What the Early Church Believed: God Has No Body

The error

Mormons, and at times Word Faith teachers such as Finnis Dake, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn, have said the Father has a body. These "anthropomorphites" appeal to man being made in God's image (Genesis 1:26-27) and to verses about God's arm or eyes.

What Scripture means

• The image of God we bear is our rational soul, which separates us from the animals; that is the image's function in Genesis 1.
• Talk of God's right arm or eyes is metaphor for his power and knowledge. The Bible also speaks of God's feathers and wings (Psalm 91:4), which no one takes literally.
• Jesus teaches that God is spirit (John 4:24), and a spirit does not have flesh and bones (Luke 24:39). Jesus says the Father is a spirit, not that he has one, so he has no body at all.

Since every body extends through space and can be divided into parts, God, whose nature has no parts, cannot have a body.

What about Christ's body?

Jesus, who is God, took an earthly body when he was born of the Virgin, and that body, now glorified, continues to exist. But he took flesh only in these "last days," while God has always existed. So having a body is not part of God's unchangeable nature: he exists eternally as pure spirit, even though the Son also took on a human nature.

The witness of the early Church

• Tatian (170): God is a spirit, the maker of matter, invisible.
• Athenagoras (177): God is unbegotten, eternal, invisible and incomprehensible.
• Irenaeus (189): God is simple, not composed of parts, all mind and all spirit.
• Clement of Alexandria (200–208): God is incorporeal and uncircumscribed, without parts or form.
• Origen (225): God is not a body nor in a body, but a simple intellectual being, by nature invisible.
• Athanasius (350), Didymus the Blind (362), Basil the Great (367), Ambrose (379), Evagrius of Pontus (381) and Gregory of Nyssa (382) all teach that God is simple and without parts.
• Hilary of Poitiers (365) says God is incorporeal, since Scripture says he is spirit and a spirit has no flesh and bones.
• John Chrysostom (386), on John 1:18, says those who saw visions of God saw shapes by condescension, not God's essence, for God is simple and without shape.
• Augustine (408): nothing in God is said by way of accident, since nothing in him changes.
• Cyril of Alexandria (420–429) calls the divine nature perfectly simple, and says that when Scripture speaks of God's bodily parts, the mind should rise from those figures to things intellectual.