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In the words of the contemporary German theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg: "Every theological statement must prove itself on the field of reason and can no longer be argued on the basis of unquestioned presuppositions of faith." In this Western intellectual scheme, theology is best understood as a form of knowledge or even a "science."

At the risk of exaggeration, we might say that in the West, theology is done with books in the library; in the Orthodox East, theology is done with liturgy in the sanctuary.

In his book The Illuminating Icon, Anthony Ugolnik points to two conversion stories to illustrate another basic difference. In the Russian Primary Chronicle (twelfth century), the story is told of Prince Vladimir of Kiev: he embraced Orthodoxy (in 988) after his emissaries described to him the liturgical beauty of worship they experienced in the Orthodox Church of the Holy Wisdom in Constantinople. By way of contrast, Augustine (354-430), in his Confessions, recounts how he heard the voice of a child telling him to "take up and read" a Bible that lay open at Romans 13:13. The contrasting conversions signal a key difference: in the Orthodox East, aesthetics play a major role in theology; the West prefers to work primarily with texts.

One can sense this difference simply by entering an Orthodox church: icons and frescoes cover virtually every square inch of the walls. The priest is resplendent in his vestments; his sonorous voice chants the liturgy. Bells chime, candles flicker, and incense fills the air.

Icons epitomize all this. Former librarian of the Library of Congress and Russian scholar James Billington once referred to icons as "the most revered form of theological expression" in early Russian Orthodoxy. Orthodox theology, he said, tends to "crystallize in images rather than in ideas." Icons are thus a "theology in color," which is why when an Orthodox priest was once asked why he did not do more doctrinal teaching in his church, he responded, "Icons teach us all we need to know."

Protestantism, on the other hand, insists upon the written word. During the Reformation, the spoken sermon gradually replaced the Catholic Eucharist as the defining moment of the liturgy for Protestants. John Calvin (1509-1564) said, "Images cannot stand in the place of books," and he whitewashed the walls of Reformed churches in Geneva. According to the Puritan John Foxe (1516-1587), "God conducted the Reformation not by the sword, but by printing, writing, and reading."

No wonder that the Orthodox Alexei Khomiakov (d. 1860) once complained that in Protestantism "a scholar has taken the place of the priest." Likewise, the Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov (d. 1944) once described Protestant Christianity as a "professorial" religion in which the central figure is the scholar-professor.

When Martin Luther burned the books of Catholic canon law at the Elster Gate of Wittenberg on December 10, 1520, he did so to dramatize a point that has become fundamental to Protestant identity: Scripture has a unique and normative value, and whatever value "tradition" has, it is secondary and derivative. Indeed, Luther wrote, "What else do I contend for but to bring everyone to an understanding of the difference between the divine Scripture and human teaching or custom, so that a Christian may not take the one for the other and exchange gold for straw, silver for stubble, wood for precious stones?"

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