Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of God Part 11.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

In our lesson, we've been thinking about the attribute of God's incorporeality, or God's not being or having a body.

And in our survey of the scriptural data concerning God's incorporeality, we saw that

God is a spirit, that God is omnipresent, that God is invisible, and that images of God as corporeal objects is

forbidden. So in all of these ways, the Bible goes to support the idea that God is an incorporeal

being, not a material or physical being.

Nevertheless, we also saw that the scriptures are filled with anthropomorphic descriptions

of God.

God is described frequently in corporeal terms.

The scriptures speak of God's arm or his hands,

his eyes, his ears, and so forth. And these are pervasive in Scripture. It's not simply that

these bodily parts are attributed to God, but even activities like God's seeing the distress of his people or God's

hearing their cry are anthropomorphic descriptions, since God doesn't literally have eyeballs

that receive photons and so give him visual images of things to see, nor does he have

eardrums on which sound waves can impinge so that he could hear things in that literal sense.

The scripture is replete with these sorts of anthropomorphic descriptions of God. Moreover, we also saw that people

sometimes experience visions of God, which are corporeal in nature. And these are called

theophanies. They are visions of God. And in these, God is usually seen in some sort of corporeal form,

perhaps sitting on a throne, for example. So we've got scriptural data that on the one

hand clearly implies and says that God is a spiritual

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