Iconoclastic Theology


Book Description

F. LeRon Shults explores Deleuze's fascination with theological themes and shows how his entire corpus can be understood as a creative atheist machine that liberates thinking, acting and feeling.




Iconoclasm and Iconoclash


Book Description

This book focuses on iconoclastic controversies and, in particular, their impact on the creation of religious identities. In the history of Jewish, Christian and Muslim culture, religious identity was not only formed through historical claims, but also through the use of certain images: ‘images of God’, ‘images of the others’, and ‘images of the self.’ Moreover, in the struggle for religious identity these ‘images’ were time and again employed for the purpose of establishing distinct groups, both ortho- dox and deviant. At the same time, they supplied weapons in the theological debate and found explicit expression in certain rituals or liturgical traditions. These conference proceedings include a discussion of the role of images in society, politics, theology and liturgy, in particular addressing the ‘iconoclash’ of physical, mental and verbal images on the construction of religious identity.




The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology


Book Description

The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology is the definitive guide to radical theology and the commencement for new directions in that field. For the first time, radical theology is addressed and assessed in a single, comprehensive volume, including introductory and historical essays for the beginner, essays on major figures and their thought, and shorter articles on various themes, concepts, and related topics. This book is a seminal work for the radical theology movement. It clarifies origins and demonstrates the exigency and utility of current figures and issues. A useful and essential guide for newcomers and veterans in the field, this volume serves as both a reference work and an introduction to omitted or forgotten topics within contemporary discussions.




Images of the Divine: The Theology of Icons at the Seventh Ecumenical Council - Revised Edition


Book Description

This book, newly revised and updated, examines the Eastern Church's theology of icons chiefly on the basis of the acta of the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787. The political circumstances leading to the outbreak of the iconclast controversy in the eighth century are discussed in detail, but the main emphasis is on the theological arguments and assumptions of the council participants. Major themes include the nature of tradition, the relationship between image and reality, and the place of christology. Ultimately the argument over icons was about the accessibility of the divine. Icons were held by the iconophiles to communicate a deifying grace which raised the believer to participation in the life of God.




Images of the Divine


Book Description

This analysis of the arguments for and against icons presented at the Seventh Ecumenical Council of 787 provides a fresh insight from an Eastern Orthodox point of view into the role of icons as channels communicative of divine life.




Image and Presence


Book Description

Images increasingly saturate our world, making present to us what is distant or obscure. Yet the power of images also arises from what they do not make present—from a type of absence they do not dispel. Joining a growing multidisciplinary conversation that rejects an understanding of images as lifeless objects, this book offers a theological meditation on the ways images convey presence into our world. Just as Christ negates himself in order to manifest the invisible God, images, Natalie Carnes contends, negate themselves to give more than they literally or materially are. Her Christological reflections bring iconoclasm and iconophilia into productive relation, suggesting that they need not oppose one another. Investigating such images as the biblical golden calf and paintings of the Virgin Mary, Carnes explores how to distinguish between iconoclasms that maintain fidelity to their theological intentions and those that lead to visual temptation. Offering ecumenical reflections on issues that have long divided Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions, Image and Presence provokes a fundamental reconsideration of images and of the global image crises of our time.




St Theodore the Studite's Defence of the Icons


Book Description

St Theodore the Studite's Defence of the Icons provides an investigation of the icon-theology of St Theodore the Studite, mainly as it is presented in his three refutations of the iconoclasts, the Antirrhetici tres adversus iconomachos. Torstein Theodor Tollefsen explores Theodore's 'philosophy of images', namely his doctrine of images and his arguments that justify the legitimacy of images in general and of Christ in particular. Tollefsen offers a historical, theological, and philosophical exploration of Theodore's doctrine of images and his arguments justifying the legitimacy of images and of Christ. In addition to the main elements of Theodore's defence of the icon, like the Christological issue, the relation between image and prototype, the question of veneration, his explanation of why we may say of an image that 'this is Christ', and his innovative thinking on the representative character of the icon, the book has an introduction that places Theodore in the history of Byzantine philosophy: He has some knowledge of traditional logical topics and is able to utilize argumentative forms in countering his iconoclast opponents. The volume also provides an appendix which shows that the making of images is somehow natural given the character of Christianity as a religion.




Iconoclastic Sex


Book Description

Christian sexual ethics operates from a place of privilege when it does not consider those impacted by its moral prescriptions. A large majority of publications on Christian sexual ethics consider choices and images abstracted from lived conditions of the people called to make these decisions. As such, it leaves out many for whom sex is neither welcome nor a choice. As such, these same texts present images of sexual subjects that marginalize those that do not fit. As the book presents, sexuality, both Christian and otherwise, prioritizes a language of purity that strangles the life of those imaged impure. The present book remedies this emphasis through the language of iconoclasm that blasphemes these images and opens theological reflection beyond the boundary of image-based approaches. Utilizing a qualitative study of survivors of trafficking and those who grew up under evangelical purity teachings, Spaulding narrates sexual ethics in light of their testimonies and the theological resources of iconoclasm to articulate a more just and loving sexuality. The new emphasis on sexual ethics not only resists the prescriptions that create the conditions of sex trafficking but the creation of new communities capable of solidarity and mutuality with those caught in the web of trafficking.




The Politics of Iconoclasm


Book Description

From false idols and graven images to the tombs of kings and the shrines of capitalism, the targeted destruction of cities, sacred sites and artefacts for religious, political or nationalistic reasons is central to our cultural legacy. This book examines the different traditions of image-breaking in Christianity and Islam as well as their development into nominally secular movements and paints a vivid, scholarly picture of a culture of destruction encompassing Protestantism, Wahhabism, and Nationalism. Beginning with a comparative account of Calvinist Geneva and Wahhabi Mecca, The Politics of Iconoclasm explores the religious and political agendas behind acts of image-breaking and their relation to nationhood and state-building. From sixteenth-century Geneva to urban developments in Mecca today, The Politics of Iconoclasm explores the history of image-breaking, the culture of violence and its paradoxical roots in the desire for renewal. Examining these dynamics of nationhood, technology, destruction and memory, a historical journey is described in which the temple is razed and replaced by the machine.




Imago Dei


Book Description

A sweeping account of the controversies surrounding the worship of images in the early Byzantine church In 726, the Byzantine emperor, Leo III, issued an edict that all religious images in the empire were to be destroyed, a directive that was later endorsed by a synod of the church in 753 under his son, Constantine V. If the policy of Iconoclasm had succeeded, the entire history of Christian art—and of the Christian church, at least in the East—would have been altered. Iconoclasm was defeated by Byzantine politics, popular revolts, monastic piety, and, most fundamentally of all, by theology, just as it had been theology that the opponents of images had used to justify their actions. Analyzing an intriguing chapter in the history of ideas, the renowned scholar Jaroslav Pelikan shows how a faith that began by attacking the worship of images ended first in permitting and then in commanding it. Pelikan charts the theological defense of icons during the iconoclastic controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries, whose high point came in 787, when the Second Council of Nicaea restored the cult of images in the church. He demonstrates how the dogmas of the Trinity and the Incarnation eventually provided the basic rationale for images: because the invisible God had become human and therefore personally visible in Jesus Christ, it became permissible to make images of that Image. And because not only the human nature of Christ, but that of his Mother had been transformed by the Incarnation, she, too, could be “iconized,” together with all the other saints and angels. The iconographic “text” of the book is provided by one of the very few surviving icons from the period before Iconoclasm, the Egyptian tapestry Icon of the Virgin now in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Other icons serve to illustrate the theological argument, just as the theological argument serves to explain the icons. In an incisive foreword, Judith Herrin explains the enduring importance of the book and discusses how later scholars have built on Pelikan’s work. Please note: All images in this ebook are presented in black and white and have been reduced in size.