The iconic character of Christian language : logos and icon

Abstract

One way of interpreting is to classify. Precisely historical hermeneutics implies the exegesis of a whole epoch, sometimes of the whole drive of Church history. Pitrim Sorokin, the noted Russian sociologist, pointed out that the habitual divisions of history in antiquity, dark ages, middle ages, modem times etc. are very onesided and even colonialistic, since they reflect only one type of experience, usually that of Western Europeans. Thus, we might think that printing-presses ushered in a"new age in civilisation, but we forget that countries like China, Japan and Korea possessed them long before Europeans. In order to shake oneself loose of prejudices one has to re-interpret history by classifying it afresh. One such classification is to divide the whole of church history as 1. posing the problem of the image, or rather, more exactly, proposing a special kind of solution for the relation between word and image; 2. deposing the image or debunking certain tacit assumptions involved in the acceptance of this particular relation; and 3. reproposing the image, i.e. the attempt to start afresh and restore the image to its original intent and heal divisions between word and image on all levels.