While reading his 1900 Outlines of Christian Dogma, Anglican theologian Darwell Stone, unlike the vast majority of those outside Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, accepts the teachings of the Second Council of Nicea in 787 vis-à-vis the veneration of images. Commenting on the number of Ecumenical Councils that are to be accepted, Stone wrote:
The Anglican divines have generally allowed six Oecumenical Councils, namely Nicaea (A.D. 325), Constantinople (A.D. 381), Ephesus (A.D. 431), Chalcedon (A.D. 451), Constantinople ii. (A.D. 553), Constantinople iii. (A.D. 680). The Second Council of Nicaea (A.D. 787) should also be reckoned as oecumenical. The oecumenicity of this Council has sometimes been questioned on the ground that, though its decisions have always been accepted in the East, they were rejected in the West at the Council of Frankfurt in A.D. 794. As a matter of fact, that which the Council of Frankfurt rejected was not what the Second Council of Nicaea affirmed, and the decisions of the latter Council were eventually generally accepted in the West as well as in the East. The affirmation at Nicaea was that reverence of honour (τιμητικη προσκυνησις), as distinct from worship of adoration (λατρεια), should be accorded to images (see the decree of the Council, Actio vii., Hardouin, Councilia, iv. 456). The denial at Frankfurt was of the lawfulness of giving service (servitium) or adoration (adoratio) to images in such a way as to the Holy Trinity (see Council, canon 2, Hardouin, Concilia, iv. 904). See a paper read by Mr. W.J. Birkbeck at the Church Congress of 1895 (Guardian, October 16, 1895), and the Church Quarterly Review, July, 1896, pp. 448-476. (Darwell Stone, Outlines of Christian Dogma [London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1900], 313-14, emphasis in bold added)
The veneration of images is something I have discussed perhaps more than any other Latter-day Saint apologist. For articles on this issue, see:
