Does God Have a Body?
“The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost has not a body of flesh and bones, but is a personage of Spirit” (Joseph Smith in Doctrine and Covenants 130:22)
This teaching, namely that God is embodied, is perhaps one of the most criticized points of LDS doctrine. I honestly don’t understand what the big deal is, though.
What’s so bad about believing God really did create us in his image (Genesis 1:26-27)?
Is it any different to think that Jesus can be fully God and yet have a resurrected body than to think that the Father could be fully God and yet have a resurrected body?
Isn’t Jesus the express image of his Father?
Is there anything either in scripture or in reason that would demand that the Father be spirit only and not possess a body also?
I myself have never understood how Jesus could be God, resurrected and will never die again according to the scripture, and then have the standard answer offered by Christians to be John 4:24, God is a spirit? This seems to be the starting point in nearly all their explanations that God cannot be embodied. Yet, the very words were spoken by an embodied God, named Jesus Christ. The same one who made having a body a permanent reality by resurrecting his body and ascending with it. Paul says that Christ will change our “vile” bodies like unto his “glorious” body? And, in turn, this body is the express image of the Father’s “person”.
If a person simply sat down and read the Bible and didn’t have the Creeds guiding their interpretations every step of the way, it seems that God indeed has a body in whose image our bodies are made. We in fact, are his “offspring” Acts 17:28. That’s one I don’t hear Evangelicals quoting too often.