Volume 11, Issue 3, October 1998

This article proposes that the understanding of icons within Eastern Orthodoxy provides a model for feminist hermeneutics in developing a poetics of sacred reading. The two major periods of icon dispute within church history are briefly reviewed (the icon controversies of the eighth and ninth centuries and the Protestant Reformation) and iconoclasm and iconophilia are discussed as competing yet ultimately complementary dynamics in theology. Christian feminism can acknowledge the value of both in understanding the place of the Bible avoiding either fundamentalist or expulsive readings of the text. Icon-veneration has an important place, alongside iconoclasm (as distinct from iconophobia), in developing a feminist biblical poetics.