Anthropomorphism

“You shall see my back, but my face shall not be seen.”

— Exodus 33:23

Anthropomorphism is Scripture’s description of God, who is pure spirit, in human terms: he is said to have a face, eyes, a hand, and a mouth, and to feel joy, grief, and anger. A closely related term, anthropopathism, names the same figure applied specifically to God’s emotions. Because God’s revelation comes to creatures who know reality only through creaturely categories, it accommodates itself to human language to communicate what is true of him. An anthropomorphism is not a fiction invented about God; it is a real, though creaturely, description of what he is or does.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to anthropomorphism, which names an interpretive principle rather than a distinct doctrine. It does, however, state the doctrine the principle depends on: God is “infinite in being and perfection… immutable… a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”¹ Because God has no literal body or parts, Scripture’s references to his hand, eye, or face cannot be physical descriptions; they must be read as anthropomorphisms, human language accommodated to describe a God who is spirit. The same paragraph’s denial of “passions” grounds the parallel reading of anthropopathism, treated at Impassibility of God.

Biblical Basis

Scripture describes God using many human terms: a face (Exod. 33:20, 23), eyes (Ps. 11:4), ears (Ps. 55:3), a mouth (Deut. 8:3), an arm (Exod. 15:16), a hand (Num. 11:23), and feet (Isa. 66:1); a soul (Lev. 26:11) and a heart (Gen. 6:6); joy (Isa. 62:5), grief (Ps. 78:40), zeal (Deut. 32:21), and anger (Ps. 2:5); and human actions such as remembering (Gen. 8:1), resting (Gen. 2:2), and walking (Lev. 26:12). “God is described in human terms via human faculties, body parts, emotions, sensations, and actions,” language so pervasive that Scripture is “anthropomorphic through and through.”² The same holds for the offices Scripture borrows to name God, bridegroom (Isa. 61:10), shepherd (Ps. 23:1), judge and physician (Exod. 15:26), and for its comparisons of God to creatures, a lion (Isa. 31:4), an eagle (Deut. 32:11), and a fountain (Jer. 2:13).³

Individual anthropomorphisms carry specific meaning rather than standing as bare decoration. Psalm 136:12 praises God’s deliverance of Israel “with a strong hand and an outstretched arm.” Since God is pure spirit and has no literal arm, the phrase is anthropomorphic, but it is not therefore empty: “God intends this anthropomorphism to communicate something true: he is powerful.”⁴ Scripture’s references to God’s “nostrils” (Exod. 15:8; Ps. 18:8, 15) work the same way, picturing him as powerful and indignant against evil without asserting that he has an actual nose.⁴

Historical Development

Patristic accommodation

In the third century, Origen compared God’s descending to speak to humanity to a parent using baby talk with a small child, since a child could understand no other kind of speech.⁵ Augustine, writing a century later, held that human language reaches its limit before it reaches God: “it is easier for us to say what he is not than what he is.”⁶ Not every reader took the same accommodation as figurative: in fourth-century Syria, the sect later known as the Anthropomorphites or Audians read Genesis 1:26-27’s statement that man was made “in the image of God” as evidence that God himself possesses a human bodily form.⁷

Bonaventure, writing in the thirteenth century, defended the same accommodation. Since no single name could do God justice, he argued, Scripture transfers to God the names of creatures “indefinite in number,” so that every name ascribed to a creature might in turn glorify him.⁸

Reformation and Reformed orthodox response

John Calvin named the Anthropomorphites in his 1559 Institutes and refuted “those who dreamed of a corporeal God, because mouth, ears, eyes, hands, and feet, are often ascribed to him in Scripture.” Such language, Calvin wrote, shows God lisping “with us as nurses are wont to do with little children,” accommodating “the knowledge of him to our feebleness” rather than describing what kind of being he is.⁹ Writing a century and a half later, the Reformed scholastic Petrus van Mastricht likewise grouped “the Anthropomorphites or Audians” among those who denied God’s infinity, since a God “endowed with human and corporeal parts, hands, feet, heart, eyes, and so on,” is a finite, composite God rather than an infinite one.⁷

Opposing Views

Scripture’s language of God “regretting” a decision (Gen. 6:6; 1 Sam. 15:11) or being moved to anger and grief has also been read literally, in the opposite direction from the Anthropomorphites: not as evidence that God has a body, but as evidence that he genuinely changes. Process theologians and open theists argue that a God who did not change “would be the impersonal, unconcerned god of stoicism and deism,” incapable of being “truly personal and active within creation.”¹⁰ On this reading, language of God’s regret or grief is a literal report of real change in him, not an accommodation.

Objections and Responses

If Scripture must borrow finite, human terms to describe God at all, doesn’t that mean he is unknowable in himself, or that any human “knowledge” of him is really just a human construction? Restricting God’s names to negation does not remove the difficulty; even a philosophical name for God such as “the Absolute” is itself an anthropomorphism, an attempt, by way of negation, to move from finite categories to the infinite. Rejecting concrete anthropomorphisms in favor of abstract ones trades one human category for another rather than escaping the human vantage point altogether. Scripture’s own choice to draw its names for God from “the entire creation” rests on a right creatures actually have: because humanity alone, among all creatures, bears God’s “image and likeness,” human beings alone may rightly call God by names drawn from human life.¹¹

Doesn’t the sheer number of texts describing God changing his mind, growing angry, or regretting a decision support the claim that he really changes? Immutability of God and Impassibility of God treat God’s changelessness and freedom from passions at length. The same principle applies here as to God’s body-language above: a text ascribing to God a bodily part or a human emotion communicates something true about him through an accommodated, creaturely category, without asserting that he is composed of parts or subject to emotional change the way a creature is. Reading such language as a literal report of change, rather than as accommodation, repeats the Anthropomorphites’ mistake about God’s body, now applied to his affections instead.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩
Peter Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God: God’s Nature and Why It Matters (Fort Washington, PA: CLC Publications, 2023), chap. 1, “Spirituality,” 18-35. ↩ ↩²
Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), chap. 2, “Can We Think God’s Thoughts after Him? How the Creature Should (and Should Not) Talk about the Creator.” ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), chap. 9, “The Infinity and Greatness of God,” 225. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 1, chap. 13, 110. ↩
Sammons, The Forgotten Attributes of God, chap. 7, “Immutability,” 131-152. ↩
Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, chap. 7, “Knowing God.” ↩