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Some Remarks about the Embodiment of God

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

W.Murray Hunt
W.Murray Hunt
Affiliation:
Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy and Religion, Susquehanna University
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Extract

In two recent articles Grace M. (Dyck) Jantzen has argued that an embodied God could be both a being worthy of worship (in the Judaeo-Christian tradition) and omnipresent. In arguing for neither of these claims has she attempted to prove that God (if he exists) is embodied, or even that God (if he exists) must be embodied. Rather, she has urged acceptance of the more modest claim there is no good reason for denying the possible embodiment of God (if he exists) on grounds either connected with his being a worthy object of worship or in terms of a supposed entailment of incorporeality on God's omnipresence. Yet contemporary thinkers with as radically divergent views about God as Kai Nielsen and Father Copleston forward ‘the argument that an embodied God is inadequate for sophisticated theism’; and, Jantzen avers, there is a ‘widespread belief that if God is indeed omnipresent, as we are clearly taught in Scripture, then that doctrine of omnipresence entails immediately that God must be incorporeal’. The purpose of my remarks in this note is not to dispute Jantzen's conclusions, but to question the strength and/or satisfactoriness of some of her arguments for those conclusions. Perhaps the most pervading misgiving arises over her unquestioned equating of ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’. Surely at first blush such synonymy appears both obvious and innocuous. But where the notion of embodiment itself is the crux of the issue, careful reflection needs to be given to just what the notion involves. Yet she simply accepts the synonymy ‘without any further ado, as though it were just obviously true’, just as she accuses Findlay of doing regarding ‘the claim that only a being who exists necessarily would be worthy of our worship’.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 1981 , pp. 105 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1981

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References

page 105 note 1 ‘Omnipresence and Incorporeality’, Religious Studies XIII (1977)Google Scholar, and ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy XIII (1978).Google Scholar

page 105 note 2 ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, p. 511, n. 2.

page 105 note 3 ‘Omnipresence and Incorporeality’, p. 85.

page 105 note 4 ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, p. 515.

page 106 note 1 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 74, p. 36.

page 106 note 2 Ibid. pp. 36–42.

page 106 note 3 Ibid. p. 41.

page 106 note 4 Ibid. p. 44

page 106 note 5 Harrison states his purpose as a proposal ‘to defend the view…that people do not need to have bodies (though they may need to be embodied), that is, that it is not logically necessary that people have bodies’ (Ibid. p. 44).

page 107 note 1 Ibid. pp. 54–5.

page 107 note 2 In ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, Jantzen discusses ‘presence’ only in one paragraph (518). But she refers to her discussion on the subject in ‘Omnipresence and Incorporeality’, which constitutes the bulk of that article (86–91). And her conclusion there emphasizes both my points. She writes, ‘This paper has been designed to show that the notion that an embodied being cannot be everywhere is ambiguous between “His body is not everywhere”, which is true but harmless, and “He is not everywhere” which is not necessarily true unless it is the case that one is present only inside one's own skin’ (90–1). The ‘true but harmless’ alternative (‘His by is not everywhere’) equates ‘embodiment’ with ‘having a body’, whereas the ‘not necessarily true unless’ alternative (‘He is not everywhere’) places the whole burden of her proof on her analysis of ‘presence’.

Another, quite disparate, source of material that Jantzen could have used to strengthen her arguments about omnipresence (one which fits very nicely with Harrison's views about embodiment, incidentally) is the Heideggerian notion of Dasein, thought of a ‘a field of being’. Along such lines, God would be the being ‘spread over a field or region which is the world of its care and concern [i.e., everywhere, for God]…[who] secretly hears his own name called whenever he hears any region of Being named with which he is vitally involved’. ( Barrett, W., Irrational Man [Garden City: Doubleday, 1962], pp. 217, 219Google Scholar, q.v.).

page 107 note 3 ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, 512.

page 107 note 4 Ibid. p. 513 (italics in original).

page 107 note 5 ‘Some remarks on the independence of morality from religion’, Mind, LXX (1961)Google Scholar, reprinted in Frankena, W. K. and Granrose, J. T., eds., Introductory Readings in Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1974), p. 111.Google Scholar

page 108 note 1 ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, p. 513.

page 108 note 2 Ibid. p. 515.

page 108 note 3 See e.g. Ibid. pp. 514, 515.

page 108 note 4 Ibid. pp. 517–18. Omnipresence is claimed to be closely connected with God's ability to show ‘love and care for all people simultaneously’ (Ibid. p. 518). (See also ‘Omnipresence and Incorporeality’, p. 91, for another claim that embodiment does not effect any limitation on omnipresence.) All these characteristics of God are assumed to be reflected in (to follow from?) her ‘three features’ of worthiness of worship. But, clearly, one could accept these qualities of God (and/or others) without accepting any of her claims about the ‘three features of the activity of worship…which would offer a moral justification of worship’.

page 108 note 5 ‘On Worshipping an Embodied God’, p. 519.