Engaging Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s God, An Anatomy (Knopf, 2022)

From a sword-wielding arm to sleepy, closed eyelids, the body of God lunges off the pages of the Bible in Stavrakopoulou’s God, An Anatomy. Vividly written, richly researched, and filled with engaging ancient stories, this book effectively cries foul on so much traditional and popular theology about the biblical God, it might be dizzying. The famous “omni-s” are invited to the seminar: Can God really be both omnipresent and walk in a garden needing to ask, “where are you?" in Genesis 2. Can God really be both omnipotent and dwell alongside a powerful, undefeated monster (Job 41)? Can God really be both omniscient and forgetful of human suffering while asleep (Ps. 44)?

To claim God has a body may sound like a shock-seeking media-minute meant to rattle America’s religious culture wars — but this book about an anatomical God does not fit the culture war’s script. Imagine teaching the Bible in public school and discussing God saying, “On Edom, I hurl my shoe” or God waking up “like a strong man shouting from wine.” God speaks to Moses from fire, murderously ambushes him, discovers that his voice is way too loud for his (and his people’s) ears, hands him a tablet inscribed by his finger, eats a meal with him in his gem encrusted palace, burns a terrifying glow on his face, and finally commands him to die only to bury him in a valley on the shy edge of promised land, with his own hands according to ancient Jewish tradition. God etches stones with his finger, scoops up dust from the underworld, paces along mountain ridges, births children, sails written curses like paper airplanes, and wraps himself with a cloud so no prayer can pass through.

God’s body is not so much Stavrakopoulou’s thesis as it is her data. And there is a lot of it. One simply cannot outright discredit God, An Anatomy after a serious reading of the book — you would have to sweep huge chunks of biblical text under the rug to regain the God you formerly conceived as biblical. The “Bible in public school” advocates would need to heavily redact the textbook.

It’s not anyone’s fault, really. Shedding God of her/their/(mostly)his body was already an ancient project across the many centuries the Bible was written. Perhaps even more consequential, “translators … have long sanitized the [biblical] text, privileging the abstract and metaphysical over the corporeal. But this more primal, vital Yahweh can be reconstructed from scattered passages in the Bible which still retain warm traces of his divine materiality” (Lyons review).

Focalizing this ancient primal deity, we look back at the past through a billowing mist of much queerer categories. For example, when the New York Times Book Review of God, An Anatomy appears in the “nonfiction” section, we have to stop and appreciate all the flashpoint concepts tossed up for grabs. If God, An Anatomy is historically true: myths, histories, divinities, Scriptures (ontologies, epistemologies…) soften as conflict-categories.

Although the body of Hebrew YHWH is on center stage, there’s a lot of talk about Jesus, New Testament literature, and early Christianity in God, An Anatomy. (I was really impressed with Stavrakopoulou’s scope and skill in crossing historical periods, languages, and religions that are often studied separately). But even the “god-body” at the center of Christian theology is surely not prepared for Stavrakopoulou’s ancient anatomical God. Here is a religion with a very clear, almost 2000 year old doctrine of incarnation — the “body of Christ” — fully god/fully human. You might think Christians would thrill at all this talk about God’s body. But the ancient categories and themes will be hard to manage. I mean, in the Hebrew Bible, God preps for attack by drawing his phallus into his quiver, and he needs to stand on a stool in order to rise above the other gods of heaven — this does not feel like the “god-body” Christianity imagines.

This would be a fine place to end. But I am eager to lift up one final, really important issue — to look under the sputtering hood of American Evangelicalism’s constructs of the biblical God.

Stavrakopoulou’s achievement dissolves several constructs that have accrued to the concept of God over the course of the Bible’s intellectual history. The construct I am most interested to watch dissolve is one Mayra Rivera identifies in her important work on early Christianity. Rivera tackles the intellectual history of a different member of Christian trinity — the spirit. Taking the ghosts of first century, Greco-Roman Judaism seriously, Rivera tacks back and forth between these biblical supernatural beings and the “Holy Ghost” of European theology. In so doing, she

puts her finger on an important and striking contradiction: Christianity proclaims a ghost, an on-going agent of presence that mediates an executed Galilean Jew to his followers. And yet, European Christian history especially lofted its Holy Ghost above the fray of lower spirits and numinous powers, constructing a theological spirit with powerful temporal but minimal memorial significance, far more like the European philosophical tradition of Spirit that links subjectivity, ontology, and (imperial) history. [Lilly, “Critical Potential of Spirits,” footnote 22]

I am a scholar of religion and harm reduction. The complementary projects Rivera and Stavrakopoulou model — of unlinking the biblical Christian god from the self-referential and often violent ontologies of Western history and society — excites me.