Christian Sakai
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

I guess you and I are agreeing but with different nuances.

My point in the opening of the essay is this — when atheists insist that what believers understand to be a metaphor must be taken literally, they are setting up a straw man argument. They are trying to make points by tearing down a belief that no one actually believes. It is exactly as if I were to attack atheism because I find their deification and ritual worship of Charles Darwin unreasonable. Of course the don’t really worship Darwin. But that’s the whole point. It’s easy to knock down a straw man. It’s also pretty pointless.

Agree on this one.

The incarnation of Christ is a very complex theological concept. To reduce it to “Jesus had a human body so God must have a human body” is a classic example of reductio ad absurdum. To say that’s what Christians believe is patently false. For example, in Christian theology all three Persons within the Godhead, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, existed as one God before the historical event of the birth of Christ occurred. So the Son preexisted Jesus. Yet Jesus is the Son. There’s no way to reduce that to a question of bodies.

This is indeed a complex theological concept, and one facet of this is the belief that we will have a transformed physical bodies on the last day. What kind of body do will we have? No one knows for sure. Regarding to reduce that to question of bodies, here is an interesting discussion https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/11397/is-god-male-and-female

For an average Christian like me. I like to err (or right?) on the side of believing God is some middle aged man with beards that lives in the clouds (or that kind of variation) mostly because the NT theology to me seems to refer more on the side of real physical bodily resurrection, which actually depends on what kind of Escathological view one holds.

    Christian Sakai

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