Over twenty years ago, when ‘soundings’ were beginning to be taken and doubts raised about the future of theology, Root diagnosed as the most serious problem facing the Christian faith the existence of a secularized imagination for which theology is no longer alive. The problem of the imagination as part of a crisis in the cognitive aspect of theology continues to preoccupy theologians almost two generations later. It is also commonly asserted that we are entering an historical age in which the visual will be paramount as the means of exposition of the truth and the verbal, with its great faith in logic, will no longer be accorded the premium which it has had for so long, particularly in European thinking. But in the early church it was possible to think theologically without cutting oneself off from other ranges of thought and imagination which in our day no longer have contact with theology; and in a volume of essays dedicated to Professor Chadwick it is a matter of happiness to begin with the recognition that there is indeed a way out of the modern impasse because it already exists in the tradition.

In 842 when the church proclaimed the Triumph of Orthodoxy it was talking about art as the visual interpretation of dogma. The ancient church considered that nourishment was to be found for theology and doctrine in the world depicted by artists, which sometimes rejects the conventional ways of theology and religion as they exist in the literary expression.