One of the problems that Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox share is the problem of ignorance of patristic literature. Because of this ignorance, the subject (which is theologically and theoretically important to RCs and EOs) can be used to cudgel (of course in a friendly way) those Protestants for whom the subject does not rise to the same theological importance. That does not mean that such things are unimportant to Protestants, but they are certainly not important in the same way. But frequently, the cudgeler and cudgelee share one thing — they have not actually read the fathers in question.
But when you actually start reading in the early church fathers, one of the first things you discover is that they are all over the map, just like us. While some modern debates are unheard of back then, many of the basic issues (like the use of images in worship) were debated, then as now, with fathers on both sides of the debate.
So suppose that I, a sturdy Protestant who likes the Second Commandment, want to appeal to something beyond my own opinions when it comes to the use of images in worship. Of course, I could always appeal to Moses and the still hot tablets he brought off the mountain. But that is insufficient for some. The words of Dt. 5:8-10 are apparently nebulous, and require an interpretative authority smarter than me.
I could, if I wanted, appeal to Irenaeus of Lyons, talking about one of the more suspect elements of Gnostic worship. “They style themselves Gnostics. They also possess images, some of them painted, and others formed from different kinds of material; while they maintain that a likeness of Christ was made by Pilate at that time when Jesus lived among them. They crown these images, and set them up along with the images of the philosophers of the world that is to say, with the images of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Aristotle, and the rest. They have also other modes of honoring these images, after the same manner of the Gentiles.” Apparently, Irenaeus took a low view of “the manner of the Gentiles,” as did Moses before him.
Now the use of images in orthodox worship came from somewhere, and there were orthodox fathers who did not get the same kind of fantods that I get when thinking about images in worship. That is not my point here. My point is that this debate and these concerns did not arise for the first time in the aftermath of Reformation. Nor was it the case that all the iconoclasts of the early church could be lumped in with the doctrinal enemies of the Incarnation. For another example, here is Epiphanius, bishop of Salamis, who once said, “It is a horrid abomination to see in Christian temples a painted image either of Christ or of any saint.” And whatever else Epiphanius was, he was not a fundamentalist hedge preacher from Arkansas.