Anthropomorphism
I am sure we have all noticed the many places in Scripture where it seems as if God is described as having body parts or else acting in ways that ordinarily require body parts. This is what serious students of the Bible come to find out to be a figure of speech. It is called an “anthropomorphism.” The first time we hear it, perhaps, we are bound to think it is a kind of trick, a card to play for the Christian to make some exception for something that is clearly an embarrassment in the biblical text. But in fact it is so frequent in Scripture that one is forced to conclude that the biblical authors were well aware of its awkwardness.
An anthropomorphism is a form of figurative speech whereby God depicts himself in the form (morphe) of a man (anthropos).
For example, we are told that, “the eyes of the LORD run to and fro throughout the whole earth” (2 Chr. 16:9). Moreover, figures like “everlasting arms” (Deut. 33:27), and “the arm of the LORD” (Isa. 51:9), are meant to communicate the security and the power of God’s salvation. In one place, the LORD even says that if the people “will seek my face … I will hear from heaven” (2 Chr. 7:14). Here we might try to envision not only ears and a face, but also—more understandably—we might think of heaven as a physical location. Likewise, “God saw” (Gen. 1:4), was “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” (Gen. 3:8); or “when the Lord smelled the pleasing aroma” (Gen. 8:21).
Now Jesus tells us that “God is Spirit” (Jn. 4:24) and that “a spirit does not have flesh and bones” (Lk. 24:39). And yet he uses these expressions all the same.
Why Would the Bible Use Anthropomorphisms?
The purpose of this figure of speech is to explain one or a few things at a time so that we can understand the relevant point. If God had to tell everything about himself in order to tell us anything about himself, things would never get started and we would never arrive at the original point of the speech. Far from being a rabbit-in-the-hat for the Christian apologist, anthropomorphic speech has a very good reason for itself.
And in fact, if we are being honest for a moment, we might even catch ourselves attributing to our own spiritual activity language that is bodily.
We say things like “I see your point.” No you don’t. Such a thing as a “point” is cannot be seen with eyes. Are you starting to hear the music? Or do you catch my drift? Not too fast: let’s pace ourselves.
Sometimes the eyes of the Lord speak to someone being found pleasing to God, so that “Noah found favor in the eyes of the LORD” (Gen. 6:8), while other times his eyes are a way of speaking of a moral valuation. For example, “Asa did what was right in the eyes of the LORD” (1 Kings 15:11). Eyes form a view. They set a value. How does such a “view” or “valuation” take place in the actual divine life? Well, let’s just say that it would take a lifetime to explain. So he sets before us “eyes,” to tell us something important, expecting of us enough maturity to remember that he doesn’t literally have eyes, so that by “the eyes of our mind,” we might ascend to the higher truth in view.
A Most Difficult Kind of Anthropomorphism
It is one thing to be able to understand that God does not have a body, and so to place all such passages in their figurative perspective. It is another thing to come to texts that speak of God doing one thing other than what it seemed as if he said previously that he would do.
In Genesis 6:6, Exodus 32:14, 1 Samuel 15:11, 35, and Jonah 3:9-10, we see God relenting. The Genesis and Samuel texts even express the emotion of regret or sorrow. In the King James Version of the Exodus passage, we are told that God even “repented” of the judgment he would have brought on Israel. What do we make of these events?
The first thing to do is define our terms. Most basically, to “repent” means to turn from one thing to another. All that this requires is that God turned from one consequence that he would bring about to another. The sorrow or regret that is described is a means of showing what God disapproves of: a statement more about the object in view in light of an eternal disposition, rather than any effect in the divine essence.
The Case of Jonah 3:10
The matter of what are often called counterfactuals is the most difficult part of this to think about. The Scripture says about Nineveh,
“When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God relented of the disaster that he had said he would do to them, and he did not do it” (v. 10).
First, God SAW; second, God RELENTED; third what God said he WOULD do, he did not do. We have already covered how God seeing does not mean he literally has eyes, and that God relenting means only a turn in the narrative from one consequence to its opposite. There is no avoiding deep theologizing in our final step.
The seventeenth century Reformed theologian, Francis Turretin, rightly divides how we are to think of God doing what he otherwise would not, and letting it hinge (in some sense) on human action. But in what way?
“It is one thing for the thing decreed to be conditional; another for the decree itself. The former we grant, but not the latter. There can be granted an antecedent cause or condition of the thing willed, but not immediately of the volition itself.”1
God decreed the Ninevites to repent on this occasion; he did not decree them to resist. And so for the inspired author to speak of what God “would have done” only refers to the natural consequence of the possible world in which they resisted. It is not meant for the reader to pontificate whether or not the actual outcome was ever in “divine doubt.”
The Bible is written to the widest audience, that none may have an excuse. It is not a set of theses for philosophers to debate. Divine speech accommodates human understanding on a “need to know” basis.
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1. Francis Turretin, Institutes, I.4.3.9
