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There was a recent question on the Catholic Answers radio show about the idea of God having a body. Here is the response. Certain groups, notably the Mormons, have committed the error of saying that God the Father has a body, and have thus become anthropomorphites, people who say that God has a human form. In recent years, this form of doctrinal decay has also set in among certain segments of American Evangelicalism, most notably in the Pentecostal Word Faith movement. Evangelicals such as Finnis Dake, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn have all (temporarily or permanently) bought into the idea that the Father has a body. Anthropomorphites argue that man is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27) and point to verses that refer to the strong right arm of God, the eyes of God, and so forth. In doing this, they profoundly misunderstand Scripture. First, the image of God we bear involves our rational soul that separates us from animals (the function that the image plays in Genesis 1 is to separate humans from the animals God has just created). Second, talk in the Bible about God’s strong right arm, his eyes, and such is metaphorical language concerning God’s power and knowledge. This can be seen by the fact that the Bible also speaks of God as having feathers and wings; yet even the anthropomorphites would not go this far (cf. Ps. 91:4—"He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge"). Anthropomorphites maintain their doctrine in defiance of verses, such as John 4:24, where Jesus teaches us: "God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth." This means God has no body, because a spirit is, by nature, an incorporeal being. As Jesus tells us elsewhere, "a spirit has not flesh and bones" (Luke 24:39). There is a big difference between being a spirit and having a spirit. Jesus says that the Father is a spirit, not that the Father has a spirit; this means that he lacks a body entirely. The Church Fathers, of course, agreed, and loudly declared the fact that God is an unchangeable, immaterial spirit who has an entirely simple ("incomposite") nature—that is, a nature containing no parts. Since all bodies extend through space and thus can be divided into parts, it is clear that God cannot have a body. "What of Christ’s body?" you may ask. It is true that Jesus, who is God, assumed an earthly body when he was born of the Blessed Virgin, and that this body, now glorified, continues to exist. But since the Lord only took on human flesh in these "last days," and since God has always existed, without beginning or end, we must still conclude that having a body is not part of God’s unchangeable nature: he exists in eternity as pure spirit, even though he chose for the Son to also take on a human nature in addition to his bodiless, timeless, divine nature.

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