Scripture Speaks of God in Human Terms

For if, when these things are said of God, they are to be understood literally, in a crude, bodily sense, then he also sleeps, since it is said, “Arise, why do you sleep, O Lord?” though elsewhere it is said of him, “See, he who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.” And he stands and sits, since he says, “Heaven is my seat, and the earth the footstool for my feet,” though he “measures out heaven with his hand and holds the earth in his fist.” And he is “drunk with wine,” as it is said, “The Lord awoke like a sleeper, like a mighty man drunk with wine”: he “who alone has immortality and dwells in the light that no man can approach.” I say nothing of the “ignorance” and “forgetfulness” we often find mentioned in Holy Scripture; nor, lastly, of the outline of his limbs, which are spoken of as arranged and ordered like a man’s: the hair, head, nostrils, eyes, face, hands, arms, fingers, belly, and feet. If we are willing to take all these in their bare literal sense, we must think of God as shaped with the outline of limbs and a bodily form, which is shocking even to speak of, and must be far from our thoughts. [a]