Where Is the Evidence?
Mark Driscoll argues that Christians have always believed God the Father is an immaterial, incorporeal spirit, “without body, parts, or passions.” He contrasts this with the Latter-day Saint belief that God is an exalted, perfected man with a glorified body of flesh and bone. He presents this as an irreconcilable difference.
But let’s replace the burden of proof.
Where does the Bible ever say that God is immaterial or without body?
Where do the apostles teach that God cannot be seen or that He lacks form?
Where is the evidence that the earliest Christians held this view before Greek philosophy reshaped Christian theology?
Driscoll does not provide such proofs. He assumes the later creeds as his starting point and declares everything else false. But the real question is this: who gave the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries the authority to override the Bible’s plain witness?
The Greek Inheritance
The phrase Driscoll leans on, that God is “without body, parts, or passions,” does not come from the Bible. It comes from the Westminster Confession of Faith in the 1600s, which itself borrowed categories from Augustine and Greek philosophy.
In Greek philosophy, God (or “the divine”) was described as asōmatos (ἀσώματος, bodiless) and apatheia (ἀπάθεια, impassible, without emotions). These terms were imported into Christianity as theologians tried to reconcile scripture with Plato and Aristotle. The result was an abstract deity very different from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
The Bible’s Witness
Scripture consistently describes God in ways that contradict the idea of a purely immaterial being.
Exodus 20:5 – “… for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God…” (other translations of the Hebrew word often translated as “jealous” qanna (קַנָּא) can read this word as, “zealous, fiercely protective, or…. passionate”).
Genesis 1:27 – Humanity was created “in the image of God.” Image implies likeness, not complete dissimilarity.
Acts 7:55-56 – Stephen saw Jesus standing on the right hand of God. Two glorified beings, distinct and visible.
Daniel 7:9-10 – Daniel saw the “Ancient of Days” seated on a throne, with “garments” and “hair like pure wool.”
The New Testament also testifies that the Son reveals the Father (John 14:9, Colossians 1:15). To know Christ’s glorified body is to glimpse what the Father is like.
If God is truly without body or passions, then what do these passages mean? Are they just endless metaphors? Or are they simple testimonies that God is real, personal, and embodied?
Early Christian Witnesses
The earliest Christians often spoke in ways that align more closely with the Restoration than with later creeds.
Irenaeus (c. 130-202 AD) taught that man was literally created in God’s image. He wrote: “If God is invisible and incomprehensible, how could man be made in His likeness?” (Against Heresies 4.20.1-6).
Tertullian (c. 160-225 AD) said that even spirit is a kind of body. “For who will deny that God is a body, although ‘God is a Spirit’? For Spirit has a bodily substance of its own kind” (Against Praxeas 7).
Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215 AD) declared, “The Father of the universe has His figure, the Son who is His Word and the most manifest image of the Father” (Stromata 5.6).
Justin Martyr (c. 100-165 AD) affirmed that prophets literally saw God through His Son. “The Father of all is not to be seen… but the Son, being in His image, was seen” (Dialogue with Trypho 127).
These leaders of the early church sound far more like Joseph Smith than like Augustine. If Driscoll wishes to condemn Latter-day Saints for teaching that the Father has a body, he must also condemn some of the earliest Christian leaders.
Evangelical Inconsistency: God as Man
There is also an inconsistency in the evangelical position. Evangelicals condemn it as heresy to say that “God was once a man,” yet they openly confess that Jesus Christ is God, and that He became fully man.
John 1:14 – “The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us.”
Philippians 2:6-7 – Christ, “being in the form of God… took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men.”
Colossians 2:9 – “For in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily.”
If it is not heresy for the Son, who is fully God, to take on flesh, then why is it heresy to believe the Father possesses a glorified body of flesh and bone? Evangelicals affirm that divinity and humanity are not incompatible in Christ, but deny that same truth about the Father. The Restoration simply removes the inconsistency.
The Restoration’s Clarity
Joseph Smith restored this truth with crystal clarity:
Doctrine and Covenants 130:22 – “The Father has a body of flesh and bones as tangible as man’s; the Son also; but the Holy Ghost… is a personage of Spirit.”
King Follett Discourse (1844) – Joseph taught: “God himself was once as we are now, and is an exalted man, and sits enthroned in yonder heavens.”
This doctrine does not degrade God. It elevates humanity. It restores the biblical truth that man is created in God’s image and that our destiny is to become like Him (Romans 8:17, Revelation 3:21).
Replacing the Burden of Proof
So the challenge back to the critic is this:
Show us where the Bible teaches that God is immaterial, bodiless, and without passions.
Prove that the apostles taught this view rather than the plain biblical witness that God is visible, embodied, and personal.
Explain why Christians accept that the Son of God is both fully divine and fully human, yet denounce it as heresy to say the Father is also embodied.
Until those questions are answered, the accusation that Latter-day Saints “changed God” has no ground. The evidence points the other way. Post-apostolic Christianity abandoned the biblical testimony of a real, embodied, relational God. The Restoration restores that original understanding, just as we see it in the Bible and in the Book of Mormon.