Renouncing Iconoclasm
We have to renounce iconoclasm. In so doing, we inherently set ourselves against certain forces within modernity. The truth is eschatological, that is, it lies in the future, but we also believe that this eschatological reality was incarnate in Christ, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. We do not oppose the future in embracing the Tradition we have received. We embrace the future that is coming in Truth, rather than the false utopias of modern man’s imagination.
From Father Stephen's blog, Glory to God for All Things
Icons are one of my favorite things about Orthodoxy. This is a good explanation of one of the many reasons why: set yourself against modernity; embrace the future.
I like your juxtaposition of modernity and the future. "Modernism," the world of the Englightment and the Industrial Revolution, is not our future. Westerners may once have thought so, but Modernism should now become our past. In rejecting Modernism, we are not being regressive, but "progressive" in the only true sense: the progress of a pilgrim on his way to heaven's shores.
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