ris3n's Apologetics Codex

Concept

Anthropomorphism

anthropomorphic, anthropomorphic language, anthropopathism, anthropopathic, anthropomorphite, God has hands, God walked in the garden, human language about God, God is described as a man

Intro

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Anthropomorphism is describing God in human terms: hands, eyes, a face, an arm, walking in a garden, coming down to look at a city. The related term anthropopathism covers human emotions ascribed to God: regret, jealousy, grief, a change of mind.

Scripture is full of this language, and skeptics regularly treat it as the discovery that undoes the whole enterprise. The argument runs: your God has body parts, walks around, gets surprised, changes His mind. That is not a transcendent being. That is a tribal deity somebody invented, and you have been dressing him up in philosophy ever since.

The reply is that Scripture noticed first. The same Old Testament that says God has an outstretched arm also says, flatly, that no one has ever seen any form of Him (Deuteronomy 4:12, 4:15-16), that He is not a man that He should lie or change His mind (Numbers 23:19, 1 Samuel 15:29), that He does not change (Malachi 3:6), and that He is God and not man (Hosea 11:9). Jesus states it as a category: God is spirit (John 4:24). These are not later philosophical additions smuggled in to rescue an embarrassing text. They sit inside the same books, sometimes within a few chapters of the imagery they qualify, and they are stated as direct propositions rather than as poetry.

That gives the reading rule. Where a text states a proposition directly and another text renders the same subject in vivid physical imagery, the direct statement controls the imagery. Nobody reads "the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth" as an anatomy claim, for the same reason nobody reads "the arm of the LORD" as a limb: the text that says no form was seen has already ruled that out.

Calvin's image is the best short answer. God speaks to us the way a nurse speaks to an infant, lisping, using small words, accommodating the speech to the hearer rather than to the subject. The alternative is not a more accurate revelation. The alternative is silence, because a creature has no vocabulary that is not creaturely.

There is a second half to this that is easy to miss and worth leading with, because it flips the objection. The Christian claim is not that we made God in our image. It is that He made us in His (Imago Dei). If that is true, then human personhood, will, knowledge and love are the derived things, and the resemblance runs the other way. Man is theomorphic before God is ever anthropomorphic.

Quick reply line: "The text that says God has an arm and the text that says nobody has ever seen any form of Him are in the same book, a few chapters apart, by the same author. He was not confused. He was using figures, and he told you they were figures. And note which way the resemblance runs on our account: we are not saying God is like a man, we are saying man was made like God. Your objection assumes the direction of dependence that is exactly what is in dispute."

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In full

Anthropomorphism, from anthrōpos (man) and morphē (form), is the attribution of human form or bodily features to God. Anthropopathism, from anthrōpos and pathos, is the attribution of human emotions or mental states. Both are subsets of the wider category of accommodated language: revelation given in a form fitted to the capacity of the recipient rather than to the nature of the subject.

The doctrinal question is not whether Scripture uses such language, which is beyond dispute, but what its use implies about the being described. Three positions are available, and only one is orthodox.

Position Claim Result
Literalism The language reports God's actual form and mutable states A corporeal, changeable deity; contradicts the explicit texts
Eliminativism The language is empty projection; nothing corresponds God becomes an abstraction with no will, knowledge or love
Analogical predication The language truly signifies, non-univocally, a reality that exceeds it The classical position

The biblical data

The physical imagery is extensive and should be conceded without flinching, because concession costs nothing here:

The qualifying texts are equally explicit and, decisively, are propositional rather than figurative:

Note what Numbers 23:19 does. It denies of God the two things a man does, lying and changing his mind, in a single verse. So the very passage most often cited against anthropopathism is itself an argument from the difference between God and man, made in the middle of the Pentateuch, in a book that elsewhere uses the imagery freely. The author is not unaware of the tension. He is telling the reader how to resolve it.

The interpretive rule, stated precisely

The rule is not "the philosophical texts win because we prefer philosophy." It is a genre and mode distinction that any competent reader applies to any text:

  1. Direct propositional statements about a subject's nature control figurative descriptions of its actions. "God is spirit" is a claim about what God is. "The arm of the LORD" is a description of what God does, in the register available to the describer.
  2. The narrower and clearer controls the broader and less clear. Deuteronomy 4:12 is unambiguous; "walking in the garden" admits several readings.
  3. A text that states its own purpose is read according to that purpose. Deuteronomy 4:15-16 does not merely mention that no form was seen; it makes that fact the reason for the second commandment. The absence of form is doing argumentative work in the text itself.

The theological tradition

Patristic. The Anthropomorphites (associated with the fourth-century Audians, and with some Egyptian monastic circles) took the Imago Dei to imply a divine bodily form and were rejected as heterodox. The mainstream reading was settled early: Origen, Athanasius, Augustine and the Cappadocians all treat the corporeal language as figurative and the incorporeality of God as doctrine.

Jewish. Maimonides gives the most systematic treatment in the Guide for the Perplexed, the whole first part of which works term by term through the Torah's physical vocabulary, showing each to be figurative. He leans on the rabbinic maxim dibbera Torah kilshon bnei adam, "the Torah speaks in the language of men" (b. Berakhot 31b). Maimonides is a useful ally to name in a Jewish exchange precisely because he is not a Christian source, and because his own principle, that Scripture's physical language about God is accommodated, is the principle a Christian needs.

Scholastic. Thomas Aquinas gives the formal apparatus in Summa Theologiae I q. 13: predication of God is neither univocal (the words mean exactly what they mean of creatures, which would make God a creature) nor equivocal (they mean something wholly unrelated, which would make revelation useless), but analogical. When Scripture says God is good, "good" signifies truly, and signifies more fully than in the creaturely case, without being reducible to the creaturely case. Analogy is the middle path that keeps revelation informative without making God finite. It connects directly to Divine Simplicity and Divine Immutability.

Reformation. John Calvin frames it as accommodation (Institutes 1.13.1): God "lisps" with us as nurses do with infants, adjusting the mode of speech to our capacity. Calvin's point is pastoral as well as technical. Accommodated speech is a mercy, not a deception.

Apologetic applications

Against the "God changed His mind" and "God was surprised" objections. The regret at Genesis 6:6 and the "let me go down and see" of Genesis 18:21 are anthropopathic and narratival: they render, from inside the story, a relation that is real without being a change in God. Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 use the same Hebrew verb (niḥam) that the "regret" texts use, and deny it of God in the sense the objection needs. The distinction the tradition draws is between a change in God and a change in the creature's standing before an unchanging God. See God Is Surprised Objection and God Is Surprised Objection Defeater, and Divine Immutability for the underlying attribute. This is also where Open Theism parts company with the classical tradition, taking the anthropopathic texts as the controlling ones.

Against Feuerbach-style projection arguments. The claim that theology is disguised anthropology, that God is humanity's own nature projected onto the sky, is old (Xenophanes observed that if oxen could draw, their gods would look like oxen) and was given its modern form by Feuerbach and then Freud. Two replies.

  1. The resemblance is predicted by the doctrine. Imago Dei says humans resemble God because they were made to. A theory that predicts the very datum offered against it is not embarrassed by that datum. The dispute is over the direction of dependence, and the projection argument assumes its answer rather than arguing for it.
  2. It is a genetic argument. Even a fully successful account of why people believe in God leaves untouched the question of whether God exists. Freud's account of religion as wish-fulfilment can be run symmetrically as an account of atheism as fear-of-judgment-fulfilment, which is why the move settles nothing. See Genetic Fallacy.

Against the Jewish objection that the Incarnation is anthropomorphism gone too far. The objection misidentifies the category. Anthropomorphism is describing God in human terms; the Incarnation is God assuming a real human nature, without confusion of natures and without conversion of deity into humanity. The two are not on a continuum. The Hypostatic Union holds that the divine nature was not altered, so nothing in the Incarnation asserts the corporeality of the divine nature, which is what Deuteronomy 4 forbids. See God Is Not a Man Objection Defeater and Old Testament Christology.

In the Islamic exchange, with the concession running both ways. Muslim polemic frequently charges Christianity with tashbih, likening God to creation, against the purity of Tawhid. Grant the principle fully: God's essence is not creaturely, and any doctrine that made it so would be false. Then note that the Quran has the identical feature and the same problem. It speaks of the hand of Allah (yad Allah, Q 48:10), the face of Allah (Q 55:27), Allah's establishing Himself on the throne (istawā ʿalā al-ʿarsh, Q 20:5), and Allah's coming (Q 89:22). Sunni orthodoxy's answer, bilā kayf, "without asking how," affirming the attributes while denying knowledge of their modality, is a good answer, and it is the same kind of answer the Christian tradition gives with analogical predication. The concession collected is larger than the one granted: an objector who presses anthropomorphism as a defeater cannot press it without it landing on his own scripture, and the only available reply to it is the one he is objecting to.

The opposite error, and why it matters more than it looks

The danger runs in both directions, and the second failure is the more damaging one because it wins arguments while losing the doctrine.

If "anthropomorphism" becomes a universal solvent, applied to every personal predicate, the outcome is not a purer theism but a bare abstraction: an It, a ground of being, a principle. Nothing prays to that. Classical theism does not say God's knowing, willing and loving are figures of speech. It says they are the realities, and that human knowing, willing and loving are the creaturely images of them.

So the correct account is asymmetric, and the asymmetry is the whole point:

  • Corporeal predicates (hand, eye, face, walking, smelling) are figurative, and Scripture says so.
  • Personal predicates (knows, wills, loves, judges) are analogical and true, signifying really, though not univocally.

Collapsing the second into the first concedes the atheist's premise while thinking it is defending against him. See Divine Impassibility for where the boundary actually falls, since that is the attribute most often overstated in this direction, and Biblical Love for the positive content the personal predicates carry.

See also

Common questions this page answers

Q: What does anthropomorphism mean in the Bible?

It means describing God in human terms: hands, eyes, a face, an arm, walking, coming down to look at something. The closely related term anthropopathism covers human emotions ascribed to God, such as regret, grief or a change of mind. Both are forms of accommodated language, meaning revelation given in a form fitted to what the hearer can grasp rather than to the nature of the subject being described.

Q: If God has no body, why does the Bible say He has hands and eyes and walks in the garden?

Because there is no creaturely vocabulary that is not creaturely. Any language a human can understand is drawn from human experience, so God either speaks in accommodated terms or does not speak at all. Calvin's image is that God lisps with us the way a nurse does with an infant. The same books that use the imagery also state directly that no one has ever seen any form of God, that He is not a man, and that He is spirit, which tells the reader how the imagery is meant to be taken.

Q: Doesn't the Bible contradict itself by saying God has an arm and also that no one has seen His form?

No, and the two statements are close enough together to make that clear. Deuteronomy 4 says that at Horeb the people saw no form, and it makes that fact the stated reason for the prohibition of images, so the point is being argued rather than assumed. Direct statements about what something is control figurative descriptions of what it does. Nobody thinks "the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth" is anatomy, for the same reason nobody thinks "the arm of the LORD" is a limb.

Q: What is the difference between anthropomorphism and anthropopathism?

Anthropomorphism ascribes human form or bodily features to God: hand, eye, face, walking. Anthropopathism ascribes human emotions or mental states: regret, grief, jealousy, changing one's mind. The distinction matters in debate because the two objections come apart. The bodily language is straightforwardly figurative and Scripture says so. The emotional language raises the harder question of divine immutability and impassibility, and needs the more careful answer.

Q: Doesn't Genesis 6:6 say God regretted making humanity, which means He changed His mind?

It uses the Hebrew verb niḥam, and the same verb is what Numbers 23:19 and 1 Samuel 15:29 explicitly deny of God. A single author using a term one way in narrative and denying it in a direct doctrinal statement is signalling that the narrative use is figurative. The classical reading is that these texts render a real relation between God and a changed creature, described from inside the story, without asserting a change in God Himself.

Q: Isn't God just a human projection, as Feuerbach and Freud argued?

The projection argument assumes what it needs to prove. Christianity already predicts that humans resemble God, because it claims God made them in His image, so the resemblance is a datum both accounts explain and cannot by itself decide between them. What is in dispute is the direction of dependence, and that is exactly what the projection argument asserts rather than establishes. It is also genetic in form: even a complete account of why people believe something leaves untouched whether the belief is true, and the same style of argument runs just as easily in reverse against unbelief.

Q: How do I answer a Muslim who says the Christian God is anthropomorphic?

Grant the principle without hesitation, because it is true that God's essence is not creaturely, and then note that the Quran has the identical feature. It speaks of the hand of Allah, the face of Allah, Allah establishing Himself on the throne and Allah coming. Sunni orthodoxy answers with bilā kayf, affirming the attributes while declining to specify their modality, which is the same kind of answer Christian theology gives through analogical predication. If anthropomorphic language defeats a scripture, it defeats his; if it does not, the objection has no work left to do.

Q: Does saying God's emotions are anthropomorphic mean God does not really love us?

No, and this is the error worth guarding against most carefully. The figurative reading applies to bodily predicates such as hand, eye and walking. Personal predicates such as knowing, willing, judging and loving are analogical and true: they signify really, though not in exactly the creaturely mode. Classical theism does not say God's love is a figure of speech. It says God's love is the reality and human love is its created image. Treating every personal predicate as a mere figure produces an abstraction nobody could pray to, and concedes the atheist's premise while appearing to answer him.