God: An Anatomy - A Review

He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just.
A faithful God who does no wrong,
upright and just is he.

Francesca Stavrakopoulou in her book "God: An Anatomy" produces a startling different image of God. This is her description of how she came to look at the texts of the Jewish bible differently:

"While I was studying theology and religion at university, there was a broad assumption among lecturers and students alike that the God of the Bible is without a body. This was a formless, imageless, invisible deity, who in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) revealed himself in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and then in the New Testament became flesh (“incarnate”) in Jesus Christ, in order to die for the sins of humanity before resurrecting and ascending back to the heavens. But as I looked closely at the books comprising the Bible, I couldn’t find this bodiless God. Instead, these ancient texts conjured a startlingly corporeal image of God as a human-shaped deity, who walked and talked and wept and laughed. A god who ate and slept and felt and breathed. And a god who was distinctly male."

"I vividly recall protesting in the question-and-answer session at the end of the lecture, “But lots of biblical texts suggest that God is masculine, with a male body.” “The problem isn’t God,” replied the professor — a highly respected Christian theologian, and a man of the cloth. “The problem only arises when we take the Bible’s descriptions too literally.”

And though a process of taking what other interpreters have taken as metaphorical, she constructs this image of God, taking the descriptions as literal not metaphors.

“The God revealed in this book is the deity as his ancient worshippers saw him: a supersized, muscle-bound, good-looking god, with superhuman powers, earthly passions, and a penchant for the fantastic and the monstrous”.

In some ways, her approach is almost like the Creationist, who takes a literal Adam and Eve, and a God walking in the garden, and presumably a talking serpent as well.

William Lane Craig notes that:

"The question naturally arises, are the narratives of Genesis 1-3 meant to be taken literally? I argue that there are two factors which weigh strongly in favor of a non-literal reading of these narratives: (1) The narratives contain many fantastic elements, where “fantastic” is a technical term meaning “palpably false if taken literally.” Moreover, these elements are not just fantastic to us moderns but would have seemed fantastic as well to an ancient Israelite. It’s worth noting in passing that I do not categorize as fantastic miraculous elements in the narratives, since divine supernatural causation is perfectly plausible. (2) The narratives contain inconsistent elements which cannot both be true if taken literally. It is characteristic of myths, by contrast, that those who tell them are untroubled by different versions of the stories which are inconsistent with each other, since they need not be taken with a sort of wooden literality. The author of Genesis seems utterly unconcerned to iron out the inconsistencies between chapters 1 and 2 that commentators have struggled with for centuries. He doesn’t seem to care that they’re inconsistent, an attitude suggestive of an intended non-literal interpretation"

In fact while there are many similarities between Jewish texts and near Eastern texts of the time, as she correctly points out, but while we may discern remnants of older stories, what is significant is that they have been altered though the prism of Jewish belief. For example, it is almost certain that the two flood narratives (conjoined in the Jewish Bible) come from something like the epic of Gilmamesh, but the writers have taken that as a starting point, and changed it to fit in with Jewish beliefs.

In fact, her approach only works if you take other descriptions of God as metaphorical. The opening verse above describes God as a rock, so perhaps some of the Israelites worshipped a kind of Silicon Avatar, a kind of living rock.

As Marc Z. Brettler points out, in Isaiah, God is a mother giving birth, and a male warrior, and "a real person cannot simultaneously be both".

Rabbi Toba Spitzer notes that:

"Like their ancient Near Eastern neighbors, the authors of the Hebrew Bible used metaphors from the human and natural world to describe their experience of the divine, including Voice, Fire, Warrior, Eagle, Parent, Lawgiver, Water, Rock, and many more."

So is God some kind of shape changer? Obviously if we are going to take these pictures of God literally, according to Stavrakopoulou's theory, we should do so. Surpisingly, she doesn't follow her own logic, and only selects those bits of imagery that suit her project. 

Or it is of course possible that all these depictions may be metaphorical! Indeed, after looking at how different metaphors for God (not all as a man!) are given in the  Hosea, Göran Eidevall proposed that the purpose of such a “plurality of perspectives” is not simply stylistic variation:

"The effect is radical relativization. No model is given a monopolistic position….which hints at the insight that all kinds of “anthropomorphism” are, in the final analysis, hopelessly inadequate as representations of the deity: “for I am God, and not human” (Hosea 11:9)."

While I am impressed by the associated texts she quotes, I remain unconvinced that she really understands the nature of language. The God that she sees, seems to be to be a reflection of her own ideas of God, and anything which contradicts that is variously excluded.