In 597 B.C., the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, descended upon the little kingdom of Judah and subjugated the region in three brutal military campaigns. The young king was deported with 8,000 exiles, including members of the royal family, the aristocracy, the military and skilled artisans. Ten years later, after another rebellion, the Babylonians destroyed Yahwehs temple, razed the city of Jerusalem to the ground and carried off 5,000 more deportees, leaving only the poorest people to remain in the devastated land. When a small group of Judahites were finally permitted to return to their homeland in 539 B.C., they brought a very different religion back with them and Yahweh never fully recovered his body. Without the temple rites that had made him a living, breathing reality, he became the distant, spiritualized deity that we know today.

This, Stavrakopoulou argues, was a tragedy. Yahweh, she complains, was transformed by Jewish philosophers such as Maimonides into a timeless, changeless, immaterial deity, wholly unlike anything in the earthly realm, while Christians developed the incomprehensible conundrum of the Trinity: Three in one and one in three!

Instead, she believes, we should return to the ancient Israelite mythology. But this is not how religion works. At its best, it demands that, as circumstances change, we respond creatively and innovatively to the present. After the Romans destroyed the Jerusalem temple in A.D. 70, the rabbis rediscovered the divine presence in a highly inventive study of Scripture. The medieval mysticism of the kabbalah depicted the inscrutable divine essence emerging successively in 10 sephiroth (stages), each more perceptible than the last, in, as it were, a divine evolution. Later in the 18th century, Polish Hasidim would develop techniques of concentration that enabled them to become vividly aware of the divine presence, as though it were flowing all around them and they were sitting in the middle of light an experience that made them dance and sing.

This reminds us that religious belief becomes a reality to us only when accompanied by the bodily gestures, intense mental concentration and evocative ceremonial of ritual. Because it imparts sacred knowledge, a myth is recounted in an emotive setting that sets it apart from mundane experience and brings it to life. Because they could no longer perform the impassioned rites of the Jerusalem temple, the traditionally vivid experience of Yahweh became opaque and distant to the Judean exiles in Babylonia. And the complex doctrine of Trinity devised by Greek theologians in the fourth century was not something to be believed but was the result of a mental and physical discipline that, accompanied by the rich music and ceremony of the liturgy, enabled Eastern Christians to glimpse the ineffable.

It is probably because most Western Christians have not been instructed in this exercise that the Trinity remains as obscure to them as it does to Stavrakopoulou, who longs for a divine face or hand to which she can turn.

The rest is here:
Piecing Together Gods Body, From Head to Toe - The New York Times