I’m not surprised at all. It’s all part of the silly IDcreationist theology that diminishes God from omnipotence to just a tiny tinkerer (with fingers!) who rarely manages to come up with anything truly new, just duplicating old stuff and tweaking it.
As a natural mechanism, it is majestic. As a hands-on design process, it’s ludicrous. Eddie Izzard did a hilarious satire of Genesis, taking @rtmcdge’s anthroporphism to the limit, here:
There is nothing in God’s Word that should make me think God did not actually write with His own finger.
In fact this may not have been the only time God wrote with His finger.
See, Daniel 5:5
Please deal with the evidence I’ve provided and stop harassing.
In the Bible, it is mentioned that God (to be precise, God’s angelic servant who took human form) wrote the commandments on stone tablets and handed them to Moses. The exact method by which the angelic servant transcribed the commandments, whether by writing them with his fingers or through another means, is not specified in the text. In that case, why give undue importance to such insignificant details?
I didn’t understand. Are you saying they refer to the same essence/substance? The doctrine of the Trinity states that One God exists as or in three distinct persons, namely the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who possess the same essence/substance. When trinitarians say ‘one God,’ whether knowingly or unknowingly, they are actually referring to ‘One essence.’ Trinity does not hold that One God is One person.
To put it more simply, the doctrine implies that there is One WHAT & Three WHOS. The ‘One WHAT’ refers to the essence/substance possessed by three persons.
I had not expected such confusion over anthropomorphisms.
The Bible clearly states that God is a spirit. Jesus said, “Behold my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Handle me and see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” (Luke 24:39) God the Father does not have a physical body and the obvious limitations in scope and power of such a body. He is a noncorporeal spirit.
I can’t help but think of Exodus 34:6-7 where most English translations render the words describing God’s patience with something like “slow to anger” or “long suffering.” The Hebrew text uses the words 'EREK and 'APPAYIM, which together describe a LONG-NOSTRILLED (patient) God! If he could read Hebrew, would rtmcdge assume that the Creator of all has particularly elongated nostrils or would he comprehend the existence of idiomatic phrases?
When God got angry with Moses in Exodus 4:14 because Moses was making excuses by complaining that he was not a good speaker, the Hebrew text states that God’s APH (nose) got hot towards Moses. Indeed, the Hebrew phrase for “hot nose” is a common one in the Old Testament when somebody got angry. (King James Bible readers will recall it through renderings like “his anger was kindled” but “his nostrils flared red with anger” also captures the meaning.)
None of these anthropomorphisms should be an excuse to promote the popularly traditional but woefully uninformed notion that God is a grizzled old man in a long white beard sitting on a throne in the clouds. The description of God writing on stone with his finger is an expression of the casual ease with which God can communicate his written word in a way that is impossible for any human. (Our fingers obviously can’t engrave stone tablets.) If someone reads such an expression and comes away thinking that the main idea is that “God has fingers!”, they egregiously miss the obvious meaning of the text.
How do you know that? You didn’t see it.
Aha, that gives me the answer I needed. Now it’s clear that your reading of the Bible is so absurdly literal that you ignore basic idioms and anthropomorphisms. Maybe if you see how wrong that is, you’ll also see how your interpretation of Genesis is not the only one necessitated by the text.
Hi everyone,
Just a few quick observations.
Professor Stavrakopoulou starts describing the evidence for God’s having a body at 3:56. She describes God as “hyper-masculine” in his appearance, but also as well-groomed. He even had a wife, named Asherah. Nor was God the only God; he was a member of a divine pantheon of several dozen gods (hence, “Let us make man in our own image.”) In fact, early on, Yahweh and El were not even the same being: El was the high god, and Yahweh was his son. Later, the two deities were merged.
Even in the book of Daniel (c. 165 B.C.), God was still envisaged as having the form of a man, although by now, he was white-haired. After the Babylonian exile (587-539 B.C.), however, the divine pantheon was cut back to just one (Yahweh), monotheism became the religion of the Jews, and God’s body was increasingly depicted in diffuse terms: it was thought to be made of a different kind of stuff, called pneuma (roughly, “gaseous fire,” or what we’d call plasma), and it was thought to fill the cosmos. Spirit was not thought to be immaterial, even by St. Paul. When he writes (1 Corinthians 15:45) that the last Adam (Christ) became (not had) a life-giving spirit, he means that Jesus has an indestructible body made of plasma. Paul was influenced by Stoicism, which envisaged God in material terms.
The first Jewish thinker who categorically denied that God has a body was the Platonist, Aristobulus of Alexandria, c. 150 B.C. He interpreted the Bible in Platonic terms: “What is Plato but Moses speaking Attic Greek?” After him, Philo of Alexandria (20 B.C. to 50 A.D.) envisaged God similarly, identifying God with Pure Existence. The point I want to make is that these were very much minority views in the Jewish world, as Professor Stavrakopoulou points out in her book. It was not until several centuries later that most Jews came to regard God as a disembodied being. As for Christians, it was not until the mid- to late second century A.D. that some of them came to believe that God is bodiless, although some Christians continued to believe in a corporeal Deity until as late as the year 400. For more on this point, see David L. Paulsen’s article, “Part II: Early Christian Belief in an Embodied God” BYU Studies Quarterly: Vol. 35 (1995): Issue 4, Article 4.
: Iss. 4 , Article 4. Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-213 A.D.) was among the first to articulate the view that God has no body, in response to anti-Christian polemic from educated Greeks, who laughed at the anthropomorphism of the Bible. It was they who began the Christian trend of spiritualizing the way we read the Scriptures. However, the original authors certainly believed in a physical Deity. No self-respecting Biblical scholar today doubts that.
Second, it doesn’t help matters much to say that the three persons of the Godhead all share a common nature. We all share a common nature, as human beings. Does that make us one? No; we are all distinct beings. The real question we need to answer is: do the Father, Son and Holy Spirit share the same Divine Mind? God has only one Mind – see Isaiah 40:13; Romans 11:34-36; 1 Corinthians 2:16. If the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have three minds, then they really are three gods. (Recent attempts by the Christian philosopher William Lane Craig to deny this conclusion by appealing to the notion that the three persons have three minds but share a common soul make no sense, unless we conceive of God as some kind of animal: disembodied agents don’t have souls. Bizarrely, Craig likens God to the mythical three-headed dog, Cerberus, in his account of the Trinity.) But if the three Divine Persons share one Mind, then we have to say it’s possible for three persons to have one and the same mind. That assertion is, to say the very least, paradoxical. I can see why many non-Christians would regard it as downright nonsensical.
Third, there’s no passage in Scripture that declares the Father, Son and Holy Spirit to share a common Mind. To get this doctrine, we have to appeal to the teachings of the Catholic Church. Without a belief in the teaching authority of the Church, the doctrine is indefensible. Cheers.
It appears fruitless to argue about scriptural topics between individuals who hold opposing beliefs regarding the Bible’s origin. On one hand, there are those who believe in the divine inspiration of the entire Bible, while on the other hand, some argue that its writers were influenced by worldly philosophies of their time.
For those who embrace the notion of the Bible being God-inspired and infallible, it is essential to understand God as an invisible spirit being. Jesus, being the Son of God and possessing unmatched insight into the divine, explicitly proclaimed in John 4:24 that ‘God is a Spirit.’ There is no explicit statement in the Bible that contradicts this view. Therefore, any other verses implying that God has a physical form should be interpreted in light of this explicit teaching.
As rightly pointed out by some commentators in this thread, the verses cited by you should be understood in an anthropomorphic sense.
Hi @Midhun,
You need to have a look at these two short videos by Dan McClellan, which make it clear that scholars overwhelmingly agree that God was originally conceived of as having a human body, and that the verse you cite (John 4:24) does not establish the immateriality of God:
Happy viewing!
It may help to remember that Judaism originated as a Bronze age tribal religion evolved out of local polytheist beliefs. It’s quite likely that the early adherents assumed that God could take the physical form of a human.* I’d bet that it was only much later – with the development of philosophy and its tendency to pigeonhole everything and make things fit into a single, consistent narrative – that the story was adapted and taught in accordance with the new philosophical sensibilities.** And that’s how God lost his fingers. They were ‘retconned’.
*Indeed, in parts of the US south it may be anathema to think of God as looking like anything other than a light-skinned, well-muscled Caucasian with the salt and paper hair of someone in their 50s or early 60s.
**Interesting that the Greek mind virus managed to punch through the defenses and take over the insular religion of a people that strove to remain separate and unmixed by other, contaminating influences.
Confident declarations of “absolutely no doubt” can be fun to make but there are plenty of OT scholars who continue to disagree.
If by “God” one means YHWH, than it depends upon which YHWH traditions McClellan is talking about. I haven’t watched the videos so I don’t know about the details of these particular presentations. However, I can certainly understand why a practicing Mormon like Dan McClellan finds it extremely convenient to insist upon a God with a physical body. As a Mormon, it comes with the territory.
As for Professor Stavrakopoulou, I think her work in this area includes some impressive writing—but overall the book struck me as one Gish Gallop after another with lots of gaps and non sequitur leaps.
Needless to say, the entire field of Biblical studies has not turned on a dime in response to Professor Stavrakopoulou and Dan McClellan. I’m all for giving them their say and they’ve certainly won plenty of allies but let’s not pretend that these matters are settled within the academy.
Indeed, if one does not view that representation as a mere metaphor, it would seem to be so ahistorical as to be blasphemous.
I’d like to point out that in his first video, Dan McClellan refers to an “overwhelming academic consensus” that the God of the Hebrew Bible was conceived of as having a body. In addition to Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s book, “God: An Anatomy,” he cites the work of several scholars in the field, including the following:
(i) Esther Hamori, who demonstrates in her book, “When Gods Were Men: The Embodied God in Biblical and Near Eastern Literature,” that in Genesis 18 and 32, God appears to a patriarch in person and is referred to as a man (in Hebrew, ish);
(ii) Andreas Wagner, whose book, “God’s Body: The Anthropomorphic God in the Old Testament,” advocates taking seriously the Old Testament notions of God as having a human form;
(iii) Benjamin D. Sommer, who argues in his book, “The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel,” that in the ancient Near East and in some books of the Bible, gods (unlike humans) were envisaged as having more than one body and as having fluid, unbounded selves;
(iv) Christoph Markschies, who shows in his book, “God’s Body: Jewish, Christian, and Pagan Images of God,” that the idea that God had a body was held by both polytheists and monotheists; and finally,
(v) Brittany Wilson, who contends in her book, “The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church,” that the early Christians who wrote and read the Gospel of Luke and Acts conceived of God as a being who is both corporeal and visible.
I’d like to ask you a question. Are you aware of a single Biblical scholar today who maintains that the Hebrews who lived in 1000 B.C., or for that matter 500 B.C., considered “spirit” to be fundamentally distinct from “body” (and not merely a refined or subtle or indestructible kind of body) and that they believed God to be altogether incorporeal? Cheers.
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