The Metropolitan, George of Lebanon, openly rejects the God of the Old Testament. In the last few weeks, I have seen 4 Orthodox prelates make similar statements.  But I’m sure I’ll be told I’m bad for pointing this out. However, if you agree with this, be on your merry way and keep your heresy. This man needs to be called out for this by other Orthodox members of that communion who know this is wrong. He writes, with the approval of the Orthodox Research Institute:

“Nevertheless, this question cannot be properly clarified as long as violence is not exorcised and its biblical foundations overthrown. If Orthodox Christians really admit that the God of the Old Testament led Israel from victory to victory and submitted all nations to it, they have no reason to question the theology of defensive war of the Byzantines or the Crusades. Keep in mind that it was with the purest intentions that the tribunal of the Inquisition erected its stakes. It was with the ideal of the perfect man that the Nazi warrior carried on his belt the inscription from Isaiah: “Gott mit uns.” What does the Bible say on this subject?

“When Israel saw the mighty deed that Yahweh had performed against the Egyptians, the people revered Yahweh.” (Ex 14:31)
“I shall go through Egypt and strike down the first-born in Egypt, man and beast alike”(Ex 12:12). Yahweh fights for them and brings them into the land of the Canaanites. During the occupation of the land, the Eternal One “will expel the Canaanites, the Hittites”(Josh 3:10) and the other peoples. He delivers Jericho and its king and pronounces this curse to its captain:

“Accursed before Yahweh be the man who raises up
and rebuilds this city [Jericho!]
On his first-born will he lay its foundations,
on his youngest son set up its gates!”(6:26)

At the conquest of Ai Joshua will say: ” When you have captured the town, set fire to it, in obedience to Yahweh’s command.”(8:8). In this conquest led by God himself we have, ahead of time, the policy of scorched earth and genocide. And the Psalms praise these great deeds. Of the enemies of the people, David says:

“As fire devours a forest,
as a flame sets mountains ablaze,
so drive them away with your tempest,
by your whirlwind fill them with terror.” (Ps 83:15-16)

The God Sabaoth, in service of Israel and its hegemony over the land of Canaan, only reflects the thirst for conquest of a confederation of Semitic tribes, a spirit that is totally foreign to the unfailingly loving nature of the One who is the God of nations and rules history in all its developments. God, whose name, presence, truth and unicity are love, cannot lend Himself to the massacres perpetrated by Joshua son of Nun.

There is a related issue in the way St. Paul deals with the concubinage of Abraham. The perfect chastity which he advocates in his Epistles is not invoked as a judgement on the patriarch. Nevertheless, when the apostle employs allegory to explain Abraham’s two wives as figures of the two alliances, he does not necessarily eliminate the historical meaning of the text. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews seems scarcely to criticize the prostitution of Rahab, which becomes part of the history of salvation: “It was through faith that the walls of Jericho fell down” (Heb 11:30) and by faith the Hebrews “conquered kingdoms” (Heb 11:32).

In opposition to this bloody deity there is the image of the gentle God whose voice is heard in the great prophets, especially Jeremiah and Hosea, and in the Song of Songs. In the betrohal of Yahweh and his people, just as in the Servant songs, we recognize the accents of the Gospel. Confronted with the irreducible opposition between these two faces of the Lord, Marcion, in the middle of the 2nd century, thought that the wars, judgments and punishments described in Scripture could not be attributed to the good God, Father of Jesus Christ, but to an inferior deity, the just God of the Jews. It was obvious that the Church, in order to preserve the unity of the Scripture, had to reject Marcionite dualism. Byzantine iconography is so impregnated with the identity between Yahweh and Christ that it always writes on the nimbus that surrounds Christ’s head o wn, the Septuagint translation of Yahweh in the epiphany of the Burning Bush. The patristic exegesis of the Old Testament is basically typological. Clement of Rome, who tells the story of Rahab and the spies in detail, says that the scarlet coed that the prostitute attaches to the window is a type of the blood shed by Christ. The raising of Moses’ arms above the battle between Israel and Amalek will be interpreted by the Tradition as a type of the Cross, and exegesis reflected in Byzantine hymns and vigil readings.

The problem concerns the how of revelation, the real meaning of inspiration. If it is right to affirm that, in a certain manner, the Old Testament is an icon of the New, the latter is also type or prototype of the Old, in the way that Saint Basil calls the bread and wine of the Eucharist before the epiclesis antetypes of the Body and Blood of the Lord. Thus I would rather apply the term type to the realities of the New Testament, with the Gospel already inaugurating the eschaton. Nevertheless, the typological exegesis of the Fathers adopted by the liturgy can veil the historical meaning. That is why I would like to propose, in a complementary sense, what could be called a kenotic reading of the Scriptures. I borrow the term from the Epistle to the Philippians where it is a question of the humiliations of Christ, from the form of God to the form of man, from the form of man to the form of a slave, from the form of a slave to death on the cross. In the kenosis the divinity of nature does not disappear but it is not made manifest. In this mystery divine knowledge becomes operational only through human growth. The synergy of the two natures also runs through Scripture, which is the body of Christ. Because of divine condescension the Word is sometimes profoundly hidden beneath words, underneath the fleshly covering of Scripture. This is what the West calls the personality or subjectivity of the sacred author. In fact, all divine writing shapes itself in human terms and everything human bears in itself the divine model. In the light of this explanation I refuse to attribute the wars waged by Israel to the divine will. Otherwise we get trapped in the morality of means, making death an instrument of life, and the destruction of various tribes becomes a condition of faith, and part of God’s plan for the exaltation and prosperity of a particular people.

Yahweh cannot be pardoned for his mighty deeds of war by peoples who were crushed because of the weight of history and the unreadiness of Israel through the ages. In any case, the notion of progressive revelation can be understood only in terms of spiritual maturity, a purification even within divine beauty. For there is no possible path from the warrior-God of Exodus and Joshua to the God of Jesus Christ. That monstrous image cannot be made acceptable. The progress of revelation seems to me to depend on Hegelian dialectic and there is no trace of this awareness of evolution in Hebraic thought. I do not believe that the Bible is truly a history of salvation: God reveals himself in time, but history is not the matrix of divine thought. It is the locus of revelations, and later, the incarnation of the Word. Hence it is the area of faith’s intelligibility, but it can in no way be its formative principle. If history is all human, it receives the divine without any confusion. That is why Scripture is not the unfolding of the divine in time but the identity of divine epiphanies across time; the only difference between the epiphanies is that they are not clothed with the same splendor, because of the divine pedagogy, or the economy that God uses, out of love, veiling himself to different degrees.”