If I remember correctly, there was a minority opinion in some pre-Nicene Christians that Christ and Michael were identical or analogous, and that's probably how the book of Daniel was understood by some- the Son of Man was an angelic or semi-divine figure
None that I’m aware of - Metatron yes, St. Michael no, but these were not Orthodox groups.
Theree's even an Orthodox icon type that depicts Christ as an angel, but it isn't understood literally in modern Orthodoxy.
That is inaccurate. Icons such as “the Angel of Great Counsel” and “the Hospitality of Abraham,” a Trinitarian icon painted by St. Andrei Rublev, which elegantly uses the three angels who met St. Abraham the Patriarch to represent God the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, were always understood to be figurative - indeed the more common of these, The Hospitality of Abraham, is self-evidently figurative. Regarding the other, I’m not entirely sure its canonical; my friends
@prodromos or
@FenderTL5 might know.
Of course our opinions are doubtless of questionable relevance since the prevailing attitude in the UCC at present seems to be that anyone, such as myself, a former UCC minister, who left the United Church of Christ to become Eastern Orthodox, is most likely sexist and misogynist and converted because I’m somehow opposed to womens’’ rights, or something like that, according to the sentiments of some liberal Christians. My work in helping to support efforts to stop FGM, my support of efforts to help male and female victims of the FLDS cult, known for its polygamy, my opposition to abusive remarks made towards female clergy by some fundamentalists, all are ignored by some because I happen to belong to a church that somehow is sexist because we venerate the Theotokos more than any other saint and honor the wishes of the majority our female members not to ordain women to the offices of presbyter or bishop (in part, ordaining women to presbyter would create an ontological problem, since it would compromise the role of the presbyteras, the wives of presbyters, who serve as mothers to their parish community and are such an important part of the church. Indeed we’re so “sexist and misogynist” (to use a very strange definition of those terms) that we won’t ordain a man without the permission of his wife!
You only really see this in religions like Shinto or Taoism today, but you can see "echoes" of this in Oriental and Eastern Orthodoxy.
Dr. David Bentley Hart is not well qualified to speak on Eastern Orthodox theology, considering he discards much of it and advocates for doctrines all Eastern Orthodox churches, and has zero qualifications to speak on Oriental Orthodox theology.
Also I really fail to see what any of this has to do with Restorationist sects claiming that Christ is the Archangel Michael, because there is no evidence that the founders of those sects which believe this were even aware the Eastern Orthodox existed as a discrete entity apart from Roman Catholicism; or that the Oriental Orthodox were even a thing (indeed, the term Oriental Orthodox did not exist at the time, being coined at the Council of Addis Ababa convened by the martyred Emperor Haile Selassie by the hierarchs of the persecuted Ethiopian, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Indian churches, which were less persecuted then than they are now, but there had been the genocide of Armenians and Syriacs in 1915, and the Armenians were being persecuted by Communism, and within the next few decades the persecution would spread to the Copts, Ethiopians, Eritreans and Indians, with St. Haile Selassie himself being strangled by the Derg Communists, but at any rate, the term was coined in the 1960s to refer to those Orthodox churches which were negotiating with the Eastern Orthodox but not in communion with them, as an alternative to inaccurate and perjorative terms like “monophysite” and “Jacobite”.
And even if there was awareness of our denominations by the founders of the Restorationist sects in question, the likelihood that any of them would have deep knowledge of our doctrine or be aware of, for instance, The Hospitality of Abraham or other iconography, or the ideas you are presumably alluding to like Theosis (DBH by the way is spectacularly in error if he suggested a fluidity exists between God and Man due to Theosis, a fundamental misunderstanding of what Theosis means, for Theosis is not apotheosis, and according to Eastern Orthodox theology going back to before the Cappadocians, but clearly expressed by them, and later expounded upon by St. Gregory Palams, God is, in his divine essence, entirely incomprehensible, being knowable only in His uncreated energies - which we can participate with, but we are able to see God only because He became man and put on our human nature in the Incarnation, and also, this doctrine is not unique to Eastern Orthodoxy - indeed Theosis as a concept was picked up and translated into Western terminology by John Wesley, who rebranded it “entire sanctification” which is also an apt metaphor. For that matter there are subtle traces of theosis in Lutheran and according to our friend
@hedrick even in Calvinist thought.
I assume you know all this, since obviously, the most ardently anti-Catholic sects known to exist such as the J/W cult would not borrow a doctrine from the Orthodox since for them that would be too close to Roman Catholicism; indeed they went so far as to rewrite what we regard as one of the most important verses of the Bible, John 1:1, in an attempt to disprove the Incarnation, the deity of Christ and the Trinity, all of which are central Orthodox doctrines.
They would be more likely I suspect to take a doctrine from Shintoism than from Roman Catholicism, although both seem vanishingly unlikely, because of the ad hominem fallacy that permeates the J/W sect, which they take to such an extreme extent as to deny that Christ was crucified on a cross - despite Scripture literally saying as much, instead insisting, contra scriptura, that he was hanged from a “torture stake”, since Roman Catholics venerate the Cross and wear crucifixes and therefore obviously that doctrine must be false and if the Bible says it, well, it was mistranslated and we can just fix that in our New World translation.
The number of logical fallacies that permeate the J/W cult are tragic - the only thing more tragic is when one looks at the demographics of the people it exploits, for J/WS are not high functioning businessmen of the kind that Mormons exclusively solicit (the LDS is known to do criminal background checks against prospective members), for J/Ws have the lowest per-capita income of any major religious group in the United States. The Unitarian Universalists, whose Unitarian ancestors paradoxically were also characterized by a denial of the Incarnation and the Trinity, but who rejected these doctrines on the basis of Enlightenment philosophy rather than supposed Bible scholarship, although in both cases there was a definite element of anti-Catholic sentiment, are paradoxically the wealthiest on a per capita basis, part of this doubtless being due to the composition of the early Unitarians - the very wealthy Bostonian Yankees, enough of them so the Unitarians were able to seize control of Harvard and expropriate it from the trinitarian Congregationalists, but also doubtless some of it has to do with the alignment of contemporary UUA politics with the prevailing sociopolitical values of the upper classes in American society.
Thus I have to confess I am much more sympathetic to individual J/Ws than I am to members of the UUA, although I am of the opinion that the UUA is as demanding of a docuseries exposing it as the J/Ws (considering widespread cultural appropriation and other bits of hypocrisy, for example, in New Mexico there is a UUA parish that has the temerity to display an Eastern Orthodox cross next to a Sikh symbol, an Islamic crescent, a Star of David, a Taoist Yin/Yang symbol, et cetera, which is so grossly offensive to the Orthodox as to be almost inconceivable.
en.wikipedia.org
answeringadventism.com
