JORDAN QUINLEY
Though not expressly stated in their 28 Fundamental Beliefs, Seventh-day Adventism has historically taught that God possesses a material body. This position was strongly advocated by Ellen White’s husband James White in his pamphlet “Personality of God.” Likewise, in the May 21, 1889 edition of Adventist Review and Sabbath Herald, Elder A. T. Jones takes the same line, emphatically opposing the view espoused in classical Reformed theology (and Christian orthodoxy more broadly) that God is “without body or parts”, saying rather that God “has a form.” He thus asserts that God is “a real being,” and has “a real personality of being.”(White and Jones both use “personality” as we would use “personhood” and in turn take this to require physical embodiment.)
Like White, Jones seems to believe that if God were immaterial, this would make him not real, and not a person, though neither conclusion follows. Indeed, insofar as fundamental reality is concerned, God’s essence as spirit makes his realness more absolute than that of any material being could ever be. More on that later. That God “has form, parts, and passions the Bible plainly shows,” says Jones.
I disagree on all three counts, but since discussions of God’s “passions” require much fined-tuned definitions of terms and usually several pots of coffee, let us concentrate on the implications of a God with parts.
Could God have been different?
The Christian doctrine criticized by Elder Jones, that God is without parts, is called the doctrine of divine simplicity. To say that God is simple, in this way, means that he is not composite. God is not a sum of components. That is to say, He is not made up of any things which are by themselves not God (just parts of God)—even such things as, for instance, his attributes, or three persons—let alone body parts, or parts that constitute a “form.”
God is also, in both orthodox and Adventist understanding, the first cause of all things, and is Himself eternal and uncaused (see SDA fundamental beliefs Nos. 2 and 3). Thus God is the ultimate answer to the question Why, the ultimate explanation for how things are, and must be the thing for which there is no explanation because none is needed. In classical Christianity, God exists because it is impossible that He should not exist, and He exists as He is because He could not be otherwise. If we were to suppose that it were even possible to provide an explanation (i.e., a cause) for God’s existence or nature, then we would admit some prior, more fundamental reality, upon which God was dependent or contingent for his own existence or nature.
This supposed explanation for God would then want its own explanation, and in the end, we would be chasing what amounted to something more basic, more grounding than God himself. There is no and can be no such necessary precondition for God, because if there were, that would be the ultimate cause. God, the I AM, is His own grounding and “has life in himself” (Jn 5:26).
This is all very interesting, but what does this have to do with God’s simplicity? The answer is that any composition in God seems to imply that, although God has been a certain way from all eternity, He might have been different. To even admit this as a possibility then draws us into a search for that grounding one step back of God that made Him be as He is (that made Him have the attributes He does have, and not other attributes), and there the whole thing unravels.
Joseph Minich has put it this way:
We should not imagine some (even logical or hypothetical) possibility that God could be just as He is sans one attribute or plus one more divine member. Such a situation would require a “realm of possibilities” existing alongside God—a pile that just “happens to be” with the same necessity of Being that is God Himself. And this would, then, imply that both God and this “realm of possibilities” are two instances of a prior and more fundamental kind of being (two members of a set of necessarily existing things). In such a case, it would be the prior unity containing both God and this possibility realm that would then be the ultimate singular reality we call Being in its most basic form (i.e. God). And since this prior reality would not be personal, we would simultaneously render ultimate reality impersonal, the particulars of the now little “g” god’s nature arbitrary, and therefore all things in the universe fundamentally unexplained.
Perhaps as I did, you’ll have to read that two or three times. But once the concept sinks in, it solidifies how crucial it is to understand that God is absolute and such that cannot-be-otherwise. This is only possible in a God that does not posses “attributes” (as we call them for the sake of convenience) without which he would still be God. You and I possess many attributes without which we would still be ourselves—our weight, eye color, full head of hair or lack thereof, ten fingers, etc. If any of these things about you changed, your identity would remain intact. In this sense, these things about you are nonessential to who you yourself are. We might say they are accidental, or arbitrary. You can lose a leg to gangrene and still be the same person. You can dye your hair or grow taller, and this doesn’t change who you are. It changes something about you, but does not change your identity. This is because your attributes are unified by a principle that exists independent of your body, which we may call the principle of identity or something like that.
So let’s apply these ideas to the Adventist pioneers’ notion that God has form and parts. Supposing God has a form, visible and corporeal, we would be justified in asking why it is that God’s appearance is what is and not different. Supposing, moreover, that God had a body much like that of a man’s, we might want to know why God is six feet tall, not seven, or why God has five fingers on each of two hands, rather than four fingers on each of four hands. Or why God has hands at all. These would be very legitimate philosophical questions.
If God has any accidentals in addition to his essential being, then He, too, could hypothetically have been different and still be God. Furthermore, if God had parts, this would predicate some reality extrinsic to God by which the parts (each of which by itself is not God) find unity in the whole (God) which they make up. Even though this reality would be conceptual rather than concrete, it would nonetheless be outside of God and needed to give God definition. It would be a principle co-eternal with God and upon which God was dependent for His being.
This external definer of God cannot be, for God is by our own definition and by necessity, the ultimate and only eternal, self-existing, independent reality.
Now, material beings can take many forms, as we observe all around us. Even human beings vary widely in appearance. So there is nothing essential or necessary about one material form or another. There couldn’t be. God’s “personality” (as James White called it), whatever form it took, would necessarily be arbitrary because it could have been different. This possibility would mean that at least some things about God are as they are by chance. Because God himself would not be the full explanation of his own being, this leaves all of reality unexplained—a terrifying prospect. That is, it leaves something that is not ultimately explained, or grounded, in God himself, with the explanation dangling in midair, unknowable, and beyond God! †
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Thank you for this challenging discussion of the topic! If I may add, not only did James White and A. T. Jones say that God has a physical body-Ellen herself said so. In Early writings on pages 53 and 77 she says it openly.
Thanks again
Jeanie