Anti-Anthropomorphism

In his The Suffering of the Impassible God: The Dialectics of Patristic Thought (Oxford Early Christian Studies) , Paul Gavrilyuk challenges the “fall into Hellenism” thesis especially as it pertains to the patristic use of the notion of impassibility.  Early in the book, relying on the work of Charles Fritsch, he notes a number of places where the LXX downplays the anthropomorphic and anthropopathic force of the Hebrew.  For instance, “The Septuagint renders several passages in which Yahweh is said to repent by different verbs that downplay the idea of change in the divine mind.”  When Abraham says, “let not the Lord be angry” (Genesis 18:30), the LXX has “let it be nothing ( me ti ), Lord, if I speak.”

From evidence such as this, Gavrilyuk concludes that “the anti-anthropomorphic impulse was not solely an external Hellenistic influence, but also an internal development within pre-Christian Judaism.”  He notes that the church followed suit in its “concern to interpret the anthropopathic passages in a God-befitting manner,” and says that the church never lapsed into the “naive anthropomorphism and anthropopathism in rabbinic thought.”

I make no comment about Gavrilyuk’s larger argument, but this line of defense simply doesn’t work.

First, it assumes a strain of Judaism (in Alexandria of all places!) that is apparently impervious to external influence; the developments he describes are purely “internal” to Judaism.  Just before he draws this conclusion, he quotes Fritsch to the effect that one strain of Jewish anti-anthropomorphism developed as a result of its “contact with Greek thought.”  He apparently is placing the LXX in the other stream of Jewish anti-anthropomorphism, the one that “goes its own way through the Old Testament into the rabbinical period” (in Fritsch’s words); he gives a brief review (not very compelling) of the “tensions” within the Hebrew Bible’s treatment of Yahweh’s immutability.  He offers no evidence that the LXX is coming from this second strain of Judaism.   Prima facie , it seems to belong to the other stream.  And of course the LXX had a considerable influence on the early church.  And if he is admitting that the LXX comes from a Judaism modified by its contact with Greek thought, I cannot understand the argument.

Second, even if we deny that the LXX’s shifting theology comes from “Hellenism,” it’s coming from somewhere else than the Hebrew Bible, since it’s changing the sense of the Hebrew Bible to make Yahweh a more “God-befitting” character.  Gavrilyuk notes that the fathers relied more on the LXX than the Hebrew Bible, and this seems to lend some support to the “fall into Hellenism [or some other -ism]” thesis.  The burden of that thesis, it seems to me, is not so much about Hellenism as about the conformity of early Christian theology with the Hebrew Bible.

Finally, while I suppose there’s some theoretical danger of “naive anthropomorphism” in theology, I have to say I’ve rarely seen that as a threat.  Did even the “naive” rabbis say that God was merely human?  I doubt it.  If humans as theomorphs, then of course it’s perfectly God-befitting to say that God the anthropo-archetype.  Why is the language of the Hebrew Bible less than God-befitting?  If the fathers followed the LXX translators in thinking it was, isn’t that, again, evidence in favor of at least some version of the “fall” thesis?