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Mormonism and the nature of God/God is a Spirit
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Criticism
Critics object to the LDS position that God has a physical body by quoting John 4꞉24:
- God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. (Italics in KJV original).
Source(s) of the criticism
Response
See also: FAIR Wiki article Corporeality_of_God [needs work]
Note that in the KJV cited above, the word “is” is italicized. This is because the King James translators have inserted it on their own—it is not present in the Greek text from which the translation was made.
Secondly, the reader should be aware that the indefinite article (“a”, as in "a dog" or "a spirit") does not exist in Greek. Thus, the addition of the word "a" in English occurs at the discretion of the translators.[1]
This leaves two Greek words: theos pneuma [θεος πνεμα]—“God spirit”. The JST resolves this translational issue by saying “for unto such hath God promised his spirit”. The word pneuma, which is translated spirit, also means ‘life’ or ‘breath’. The King James Version of Revelation 13꞉15 renders ‘pneuma’ as life. Thus "God is life," or "God is the breath of life" are potential alternative translations of this verse.
Also, if God is a spirit and we have to worship him in spirit, do mortals have to leave our bodies to worship him?
Why the idea of an incorporeal God?
The time when the Apostles began to preach to the gentile nations, was a time of many philosophical schools and ideas. A very strong idea at the time was a neo-platonic (new version of teachings of Plato) idea that all flesh or matter was essentially evil. Now Christians had less than fifty thousand members at 200 A.D. in a society comprising of sixty million (The Christians as the Romans saw them, pg. 31) . They were the minority. And because of persecution, baptized members who held on to past beliefs (it seems the people of Corinth had this problem early on from the many reminders of the resurrection of Christ, and the saints made by Paul), and no more living inspired leaders, they gradually accepted the pagan view of God being a spirit, and not having flesh and bones, which the philosophical world thought was evil. Because they did this, they were able to convert many more pagans as they had previously. Augustine thoroughly fused the theology of the New Testament with neoplatonism. In examining Christian doctrine, Augustine confessed to a strong preconception--a repugnance to the idea that God had a body (The Confessions, 5.10.19-20; 7.1.1). He acknowledged that he had labored on the thesis of the trinity for fifteen years without “ever reaching a satisfactory conclusion” (The World and the Prophets, Nibley, 3:95). Finally he rationalized that if one accepts the platonic idea that spirit essence is the purest manifestation of reality and that matter is the most corrupt, god must therefore be an immaterial being. He was then able to accept the doctrine of the trinity. (Confessions, 4.16.29, 31; 5.10.19-20; 6.3.4-4.5). As Plato had done before him, Augustine decided that since God is the ultimate good, He cannot be associated with anything material. We believe that man is also spirit (D&C 93:33-4; Numbers 16:22; Romans 8:16) and is, like
God, housed in a physical body. We were, after all, created in the "image" of God (Genesis 1:26-7). It is interesting that, in 1 Corinthians 2:11, Paul wrote about "the spirit of man and the Spirit of God." Elsewhere he spoke of the resurrection of the body and then noted that it is a "spiritual" body (1 Corinthians 15:44-6), though, rising from the grave, it is obviously composed of flesh and bones, as Jesus made clear when he appeared to the apostles after his resurrection (Luke 24:37-9). Paul also told the saints in Rome, "But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you" (Romans 8:9). Similarly, in Alma 11:45, Amulek defines resurrected bodies as "spirits uniting with their bodies, never to be divided; thus the whole becoming spiritual and immortal." The parallel between "God is a Spirit" and worshipping him "in spirit and in truth" in John 4:24 is identical to the parallel in 1 John 4:7-16, in which "God is love" (1 John 4:8) and we must have love in order to worship him properly. It should be obvious that God is not an emotion; similarly, he is not merely a spirit.
One Commentary reads “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.” (Sanders, A Commentary on the Gospel According to St. John, pg. 147-148)
Tertullian taught that “Spirit has a bodily substance of it’s own kind” (Against Praxeas 7,
Ante-Nicene Fathers 3:602)
Endnotes
- [note] Leon Morris, "The Gospel According to John," pg. 271. (needs formatting)
Conclusion
Endnotes
None