Ella's Reviews > God: An Anatomy

This is an incredible work of comparative religion and mythology, placing the God of the Bible in the mythological and religious context of ancient Near Eastern belief, and I deeply admire it for this reason and this context. I’d rate it a strong 4.5 for that alone. However, I am distinctly more mixed when it comes to how the author approaches metaphor and allegory, treating them as cop-outs and contemporary wishful thinking (let’s just say that God as Mother in the Christian sense is a product of Cistercian monks in the medieval period, not just of feminist theologians of the 20th century trying to make an androcentric faith fit with their political context). There’s also a sense in here that religious evolution is a cop-out, in a way, which I’m also very mixed on. I think there’s a line of reinterpretation where something ceases to be good theology, but surely if we have made God in our own image, as this book so eloquently argues, then God too must change as worshippers change, and this is not a disservice to a religion or to the literary complexity of the Bible’s many texts. Sometimes, in fact, Stavrakopoulou treads uncomfortably close to literalism in her efforts to remind the reader that God once had a body, and, being a medievalist, I am never very fond of literalism as a biblical interpretation framework, even if it’s not contemporary fundamentalist Protestantism. And at the end of it all, I’m ultimately much more interested in exegetical traditions and how people have interpreted the Bible for their own ends and to mirror their own contexts than I am in envisioning God exactly as the original authors of these texts would have. We go on making God in our image, telling our stories in the ways that reflect our own reality, and I would argue that this is not bowdlerisation inherently, but using the tool of belief for the purposes of an ever changing world.