“Shining in the Light of Your Glory”: Finding the Simple Reading of Scripture

Abstract

AbstractThis essay argues that without allowing for a legitimate extra‐biblical reasoning for the appropriateness of God's “simplicity,” Christians will be compelled biblically to affirm that God, as such, has a body — or at least Christians will have to accept this as a theologically possible reading of Scripture that cannot be ruled out. Barnes first cites ancient philosophical sources that argue that God has no parts but is utterly simple. In Barnes's quick sketch, the main role is given to Plotinus and especially to the summation found in Alcuinus's Didaskalon X.7 (Alcuinus is known also as Albinus). Barnes then examines readings of Israel's Scriptures that indicate the bodiliness of God (YHWH). Most importantly, divine bodiliness comports with the “plain sense” of Scripture. Here he draws upon such works as Benjamin Sommer's The Bodies of God, Stephen Moore's “Gigantic God,” and Tryggve Mettinger's The Dethronement of Sabaoth; and he also makes reference to the work of the Jewish kabbalist scholar Gershom Scholem. Barnes carefully investigates such passages as Exodus 33, in which God is clearly presented as having bodily parts, including a “face.” As Barnes notes, the Fathers’ arguments for why God does not have a body are tied completely to their arguments for why God exists simply.