Divine Embodiment: The Earliest Christian Understanding of God

David L. Paulsen

 

It is the first principle of the Gospel to know for a certainty the Character of God, and to know that we may converse with him as one man converses with another . . . and . . . if you were to see him today, you would see him like a man in form—like yourselves in all the person, image, and very form as a man.¹

So the Prophet Joseph Smith taught the Latter-day Saints assembled in a grove in Nauvoo, Illinois, on 7 April 1844. Joseph's understanding of God as a supremely perfect, embodied person, humanlike in form, departed radically from the traditional Christian understanding as typified by the Westminster Confession of Faith: "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."²

While creedal god-concepts like those found in the Westminster Confession were largely the product of rational theologiZing, Joseph's understanding was not derived in this way. Nor was it the outcome of a careful exegesis of relevant biblical texts. Rather, according to Joseph, it was based on God's own self-disclosures. God's initial self-disclosure to Joseph, known now as the first vision, occurred in 1820 in a grove of trees near Joseph's home in Palmyra, New York. On that occasion, God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared to Joseph as gloriously embodied persons and gave him instructions relating to their latter-day work.

Joseph's vision was tradition-shattering in many ways. In an age when Christians claimed that public revelation had forever ceased, it marked a reopening of the heavens—a resumption of direct revelation from God to man. And with the first vision and the many revelations that followed came Joseph Smith's creed-contradicting understanding of God: God is a supremely perfect divine person, humanlike in form, with whom man may converse as one man converses with another. Reflecting on this divine self-disclosure and others with which the Lord privileged him, Joseph once exclaimed: "Could you gaZe into heaven five minutes, you would know more than you would by reading all that ever was written on the subject."³

Though God's self-disclosures to Joseph radically contradicted the established Christian creeds, it is critical to note that Joseph never claimed that what he learned about God's nature was "new" truth, hidden by God until the nineteenth century. To the contrary, Joseph testified that his view was a restoration of the biblical and primitive Judeo-Christian understanding of God, an understanding that was lost because of a "falling away"—an apostasy—from the truths once held by the earliest Christians.⁴

My study of the relevant evidence convinces me that Joseph is correct: biblical writings and the documents of formative Judaism and primitive Christianity consistently portray God as an embodied person, humanlike in form. In this paper, I detail this evidence, showing that the later Christian loss of the knowledge that God is embodied resulted from the attempt of early Christian apologists to reconcile their beliefs with their dominantly Greek culture.

 

Primitive Christian Belief in an Embodied Deity

Some of the evidence I cite for primitive Christian belief in an embodied deity is indirect and circumstantial, but when all the evidence is considered cumulatively, it seems quite convincing. Ironically, a considerable amount of this evidence is drawn from the writings of two of the most uncompromising incorporealists, Origen and Augustine. Given their strong opposition to the doctrine of divine embodiment, the evidence they provide is particularly persuasive.

First and Second Centuries

That the earliest Christians believed God to be embodied is admitted by the noted church historian Adolph Harnack, though he buries this admission in two footnotes in his seven-volume work, History of Dogma. Writing about first-century believers, he explains:

God was naturally conceived and represented as corporeal by uncultured Christians, though not by these alone, as the later controversies prove (e.g., Orig. contra Melito; see also Tertull. De anima). In the case of the cultured, the idea of a corporeality of God may be traced back to Stoic influences; in the case of the uncultured, popular ideas co-operated with the sayings of the Old Testament literally understood, and the impression of the Apocalyptic images.⁵

He further concedes, "In the second century . . . realistic eschatological ideas no doubt continued to foster in wide circles the popular idea that God had a form and a kind of corporeal existence."⁶

Harnack identifies several possible sources of primitive⁷ Christian belief in an embodied deity including popular religious ideas, Stoic metaphysics, and literally construed Old Testament scripture. It is common knowledge that ordinary persons, including the early Greeks,⁸ have always (as Harnack suggests) naturally conceived God (or the gods) to be embodied. Further, Harnack proposes that Christians influenced by Stoic views could have reached the same conclusion on metaphysical grounds. From the Stoic beliefs that only matter is real and that God is real, it follows that God is a material being.⁹

The Hebrew Bible

Whatever the impact of popular belief and Stoic metaphysics on the primitive Christian understanding of God, perhaps a more significant influence was the Hebrew Bible. J. N. D. Kelly informs us, "from the apostolic age to the middle of the second century . . . there was as yet no officially sanctioned New Testament canon."¹⁰ Indeed, "for the first hundred years, at least, of its history the Church's Scriptures, in the precise sense of the word, consisted exclusively of the Old Testament."¹¹ And as Harnack reminds us, the Old Testament literally construed describes God in decidedly anthropomorphic terms. For example, Edmond Cherbonnier has shown that the God of biblical revelation, in contrast with the deity of Platonist metaphysics, was personal, not abstract; invisible as a matter of choice, not inherently; everlasting or enduring through time, not timeless; and ethically constant, not metaphysically immutable. He concludes that in many respects, the God of the Bible has more in common with the gods of the Greek and Roman pantheon than with Plato's idea of ultimate Being or Aristotle's Unmoved Mover.¹²

More to the point, many biblical passages straightforwardly describe God as embodied. For instance, Genesis 1:26 records, "And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness."¹³ Even more explicit are the many references to God's body parts, such as "I [Jacob] have seen God face to face" (Genesis 32:30); "they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet . . ." (Exodus 24:10); "the Lord spake unto Moses face to face" (Exodus 33:11); and "I will take away mine hand, and thou shalt see my back parts: but my face shall not be seen" ( Exodus 33:23).¹⁴ It is hard to imagine a being with a face, feet, hands, and back parts but without a body.

God also appears embodied in New Testament accounts of divine appearances. For instance, Acts 7:56 tells of Stephen seeing the Son of Man standing on the right hand of God.¹⁵ And Hebrews 1:3 informs us that Jesus Christ, a gloriously embodied being, humanlike in form, is in "the brightness of [the Father's] glory, and the express image of his person." On the basis of scriptures such as these, early Christians no doubt simply took it for granted that God has a body in form like man's. But this does not mean they thought of God as similar to man in all respects. Unlike man, for example, God is holy, as in Hosea 11:9: "For I am God, and not man; the Holy One in the midst of thee." Cherbonnier acknowledges that a considerable variety exists in scripture and that this and similar passages do point away from an overly simple anthropomorphism. However, passages that distinguish God from man do not indicate that the later biblical prophets gave up the ideas that God has a body and that man's body was created in his image. To the contrary, Cherbonnier claims that modern scholarship, "by restoring these passages to their context and so recovering their original meaning, reverses such an interpretation."¹⁶

Only after divine embodiment was rejected on philosophical (primarily Platonist) grounds was the image of God identified with the soul or the rational aspect of the soul. Once Platonism took hold of Christianity, biblical passages referring to God's body or bodily parts were explicitly given figurative interpretations. While the philosophical critique of anthropomorphic conceptions of deity has its roots in ancient Greece and while there is evidence that anthropomorphism was an issue for the translators of the Septuagint,¹⁷ Philo Judaeus (20 BC—ad 40), a Jewish Platonist educated in Alexandria, appears to be the first thinker who applied allegorical interpretations to the anthropomorphic passages in the Old Testament. Although Philo's views were not generally accepted by his mainstream Jewish contemporaries, Albinus, a second-century non-Christian and Middle-Platonist, did follow Philo's lead and, in turn, greatly influenced Origen and later Christian thinkers.¹⁸

First Century Judaism

Aside from direct revelation as a source for the primitive Christian belief that God is embodied, Harnack fails to mention another, no doubt powerful, influence—the understanding of God within the first-century Jewish communities out of which Christianity first emerged. According to J. N. D. Kelly,

Judaism was the cradle in which Christianity was nurtured, the source to which it was uniquely indebted. It left a deep imprint, as is generally agreed, on the Church's liturgy and ministry, and an even deeper one on its teaching. In evaluating this impact, we must take account both of Palestinian Judaism and of the helleniZed version current at Alexandria. The former can be dealt with quite briefly, for the heyday of its influence falls outside this book in the apostolic age, when it moulded the thought of all New Testament writers. Yet, in spite of the early rupture between Christians and Jews, it would be a grave error to dismiss it as a negligible force in our period. Until the middle of the second century, when Hellenistic ideas began to come to the fore, Christian theology was taking shape in predominantly Judaistic moulds, and the categories of thought used by almost all Christian writers before the Apologists were largely Jewish. ¹⁹

Those early Christian categories, based as they were upon a literal reading of the Hebrew scriptures, were unabashedly anthropomorphic.²⁰ For instance, James Drummond admits that even as the Jews advanced theologically to a higher conception of God, "we can hardly doubt that the mass of the people would be satisfied with [the scriptures'] literal meaning, and that their idea of God was the purest anthropomorphism."²¹ Similarly, George Foot Moore claims that Palestinian Judaism was "innocent . . . of an 'abstract' or 'transcendent'—or any other sort of a philosophical—idea of God."²²Indeed, he asserts, "the philosophical horror of 'anthropomorphisms' which Philo . . . entertained was unknown to the Palestinian schools. They endeavored to think of God worthily and to speak of him reverently; but their criterion was the Scripture and the instinct of piety, not an alien metaphysics."²³

Thoroughly influencing the basic concepts of formative Judaism was, indeed, the understanding of God's "incarnation," which Jacob Neusner describes as "a commonplace for Judaisms from the formation of Scripture forward."²⁴ By incarnation, Neusner means "the representation of God in the flesh, as corporeal, consubstantial in emotion and virtue with human beings, and sharing in the modes and means of action carried out by mortals, . . . doing deeds that women and men do in the way in which they do them."²⁵ So powerful and natural was Judaism's "rich legacy of anthropomorphism"²⁶ that Rabbi Hoshaiah could tell a story about the time when God came to create man and how the ministering angels mistook Adam for God: "What did the Holy One, blessed be He, do? He caused sleep to fall upon him, and so all knew that he was [but mortal] man."²⁷ Of course, in this portrayal of divinity the purpose was never to confuse God with man but rather to teach an understanding "that draws humanity upward and does not bring God downward."²⁸

Nowhere is this Jewish anthropomorphism more evident than in the teachings of several classical rabbis. For instance, in his recently published study, Alon Goshen Gottstein claims:

In all of rabbinic literature [covering both the tannaitic (70—200 a.d.) and amoraic (220—500 a.d.) periods] there is not a single statement that categorically denies that God has body or form.

In my understanding, the question of whether the rabbis believed in a God who has form is one that needs little discussion. . . . Instead of asking, "Does God have a body?" we should inquire, "What kind of body does God have?"²⁹

Gottstein further contends: "The bodily meaning is the only meaning of Zelem [image] in rabbinic literature. This suggestion is borne out in all tannaitic and amoraic sources."³⁰

The rabbinic interpretation of the image of God as referring to the body is clearly shown in the following representative selection, a story about Rabbi Hillel:

His disciples asked him: "Master, whither are you bound?" He answered them: "To perform a religious duty." "What," they asked, "is this religious duty?" He said to them: "To wash in the bath-house." Said they: "Is this a religious duty?" "Yes," he replied, "if the statues of kings, which are erected in theatres and circuses, are scoured and washed by the man who is appointed to look after them, and who thereby obtains his maintenance through them—nay more, he is exalted in the company of the great of the kingdom—how much more I, who have been created in the Image and Likeness."³¹

Rabbinic anthropomorphism so strikingly contrasts with later (third century on) Christian immaterialism and so closely parallels Joseph Smith's understanding of God that it will be helpful to summariZe Gottstein's account of the rabbinic concepts in some detail.

First, Gottstein shows that rabbinic anthropomorphism was not a crude notion in which God's body (or even Adam's body created in its image) was seen as identical or very similar to our present fallen human bodies.³² For example, one rabbinic account describes Adam's body as one of great beauty and light.

Resh Lakish, in the name of R. Simeon the son of Menasya, said: The apple of Adam's heel outshone the globe of the sun; how much more so the brightness of his face! Nor need you wonder. In the ordinary way if a person makes salvers [servants], one for himself and one for his household, whose will he make more beautiful? Not his own? Similarly, Adam was created for the service of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the globe of the sun for the service of mankind.³³

Thus Adam's original body was more radiant than the sun, but God's body, in whose image Adam's was made, is still more brilliant and beautiful;³⁴ though God's body resembles the human body in form, it differs from it in function. Gottstein quotes a passage from Peter in the Jewish-Christian Pseudo-Clementine Homilies that parallels notions found in Sefer YeZira:

He has the most beautiful Form for the sake of man, in order that the pure in heart shall be able to see Him [cf. Matt. 5:8], that they shall rejoice on account of whatever they have endured. For He has stamped man as it were with the greatest seal, with His own Form, in order that he shall rule and be lord over all things, and that all things shall serve him. For this reason, he who having judged that He is the All and man His image (eikōn)—He being invisible and His image, man, visible—will honour the image, which is man.³⁵

Next, Gottstein proposes a model for reconciling apparently contradictory rabbinic passages pertaining to the issue of whether man, as the result of sin, lost the image of God.

As we have seen, Adam's Zelem is his luminous body. In other sources, such as the story of Hillel washing his body, the Zelem referred to the physical body. Zelem can thus refer to various levels, or aspects, all of which bear a resemblance to the physical body. I would propose that these various levels, or various bodies, reflect one another. The physical body is a reflection of the body of light. . . . [A] kind of graded devolutionary process . . . may be a model for two ways of talking about Zelem. The Zelem in its original form may be lost, but the dimmer reflection of this form is extant in the physical body, which may still be spoken of as Zelem.³⁶

Finally, Gottstein ventures a partial explanation of why the rabbinic interpretation of image is exclusively bodily compared with the subsequent nonbodily interpretations given by Christian immaterialists. Rabbinic anthropology did not consider the soul to be immaterial or radically distinct from the body, as Platonists held it to be. He elaborates:

Rabbinic anthropology differs . . . from Hellenistic and later Christian anthropology. The distinction between spirit and matter is not known in rabbinic literature.³⁷ . . . Metaphysically soul and body form a whole, rather than a polarity. Crudely put, the soul is like the battery that operates an electronic gadget. It may be different and originally external to the gadget, but the difference is not one of essence. . . . More significantly, the gadget and its power source ultimately belong together, rather than apart. Thus, the soul is the vitaliZing agent, whose proper place is in the body, not out of it.³⁸

Consistently, then, in rabbinic eschatology "the future life takes the form of resurrection of the dead, rather than the eternal life of the soul."³⁹

Even in first-century Alexandria, where Hellenistic ideas were already firmly entrenched, Jewish incorporealism was a minority position. For example, Harry Austryn Wolfson, author of the standard biography of Philo, tells us that in his writings Philo often opposed a traditional school of Alexandrian Judaism that interpreted the scriptures literally. In Wolfson's words, these traditionalists "display a self-confidence and self-contentment which flow from . . . a faith in the loyalty of their adherents among the great masses of the Alexandrian Jews."⁴⁰ He adds:

The great mass of believers who will not have felt the impact of the foreign philosophy will see no need of any reconciliation between them. This great mass of believers will either remain indifferent to the innovations of the philosophic reconcilers, or will superciliously look upon them as mere triflers, or, if given provocation, will militantly oppose them as disturbers of the religious peace.⁴¹

In the end, Wolfson admits that despite Philo's effort to synthesiZe Jewish belief and Greek thought, "Alexandrian Judaism at the time of Philo was of the same stock as Pharisaic Judaism, which flourished in Palestine at that time."⁴² Thus apparently in the first century the Jews in Alexandria, as well as in Palestine, almost universally believed in an embodied God.⁴³ And, as Kelly has reminded us, first-century Jewish thought was the mold in which primitive Christian theology took shape.⁴⁴

Though data pertaining to Christian belief during the earliest period of Christian history is meager, it strongly supports the thesis that the earliest Christians generally believed God to be embodied. Thus the claim that the doctrine of divine embodiment was a restoration of primitive Christian understanding seems well corroborated.

 

Second-and Third-Century Belief
in an Embodied God

Immaterialism was introduced into Christian theology at least as early as the mid-to-late second century, with Clement of Alexandria (about AD 150—213) being perhaps the first to unequivocally refer to God as immaterial.⁴⁵ Immaterialists ultimately triumphed, but not without a three-century-long struggle with Christians who held tenaciously to the primitive doctrine of divine embodiment.

Origen as Witness

The writings of Origen (about AD 185—253) provide substantial evidence that Christians in the second and third centuries generally continued to believe in God's embodiment—despite the efforts of Platonists both within and without the church to persuade them otherwise. Origen adopted the Platonistic metaphysics of his culture. He then devoted his life to the exegesis of biblical texts in an effort to construct and clarify Christian doctrine to fit his incorporealistic concept of God.⁴⁶ Origen's devotion to this task adds great evidentiary weight to his reluctant admissions, explicit and tacit, that his Christian contemporaries generally believed in an embodied God. Origen's writings support this conclusion in at least six ways.

1. In his most important theological work, De Principiis (On First Principles), Origen enumerated the doctrines that he claims were delivered to the church by the apostles. Significantly, he did not include the doctrine of divine incorporeality on the list.⁴⁷

2. Origen explicitly acknowledged that when he wrote (around the middle of the third century AD), the issue of divine embodiment had yet to be settled in the church: "How God himself is to be understood,—whether as corporeal, and formed according to some shape, or of a different nature from bodies—[is] a point which is not clearly indicated in our teaching." He thus proposed to make the issue a matter of rational and scriptural investigation with a view to formulating a coherent body of doctrine "by means of illustrations and arguments,—either those . . . discovered in holy Scripture, or . . . deduced by closely tracing out the consequences and following a correct method."⁴⁸

3. Origen discussed first- and second-century word usages dealing with divine corporeality, ignorance of which had contributed to misunderstanding of some biblical and other early texts. For example, he pointed out that nowhere in the Bible is God explicitly described as incorporeal; the Greek term for incorporeal, asomatos, does not appear there. Even where that term does appear in early nonscriptural Christian writings, Origen claimed that it does not have the same meaning that the Greek and Gentile philosophers assigned to it (i.e., having no material body). Rather, he asserted, Christian writers simply used the term to refer to a material body that is much finer and less palpable than those that can be perceived through the senses.

For example, he explained that in the treatise, The Doctrine of Peter, where the resurrected Jesus is quoted as saying to his disciples, "I am not an incorporeal demon," this statement

must be understood to mean that He had not such a body as demons have, which is naturally fine, and thin as if formed of air (and for this reason is either considered or called by many incorporeal), but that He had a solid and palpable body. Now, according to human custom, everything which is not of that nature is called by the simple or ignorant incorporeal; as if one were to say that the air which we breathe was incorporeal, because it is not a body of such a nature as can be grasped and held, or can offer resistance to pressure.⁴⁹

Among the early Christian writers who described God as asomatos, Origen was the first (with the possible exception of Clement of Alexandria) to consistently use the term in its technical Platonist sense. In doing so, Origen followed the lead of second-century non-Christian middle-Platonists such as Albinus.⁵⁰

More unexpectedly, Origen informs us that the New Testament passage "God is a Spirit" (John 4:24)—the proof text now cited most frequently in support of the doctrine of incorporeality—was initially understood as evidence against it.

I know that some will attempt to say that, even according to the declarations of our own Scriptures, God is a body, because . . . they find it said . . . in the Gospel according to John, that "God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth." . . . Spirit, according to them, [is] to be regarded as nothing else than a body.⁵¹

This surprising statement is easily explained. Pneuma (translated "spirit") literally means " air" or "breath," implying that spirit is composed of a material substance, one of the four basic elements. Furthermore, since Christian Stoics believed that existence was confined to material bodies, God (being spirit) was the purest of all bodies.⁵²

4. Origen engaged in sustained polemics against those who affirmed God's humanlike embodiment. His argument has two parts. First, he tried to show that corporeality is logically incompatible with philosophical (Platonist) conceptions of the divine nature. Second, by means of painstaking exegesis and allegorical interpretation, he labored to convince his fellow Christians that the scriptures, notwithstanding their literal import, do not disprove divine incorporeality. It is instructive to consider some instances of the latter argument because they indicate the popular Christian understanding of the scriptures that Origen inveighed against.⁵³

Origen argued that if scriptural passages that describe God as spirit, light, fire, and so forth were literally understood, they would erroneously suggest that God is corporeal. Consequently, he advocated a metaphorical interpretation.⁵⁴ For example, Origen argued that Genesis 1:26, properly interpreted, does not show God to be corporeal.

We do not understand, however, this man indeed whom Scripture says was made "according to the image of God" to be corporeal. For the form of the body does not contain the image of God, nor is the corporeal man said to be "made," but "formed," as is written in the words that follow. For the text says: "And God formed man," that is fashioned, "from the slime of the earth."

But it is our inner man, invisible, incorporeal, incorruptible, and immortal which is made "according to the image of God." For it is in such qualities as these that the image of God is more correctly understood. But if anyone suppose that this man who is made "according to the image and likeness of God" is made of flesh, he will appear to represent God himself as made of flesh and in human form. It is most clearly impious to think this about God.⁵⁵

Origen also made light of an anthropomorphic interpretation of Genesis 1:26 by showing the absurdity that results from interpreting other passages the same way.

In brief, those carnal men who have no understanding of the meaning of divinity suppose, if they read anywhere in the Scriptures of God that "heaven is my throne, and the earth my footstool," that God has so large a body that they think he sits in heaven and stretches out his feet to the earth.⁵⁶

Origen acknowledged that "the Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance," because in many scriptural passages God is described as speaking to men. But since, as Origen maintained, "the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions," he attempted to show how God can speak to men without the physical ability to perform the function of speaking.

But in this manner God is said to have spoken to man: he either inspires the heart of each of the saints or causes the sound of a voice to reach his ears. So also when he makes known that what each one says or does is known to him the Scriptures says that he "has heard"; and when he makes known that we have done something unjust, it says that he "is angry"; when he censures us as ungrateful for his benefits, it says he "repents," making known indeed these things by these dispositions which are common to men, but not performing them by these members which belong to corporeal nature.⁵⁷

Origen's criticism of his fellow-Christians' belief in divine embodiment was no doubt connected with his Platonistic low estimation of matter and the body.⁵⁸ His choice, as a young man, to castrate himself testified of his contempt for the body, although it seems he later judged this action rash.⁵⁹ Origen believed that the body was a humiliation—a punishment for the fall from the presence of God. Nonetheless, it served as a means of training whereby we may return to God's presence.⁶⁰ Thus, in Origen's view, the body had an instrumental value, but the spiritual life after the body's death was much to be preferred:

I think that they love God with all their soul who with a great desire to be in union with God withdraw and separate their soul not only from the earthly body but also from everything material. Such men accept the putting away of the body of humiliation without distress or emotion when the time come[s] for them to put off the body of death by what is commonly regarded as death.⁶¹

Since Origen saw even human embodiment as a humiliation, he vigorously contested divine embodiment.

5. Origen specifically included Melito as among the prominent second-century Christians who taught that God is embodied. Not much is known about Melito's life. Neither his date and place of birth nor his date of death are known, although he was probably dead by AD 197. He was active during the imperial reigns of Antoninus Pius (AD 138—161) and Marcus Aurelius (AD 161—180). Though he apparently spent some of his earlier life in Syria, he was made bishop of Sardis in Lydia in about 168 or 169. As bishop, he was polemically engaged as a Quartodeciman "in the controversy concerning Easter."⁶² The only complete text that remains from Melito, Peri Pascha (On Easter), dealt with this controversy.

Melito was a prolific writer, authoring some eighteen to twenty works. Of these, only five or six have been definitely identified, and these are mostly in fragments.⁶³ Although the extant fragments provide no affirmation of divine corporeality, Origen's testimony, recorded about fifty years after Melito's death, explicitly identified Melito as among the Christians who taught that God has a humanlike body.⁶⁴

Some have suggested that Origen was mistaken in attributing a corporealist view to Melito. They claim that Origen had no basis for this attribution other than a very weak inference from the title of a treatise, On the Corporeality of God,⁶⁵ which Eusebius included in his enumeration of Melito's works. Because the title of this work could also be translated as On God Incarnate, one commentator, while admitting that "it is not at all impossible that a writer as orthodox as Melito . . . held the opinions which Origen imputes to him," nonetheless questions Origen's claim:

Here occurs the doubt: Had Origen himself read the treatise of Melito, or did he know nothing but the title, and rashly jump to the conclusion that Melito held views akin to those which he was at the moment combating? If Melito be the author of the Syriac apology no fault can be found with the spirituality of his conceptions of God. It does not seem possible now absolutely to determine the question. We are ourselves inclined to believe that Origen made a mistake, and that the subject of Melito's treatise was the Incarnation.⁶⁶

Such speculation appears unwarranted. Given Origen's vigorous efforts to persuade his fellow Christians to give up their corporealism, it seems totally incongruous that he, without having read Melito's book and without any further evidence, would have attributed this view to a respected bishop of the Church. Moreover, Origen's testimony is further corroborated by Gennadius who, writing in about AD 425, affirmed that Melito was responsible for a sect of Christians who followed him in the belief that the body of man is made in the image of God.⁶⁷ Furthermore, since the doctrine of divine incorporeality eventually became Christian orthodoxy, the fact that Melito taught God's corporeality could help explain the otherwise mysterious disappearance of this work and other writings.⁶⁸

6. Finally, it was Origen who preserved the testimony of Celsus, a second-century Middle-Platonist and non-Christian who wrote a comprehensive critique of Christianity (about AD 178) entitled Alethes Logos (True Doctrine), which was later suppressed or destroyed. It is known only through quotations in Origen's work, Contra Celsum, composed seventy years later. Celsus attempted to demonstrate the inadequacy of Christian doctrine, especially the doctrine of God, on the basis of assumptions drawn from Platonist philosophical theology.⁶⁹

According to Origen, Celsus argued "at length" against what he understood to be the Christian belief that God "is corporeal by nature and has a body like the human form." To give the idea of divine corporeality as little attention as possible, Origen did not spell out Celsus's sustained anticorporeality arguments, explaining that if Celsus "invents out of his own head ideas which he heard from nobody, or, to grant that he heard them from somebody, notions which he derived from some simple and naïve folk who do not know the meaning of the Bible, there is no need for us to concern ourselves with unnecessary argument."⁷⁰

Interestingly, in responding to Celsus—a fellow Platonist whose objections to divine corporeality he shared—Origen feigned ignorance of any Christians actually teaching the doctrine. But as already shown above, Origen elsewhere reckoned the learned bishop Melito among the Christian teachers of the doctrine, and throughout his writings he engaged in sustained polemics against his fellow Christians who believed the doctrine. Thus, it seems clear from the evidence in Origen's own writings that Celsus was neither misinformed nor did he misrepresent second-century Christians' belief. They did, indeed, believe that God is embodied. And from Origen's testimony, it appears that this belief continued to be generally held in the third century as well.

Tertullian as Witness

Origen's implication that contemporary Christians who believed God to be embodied were confined to simple and naive folk is contradicted by one of the most cultured of all his Christian contemporaries—Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus (about AD 150—220). Tertullian stoutly maintained his belief that God is embodied and passionately resisted attempts by immaterialists to PlatoniZe Christian doctrine. Tertullian not only personally believed in an embodied God, he claimed this to be the teaching of the Christian churches of his day, which they, in turn, derived from the original apostolic churches. He articulated in rich detail a unified corporealist understanding of their understanding of God.

Tertullian's genius with language allowed him to craft brilliant polemical theological treatises, which contributed profoundly to the clarification of Christian doctrine on topics such as the Incarnation, the Trinity, and the Sacraments.⁷¹ As far as is known, Tertullian was the first to coin the Latin trinitas.⁷²

Tertullian was active in a Christian movement known at the time as the New Prophecy.⁷³ This movement attempted to recover the prophetic revelation and spiritual gifts characteristic of the apostolic age, to preserve pristine Christian doctrine against philosophical intrusions, and to prepare a people for Christ's second coming, which was believed to be imminent. The movement apparently began about AD 170 in Mysia, a remote village in Phrygia, when a man named Montanus began to prophesy, claiming revelation through the Paraclete (or Holy Ghost). Soon after, he was joined by two prophetesses, Prisca (or Priscillia) and Maximillia.

All three spoke as the mouthpieces of God himself: their possession was truly divine, not the doing of a mere angel or messenger from heaven. In them God spoke, the Almighty, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The prophets played a consciously passive role as God's instruments: they were the lyre which the Spirit plucked like a plectrum. Through them God spoke directly to the world, and especially to the humble, in order to give them the courage to die as martyrs. The end of the world was approaching, and the New Jerusalem (Rev. 21. 1 ff.) would descend on PepuZa in Phrygia. In a word, Montanism was a millenarian movement.⁷⁴

Some Asian churches declared Montanus's prophecies "to be inspired by the Devil, and the Montanists were excommunicated, then vilified in slanderous pamphlets."⁷⁵ Despite this opposition, the movement spread rapidly to Rome, Alexandria, and even Gaul. It achieved its greatest success in Carthage, where Tertullian became a partisan, as Timothy Barnes explains:

Since Christianity was a revealed religion, [Tertullian] was unwilling to believe that revelation had ceased in the Apostolic age. Inexorably, therefore, he was led on to espouse the Montanist cause. The issues were simple in his eyes. Recognition of the Paraclete, whom God has promised to send (Jn. 14. 16), severed him from the 'psychici'. The Paraclete, the 'deductor omnis veritatis' (Jn. 16. 13), gave necessary counsel to every Christian. Its promptings preserved doctrinal orthodoxy from the assaults of heresy.⁷⁶

Tertullian himself sought to preserve original Christian doctrine, as founded on revelation, against the encroachments of Platonistic immaterialism. His understanding of Christianity included at least six points that support divine embodiment. He argued that (1) God, like all that is, is embodied, (2) beings of spirit may take on more solid bodily form, (3) Christ in the Incarnation specifically took on flesh that was unqualifiedly human, (4) human flesh is a sacred and glorious substance, (5) the same fleshy body that falls in human death rises in the resurrection, and (6) Christ's resurrected body is an everlasting and crucial attribute of the Godhead.⁷⁷ These complementary points form part of Tertullian's unified explication of his corporealist Christian faith.

1. Tertullian believed that God is and has always been a material body.⁷⁸ He believed that anything that exists is material,⁷⁹ though not all material is the rough stuff we interact with in daily life. In an apologetic work addressed to pagans hostile to Christianity, Tertullian expressed approval of Zeno's model, which "separates the matter of world from God . . . [in which] the latter has percolated through the former, like honey through the comb."⁸⁰ Addressing heretics who taught that the Word was immaterial (AD 210),⁸¹ Tertullian defined God's materiality as a more fluid or subtle mode of matter than that which comprises the world. He is also "a body, although 'God is a Spirit,'" for Spirit "has a bodily substance of its own kind."⁸²

To support his claim that the creator of the material earth must be a body, Tertullian presented an argument reminiscent of modern versions of the so-called mind-body problem.

How could it be, that He Himself is nothing, without whom nothing was made? How could He who is empty have made things which are solid, and He who is void have made things which are full, and He who is incorporeal have made things which have body? For although a thing may sometimes be made different from him by whom it is made, yet nothing can be made by that which is a void and empty thing. ⁸³

This argument attempts to show that the Word, by whom the worlds were made (Hebrews 1:2), must be a material body. The same argument applies to the Father, thus supporting Tertullian's understanding of the Father as Spirit and therefore materially embodied, although in the original text, Tertullian presented the Father's corporeality as needless of argumentative support; he gave the Father's corporeality as another reason to believe in the Son's corporeality.⁸⁴

Tertullian's notion of material Spirit included attributes of location, extension, shape, texture, rarity, and density. In arguing against Hermogenes and others misled by Plato and the Stoics (in AD 206),⁸⁵ he described how God's breath, which is a portion of his Spirit,⁸⁶ condensed and became Adam's soul:

After God hath breathed upon the face of man the breath of life, and man had consequently become a living soul, surely that breath must have passed through the face at once into the interior structure, and have spread itself throughout all the spaces of the body; and as soon as by the divine inspiration it had become condensed, it must have impressed itself on each internal feature, which the condensation had filled in, and so have been, as it were, congealed in shape, (or stereotyped). Hence, by this densifying process, there arose a fixing of the soul's corporeity; and by the impression its figure was formed and molded. This is the inner man, different from the outer, but yet one in the twofold condition. It, too, has eyes and ears of its own.⁸⁷

Thus, according to Tertullian, before its impression in the body, the Spirit of God apparently has no fixed shape, but it has extension and position so that it can pass through Adam's face and flow through his body before condensing and transforming into soul.

Even in his earliest writings (between AD 198 and 203), Tertullian represented the Spirit of God explicitly as "subtlety" material, having location and form, although its shape may not be fixed. He described the Spirit of God as corporeal, although not human in form.

The Spirit of God, who since the beginning was borne upon the waters, would as baptiZer abide upon waters. A holy thing in fact was carried upon a holy thing—or rather, that which carried acquired holiness from that which was carried upon it. Any matter placed beneath another is bound to take to itself the quality of that which is suspended over it: and especially must corporal matter take up spiritual quality, which because of the subtlety of the substance it belongs to finds it easy to penetrate and inhere.⁸⁸

2. Tertullian did not think it strange that a being of subtle spirit should take more solid bodily form. He considered the human spirit to be one of the inseparable faculties of the human soul,⁸⁹ which has the same form as the body of flesh it inhabits. He used reason, religious experience, and biblical revelation to support this belief.

CriticiZing Plato, Tertullian argued rationally that the soul must be corporeal in order to (1) sympathiZe and interact with the body, (2) move the body, and (3) be described as departing the body at the time of death.⁹⁰ Then he reasoned that since the soul is corporeal,

We shall not be at all inconsistent if we declare that the more usual characteristics of a body, such as invariably accrue to the corporeal condition, belong also to the soul—such as form and limitation; and that triad of dimensions. . . . What now remains but for us to give the soul a figure [effigiem]?⁹¹

To his rational argument that a soul must have humanlike form, Tertullian added evidence drawn from the religious experiences of a contemporary Christian woman associated with New Prophecy. She claimed:

"There has been shown to me a soul in bodily shape, and a spirit has been in the habit of appearing to me; not, however, a void and empty illusion, but such as would offer itself to be even grasped by the hand, soft and transparent and of an etherial colour, and in form resembling that of a human being in every respect."⁹²

Finally, he rounded out his case for the humanlike form of the soul by an appeal to biblical authority. For instance, he relied on the New Testament account of LaZarus and the rich man in hell (Luke 16:23—24): "[The soul], too, has eyes and ears of its own . . . ; it has, moreover all the other members of the body. . . . Thus it happens that the rich man in hell has a tongue and poor (LaZarus) a finger and Abraham a bosom."⁹³

Tertullian believed that angels, though beings of spirit, appear in temporary solid bodies. Furthermore, addressing heretics who claimed Christ's corporeality was illusory (about AD 206), Tertullian even attributed to the Holy Spirit the power to take literal bodily form.

The Gospel of John . . . declares that the Spirit descended in the body of a dove, and sat upon the Lord. When the said Spirit was in this condition, He was as truly a dove as He was also a spirit; nor did He destroy His own proper substance by the assumption of an extraneous substance. But you ask what becomes of the dove's body, after the return of the Spirit back to heaven, and similarly in the case of the angels. Their withdrawal was effected in the same manner as their appearance had been. . . . Still there was solidity in their bodily substance, whatever may have been the force by which the body became visible.⁹⁴

3. Tertullian believed that the Word took on human flesh when he was born as the Son of God. Tertullian wrote an entire book, On the Flesh of Christ, to argue that Christ's flesh was very much human flesh; that the soul, which gave that flesh life, was of the same sort that inhabits other human bodies; and that Christ's humanity was essential to the purpose of his life and work on earth. He affirmed that Christ's was a flesh "suffused with blood, built up with bones, interwoven with nerves, entwined with veins, a flesh which knew how to be born, and how to die, human without doubt, as born of a human being." Such a flesh was necessary so that Christ could suffer and die to redeem mankind. While fully divine in spirit, Christ was fully human in body: "The powers of the Spirit, proved Him to be God, His sufferings attested the flesh of man. If His powers were not without the Spirit in like manner, were not His sufferings without the flesh."⁹⁵

4. In no way did Tertullian consider it degrading for God to take bodily or even human form. As part of his multifaceted argument that Christ really dwelt in human flesh, Tertullian argued vehemently for the worthiness of human flesh. To those who considered the flesh a shameful thing, Tertullian said of the condition of being clothed in flesh:

And are you for turning these conditions into occasions of blushing to the very creature whom He has redeemed, (censuring them), too, us unworthy of Him who certainly would not have redeemed them had He not loved them? Our birth He reforms from death by a second birth from heaven; our flesh He restores from every harassing malady; when leprous, He cleanses it of the stain; when blind, He rekindles its light; when palsied, He renews its strength; when possessed with devils, He exorcises it; when dead, He reanimates it,—then shall we blush to own it?⁹⁶

Far from an embarrassment, Tertullian considered the body and its process of generation to be sacred, calling it a "reverend course of nature."⁹⁷ Elsewhere he reiterated that "nature should be to us an object of reverence, not of blushes."⁹⁸

Tertullian also denied that the flesh is the source of sin.

[The soul] suffuses even the flesh (by reason of their conjunction) with its own shame. Now although the flesh is sinful, . . . yet the flesh has not such ignominy on its own account. For it is not of itself that it thinks anything or feels anything for the purpose of advising or commanding sin. . . . It is only a ministering thing.⁹⁹

Thus Tertullian held that the soul is the origin of sinful impulses and that the flesh is sinful only as an abettor in the commission of the sins the soul initiates.¹⁰⁰

Far from being a degrading substance, Tertullian maintained that earthly flesh is a glorified substance, since God created it.

You have both the clay made glorious by the hand of God, and the flesh more glorious still by His breathing upon it, by virtue of which the flesh not only laid aside its clayey rudiments, but also took on itself the ornaments of the soul.¹⁰¹

He further compared the flesh to splendid gold, which similarly derives from the refining of earth.¹⁰²

5. Tertullian believed that the resurrected rise in a body of flesh. Arguing against those led by philosophy to deny bodily resurrection, Tertullian points to Christ's fleshly resurrection as paradigmatic of our own; stated of Christ:

For the very same body which fell in death, and which lay in the sepulchre, did also rise again; (and it was) not so much Christ in the flesh, as the flesh in Christ. If, therefore, we are to rise again after the example of Christ, who rose in the flesh, we shall certainly not rise according to that example, unless we also shall ourselves rise again in the flesh.¹⁰³

To clarify Paul's teaching regarding the resurrection—"It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body" (1 Corinthians 15:44)—Tertullian explained the difference between natural and spiritual bodies: "As therefore the flesh was at first an animate (or natural) body on receiving the soul, so at last will it become a spiritual body when invested with the spirit [of God]."¹⁰⁴ Thus Tertullian believed that resurrected flesh is flesh similar to mortal flesh, but the spiritual body of the resurrection is a fleshy body that has been purified by accepting God's Spirit.

In a similar manner, Tertullian claimed, our (fleshy) bodies may become spiritual even in mortality.

First of all there comes the (natural) soul, that is to say, the breath, to the people that are on the earth,—in other words, to those who act carnally in the flesh; then afterwards comes the Spirit to those who walk thereon,—that is, who subdue the works of the flesh; because the apostle also says, that "that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, (or in possession of the natural soul,) and afterward that which is spiritual." ¹⁰⁵

The fact that a person's body can become a spiritual one while it is still mortal further clarifies that the spiritual body is material. Clearly, for Tertullian, the spiritual body of the Resurrection is a body of flesh, purified by the Spirit of God.

6. Tertullian believed that the Word not only took on human flesh when he was born as the son of God, but that he also will retain that flesh forever in its resurrected, glorified state.

He who suffered "will come again from heaven," [ Acts 1:2], and by all shall He be seen, who rose again from the dead. They too who crucified Him shall see and acknowledge Him; that is to say, His very flesh, against which they spent their fury, and without which it would be impossible for Himself either to exist or to be seen; so that they must blush with shame who affirm that His flesh sits in heaven void of sensation, like a sheath only, Christ being withdrawn from it; as well as those who (maintain) that His flesh and soul are just the same thing, or else that His soul is all that exists, but that His flesh no longer lives.¹⁰⁶

Without his body, Christ could not have accomplished his mission on earth, and deprived of it, he would not be Christ. Insofar as Christ and his mission contribute to the glory of the Godhead, so contributes the flesh. Tertullian's belief clearly contrasts with later interpretations of the Resurrection that deny Christ's eternal embodiment.

Tertullian's defense of God as materially embodied, of the Resurrection of the flesh, and of the soul as humanlike in form is part of a larger effort to preserve what he understood to be pristine Christian doctrine and to defend it against attempts by late second-century and early third-century Christian Platonists to recast it within an immaterialistic, metaphysical framework.¹⁰⁷ Since Christianity is a revealed religion, Tertullian insisted that discussants must refer "all questions to God's inspired standard." This standard included the Old Testament, the words of the apostles, and the tradition of the churches that the apostles established. Tertullian cited all three in support of his doctrines.

While combating heresy, Tertullian maintained that the apostolic tradition had been well preserved. The "many" and "great" Christian churches that continue in "one and the same faith" evidence that the tradition is strong.¹⁰⁸ Moreover, his own doctrine "has its origin in the tradition of the apostles" and the churches they organiZed, being "in no respect different from theirs."¹⁰⁹ Tertullian thus implied that from the beginnings of Christianity to his day, there had been a unified body of Christians who, faithful to the apostolic tradition, affirmed that God is embodied.¹¹⁰

As an educated Christian, Tertullian was in a position to resist philosophical intrusions into Christian doctrine in a way that unlearned Christians could not. After his conversion, Tertullian devoted all his efforts to the defense of Christianity.¹¹¹ He asserted that philosophy is the parent of heresy and posed the trenchant questions that have continued to haunt conventional Christian theologians through the centuries:

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Christians? Our instruction comes from "the porch of Solomon," who had himself taught that "the Lord should be sought in simplicity of heart." Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition!¹¹²

 

Fourth- and Fifth-Century Christian Belief in an Embodied God

Tertullian's vigorous attempt to preserve within Christianity the understanding that God is embodied would, of course, ultimately fail. But the triumph of immaterialism came about only gradually. Indeed, significant pockets of Christians resisted Hellenistic influences and continued to believe in an embodied deity as late as the fourth and fifth centuries. This is clearly shown in the writings of Augustine (AD 354—430) who, ironically, was himself an uncompromising advocate of incorporealism.

Augustine was born at Thagaste in North Africa in 354. His mother, Monica, was a Christian. During his youth and early adulthood, Augustine apparently understood that Christians believed God to be embodied; by his own admission, it was this very doctrine that for many years constituted an insurmountable stumbling block to his acceptance of the Christian faith. He said that as a youth, he was much embarrassed by the doctrine and thus succumbed to the logic of those who maligned it.

My own specious reasoning induced me to give in to the sly arguments of fools who asked me . . . whether God was confined to the limits of a bodily shape, whether he had hair and nails. . . . My ignorance was so great that these questions troubled me, and while I thought I was approaching the truth, I was only departing the further from it. . . . How could I see this when with the sight of my eyes I saw no more than material things and with the sight of my mind no more than their images? I did not know that God is a spirit, a being without bulk and without limbs defined in length and breadth. . . . Nor had I the least notion . . . what the Scriptures mean when they say that we are made in God's image.¹¹³

At first unable to accept Christianity because of its doctrine that God is embodied in humanlike form, Augustine was much attracted to the Manichaean sect, which endorsed a nonanthropomorphic, though still material, deity. Augustine wrote:

I had lost hope of being able to find the truth in your Church, O Lord. . . . The Manichees had turned me away from it: at the same time I thought it outrageous to believe that you had the shape of a human body and were limited within the dimensions of limbs like our own. . . .

For when I tried to fall back upon the Catholic faith, my mind recoiled because the Catholic faith was not what I supposed it to be. . . . but, O my God . . . I thought that this was a more pious belief than to suppose that you were limited, in each and every way, by the outlines of a human body.¹¹⁴

Eventually, Augustine's career as a teacher of rhetoric took him from his native Africa to Italy, first to Rome and then to Milan. There, under the influence of Bishop Ambrose, he became acquainted with Latin translations of Platonist writings and with the possibility of God's being a "purely spiritual being" in the sense of being totally immaterial, invisible, and incorporeal.¹¹⁵ This view of God dissolved his long-standing aversion to Christian doctrine and was a major factor in his conversion in 386. The following year, at age thirty-two, he was finally baptiZed a Christian. In his newly found Platonic understanding of God, he exulted:

I learned that your spiritual children . . . do not understand the words God made man in his own image to mean that you are limited by the shape of a human body, . . . nevertheless I was glad that all this time I had been howling my complaints not against the Catholic faith. . . .

O God, you who are so high above us and yet so close, hidden and yet always present, you have not parts, some greater and some smaller. You are everywhere, and everywhere you are entire. Nowhere are you limited by space. You have not the shape of a body like ours. . . . Your Catholic Church . . . I had learnt [sic] . . . did not teach the doctrines which I so sternly denounced. This bewildered me, but I was on the road to conversion and I was glad. . . . [I] had no liking for childish absurdities and there was nothing in the sound doctrine which she taught to show that you, the Creator of all things, were confined within a measure of space which, however high, however wide it might be, was yet strictly determined by the form of a human body.¹¹⁶

From these passages, it is evident that in his youth and probably until his early thirties, Augustine understood Christians to believe that God is embodied.¹¹⁷

In two ways, Kim Paffenroth has recently challenged this view of Augustine's arguments. He claims that young Augustine's references to Christian belief in an embodied deity are either merely allusions to the Incarnation or misunderstandings caused by Manichaeans who, intent on discrediting Christian beliefs, misrepresented them.¹¹⁸ However, the fact that young Augustine understood that Christians believed that God was embodied—and not merely as the incarnate Son—seems beyond dispute, for according to Augustine's own account, the scriptural warrant for Christian belief in divine embodiment was largely found in the Old Testament and, hence, was not based on the Incarnation alone. For instance, he disclosed that it was only after he met Ambrose in Milan that he learned that God's "spiritual children . . . do not understand the words God made man in his own image to mean that [God is] limited by the shape of a human body."¹¹⁹

Moreover, that Augustine, as a result of Manichaean misrepresentations, for many years simply misunderstood what Christians of his acquaintance believed seems incredible. How could he be so radically mistaken when his own mother was a Christian, when he grew up among Christians, and when he even studied Christian catechism? But quite apart from inference, Augustine provided considerable evidence of Christian belief in an embodied deity.

Augustine discussed "the carnal and weak of our faith, who, when they hear the members of the body used figuratively, as, when God's eyes or ears are spoken of, are accustomed, in the license of fancy, to picture God to themselves in a human form." Though Augustine found laughable these Christians' belief that God has "a human form which is the most excellent of its kind," he nonetheless found their belief more "allowable" and "respectable" than the Manichaean alternative. Moreover, unlike the Manichaeans, Augustine said that these "carnal" Christians are teachable and, with proper instruction in the Church, may gradually come "to understand spiritually the figures and parables of the Scriptures."¹²⁰

Furthermore, Augustine provided a catalogue of heretical Christian communities or sects.¹²¹ He identified two Christian communities, contemporary with himself, that explicitly taught that God is embodied in humanlike form. Members of the first community were called Audiani (sometimes Vadiani). They were followers of a Christian deacon, Audius of Edessa, and were located primarily in Syria and Mesopotamia. Members of the second community were called the Anthropomorphites and were located in Egypt. John Cassian, a Christian monk who spent about fifteen years (about AD 385—400) in the Egyptian monastic communities, corroborated Augustine's testimony with respect to Egyptian anthropomorphism. Although Cassian was an Origenist and an incorporealist, he nonetheless made it clear that for late fourth-century Christian monks in Egypt, anthropomorphism was the long-established norm and incorporealism was the innovation.¹²²

Cassian records that Theophilus, Bishop of Alexandria, sent a letter in 399 to the Egyptian churches to set the dates of Lent and Easter. In that letter, Theophilus included a condemnation of anthropomorphism, which,

was received very bitterly by almost every sort of monk throughout all Egypt. . . . Indeed, the majority of the older men among the brethren asserted that in fact the bishop was to be condemned as someone corrupted by the most serious heresy, someone opposing the ideas of holy Scripture, someone who denied that almighty God was of human shape—and this despite the clear scriptural evidence that Adam was created in His image.¹²³

Even the monks in Scete, "who were far ahead of all the Egyptian monks in perfection and knowledge,"¹²⁴ and all the priests except Paphnutius—an Origenist in charge of Cassian's church—denounced the bishop's letter. Those in charge of the three other churches in the desert refused to allow the letter to be read or publicly presented at their assemblies.

Cassian chronicled the particular struggles of one monk, Serapion, in accepting the view that God is not embodied. According to Cassian, Serapion had long lived a life of austerity and monastic discipline that, coupled with his age, had brought him into the front ranks of the monks. Despite the persistent efforts of Paphnutis to dissuade him, Serapion had held fast to his belief that God is embodied. The concept of a non-embodied God seemed newfangled to him. It was something unknown to his predecessors and not taught by them.

By chance, a well-versed anticorporealist deacon named Photinus visited Cassian's community in Scete. In order to support the condemnation of anthropomorphism contained in the bishop's letter, Paphnutis brought Photinus into a gathering of all the brethren and asked him how the Catholic churches of the East interpreted the words in Genesis, "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Genesis 1:26).

Photinus explained that all the leaders of the churches were unanimous in teaching that the image and likeness of God should be understood not in an earthly, literal sense but spiritually. In a lengthy discourse, Photinus attempted to demonstrate to Serapion the truth of this teaching.

At last the old man was moved by the many very powerful arguments of this extremely learned man. . . . We stood up to bless the Lord and to pour out our prayers of thanks to Him. And then amid these prayers the old man became confused, for he sensed that the human image of God which he used to draw before him as he prayed was now gone from his heart. Suddenly he gave way to the bitterest, most abundant tears and sobs. He threw himself on the ground and . . . cried out: "Ah the misfortune! They've taken my God away from me. I have no one to hold on to, and I don't know whom to adore or to address."¹²⁵

According to Owen Chadwick, Cassian's description of Serapion's capitulation greatly understated the resoluteness of Egyptian resistance to Theophilus's decree proscribing anthropomorphism. Chadwick writes:

Were Cassian the sole authority, the impression would be left that, despite the fierce opposition of great numbers, the decrees of Theophilus were ultimately accepted by the Egyptians. We hear nothing in Cassian of the riots in Alexandria, of the bishop's submission, of the expulsion of Origenism.

Except in Cassian's community in Scete, where Paphnutius succeeded in bringing round his congregation to the Origenist viewpoint, a violent agitation arose. A band of monks repaired to Alexandria and caused riots. Theophilus had courage. He went out to meet the approaching band, and, as soon as he could make himself heard, "When I see you," he said, "I see the face of God". "Then," said the leaders, "if you really believe that, condemn the works of Origen." Theophilus, whom Palladius nicknamed "Mr. Facing-both-ways", consented on the spot to condemn the Origenists. . . . He sent letters to his suffragans ordering the expulsion of the Origenist monks from the monasteries and the desert. There appear from this moment a drift out of Egypt by some members of the now condemned Origenist party.¹²⁶

Finally, Augustine provided evidence that fourth- and fifth-century Christian anthropomorphism was not confined to priests, monks, and laity. For instance, in "A Letter of Instruction to the Holy Brother, Fortunatianus (Epistle 148)," written in AD 413, Augustine discussed an unnamed brother bishop who was teaching that we are able, or at least will be able after the Resurrection, to see God with the eyes of our bodies. In a prior letter, without mentioning the bishop by name, Augustine had sharply rebuked those who held this view, and the bishop had been offended. Augustine asked Fortunatianus's intercession on his behalf in seeking the bishop's forgiveness and in effecting reconciliation. Nonetheless, Augustine said he had no regrets about having written the letter, for his intent was to

prevent men from believing that God Himself is corporeal and visible, as occupying a place determined by siZe and by distance from us (for the eye of this body can see nothing except under these conditions), and to prevent men from understanding the expression "face to face" as if God were limited within the members of a body.¹²⁷

Thereupon, Augustine argued at length against the bishop's view.

On the basis of the evidence detailed above, it seems clear that Christians, from the very inception of the faith up until at least the early part of the fifth century, commonly believed God to be an embodied being. This belief continued despite the fact that it was challenged by both Christian and non-Christian Platonists from at least the time of the second century. As Platonism became entrenched as the dominant Christian worldview, the idea of an embodied God gradually faded into obscurity.

 

Conclusion

Precisely what happened to disrupt the primitive Christian belief in an embodied God has not received exhaustive treatment here but is dealt with elsewhere in this volume. My concern was simply to establish that, contrary to contemporary misunderstanding, the belief in divine embodiment did in fact exist and persist among the faithful followers of Christ from Christianity's earliest beginnings into the fifth century AD. Such a belief was not only not heretical, but apparently was the widely held understanding of God within both formative Judaism and Christianity for the greater part of the first three centuries. This understanding was gradually abandoned as Neo-Platonism became the dominant worldview of Christian thinkers. Far from being a departure, then, from the faith once delivered to the saints, Joseph Smith's declaration of divine embodiment is a sign of the "times of refreshing . . . the times of restitution of all things" (Acts 3:19, 21). It is the return to, even the restoration of, the primitive Christian knowledge of "the only true God" (John 17:3).

 

Notes

1.  Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, sel. Joseph Fielding Smith (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1976), 345. This section is drawn from Joseph's famous address commonly called the "King Follett Discourse," given on 7 April 1844.

2.  The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chapter II; Philip Schaff, ed., The Creeds of Christendom, 6th ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), 3:606.

3.  Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 324.

4.  See Donald Q. Cannon, Larry E. Dahl, and John W. Welch, "The Restoration of Major Doctrines through Joseph Smith: The Godhead, Mankind, and the Creation," Ensign, January 1989, 27—33.

5.  Adolph Harnack, History of Dogma (New York: Dover, 1961), 1:180 n 1.

6.  Harnack, History of Dogma, 2:255 n 5.

7.  The primitive period of the Christian Church is usually understood to last from the apostolic years to the middle of the second century. See J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 5th ed., rev. (London: Adams and Charles Black, 1977), 31—35.

8.  See Gilbert Murray, Five Stages of Greek Religion (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1955), 9—10. For an excellent study of the popular Greek understanding of the gods, see Martin P. Nilsson, Greek Folk Religion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972).

9.  Stoicism, "founded by Zeno of Citium, c. 300 BC . . . was mostly a closely knit system of logic, metaphysics and ethics. . . . From the theological point of view, however, what was most remarkable about it was its pantheistic materialism. The Stoics reacted vigorously against the Platonic differentiation of a transcendent, intelligible world not perceptible by the senses from the ordinary world of sensible experience. Whatever exists, they argued, must be body, and the universe as a whole must be through and through material. . . . Thus Stoicism was a monism teaching that God or Logos is a finer matter immanent in the material universe." Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 17—18.

10.  Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 31.

11.  Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 52.

12.  See Edmond La Beaume Cherbonnier, "The Logic of Biblical Anthropomorphism," Harvard Theological Review 55 (1962): 187; and Cherbonnier, "In Defense of Anthropomorphism," in Reflections on Mormonism: Judeo-Christian Parallels, ed. Truman G. Madsen (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1978), 155—73. Cherbonnier provides a clear description of the anthropomorphic God of the biblical record, particularly in contrast with later mystical or Platonist views of deity.

13.  Umberto Cassuto explains that "there is no doubt that the original signification of this expression in the Canaanite tongue was, judging by Babylonian usage, corporeal, in accordance with the anthropomorphic conception of the godhead among the peoples of the ancient East." Umberto Cassuto, A Commentary on the Book of Genesis (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1961), 1:56.

14.  It has been a traditional Jewish belief that God is anthropomorphic (or better, humans theomorphic), and with some notable exceptions, late antique Jews rejected the metaphysics which demanded he be otherwise. I would not wish to minimiZe the great diversity of Jewish belief. Certainly there have been and are Jewish theologians who are committed incorporealists, but there has never been, in any event, a general and unambiguous rejection of the anthropomorphism that characteriZes so much of the Torah and classical Jewish literature. See Jacob Neusner, The Incarnation of God: The Character of Divinity in Formative Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1988).

15.  Consider also the postascension appearances of the resurrected Christ to Saul on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:3—7), to John the Beloved on the Isle of Patmos (Revelation 1:10—18), and to many others who saw the resurrected Lord (1 Corinthians 15:5—8).

16.  Cherbonnier, "Biblical Anthropormorphism," 188.

17.  See B. H. Roberts, The Truth, The Way, The Life: An Elementary Treatise on Theology, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: BYU Studies, 1994), 173 n. 1; and Harry M. Orlinsky, "Introductory Essay: On Anthropomorphisms and Anthropopathisms in the Septuagint and Targum," in Bernard M. ZlotowitZ, The Septuagint Translation of the Hebrew Terms in Relation to God in the Book of Jeremiah (New York: KTAV, 1981), xv—xxiv.

18.  For an insightful examination of the reasons why the later church fathers rejected the primitive view of a corporeal deity, see Grace M. JantZen, "Theological Tradition and Divine Incorporeality," in God's World, God's Body (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1984), 21—35.

19.  Kelly, "Early Christian Doctrines," 6. Jacob Neusner has cautioned against the presumption that this "Judaistic mould" was all of one piece. He asks: "Can we identify one Judaism in the first centuries BCE and CE? Only if we can treat as a single cogent statement everything all Jews wrote. That requires us to harmoniZe the Essene writings of the Dead Sea, Philo, the Mishnah, the variety of scriptures collected in our century as the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, not to mention the Gospels! This is to say, viewed as statements of systems, the writings attest to diverse religious systems, and, in the setting of which we speak, to diverse Judaisms. There was no one orthodoxy, no Orthodox Judaism. There were various Judaisms." Jacob Neusner, "Judaism and Christianity in the First Century: How Shall We Perceive Their Relationships?" in A Tribute to GeZa Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature and History, ed. Philip R. Davies and Richard T. White (Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 1990), 256. Nevertheless, E. P. Sanders argues that there was, at least, within first-century Palestinian Judaism, a common theological core underlying all this rich diversity of thought and practice. Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE to 66 CE (London: SCM, 1992), 241—78.

20.  "Jewish anthropomorphism seems to have been notorious in the first centuries c.e." Gedaliahu G. Stroumsa, "Form(s) of God: Some Notes on Meṭaṭron and Christ," Harvard Theological Review 76 (1983): 269—88, at 271.

21.  James Drummond, Philo Judaeus; or, The Jewish-Alexandrian Philosophy in Its Development and Completion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1888), 1:135.

22.  George Foot Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era: The Age of the Tannaim (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927), 1:421. For a recent treatment of this topic see Elliot R. Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 13—51.

23.  Moore, Judaism in the First Centuries, 1:438.

24.  Neusner, Incarnation of God, 4.

25.  Neusner, Incarnation of God, 12, 17, emphasis deleted.

26.  Neusner, Incarnation of God, 6.

27.  Midrash Rabbah Genesis 8:10, quoted in Neusner, Incarnation of God, 3.

28.  Neusner, Incarnation of God, 3. The tractate Shi'ur Qomah (The Measure of the Body) describes God's body in huge proportions. See Encyclopaedia Judaica, 14:1418, s.v. "Shi'ur Komah." A widely acknowledged source for studies of Jewish anthropomorphism, this tractate is from the period of the Tannaim and is associated with Kabbalah, but its concepts are known in rabbinic midrashim.

29.  Alon Goshen Gottstein, "The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature," Harvard Theological Review 87 (1994): 172. See also Arthur Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God (1937; reprint, New York: Ktav, 1968), which deals with the literal versus allegorical interpretation of scripture in rabbinic tradition. Marmorstein suggests that the allegorical interpretations among the rabbis were moving away from anthropomorphic conceptions of God.

30.  Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 174, emphasis in original. Gottstein acknowledges that in the later Tanhuma literature, several paraphrases expand the meaning of Zelem to include eternal life, divine glory, and righteous behavior. None of these expansions overrides the older understanding of Zelem as body but rather are derived from it (Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 174 n. 9). See also Stroumsa, "Form(s) of God," 269—88, esp. 277—79; and G. Scholem, Jewish Gnosticism, Merkabah Mysticism, and Talmudic Tradition, 2nd ed. (New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1965), 36—42; Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of the Godhead (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), 21—55; and more generally on the topic of corporeality in Jewish mysticism, Wolfson, Through a Speculum That Shines. For an introduction to and English translation of the Shi'ur Qomah, see Pieter W. van der Horst, "The Measurement of the Body, A Chapter in the History of Ancient Jewish Mysticism," in Essays on the Jewish World of Early Christianity (G˘ttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990), 125—31. See also Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 100 n. 17.

31.  Midrash Rabbah Leviticus 34:3, in Midrash Rabbah, trans. H. Freedman and Maurice Simon (London: Soncino, 1983), 4:428.

32.  Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 183—86.

33.  Midrash Rabbah Leviticus 20:2, in Midrash Rabbah, 4:252. Other texts corroborate Adam's possessing a body of light: Midrash Rabbah Genesis 12:6, in Midrash Rabbah, 1:91; Midrash Rabbah Ecclesiastes 8:1—2, in Midrash Rabbah, 8:213; and Midrash Rabbah Deuteronomy 11:3, in Midrash Rabbah, 7:173.

34.  Compare Joseph Smith's description of the brilliance of God's body. In his 1838 account of the first vision, he told of a light "above the brightness of the sun" and attempted to describe the Father and the Son "whose brightness and glory defy all description" (Joseph Smith—History 1:16—17). Compare also the language that Zebedee Coltrin (Joseph's LDS contemporary) used to describe God (for example, "surrounded as with a flame of fire," "consuming fire of great brightness," and "flame of fire, which was so brilliant") with the rabbinic descriptions of the divine body. Statement of Zebedee Coltrin, 3 October 1883, Salt Lake School of the Prophets: Minute Book 1883 (Palm Desert, CA: ULC, 1981), 38

35.  This passage is from a section of the homilies recently translated and discussed by Shlomo Pines in "Points of Similarity between the Exposition of the Doctrine of the Sefirot in the Sefer YeZira and a Text of the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies: The Implications of this Resemblance," Proceedings of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities 7/3 (1989): 64—65. "Pines . . . considers this sentence a later gloss, for it contradicts the possibility of seeing the divine form." Gottstein, however, conjectures that "'invisible' may refer to the ordinary state, and not to the exceptional condition that the pure-hearted ones attain." Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 173 n. 5.

36.  Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 188, emphasis in original.

37.  Compare D&C 131:7—8: "There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; We cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter."

38.  Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 176—77. Compare D&C 93:33: "For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy." Joseph further explained his beliefs about spirit: "In tracing the thing to the foundation, and looking at it philosophically, we shall find a very material difference between the body and the spirit; the body is supposed to be organiZed matter, and the spirit, by many, is thought to be immaterial, without substance. With this latter statement we should beg leave to differ, and state the spirit is a substance; that it is material, but that it is more pure, elastic and refined matter than the body; that it existed before the body, can exist in the body; and will exist separate from the body, when the body will be mouldering in the dust; and will in the resurrection, be again united with it." Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 207.

39.  Gottstein, "Body as Image of God," 177.

40.  Harry Austryn Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:64.

41.  Wolfson, Philo, 1:72.

42.  Wolfson, Philo, 1:56.

43.  It is interesting that Wolfson asserts "[t]he Jewish God indeed is incorporeal and free of emotions as is the God of the philosophers," despite his implication that "the great masses of Alexandrian Jews" believed otherwise. Wolfson, Philo, 1:26.

44.  Kelly, "Early Christian Doctrines," 6.

45.  See Robert P. Casey, "Clement of Alexandria and the Beginnings of Christian Platonism," Harvard Theological Review 18 (1925): 79. For a brief summary of Clement of Alexandria's immaterialistic views on God, see Robert M. Grant, Gods and the One God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1986), 90—91.

46.  According to a recent biographer, Joseph Wilson Trigg, Origen did "more than anyone else to relate the Bible to Greek philosophy." Trigg, Origen: The Bible and Philosophy in the Third-Century Church (Atlanta: John Knox, 1983), 3. For a clear presentation of Origen's Platonism and its formative influences, see chapter 3 (52—75). See also Richard A. Norris, God and World in Early Christian Theology (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1966), 106—29; and Grant, Gods and the One God, 91—92.

47.  Origen, De Principiis, in The Ante-Nicene Fathers, ed. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson (1885; reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1951), 4:239—41 (hereafter ANF).

48.  Origen, De Principiis 1.9, 1.10 (ANF 4:241).

49.  Origen, De Principiis preface, verse 8 (ANF 4:241).

50.  See Gedaliahu Stroumsa, "The Incorporeality of God: Context and Implications of Origen's Position," Religion 13 (1983): 345—58.

51.  Origen, De Principiis 1.1 (ANF 4:242). For an instance of this, see point 1 of the section "Tertullian as Witness" in this paper. Wolfson admits that "in Scripture . . . there is no indication that by spirit and soul were meant any such principles as form or immateriality." Wolfson, Philo, 2:95.

52.  See Stroumsa, "Incorporeality of God," 345—47. See also JantZen, "Theological Tradition and Divine Incorporeality," 22—23.

53.  For an excellent analysis of the centrality of the doctrine of divine incorporeality to Origen's theology and his sustained polemics against anthropomorphic conceptions of God, see Stroumsa, "Incorporeality of God," 345—58. Though Origen does not explicitly identify his opponents, Stroumsa says, "they are, obviously, Christians" (p. 346).

54.  Origen, De Principiis 1.1 (ANF 4:242—45).

55.  Origen, Homilies on Genesis 1.13 in Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, trans. Ronald E. Heine (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1981), 63.

56.  Origen, Homilies on Genesis 1.13 in Homilies, 63—64. As a matter of fact, some believers of this period did conceive of God as having a body of such cosmic proportions. Stroumsa, "Form(s) of God," 269—88.

57.  Origen, Homilies on Genesis 3.1—2 in Homilies, 90—91.

58.  See Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 97—118. Platonists believed, unlike the Stoics, that there were intellectual principles that existed independently from matter. In the hierarchy of being these "ideas" were superior to their material instances, and above them all was the One, or God, who was necessarily incorporeal and as their source beyond intellect and matter. See also Ulrich Mauser's study, Gottesbild und Menschwerdung: Eine Untersuchung Zur Einheit des Alten und Neuen Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr, 1971).

59.  Trigg, Origen, 53—54.

60.  Trigg, Origen, 106.

61.  Origen, Exhortation to Martyrdom 1.3, in Alexandrian Christianity, trans. John E. L. Oulton and Henry Chadwick (Philadelphia: Westminister, 1954), 394.

62.  Richard C. White, Melito of Sardis: Sermon "On the Passover" (Lexington, KY: Lexington Theological Seminary Library, 1976), 4—6. A Quartodeciman is "one of a group in the early church esp. in Asia Minor who during the 2d century and until the Nicene council in 325 observed Easter on the 14th of Nisan when the Jews slaughtered the Passover lamb no matter on what day of the week that date occurred." Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd ed., s.v. "quartodeciman."

63.  Stuart George Hall, ed., Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments (Oxford: Clarendon, 1979).

64.  Et Dixit Deus: Faciamus hominem ad imaginem nostram et similtudinem. Prius discutiendum est ubi consistat illud, ad imaginem, in corpore, an in anima. Et in primis videamus, quibus utantur qui prius asserunt; e quorum numero est Melito, qui scripta reliquit, quibus asserit Deum corporeum esse ["And God said, 'Let us make man in our image and likeness.' We must determine beforehand where the 'image' resides, whether in the body or in the soul. And let us first see what evidences the first writers on the subject used; among these was Melito, who has left treatises asserting the corporeality of God." Daniel W. Graham, trans., Department of Philosophy, Brigham Young University]. Origen, Selections on Genesis 2.5, in Patrologia Graeca, ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Geuthner, 1857—), 12:94 (hereafter cited as PG). See also Origen, Commentary on the Epistle of Paul to the Romans 476.16 (PG 14:870—71), where he continues his polemics against Christian anthropomorphites: "qui in Ecclesia positi imaginem corpoream hominis, Dei esse imaginem dicunt" ["those members of the Church who say that the corporeal form of man is the image of God." Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 416 n. 3]. Unless otherwise indicated, I find the cited translations precise enough for present purposes.

65.  See Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 4.26.2, in The Ecclesiastical History and the Martyrs of Palestine, trans. Hugh J. Lawlor and John E. L. Oulton (London: SPCK, 1954), 1:132.

66.  A Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature, Sects and Doctrines, ed. William Smith and Henry Wace (London: Murray, 1882), s.v. "Melito."

67.  Gennadius, Liber ecclesiasticorum dogmatum, 24.2, in Cuthbert H. Turner, "The Liber Ecclesiasticorum Dogmatum Attributed to Gennadius," Journal of Theological Studies 7 (1906): 90.

68.  Stroumsa claims that the affirmation of Melito's anthropomorphism is unfounded, citing Othmar Perler, trans. and ed., Méliton: Sur la pâque (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 13 n. 1. Referenced in Stroumsa, "Form(s) of God," 270 n. 6.

69.  See the introduction to Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Chadwick, ix—xxxii. For an attempted reconstruction of Celsus's work from the quotations in Origen's Contra Celsum, see Celsus, On the True Doctrine: A Discourse Against the Christians, trans. R. Joseph Hoffmann (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). Though by his own admission, Origen has omitted Celsus's sustained anticorporeality arguments, Hoffmann claims to have reconstructed several pages of these arguments (103—15).

70.  Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Chadwick, 416. This passage continues: "The Bible clearly says that God is incorporeal. That is why 'No man has seen God at any time' [ John 1:18], and 'the firstborn of all creation' is said to be an 'image of the invisible God' [ Colossians 1:15]—using 'invisible' in the sense of 'incorporeal'" Origen, Contra Celsum, (trans. Chadwick, 416). Colossians 1:15 is one of four places where Paul uses the Greek word aoratos, which is usually translated "invisible." However, Origen's claim that Paul meant incorporeal here when he wrote "invisible" is dubious. In their translation of and commentary on Colossians, Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke suggest that Origen's interpretation is not the proper way to understand aoratos. "Aoratos is usually translated as 'invisible.' But the verbal adjective in the biblical Greek not only designates a possibility or impossibility, but is also used in a factual and pragmatic sense: the agnostos theos in Acts 17:23 is the 'unknown God,' not the 'unrecogniZable' one; as also the aniptoi cheires (Matt 15:20) are the 'unwashed hands,' not the 'unwashable' ones. It is recommendable in Col 1:15 to translate aoratos in this pragmatic sense. This corresponds to the OT usage because there is no Hebrew equivalent of aoratos with the meaning of 'invisible.' According to the proclamation of the OT, God is not invisible; it is simply not within the capacity of human beings to see Yahweh. . . . It is unlikely that Paul fostered different notions and cannot be demonstrated. In 1 Cor 13:12, he speaks of a 'time' when we will no longer look as though through a mirror, but rather 'from face to face.' Obviously, he does not presuppose an 'invisible God.'" Markus Barth and Helmut Blanke, Colossians: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, trans. Astrid B. Beck (New York: Doubleday, 1994), 195—96. Paul was then not suggesting that God is inherently unseeable, but only that he is presently unseen. Whether humans can see or have seen God is a separate issue because even if no man had ever seen God the Father, this fact in no way entails that God is incorporeal.

71.  For a fuller account of Tertullian's significance in relation to contemporary theology, see James Morgan, The Importance of Tertullian in the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Kegan Paul, 1928), 148—65.

72.  Morgan, Importance of Tertullian, 103.

73.  Clear signs of Tertullian's involvement appear in his writings starting ca. 206—7. Timothy David Barnes, Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), 46—47. Much later, adherents of the New Prophecy were called Montanists after the name of the movement's founder, Montanus. They were most often called Cataphrygians by their opponents, the title indicating their geographical origin. See Ronald E. Heine, The Montanist Oracles and Testimonia (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989), ix.

74.  Barnes, Tertullian, 131.

75.  Barnes, Tertullian, 131.

76.  Barnes, Tertullian, 131—32. Although the Montanists were called heretical by later Christians, their differences from their contemporaries were in matters of practice, not theology. Barnes, Tertullian, 42. Likewise Tertullian's "orthodoxy in matters of doctrine remained impeccable" during his Montanist years, as before.

77.  For a summary of Tertullian's views on God, see Norris, Early Christian Theology, 81—105.

78.  Tertullian did not use the phrase "material body" to describe God, but simply "body" (Latin corpore). In fact, Tertullian used the Latin materia, cognate to the English "matter," to refer specifically to the matter of the world in contradistinction to God's eternal substance. Tertullian, Against Hermogenes (ANF 3:477—502). (In addition to referring to the chapter and book [if any] of Tertullian's works, I cite the page number from Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian (ANF 3.) He also specifically distinguished God and matter as "two words (and) two things." Tertullian, Ad Nationes 2.4 (ANF 3:133). Likewise, he said that the human soul is formed "by the breathing of God, and not out of [non-divine] matter," clearly distinguishing God from the matter of the world. Tertullian, A Treatise on the Soul, 1.3 (ANF 3:184). Although Tertullian did not apply the term "material" to God, the properties that he ascribed to God are what we now consider to be the defining properties of matter: spatial location, extension, shape, and "even a certain tangibility." Morgan, Importance of Tertullian, 182. Hence I describe Tertullian's conception of the soul and of God as materialistic. It is nevertheless important to remember that Tertullian distinguished between created, perishable, sensible matter and the uncreated, imperishable, insensible substance (matter) of God. Tertullian, Ad Nationes 2.4 (ANF 3:132).

79.  Morgan, Importance of Tertullian, 15. This notion appears explicitly in Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.7 (ANF 3:187); and implicitly in Tertullian, Against Praxeas 1.7 (ANF 3:602). Although Tertullian closely agreed with the Stoics on this and many other beliefs and methods, we should not thereby conclude that Stoicism was the source of his belief. See Morgan, Importance of Tertullian, 10—16. While Tertullian employed Stoic explanations, arguments, and beliefs, he exercised discrimination in doing so. For example, Tertullian used arguments of Stoic and other philosophers to support his belief in the corporeality of the soul, particularly agreeing with the Stoics' description of the soul "almost in our own terms." Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.5 (ANF 3:184). Yet elsewhere, Tertullian pointed out that the Stoics do not believe in the restoration of the body, condemned them as the source of Marcion's and Hermogenes' heresies, and denounced broadly the teaching of Zeno as making the matter of the world equal with God. Tertullian, The Prescription against Heretics 1.7 (ANF 3:246); and Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 1.1 (ANF 3:477). On this last point, Tertullian criticiZed precisely the Stoic materialism that some say was the basis of his own belief. Morgan, Importance of Tertullian, 182. While Tertullian acknowledged that his beliefs sometimes coincided with those of this or that philosopher, he used philosophical authority strictly as a supplement to the ultimate authority of biblical and continuing revelation. He held that "all questions" should be referred "to God's inspired standard." Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.2 (ANF 3:183). The discrimination Tertullian showed in regard to philosophical doctrine precludes a simple explaining away of Tertullian's materialism as due to inability to transcend Stoic prejudices (although Morgan suggests this explanation in Importance of Tertullian, 16). For further discussion of Tertullian's relationship to pagan philosophy, see R. Braun, "Tertullien et la philosophie païenne: Essai de mise au point," Bulletin de L'Association Guillaume Budé 2 (June 1971): 231—51.

80.  Tertullian, Ad Nationes 2.4 (ANF 3:133).

81.  To date Tertullian's writing, I rely on Barnes's chronology. Barnes, Tertullian, 55.

82.  Tertullian, Against Praxeas 1.7 (ANF 3:602). This interpretation of John 4:25 was noted by Origen. See point 3 of the section "Origen as Witness" in this paper.

83.  Tertullian, Against Praxeas 1.7 (ANF 3:602).

84.  While some may find this argument persuasive, my point in presenting it is to illustrate Tertullian's understanding of God, not to suggest that this understanding is demonstrated by this reasoning. Tertullian, Against Praxeas 1.7 (ANF 3:602).

85.  See Barnes, Tertullian, 123.

86.  Tertullian cited Isaiah 24:5 as teaching that man's soul is a condensation of the Spirit or breath of God: "My Spirit went forth from me, and I made the breath of each. And the breath of my Spirit became soul." Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.11 (ANF 3:191). Hence man's soul was once a part of God. This concept is especially significant because Tertullian expressly asserted elsewhere that the matter out of which God formed the world had a beginning when God created the world out of nothing. Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 1.33 (ANF 3:496). In this book, he contrasted creation out of nothing with creation out of God's own substance. Tertullian, Against Hermogenes 1.2 (ANF 3:477—78). Hence, Tertullian made the human soul of eternal, uncreated, divine substance in contrast with created and perishable matter.

87.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.9 (ANF 3:189). Although he says "the face of man," Tertullian clearly alludes to Genesis 2:7 in this passage, which he quotes as referring to Adam. Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.3 (ANF 3:184).

88.  Ernest Evans, trans., Tertullian's Homily on Baptism (Cambridge, England: University Printing House, 1964), 9, 11. See also a slightly different translation in Tertullian, On Baptism 4 (ANF 3:670).

89.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.10 (ANF 3:190).

90.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.5—6 (ANF 3:185).

91.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.9 (ANF 3:188). The word that Tertullian uses for figure is cognate with the English "effigy," which roughly means a copy of something.

92.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.9 (ANF 3:188).

93.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.9 (ANF 3:189). In this passage, Tertullian also refers to Paul hearing and seeing the Lord (2 Corinthians 12:2—4). For other arguments based on scripture, see Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.7 (ANF 3:187).

94.  Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 1.5 (ANF 3:523).

95.  Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 1.5 (ANF 3:525); emphasis in original.

96.  Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 1.4 (ANF 3:524); emphasis in original.

97.  Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 1.4 (ANF 3:524).

98.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.27 (ANF 3:208).

99.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.40 (ANF 3:220).

100.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.40 (ANF 3:220).

101.  Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1.7 (ANF 3:550).

102.  Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1.18 (ANF 3:557—58); 1.6 (ANF 3:549—50).

103.  Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1.48 (ANF 3:581).

104.  Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 1.53 (ANF 3:587).

105.  Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.11 (ANF 3:191).

106.  Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ 1.24 (ANF 3:542).

107.  See Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.23 (ANF 3:203). For a fuller discussion of Tertullian's resistance to Platonism, see Robert E. Roberts, The Theology of Tertullian (London: Epworth, 1924), 63—78.

108.  Tertullian, On Prescription against Heretics 1.28 (ANF 3:256).

109.  Tertullian, On Prescription against Heretics 1.21 (ANF 3:252—53). Although this work stands on its own as a general statement on heresy and orthodoxy, it also serves as a preface to a series of Tertullian's works addressed to particular heresies, including A Treatise on the Soul, Against Praxeas, On the Flesh of Christ, On the Resurrection of the Flesh, Against Hermogenes, and The Five Books against Marcion. Note also the many places where Tertullian refers to his appeal to apostolic authority as a criterion for distinguishing orthodox Christian doctrines: The Prescription against Heretics 1.31, 1.34 (ANF 3:258, 259—60); Against Marcion 5.1 (ANF 3:429); and Against Hermogenes 1 (ANF 3:477).

110.  Tertullian, On Prescription against Heretics 1.20, 1.28 (ANF 3:252, 256). See also numerous instances where Tertullian speaks as "we" and of his doctrines as those of "ourselves," as in Tertullian, Treatise on the Soul 1.2 (ANF 3:182).

111.  As a new convert, Tertullian devoted himself to the obvious threats to Christianity outside the Christian community. His earliest writings defended Christianity against pagans and Jews. However, as he became more deeply involved in the issues threatening Christianity, Tertullian turned to internal threats, which he saw as the most significant dangers.

112.  Tertullian, On Prescription against Heretics 1.7 (ANF 3:246).

113.  Augustine, Confessions 3.7, in R. S. Pine-Coffin, trans., Confessions (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1961), 62—63.

114.  Augustine, Confessions 5.10 (104—5).

115.  Stroumsa, "Incorporeality of God," 352.

116.  Augustine, Confessions 6.3—4 (114—15); emphasis in original. Paulsen and Griffin further write: "At times scholars have read this and similar passages rather naively, expressing surprise at how Augustine, schooled in and so otherwise perceptive of Christian teaching from his youth, could have been ignorant of such fundamental doctrines as the incorporeality of God and the soul." (Footnote 41: See So Maurice Testard, Saint Augustin et Cicéron, [Paris: Études augustiniennes, 1958], 1:110, "though he is certain Augustine must have been taught it" ['nul doute cependant qu'il les reçut'].") "Simply put, in the West they were not fundamental doctrines before Augustine, although they became fundamental largely because of him." (Footnote 42: "We here follow and are indebted in many particulars to the studies of Ronald J. Teske, especially, 'The Aim of Augustine's Proof That God Truly Is,' International Philosophical Quarterly 26 [1986] 253—68, and 'Divine Immutability in Saint Augustine,' The Modern Schoolman 63 [1986] 233—49. See also Goulven Madec, 'Deus,' in Augustinus-Lexikon [ed. Cornelius Mayer; vol. 2; Basel: Schwabe, 1996, 323—26.]") See Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 105. This footnoted text includes the footnotes accompanying the quoted text from that same article.

117.  Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 104. Augustine says that at the time of his conversion to Manichaeism, "'I had not realiZed that God is a Spirit, not a figure whose limbs have length and breadth and who has a mass' (Conf. 3.12.12). The Manichaeans conceived of God as a being of light, corporeal in the Stoic sense, but not a 'figure' with 'limbs.' On Manichaean doctrine, see Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China: A Historical Survey (2d ed.; Tübingen: Mohr, 1992), and François Decret, L'Afrique manichéenne, IV^e—V^e siècles: étude historique et doctrinale (2 vols.; Paris: Études augustiennes, 1978)" Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 104 n. 39. Paulsen and Griffin further write: "While in other works he argues explicitly against Manichaean corporealism, here Augustine assigns no real antagonist to the opposing view (Evodius is obviously a rhetorical fiction). Supposing there is an antagonist external to himself and the source of his own error, one is led to ask if he is addressing, not simply (non-Christian) Stoic or Manichaean corporealism, but that Christian corporealism of which we have made mention. Tertullian had said, 'Nothing is incorporeal except that which is nothing,' and this very belief was for the young Augustine 'the principal and almost sole cause of my error.' It may be that Tertullian's views on corporeality were prevalent among African Christians. If Teske and others are correct, they were prevalent not just among Africans but Western Christians in general, for 'there simply was no spiritual concept of God or of the soul in the Western Church' at this time outside of a small group of platonici." Griffin and Paulsen, "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," 106—7.

118.  Kim Paffenroth, "Paulsen on Augustine: An Incorporeal or Nonanthropomorphic God?" Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 233—35.

119.  Augustine, Confessions 6.3 (114); emphasis in original.

120.  Augustine, "Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental," 23.25, in The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 1 (hereafter NPNF), ed. Philip Schaff (reprint, Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956), 4:139.

121.  See Liguori G. Müller, The De Haeresibus of Saint Augustine: A Translation with an Introduction and Commentary (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1956). Müller writes, "It becomes evident immediately in the De Haeresibus that Augustine envisioned a heresy as a concrete sect, not a heretical proposition, since he speaks of the individual members of the sect rather than of the tenets they hold" (50).

122.  Otto F. A. Meinardus concludes that "anthropomorphists appear to have outnumbered the liberal party [the Origenists who preferred allegorical interpretations of the Scriptures] by at least three to one." Monks and Monasteries of the Egyptian Deserts, rev. ed. (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1989), 53.

123.  Colm Luibheid, trans., John Cassian: Conferences (New York: Paulist, 1985), 125—26.

124.  Luibheid, Cassian: Conferences, 126.

125.  Luibheid, Cassian: Conferences, 126—27.

126.  Owen Chadwick, John Cassian, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 28—29. On the causes of the controversy and the subsequent expulsion of Origenists, see EliZabeth A. Clark, The Origenist Controversy: The Cultural Construction of an Early Christian Debate (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Chapter 2 focuses on anthropomorphism. For a tentative questioning of the generally accepted view that the Egyptian monks believed in an embodied God, see Graham Gould, "The Image of God and the Anthropomorphite Controversy in Fourth Century Monasticism," in Origeniana Quinta, ed. Robert J. Daly (Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1992), 549—57.

127.  Augustine, Letters of St. Augustine 148.1.1 (NPNF 1:498). Note also that the bishop's basis for his belief was apparently Old Testament, not incarnational, passages about God.

Substantial portions of this paper were drawn from the following writings by this same author: "Must God Be Incorporeal?" Faith and Philosophy 6/1 (1989): 76—87; "Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses," Harvard Theological Review 83 (1990): 105—16; "Reply to Kim Paffenroth's Comment," Harvard Theological Review 86 (1993): 235—39; "The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives," BYU Studies 35/4 (1996): 6—94; "Augustine and the Corporeality of God," Harvard Theological Review 95 (2002): 97—118 (with Carl Griffin), reprinted by permission. Student assistants Marc-Charles Ingerson, Matthew Fisher, Spencer Noorlander, and David Vanderbeek have each contributed to the preparation of this paper. Laura Rawlins, Manager of Faculty Editing for the College of Humanities, assisted with final polishing and editing.