Theological Significance
The name of this Sunday reflects the great significance which icons possess for the Orthodox Church. They are not optional devotional extras, but an integral part of Orthodox faith and devotion. The debate involved important issues: the character of Christ's human nature, the Christian attitude towards matter, and the true meaning of Christian redemption. Icons are held by the Orthodox to be a necessary consequence of Christian faith in the Incarnation of the Word (John 1:14), Jesus Christ. Icons are considered by Orthodox Christians to have a sacramental character, making present to the believer the person or event depicted on them. However, the Orthodox always make a clear doctrinal distinction between the veneration (proskynesis) paid to icons and the worship (latria) which is due to God alone.
Since Iconoclasm was the last of the great Christological controversies to trouble the Church, its defeat is considered to be the final triumph of the Church over heresy. All subsequent heresies tend to be merely offshoots of the earlier great heresies.
Read more about this topic: Feast Of Orthodoxy
Famous quotes containing the words theological and/or significance:
“As liberty and intelligence have increased the people have more and more revolted against the theological dogmas that contradict common sense and wound the tenderest sensibilities of the soul.”
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“The hypothesis I wish to advance is that ... the language of morality is in ... grave disorder.... What we possess, if this is true, are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts of which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have—very largely if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality.”
—Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (b. 1929)