https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=gjK3J6ujXIQ
I wonder, one thing that I’ve heard, I’ve heard differing things from different individuals, from Catholics and from Orthodox, so I wonder, would it be, is it permissible to actually work or to do an icon of God the Father? Well, I don’t make icons of God the Father. You know, the appearance of the icon of God the Father is a very late medieval thing, you know, and so even in the West, God the Father was not represented until 13th, 14th, and very rarely already, and it’s really in like the late Gothic and then early Renaissance that God the Father starts to be represented, and that happened in the Orthodox countries as well, like I don’t want to remove the blame on the Orthodox for doing that, but they always were trying to find ways to justify it, like they would make images of God the Father, but then they’d write Lord Sabaoth next to it and say, well, it’s a vision of Daniel, you know, it’s like, it’s the vision of Daniel, so we can represent it. I hear that very often, yeah. So they’re always trying to be tricky about it, and I think that the fact that all of this type of elasticity in the tradition led to basically the destruction of icons, like you know, the 19th century, late 19th century, early 20th century, there was almost no iconography being made, it was gone, it was destroyed, and so I think that in the renewal of iconography, there’s a desire to trace back the mistakes that were made, and then try not to make those same mistakes, but still with respect to what happened, it’s like, you know, I want to be careful, and there are miracle working icons that have an image of God the Father on them, and so we want to be careful not to be like crazy icon smashing iconoclasts, but I think it is wiser today to not have those images because they lead to theological confusion. There’s a really good point that you bring up, I’ve heard of that as well. I’ve never done deep research, but it sounds to me like you have, so that’s a very good point, and I have frequently heard it brought up that people that argued for it being permissible bring up the vision of Daniel chapter 7, ancient of days and what have you, really, really good points you bring up there. Now, I don’t want to put you in the spot, but just let’s say that, curious, curious, let’s say that I come up to you, Jonathan, and I’m a Protestant, and I tell you, well, Jonathan, from an Orthodox perspective, where in the Bible is it permissible to have any kind of, you know, graven image? Isn’t it condemned in the very commandments? How would you reply to that? Yeah, of course it’s condemned. It’s not totally condemned, that’s really important, because obviously there were images. The idea that there were no images in the temple is ridiculous. You just have to read the text, and you see clearly there were images, and not just images of animals, but images of angels. And so, what I try to, everything in the scripture points to Christ, everything. There’s nothing in scripture that points to Christ. So the question is, if there is a commandment that says you’re not allowed to represent things and use them, let’s say, somehow, like to have them have importance, let’s say, then how does that point to Christ? And the answer is that it does, in fact, point to Christ. Christ is the answer to the second commandment. He is the resolution of the second commandment, because God gave us an image. God gave us the image of himself and the person of Christ, and therefore to not represent Christ is to deny the incarnation. And that’s really the answer that the Fathers gave, is that if you don’t represent Christ, it means what? What does it mean? It means that you don’t believe that Christ could be seen? It means that you don’t believe that someone could point to that guy in Galilee and say, hey, where’s God? And someone could point to that and say, there’s God. How crazy that sounds, but that’s what we believe, right? That’s what we believe. And so the importance of God manifesting his image in Christ, that’s what the second commandment is ultimately pointing to. And we have to take that into account as we now worship God and understand that there has to be a place for images. And the seventh ecumenical council is really a precision on how to avoid the problem of images while understanding the need for them because of the incarnation. And so that’s what it says. It says we don’t worship images, but we recognize that images are one of the vehicles by which God manifests himself, really. And so we don’t worship the image, but we see in the image something which leads us towards those higher images, towards the prototypes which manifest them. And therefore we can have this healthy relationship with images because Christ revealed God to us.