appreciate is that while the west has always revered St. Augustine as a great teacher, our second greatest doctor in fact after St. Thomas Aquinas, we do not follow him in all things.
St. Augustine, because of the myriad contrversies he involved himself in, was the first Latin Father to provide enough material for a systematic expostion of the Catholic Faith. He also stood up and put down the Pelagian heresy and systematized western thinking on grace and related topics. But, his excessive zeal lead to a need to correct his intemperance in protecting truth from error, something which began at once by his disciple St. Prosper of Aquitaine, who modified and molified many of his stances.
It seems to me the confusion comes in from our great reverance for St. Augustine in the west. Because we quote him so much as an authority on certain topics, the Greeks seem to assume he is to be taken as an authority for Catholicism on all things in his works without question. Not so. We are guided in all things only by the Sancta Romana Ecclesia - the Holy Roman Church - and NOT by St. Augustine.
"When anyone finds a doctrine clearly established in Augustine, he can absolutely hold and teach it, disregarding any bull of the Pope. ... Condemned and prohibited as rash, scandalous, evil-sounding, injurious, close to heresy, smacking of heresy, erroneous, schismatic, and heretical respectively." (Decree of the Holy Office, confirmed by Pope Alexander VIII, 7 December 1690)
I agree, His talk about how moved he was by seeing fathers take their children up for communion in an orthodox church seems a little phoney. Like he was shocked to see that anyone other than his group, might have religious devotion, or good family relations. I guess it's a good thing he was not invited to visit a mosque, or maybe he'd be changing his name about now.
Plus his "Biblical Studies" on the issue seems a little on the light side. It appears that he made up his mind to switch and is now trying to justify it.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that he was invited to the orthodox church by then girlfriend, now wife.
"Would you say that the Orthodox Church is closer to the Roman Catholic Church than to the Protestant churches?"
"....as one Russian theologian put it in the last century, it is probably true to say that the Roman and Reformed Protestant churches are much closer to each other -- historically, spiritually, theologically, culturally, psychologically -- than the Orthodox Church is to either."
I hope this helps to explain. I completely understand in advance that this is not how you view things and I apologize in advance for anything here that is offensive. My intent in posting is only by way of explanation.
"Orthodoxy lies way distant from the Enlightenment because its approach to the human mind is so radically different. We do not believe that the human mind is so pure that the exercise of unaided reason will inexorably lead to certain self-evident truths about God and humanity, or simply, just humanity. We cannot even tread part of the way with David Hume because it must remain a sorry little faith that only relies on evidence.
"We might be tempted perhaps to join with Protestants in our emphasis on revelation rather than reason or evidence; but no, our understanding of revelation and evidence is of quite a different character. If a Protestant Christian cannot accept revelation as God’s steamroller grinding into history and flattening everything before it, he must eventually side with the rationalists and have done with such debased notions of God‘s action. This is, indeed, what many Protestants have done as their Calvinism has collapsed under the weight of modernity. We cannot even side with what we may call the "heart-Christians," the Methodists, Pentecostals and Charismatics. They would make of Christianity a "warm glow" and little else, reducing it as surely as the Quakers did before into pious platitudes and social activism. Orthodoxy is bound to regard all western reform movements as well intentioned but essentially suspect until a more radical analysis of the problems of the western Christianity is undertaken.
"One good place to start is the relationship between the mind and the heart. It was the medieval scholastics led by the Dominicans who had first begun the grand enterprise of Reason, namely, to discern and confirm the great purposes of God using the faculties of the human mind. Although Protestants rebelled against this, many Reformed Churches eventually substituted their own scholasticism of the mind.
The Enlightenment was the inevitable anti-Christian resolution of this trend. Developing in a parallel fashion, both before and after the Reformation, the religion of the heart was propagated by the Rhineland mystics, the Spiritual Franciscans, the Anabaptists, the Quakers, the Methodists and the Pentecostals. However, these two tendencies in the West, the mind and the heart, remained quite distinct. Sometimes, open warfare broke out between them, but each, essentially had its own separate domain, method and spirituality and each was often defined against rather than for the other.
Enter now Orthodoxy, a quite different idea, or one should say, a different ascetical practice, now largely forgotten in the West. In the highest work of Man, prayer, the mind descends into the heart. There, the mind remains in tact, still active and functioning; but in the heart it listens to a Song wider and deeper than its own reasoning, the murmuring of the Holy Spirit who reveals the Living Word, Christ-God, whom it must worship before it understands.
However, having met Christ in the heart and having battled against all the demons that would seek to dethrone His just and gentle rule, the mind resurfaces to the active realm to understand the blessing it has received. This understanding combines all that is good and noble in the human and natural sciences, not in an "easy" humanism that would sell its Christianity for acceptance by the world, but in a new synthesis, the transfiguration of all that is human by the Word and Power of God.
In this synthesis of Holy Orthodoxy there are no battles between Faith and Reason, between Heart and Mind, between Religion and Science, between the individual and the community. All are one in God and this unity extends from humanity to the whole Cosmos."
Exactly. Thank you for this.
"Concerning Roman Catholicism, not long after its falling away from us because of their adoption of Augustine's Filioque heresy, Thomas Aquinas, who considered himself to be — and indeed thoroughly was — Augustinian, eventually converted the whole of the Latin Church over to his ritualistic theology, a theology which now is the foundation and cornerstone upon which all Roman Catholicism stands. It was Augustine's view of a totally depraved and guilty mankind that necessitated the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
Thomas Aquinas taught Augustine's presumptuous doctrine that merely by the priest properly performing the right ritual can original sin, which damns one, be removed automatically. In reaction and opposition to this, a second solution was formed for original sin. An Augustinian monk by the name of Martin Luther, protesting against the hypocritical aridity of the former view (and its automatic priestly absolvements upon anyone who paid for monetary indulgences from the clergy), baptized the populace into his mystically saving experience."
"In the reformations of the sixteenth century, both Protestant and Roman Catholic reformers appealed to different aspects of his teachings to support their claims. Roman Catholics cited his teachings on ecclesiology and sacramental theology. Protestants invoke his teachings on the Christian's dependence on the grace of God for justification. Martin Luther quotes him more than one hundred times in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans alone. Augustine's ideas have provided arguments for political arrangements. His approval of the Donatists' suppression influenced theories of just war, and his social theory, described in City of God, urges the maintenance of a hierarchical ordering in society. [19. 13-15]
In contrast to the theology of the Orthodox Fathers of the East and the West, the Frankish theological tradition makes its appearance in history reading and knowing in full only Augustine. As the Franks became acquainted with other Latin-speaking or Greek-speaking Fathers, they subordinated them all to the authority of Augustinian categories. Even the dogmas promulgated at Ecumenical Synods were replaced by Augustine's understanding of these dogmas.
It is largely because of the development of these Augustinian heresies, that there has arisen the general confusion of secularism, which, in a sense, is just a more firm attachment to the justification initially provided by original sin, that sin is natural to us and therefore requires not remedy but pardon (i.e. toleration), as well as an attachment to the initial faithless despair behind original sin that there is no true redemption within this mortal existence — it being inherently sinful — but rather is something you just have to live with. Capping off this general spirit of Western heresy is Augustine's heretical validation of the baptism of heretics, a view that has contributed greatly to the present Ecumenical movement and its divergent heresies that he largely created."
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