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- Article No. 05

# Beyond the Material: Toward a Proper Understanding and Engagement with the Material in Christianity

            Aaron T. Lockhart
            University of Denver / Iliff School of Theology

               August 24, 2026

                 |  doi.org/10.17613/2bk3q-1bh78

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## Table of Contents

Upon entering the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the pilgrim is met by the Stone of Anointing—a limestone slab set in place in 1810, seventeen centuries after the anointing it commemorates. What place does this stone occupy, and what place *should* it? This article argues that modern discomfort with material veneration originates not in the practice but in a philosophical inheritance that severed the material from the transcendent, and that a properly catechized understanding of the icon dissolves the charge of idolatry.

I trace a thread from Plato’s realms and Forms, through the Aristotelian renaissance of Medieval Scholasticism, to the Nominalist turn of Roscelin of Compiègne and William of Ockham, by which the Universals were denied and creation ceased to point beyond itself. Coupled with the Enlightenment insistence upon the empirically verifiable, this turn produced the desacralized man Eliade describes—a condition shared, I contend, by many modern Christians of Protestant heritage.

Against this background I examine iconoclasm, Byzantine and Reformation alike, and defend the icon on three grounds: as scripturally valid, as book for the unlearned, and as window to the transcendent. Drawing on John of Damascus, Gregory the Great, and the Christological settlement of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, I argue that the icon is neither consubstantial with nor identical to its prototype; the representation is something different from that which is represented, and veneration passes through the material to the person beyond it.

The kiss is given not to the object, but to the face it bears. Christianity is material through and through.

[![CC BY 4.0]](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) © 2026 the author(s). This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license. Authors retain copyright.

          Keywords:

            materiality

            veneration

            iconoclasm

            plato

            aristotle

            medieval-scholasticism

            nominalism

            william-of-ockham

            metaphysical-realism

            eastern-orthodoxy

            catholicism

            transcendence

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[The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (JCRT)](https://jcrt.org) is an online, peer-reviewed, academic publication published by [The Whitestone Foundation](http://thewhitestonefoundation.org/), a 501c3 corporation located in Boulder, Colorado. ISSN 1530-5228. Articles are open access under a [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) license; authors retain copyright. Indexed by [EBSCO](https://www.ebsco.com/). Listed with [Duotrope](https://duotrope.com/magazine/journal-cultural-religious-theory-20464?ref=lst-7vbKB-7r3u0g8&pc=L-7VBKB). Website © The Whitestone Foundation dba The Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 1999-2026.

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