276°
Posted 20 hours ago

God: An Anatomy - As heard on Radio 4

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

It's a book that should be taught in any school that have religion as a subject. And religious people should read it too. Maybe there be less religion, and the world would be a better place!

I really loved this book. Francesca Stavrakopoulou is a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion at a British university who occasionally makes programmes for TV. Let’s move on to The Ruin of All Witches: Life and Death in the New World by Malcolm Gaskill. What makes this among the best history books of 2022. As Stavrakopoulou notes, at some point in the history of what became Israel, Hebrew mythology identified the high god, El, with his more active deputy. No one is quite sure, but this seems to be happening well before the great disruption of the Babylonian conquest in the sixth century BCE, though the traces of the older distinction can be seen in some rather laboured passages in Genesis and Exodus where a shift in the divine name has to be explained. On the one hand, this means that the biblical god acquires a double set of robustly physical divine attributes – the more sedentary splendours of the enthroned High God as well as the active and violent characteristics of the warrior storm-god. On the other, it reinforces the sense that the supreme divine power can be the subject of diverse attributes; God is less obviously a straightforwardly amplified physical being, a “big man” – though this does not mean that he loses some of his more toxic gendered qualities.

Sign up to our newsletter

As an undergraduate, Francesca Stavrakopoulou observed “lots of biblical texts suggest that God is masculine, with a male body” and was told by her theology professor that these texts were metaphorical, or poetic. “We shouldn’t get too distracted by references to his body,” her professor asserted, because to do so would be “to engage too simplistically with the biblical texts”. See Alon Goshen Gottstein, “The Body as Image of God in Rabbinic Literature,” Harvard Theological Review87, no. 2 (1994): 171–195; DavidL. Paulsen, “Early Christian Belief in a Corporeal Deity: Origen and Augustine as Reluctant Witnesses,” Harvard Theological Review83, no. 2 (1990): 105–116; CarlW. Griffin and David L. Paulsen, “Augustine and the Corporeality of God,” Harvard Theological Review95, no. 1 (2002): 97–118. The nagging issue? Probably at least 80 percent of endnotes refer to Bible passages. FOOTnotes — using that word correctly — would have been MUCH more convenient. (In-line citations, common at least in US biblical criticism writings, would have been better yet.) In a certain number of cases, I was familiar with the verse, even in Stavrakopoulou’s translation. But, I couldn’t remember the exact Bible passage. Seriously, this came close to losing the book a star by itself. In the day that God created man, in the likeness of God made he him; In the image of his own body, male and female, created he them. … And Adam lived one hundred and thirty years, and begat a son in his own likeness, after his own image, and called his name Seth. (Moses 6:8–10).

Yahweh (she seems to hint at, but doesn’t openly embrace, some version of the Midianite hypothesis) is just as embodied as Baal or Marduk. More importantly, he’s just as masculinely male, complete with penis. As part of this, she notes that “hand” as well as “foot” is often a biblical synonym for “penis,” as in other southwest Asian religious works. And Yahweh waves his penis. He wields it. He is procreative with it. However, are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.

Donne seems in his 19th “Expostulation” simply to praise the Lord, but a polemic is clearly to be heard between the lines. Born Catholic (he accepted Anglican ordination only in his early 40s), Donne intends to praise metaphorical and figurative language in itself by praising it in his Creator. Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist and derivatively Puritan guise, celebrated as the only proper reading of scripture the literal, “plain sense” reading, which Donne concedes in his first sentence is sometimes the proper reading. It was the rejection of the metaphorical, the figurative and, above all, the allegorical so celebrated by Christianity down to the West European 16th century that crucially enabled the Protestant Reformation’s return to the alleged “plain sense” of primitive Christianity. John Donne begs artfully to differ. The scholarship of theology and religion teaches us that the God of the Bible was without a body, only revealing himself in the Old Testament in words mysteriously uttered through his prophets, and in the New Testament in the body of Christ. The portrayal of God as corporeal and masculine is seen as merely metaphorical, figurative, or poetic. But, in this revelatory study, Francesca Stavrakopoulou presents a vividly corporeal image of God: a human-shaped deity who walks and talks and weeps and laughs, who eats, sleeps, feels, and breathes, and who is undeniably male. Carole Hillenbrand | Professor Emerita of Islamic History at the University of Edinburgh and Professorial Fellow (Islamic History) at the University of St Andrews

So, too, does “traditional” critical theology. Its Enlightenment basis is as willing to explain away this fact with words such as “allegory” and “anthropomorphizing.” God,” like God, offers a host of surprising revelations. And the timing of this award — in the season of Christmas and Hanukkah — feels strangely ordained.And, taking the standard philosophical definition of knowledge as justified true belief, Job actually knows bupkis about the physical assault — his loss of family, wealth, etc. Therefore, he does not know he is under assault from the eye of god. Despite the bashfulness of the Biblical authors, and in defiance of the discomfort of later traditions with ascribing human sexuality to God, Yahweh was famed for His virility; and His relations with His one-time consort Asherah, and with Israel, are described with strong sexual implications. Yahweh was perhaps conceived of with a set of genitals befitting both the size of His body and the divine, creative, and life-giving capacities ascribed to the phallus by other near eastern mythologies, which likewise endowed their creating gods, like El, Enki, and Min, with large and cosmically-generative penises. “I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, tall and lo The Book of Mormon and the book of Moses were translated in 1829 and 1830, respectively. 4Thus, humanity’s physical resemblance to deity was one of the earliest truths restored in modern times—a truth which Joseph Smith himself surely understood even earlier thanks to his First Vision. 5 It is often moving. It shows us how religious life was woven into people’s everyday experiences, from Anglo-Saxon times to the Reformation. It is richly illustrated, too. These churches were crucial to English, religious and social life, for church services on Sundays weekdays and for feast days, such as the celebrations at Christmas and Easter. The recurrent cycle of baptism, marriage, funerals, the everyday existence of ordinary people in parish churches are at the very centre of the story.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment