Does God really have bodily parts
Does God really have bodily parts?
The Apostle Paul lays it on the line as far as our body and its various parts are concerned: ‘ (Romans 6.12). Then he elaborates: ‘Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments Do not let sin reign in your mortal body’, he says, ‘so that you obey its evil desires’ of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness’ (Romans 6.13). Later in the same chapter he takes it up again: ‘Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness’ (v.19). Both our body as a whole and its constituent parts are to be used in the Lord’s service, not in the service of sin.
From the parts of our own body we then pass to the bodily parts that are ascribed to God. The Biblical references are remarkably numerous. Eyes, ears, hands, arm, finger, face, mouth, and lips; – God is said to have them all. ‘The eyes of the LORD are toward the righteous and his ears toward their cry’ (Psalm 34:15). ‘It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God’ (Hebrews 10:31). ‘Awake, awake, put on strength, O arm of the LORD’ (Isaiah 51:9). ‘And he gave to Moses, when he had finished speaking with him on Mount Sinai, the two tablets of the testimony, tablets of stone, written with the finger of God’ (Exodus 31:18). ‘The LORD…make his face to shine on you’ (Numbers 6:25). ‘[T]he mouth of the LORD has spoken’ (Isaiah 1:20). ‘But oh, that God would speak and open his lips to you’ (Job 11:5).
What are we to make of this? Does God have a body too? Is the ascription of bodily parts to him to be taken literally? According to the Audeans or Anthropomorphites of the 4th and 5th centuries the answer to these questions is, ‘Yes’. Robert Shaw, in his exposition of the Westminster Confession of Faith, explains that Anthropomorphites is ‘a name compounded of two Greek words, the one signifying human, and the other shape or form’. The sect in question was given this name because they took everything that was said of God in a literal sense, holding that God had ‘bodily parts and a human form’. According to Smith and Wace’s Dictionary of Christian Biography, Audius, or Audaeus, of Syria, the founder of the sect, started with the teaching of Genesis about man being created in the image of God, ‘and reasoned from the nature of man to the nature of God, whose image he was’. Since man has a body with all its different parts, the God whose likeness he bears must have the same.
Mainstream Christianity, however, has had no hesitation in denouncing the views of the Anthropomorphites as heretical, insisting that the ascription to God of bodily parts is to be taken metaphorically. The divines of the Westminster Assembly, along with those who have adopted their Confession of Faith and Shorter Catechism, may be taken as representative in their teaching and defence of this truth.
The Westminster Confession of Faith
Chapter Two of the Westminster Confession is entitled, Of God and the Holy Trinity. Section I begins like this: ‘There is but one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts or passions’. It was the teaching of Jesus that ‘God is spirit’ (John 4.24). The Confession teaches that as a corollary of this, God is ‘without body, parts or passions’. Our interest is in the denial of body and of parts to him.
We start with the Assembly’s three proof texts. They cover both body and parts. One of them has already been quoted, John 4:24: ‘God is spirit’. Another is Deuteronomy 4:15-16: ‘Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness male or female’. The third is Luke 24:39: ‘See my hands and feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have’. The identification of God as spirit necessarily rules out any physicality. He has neither a body nor bodily parts.
Charles Hodge, in his exposition of Chapter Two of the Confession, Sections I and II, begins thus: ‘These sections teach the following propositions: – 1.There is but one living and true God. 2.This God is a free personal Spirit, without bodily parts…We deny’, he continues, ‘that the properties of matter, such as bodily parts…belong to him’. What then are we to make of the many Scriptures that do speak of bodily parts? Says Hodge, ‘When the Scriptures, in condescension to our weakness, express the fact that God hears by saying that he has an ear, or that he exerts power by attributing to him a hand, they evidently speak metaphorically, because in the case of men spiritual faculties are exercised through bodily organs’.
Here is Robert Shaw again: ‘It is asserted that this God is a most pure Spirit…without bodily parts’. He continues, ‘That corporeal parts and bodily members, – such as eyes, ears, hands, and face, – are ascribed to God in the Scriptures is certain; but such language is used in accommodation to our capacities, and must be understood in a way suitable to a pure spirit’. He then gives us some examples. ‘We become acquainted with persons and things by seeing them or hearing of them; and to intimate the perfect knowledge which God has of his creatures, eyes and ears are ascribed to him. It is chiefly by our hands that we exert our bodily strength; and hands are ascribed to God to denote his irresistible power. We look with an air of complacency and satisfaction on those whom we love; and God’s face denotes the manifestation of his favour’.
One final quotation. In David Dickson’s commentary on the Confession, Truth’s Victory over Error, he asks, ‘Is the only living and true God a most pure Spirit, invisible, without a body and parts?’ He answers, of course, in the affirmative, citing the same proof texts as the Westminster divines – John 4:24, Deut.4:15-16, and Luke 24:39 – and adding 1 Tim.1:17, Paul’s declaration of God’s invisibility. He then asks a further question: ‘Well then, do not the…Anthropomorphitans[1]…err who maintain God to have a body and [to be] endued with parts, and an outward shape and form?’ Answering again in the affirmative he gives as a reason, ‘Because God is like to no bodily thing, nor can he be represented by any image or corporeal likeness (Is.40:18; Acts 17.29)’.
The Westminster Shorter Catechism
From the Confession we pass to the Assembly’s Shorter Catechism. To Question Four, ‘What is God?’ the divines answered as follows: ‘God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth’. It is with the opening words that our interest lies, ‘God is a Spirit’. Alexander Whyte, in his exposition of the Shorter Catechism, begins by giving it as his judgment that, ‘both in grammar and theology’, God is Spirit is to be preferred to God is a Spirit. He goes on, ‘this single expression at once does this great service for us, that it removes God’s nature far from all association with material and corporeal organisation. For, as our Lord said, “A spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have”’. He then quotes the following Minute of the Westminster Assembly: ‘RESOLVED upon the question, Hath God any body, or is He to be seen with bodily eyes? – A. God is a Spirit, invisible, without body or bodily parts, not like a man or any other creature’ (714, Sept.22, 1646, Tuesday morning).
Other expositions of the Shorter Catechism make similar points. Asking how God is said in Scripture ‘to have eyes, and ears, and mouth, and hands, and other parts’, Thomas Vincent, in his The Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly Explained and Proved from Scripture, replies as follows: ‘These and the like bodily parts are not in God properly, as they be in men, but figuratively; and after the manner of men, he is pleased to condescend (in expressing himself hereby) to our weak capacities, that we might the more easily conceive of him by such resemblances’.
Our next quote is from A.S. Patterson’s A Concise System of Theology on the Basis of the Shorter Catechism: ‘Although we find that bodily parts or members (such as eyes, ears, hands, etc.)…are ascribed to God in Scripture, – yet these are only emblems of his spiritual perfections and acts, used in condescension to our weakness. They are ascribed to him, not properly, but figuratively. Thus, when eyes and ears are ascribed to God, they denote his omniscience; hands denote his power; and his face, the manifestations of his favour, – and so of the rest’.
James Fisher, in The Assembly’s Shorter Catechism Explained, By Way of Question and Answer, asks, ‘Since God is a most simple and pure Spirit why are bodily parts, such as eyes, ears, hands, face, and the like ascribed unto him in Scripture?’ His answer, ‘Such figurative expressions ought not to be understood in their literal sense, but according to the true scope and intent of them: which is, to set forth some acts and perfections of the divine nature, whereunto these members of the body bear some faint resemblance: thus, when eyes and ears are ascribed to God, they signify his omniscience; hands are designed to denote his power; and his face the manifestation of his favour; and in this light, other metaphors of like nature, when applied to God, ought to be explained’.
One more quote, this time from S.D.F. Salmond’s exposition. He writes, ‘Spirit is the opposite of body or matter. We are to think of God, therefore, as without bodily parts, not to be seen by the bodily eye or grasped by the bodily hand. Matter is unconscious, inert, locally confined. Spirit is conscious, active, limited to no particular place’.
The essence of it is so simple that a little child can understand it. ‘When the Bible says that God has eyes, it means it that he can see. When it says that he has ears, it means that he can hear. When it says that he has a mouth and lips, it means that he can speak. And when it says that he has a hand and an arm, it means that he is strong and can do great things for us’.
We end as we began, with the parts of our own body. Let’s hear Paul again: ‘Do not offer the parts of your body to sin, as instruments of wickedness, but rather offer yourselves to God, as those who have been brought from death to life; and offer the parts of your body to him as instruments of righteousness’ (Romans 6.13). Later in the same chapter he takes it up again: ‘Just as you used to offer the parts of your body in slavery to impurity and to ever-increasing wickedness, so now offer them in slavery to righteousness leading to holiness’ (v.19). May we not take God himself as our example, in the use to which the bodily parts ascribed to him are put?
God is said by the prophet Habakkuk, for example, to be ‘of purer eyes than to see evil and cannot look at wrong’ (Ch.1:13). God never beholds wickedness with pleasure. We need on the one hand to train our eyes to look away from those wicked things that in our fallenness do give us pleasure. And on the other, we need to so become like God that the evil we cannot but see will be increasingly abhorrent to us. Or think of the eyes of the LORD being toward the righteous (Psalm 34:15). He sees us in our need and his heart goes out to us. Is there no word in that to us about the value of seeing for ourselves the situations God’s people are facing that we might offer them compassionate help?
What about our mouths? The ‘new self, says Paul in Ephesians 4, is ‘created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness’ (v.24). That likeness unquestionably shows in our speech. How truthfully and lovingly and wisely God speaks to us, always aiming at our spiritual good! And the more we are like him, the more our own speech will model itself on his.
So we could go on. God’s ears are ever open to the cries of his loved ones. Let our own ears be the same. What a need in the church for careful and sympathetic listeners! And then, as a final example, our hands and our arms. God uses the hands and arms ascribed to him to give us the help we need. They are at our service; strong for us. Let our own be at the service of others too; especially those who belong to the family of believers.
[1] Anthropomorphitans and the Anthropomorphites discussed above are one and the same. Dickson also references the Vorstians and Socinians as guilty of the same error.