God's Transcendence and Incorporeality

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, you've been working on divine incorporeality lately. Some of our viewers and listeners may be unaware of divine incorporeality. Shannon Byrd is a friend and follower of Reasonable Faith, and he has a really good theology and apologetics blog. He writes in this article^[1],

Traditional Christianity affirms that God is an immaterial, nonphysical reality. This is to say that God is formless or “without body.” Christianity has historically opposed material conceptions of God and instead posited that God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are lacking any material structure or composition, that is apart from the incarnation of Christ.

Which we will get into a little bit later. What do you think of that summation, Bill?

DR. CRAIG: Well, I think that Shannon is quite right in saying that divine incorporeality means that God is an immaterial non-physical reality. We should not say that it means that God doesn't have a body because, as he indicates in his very last phrase, in the incarnation the second person of the Trinity does assume a human nature so that in Christ God does have a body. But God himself, apart from the incarnation, is an immaterial non-physical reality. And that's what we mean by divine incorporeality.

KEVIN HARRIS: There seems to be plenty of Scriptural data supporting God's incorporeality. This article from Shannon continues, for example,

John 4:24 Christ says, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” . . . In 1 Timothy 6:16, Paul says God dwells in unapproachable light and no man has seen or can see him. Paul also mentions that God is invisible (Col. 1:15). Similarly, John says no one has seen God at any time (John 1:18).

The Bible certainly indicates that God is immaterial it seems.

DR. CRAIG: I think that's right. This is just some of the biblical evidence for God's incorporeality. In my Systematic Philosophical Theology I list about five such lines of evidence including these. One, again, is the statement by Jesus himself that God is spirit. It's important to understand here that in the Jewish-Christian conception, a spirit was not some sort of ethereal substance like a ghost – like ectoplasm or ether. It meant an immaterial reality. This is in contrast to the Greek Stoic view which did think of spirit as a kind of material reality – a very thin sort of substance like the air. The Jewish-Christian conception was quite different from the Stoic conception in that, for Christians, God's immateriality meant that he was of the order of mind and was therefore immaterial. Another evidence for God's incorporeality, as Shannon indicates, is God's invisibility. Scripture says over and over again that God is invisible. I think that we can take that more broadly to say that God is not sense-perceptible – not only can he not be seen, he can't be felt or touched or heard or smelled. God is not perceptible by the five senses. So those would just be two examples of biblical evidence for the immateriality of God.

KEVIN HARRIS: And of course there are philosophical arguments for divine incorporeality. Shannon mentions,

For instance, if material things are subject to corruption and God is incorruptible, then God is not material. Additionally, if God is omnipresent and God is material, it would follow that everything material is God. And if everything material is God, and humans do evil, then it follows that God did evil, which is not a great-making property. Aside from the Scriptural data, on the merit of these arguments alone, the Christian theist would want to affirm the incorporeality of God.

OK, Bill? Any other arguments to mention?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. What Shannon is referring to here are arguments of so-called perfect being theology; that is to say, if God is a maximally great being then his incorporeality will follow from certain of his other attributes. For example, he mentions here God being incorruptible. God can never decay or cease to exist, and yet all material things according to the laws of thermodynamics are corruptible. Therefore God could not be of the substance of matter. He also mentions God's omnipresence. If God is material then it follows that he is a material substance existing throughout the universe. I don't think that would necessarily imply that everything material just is God, though it would seem to imply that God fills every space in a material way. You would have to have more than one material object occupying the same space, but clearly that's not the conception of God in the Bible which is that God is wholly present at every place – that he's not divisible up into pieces or segments throughout space. So I think the omnipresence of God also entails God's immateriality. I think that God's timelessness would also entail his immateriality. If I'm right in thinking God is timeless without creation then it follows that he's immaterial. Now, in addition to these arguments of perfect being theology, I do think that divine incorporeality is an implication of certain arguments of natural theology; that is to say, arguments for God's existence. For example, the kalam cosmological argument leads to a transcendent creator of the universe who is responsible for bringing into existence all matter and energy without any material cause. So various arguments of natural theology like the cosmological argument would also support God's immateriality. So both the arguments of perfect being theology and the arguments of natural theology provide support for the biblical doctrine of divine incorporeality.

KEVIN HARRIS: Shannon further chronicles in this article that Tertullian thought that God was material or corporeal and that Augustine disagreed and said that Tertullian was “raving.” I suppose that at least some Mormon theology also holds that God has a body.

DR. CRAIG: Tertullian was influenced by this Stoic view that I described earlier where spirit is a sort of thin aerial substance. So he thought that God was material in that sense. But Mormons are even more materialistic. They think that God is a humanoid being that exists on some planet in outer space with our universe subject to him. So those would be even more radical examples of people who think that God is a material being.

KEVIN HARRIS: Shannon continues,

Thus, this argument over the corporeality of God is not a new one, though it was largely defeated early on. Charles Taliaferro states, “A major objection to theism from the mid-twentieth century onward among English-speaking philosophers of religion has been that it makes no sense to posit an incorporeal God.” They claim that it is a category error to attribute intelligence and personal agency to a thing, which has no physical body. However, it must be said that this conclusion comes from a presupposition of naturalism. And as many have aptly demonstrated, if naturalism is true, then personal agency is impossible. Thus, it isn’t a category mistake to attribute agency to an incorporeal being, rather agency requires immateriality, for without it everything is determined by prior material causes.

What do you make of this objection that it makes no sense to posit an incorporeal God?

DR. CRAIG: Here we see the very close linkage between theology and the philosophy of mind. Substance dualists (or anthropological dualists) have argued that human beings are composed of body and soul and that the soul is an immaterial self that is connected with our bodies. When you think about what God is, God is an unembodied soul. He is an immaterial mind that is not connected to a body apart from the incarnation of Christ. So issues in the philosophy of mind become very relevant to your Christian doctrine of God as an incorporeal being. In my Systematic Philosophical Theology I consider three objections to mind-body dualism that would also apply to the existence of God and try to show how those arguments in fact fail. Indeed, the most important of these (namely the causal closure of the physical, namely that physical things can only have causes which are physical) ultimately is self-defeating and incapable of rational affirmation. That's very close to the argument that Shannon wants to make here.

KEVIN HARRIS: Another thing to look at is Scriptures that seem to speak of God as having a body or being material. One example that Shannon mentions is Exodus 33 where God tells Moses,

Behold, there is a place by Me, and you shall stand there on the rock; and it will come about, while My glory is passing by, that I will put you in the cleft of the rock and cover you with My hand until I have passed by. Then I will take My hand away and you shall see My back, but My face shall not be seen.

How do we interpret passages like this?

DR. CRAIG: I think there are two sorts of passages in the Scriptures that describe God in bodily terms. One would be these theophanies such as you just described in Exodus 33. These are visions of God that God gives to a percipient, but it doesn't represent God as he actually is. God is an incorporeal being but he can cause a human being to project a vision of God as a corporeal form. Or, even more radically, God could materialize in a corporeal form. But this would not be the way God is in his own nature, which is incorporeal. These would be manifestations of God which God creates for various purposes of revelation. The other type of Scriptural passage would be those which describe God as having bodily parts. For example, the eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous and his ear is open to their prayer. I think these are simply poetic anthropomorphisms that serve a clear literary purpose. When the Bible speaks of “the eyes of the Lord” it means God is attentive to his own. He knows what's going on. When it says “his ear is open to their prayer” it doesn't mean that God has literal ears but rather God attends to our prayers and answers them. The Scripture speaks of “the arm of the Lord” as a metaphor for his strength; “the face of the Lord” symbolizes his presence. In all of these anthropomorphic descriptions of God we have poetic descriptions of God that serve a clear literary purpose to affirm attributes that he does literally have.

KEVIN HARRIS: One more issue. Shannon mentions your professor, John Hick. Shannon says that an additional objection to God’s incorporeality is the incarnation of Christ, that is an immaterial God taking on a material body. He says^[2],

John Hick postulates that Chalcedonian (orthodox) Christology is docetic in nature. He postulates that it’s impossible for Christ to be fully God and fully man; the two are logically contradictory. Hick believes that thinking Christ could be fully God and fully human is tantamount to a squared circle. In Hicks opinion, it is just impossibility. Rather than the Chalcedonian Christology, Hicks takes the accounts in Scripture and reinterprets them according to his presuppositions in order to render a metaphorical interpretation; this says more about Hick’s philosophical presuppositions than his hermeneutical acumen.

Thoughts on the objection?

DR. CRAIG: Yes. I do. I think it's a mistake when Christians say that Jesus is “fully” God and “fully” man. That is not in fact what the creeds affirm. That would be a contradiction if you mean that he's 100% God and he's 100% man. Rather, what the creeds affirm is that Christ is truly God and truly man – vera Deus, vera homo. He is truly God and truly man. That is to say, he has all the essential properties of deity, and he has all the essential properties of humanity. So the classic Christian view of the incarnate Christ is that the second person of the Trinity assumed (in addition to his divine nature that he already had) a human nature so that Christ came to have two natures: one human and one divine. And yet these are united in one person. So the watchword of orthodoxy is that you have one person in two natures, and there is simply no logical contradiction in such a view as that at all.

KEVIN HARRIS: Bill, we will be keeping up with your progress as you continue writing, and discussing some more of the topics that you are writing on in upcoming podcasts.

DR. CRAIG: I’m eager to do so.^[3]