God Is a Physical Being

[Lost4words]

God is spirit.

 

[JAL]

If God pre-existed time and space then He cant be essentially physical.

He didn't preexist space. He's a material being. How could He preexist space?

Incidentally, I believe that the word "time" is properly used, both in the Bible and in science, to refer to the practice of counting the movements of matter. For example when a clock-hand has spun around the clock x-number of times, we say that x-number of hours have passed. Thus what I believe in, fundamentally, is matter in motion. I don't believe in some "river of time", for example, that I can actually put my hand in. There's no such independent reality existing "out there" called time. Rather what is real is matter in motion, and "time" is a count of the motions transpired to date.

Just wanted to get my terminology clear.

 

[Carl Emerson]

There you go - you presuppose He is a material being. Circular argument.

I strongly suggest you support your position with scripture, then we discuss.

God has the ability to create something out of nothing - give that some thought.

 

[JAL]

There you go - you presuppose He is a material being. Circular argument.

I strongly suggest you support your position with scripture, then we discuss.

What? Have you been reading any of my posts? I've already showed a series of biblical demonstrations of the divine physicality, as well as surfacing some of the unresolved problems of DDS.

And the irony is - I don't need to! Material substances clearly exist! The burden of proof falls on those who dream up magical immaterial substances!

I think what you're really saying here, "You haven't proven your position 100%". Look, I can't prove anything 100%. I can't even prove that you exist. What I can say is that, given the fact that NONE of us can prove anything 100%, the rationally minded exegete will gravitate towards the theology with the most cogency, clarity, and harmony with the biblical data.

 

[JAL]

@Carl Emerson,

Still waiting for you get past the big zero. You have zero evidence for magical immaterial substances.

 

[Carl Emerson]

God cannot be omnipresent and physical as you have defined it - there would be no unoccupied space for anything else.

You seem to dismiss the concept of co-existing dimensions in the same time and space.

Are you comfortable with God creating something out of nothing?

How can a physical being walk through walls?

I joined this thread...

 

[JAL]

You DEMANDED Scripture from me (and I had already given plenty), and then you respond to me with NO SCRIPTURE, just logical arguments. Hopefully you've figured out that there is no scriptural basis for immaterialism.

God cannot be omnipresent and physical as you have defined it - there would be no unoccupied space for anything else.

Correct. I've addressed this question at post #4 where I noted, for example, that:
(1) Omnipresence need not be absolute for God to be an impeccable ruler/judge. This is similar to the Calvinist who claims that God's sovereignity must be absolute - thus disallowing human freedom - in order for Him to be a real God. This insistence on clinging to Platonic absolutes culminates in contradictions to the biblical view of God.
(2) Omnipresence in the absolute sense contradicts the biblical data. Again, see post #4 for details.

You seem to dismiss the concept of co-existing dimensions in the same time and space.

Statements like this are too nebulous to debate. I could accuse you of the same thing, since the words don't convey anything clear. I've heard of theologians claiming that 50 or 60 dimensions exist. Can anyone say - gibberish?

Are you comfortable with God creating something out of nothing?

I'm terribly uncomfortable with apparent gibberish, especially when there is a perfectly lucid alternative theory.

 

[JAL]

How can a physical being walk through walls?

Some insects can bat their wings 1000 times per second. Now imagine how fast Yahweh can move. Thus in the blink of an eye, He can accomplish amazing sleight of hand, for example:
(1) He could part the material wall, push you through the gap, and then reassemble the wall. (Kinda reminds me of parting the Red Sea).
(2) Permeation. He could simply diffuse your particles through the spaces between the wall's molecules, pushing them through.

 

[JAL]

Silly me. I always think that insects batting their wings 1,000 times per second is a good example. I tend to forget that an ordinary, run-of-the-mill Desktop computer is a better example. A 2 gigahertz computer is processing 2 billion instructions per second.

 

[JAL]

I strongly suggest you support your position with scripture, then we discuss.

What's the point of providing more Scripture? You've already bought into Plato and therefore are resolute to ignore the Scriptures. But if you insist, here's a passage worth contemplating. Have you ever seen a father play-wrestle with his kids? I'm confident you have. Fine. In that case, care to explain to me how Jacob physically wrestled with an intangible heavenly Father? How does that work, exactly?

 

[Carl Emerson]

I'm terribly uncomfortable with apparent gibberish, especially when there is a perfectly lucid alternative theory.

Romans 4:17

God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.

Surely the resurrection is prime evidence of this.

One day a corpse, then suddenly appearing among them.

And the Holy Spirit - were the flames of fire at pentecost physical?

Jesus within us - is that physical as well?

Anyway I am not so interested in debate... He has neither beginning of time nor end of days - pre-existing creation - Before anything was made He IS... Hardly a physical being...

 

[Bobber]

deleted

 

[Carl Emerson]

You DEMANDED Scripture from me (and I had already given plenty), and then you respond to me with NO SCRIPTURE, just logical arguments. Hopefully you've figured out that there is no scriptural basis for immaterialism.

Strongly suggest and demand are two different things.

 

[JAL]

God is spirit.

Hate to break the news to you, but if the goal of exegesis is to select the most plausible translation based on the context, you can't possibly hold to "spirit" on a purely exegetical basis. If you hold to that conclusion based on Tradition, fine, but please don't associate it with exegesis - for a couple of reasons. I'll clarify one of them here.

2 Tim 3:16 says that all Scripture is didactic. God considers it potentially useful for instruction, and He is not an obtuse teacher, nor intentionally misleading. That's generally the presupposition of the exegetical procedure. Fine. In the passages NOT in dispute here (actual souls), how is the term pneuma/ruach used? Even in the Greek OT? All parties agree that at least 100 times, it clearly denotes physical wind/breath. And yet THAT is the SAME term that God chose for souls! (Laying aside for the moment the term soul/psuche, which ALSO originates in wind/breath).

Again, is God a wise instructor? Or a foolish one? Or intentionally misleading? When the NT was written God was WELL AWARE that there would be potentially two competing translations for the term pneuma and thus the phrase "The Holy Pneuma"
(1) The Holy Spirit/Ghost as immaterial substance.
(2) The Holy Wind/Breath as material substance.

God could have solved the conflict easily if He wanted to convey immaterial substance. He could have actually chosen a traditional Greek term for Ghost, or even used the word "immaterial" or "non-material". He did none of that. It thus looks to me, if I were an immaterialist, that's He's not doing a very good job here didactically speaking. But it only gets worse. The LEAST He could have done, in this conflicted scenario, is to abstain from mentioning wind/breath in the CONTEXT of the third person. After all, we're talking about the TITLE of the third person which, as such, cannot change from verse to verse. Therefore if we can find even ONE PASSAGE that clearly mentions wind/breath in the CONTEXT of the Third Person, the scales are tipped decisively in favor of translation #2. (Again, unless you think that God is an inane instructor).

In point of fact there are SEVERAL passages that put wind/breath in the context of the Third Person. Here's an example I gave at post 12:

"The Red Sea did not part instantly. Rather a wind slowly pushed the waters apart over the course of an entire evening. According to Moses, that wind was a blast of Breath from God's nostrils (Ex 15). This is God physically pushing a pencil - by direct agency. The word that Moses used for Breath in that passage is the SAME WORD blatantly mistranslated "The Holy Spirit" for 2,000 years."

My favorite example is John 20:22:

"Jesus breathed on His disciples, and said, 'Receive ye The Holy [Breath]" (Jn 20:22).

Jesus was expelling physical wind/breath from His nostrils. In my understanding, there was a scholarly consensus, for at least 1,000 years in the church, that the above rendering was the most literal translation of the Greek. Even some modern scholars admit this to be the most literal rendering.

Another great example is Pentecost:

"They heard the sound of a mighty rushing wind...They were all filled with the Holy [Wind]" (Acts 2).

Again, the CONTEXT is exegetically decisive. Even a relatively uneducated Greek child, in those days, would have rendered the text as I just did, based on the context. ONLY a Platonist could possibly read "magical immaterial substance" into these passages.

 

[disciple Clint]

The church father Tertullian (200 AD) was rightly a staunch materialist who realized that all of the biblical data - not just some of it, literally all of it - favors a wholly physical God. In fact the entire exegetical case for an immaterial God is predicated on the blatant, exegetically unsupportable mistranslation of the terms pneuma and ruach (breath/wind) as "spirit", due to the influence of a Platonic philosophy known as The Doctrine of Divine Simplicity (DDS). The term "spirit" is, in a nutshell, an English term unjustifiable exegetically. Moreover the human soul (i.e. the human pneuma) is truistically/tautologically material on an essentially empirical basis - for example Tertullian's tautological argument for the materiality of the human soul has never been refuted.

Understand that I'm a staunch Trinitarian, like Tertullian. In fact:
(1) Tertullian is the first person known to use the word Trinity.
(2) Phillip Schaff, one of the world's foremost experts on othodoxy, considered Tertullian to be one of the best defenders of orthodoxy in church history.

This discussion began on another thread closed at the request of the opening poster. I will copy some of that material, as it pertains to my posts, over to this thread.

Could you provide some evidence to support the claim that Tertullian favors a wholly physical God, other than his belief in the Stoic concept that everything that exists has a bodily existence, for him that also included spirit and soul. He, in believing this, is not saying that God has a body. His Theology with the exception of his view of the subordination of the Trinity is for the most part consistence with the early Christian Church. Are you saying that you agree with his concept of the Trinity which is certainly not orthodox.

 

[disciple Clint]

Several church fathers acknowledged that angels are physical - and yet God (normally) keeps them hidden from material instruments. Therefore I wouldn't expect material instruments to detect any change in weight when He extricates the human soul from the dead or dying body.

Which Church Fathers acknowledge that angels are physical, do you have examples?

 

[JAL]

Romans 4:17

God, who gives life to the dead and calls into being that which does not exist.

Surely the resurrection is prime evidence of this.

One day a corpse, then suddenly appearing among them.

Um...Is CPR a physical process, in your view? Or immaterial magic? Again, there is a huge burden of proof on those who seem to be proposing fairytales at odds with, and disconnected from, both biblical and empircal reality.

And the Holy Spirit - were the flames of fire at pentecost physical?

Have you considered the phenomenology of divine Fire in the OT? Based on what's documented there, why would you propose or consider anything OTHER than physical fire? (Oh that's right. Plato said so). Tell me what part of the following anecdote strikes you as clearly an immaterial Fire in action:

"Then the fire of the LORD fell and burned up the sacrifice, the wood, the stones and the soil, and also licked up the water in the trench." (1Kings 18).

Did you see what the Lord did? He sent the Fire INTO THE VICINITY. As I pointed out earlier, if God works by magic, He would simply enchant "Abracadabra" from afar (no need to venture into the actual vicinity). Clearly, these are physical dynamics.

Jesus within us - is that physical as well?

Again, He is outpoured directly into your body - He comes into the vicinity. That makes ZERO SENSE, if He operates magically from a distance, instead of physically at hand. Shall we consider an example? Pentecost. Explain to me how an immaterial outpouring manages to vibrate the larynxes of 120 people with foreign languages. As the noted Pentecostal theologian Howard Ervin pointed out, this attests to a matter/energy continuum (his term), a physical Presence of the Third Person.

Anyway I am not so interested in debate... He has neither beginning of time nor end of days - pre-existing creation - Before anything was made He IS... Hardly a physical being...

Right. You don't believe the Scriptures. You believe Plato. (I thought we discussed that already?).

Maybe you should have considered Augustine? He wrote:

“Whoever saw that dove [descend upon Christ] and that fire [at Pentecost],” he wrote, “saw them with their eyes….in corporeal forms” (Augustine, NPNF Part 1 Vol 3 Book 2 chap 6).

Augustine‟s additional examples of “corporeal forms [were] the fire of the bush, and the pillar of cloud or of fire, and the lightnings in the mount.” (Ibid).

No? Augustine is not worth listening to? Maybe the ISBE, composed of 200 evangelical scholars? The ISBE commented on the "glory" of God, as manifested to Moses when God walked by him:

"The glory of Yahweh is clearly a physical manifestation, a form with hands and rear parts, of which Moses is permitted to catch only a passing glimpse, but the implication is clear that he actually does see Yahweh with his physical eyes."

That passage about Moses merits a little more commentary on the blatant physicality of it. Maybe I'll come back to it again.

 

[JAL]

Which Church Fathers acknowledge that angels are physical, do you have examples?

Here's my source. Lewis Sperry Chafer, president and founder of Dallas Theological Seminary, insisted that angels are physical since:

"The term spirit…in both Hebrew and Greek is primarily a material term, indicating wind, air, or breath" (Lewis Sperry Chafer, Angelology Part 1, Bibliotheca Sacra, Vol 98:392 (1941), p. 401).

In that article Chafer named several church fathers who viewed angels as physical: Tertullian, Clemens Alexandrinus, Origen, and Caesarius

 

[JAL]

Are you saying that you agree with his concept of the Trinity which is certainly not orthodox.

My primary goal is to ascertain the truth. In so attempting, I'm orthodox in some areas of doctrine, unorthodox in others.

Anyway which aspects of his Trinitarianism do you consider to be unbiblical?

 

[JAL]

Moreover Chafer, speaking a bit obliquely, seemed to strongly imply, in that same article, that God Himself is physical.