Question: Is the doctrine that God the Father and Jesus Christ have physical bodies not Biblical?

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Questions

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Critics attack the LDS doctrine of God the Father and Jesus Christ being corporeal beings—i.e., having physical bodies. They claim that this doctrine is not Biblical.

To see citations to the critical sources for these claims, [[../CriticalSources|click here]]

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John 4:24

In John 4:24 Jesus says:

24 God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth.

It is sometimes claimed that this verse proves that God is non-corporeal: i.e., a spirit, and nothing but a spirit.

However, there is no indefinite article in Greek (the indefinite article in English is "a," as in "a spirit." The New International Version (NIV) translation of the same verse reads:

God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and truth.

One non-LDS work noted of this verse:

That God is spirit is not meant as a definition of God's being—though this is how the Stoics would have understood it. It is a metaphor of his mode of operation, as life-giving power, and it is no more to be taken literally than I John i. 5, "God is light", or Deut. iv. 24, "Your God is a devouring fire". It is only those who have received this power through Christ who can offer God a real worship.^[1]

The absence of God's body is thus only present in this scripture if one approaches it with that preconception. There is nothing which requires such a reading, and much that does not.

Even the presumption that spirit means being immaterial is not scriptural, and is the product of later thinking: "in Scripture...there is no indication that by spirit and soul were meant any such principles as form or immateriality."^[2]

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Answer

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== Notes ==

1. [note]  Joseph Newbould Sanders, A Commentary on the Gospel according to John, ed. B. A. Mastin (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 148–149. (emphasis in original)
2. [note]  Harry A. Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 2:95. ISBN {{{isbn}}}.

Further reading

FairMormon web site

• FAIR Topical Guide:

External links

• David L. Paulsen and R. Dennis Potter, "How Deep the Chasm? A Reply to Owen and Mosser's Review," FARMS Review of Books 11/2 (1999): 221–264. off-site