The classical crisis of iconoclasm

Abstract

History is more interesting than fiction. This holds eminently true of the history of dogma, provided that this itself is not divorced from the human dimension taken as a whole. Ifmodern theology in the West has found the need of creating a political theology then this is due to the loss of the kind of communitarian theology which makes the core of Eastern theology, the theology of vision, which in turn harks back to the iconic consciousness of which we have already spoken. If Western theologians like John Baptist Metz have felt the need to remedy the situation, it is because the individual himself, and individual disciplines in a theology which has become increasingly more specialized and divided into new auxiliary disciplines in the wake of the Enlightenment, were suffocating for lack of vision of the whole. But a good theology need undertake no such desperado measures. The history of dogma can also be presented, with fully critical means, as the history of the Church's discernment of spirits, and thus attain a synthesis between faith and history, without either collapsing the one reality into the other, or pitting the one against the other from the start.