Worship Condemned 787 AD

Iconoclasm

Religious images are idolatry and must be destroyed.

Second Council of Nicaea (787)

Iconoclasm

The Story

In 726 AD, Emperor Leo III ordered the removal of a famous image of Christ that hung above the Chalke Gate, the ceremonial entrance to the imperial palace in Constantinople. According to later accounts, the soldiers sent to take it down were attacked by a group of women, and one soldier was killed. Whether or not the details are legendary, the event marks the conventional beginning of Byzantine iconoclasm — a theological and political crisis that would convulse the eastern Roman Empire for over a century.

Leo III and his successor Constantine V (r. 741-775) were not barbarians smashing pretty things. They had a theological argument. The second commandment forbids graven images. The early church had been wary of representational art. And the veneration of icons — kissing them, bowing before them, lighting candles in front of them, processing with them through the streets — looked, to iconoclast eyes, indistinguishable from the pagan idol worship that Christianity had originally defined itself against. Constantine V was the more intellectually serious of the two. He convened the Council of Hieria in 754, attended by 338 bishops, which declared that the only legitimate image of Christ was the Eucharist, because it alone was authorized by Christ himself. All other images were either Nestorian (because they depicted only his human nature and thus divided him) or idolatrous (because they attempted to depict the indescribable divine nature). Icons were ordered destroyed; monks who resisted were persecuted, exiled, or killed.

The tide turned under Empress Irene, who served as regent for her young son Constantine VI. In 787, she convened the Second Council of Nicaea (the seventh ecumenical council), which restored the veneration of icons. The council drew a crucial distinction between latreia (worship, due only to God) and proskynesis (veneration or honor, which could properly be directed toward images, saints, and the cross). Icons were not themselves divine, but they served as windows to the divine — the honor paid to the image passes to the prototype it represents. Iconoclasm flared up again between 815 and 843 under a second wave of iconoclast emperors, before being definitively ended on the first Sunday of Lent in 843, an event still celebrated in Eastern Christianity as the “Triumph of Orthodoxy.”

What the Council Actually Said

The Second Council of Nicaea (787) decreed:

“We define with all accuracy and care that the venerable and holy images are to be set up in the holy churches of God… for the more frequently they are seen in representational art, the more those who behold them are aroused to remember and desire the prototypes.”

The council’s key distinction:

“The honor paid to the image passes to its prototype. He who venerates an image venerates the person depicted in it… for the honor rendered to the image goes to its original subject.”

The Council of Hieria (754), representing the iconoclast position, had declared:

“Supported by the holy scriptures and the Fathers, we declare unanimously that there shall be rejected and removed and cursed out of the Christian church every likeness which is made out of any material whatever by the evil art of painters.”

Why You Might Accidentally Believe This

If you are a Protestant, you may already believe a version of this. The Reformed tradition, following John Calvin, was deeply suspicious of religious images. Calvin argued that the human mind is “a perpetual forge of idols” and that images inevitably become objects of worship regardless of the theological distinctions drawn by councils. The Puritans stripped English churches bare. Scottish Presbyterians smashed stained glass. The Amish and many Baptist traditions maintain plain meeting houses to this day. While few modern Protestants would call themselves iconoclasts, the instinct — that physical representations of divine things are spiritually dangerous — runs deep in Western Protestantism.

Even outside explicitly Protestant contexts, the discomfort surfaces. Many evangelicals feel uneasy around crucifixes, statues of saints, or ornate church interiors. The impulse to keep worship “spiritual” and free from material mediation is, at its root, an iconoclast impulse.

The Strongest Case For This View

The second commandment is clear: “You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath” (Exodus 20:4). The Old Testament is relentless in its hostility toward images used in worship — the golden calf, the bronze serpent (eventually destroyed by King Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18:4), the “high places” condemned by prophet after prophet. The early church was significantly more cautious about images than later centuries would suggest; the Synod of Elvira (c. 305) may have forbidden pictures in churches outright.

Constantine V’s theological argument was also sharper than it is usually given credit for. If Christ is one person with two natures (as Chalcedon taught), then any image of Christ either depicts only his humanity (which separates the natures, a Nestorian error) or attempts to depict his divinity (which is impossible and idolatrous). The only way to depict Christ without error, Constantine argued, is through the Eucharist — the form Christ himself authorized. This is not a stupid argument. It takes Christology seriously and applies it rigorously to the question of representation.

The Strongest Case Against

The defenders of icons, led by John of Damascus (c. 675-749), made several powerful arguments. First, the incarnation changed everything. In the Old Testament, God had no visible form, so images were forbidden. But in Christ, God took on visible, material, depictable flesh. To refuse to depict Christ is, paradoxically, to deny the incarnation — to suggest that God did not truly become material and visible. Icons are not violations of the incarnation; they are consequences of it.

Second, the distinction between veneration and worship is not a trick — it is the same distinction everyone makes in ordinary life. You honor a photograph of a loved one without worshiping it. You stand for a national anthem without treating the flag as a god. Veneration of images is a natural human response to the material mediation of the sacred, and Christianity — with its sacraments, its scriptures, its incarnate God — is a religion of material mediation.

Third, the iconoclast position proved practically untenable. If images are forbidden, what about the cross? What about the Bible itself, which uses verbal “images” of God? What about the Eucharist, which Constantine V approved — is bread not also a material object? The logic of iconoclasm, pressed consistently, eliminates almost every form of Christian worship that involves material objects.

What the New Testament Actually Says

The New Testament says remarkably little about images in worship, largely because the earliest Christians were still operating within Jewish synagogue contexts where the question did not arise in this form. Jesus quotes the Decalogue but does not address the image question directly. Paul warns against idolatry (1 Corinthians 10:14) but defines it in terms of worshiping created things rather than the Creator (Romans 1:23-25) — a definition that the icon-defenders would say supports their distinction between worship and veneration.

The strongest New Testament support for icons comes from the incarnation itself. Colossians 1:15 calls Christ “the image (eikon) of the invisible God” — the same Greek word used for “icon.” If Christ himself is the icon of God, then the principle of depicting the divine through the material is built into the foundations of Christology. Hebrews 1:3 calls the Son “the exact imprint of God’s nature,” reinforcing the same logic. John of Damascus made this argument central to his defense, and it remains the theological heart of the icon tradition.

Further Reading

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