OCU cleric harshly insults traditional iconographic depictions of Christ

Fresco of Christ Pantocrator. Photo: open sources

Roman Hryshchuk, a cleric of the OCU known for overseeing large-scale seizures of UOC churches in Bukovyna, delivered a lecture at the Volyn Theological Academy in which he used offensive language to criticize iconographic depictions of the Savior.

Addressing the audience, Hryshchuk declared that he wanted to dismantle their image of Christ, “which the Moscow Patriarchate and Orthodoxy in its version have imposed over the past centuries.”

According to him, icons depict Christ in a caricatured fashion, “as a person with a disproportionately small head, a thin body and long fingers, small lips, a large area where the brain and eyes are supposed to be.”

“We imagine Christ this way. In our understanding, He is a person with such an appearance and with a spine necessarily bent forward, with the head jutting outward. And from a distance we already know that this is a typical ‘nerd’,” Hryshchuk said.

He is convinced that “Christ was nothing like this, but rather a physically strong and resilient figure, a person who never searched for words.” Hryshchuk believes that the Savior’s words addressed to the scribes and Pharisees “we would today call verbal abuse or even profanity.” The OCU cleric insists that if Christ ever displayed humility, it was only before God the Father. In dealing with people, the Savior, he says, was entirely different – “He spoke as one who has authority, who has strength.” Moreover, according to Hryshchuk’s theory, Christ avoided neither force nor violence, since He demonstrated excellent skill in wielding a whip.

For this reason, Hryshchuk urged abandoning the vision of a priest as a meek pastor who avoids conflict. In his words, a priest should not be such a person, for Christ was not like that. “The Savior was a strong, powerful, impressive figure. His wisdom is the ability to engage in dialogues and to emerge victorious from them. That is, it is not the avoidance of conflict, but emerging victorious from conflict,” Hryshchuk stated.

Earlier, the UOJ reported that Hryshchuk called UOC believers in Chernivtsi “zombies” and urged their destruction.

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