Brennan Flentge

TL;DR

• Ancient religion was messier than modern theology allows.
• This book explains why—thoroughly, densely, and without apologizing.

I am very much not a scholar 🌝 I read this as the kind of person who’s interested in biblical history but does not own tweed, know Hebrew, or enjoy pretending this is light reading.

That said, YHWH’s Divine Images is doing something genuinely interesting. The basic idea (as I understand it) is that ancient people didn’t think about God, images, messengers, or objects in clean either/or ways. Things could be “God” and “not God” at the same time, depending on context, function, and how humans actually think. Which immediately explains why so many modern debates about idols, angels, and divine presence go absolutely nowhere.

The book then methodically walks through how divine presence was “handled” in the ancient world—stones, objects, the Ark, messengers, the Name, glory, etc.—until you eventually realize that what later readers call symbolism was often functioning as something much closer to presence. And then it lands on the idea that the scripture itself eventually becomes the primary vehicle of divine presence, which suddenly makes a lot of later religious behavior make sense in a way that’s mildly uncomfortable 🌚

If you are a normie like me, this is not an easy read. It’s dense, technical, and not interested in holding your hand. You will reread sentences. You will be unsure whether you understood something correctly. That seems to be part of the experience.

But if you’re tired of being told ancient people secretly believed modern theology before modern theology existed, this book is worth the effort. I didn’t understand everything, but I understood enough to know my old assumptions were doing a lot of unexamined work.

Lastly, also worth noting: Dan made this book freely available years ago, and his broader work has been genuinely eye-opening for separating confidence from evidence. More of that, less noise.

TL;DR

— Someone finally read the Bible without trying to rescue it from itself.

— Ideal reading conditions: recently deconstructed, still processing.

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

I came to God: An Anatomy fairly fresh off learning that “non-denominational” was just charismatic Pentecostal evangelical in a Hillsong hoodie. Great time to read a book about God’s genitals.

Just a warning for religious / believing people, some parts of this are kind of heavy to sit with if you are learning about it for the first time / you have had zero exposure to secular biblical scholarship.

The thesis is not complicated. The God in the Bible has a body. Feet. Hands. A face. Genitals. A smell. Dr. Stavrakopoulou, a professor of Hebrew Bible and Ancient Religion who clearly enjoys her job, works through it anatomically. Chapter by chapter. Feet to head.

She is not trying to destroy anything. She is simply pointing at the text and declining to look the other away. Which is more than I can say for thirty years of Sunday sermons.

The God I was handed was abstract, invisible, philosophically sanitized. That editing job started about two thousand years ago and nobody within my faith tradition mentioned it.

What gets me is how boring her case is. She is not speculating. She is translating. The uncomfortable parts were always there, and there's a long history of deciding words don't mean words and they are just metaphors.

I listened to the audiobook while reading along. (Yes, both at once, I need the training wheels.) Her writing is scholarly, but alive. She reads the audiobook herself - her voice gives the book even more character. Sounds like someone constitutionally incapable of pretending things are simpler than they are. After years of “teachers” doing the opposite, this book was eye-opening.

Five stars. Not a faith-killer. More like a very well-researched autopsy.

TL;DR

—Interesting ideas, borrowed authority.

—Confidence doing a lot of heavy lifting here.

⭐⭐

The Sermon on the Mount is New Thought in church clothes, with Jesus tagged as a collaborator against his will. Incredible what you can get away with after the co-author ascends. Fox takes Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount and reworks it into a metaphysical self-help system built on mental causation, positive thinking, and the belief that reality answers to the condition of your mind.

To be clear: I actually like New Thought ideas. Introspection is good. Mindset matters. Inner work is real. I’ve personally found a lot of value in metaphysical concepts when they’re presented honestly (as tools, perspectives, or practices). The issue here is not the ideas. It’s the delivery.

Fox doesn’t present his framework as one way of understanding Jesus. He presents it as the way - accessible only through a mystical “Spiritual Key,” which he alone seems to have found under the couch cushions of history. Biblical scholars, theologians, clergy, and two thousand years of disagreement are brushed aside as people who just didn’t think hard enough about the "Truth" (naturally, with a capital T).

At times, reading this feels like watching introspection slowly promote itself to prophecy. The author has a habit of taking a private thought and, within the span of a paragraph, inflating it into a universal law.

Throughout the book, biblical language is aggressively redefined to serve a pre-existing metaphysical system. Ethics become mental techniques. Communal justice becomes a matter of internal equilibrium. The Sermon on the Mount, famously demanding, communal, and inconvenient, is stripped of its weight as a vision for humanity and repurposed as a mental framework for manifesting a more convenient reality.

Fox’s doctrine of mental causation is where the system starts to wobble. When suffering and misfortune are framed primarily as the result of incorrect thinking, empowerment easily slides into blame. Fox does occasionally acknowledge reality (pray that the bleeding stops, and then stop the bleeding yourself - pray for the drowning child to be okay, and then rescue the drowning child), but these moments feel like fine print at the bottom of an otherwise absolute metaphysical contract.

In other words: prayer works! Sometimes, kind of, until it doesn't, so when prayer doesn't work, come back down to reality.

Then there’s the Christian framing. Fox presupposes the Bible as inherently authoritative and Jesus as the unquestioned final word (assumptions that many Christians take for granted, but which are very much assumptions). If you’re even mildly allergic to claims of biblical infallibility or “this is just obviously true if you’re enlightened,” this book will test your patience.

None of this makes the book useless. It just makes it deeply overconfident. If you want optimism, certainty, and spiritual ideas that come pre-validated by Jesus’ name, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you’re interested in history, nuance, or the radical possibility that ancient texts might be complicated, this book is not especially curious about your questions.