Immateriality of God

God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.

— John 4:24

The immateriality of God is the teaching that God is not made of matter: he has no body, extension, or physical parts, and so cannot be perceived by the senses. Because he is immaterial, God is also invisible; no one has seen his very being and lived (Exod. 33:20). Scripture calls this mode of being spirit (John 4:24), the same term it uses of angels and the human soul, though God is spirit in a way no creature is: he alone is spirit of and from himself, rather than receiving it from another.¹

Confessional Witness

The Second London Baptist Confession describes God’s essence as “a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions.”² The Westminster Confession states the identical clause, calling God “one only living and true God, who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible, without body, parts, or passions,”³ and the Savoy Declaration repeats the same wording.⁴ Immateriality is therefore Reformed teaching generally, not a distinctive of the Baptist confession.

Particular Baptist theologian John Gill explains what the clause rules out. No creature can say what a spirit looks like, “who can tell of what colour, form and figure, shape and size, the soul of a man is?” and the same is true, more emphatically, of God himself: “no likeness can be formed of God; no similitude was ever seen of him, and to whom can he be likened and compared?”⁵ The confession’s denial of “body” and “parts” rules out any literal physical form; its denial of “passions” is the distinct claim that God is free from the unbidden emotional flux creatures undergo, the subject of impassibility rather than immateriality as such.

Biblical Basis

Jesus tells the Samaritan woman that “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24), the one place Scripture states his mode of being this directly. Paul calls him “the King of ages, immortal, invisible, the only God” (1 Tim. 1:17) and “he who alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see” (1 Tim. 6:16). John states the same fact negatively and positively together: “No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father’s side, he has made him known” (John 1:18), and Paul calls the Son “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), a visible image of one who is not himself visible. After his resurrection, Jesus distinguishes his own body from the nature of a spirit: “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39), which implies that God, who is spirit, does not have flesh and bones either.

The second commandment’s prohibition on images, “you shall not make for yourself a carved image” (Exod. 20:4), rests on the same fact about God’s nature. Moses grounds the command in what Israel did and did not perceive at Horeb: “you saw no form; there was only a voice” (Deut. 4:12, 15), so that any image, of any creature, would misrepresent a God none of them had seen in any form to copy.

Historical Development

Patristic controversies over God’s form

In the fourth century, a group in Syria that took its name from its founder, Audius, read Genesis 1:26-27’s statement that God made man “in his own image” to mean that God’s own form supplied the pattern, and concluded that God possessed a human shape.⁶ Around the same period, in Egypt, a group of monks held to the same conviction so fiercely that they attempted to kill Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, for teaching otherwise.⁷ Both controversies were later grouped together under a common name, Anthropomorphites, for holding that Scripture’s descriptions of God’s hands, eyes, and face describe his literal form rather than his works.

The Reformation’s refutation

John Calvin names and answers the same error in the Institutes: “The Anthropomorphites also, who dreamed of a corporeal God, because mouth, ears, eyes, hands, and feet, are often ascribed to him in Scripture, are easily refuted. For who is so devoid of intellect as not to understand that God, in so speaking, lisps with us as nurses are wont to do with little children?”⁸ Such language, Calvin concludes, does not “so much express what kind of a being God is, as accommodate the knowledge of him to our feebleness.”⁸

Reformed scholastic formulation

Stephen Charnock’s discourse on God’s being a spirit argues from the divine perfection itself: “If we grant that God is, we must necessarily grant that he cannot be corporeal, because a body is of an imperfect nature.”⁹ His contemporary Petrus van Mastricht pressed the same doctrine into a live pastoral dispute with Lutheran casuists over whether a worshiper might picture God as an old man while praying. The Reformed position denied it was lawful at all, “because a concept of God under the form of a man, or of any corporeal entity at all, is altogether unlawful”; the Lutheran casuist Friedrich Balduin allowed it, provided the worshiper “do not believe that God’s essence actually has such a shape.”¹⁰

Opposing Views

Herman Bavinck names several movements that ascribed some form of materiality to God against the historic Christian consensus: “theosophists, pantheists, Socinians, and certain philosophers.” G. W. F. Hegel’s identification of God with “Spirit” (Geist) is one such philosophical case: Hegel used the same word Scripture does, but meant by it the final stage the Idea reaches through nature and, above all, through human thought, not an eternally existing immaterial being distinct from the universe he made.¹¹ Augustus Hopkins Strong records two later movements teaching a God with a literal human form: Emanuel Swedenborg, and “the doctrine of Mormonism,” which Strong describes as teaching “that God is a man.”¹²

Objections and Responses

Scripture repeatedly ascribes bodily parts to God: eyes, ears, a mouth, hands, an arm, feet. Doesn’t this show he has some kind of physical form? Charnock answers that these expressions describe God’s works, not his essence: “those members ascribed to him rather note his visible operations to us, than his invisible nature… the wisdom of God is called his eye, because he knows that with his mind which we see with our eyes… The efficiency of God is called his hand and arm; because as we act with our hands, so doth God with his power.”¹³ These are anthropomorphisms, accommodated descriptions of what God does, not reports of what he looks like.

God is said to have appeared to the patriarchs, sometimes in human form (Gen. 18:2; Josh. 5:13; Dan. 7:9), and the Son became genuinely human at the incarnation. Doesn’t this contradict his immateriality? Mastricht answers that a theophany is not a display of God’s essence but an accommodated appearance for the sake of the one who sees it: “God appeared… so that those who saw might conceive of his extraordinary presence, and that whatever glory appeared they might ascribe to God. By no means did God appear so that they might thus conceive of an image inside themselves or might form one outside themselves.”¹⁴ The incarnation is a distinct case: in the hypostatic union, the Son’s assumption of a real human nature adds a body to his person without converting or compounding the divine essence itself.

If God cannot be seen, how can Scripture promise that believers “shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:2) and that “the pure in heart… shall see God” (Matt. 5:8)? Francis Turretin distinguished the manner of this future sight from ordinary vision: the “beatific vision” of God’s own essence will be “a decidedly intellectual (rather than ‘sensitive’ or corporeal) seeing.” Believers will behold Christ’s glorified human nature with their bodily eyes, but they will apprehend God’s spiritual essence itself through a supernaturally elevated understanding, not through physical sight.¹⁵

Related Doctrines

References

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. 6, “The Spirituality and Simplicity of God,” 169: “For in our view, God is Spirit from himself,” unlike angels and human souls, which are spirit only by having received that nature from him. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
The Savoy Declaration (1658), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book 1, chap. 4, “Of the Nature of God.” ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 9, “The Infinity and Greatness of God,” 225, quoting: “the Anthropomorphites or Audians, because they taught a composite God who was endowed with human and corporeal parts—hands, feet, heart, eyes, etc.—which, after his own image, God exhibited in man, they could not but deny that he was infinite in respect to his essence”; the accompanying editorial note dates Audius to fourth-century Syria, citing Epiphanius, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III: De Fide, trans. Frank Williams (Leiden: Brill, 2013), Heresy 70, “On the Schism of the Audians,” 412. ↩
Stephen Charnock, The Existence and Attributes of God, ed. William Symington, 2 vols. (New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, 1853), vol. 1, Discourse III, “On God’s Being a Spirit,” 182: “some monks of Egypt were so fierce for this error, that they attempted to kill one Theophilus, a bishop, for not being of that judgment.” ↩
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-46), book 1, chap. 13, sec. 1. ↩ ↩²
Charnock, Discourse III, 181. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 6, 177, quoting Friedrich Balduin, Cases of Conscience, bk. 2, chap. 2, case 1. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God”: “Despite efforts by theosophists, pantheists, Socinians, and certain philosophers to ascribe a body to God, the Christian church and Christian theology have steadfastly maintained God’s spirituality.” ↩
Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology: A Compendium and Commonplace-Book Designed for the Use of Theological Students, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The Griffith & Rowland Press, 1907), 251: “Swedenborg, in modern times, represents the view that God exists in the shape of a man… This is also the doctrine of Mormonism… The Mormons teach that God is a man.” ↩
Charnock, Discourse III, 189. ↩
Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, chap. 6, 177. ↩
Steven J. Duby, God in Himself: Scripture, Metaphysics, and the Task of Christian Theology, Studies in Christian Doctrine and Scripture (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2019), chap. 1, “Theologia Within the Divine Economy,” 40-41, summarizing and quoting Francis Turretin, Institutio Theologiae Elencticae. ↩