This an excellent article by Dr. Leroy Huizenga for Catholic World Report. The author, who has a PhD in New Testament studies, traces the history the the “image breakers” that upset the Church in the East in the eighth century. With great erudition he explains how iconoclasm, in whatever negative form it takes in theology, is a denial of the Incarnation. Quoting from the second council of Nicaea (787), which condemned the heresy, from several doctors of the Church, and the New Catechism, he paints an icon in words that is beautiful, inspiring, and educational. Both icons in painting and later in sculpture have enhanced the Faith of Catholics since apostolic times. To those who would say that statues are too unrefined and unworthy of the mystery that ought to enhance the house of God and that only icons should be used therein, Father Feeney used to say that “God did after all become three-dimensional, did He not?” To those who would say that icons are unproportional and too artistically symbolic or exaggerated (now that I, a Latin Catholic, know much more about icons than I used to) I would say one needs to “study” an icon to appreciate its transcendent theological beauty. Icons are not “painted” as the iconographer would quickly tell you; an icon is “written.” Apparently Fr. Robert Robbins, the new pastor of Holy Savior Church in Manhattan, is a liberal “book-burner.”
Catholic World Report: The incarnation is the most radical claim of Christian faith, the mystery by which the mystery of the Trinity invades the wayward world. The conviction that the ineffable, invisible, almighty God might deign to take on human flesh—and not just any flesh but the flesh of a particular Jew of dubious parentage born in a Roman backwater—is shocking, scandalous, and also the “distinctive sign of Christian faith,” as the Catechism puts it (CCC, 463). Read full article here.
