A - Theological Icon

The "Theological Icon" as deployed in Rollins's a/theology names a mode of relating to religious traditions and spiritual practices that is neither naively literalist nor dismissively secular. The iconic register, borrowed implicitly from Eastern Orthodox theology's icon/idol distinction, treats doctrines, rituals, and wisdom narratives not as fixed, self-sufficient formulas that transparently capture divine truth (the idol), but as transparent mediations—partial, humanly-constructed pointers toward a genuine encounter with the divine that always exceeds them. Crucially, this is not mere instrumentalism: the icon acknowledges that every conceptual or liturgical construction necessarily expresses the desiring, historically situated subject, even while it genuinely orients that subject toward something beyond the subject's own projection. The iconic stance therefore navigates between two reductive positions—fundamentalism (which forgets that the construction is a construction, treating the tradition as identical with divine truth) and liberal humanism (which collapses the tradition entirely into a human, pragmatic artifact with no remainder of genuine transcendence).

The "Theological Icon" is thus a structural solution to the aporia of religious language: it holds together the subject's irreducible role in meaning-making (the tradition always "expresses the subject") and the irreducibility of what the tradition points toward. Understood as wisdom narratives rather than abstract doctrines, religious traditions become pragmatic disciplines of transformation—lived, repeated practices that reshape the subject—without being reduced to mere technique. This is what makes the concept properly a/theological: it refuses both the "A" (atheism's dismissal of genuine encounter) and naive theism (God fully present in the sign), inhabiting the slash between them.

Within peter-rollins-how-not-to-speak-of-god-paraclete-press-2006, the Theological Icon sits at the constructive heart of the argument: it is the positive proposal that emerges after the apophatic critique of idolatrous religious language has done its negative work. It is directly related to the cross-referenced concept of Pragmatic Discipline: religious traditions held iconically are not doctrinal deposits but lived, repeated practices of transformation, aligning with the pragmatic emphasis on doing-over-knowing. This also connects structurally to Repetition: the wisdom narratives that constitute the iconic tradition work precisely by being repeated—circled around again and again—without ever fully delivering a final, totalizing encounter with the divine, which in Lacanian terms recalls the automaton/tuché structure where repetition approaches but constitutively misses the Real. The iconic mode thereby models the Lacanian logic of the missed encounter at the level of religious practice.

The Theological Icon also speaks to the cross-referenced concepts of Sublimation and Ideology. Like sublimation (raising an object to the dignity of the Thing without identifying it with the Thing), the icon elevates tradition to the dignity of a genuine mediator without collapsing it into the divine itself. And against Ideology in its fundamentalist form—where the symbolic construction is mistaken for unmediated reality, its constructed character disavowed—the iconic stance maintains reflexive awareness of the tradition's status as construction. The cross-referenced concept of Abstract is also at stake: the iconic move resists abstract doctrine (universal formula divorced from the living subject's situation) in favor of concretely embedded wisdom narratives that remain in relation to the particularities of lived transformation. The concept of Tuché lurks in the background as what the icon points toward: the genuine, ungovernable encounter that no formula can capture or repeat at will. Finally, Appearance is implicated in that the icon is an appearance of the divine that does not claim to exhaust what appears through it—preserving the gap between appearance and the Real that ideology (in its idolatrous-fundamentalist form) forecloses.

How (Not) to Speak of GodPeter Rollins · 2006 (page unknown)

This iconic understanding of faith not only allows us to view our religious traditions as an aid to reflection, but they can be held as wisdom narratives that help us to work out how to live as followers of Christ.

The phrase "wisdom narratives" is theoretically loaded because it simultaneously concedes the constructed, narrative character of the tradition (they are stories, not transparent facts) and ascribes to them genuine normative weight ("help us to work out how to live")—holding together the subject's expressive role and the tradition's pragmatic-transformative force without collapsing either pole; "aid to reflection" further signals the icon's mediating, non-self-sufficient status, distinguishing it from an idol that would claim to be the destination rather than the pointer.