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Orthodox stand up for worship most of the time because it's honoring the King, and you don't sit down in the presence of a king. And for him, the ancient quality of the worship, the moral and theological stands, [had an] appeal of truth he felt like he could rely on.

But I didn't feel a corresponding attraction to the beauty of it. It looked a little forbidding to me.

Which is why I think you're a good guide on the subject of icons, because you had the reaction to icons that a lot of our listeners have.

Yeah, it took me a while to warm up. And I finally reached the point where I just had to trust that he knew what he was doing.

How would you describe your early reaction to icons?

Anywhere I'd see an icon—in a magazine, or a book, or an art museum—I thought how unfriendly and forbidding they look. Usually the background is gold, and it's sort of stylized. They're not smiling. They look very severe, very serious. And in some ways it doesn't look realistic.

There's a lot to not like. If you're sort of raised in a Disneyland culture where you think everything is going to be user-friendly and smiling and amiable, there's a seriousness about these images that I found very off-putting.

In fact, it didn't feel like the kind of faith that I knew. I had been in renewal movements, playing the guitar and singing the choruses for so long, and that was quite a different world from the austerity of orthodox worship and iconography. That was the first thing I had to overcome.

But the austerity isn't what many Protestants find uncomfortable about the Orthodox use of icons.

Right. The basic controversy is that this sounds like idolatry. Especially when I say we kiss and bow to them.

Are these being treated as objects of superstition? Are these idols?

The controversy came up very pointedly about the seventh and eighth century, during the rise of Islam. Up until that point, early Christians had images of the saints and Jesus depicted as the Good Shepherd. It was just natural to make pictures. But as Christians saw Islam rise and to make so many military victories, and to enslave and to conquer Christian cities, the Emperor of Constantinople thought, "Maybe we're doing the wrong thing." There was an icon of Christ in the city gate, and he took it down. And this caused a big uproar because the believers in the church felt that we should stand up for our beliefs no matter what. But the government felt strategically it was time to get rid of all those icons.

That led to the iconoclast—meaning smashing of icons—controversy. Over the course of about 125 years a great many Christians died trying to defend the icons. After a great deal of trouble and strife and persecution, there was a church council called in which it was decided that there were to be guidelines in how icons were used.

We should not treat them as objects of magic or superstition, but that they could be seen as a physical Bible is seen.

That what's shown in an icon, usually it's like a picture Bible. You're not supposed to make anything up, you just depict things that we know happened in the Bible. You can show the angel announcing to the Virgin Mary the Virgin Birth. You don't use your imagination or embellish it, you just try to stick with what scripture says. And for a mostly illiterate people they were substitutes for the Bible. People didn't have Bibles they could take home, and mostly they couldn't read anyway.

Now, you can ask the most Bible-loving person you know, Is the Bible an idol? And they'd say, No, it's just paper and ink. But it would break their heart if you tore up their Bible or spit on it.

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September (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47