atry in that its many gods were represented in various pictorial and statuary forms. In early Christian missionary preaching, the Old Testament attacks upon pagan veneration of images were transferred directly to pagan image veneration of the first three centuries AD. The struggle against images was conducted as a battle against "idols" with all the intensity of faith in the oneness and exclusiveness of the imageless biblical God.The starting point for the development of Christian pictorial art lies in the basic teaching of the Christian revelation itself--namely, the incarnation, the point at which the Christian proclamation is differentiated from Judaism. The incarnation of the Son of man, the Messiah, in the form of a human being--who was created in the "image of God"--granted theological approval of a sort the use of images that symbolized Christian truths. Clement of Alexandria, at one point, called God "the Great Artist," who formed humans according to the image of the Logos, the archetypal light of light (5, 92). The great theological struggles over the use of images within the church during the period of the so-called Iconoclastic Controversy in the 8th and 9th centuries indicate how a new understanding of images emerged on the basis of Christian doctrine. This new understanding was developed into theology of icons that still prevails in the Eastern Orthodox Church in the 20th century. The foes of images explicitly deny that the New Testament, in relation to the Old Testament, contains any new attitude toward images. Their basic theological outlook is that the divine is beyond all earthly form in its transcendence and spirituality; representation in earthly substances and forms of the divine already indicate its profanation. The relationship to God, who is Spirit, can only be a purely spiritual one; the worship of the individual as well as the community can happen only "in spirit and in truth"(4, John 4:24). Similarly...
