As a debate over the legitimacy of the liturgical use of images, the Byzantine Iconoclastic controversy (ca. 726-843) had important political and theological implications, which modern scholarship generally tends to treat unconnectedly. The primary object of this study is to explicate the relationship between the political and theological dimensions of the controversy and to reconstruct the debate over images in a comprehensive approach that accounts for both its political and theological dimensions. / The main argument of the thesis is that the question of images was a politico-theological problem and the prospects of 'political expediency' and 'theological propriety' were correlated in the minds of both the Iconoclastic reformers and their Iconodule rivals. Indeed, it was through their respective soteriologies that the two parties gave meaning to the theological and political dimensions of the debate in relationship with their respective theological first principles. Therefore, the Iconoclastic debate is explained as a soteriological dispute where the worldview represented by the traditional Byzantine religio-political ideology and the worldview represented by the proponents of images were set over against each other. / The main contribution of our thesis to modern scholarship of the Byzantine Iconoclastic controversy is to reconstruct the debate in the light of the contending theological paradigms of the two parties, which shaped not only their attitudes towards images but also their political stands in relation to the Byzantine Empire's involvement in ecclesiastical politics. This new synthetic reading explains the debate in reference to two essential theological cornerstones of the Byzantine tradition---the Eusebian "Imperial Theology" and the Christological definition of the council of Chalcedon---both taken as key reference points, against which the political and doctrinal stands of both parties were constructed and interpreted.

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