Visual sermons in icons

Seeing the Gospel: An Interpretive Guide to Orthodox Icons

Eve Tibbs
Baker 2025.

We are an increasingly visual culture, so it is good to learn from a long Christian tradition of showing the faith through images.

Eve Tibbs, Orthodox Christian and professor at Fuller Theological Seminary, an evangelical bastion, addresses this challenge with her lovely book Seeing the Gospel: An Interpretive Guide to Orthodox Icons. Intriguingly, prestigious Calvinist theologian Richard Mouw writes in the foreword that this “splendid Orthodox feast” unexpectedly expanded and reoriented his own “theological understanding of the gospel.”

Seeing the Gospel helps people understand and appreciate the beauty, tradition and rich symbolism of icons. The book itself is lovely, with over 90 vivid colour depictions of classic icons amply demonstrating icons’ play of light and gold. And it is firmly bound with thick quality paper, so it stands up to repeated examination. I recommend it as a devotional resource.

New views of the gospel

The book marvellously explains the theory and theology behind icons. I’ve admired icons for forty years but they sometimes perplex me. Now I understand that people are differently sized in the same picture to show relative importance, that background geography is distorted to remind us that Bible stories point to the timelessness of heaven, and some folks are shown full-faced rather than from the side to reveal who is righteous and who is not.

What I loved best, though, is how this volume explains the Orthodox perspective on the sweeping arc of the gospel. Tibbs details the Orthodox interpretation of the entire story, carefully walking us through Bible accounts, each vignette accompanied by one or more icons.

I once was distracted by icons that were not strictly accurate to accounts of Biblical incidents. Now I regard them as sermons and illustrations to teach the true meaning of gospel events, making spiritual truths visible. Each icon is a visual sermon.

Over and over, Tibbs showed me the gospel from new sides. She helped me uncover deeper meanings of stories I have loved ever since I was a child raised in the Christian Reformed Church. I am more deeply convinced about how everything changed because of God’s incarnation among us. She shows many ways that the nativity of Jesus foreshadowed his death and burial. I came to a new appreciation of Joseph, Jesus’s adoptive father. I was moved by Jesus’s baptism being a promise and call to purify the entire human race and even all of creation. I was reminded that the Fall is not so much about legal guilt but that “all creation suffers with something like an inherited illness” and Christ’s work brings healing: “As fully God and fully human, Christ’s Incarnation restores the severed human with God – in himself. In his baptism, the human condition is healed, and through his crucifixion, and resurrection, he conquers the ‘last enemy’: death.”

I’ve been preaching for over forty years. Two of my bookshelves are my go-to when looking for new insights into familiar passages. Seeing the Gospel is on those shelves now, as I will refer to it often in future sermon prep and Bible study.