Icon and Covenant

The Loss of Biblical Meaning in the Rejection of the Imago Dei

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

As I consider the crisis of faith within the Anglican Communion, I notice something disurbing in many of the official documents released in the Global North about the schism forming with the Global South over issues of Tradition, Scripture and Sexual Ethics. Remarkably, the framing of the terminology for the debate on sexuality by the Archbishop of Canterbury is theologically wrong. It has consistently describes sexuality as a "social issues” and stresses the “need for justice and fairness" for those with different "genders and orientations". The discussion fails to comprehend that the debate on sexual ethics cuts to the heart of the Christian theology of the Imago Dei and the essence of the humanity that Christ shares with us. This is because iconographic thinking, the method of theological processing in the New Testament and the Ancient Church, was inadvertently killed by the Reformation. Without the typological approach and the ability to lay the spiritual and physical side by side for comparison, the whole of Incarnational Theology falls apart and the world is stripped of all its innate meaning as a creation and reflection of the nature and will of the Godhead.

If man is autonomous, self-purposing, and self-referential, not only is community impossible, but sexuality ultimately becomes meaningless in a Christian context. Why? Because communion and generation are our core credal beliefs as to the nature of the Trinity, the expression of the Holy Spirit in the Church, and the Icon of Truth enshrined at the heart of the Sacrament of Marriage. God is, at His core, a relationship, which eternally births the Son and from Whom the Holy Spirit eternally proceeds (as stated in the Nicene Creed). In the Incarnation, God shares this eternal Life (salvation) with us. He shares the eternal, perfect, creative context of His trinitarian sharing with created, finite and infinitely inferior humanity. If this understanding of communion, which undergirds all Christian theology, is jettisoned, there is no way that God can save us. There is no true communion, no eternal life - only recreational, non-generative, life-denying personal choices, for our own enjoyment and not for the purpose of truly sharing ourselves with others and creating new life. This is what the Scriptures call the "way of death" and the "wages of sin."

Thus, the Mystery of God and our salvation can only be comprehended in a sexual analogy, a picture that is only truly present, not in the institutional Church, but in the context of a loving, committed, sacramental marriage between one man and one woman. This is why the Scriptures calls the Church "The Bride" and consistently uses this image to teach us about our relationship with God. This profound theological definition of life, personhood or individual value, then, transcends even legal or biological categories - it goes to the core of the human family, its relationships, its orientation, and our choice to interact with it as the ultimate expression of theological reality. Through this, we understand that no one "owns" themselves or has innate value without God and other people. With this, we agree with every tradition and culture, every psychological theory, and every social worker on the face of the planet - our "individuality" is merely a reflection of our context within our family. Personhood is granted in relationships, in communion with God and one another, and is not an inalienable human condition. To strip away this context is absolute folly and recklessness.

Understood in this context, the Church's teachings on marriage are not optional, cultural, or a matter of personal conscience. They are the essence of the Christian vision of God. It is not "conservative vs. liberal", not "global north vs. global south", not "colonizers vs. colonized", not "rich vs. poor". It is a battle between those who know, respect and commune with the revealed Word of God, those who "receive the implanted word", and those who would use the Church as a social mechanism for power, changing its core beliefs, and disbelieving its ultimate claims, ultimately becoming a "barren womb". That is why, whether they are "formally excommunicated" or not, those who refuse the Church's traditional teachings on marriage are already cut off from the Church, "having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof" (2 Tim3:5).

I believe that all marriages, in their function, are pictures of God’s relationship, but not all marriages are filled with God’s grace. This doesn’t mean that the picture is unnecessary. Many Protestants, based on this thinking, believe that the form, or Icon, is therefore dispensable and a “stumbling block”. However, we do not believe that God communicates His Love, His Presence, His Grace, through incomprehensible warm fuzzies, feelings without a rational, logical, linguistic expression. He has communicated with us, partially, through the Old Testament and the Prophets, and fully through the Person of His Son, Jesus Christ. His Gospel is the medium through which God has chosen to give us salvation, and our faith, ignited as it is by His Spirit, is the way in which we enter into that Grace-giving pathway. Instead, we know that His Grace is communicated in word, symbol, and sacraments that bring them all together. Marriage outside of the Church is incomplete, but it doesn’t lose its function as a picture of God’s trinitarian relationship. A marriage outside of the Church is like the Eucharist outside of the Church’s apostolic succession. Its form still communicates the icon, the story, the Logos of the Gospel, even if it is deprived of the saving Grace of the Holy Spirit through a rejection of love, mutual submission and accountability. It is deprived because of a rejection of submission to the Gospel as it has come to those before us, a failure to receive that which is given “once and for all", not because the form has been kept or altered. The icon can exist without the covenant, just as the Jew’s now keep the icon that pointed towards Christ, but have failed to enter into the completion of the covenant through Jesus Christ.

Icon mean "likeness", so it is the similarity that communicates meaning. This is how we use the symbols of language to represent thought and analogy to understand the world. To deny that a natural likeness communicates a spiritual truth would be to reject natural law of St. Paul's conclusions in Romans 1, where we are told that the natural world is enough to condemn the sin of those without a Scriptural witness. I agree that marriage outside of the Church is incomplete and "inaccurate", but I don't think we can say that the male-female relationship in a committed family is robbed of its original design or of its role of revealing God's character. If it did, non-Christian two parent homes wouldn't be as successful at raising healthy children as they are. As it is, imitating the Christian marital covenant is the next best way to insure the mental health, intelligence, emotional stability, and social adjustment of children. Although this natural state is not formed for, or explicitly leads to, human salvation through sharing in God's life.

The Old Testament's definition of covenant is a legal agreement between God and Man, whereas the New Testament uses the term “icon” is the symbol that communicated the meaning upon which a covenant is based, establishing a connection between God and Man ("Christ is the icon of the Father" Colossians 1:15). So, these terms play similar, but different roles, and are intimately connected. In the New Testament, it is understood that while "No man can see God", we can "See the Father" through Jesus Christ. The Icon is not the "thing in itself", but it is necessary to communicate that "thing", and is woven into the Early Church's understanding of sacraments, hierarchy and catechesis. There is an understanding in this early theology that the Icon is necessary, but that it does not communicate the essence of God while establishing a very real, very necessary, life-giving connection with the thing that it represents. During the Reformation, those who crafted the covenantal approach did not have the same disclaimers, often mistaking the covenants of the Old Testament for the "Word of God" itself (a category that is reserved for Jesus Christ Himself in the New Testament), returning to a kind of Jewish interpretation of history that would, in its extreme interpretation, deny the New Covenant to the Church or insist that the Old Covenant is still in force. While idolatry (mistaking the symbol for the thing itself) is the dangerous imbalance of icon-based thinking, legalism (mistaking the Old Testament law as the full revelation of God's Person) is the danger of Old Testamental covenant theology.