Icons Over Idols: Heroes in an Age of Disillusionment
There is an overwhelming lack of trust in leadership and institutions, including religious leaders, in our day. I’ve had young men approach me privately within my parish, lamenting that they believe they cannot trust the actions or teachings of any religious leader or denomination. A perceived absence of trustworthy shepherds—dare I say heroes—plagues the Christian community.
This is particularly true within the Anglican Church in North America at the moment, as multiple recent allegations and ongoing situations have rocked the faith and steadfastness of our people. I make no judgment on those present scandals, except to say that I pray we are a church that wills the truth to be found, known, and owned, regardless of where that takes us. But no matter what happens, it is indisputable that the trust of our people and the watching world has been further eroded. It is that reality, both in the Anglican and wider world, that I’d like to speak into.
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Iconography & the Hope of Glory
I have found help for these times in the veritable Christian tradition of iconography. Iconography depicts the Christian hero in the kingdom of God. The person is “written” as they are and ever shall be in heaven. That is why gold is so prominent as the background for so many icons. Take King David, for instance. Iconography often depicts him with a crown and a harp. Sometimes he is surrounded by sheep as a shepherd. Why? These are the emblems that adorned his work and person on earth. And now they adorn him in the kingdom of God. His prophetic psalms and kingship, which bore witness to Christ Jesus himself, now remain forever in glory. And, on earth, he was blessed to be a prototype for the Good Shepherd himself!
The Failure of Heroes
And yet, David failed so very badly. The Bible exposes him for his grievous sins—the seduction of Bathsheba and the calculating murder of Uriah her husband, to name but two instances (2 Samuel 11—the Bible’s honesty here is a point not to be overlooked). We could think of other saints with similar stories. St. Paul ravaged the Church of Christ as a Pharisee devoted to the God of Israel. St. Bernard of Clairvaux supported the Crusades, a stance which made sense at the time, but is criticized today. Martin Luther famously sanctioned bigamy and railed against the Jews in his later life. The list could go on and on.
Shining with Heavenly Glory
Yet, each of them is worthy of the depiction they receive in iconography. Each of them, in Christ, is worthy of our emulation. Each of them shines now with heavenly glory. And we remember that heaven itself is purgative. Whatever stain of sin was found in their lives on earth has been and is being removed by the searing light of glory. But as contemporary artist Makoto Fujimura observes, “We today have a language to celebrate waywardness, but we do not have a cultural language to bring people back home.”
That, I believe, is often why cancel culture is so prominent today on both sides of our nation’s chasmic divide: we have nowhere else left to turn. When our hopes become horizontal, there is no other option but to smash our opponents. There is no heaven to either purify or render final judgment. Further still, there is no forgiveness—not for us, not for others, and not for our heroes.
More Solid Than Earth
Culture often offers a picture of our afterlives as existent as a sort of quasi-Nirvanic force ghost—an apparently fainter shadow of our former selves in some cloudy astral plane. But heaven is more, not less, solid than earth. So shall we and our heroes be. “It’s a serious thing,” C.S. Lewis says in his oft-quoted passage, “to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship” (The Weight of Glory).
We see this reflected in his friend J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The heroes are mostly flawed, but their endings are each more glorious than their beginnings. Think especially of Boromir’s sacrifice after such a terrible fall from his purpose as part of the Fellowship of the Ring. It was one of the best and most memorable scenes in the entire story. It is so because it teaches us to believe in that other word, so missing from our culture today: Redemption. And with redemption, glory. A St. Boromir icon would do nicely.
Glorification as Our End
In short, what our cultural moment needs is a robust defense of the doctrine of Glorification. It is the belief that, as the Anglican catechism To Be a Christian puts it, no matter where the poison of sin is found, believers will be made “whole and holy” in Christ (Qs. 364, 367). Or, as the Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses it, quoting Lumen gentium, “The Church … will receive her perfection only in the glory of heaven, when will come the time of the renewal of all things” (Part One, VI, 1042). Only then—but we are taught that it will come.
As we are taught in Holy Scripture by St. Paul,
I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.
Romans 8:18-25
In line with the above, Glorification is the certainty that, in the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, “Grace is nothing else than a kind of beginning of glory in us” (Summa Theologica, II, II, xxiv, 3). Or, in the larger statement of St. Augustine of Hippo, it is the firm conviction that “[In our final state] we shall rest and we shall see; we shall see and we shall love; we shall love and we shall praise. Behold what shall be in the end and shall not end” (City of God, Book XXII, ch. 30).
In other words, life will not only change, but we will also be changed. We will no longer be like tin foil. Instead, we shall be, for the first time, golden. We will not only be known perfectly by Christ in the beatific vision, but we shall also come to know. That can be true for you. It can be true for me. It can be true for leaders who fail—and fail big.
A Fearful Caveat
Now here, I need to insert a fearful caveat, which is two-pronged:
- Moral failure in spiritual leadership must be held to account. Indeed, this is one of the means of keeping us, and those in leadership over us, on the road to glory, and not to perdition. This vision of glorification does not preclude forthright, honest, searching church discipline. On the contrary, it demands it. And, sometimes that forthright, searching process will rightly disqualify (1 Corinthians 9:27). But even that can work for grace and glory.
- The possibility exists that the road to glory may be forfeited. This is, perhaps, one of the most harrowing of all possibilities. And it is no less a possibility for leaders. Or, if you like, heroes. Indeed, it is a greater possibility for these (James 3:1). Dare we forget the inverted example of Judas Iscariot? Dare we forget St. Jude’s warning to all the Beloved to “keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life” (Jude 1:21) is also addressed to leaders? Dare we forget the proverb, “The road to hell is paved with the skulls of erring priests, with bishops as their signposts”? Or, as St. John Chrysostom put it more prosaically, “I do not think there are many among bishops that will be saved, but many more that perish” (Homilies on the Acts of the Apostles, Homily 3).
Pastoral Leadership and Warfare
Of course, it was also Chrysostom who, less prosaically, compared the duties of pastoral leadership to warfare. In his Six Books on the Priesthood, he imagines a young man being grabbed and told to command an army after being shown the brutalities of war by another:
Let him relate all the circumstances of warfare, the crowds of spears, the clouds of arrows, the vast darkness, the obscurity and the blackness of night which a quantity of darts occasion, even to the concealing the rays of the sun by their thickness, the dust which blinds the eyes not less than the obscurity, the torrents of blood, the cries of the wounded, the shouts of the combatants, the heaps of the slain, wheels bathed in blood, horses with their riders carried headlong over the piles of the dead, the ground confusedly covered with blood and bones and javelins, the hoofs of horses and the heads of men lying together, arms and necks and legs and breasts cloven asunder, brains adhering to swords, and broken points of spears with eyes affixed to them.
John Chrysostom, Six Books on the Priesthood, Book VI
Chrysostom then relates that the spiritual war into which a Christian leader is necessarily engaged is not the less, but the greater:
Do not suppose that I exaggerate this matter, nor imagine … all that has been said too great. Could you see at any time with these eyes the devils’ dark array, and its furious encounters, you would witness a conflict greater and more frightful than this. … [The] sight of this cursed army would alone be enough to annihilate the soul, unless it chance to be much fortified, and that before all inward strength it rely upon the boundless providence of God. But were it possible to “shuffle off this mortal coil,” or that it were even possible with it to view this armament and war against us clearly, you would not see torrents of blood, nor dead bodies, but so many prostrate souls, and wounds so dreadful that you would fancy the description I have but now given you to be mere child’s play, and to be a sport rather than a fight, such numbers perish daily.
John Chrysostom, Six Books on the Priesthood, Book VI
It is into such a battle that any Christian leader is thrust. Great are the temptations within and without.
The Foil to the Plot
But there is one more thread to briefly tease out. Or rather, it is not a thread but the main plotline of human history—the scarlet cord. Above all, it is our Lord himself who dispels the “there are no real heroes” sentiment and malaise today. The closer one gets to our Lord, the better Jesus Christ appears. Or, if you prefer, the more glory shines through. And that glory is real. Ask the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration. Ask St. John on the island of Patmos. Jesus’ glory is no mere propped-up personality cult supported by sycophants. There is no man behind the curtain. No two-faced act here. Jesus is double-natured, yet he is One!
He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.
Hebrews 1:3
He is the shining purity of God made flesh. And what’s more, glory was poured out. It is in our crucified-yet-risen Lord that every saint will find a place to stand, too.
So hang your icons; burn your idols.
“Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. He who has ears, let him hear.”
Matthew 13:43
Image: King David stained glass. Photo by ewg3D from Getty Images Signature, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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