God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

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The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. It's a book that should be taught in any school that have religion as a subject. And religious people should read it too. Maybe there be less religion, and the world would be a better place!

If you are exploring topics connected to sexual ethics, particularly going beyond a focus on heterosexuality, the work of Dr Susanna Cornwell and Marcella Althaus-Reid are both eminently relevant. The God we worship is a glorified Being in whom all power and perfection dwell, and he has created man in his own image and likeness (Gen. 1:26–27), with those characteristics and attributes which he himself possesses. And so our belief in the dignity and destiny of [humankind] is an essential part both of our theology and of our way of life. It is the very basis of our Lord’s teaching that “the first and great commandment” is: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind”; and that the second great commandment is: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matt. 22:37–39). 18 Further ReadingFor a more complete discussion of the embodiment of God in the earliest stages of the Restoration, see DavidL. Paulsen, “ The Doctrine of Divine Embodiment: Restoration, Judeo-Christian, and Philosophical Perspectives,” BYU Studies Quarterly35, no. 4 (1995–1996): 9–39. See also TerrylL. Givens, Wrestling the Angel: The Foundations of Mormon Thought—Cosmos, God, Humanity(New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2015), 89–95. On what Joseph would have known about God’s body after the First Vision, see JohnW. Welch, “ When Did Joseph Smith Know that the Father and the Son Have Bodies as Tangible as Man’s?,” BYU Studies Quarterly59 no. 2 (2020): 298–310. Dr Katherine Southwood is Associate Professor in the Old Testament in the Faculty of Theology and Religion in the University of Oxford, and a Fellow and Tutor of St John’s College, Oxford.

The nagging issue? Probably at least 80 percent of endnotes refer to Bible passages. FOOTnotes — using that word correctly — would have been MUCH more convenient. (In-line citations, common at least in US biblical criticism writings, would have been better yet.) In a certain number of cases, I was familiar with the verse, even in Stavrakopoulou’s translation. But, I couldn’t remember the exact Bible passage. Seriously, this came close to losing the book a star by itself. After all, what is it that comes below the hands, resting there at a man’s sides, but above his thighs? Stavrakopopoulou, smartly adducing support from the learned Daniel Boyarin, infers from this jewel-studded evocation of a nude male lover that a comparably jewel-studded sculpture of the nude male Yahweh once stood in the Jerusalem Temple. She draws repeatedly not just on her close reading of the Hebrew but also on her wide and resourceful use of relevant and surprisingly copious lexical and archaeological work done just since the turn of the millennium.This is a very interesting book. The Ottoman Turks were a very long-lasting and important dynasty, who ruled for seven centuries. And the book unfolds a sweeping narrative stressing the importance of the Ottoman dynasty, both in relation to Middle Eastern countries, but also its role in European history. For many Europeans for about half a millennium, the Ottomans represented the exotic, dangerous and non-Christian Orient. They were the enemy to fear. The book draws out six key moments in Ottoman history as important. 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. Stavrakopoulou is a remarkable and unusual historian. Her attitude to the Bible in this book is controversial. It has a decidedly anthropological slant. She describes how, three thousand years ago in the Holy Land, the inhabitants knew of many deities, led by a Father God called El. Later, one such deity, known as Yahweh, had a human-shaped body and he possessed feet to walk on. He had a wife, offspring and colleagues. His body changed all the time. At one point, he was virile young, strapping, and emanated red hot light. However, in the book of Daniel, he had a more celestial colour. He had the white hair and the beard of an aged deity who possesses wisdom. 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. 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.