Lombaard, Christoffel Johannes StephanusJoubert, Lisel2025-10-022025-10-022025Lombaard, C. & Joubert, L. 2025, 'How do religious icons read-and-write?', Scriptura: Journal for Biblical, Theological and Contextual Hermeneutics, vol. 124, no. 1, art. 2234, pp. 1-14, doi : 10.7833/124-1-2234.0254-1807 (print)2305-445X (online)10.7833/124-1-2234http://hdl.handle.net/2263/104593This contribution is a further development of a presentation at the Society of Biblical Literature international conference, 3-7 July 2023, University of Pretoria.This contribution starts off with a broad understanding of icons and their communication, and the implications this has for religious discourse today. The focus then moves to icons within the Christian Orthodox traditions to indicate aspects of the interaction of text, image and presence. The final part returns to the implication of "seeing" icons for reading texts and hence for the possibility of again in our age encountering God in texts. Analysing the communicative dynamics of icons from the Reformed strand of Protestant Christianity, a tradition which exhibits a stronger inclination to biblical hermeneutics than to icons as operative faith impulses, combines these two interpretative traditions as a service to the unfolding post-secular intellectual and societal climate unfolding internationally.en© 2025 Scriptura. This is an electronic version of an article published in Scriptura, 124 (2025:1), pp. 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.7833/124-1-2234.IconsBibleInterpretationArticle