Heaven's not a vapor
And God's not a cloud
He's in a physical temple
On the top of a mount
(Chorus from the IHOP-KC Prayer Room, June 2010)

One of the criticisms occasionally leveled against "charismatic" teachers and groups¹ is that they are anthropomorphites (e.g. Catholic Answers). That is, they believe that God the Father - in addition to God the Son - has a human form.

At first glance, the topic may appear to be as straightforward as Catholic Answers suggests - people are merely taking imagery like "The right hand of YHWH" (Ps 118:15-16) literally and coming to overly simplistic conclusions. But on closer inspection, there is a case to be made for the anthropomorphism even of the Father. Abraham apparently had YHWH to his tent for dinner and then talked with Him about Isaac and the fate of Sodom (Gen 18). Moses and seventy elders of Israel "saw the God of Israel" and He had feet (Ex 24:10). Isaiah saw YHWH sitting on a throne and wearing a robe (Is 6:1,5). Ezekiel saw "the glory of YHWH" and he had "a likeness with human appearance." (Ezek 1:26,28, see also Ezek 3:23; 8:4; 9:3; 10:4, 18).

The standard theological response to these verses has been to regard them as Old Testament Christophanies (pre-Incarnate appearances of the Second Person of the Trinity). Various New Testament scriptures do provide legitimacy for that view (e.g. Jn 1:18, 1 Jn 4:12; and Jn 12:41, which states clearly that Isaiah saw a Christophany). But it must be noted that with the exception of John 12:41, Scripture itself is silent on Old Testament Christophanies.

The early church fathers are helpful to a degree (see the extensive selection of quotes at the Catholic Answers link above), but it must be recognized that the apologists and early theologians of the Church virtually all imported a large number of Hellenistic assumptions into their theological works. These ideas were alien to the Hebrew worldview in which the Torah was received and into which the Messiah and all His apostles were born. This can be seen clearly in some of the earliest quotes on the topic, where the church fathers go beyond scripture and import propositions from Greek philosophy, e.g.:

Athenagoras

"I have sufficiently demonstrated that we are not atheists, since we acknowledge one God, unbegotten, eternal, invisible, incapable of being acted upon, incomprehensible, unbounded, who is known only by understanding and reason, who is encompassed by light and beauty and spirit and indescribable power, by whom all things, through his Word, have been produced and set in order and are kept in existence" (Plea for the Christians 10 [A.D. 177]).
(http://www.catholic.com/library/God_Has_No_Body.asp)

You will not find the idea that God is "incapable of being acted upon" in the Bible. In fact, it's hard not to get the impression that He is very much affected by our choices - not least our sins. (e.g. Jer 12:7-8) Or try telling Abraham that God is "known only through understanding and reason." His answer might be, "No, He talked with me and He visited my tent." (Gen 18)

But aside from throwing Bible verses back and forth, there is actually an important pastoral issue involved. I recently finished reading Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, by C.S. Lewis, and I found Lewis' thoughts on anthropomorphisms in scripture to be the best I've heard:

This talk of “meeting" is, no doubt, anthropomorphic; as if God and I could be face to face, like two fellow-creatures, when in reality He is above me and within me and below me and all about me. That is why it must be balanced by all manner of metaphysical and theological abstractions. But never, here or anywhere else, let us think that while anthropomorphic images are a concession to our weakness, the abstractions are the literal truth. Both are equally concessions - each singly misleading, and the two together mutually corrective. Unless you sit to it very tightly, continually murmuring “Not thus, not thus, neither is this Thou,” the abstraction is fatal. It will make the life of lives inanimate and the love of loves impersonal. The naïf image is mischievous chiefly in so far as it holds unbelievers back from conversion. It does believers, even at its crudest, no harm. what soul ever perished for believing that God the Father really has a beard? (Pg 22)

Scripture doesn't take the slightest pain to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity - even as "grieving" God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction's value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction "impassible"can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naïf Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was “Pure Act” in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created.

I suggest two rules for exegetics: 1) Never take the images literally. 2) When the purport of the images—what they say to our fear and hope and will and affections—seems to conflict with the theological abstractions, trust the purport of the images every time. For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modelling of spiritual reality in legal or chemical or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag-heaps. Hence what they now call “demythologising” Christianity can easily be “re-mythologising” it—and substituting a poorer mythology for a richer. (Pg 51-52)

In essence, Lewis is saying that anthropomorphism is far less dangerous than mechanomorphism (imagining God to be like a machine), which is all we have left if we think that words like "omnipresent," "omnipotent," and "impassible" are literal truth that doesn't need to be qualified or explained.

God's impassibility is probably the weakest of the "attributes of God" discussed by theologians - the least Biblically supported and the most liable to dangerous misunderstanding. There are some Biblical reasons to support it (e.g. "God is not a man that He should lie or a son of man that He should change His mind…" Num 23:19, and the very fact that the Lake of Fire is a place of everlasting wrath - everlasting wrath is an impossible emotion for human beings). But we are much safer to think of God's emotions as analogous to ours than to think of them as something abstract and static. If we focus on the idea that God's emotions are utterly unlike ours, we will ruin our emotional relationship with Him, and we will actually make void the many things that He tells us about His emotions through scripture.

We run into a similar problem when we think about God's relationship to time. It is all but unthinkable that God could experience time in the same way as us, as a slave of the future, not knowing with certainty what will happen. To think of God like that reduces His promises from certainties to probabilities, and His sovereignty from utterly trustworthy rule to the best bet among uncertain options. Further, if the theory of relativity is correct in that time and space are inextricably linked - to the point that travel through space at speeds approaching the speed of light actually affects time - then to make God subject to time is to make God subject to space, and therefore to His own creation. It would be a self-contradiction.

However, when we consider the alternative - of declaring God to be "outside time" or "timeless," the distortion that enters in is again far more spiritually dangerous than the intellectual difficulty of picturing God within time. When we think of "timelessness," we inevitably think of something static. And in fact, that was precisely how Plato pictured the First Cause - the "Unmoved Mover", the "Ultimate Form" from which all else was derived. It reduces the personal and deeply involved YHWH of Israel to a pretty statue and renders the Incarnation an irreconcilable contradiction in terms.

So, as Lewis wrote, we are far safer to approach God using the imagery and language that He has given us, even recognizing that the Bible itself warns us against taking the images rigidly (e.g. we are told "He does not change His mind," and yet on several occasions, the story records that He did precisely that). It is much better to cry with Moses, "Turn from Your burning anger," (Ex 32:12) than to sit back with the false piety of Ahaz saying, "I will not ask, and I will not put YHWH to the test." (Is 7:12)

¹ Note that I am using the word "Charismatic" loosely to refer to a broad spectrum of groups and denominations who believe in the present operation of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.