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Brittany E. Wilson, The Embodied God: Seeing the Divine in Luke-Acts and the Early Church (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2021).

Abstract

"This book focuses on God's body in the New Testament. While there are various views in the New Testament regarding God's body, the present work argues that Luke-Acts stands out as an important example of a New Testament text that portrays God as visible and corporeal. According to Luke, God is a visible, concrete being who can take on a variety of different forms, as well as a being who is intimately intertwined with human fleshliness in the form of Jesus. In this way, the God of Israel does not adhere to the incorporeal deity of Platonic philosophy, especially as read through post-Enlightenment eyes. Luke's portrayal of God instead finds more affinity with Greco-Roman traditions that conceive of the divine in corporeal terms, and above all, with the God found in the pages of Jewish Scripture. Moreover, Luke's depiction of Jesus as an embodied being has both similarities and dissimilarities with Luke's depiction of Israel's God and points ahead to future controversies concerning Jesus's divinity and humanity in the early church. Indeed, in Luke-Acts and beyond, questions concerning God's body are intimately intertwined with Christology and shed light on how to understand Jesus's own visible embodiment in relation to God"--Publisher description.

Contents

Introduction: Seeing God's Body -- Part I. Seeing God -- 1. Imaging God: Idolatry and Divine Anthropomorphism -- 2. Glimpsing God: Visions and Theophanies -- 3. Encountering God: Divine Fluidity and God's Many Forms -- Part II. Seeing Jesus -- 4. Seeing the Light: Jesus's Divinity and Epiphanic Form -- 5. Visually Verifying the Corporeal Christ: Jesus's Humanity and Fleshly Form -- 6. Beholding the Human One: Christophanies and Jesus's Embodied Form in Heaven.

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