] had been told as a child that God was a spirit and therefore did not act as we with our bodies act.. .. Was there any reality other than body of some sort? It seemed the more honest course to go along with the Manichaean view that God is in some sense a body composed of fine and luminous matter.. .. It seemed to him more honest to think that 'anything not a body is nothing whatsoever.' This was the position which the Stoics and Epicureans had felt themselves forced to take against the 'spiritualism' of Plato and Aristotle six hundred years before."
The view that God is incorporeal, without body or parts, has been the hallmark of Christian orthodoxy, but in the beginning it was not so. In this article I show that ordinary Christians for at least the first three centuries of the current era commonly (and perhaps generally) believed God to be corporeal. The belief was abandoned (and then only gradually) as Neoplatonism became more and more entrenched as the dominant world view of Christian thinkers.
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