Skys
New Member
Thank you for your response, and scriptures included with it!
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Question for Most Christians: God being Spaceless, and Immaterial
- Thread starter Skys
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Wandering Monk
Well-Known Member
Logically for Christians, if God created everything from nothing (ex nihilo) then his existence could not be contingent on anything material.
Christian doctrine also holds that God has always existed from eternity past.
Skys
New Member
I agree, Jesus is a perfect reflection of God's attributes.
If I understand what you are saying, is that God the Father And Jesus both do not have Physical bodies.
From your response I am not sure if you believe God the Father and Jesus are two separate beings or one being, could you clarify?
I believe they are two separate beings, it helps me better understand your view and where you're coming from.
Skys
New Member
Thanks for the response, and including scripture references. It is very informative!
No it is not. Christians do not view God as a "guy" without a body. God is considered as Omnipresent Spirit.
Omnipresent means God is everywhere. This universe is obviously included. If God is not in this universe, then God is not omnipresent. If God is not infinite, then "He" would be a "god", a little g god, not big G God.
No. There is no scriptural support for that. Unless you read anthropomorphic metaphors as biological facts. But that would be silly.
Because God is Omnipresent Spirit, not a creature like a Bigfoot, or an extraterrestrial space martian.
Anthropomorphism - Wikipedia
Metaphor - Wikipedia
InChrist
Free4ever
I don't know how accurate it is to say that Christians generally believe God does not dwell in the universe, since most Christians believe God is omnipresent.
As far as the scripture references you presented in support of the idea of God has a physical body, I would say that these are examples of metaphorical speech often used to describe God actions. Or a theophany, an occurrence where God took on human form which were foreshadows the incarnation, when God, in Jesus, took the form of a man to live among us as Emmanuel, “God with us” (Matthew 1:23)
PureX
Veteran Member
"Totally changes" is a relative assessment, and ego is a purely human phenomenon, we assume. "God" is commonly conceived of the mystery source, sustenance, and purpose of all that exists. By that definition, God would both transcend and ultimately create the various time-limited expressions of being. Given the way most religions depict it, God is the "all-in-all", and the many material and immaterial manifestations of that "all-in-all" are just temporary expressions of the whole. (Including ourselves.) By this conceptualization, ALL the forms are God, past, present, and future. The constant metamorphosis is just the "way God is".
Pleased to hear that.
God does not have a physical body, but Jesus does.
Gnosticism is a theology which sees Jesus as being purely spirit. I'm not aware of any mainstream Christian denomination that believes this.
God and Jesus are two separate beings. A mirror can provide a perfect reflection of the sun. The sun's reflection through the mirror may say "I am the sun". That is true but the mirror and the sun are separate.
Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
YoursTrue
Faith-confidence in what we hope for (Hebrews 11)
Exodus 3:15 in the New Jerusalem Bible has a footnote that explains Yahweh may be some form of the verb 'to be.' It also says that the Greek understands that it is a statement that God is Being itself. We also know that Jesus certainly spoke of God as a person. He said he has a God. We have images of God in Daniel and other places as a person.
Aurelius
Contemplating Living
If God simply exists as 'all that is' we don't need to call that God. Do we?
Besides, how do we get to the conclusion that 'all that is' constitutes divinity?
That video clip is nearly six hours long. How about summarising the salient points?
PureX
Veteran Member
We (humans) seem to need a way of relating to the mystery of 'what is'. And most of us do that by ascribing it a 'personality'.
We (most of us) perceive more than just mindless, pointless functionality in it all. We perceive meaning and purpose, and most of all, value.
Good-Ole-Rebel
*banned*
Because God created the universe, then He is separate from the universe. I don't see why that should mean He cannot dwell in the universe or outside of the universe.
As to 'spaceless', we shouldn't think of God being without 'shape'. As He does have shape. (John 5:37) "...Ye have neither heard his voice at any time, nor seen his shape." And I believe that shape is the very shape of man. And man was created in His shape because God the Son would become man and the exact image of God in every aspect. (Heb. 1:3) "Who being the brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person...."
Good-Ole-Rebel
Terrywoodenpic
Oldest Heretic
I have given up trying to visualise God.
Even the bible struggles to describe or explain his nature.
Most churches accept that he is outside time and space, but make little if any attempt to describe him or his nature.
The concept of the Trinity is inexpiable, except by the artifice of inventing other parallel concepts.
I suggest that we must be satisfied with the belief that God is benevolent towards both the universe and toward us.
If we are Christians we are likely to believe that Jesus was in some way his son, that his teachings are a true reflection of God, and that Jesus has now returned to God, and that we are watched over by the Holy spirit, until such time as Jesus will return.
The nature and role of Saints, Angels and the Heavenly Host, is more speculative than explained.
We may or may not understand or believe in a Trinity in the form defined by the Nicene creed.
God may not have all the attributes that we associate with him. We simply do not know the extent of his abilities and knowledge.
On the other hand he may have powers and abilities far greater and wider than we can comprehend.
Even the bible struggles to describe or explain his nature.
Most churches accept that he is outside time and space, but make little if any attempt to describe him or his nature.
The concept of the Trinity is inexpiable, except by the artifice of inventing other parallel concepts.
I suggest that we must be satisfied with the belief that God is benevolent towards both the universe and toward us.
If we are Christians we are likely to believe that Jesus was in some way his son, that his teachings are a true reflection of God, and that Jesus has now returned to God, and that we are watched over by the Holy spirit, until such time as Jesus will return.
The nature and role of Saints, Angels and the Heavenly Host, is more speculative than explained.
We may or may not understand or believe in a Trinity in the form defined by the Nicene creed.
God may not have all the attributes that we associate with him. We simply do not know the extent of his abilities and knowledge.
On the other hand he may have powers and abilities far greater and wider than we can comprehend.
The gnostic-flavored god(s) of Paul and the author of John are remote, pure and immaterial, and Jesus, who in both cases is the creator of the material world, is the mediator between God and that world, particularly man.
The mainly Jewish God of Mark, and the more Greek versions of God in Matthew and Luke, don't have those traits.
So there's no single scriptural answer to your question.
Terry Sampson
Well-Known Member
I prefer to post a good portion of the introduction to his book, The Bodies of God and the World of Ancient Israel, Benjamin D. Sommer (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Introduction: God’s Body and the Bible’s Interpreters
The god of the Hebrew bible has a body. This must be stated at the outset, because so many people, including many scholars, assume otherwise. The evidence for this simple thesis is overwhelming, so much so that asserting the carnal nature of the biblical God should not occasion surprise. What I propose to show in this book is that the startling or bizarre idea in the Hebrew Bible is something else entirely: not that God has a body – that is the standard notion of ancient Israelite theology – but rather that God has many bodies located in sundry places in the world that God created.
The bulk of this book is devoted to two tasks: first, demonstrating that in parts of the Hebrew Bible the one God has more than one body (and also, we shall see, more than one personality); and second, exploring the implications of this fact for a religion based on the Hebrew Bible. The first of these tasks is historical and descriptive in nature. The second, especially as taken up in the last chapter, is theological and much more speculative.
Before I embark on these two tasks, however, some readers may find a brief discussion of the corporeality of the biblical God beneficial. After all, Sunday school teachers and religious sages have long taught Jews and Christians that the Hebrew Bible is distinctive among the religious documents of antiquity precisely because it rejects the notion of a physical deity. The formidable authority of childhood teachers and the less robust influence of theologians have embedded the notion of the non-corporeal Hebrew deity so deeply into Western thought that some readers may be skeptical of my starting point (to wit, that the biblical God has at least one body). Consequently, it will be worthwhile to glance at a small sample of the relevant evidence found throughout scripture and to explore how some modern scholars attempt to evade this evidence.
THE EMBODIED GOD
One need not go very far into the Bible to find a reference to God’s form or shape. Both terms, in fact, appear in the twenty-sixth verse of the Bible, in which God addresses various unnamed heavenly creatures as follows: “Let us make humanity in our form, according to our shape, so that they rule over the fish of the sea, and the birds in the sky, and the beasts, over all the earth and all the creeping things that creep on the earth” (Genesis 1.26). This verse begins from the assumption that God and the unnamed heavenly creatures have bodies, and it tells us that human bodies will have the same basic shape as theirs. Because this verse plays an important role in Chapter 3 of this book, I do not discuss it at length here. Suffice it to say that the verse makes clear that human and divine bodies have the same contours, but it does not say anything about what the respective bodies are made of.
We will see later, in Chapter 3, that some biblical authors regarded the substance of the divine body as one of its distinctive features: This body was stunningly bright, so that it had to be surrounded by dark clouds to protect anyone nearby.
In modern terms, we might tentatively suggest that this body was made of energy rather than matter. We can term this conception of God anthropomorphic in the most basic sense of the word: having the shape of a human. But because the divine body according to this conception is not necessarily made of the same sort of matter as a human body, it might be appropriate to term this belief a nonmaterial conception of God or even a spiritual one. Indeed, Yehezkel Kaufmann, the greatest and most influential Jewish biblical scholar of modern times, describes the Hebrew Bible’s conception of God as at once spiritual and anthropomorphic: The biblical God, Kaufmann maintains, had a form but no material substance. Kaufmann’s portrayal, we shall, see, does not apply to the whole Hebrew Bible, but it aptly captures the peculiar type of anthropomorphism found in many parts of the biblical canon.
As one moves forward in Genesis, one quickly arrives at additional verses that reflect the physicality of God – and although some of these verses point toward a nonmaterial anthropomorphism, others reflect a more concrete conception of God’s body. We can term this conception material anthropomorphism, or the belief that God’s body, at least at times, has the same shape and the same sort of substance as a human body. In Genesis 2.7 God blows life-giving breath into the first human–an action that might suggest that God has a mouth or some organ with which to exhale. Less ambiguously, in Genesis 3.8, Adam hears the sound of God going for a stroll in the Garden of Eden at the breezy time of the day. A being who takes a walk is a being who has a body–more specifically, a body with something closely resembling legs. As we move forward in Genesis, we are told that God comes down from heaven to earth to take a close look at the tower the humans are building (Genesis 11.5) and that God walks to Abraham’s tent, where He engages in conversation (Genesis 18). Again, these are actions of a being with or in a body. They point toward a crucial similarity between the divine body and any other body (human or nonhuman, animate or inert): The divine body portrayed in these texts was located at a particular place at a particular time. It was possible to say that God’s body was here (near Abraham’s tent, for example) and not there (inside the tent itself), even if God’s knowledge and influence went far beyond that particular place. Indeed, this is what I mean by “a body” in this book: something located in a particular place at a particular time, whatever its shape or substance.
To be sure, many readers believe that the God of the Hebrew Bible cannot be seen, a circumstance that many assume to result from God’s lack of a body. After all, Yhwh famously informs Moses in Exodus 33.20, “A human cannot see Me and live.” In fact this text does not claim that God has no body for us to see; the point is rather that seeing God’s body will lead immediately to death. (Similarly, the statement, “One cannot touch a high-voltage wire and live,” does not mean that there is no such thing as a high-voltage wire; on the contrary, high-voltage wires are dismayingly, dangerously real. So is the embodied deity of the Hebrew Bible.)
The belief that one could see God but that doing so would be fatal is widespread in scripture, and it is closely related to the conception of God’s body as extraordinarily luminous: The light God’s body gives off is not just blinding but deadly.
What is surprising is how many people discovered that there were exceptions to this rule. “In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw my Lord, sitting on a throne high and lifted up; His clothing filled the palace,” Isaiah tells us in 6.1. The prophet is not surprised to discover that God has a body (or clothing); rather, Isaiah is dismayed at having seen it, because he is sure he is about to die: “I said, ‘Woe is me, for I am doomed, for I am a man with impure lips, dwelling among a nation with impure lips, and my eyes have seen the king, Yhwh of hosts’” (6.5). Divinity, we know from other parts of the Bible, does not tolerate the various forms of ritual impurity that were perfectly normal for men and women; it is for this reason that humans coming into even indirect contact with God had to take careful steps to become ritually pure. Yet Isaiah suddenly found himself in direct visual contact with the deity, and, reasonably enough, he expected to die. In his case, however, a heavenly being purified him with a burning coal, which somehow allowed him to see God without the normal danger, and Isaiah became one of several exceptions to the general rule described in the Bible.
Some biblical texts, on the other hand, consider looking at God as perfectly safe; for them, God’s body is not dangerously luminous, at least not all the time. Unlike Isaiah, the prophet Amos expresses no fear at having seen God. He simply informs us, “I saw God standing at the altar” (Amos 9.1). Adam and Eve hide when they hear God walking in the garden not because they fear seeing the divine body but, we are told, because they suddenly felt shy about being naked (Genesis 3.8–9). Abraham speaks with God respectfully, but without giving any sense that standing right next to God is dangerous or unusual (Genesis 18–19). This case is especially revealing: When Abraham first saw God approaching his tent, he seemed to think that his visitor was an ordinary human being, rather than the creator of the universe. In these texts God’s body, at least at first sight, did not look different from a human body. Other biblical texts also regard seeing God as involving no particular danger, whatever the body’s substance or luminosity. Exodus 33, the same chapter that told us that a human cannot see God and live, nevertheless informs us that Moses regularly went out to a special tent outside the Israelite camp to converse with God. God would come down to the tent surrounded by (or in the form of?) a pillar of cloud (Exodus 33.9), “and Moses would speak with God face to face, as a man speaks with his friend” (Exodus 33.11).
The same chapter, however, goes on to tell us that Moses was not able to see God’s face, but that he was, briefly, allowed to see God’s back, which apparently is less harmful (Exodus 33.22–3). In these verses, perceiving the divine body, at least in its entirety, does involve danger; God protects Moses by putting His hand, which seems to be quite large, over Moses’ body as He passes by. Notice that Exodus 33 contradicts itself on the question of whether a human (or at least one exceptional human) can look at God and, if so, how much or which parts can be seen safely. In fact, the chapter is an anthology of conflicting traditions regarding the presence of God and how humans relate to it: An ancient Israelite editor crafted this chapter by collecting originally independent texts in order to pose a debate concerning a single theme. What is crucial to note for our purpose is that none of the texts edited into this chapter make the claim that God does not have a body; the debate in which they engage concerns itself exclusively with the effect that body has on humans nearby.
SCHOLARLY AVOIDANCE
To these examples one could add copious evidence from narrative, prophecy, and psalms, many of which are examined in detail in Chapters 2 and 3. In light of these texts, it is surprising that many scholars ignore or even deny the corporeality of the biblical God. Others acknowledge the evidence but attempt to minimize it or to claim that it is to be understood only symbolically.
....
wellwisher
Well-Known Member
One way to look at this is with an example. Say you used your imagination and came up with a better mouse trap. This image in your mind's eye is similar to the spirit, since it has no physical form in space and time. It cannot be verified by others based on tangible observation. To become tangible and part of material nature, you will need to go to your lab and build a prototype. The spirit exists apart from material reality and comes before the material. It can also animate matter to create an expression in material reality; prototype.
In Genesis, God broods over the deep. The universe is forming in his imagination; spirit, first. He then goes to his lab and builds a prototype in physical reality; let there be light!
The spirit is different from material reality, in that it is composed of all that we have imagined, including that which does not take form in material reality. We may have had a dream of being a singer in a rock and roll band. However, but we do not pursue this dream sufficiently to make it tangible. The spiritual realm is not only composed of what is, and what shall be, but also what could have been. The spirit is both in and out of time and space.
In a concept such as Heaven, which is a spiritual realm, the spiritual realm is not limited to the time and space limitations of physical expression. That what is, shall be, and what could have been, can all exist side-by-side. Physical sets limits in time and space and segregates what could have been, from what was. In heaven, everyone gets a second chance at what could have been.
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Looks like an interesting read. From the introduction and references to the Hebrew Bible it seems clear that God’s Body isn’t a physical body at all, not in the sense that you and I have physical bodies.
Goodman John
Active Member
My belief is that God is completely immaterial and resides completely in the spiritual realm. We might assign to God certain attributes, but we have no real way of comprehending God until we (hopefully) meet him one day (and maybe not even then).
As for Jesus, I do not believe he was a totally spiritual being; I believe Jesus was just a man, conceived and born like any other, but possessed of a great spirit- that being the Christ that dwelt within him. When Jesus died, the Christ spirit returned to the spiritual realm.
As for Satan, that's a bit more tricky, as he began as a totally spiritual being- like God- but was forced into the physical realm (but that's a different story). As such, and due to his power, his spirit may flit from one body to another to engage in all sorts of nefarious deeds, suppressing the existing spirit. (Unlike 'normal' spirits, Satan has no chance at redemption and is forced to remain in this physical realm of his making until it ceases to exist- at which time he will be returned to the spiritual realm to await God's pleasure.)
As for Jesus, I do not believe he was a totally spiritual being; I believe Jesus was just a man, conceived and born like any other, but possessed of a great spirit- that being the Christ that dwelt within him. When Jesus died, the Christ spirit returned to the spiritual realm.
As for Satan, that's a bit more tricky, as he began as a totally spiritual being- like God- but was forced into the physical realm (but that's a different story). As such, and due to his power, his spirit may flit from one body to another to engage in all sorts of nefarious deeds, suppressing the existing spirit. (Unlike 'normal' spirits, Satan has no chance at redemption and is forced to remain in this physical realm of his making until it ceases to exist- at which time he will be returned to the spiritual realm to await God's pleasure.)