How an Icon Brought a Calvinist to Orthodoxy: 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.

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.

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!

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.

What did Jesus look like? Amazingly, there is no description of Him in the New Testament or in any contemporary source. Yet, in hundreds of icons, paintings, mosaics, drawings and coins, there is a common quality that enables us to identify Jesus in works of art. Shroud scholar and historian Ian Wilson theorizes that a common set of facial characteristics became the norm following the discovery of the Edessa Cloth concealed in the city's walls in 544 CE.

Apparent Shroud-inspired images of Christ are noticeable on coins struck in 692 CE during the reign of the Byzantine emperor Justinian II. The distinctive front-facing appearance of Jesus on the Shroud is also found on numerous icons, mosaics and frescos from the sixth century on. The most startling example is the Christ Pantocrator icon at Saint Catherine's Monastery, reliably dated to 550 CE.

the 1930's, French Shroud scholar Paul Vignon described a series of common characteristics visible in many early artistic depictions of Jesus. The Vignon marking, as they are known, all appear on the Shroud suggesting that it is the source of later pictures of Jesus.

A square U-shape between the eyebrows.
A downward pointing triangle or V-shape just below the U-shape, on the bridge of the nose.
Two wisps of hair going downward and then to the right.
A raised right eyebrow.
Large, seemingly "owlish" eyes. This may be the result of coins placed over the eyes.
An accent on the left cheek and an accent on the right cheek that is somewhat lower.
A forked beard. Dr. Whanger (see below) has suggested that this may the result of a chin band tied around the head to keep the mouth closed.
An enlarged left nostril.
An accent line below the nose and a dark line just below the lower lip.
A gap in the beard below the lower lip.
Hair on one side of the head that is shorter than on the other side.

Christ Pantocrator, c. 1200 from dome of Church at Cefalu, Sicily.

Computerized overlay of the Shroud of Turin facial image and the Christ Pantocrator icon from St. Catherine's Monastery (550 CE). Images were scaled to the same size and shifted horizontally and vertically for alignment. No changes were made in the vertical to horizontal ratios.

This image is a computerized density average of the negative of the face and the Pantocrator icon above. The high degree of symmetry is best seen by changing the relative averaging weights of each picture which you can do with a Java Applet that runs in your web browser.
See For Yourself at this link.

We might be tempted perhaps to join with Protestants in our emphasis on revelation rather than reason or evidence

This is an utter misreading and misunderstanding of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics and Catholicism. Reason and evidence are put at the service of revelation, to unfold it for the human mind so that the intellect might grasp it. Reason is not a parallel path to divine knowledge seperate from revelation. St. Thomas Aquinas did not begin to write until he had first memorized the Sacred Scriptures.

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.

This is a significant misreading of the purposes of the Scholastics. Their treatises were at the disposal of charity - the love of God. It is the virtue of charity and the eternal happiness of man that is caused by charity that are at the center of the Summa Theologica, NOT reason or even faith. If there is one simple message to take away from Scholasticism, it is St. Augustine's dictum: "None can love what he does not know." The will to love God presupposes the ability of the intellect to accept the faith, so that the heart has an object for its affection.

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.

Far from being forgotten, this is a good description of the meditative prayer of the Most Holy Rosary.

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.

This is PRECISELY the purpose of Scholasticism and of St. Thomas' Summa. The Summa pre-supposes deification.

It is written: "In Thy light we shall see light" (Ps. 35:10).
I answer that, Everything which is raised up to what exceeds its nature, must be prepared by some disposition above its nature; as, for example, if air is to receive the form of fire, it must be prepared by some disposition for such a form. But when any created intellect sees the essence of God, the essence of God itself becomes the intelligible form of the intellect. Hence it is necessary that some supernatural disposition should be added to the intellect in order that it may be raised up to such a great and sublime height. Now since the natural power of the created intellect does not avail to enable it to see the essence of God, as was shown in the preceding article, it is necessary that the power of understanding should be added by divine grace. Now this increase of the intellectual powers is called the illumination of the intellect, as we also call the intelligible object itself by the name of light of illumination. And this is the light spoken of in the Apocalypse (Apoc. 21:23): "The glory of God hath enlightened it"--viz. the society of the blessed who see God. By this light the blessed are made "deiform"--i.e. like to God, according to the saying: "When He shall appear we shall be like to Him, and [Vulg.: 'because'] we shall see Him as He is" (1 Jn. 2:2). ...
This light is required to see the divine essence, not as a similitude in which God is seen, but as a perfection of the intellect, strengthening it to see God. Therefore it may be said that this light is to be described not as a medium in which God is seen, but as one by which He is seen; and such a medium does not take away the immediate vision of God.
The disposition to the form of fire can be natural only to the subject of that form. Hence the light of glory cannot be natural to a creature unless the creature has a divine nature; which is impossible. But by this light the rational creature is made deiform, as is said in this article. (Summa Theologica, Pt. I, Q. 12, Art. 5)
Eternal life consists in the vision of God, according to Jn. 17:3: "This is eternal life, that they may know Thee the only true God," etc. Therefore if all saw the essence of God equally in eternal life, all would be equal; the contrary to which is declared by the Apostle: "Star differs from star in glory" (1 Cor. 15:41).
I answer that, Of those who see the essence of God, one sees Him more perfectly than another. This, indeed, does not take place as if one had a more perfect similitude of God than another, since that vision will not spring from any similitude; but it will take place because one intellect will have a greater power or faculty to see God than another. The faculty of seeing God, however, does not belong to the created intellect naturally, but is given to it by the light of glory, which establishes the intellect in a kind of "deiformity," as appears from what is said above, in the preceding article.
Hence the intellect which has more of the light of glory will see God the more perfectly; and he will have a fuller participation of the light of glory who has more charity; because where there is the greater charity, there is the more desire; and desire in a certain degree makes the one desiring apt and prepared to receive the object desired. Hence he who possesses the more charity, will see God the more perfectly, and will be the more beatified. (Summa Theologica, Pt. I, Q. 12, Art. 6)
Nothing can act beyond its species, since the cause must always be more powerful than its effect. Now the gift of grace surpasses every capability of created nature, since it is nothing short of a partaking of the Divine Nature, which exceeds every other nature. And thus it is impossible that any creature should cause grace. For it is as necessary that God alone should deify, bestowing a partaking of the Divine Nature by a participated likeness, as it is impossible that anything save fire should enkindle. (Summa Theologica, Pt I-II, Q. 112, Art. 1)
It is written (Jn. 3:8): "The Spirit breatheth where He will," and (1 Cor. 12:11): "All these things one and the same Spirit worketh, dividing to every one according as He will." Therefore charity is given, not according to our natural capacity, but according as the Spirit wills to distribute His gifts.
I answer that, The quantity of a thing depends on the proper cause of that thing, since the more universal cause produces a greater effect. Now, since charity surpasses the proportion of human nature, as stated above (2) it depends, not on any natural virtue, but on the sole grace of the Holy Ghost Who infuses charity. Wherefore the quantity of charity depends neither on the condition of nature nor on the capacity of natural virtue, but only on the will of the Holy Ghost Who "divides" His gifts "according as He will." Hence the Apostle says (Eph. 4:7): "To every one of us is given grace according to the measure of the giving of Christ."
The virtue in accordance with which God gives His gifts to each one, is a disposition or previous preparation or effort of the one who receives grace. But the Holy Ghost forestalls even this disposition or effort, by moving man's mind either more or less, according as He will. Wherefore the Apostle says (Col. 1:12): "Who hath made us worthy to be partakers of the lot of the saints in light."
The form does not surpass the proportion of the matter. On like manner grace and glory are referred to the same genus, for grace is nothing else than a beginning of glory in us. (Summa Theologica, Pt. II-II, Q. 24, Art. 3)

The Summa is really a ladder of ascent, beginning with our knowledge of the Holy Trinity, His creation of us, the abilities of our natural power versus God's supernatural end for us, our need for the grace of the Holy Spirit, and grace's causing of infused virtue, virtue's action to mitigate our vices, the coming of Christ and our participation in Him by the Sacraments, and our final glorification.

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.

The same holds for Catholicism. The battle of "Science and Religion" is a battle of scientific investigation freed from the moorings of God versus revealed truth. Same with the battle of "faith and reason".

Now reason, does indeed when it seeks persistently, piously and soberly, achieve by God's gift some understanding, and that most profitable, of the mysteries, whether by analogy from what it knows naturally, or from the connexion of these mysteries with one another and with the final end of humanity; but reason is never rendered capable of penetrating these mysteries in the way in which it penetrates those truths which form its proper object. For the divine mysteries, by their very nature, so far surpass the created understanding that, even when a revelation has been given and accepted by faith, they remain covered by the veil of that same faith and wrapped, as it were, in a certain obscurity, as long as in this mortal life we are away from the Lord, for we walk by faith, and not by sight.
Even though faith is above reason, there can never be any real disagreement between faith and reason, since it is the same God who reveals the mysteries and infuses faith, and who has endowed the human mind with the light of reason.
God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever be in opposition to truth. The appearance of this kind of specious contradiction is chiefly due to the fact that either the dogmas of faith are not understood and explained in accordance with the mind of the church, or unsound views are mistaken for the conclusions of reason.
Therefore we define that every assertion contrary to the truth of enlightened faith is totally false. (First Vatican Council, Dogmatic Constitution on the Faith)

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