Nature of God

by Robert Rosskopf

In the Christian world today, there are two distinct views on the nature of God. Most modern Christians view God as a great spirit which fills the universe. According to the Westminster Confession of Faith, God is "without body, parts, or passions, immutable". Saint Augustine taught that God is unknowable. He is also described as omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent by John Wesley.
http://wesley.nnu.edu/wesleyan_theology/theojrnl/31-35/32-1-2.htm

This belief is completely at odds with the revelation described in the Doctrine and Covenants of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

"The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit. Were it not so, the Holy Ghost could not dwell in us. "
(D&C 130:22)

In the Holy Bible, God often appears as a man. (Exodus 24:9-11, Numbers 12:8, Isaiah 6:5, Judges 13:22)

Christians in the first and second centuries also believed that God was in the form of a man.

"And Simon said: 'I should like to know, Peter, if you really believe that the shape of man has been moulded after the shape of God.' And Peter said: 'I am really quite certain, Simon, that this is the case…. It is the shape of the just God.'"
(Clementine Homilies 16:19, in ANF 8:316.)

"The Jews indeed, but also some of our people, supposed that God should be understood as a man, that is, adorned with human members and human appearance. But the philosophers despise these stories as fabulous and formed in the likeness of poetic fictions."
(Origen, Homilies on Genesis 3:1, translated by Ronald E. Heine (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 89.)

If Christians and Jews once thought that God was an actual physical person, then why did they change their mind? We have a clue in the previous quote. "The philosophers despise these stories..." What did the philosophers teach?

Socrates and Plato held that (God is) the One, the single self-existent nature, the monadic, the real Being, the good: and all this variety of names points immediately to mind. God therefore is mind, a separate species, that is to say what is purely immaterial and unconnected with anything passible.
(Plutarch, quoted in Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 14:16, translated by E.H. Gifford (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1903), 812.)

The God of the philosophers sounds like the God taught in most modern Christian churches. In fact, before the Romans had accepted Christianity, they had accepted Greek philosophy. Their belief in Greek philosophy colored their understanding of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The physical, tangible, and loving God that Jesus taught was replaced with a being that no one could know or understand, something completely alien to us. Greek philosophy corrupted the teachings of Christ, and replaced the Christian God with the pagan God of the philosophers.