“God’s Body” in Relation to Materiality

Confusion can quickly arise when biblical scholars talk about “God’s body” because scholars do not always use this phrase in the same way. At the heart of the confusion is the term “body” itself, for biblical scholars define what constitutes a “body” differently, if they define it at all. Of all the various definitions, Benjamin Sommer’s has garnered the most attention and is perhaps the most controversial. In Bodies of God, Sommer explains that he understands “a body” to mean “something located in a particular place at a particular time, whatever its shape or substance.”Footnote ⁷ While some biblical scholars, such as Charles Halton, adopt Sommer’s definition, others have taken issue with Sommer’s understanding of the body, maintaining that it is too broad.Footnote ⁸ Mark Smith, for instance, observes that Sommer’s definition might include all sorts of non-living objects not usually regarded as bodies, and he further argues that it discounts the central role that the human body plays in biblical anthropomorphism.Footnote ⁹ Smith, along with Anne Knafl, instead prefers the definition of “body” provided by the Oxford English Dictionary, which reads: “the physical or material frame or structure of man or of any animal.”Footnote ¹⁰ I take a different approach and follow (with a number of emendations) the definition of the well-known “body studies” scholar Chris Shilling, who defines the body as “emergent material phenomena” that shapes and is shaped by its social environment.Footnote ¹¹ I prefer starting with Shilling’s definition because it helpfully captures both the biological materiality of bodies and the social forces that configure and construct bodies, elements that are missing from the definitions in Bodies of God and the Oxford English Dictionary.

Because of these different definitions of the term “body,” biblical scholars, to no surprise, describe God’s body differently. Sommer, for example, maintains that, in some biblical texts, God has a fluid self (or “divine fluidity”) that inhabits different bodies—bodies that can include things that we today often consider to be inanimate, such as rocks. This is why Sommer can refer to God’s “rock body”—or God’s material instantiation in rocks—and why he uses the terminology of God’s “bodies” (plural). Many ancients conceived of God or the gods as having the ability to embody physical objects, and this belief, Sommer argues, can also be seen within the pages of the Hebrew Bible (a point to which we shall return).Footnote ¹² Smith and Knafl, on the other hand, focus primarily on God’s anthropomorphic depictions (or verbal descriptions of God’s human form).Footnote ¹³ Smith discusses theriomorphic depictions of God as well (and note that his definition of a body refers to both humans and animals), but when he does so, he highlights the intersections between God’s human and animal forms, and he ultimately underscores the centrality of the human body in biblical accounts of God.Footnote ¹⁴ I too consider God’s anthropomorphic depictions (and to a lesser degree, God’s theriomorphic depictions), but I also discuss God’s visibility and concrete manifestations more broadly.Footnote ¹⁵ Furthermore, I would add that the conversation becomes even more complicated when we consider that the ancients often regarded as “bodies” many objects (like stones) or natural phenomena (like the cosmos) that we do not necessarily regard as bodies today.Footnote ¹⁶ As these examples evince, discussions of what constitutes God’s “body” vary depending on how one conceives of the “body” in the first place.

Regardless of these different definitions, many of the above biblical scholars clarify that the Bible does not always portray God’s body (however that is conceived) as a material body. Sommer notes that while some biblical passages indicate that God’s body is material, many other parts of the canon do not.Footnote ¹⁷ Smith identifies three main categories when it comes to understanding God’s body, describing the first of God’s three “bodies” as a material body, the second as luminous but not physical, and the third as partaking of a bodily form but with an unclear physicality.Footnote ¹⁸ I likewise highlight how biblical texts are typically unclear (or silent) when it comes to the substance of God’s body, even though I caution that such ambiguity does not mean that God’s various forms of embodiment lack a connection to materiality.Footnote ¹⁹ As these discussions demonstrate, corporeality and materiality are certainly linked in the ancient world, but they are not always one and the same (which is why I note that Shilling’s definition of the body as “emergent material phenomena” does not always apply to God’s “body”).Footnote ²⁰ What biblical scholarship on God’s body makes clear, therefore, is that the Bible itself is not always clear about whether God’s manifestations are—or are not—material.

Nevertheless, despite such reticence, biblical accounts of God’s body still complicate a neat division between God and materiality, for, as the above scholars note, there are at least some texts that portray God’s body in material terms. Of all these texts, biblical theophanies provide the clearest complication of the God/materiality binary since theophanies in effect grapple with the form of God’s appearance to others within the narrative. Theophanies are thus distinct from other descriptions of God, including the wider phenomenon of divine anthropomorphism, because theophanies depict God’s visible manifestation in a manner that other characters can encounter.Footnote ²¹ That is to say, since theophanies depict the manifestation of God’s form, such occurrences likewise raise the question of the substance of God’s form. While not all theophanies clearly communicate the substance of God’s manifestation, a number do indicate that the manifestation is material. Of these, the two most famous are when God appears in the form of an ish or “man” in Gen 18 and 32, or what Esther Hamori calls the “ish theophanies.”Footnote ²² In the ish theophanies, God is identified as an ish and performs very human, bodily activities, such as eating a meal prepared by Abraham and Sarah and participating in a wrestling match with Jacob.Footnote ²³ Given that God interacts with humans in a bodily (and indeed, human) form, it is difficult to dismiss these accounts as being metaphorical—a traditional interpretative move when it comes to anthropomorphic depictions of God in the Bible more broadly.Footnote ²⁴ Because Gen 18 and 32 portray these divine-human encounters as realistic events that involve God eating and having a body that can be grasped and even wrestled with for an extended period of time, it is hard to escape the sense that these theophanies are “literal” embodiments.

To be sure, various interpretations have emerged over the years to explain how these theophanies in Genesis and beyond do not convey God’s embodied materiality. Interpreters like the Jewish philosopher Philo have made this claim from as early as the first century CE, and they go to great pains to emphasize that, despite appearances to the contrary, biblical texts do not portray God as a corporeal or material being.Footnote ²⁵ According to Philo, biblical theophanies were actually noetic experiences, for the recipients, Philo argues, did not see God in a bodily sense but in a cognitive sense.Footnote ²⁶ Some early Christian interpreters, such as Origen, likewise have a noetic interpretation, whereas others, such as Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, maintain that when humans saw God in theophanies, they were actually seeing Jesus, or “the Son,” and not God “the Father.”Footnote ²⁷ According to these two interpretive approaches, which occur in various iterations throughout the history of interpretation, God does not become materially manifest because God cannot become materially manifest.Footnote ²⁸ Instead, God only becomes visible in the Son or “manifest” in the human mind. As Robin Jensen observes, theophanies posed a special problem for interpreters who believed that God was incorporeal, immaterial, and invisible, and such interpreters therefore took special care in explaining that these passages did not contradict God’s essential immateriality.Footnote ²⁹

Yet, while such interpretations belie an underlying conviction in God’s immateriality, scholars who discuss divine embodiment counter that many people in the ancient world in fact did believe that deities—including the God of Israel—were embodied beings or could become materially manifest.Footnote ³⁰ Scholars such as Sommer and Hamori argue that biblical texts themselves evince this belief, with theophanies in particular indicating that God becomes manifest in the material realm and sometimes, as in Gen 18 and 32, in the form of a material being who partakes in mundane bodily activities. Moreover, as Mark Smith and I note, there are a few places in both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament that mention God actually having some kind of “form” (temunah; eidos; morphē) (Num 12:8; Ps 17:15; John 5:37–38; Phil 2:6; cf. Job 4:16).Footnote ³¹ In these instances, there is an assumption that God has a visible form that can be seen, and Paul even writes that Jesus, before taking the form of a slave, was in the “form” (morphē) of God (Phil 2:6).Footnote ³² Of course, God’s form is not necessarily material in these references, and the word “form” itself is less concrete than the term “body.” Nonetheless, all three of the terms used to refer to the divine form are elsewhere associated with bodies and materiality in biblical texts, thus making it difficult to rule out the potential material connotations of God’s own “form.”Footnote ³³

Despite later interpretations, biblical texts also never explicitly say that God is “incorporeal” or “immaterial” (a not surprising occurrence since these words are foreign to the Bible).Footnote ³⁴ Biblical texts do sometimes call God “spirit” (John 4:24) or “light” (1 John 1:5; cf. Deut 4:24; Heb 12:29) or “invisible” (Col 1:15; 1 Tim 1:17; cf. Rom 1:20; Heb 11:27), and they also sometimes clarify that God is not like humans (Num 23:19; 1 Sam 15:29; Ps 50:21; Hos 11:9; cf. Isa 31:3; Mal 3:6).Footnote ³⁵ But even these verses that arguably suggest God’s immateriality—and have certainly been interpreted in this manner—are not necessarily as clear on this point as they appear at first glance. References to God as “spirit” are complicated because many ancients conceived of “spirit” (ruach or pneuma) in material terms as a more rarefied form of matter.Footnote ³⁶ References to God as “light” are similarly complicated since some ancients conceived of light as a fine, fiery substance and the purest form of the cosmic element fire, as well as a physical phenomenon.Footnote ³⁷ References to God being “invisible” (aoratos), while best approximating a classical theistic understanding of God, could just as easily be translated as “unseen,” which would thus suggest that God is simply unseen by most human eyes and not that God is “invisible” in an ontological sense.Footnote ³⁸ And finally, references to God being distinct from humans typically make this distinction in order to highlight how God is not like humans with respect to specific character traits, whether it be lying, changing one’s mind, or executing wrathful anger.Footnote ³⁹ In other words, they are not statements that claim God is categorically distinct from humans.Footnote ⁴⁰ With all of these typical biblical “prooftexts” for God’s negative attributes, therefore, the link with immateriality and incorporeality is actually quite tenuous.

Overall, biblical scholars have different understandings of what constitutes “God’s body,” and they do not always identify this “body” as a material body. At the same time, they also highlight how at least some theophanies—or God’s visual manifestations—indicate that God becomes materially manifest. In doing so, they stand in tension with early—and still prevalent—interpretative traditions that argue God is disembodied and immaterial. They also, as we shall see, find interesting points of correspondence with new materialism and its own metaphysical framework. But before turning to these correspondences, and how this framework can help us to see God’s relationship with materiality in biblical texts more clearly, it is first important to look a little more closely at new materialism itself.

New Materialism and the Immaterial God

What is new materialism, and why does it matter for scholarship on God’s body? In short, new materialism, or “the material turn,” is a recent, cross-disciplinary reconsideration of the metaphysical import of matter and material realities, and this turn, I believe, can help us reconsider the role matter plays in biblical theophanies.Footnote ⁴¹ The new turn toward materiality, which has gained increasing momentum since the start of the twenty-first century, currently spans numerous disciplines across the humanities and the social and biological sciences, and it has also started to make an impact within some theological circles.Footnote ⁴² As with other scholarly shifts that are retrospectively labeled “turns,” this particular turn critically responds to the “turn” that directly preceded it: namely, the “linguistic turn” of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. In other words, materialist approaches often critique the perceived shortcomings of postmodern—and specifically poststructuralist—approaches. For many new materialists, poststructuralism has been important in helping us understand the ways in which discourse constructs social norms and mechanisms of power and how one’s social location indelibly shapes one’s view of reality. Yet, while many new materialists build on insights from poststructuralism, they differ from poststructuralists in key ways. New materialists, for instance, demonstrate a revived interest in ontology and metaphysics in contrast to poststructuralism’s focus on epistemology, language, and discursive representation.Footnote ⁴³ More importantly, materialists also demonstrate a renewed interest in matter, materiality, and corporeality in contrast to poststructuralism’s rejection of “nature” and biology in favor of culture and social construction.Footnote ⁴⁴

Because of this (re)turn to questions of metaphysics and materiality, however, new materialism (or what is sometimes called post-poststructuralism) also challenges the Platonic metaphysics that inform classical theism and traditional readings of biblical accounts of God, including biblical accounts of theophany. Early Jewish and Christian interpreters who argue that God does not become physically manifest in theophanies do so because of their adoption of Platonic beliefs concerning the superiority of the immaterial over the material and the equation of divinity with immateriality.Footnote ⁴⁵ Plato maintained that incorporeal “Being” (ontologically speaking) was the highest mode of existence, and the reception of this exaltation of incorporeal Being in philosophical circles played an influential role in later Jewish and Christian conceptions of the divine, beginning with Philo in the first century and a number of the church fathers in the second and third centuries.Footnote ⁴⁶ It is for this reason, therefore, that Philo, Justin Martyr, and Origen, among others, interpret biblical theophanies in the manner they do: their interpretations are in effect an apologetic attempt to correlate biblical accounts of God’s (seemingly) material manifestations with philosophical views of God’s immateriality.Footnote ⁴⁷

For our purposes, therefore, a comparison between new materialism and Platonism is especially helpful in terms of how they view material realities. Unlike the Platonic tendency to see bodies as somehow “less than,” new materialism invests bodies—and the wider material conditions in which bodies participate—with value and meaning. Thus, instead of privileging the immaterial over the material, new materialists underscore that bodies matter and, indeed, that matter matters.Footnote ⁴⁸ With this lens, I maintain, we can also better see that God’s body matters. Instead of trying to “explain away” stories of God’s concrete manifestations in the Bible, new materialism can help us to consider these manifestations anew.Footnote ⁴⁹ In fact, new materialism can help biblical scholars recognize how our own inherited assumptions about God’s immateriality have influenced how we read.

To be clear, new materialism does not provide the only alternative to the link between divinity and immateriality. There have always been exceptions to the belief in God’s immateriality throughout the development of classical theistic thought, and Christoph Markschies maintains that this belief did not become theologically “mainstream” until the Middle Ages.Footnote ⁵⁰ Since the Middle Ages, and especially since the beginning of the twentieth century, exceptions have continued to surface from across the theological spectrum and range from proponents of process theology and pantheism to Jewish and Christian thinkers such as Michael Wyschogrod, Yochanan Muffs, Jürgen Moltmann, Robert Jenson, and Stephen Webb.Footnote ⁵¹ Feminist theologians in particular have questioned the presumed superiority of immateriality within classical theism, noting that the rejection of corporeality as a divine attribute is based on the assumption that embodiment is somehow a distortion of an ideal.Footnote ⁵² In my view, new materialism coincides with many of these earlier alternatives to divine immateriality, but new materialism, as the most recent reassessment of matter and materiality, also pushes these earlier arguments forward in important ways.This push, I believe, is necessary, because the notion of God as an incorporeal, immaterial being still remains so prevalent in the West that it is difficult for many theists even to consider the metaphysical possibility of God having a body or being material. Despite the efforts of feminists and other “exceptions” to the rule of classical theism, God remains for many an immaterial, invisible entity, and scholars—whether they are professed theists or not—typically read biblical accounts of God through this lens.Footnote ⁵³

Biblical scholars themselves often tend to read God as an immaterial being, and they also have been slow in incorporating critiques of divine immateriality, including the insights of new materialism, into their work more broadly. Although new materialism has made inroads within the field of theology, very few people within biblical studies specifically situate their scholarship in relation to the material turn (a not surprising occurrence given that biblical studies tends to be about 20 to 30 years behind what is happening in other disciplines).Footnote ⁵⁴ This lack of engagement is also the case for biblical scholars who write on divine embodiment, even though their work intersects with materialist impulses in a variety of ways.Footnote ⁵⁵ For the purposes of space, the remainder of this section will briefly consider three key emphases that emerge in new materialism before turning in the final section to how these emphases shed light on God’s own theophanic “bodies.”

When looking at new materialism, it is first important to note that materialist approaches are not just interested in bodies and materiality but in the agency of bodies and materiality. Whereas postmodern approaches often situate the body as a passive entity that is shaped and controlled by larger social forces, materialist approaches emphasize how the body is an active participant in the wider material world.Footnote ⁵⁶ What is more, materialist approaches challenge the Platonic assumption that matter itself is a passive substance intrinsically devoid of meaning. (Indeed, according to Platonism, the immaterial Forms are active, but matter itself is passive.) Instead of understanding matter in passive terms, matter is described as an active agent that is alive, dynamic, and relational. In the words of the new materialist Jane Bennett, matter is “vibrant.” (Hence the title of her often-cited 2009 book, Vibrant Matter.)Footnote ⁵⁷ In discussing the vibrancy of matter, many materialists like Bennett turn to the biological sciences to describe how a variety of human and nonhuman materialities (such as food, inanimate things, etc.) interact with one another in a complex network of relations. (In the sciences, Bennett explains, it is especially clear that humans do not simply act upon inert, nonhuman matter. Instead, food, for example, can influence a person’s mood, and even inanimate things can exert agency over humans in complicated ways.) While postmodern approaches tend to dismiss the biological sciences as simply another socially constructed discourse within the wider mechanizations of power, materialist approaches exemplify a renewed engagement with work being done in the scientific community, and they ask how this work connects to actual bodies and biological processes. Such approaches, moreover, likewise complicate popular Platonic assumptions that matter is simply acted upon by higher forms of reality such as God or the immaterial Forms.

Second, materialist scholars do not limit their focus to human bodies but instead shift their attention to nonhuman bodies and materiality more broadly (a shift that is also sometimes called “posthumanism” or “the nonhuman turn”).Footnote ⁵⁸ This shift to the nonhuman is in part a response to poststructuralism and its anthropocentric orientation—an orientation that is evident from the fact that the “linguistic turn” concentrates on (human) language and discourse.Footnote ⁵⁹ The nonhuman shift, however, is also a response to our current global ecological crisis. Scholars who evince an interest in the nonhuman often focus on environmental concerns, which is why the interdisciplinary field known as “ecocriticism” can be considered part of the material turn.Footnote ⁶⁰ On one level, then, scholars who turn to the nonhuman seek to correct the common perception that nonhuman materialities (e.g., animals, plants, inorganic entities) simply exist for human consumption, and they emphasize the importance of social activism and ecological justice. But on another level, such scholars also insist that the human and nonhuman have always coexisted, to the point where the boundaries between the human and nonhuman become indistinct. Nonhuman theorist Richard Grusin, for instance, argues that the human is characterized precisely by an indistinction from the nonhuman since all matter constantly interacts with other matter, whether in human or nonhuman forms.Footnote ⁶¹ Similarly, many affect theorists highlight the dynamic interaction between human matter and matter in general, noting that the human is irreducibly bound up with the nonhuman.Footnote ⁶²

Third, materialist approaches maintain that these permeable boundaries between the human and nonhuman also extend to the question of agency. It is never the case that a human acts on their own, for human agency always emerges at the intersection of the human and the nonhuman since human bodies are co-constituted with the nonhuman (including the atmosphere, affects, microbes, organic food material, and so forth). Because of this intersection, agency itself is not located in a singular body but is spread across a network of actors.Footnote ⁶³ For a new materialist, therefore, to be embodied is already to be a distributed agent. Due to these views concerning a human/nonhuman permeability, materialist approaches complicate the binary between humans and nonhumans as found in Platonic understandings of the hierarchy of creation (e.g., humans are “higher” than animals in “the great chain of being”). Materialist approaches also complicate classical theistic understandings of God (the ultimate “nonhuman”) as being utterly distinct from humans and creation, as evidenced, for example, in the doctrine of creation ex nihilo (i.e., the doctrine that God created matter out of nothing by speaking the cosmos into existence, thus making matter utterly dependent on—and distinct from—God’s eternal immateriality).Footnote ⁶⁴

As these key emphases demonstrate, new materialism’s understanding of material realities not only stands in sharp contrast to poststructuralism but also to the Platonic metaphysics that shaped classical theism and traditional interpretations of biblical theophanies. As the most recent turn to the importance of bodies and matter, new materialism provides a more expansive understanding of the relationship between materiality and divinity and reminds us that biblical texts on the whole do not share the Platonic framework out of which classical theism later emerged. In fact, new materialism can particularly illuminate biblical theophany accounts in ways that classical theism has obscured, and it is to these theophany accounts that we now return—this time looking at them with these new materialist emphases in view.

A Material Turn Towards God’s Body

When we make a “material turn” to biblical theophanies, the close relationship between divinity and materiality becomes more apparent since accounts of theophany often evince the three new materialist emphases that I outlined in the previous section. First, the depiction of God inhabiting objects exemplifies new materialist claims concerning the vibrancy of matter. In this case, of course, God is the one who infuses matter, bestowing it with a divine agency and a specific, localized site where God’s presence can be met.Footnote ⁶⁵ I noted at the outset of this article that there was a widespread belief throughout the ancient Mediterranean that the gods inhabited the natural world, and Sommer, among others, maintains that these beliefs can be heard within the pages of the Hebrew Bible in reference to Israel’s God. There are suggestions, for instance, that some biblical texts reflect the view that God can become manifest in wood and stones, as when Moses refers to God as “the one who dwells in a bush” (Deut 33:16; cf. Exod 3:1–6) or when Jacob says “this stone, which I have set up for a pillar, shall be God’s house” (Gen 28:22).Footnote ⁶⁶ According to some biblical texts, therefore, God’s own self can dwell in the very things that God created if God so chooses, a dwelling that saturates at least some particular forms of matter with divine vibrancy.

More generally, however, biblical texts also point to the vibrancy of matter beyond God’s manifestation in objects. Charles Halton, for example, highlights how some scriptural texts indicate that the earth is not inert matter or an inanimate “thing” since passages ranging from Genesis to the prophets to Romans imbue creation and the land with agency and the capacity for suffering, as well as redemption (e.g., Gen 4:10–14; Jer 4:19–31; Hos 4:1–3; Rom 8:19–23).Footnote ⁶⁷ Though not writing on the topic of God’s body, Mari Joerstad likewise points to how nonanimal nature performs actions in biblical texts, as well as how nonanimal nature displays affect and is addressed in a manner akin to a person.Footnote ⁶⁸ Across the Hebrew Bible, we find stones witnessing (e.g., Gen 31:48, 52; Josh 24:23–27), the ground responding to human action (e.g., Gen 4:10–12; Exod 15:12; Lev 18:24–28; Num 16:32–34), trees rejoicing (e.g., 1 Chron 16:33; Ps 96:12; Isa 14:7–8; 55:12), or the prophets exhorting nonhuman nature to listen (e.g., Isa 1:2; 34:1; Jer 6:18–19; Mic 1:2).Footnote ⁶⁹ I would add that such personalistic accounts of nature continue in the New Testament.Footnote ⁷⁰ When taken seriously and not dismissed as “mere” metaphor, these accounts complicate the classical theistic divide between the human and nonhuman as well as the divide between the Creator and creation.Footnote ⁷¹ It is not as though God and humans alone have agency, but instead God, humans, and nonhuman nature interact with one another in more relational ways. According to some biblical texts, therefore, creation more broadly conceived can also be “vibrant.”

The second point of correlation between biblical theophanies and new materialism more specifically concerns the nonhuman. In some of the examples provided above, God can reside in materials such as bushes and stones, both of which are nonhuman (or God’s “nonhuman bodies,” to adapt Sommer’s terminology).Footnote ⁷² Mark Smith likewise considers God’s connection to the nonhuman when he discusses God’s theriomorphic forms.Footnote ⁷³ Smith argues that in 1 Kings some Israelites believed that God could become manifest in calf statues, even though the narrator condemns the worship of such images (1 Kgs 12:25–33), and he observes that a number of biblical texts apply theriomorphic language to God, as when God has wings like a bird (e.g., Ruth 2:12; Pss 17:8; 36:7; 57:1; 61:4; 63:7; 91:4).Footnote ⁷⁴ Indeed, Smith notes that theriomorphic, anthropomorphic, and physiomorphic (or natural, nonhuman) depictions of God often intersect with one another, as when Moses’s song in Deuteronomy 32 refers to God as an eagle (v. 11), a father (v. 6), and a rock (vv. 4, 15, 18, 30, 31).Footnote ⁷⁵ Such intersections, Smith argues, point to God’s incomparability, but they also, I would argue, point to the connections between God and nonhuman entities, whether those forms be a “natural” thing like a rock or an animal like a bird.Footnote ⁷⁶

While many of God’s theriomorphic and physiomorphic “forms” are descriptive in nature and do not refer to a theophanic manifestation, it is important to note that this is not always the case. God, as we have seen, can become physiomorphically manifest in wood and stone, but God may also become theriomorphically manifest. In the New Testament, for example, the Holy Spirit—a manifestation of God and God’s presence—famously descends “as a dove” in the scene of Jesus’s baptism, and, according to Luke, the Spirit specifically descends as a dove in “bodily form” (sōmatikō eidei).Footnote ⁷⁷ While this image may function primarily as a vivid simile since the word hōs (“as” or “like”) often acts as a particle of comparison (cf. hōsei in Matt 3:16), Luke’s placement of the phrase “as a dove” directly after “bodily form” may indicate that “as a dove” is an appositional phrase that qualifies the kind of form in which the Spirit descends. In other words, Luke may convey the Spirit’s visibly ornithomorphic form.Footnote ⁷⁸ Regardless, all of the evangelists describe the Spirit as an entity who enters the narrative in theriomorphic terms, with Luke in particular characterizing the Spirit in both theriomorphic and somatic terms. According to the Gospel accounts, the Spirit’s descent is visible and may even take the form of a bird, an image often applied to God in Israel’s scriptures.Footnote ⁷⁹

In addition to God’s “natural” and animal forms, God’s connection to the nonhuman can also be seen via God’s angelic forms. As Sommer argues, there are places in the Hebrew Bible where God becomes manifest as an angel or, more specifically, as an “angel of the Lord” (malak Yhwh).Footnote ⁸⁰ Commentators have long noted that a number of passages overlap the angel of the Lord with God in confusing ways, to the point where it is difficult (if not impossible) to distinguish the angel from God (e.g., Gen 16:7–13; Exod 3:2–4; Judg 6:11–13). Sommer identifies the angel in such passages as a “small-scale manifestation of God” since the angel, he argues, is a part of God, though not all of God.Footnote ⁸¹ In many of these cases, the angel appears like a human or in anthropomorphic form, but the angel, of course, is still ultimately a heavenly, nonhuman being.Footnote ⁸² Furthermore, there are also instances where God’s angelic manifestations are not anthropomorphic, as when God and the angel of the Lord appear as fire in the burning bush (Exod 3:1–6; cf. Exod 14:19–20; Deut 4:24; Heb 12:29). Not only are angels nonhuman beings, but they, along with God, sometimes become manifest in nonhuman forms such as fire and light. Furthermore, God’s nonhuman manifestations as fire and light, as well as “Glory,” also arguably point to God’s material manifestations, for a materialist—whether they be ancient or “new”—would not view light as “immaterial.”Footnote ⁸³

New materialism, as I have argued, helps us to see how biblical theophanies, and biblical texts more broadly, bestow matter with vibrancy (whether that matter is “divinely” vibrant or not) and how they overlap God with the nonhuman. However, new materialism also enables us to broaden our understanding of divine agency. A materialist approach would thus not only argue that creation is an active agent in biblical texts but that God’s own agency is inextricably enmeshed with creation. In Gen 1, for example, God initiates the work of creation but leaves its execution to the earth, for the earth is what brings forth vegetation in obedience to God’s command (Gen 1:11–12).Footnote ⁸⁴ Joerstad explains that the actions of God and the earth overlap and merge in Gen 1, so much so that the activity of nonanimal nature “is a constitutive element in the process of creation.”Footnote ⁸⁵ In this instance, creation itself participates in God’s act of creating, doing so in a manner that blurs a neat division between God and creation along active/passive lines. Thus, while not a theophany per se, this example from the outset of Genesis demonstrates that God’s agency can intertwine with the material world, and it may signal that the material world’s participatory role occurs from the very “beginning.”

Some passages, therefore, clarify that material creation participates in God’s actions by responding to God’s initiative (e.g., in Gen 1:11–12, God commands the earth to sprout vegetation and the earth does so in response). Other passages, however, lift up creation as the principal agent in these participatory acts and leave God’s role more oblique. To cite just one example, the book of Acts depicts an earthquake freeing Paul and his companion Silas from prison in a manner that suggests the (shaking) earth is a—if not the—primary actor in the release (see Acts 16:25–34). God, to be sure, is the implied subject of this act, for the earthquake happens directly after Acts depicts Paul and Silas praying and singing hymns to God (Acts 16:25–26; cf. 16:34).Footnote ⁸⁶ The prison release also recalls the programmatic scene from Luke’s Gospel where Jesus connects God’s action to the release of captives (Luke 4:18; cf. Isa 61:1). At the same time, the narrator only mentions the earthquake—not God—in conjunction with the physical release. God nowhere appears as the explicitly stated subject of the action, for the narrator relates that a “great” (megas) earthquake suddenly occurred, with the result (hōste) that the prison foundations were shaken, followed by the immediate opening of the prison doors and the unfastening of everyone’s chains (Acts 16:26).Footnote ⁸⁷

A reading attuned to new materialism, therefore, would take notice of these textual details and reject the notion that God simply acts through the earthquake, as though the earth is a passive entity that God harnesses. Instead, a new materialist reading would maintain that God and the earthquake together free Paul and Silas; God is a key agent but not the sole agent and perhaps not even the main agent. Here in this “theophanic” encounter, as in numerous other biblical examples, God and nonhuman matter overlap in a way that impacts the lives of God’s followers, in this instance bringing about the liberative act of freeing Paul and Silas from prison.Footnote ⁸⁸ In a new materialist reading, then, divine agency—as with agency in general—cannot help but be spread across a network of actors.Footnote ⁸⁹ God never acts solely on God’s own, as though God were somehow in a vacuum, for God’s interaction in the world involves an interaction of different actors, human and nonhuman alike.

Because of this understanding of how agency becomes manifest, a new materialist approach to God’s body brings to light the various participants of divine involvement within biblical texts and thus expands our understanding of what constitutes a theophany in the first place. When it comes to traditionally recognized scenes of theophany, moreover, a new materialist approach to God’s body would also maintain that God, matter, and material bodies necessarily constitute one another. When discussing theophanies, therefore, a new materialist would not only talk about God becoming embodied. God does not just temporarily dwell in matter, as though material entities are passive vehicles that God possesses (per Sommer’s understanding that matter is inert until God becomes manifest in it).Footnote ⁹⁰ Instead, theophanies entail a dynamic, transformative interplay between God and matter. So when Moses encounters God in the fiery bush (Exod 3:1–12), for example, this theophany entails a co-constitution—or relational imbrication of being—between the bush and God. In other words, the bush is a part of the theophany itself and not just an empty “vessel” that somehow “holds” God. If God’s various “bodies” are in some ways analogous to human bodies, then God’s agency is also distributed across a network of other bodies. And just as human and nonhuman bodies are not singular entities that act on their own, God’s bodies likewise do not operate in isolation. God’s bodies are instead entangled with various other entities in a manner that blurs traditional dividing lines between God and creation and between the human and nonhuman.

In this way, I want to argue, biblical texts suggest a material vibrancy to God’s own self. In scenes of divine encounter, God can be said to be “material” because interaction with the material world inevitably involves a dynamic entanglement of being. Of course, one could argue that God is the great exception to this way of being in the world. Because God is “Other,” God’s bodies do not always operate in the same manner as human or nonhuman bodies. This may very well be the case, but the position that God alone is a self-contained agent primarily emerges as a possibility if the reader has a prior commitment to God’s immateriality, a commitment, as I outlined earlier, that biblical texts do not seem to share. Indeed, the very fact that biblical texts speak of God’s “spirit” (pneuma) becoming manifest or even speak of God as “spirit” (John 4:24), indicates that readers who believed pneuma (“spirit”) to be a rarefied form of matter very likely heard God in material terms, a point that Origen, for example, recognizes and goes to great pains to explain away (e.g., Princ. 1.1–9).Footnote ⁹¹ For some New Testament texts in particular, God’s manifestation in the human Jesus presses God’s relationship with materiality even further (e.g., John 1:1–14; Phil 2:5–11; Col 1:19; 2:9), for while later Christian doctrine would distinguish between Jesus’s immaterial divine nature and his material human nature, the New Testament itself betrays no division between Jesus’s “immaterial” divinity and “material” humanity.Footnote ⁹²

In sum, God’s relationship with matter emerges more clearly when we look at biblical theophanies through a new materialist lens. Theophanies at times portray matter as vibrantly alive and the divine as a nonhuman entity. They also ascribe agency to creation and depict divine agency in distributed terms. New materialism not only brings these textual elements into sharper focus, but it also expands our understanding of what constitutes God’s “body” in the first place. Biblical texts do not always depict divine manifestations as the appearance of a “self-contained,” human body (as in Gen 18 and 32), for divine manifestations are dispersed across different kinds of materiality, including the human and the nonhuman. There is a “fluidity” of the divine self, as Sommer puts it, across nature, animals, angels, and/or humans: if God so chooses, God can encounter God’s creatures in a variety of concrete, tangible ways. God, in fact, can encounter creatures outside of traditional theophanic scenes simply by exercising an agency which is entangled with the material world. When looking at “theophanies” as a whole, therefore, neither anthropomorphism nor even theriomorphism, can account for all of the ways in which God becomes materially manifest in biblical texts. There is instead a materiality to God by virtue of God’s care for and intervention in the world.