The Body Of God

A very distinctive and important new option for Christian theology. McFague proposes in a clear and challenging way a theological program based on what she calls 'the organic model' for conceiving God.

God is unbounded. God became flesh. While these two assertions are equally viable parts of Western Christian religious heritage, they stand in tension with one another. Fearful of reducing God's majesty with shallow anthropomorphisms, philosophy and religion affirm that God, as an eternal being, stands wholly apart from creation. Yet the legacy of the incarnation complicates this view of the incorporeal divine, affirming a very different image of God in physical embodiment. While for many today the idea of an embodied God seems simplistic--even pedestrian--Christoph Markschies reveals that in antiquity, the educated and uneducated alike subscribed to this very idea. More surprisingly, the idea that God had a body was held by both polytheists and monotheists. Platonic misgivings about divine corporeality entered the church early on, but it was only with the advent of medieval scholasticism that the idea that God has a body became scandalous, an idea still lingering today. In God's Body Markschies traces the shape of the divine form in late antiquity. This exploration follows the development of ideas of God's corporeality in Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. In antiquity, gods were often like humans, which proved to be important for philosophical reflection and for worship. Markschies considers how a cultic environment nurtured, and transformed, Jewish and Christian descriptions of the divine, as well as how philosophical debates over the connection of body and soul in humanity provided a conceptual framework for imagining God. Markschies probes the connections between this lively culture of religious practice and philosophical speculation and the christological formulations of the church to discover how the dichotomy of an incarnate God and a fleshless God came to be. By studying the religious and cultural past, Markschies reveals a Jewish and Christian heritage alien to modern sensibilities, as well as a God who is less alien to the human experience than much of Western thought has imagined. Since the almighty God who made all creation has also lived in that creation, the biblical idea of humankind as image of God should be taken seriously and not restricted to the conceptual world but rather applied to the whole person.

The Anatomy Of The Body Of God; Being The Supreme Revelation Of Cosmic Consciousness Explained And Depicted In Graphic Form. Written from a Thelemic point of view, this relatively short book deals with Qabalastic geometry and how the 'Tree Of Life' can be used as a model for viewing creation multi-dimensionally.

"God's eternal plan for us involves our body. We can't write off our physical life as spiritually irrelevant." — Sam Allberry There's a danger in focusing too much on the body. There's also a danger in not valuing it enough. In fact, the Bible has lots to say about the body. With the coming of Jesus, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us"—flesh that was pierced and crushed for the sins of the world. In What God Has to Say about Our Bodies, Sam Allberry explains that all of us are fearfully and wonderfully made, and should regard our physicality as a gift. He offers biblical guidance for living, including understanding gender, sexuality, and identity; dealing with aging, illness, and death; and considering the physical future hope that we have in Christ. In this powerfully written book, you'll gain a new understanding for the immeasurable value of our bodies and God's ultimate plan to redeem them.

Many people look in the mirror and are dissatisfied with their bodies. They see a seat too big and a chest too small, an enormous nose or beady eyes. Psalm 139 tells us how God feels about our bodies. We get the “fearful” part; it’s the “wonderful” we’re not so sure about.

Your body is by God. God preprogrammed you to look great, have outrageous health, and experience incredible happiness. In the human body, God created a perfect design, equipped with all the organs, tissues, and cells necessary for health, production, and reproduction. The problem, asserts Dr. Ben Lerner, is when we as humans interfere with God's design for our bodies. Junk food, high-stress living, and neglecting exercise are just a few of the things we do to hinder our bodies' performance. In Body by God, Dr. Lerner offers a comprehensive plan for getting in touch with our bodies in four areas: nutrition, exercise, stress management, and time management. His "5-in-5" plan is designed to instill the good habits that will lead to optimum health benefits. Readers will learn how to get in shape with 10-minute workouts, reprogram the way they react to stress, and more. "Owner's Manual Tips" give specific ways to apply the material to real life. Our bodies are "fearfully and wonderfully made." With the help of Body by God, readers will learn how to achieve the highest level of performance from God's handiwork.

This remarkable book is the crowning achievement of the great scholar of Hinduism D. Dennis Hudson. Although Hudson died without completing it, the work has been brought to fruition by editor Margaret Case. The book is a finely detailed study of a renowned Tamil Hindu temple, the Vaikuntha Perumal (ca. 770 C.E.). Hudson uses this temple as an illustration of one major current and historical stage in South Indian Vaisnava religion. He offers a sustained reading of the temple as a coherent, organized, minutely conceptualized mandala whose code can be cracked by close analysis of the temple iconography and structure in the light of major literary and religious texts.

Images of the body in ancient Near Eastern civilizations are radically different from body images today, which in turn creates significant consequences for our understanding of the biblical notion of God's human shape and the frequent and widespread misconceptions therein. Andreas Wagner illuminates such frequent and widespread misconceptions, and reveals the sometimes distant pictorial world of ancient body images. He contrasts these with contemporary models and makes the matter of the Old Testament concept of God's human form accessible and clear. Wagner begins by introducing readers to aspects of anthropomorphism, the study of body parts, and Israel's basic understanding of the human body. He then turns specifically to the body of God, analysing why and how certain body parts are emphasized or regularly employed in the biblical text when it tries to describe God. Wagner draws out the theological aspects of the ways in which God's body is described as well as considering the diverse range of ancient Near Eastern perspectives on God, and the ways in which ancient cultures constructed and understood deities. Wagner concludes by looking at how the depiction of God in the Old Testament fits with the concept of mankind made in God's image. Enhanced by over fifty illustrations, God's Body will lead the debate in biblical anthropomorphism for years to come.