God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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So what was this humanoid God like? His feet were always firmly rooted in His sacred places; whether on a platform of lapis lazuli, as on His holy mountain (Ex. 24:10); or else on His footstool, the Ark of the Covenant, in the temple sanctuary (Ps. 99:1-5), where He sat enthroned, like other gods and kings, on the wings of golden cherubim. After the Babylonian Captivity of the sixth century BC, Yahweh’s stature only grew, and His throne became more elevated. He now sat on a crystalline platform borne aloft in the heavens by cherubim and spinning wheels (Ezekiel 1:4-28), and the whole world became His footstool (Is. 66:1). The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5 She makes two key points. The first is that Christianity and Judaism are not Biblical religions; they are post-Biblical religions. Most of the Hebrew Bible was written in and refers to very different times when the concept of God was very different to the monotheistic Christian and Jewish concepts of God.

Tellingly, the prophecies of Daniel, from the second century BCE reintroduce images of a “high god” and a second heavenly presence, superficially reminiscent of the archaic Syrian model. But here the second presence is a glorified human figure representing the struggles and sufferings of the Jewish people. This figure is received into the heavenly court as a sign of the triumph, not of the savage regional empires of the period, symbolised by giant beasts at war with each other, but of “the holy people of the Most High” – a society of properly human character, living in devotion, justice and humility. It is an image that can be perceived clearly behind some of the early Christian language about Jesus. But it originally reflects a second great thought-shift in later Hebrew writings. What the judges said: “Intelligent, illuminating and thoroughly enjoyable. A well-researched book that uses carefully chosen case studies to shed light on a topic of contemporary debate.”

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What if the Ten Commandments were not just a set of ancient rules, but a guide to experiencing the good life today? Stavrakopoulou’s thesis is that even during the six centuries over which the books of the Old Testament were written, the immense physicality of this wilder divinity was being erased, not least under the sway of Platonism. “Reverence rather requires . . . an allegorical meaning,” Clement of Alexandria wrote around the turn of the second century CE, expressing a scholarly distaste for the experiential and somatic that remains highly influential. Translators, too, have long sanitised the text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. But this more primal, vital Yahweh can be reconstructed from scattered passages in the Bible which still retain warm traces of his divine materiality.

Without denying that there are other factors at play, Restoration scripture makes clear that humanity’s status as the image of God includesa physical resemblance to deity. In Ether 3, the brother of Jared “saw the finger of the Lord; and it was as the finger of a man, like unto flesh and blood” (Ether 3:6). Because of his great faith, “the Lord showed himself unto him” (v. 13) and said: Paulsen, “ Doctrine of Divine Embodiment,” 41–79, which is a significant expansion of Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity.” Paulsen also critiques the philosophical arguments against an embodied God in Paulsen, “ Doctrine of Divine Embodiment,” 81–94, an adaptation of David Paulsen, “Must God Be Incorporeal?,” Faith and Philosophy6, no. 1 (1989): 76–87.Let’s go onto the last of the best history books of 2022, Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

Similar ideas were soon championed by other Greek thinkers, most notably Plato (c. 429–347 bce), his student Aristotle (c. 384–322 bce) and subsequent generations of their elitist, learned adherents in the Graeco-Roman world, who theorized that the divine power ultimately undergirding the universe and everything in it was necessarily without a body – an incorporeal, invisible, abstract principle, force or intellect, wholly beyond and distinct from the material world. Not that these rarefied views made much of an impact on the religious lives of ordinary folk. Whether they were schooled in philosophy or not, and no matter the deities they worshipped, most people living in the Graeco-Roman world continued to envisage their gods as corporeal beings with bodies shaped like their own – much as they always had. Furthermore, God commanded the Israelites not to make any graven images of God to bow down and worship (see Exodus 20:3–4; Deuteronomy 4:15–19), at least partially because rather than “dumb idols” (Habakkuk 2:8), God’s true image is manifest in living, breathing persons. 17This means, every human being deserves to be treated with dignity and respect as children of God and reflections of his image and likeness. As President Joseph Fielding Smith taught,An astonishing and revelatory history that re-presents God as he was originally envisioned by ancient worshippers—with a distinctly male body, and with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and monstrous. El, not Yahweh, was most likely the first god of the people of Israel. But early in the first millennium BCE, Yahweh displaced him. This Yahweh is the god whom Francesca Stavrakopoulou – professor of the Hebrew Bible and ancient religion at the university of Exeter – anatomises. He is not the perfect, abstract, immaterial being of modern conception; his is a visceral presence with an all too corporeal reality and many of the flaws that flesh is heir to. Of all these six books this one is the most accessible to the general reader. It is fascinating. It examines the fate of fallen statues of famous figures from the past. And, occasionally, I didn’t totally trust her translation. And, that ties with her perhaps overemphasizing not just feet, but entire legs, as euphemisms for genitals. Specifically, it was Song of Songs 5:10-16 that was a bridge too far for me. My modern translation has verse 15 as “His legs are alabaster pillars,” after verse 14 talks of the lover’s arms. She translates that as “genitals.” (That said, there are far more off the wall takes: https://explorethefaith.com/song-of-s.... That’s not only off the wall, but obviously incorrect, and I’m not prudish, nor de-bodifying.) But at other times, Stavrakopoulou is willing to occasionally going beyond "literal" to "literalistic." I really loved this book. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV.

Donne seems in his 19th “Expostulation” simply to praise the Lord, but a polemic is clearly to be heard between the lines. Born Catholic (he accepted Anglican ordination only in his early 40s), Donne intends to praise metaphorical and figurative language in itself by praising it in his Creator. Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist and derivatively Puritan guise, celebrated as the only proper reading of scripture the literal, “plain sense” reading, which Donne concedes in his first sentence is sometimes the proper reading. It was the rejection of the metaphorical, the figurative and, above all, the allegorical so celebrated by Christianity down to the West European 16th century that crucially enabled the Protestant Reformation’s return to the alleged “plain sense” of primitive Christianity. John Donne begs artfully to differ. Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all men were created in the beginning after mine own image.” Ether 3:15 The Know

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Behold, I am Jesus Christ. … Seest thou that ye are created after mine own image? Yea, even all men were created in the beginning after mine own image. Behold, this body, which ye now behold, is the body of my spirit; and man have I created after the body of my spirit; and even as I appear unto thee to be in the spirit will I appear unto my people in the flesh. (Ether 3:14–16)