Without Body, Parts, or Passions

“God is not a Presbyterian. God is not a Christian. God is not a noun at all. God is a verb. God is not a being. God is being itself.”¹

The last sentence in the line above is Thomas Aquinas. Not a progressive interpretation of Aquinas, not a liberal twisting of him, the actual position of the Summa Theologiae. God does not belong to a genus. God is not one existing thing alongside other existing things, however large that thing is thought to be. God is ipsum esse subsistens, subsistent being itself, the act of existing rather than a thing that happens to exist.² Aquinas argued this in the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church made him a Doctor of the Church, and no one called him the antichrist for it.

James Talarico said it in a sermon in October, 2023. American evangelicalism, or at least a loud and well-funded portion of it, responded as though he had just burned a pulpit Bible.

What Talarico actually said

His sermon lasted about twenty minutes, at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Austin on October 22, 2023, under the title “God Is Not Christian: Confronting Christian Nationalism.” Several of the news outlets circulating the clip in August 2026 printed the final line as “God is being self.” The church’s own transcribed manuscript reads “being itself,” and so, to its credit, does at least one of the conservative outlets attacking him.³ The others reprinted a garbled version of the sentence at the center of the scandal and nobody stopped to wonder whether it made sense.

Here is a detail none of the coverage mentioned, however. The assigned scripture reading that morning was Matthew 4:8-11, where the devil takes Jesus to a high mountain, shows him all the kingdoms of the world, and offers them to him.⁴ That is the text the sermon was preached on. A politician stood in a pulpit, read the passage where Satan offers political power, and then argued that Christians should refuse it. And this was reported as an attack on Christianity.

The nonbinary line many are up in arms about is a separate item; a full three years older. Talarico said it on the Texas House floor in October 2021, during debate on HB 25, the bill requiring K–12 students to play on sports teams matching their sex at birth. His argument at the time ran through Hebrew grammar and Genesis 1:26. The first two lines of Genesis, he said, use two different Hebrew words to describe God, one a masculine noun for divinity and the second a feminine noun for spirit, and so God is both masculine and feminine and everything in between.⁵

Neither statement made the news when it was first made. Both became news in the spring and summer of 2026, after Talarico won the Democratic Senate primary and became the person standing between Ken Paxton and a seat in the United States Senate. The timing of all of that is definitely not incidental to what follows here.

What they could have argued

I think it’s important to give critics their strongest case in an argument, so let’s do that. The argument has nothing whatsoever to do with Aquinas.

In the very same passage, immediately before the lines about categories, Talarico asked whether God would have made all these beautiful people with all their beautiful traditions for no reason at all, quoted the Sufi poet Rumi, and said there are many pathways to the sacred.⁶ That is a nod to religious pluralism, and pluralism does stand in tension with John 14:6 and with the exclusivist reading most of the tradition has embraced. Universalism has a real pedigree, running from Origen through Gregory of Nyssa, and I have argued elsewhere that the tradition contains far more of it than most Protestants are aware. Hard pluralism, however, is a different claim and definitely a minority one.

A critic who objects to this is actually doing theology, not just throwing a tantrum. The same critic could fairly ask what Talarico means when he calls himself a Christian who hates Christianity, a line he has used since at least 2021.⁷

Talarico’s Easter 2025 sermon shows the same pattern, which shows it to be a habit rather than a one-off improvisation. Preaching in Jim Rigby’s absence, Talarico quoted Rumi again, along with Muhammad, Gandhi, and Richard Rohr, and closed by placing Passover, Easter, and Ramadan side by side with the line that the lyrics differ while the hymn is the same.⁸ On the resurrection, he said Paul understood it as something happening to everyone all the time, and that resurrection means seeing Christ in everyone and everything. He never directly denied the bodily resurrection of Christ, but he never affirmed it either. The entire doctrinal concept moved into the present tense and stayed there.

Then there is his church itself, which is of particular interest to this discussion. Jim Rigby has pastored St. Andrew’s since 1984 and has spent four decades on the front lines of the PC(USA) fights over theology and sexuality. In 2006, the congregation was fighting for its standing in the denomination after granting full membership to Robert Jensen, a University of Texas professor and avowed atheist, for example.⁹ Rigby has said publicly that he does not believe in a literal resurrection. When the New York Times profiled Talarico in June, the subhead identified Rigby as a pastor who rarely uses the word “God.”¹⁰ Talarico was raised in that congregation and told the Times that Rigby is his pastor in every sense of the word, adding, however, that they do not agree on everything.

While this may be shocking to fundamentalist-leaning evangelicals, none of that makes Rigby’s theology Talarico’s precisely, and treating a congregation’s pastor as a candidate’s own confession of faith would be dishonest at best. But a critic looking for a substantive theological argument had one available in this narrative, sitting right there in the New York Times, in June, on the front page.

Nobody used it. Likely, and I don’t mean this as a pejorative, because few understood what it all meant.

God is not a being

What was attacked instead was the sentence that has the deepest roots in orthodox Christian history.

The apophatic tradition, which approaches God by ruling out what God is not, runs from Pseudo-Dionysius through Gregory of Nyssa’s argument for divine infinity and on into the Latin West through Aquinas. The core claim of the apophatic approach is that God is not a member of any category, including the category of existing things. Creatures have existence, but God is existence. David Bentley Hart has spent a career pointing out that most modern arguments about God, on both sides, are arguments about a very large discrete object located somewhere within the universe, which is not what any classical tradition ever meant by the word.¹¹

This produces a rather inconvenient result for the folks that took issue with Talarico on this point. A person who insists that God is a being, even the biggest and most powerful being ever, holds a position the classical Christian tradition rejected. The people calling this statement blasphemy are actually the ones who hold the heterodox view. A bit of irony for you.

That would be a satisfying enough place to stop, and it is where the viral defenses of Talarico have largely stopped. It is also incomplete, and the incompleteness of this argument is where the really interesting stuff exists.

On November 2, 2025, Rigby preached a sermon at St. Andrew’s called “God as Being or a Being,” and the church posted full transcribed manuscripts online. Here is his own account of the distinction as he understands it: traditional theology believes that God is a being, and mysticism remains silent before Being itself. He closed by inviting the congregation to consider the difference between God as a symbol of a Being, which he said is what most of them were taught, and God as a symbol of the profound depths of their own being. Earlier in the sermon he specified that mysticism, for him, has never meant supernatural.¹²

Read that closely, despite it being a bit convoluted. Rigby is not claiming Aquinas here. He is positioning himself against what he calls traditional theology, and he identifies traditional theology as the view that God is a being. The problem is that Aquinas would say the opposite, that classical theology is precisely the tradition that denied God is a being. So Rigby means something else by the same words in this case. God as a symbol for the depth of the hearer’s own existence, explicitly non-supernatural, closer to Paul Tillich than to the Summa. Rigby is confusing his “traditional theology” on this point.

So we have two claims, one sentence. Aquinas’s God exists in the fullest possible sense, independent of every creature, the source from which all contingent things borrow their existence. Rigby’s God is a symbol that dissolves into human experience. Both come out of the mouth as “God is not a being.” Interesting stuff.

Meanwhile, the outrage machine sensed that something in that pulpit differs from what it believes, which is indeed accurate, and then reached for the one sentence in the sermon that has actually been definitional orthodoxy since the thirteenth century. And the people defending Talarico by quoting Aquinas at his critics are describing a metaphysics that the church he was raised in has explicitly declined.

Are you following?

His verb line follows basically the same pattern as well. God as pure act, actus purus, with no unrealized potential, is Aquinas again, and the divine name given to Moses at Exodus 3:14 is a conjugated verb, ehyeh, regardless of what one makes of the theology built on it.¹³

There is also a modern lineage and it does not run through any seminary. R. Buckminster Fuller is the engineer and designer you know from the geodesic dome, and he was also a compulsive writer about systems, process, and what he took to be the operating principles of the universe. In a poem he wrote in 1940 and published in 1963 as No More Secondhand God, he put it this way: “God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun.”¹⁴ His reasoning was that reality consists of ongoing processes, that God is the articulating and not the art, the loving and not the abstraction, and that a static thing-word cannot name the source of a universe which never stops happening. He applied the same logic to himself, publishing a book in 1970 titled I Seem to Be a Verb. Mary Daly picked the idea up in Beyond God the Father in 1973 and made it a formal theological argument, and Rabbi David Cooper carried it into Kabbalah in 1997 with a book called God Is a Verb.

That is the actual popular career of the phrase. Talarico’s wording sits closer to Daly’s than to anything patristic, which is why the line sounds modern to people who hear it. It converges with actus purus by a completely different road, and Fuller, a lapsed Unitarian working from engineering principles, almost certainly did not know he was rebuilding Aquinas with a different set of tools.

Both genealogies are quite real. Only one of them gets mentioned by the people defending him, however, and neither gets mentioned by the people attacking him, because to trace a lineage a person has to know that lineages exist in the first place. They, largely, do not.

God is not a Christian

Desmond Tutu published a book in 2011 titled God Is Not a Christian.¹⁵ Tutu is an Anglican archbishop, a Nobel laureate, and no ecclesiastical proceedings followed this proclamation.

The argument doesn’t even require someone of Tutu’s stature. The word “Christian” first appears in Acts 11:26, applied at Antioch to a human community that came into existence at a specific moment in history. Contrary to seemingly popular belief, God did not join it. Jesus of Nazareth lived and died a Jew and never converted to anything.

And then there is Karl Barth, who spent his career demolishing the liberal theology of his own teachers and who still went further on this point than Talarico ever has. Section 17 of Church Dogmatics I/2 carries the title “God’s Revelation as the Abolition of Religion.”¹⁶ Barth’s argument is that religion is the human attempt to reach God on human terms, to secure God, to get God’s authority working on our behalf. So religion is unbelief. It is the thing revelation interrupts. And Christianity gets no exemption from this accusation. Barth says it is the true religion only in the sense that a sinner is a justified sinner, by grace and never by inherent superiority, which means Christianity holds no possession, no claim, no leverage of its own.

Consider when and where he wrote this. Barth was in Germany in the 1930s watching the German Christian movement fuse the gospel with the nation, and he was the principal drafter of the Barmen Declaration in 1934, which rejected the notion that the church could take its message from any source besides Jesus Christ and rejected the church becoming an instrument of state power. He was dismissed from his chair at Bonn in 1935 for refusing to swear an unconditional loyalty oath to Hitler and went home to Switzerland.

Here is why that ought to sting a little. The movement currently treating “God is not a Christian” as some sort of blasphemy is doing precisely what Barth built the doctrine of revelation to prevent. It has made Christianity a national possession, a political credential, a thing that certifies its holders and disqualifies everyone else. It has done what Barth called religion, arranging God into a form that serves the people arranging him. And the man who diagnosed this was not a liberal, was not a progressive, and did not survive the century’s great test of that diagnosis by being soft.

Rigby, from the opposite end of the spectrum, arrived at the same observation in that November sermon when he described the traditional God as a mascot representing Christianity or Judaism or America. Barth would have assuredly hated most of Rigby’s theology, but on this point they are describing the same disease.

Talarico’s own Easter sermon put the point in plain Matthew 25 categories. Reading the criteria Jesus lists for judgment, he noted that the passage says nothing about being a Christian, nothing about going to church, and nothing about reading your Bible.¹⁷ That is absolutely a fully defensible reading of the text as it stands and one a lot of Christians seem to ignore.

Here’s a test. Every person who is currently furious about this line would very likely agree, instantly and without argument, that God is not an American, not a Texan, and not even a Republican. The category error being committed here is identical. “Christian” hits differently with these folks only because God and tribe have been fused together so tightly that separating them feels like a heretical thought.

Which, by the way, was the precise thesis of the sermon. The reaction Talarico’s opponents gave is evidence of its veracity.

God is nonbinary

There is nothing new in the underlying claim, and nothing hidden about it either. God is spirit, according to John 4:24, and therefore incorporeal, and therefore has no sex. The Westminster Confession, the doctrinal standard of every Presbyterian body in North America, including the one Talarico is training for ordination in, opens its chapter on God by stating that God is without body, parts, or passions.¹⁸ The Catechism of the Catholic Church says in section 239 that God is neither man nor woman and that God transcends human fatherhood and motherhood.

Scripture itself is not shy about this point either. God cries out like a woman in labor at Isaiah 42:14, promises comfort as a mother comforts at Isaiah 66:13, and is described at Deuteronomy 32:18 as the God who gave you birth. Hosea 11 has God teaching Ephraim to walk. Jesus compares himself to a hen gathering her brood at Matthew 23:37 and tells a parable in Luke 15 where the figure searching for what was lost is a woman. Anselm addressed Christ as mother in the eleventh century. Julian of Norwich devoted three chapters of the Revelations of Divine Love to the same theme.¹⁹ My point is, none of this is a recent innovation as odd as it might sound to gender-triggered evangelicals and none of it has ever been controversial in the places where people read.

Talarico’s specific argument, though, does not entirely work, and pretending it does would be doing him the same disservice his defenders are doing him. Here’s why.

Grammatical gender is not sex. In Hebrew, as in Spanish or French or German, every noun belongs to a gender class, and that class governs how the words around it agree with it. It is a filing system for the language. It carries no information about the thing being named. Shulchan, table, is masculine. Eretz, land, is feminine. No conclusions follow about tables or dirt.

Elohim, the word in Genesis 1:1, is grammatically masculine and formally plural, yet when it refers to Israel’s God it takes singular verbs, which is why English Bibles render it “God” and not “gods.” If grammar settled the question, that word alone would make God plural, and nobody making Talarico’s argument really wants to go there. Ruach, which covers spirit and wind and breath, is usually feminine and sometimes takes masculine agreement anyway, so it is not even consistent on its own terms.

And Genesis 1:2 does not give a second name for God at all. The phrase is ruach elohim, a construct chain, two nouns bound together to mean spirit of God. Talarico’s argument requires that second word to be standing on its own as a divine name, and it simply is not. It is a possessive.

Gregory of Nazianzus dismantled exactly this faulty reasoning in the fourth century. In the fifth of his Theological Orations, he mocked the inference that God is male because the words for God and Father are grammatically masculine and asked whether the neuter noun for deity therefore makes God neuter.²⁰ A Cappadocian father, and one of the architects of the doctrine of the Trinity, agrees with Talarico’s basic conclusion and yet still manages to demolish his argument.

Genesis 1:26 does not help him out either. The plural in “let us make humankind in our image” is best read as a reference to the divine council, in line with 1 Kings 22:19, Job 1:6, Psalm 82:1, and Isaiah 6:8, or as a plural of deliberation. It has nothing to do with gender, and treating it as divine pronouns is the kind of claim that gets a person taken apart by anyone with a semester of Hebrew. This isn’t the Hebrew author playing at pronouns in any modern sense.

The word itself is also imprecise. “Nonbinary” describes a gender identity, which presumes a gendered self doing the identifying. The classical claim is much stranger and larger than that definition. God has no sex, no body, no parts, is not a self in the way creatures are selves, as we’ve already covered, and every gendered word applied to God is analogical.

The tradition is actually more radical than the thing Texas Republicans keep calling radical.

To his credit, Talarico appears to have noticed his inconsistency and reeled it in a bit. Pressed on The Bulwark by Tim Miller, who opened with a question about divine anatomy, Talarico dropped the Hebrew grammar argument entirely and cited Galatians 3:28 instead, saying the point may be provocative politically while not being controversial theologically, and telling critics to take it up with the Apostle Paul.²¹ Galatians 3:28 concerns human status in Christ rather than the divine nature, so the aim is still slightly off center but far more solid than his previous attempt.

Beer jokes

Talarico’s sermon opened with a list of reasons beer is better than religion. The first item was that when you have beer, you don’t knock on people’s doors trying to give it away. Several outlets led with this quip.

What most of them left out is where the list came from. Rigby was away on sabbatical. Talarico texted his pastor asking for some inspiration for the sermon, and Rigby sent him the beer list.²² So the material now being circulated as proof of a candidate’s contempt for the faith is a joke a Presbyterian minister of forty years sent to a seminary student who had asked him for help writing a sermon.

I spent a long stretch of my working life in the beer business, on the production side, the distribution side, and the retail side, so allow me to offer a professional assessment of the list. It’s a light lager. Nothing in it will offend anybody and nothing in it will be remembered. It has been circulating through church office email chains since the days of the fax machine, and it was worn out then.

So a twenty-minute sermon on divine transcendence got clipped for the punchline about door-to-door evangelists, because the punchline could be attacked without anyone having to look up what ipsum esse subsistens means.

The same coverage reports with considerable sensationalism that Talarico called the faith of millions of Christians a cancer. What he actually said is that there is a cancer on our religion, and he identified the cancer by name in the following sentence as Christian nationalism, which he called a sin the church needs to confess and cast out.²³ Removing the preposition turns the sentence into its opposite, by design.

The rest of the response to Talarico has been just about as theological (that’s sarcasm). Congressman Ronny Jackson compared him unfavorably to Beto O’Rourke. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller asked which of the six genders Talarico is. At a campaign event in Manor, while Governor Abbott worked through a list of grievances, a member of the audience shouted that Talarico is the Antichrist.²⁴ So, bottom line here, a sermon from back in 2023 surfaced in August 2026 for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with Nicaea and everything to do with winning a Senate seat.

Albert Mohler is the surprising exception, and the contrast is rather instructive. On June 2, he gave the New York Times profile a segment on his podcast and did the thing almost nobody else did. He argued.²⁵ He credited the two reporters for opening the piece on Rigby, identified Rigby’s avoidance of the word “God” as a deliberate theological position and not a verbal habit, and told his listeners there was a real story here for Christians to reckon with. He reached a negative verdict, which he is entitled to do, of course, and he reached it by engaging what these two men actually believe about God, Scripture, and the resurrection.

That’s a theological argument. You can lose one of those. Asking which of the six genders somebody is isn’t an argument at all, and it can’t be lost, because nothing was risked. The real divide here is not left against right ideology so much as a battle between people doing actual theology and people just drudging up old gotcha clips.

What was lost

The really interesting question to me is not why a campaign ran opposition research. Campaigns always do that. The interesting question is why the research worked on anyone, and it worked because the audience receiving it could not tell Aquinas from Tillich if they had to, or either one of them from an insult.

That disparity did not occur by accident. Divine simplicity, aseity, incomprehensibility, the whole apophatic inheritance; none of it can be conscripted. A God who is being itself, outside every human category, unavailable to analogy except by concession, cannot be handed a party registration or asked to bless a policy platform. The doctrine is politically useless. What replaced it is a God who is thought to be a being, one item among the universe’s contents, large and powerful and situated squarely inside the same order of things as the people invoking him. A being can take sides; a being is useful. Being itself cannot and is not.

I served many years as an elder in a Presbyterian Church with a real theological tradition rather than a nationalist one. In all that time, though, and in all those session meetings, I do not recall the phrase “God is not a being” coming up once, and certainly not because anyone would have denied it.

Drink Wisely has examined elsewhere what the evangelical political test actually tests. This is the same discovery from a different perspective. A community that spent forty years insisting the country needed more theology in public life has produced an electorate that cannot recognize the basics of the faith, much less the Summa Theologiae when it is invoked.

The sermon’s assigned text, remember, was the devil on the mountaintop offering all the kingdoms of the world. Talarico preached for twenty minutes on the proposition that God exceeds the categories people keep trying to force God into. The response has been three years of people trying to force God into a category, at increasing volume, and with a straight face.

I think someone should tell them what they’re actually proving.

. . .

Endnotes

1. James Talarico, “God Is Not Christian: Confronting Christian Nationalism,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Austin, October 22, 2023. Transcribed manuscript published by the St. Andrew’s Sermon Transcription Project.

2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 3–4, 13.

3. The Daily Wire, Texas Scorecard, and others rendered the phrase “God is being self.” The Washington Stand, also critical of Talarico, printed “being itself,” matching the church’s manuscript.

4. Matthew 4:8-11, listed as the scripture reading in the sermon manuscript.

5. Texas House floor debate, HB 25, 87th Legislature, 3rd Called Session, October 2021.

6. From the same sermon passage.

7. Talarico used the phrase in a March 2021 podcast interview and returned to the theme in the 2023 sermon.

8. James Talarico, “Divine Losers: Resistance and Resurrection,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, Easter Sunday, April 20, 2025.

9. Texas Monthly, January 2007.

10. Ruth Graham and J. David Goodman, “Are Texans Ready for Talarico’s Kind of Christianity?” New York Times, June 1, 2026.

11. David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (Yale, 2013).

12. Jim Rigby, “Introduction to Christian Mysticism: God as Being or a Being,” St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, November 2, 2025.

13. Exodus 3:14, NRSVue.

14. R. Buckminster Fuller, No More Secondhand God and Other Writings (Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 28; the poem was composed in 1940. See also I Seem to Be a Verb (Bantam, 1970); Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Beacon, 1973); David A. Cooper, God Is a Verb: Kabbalah and the Practice of Mystical Judaism (Riverhead, 1997).

15. Desmond Tutu, God Is Not a Christian: And Other Provocations (HarperOne, 2011).

16. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, §17, “God’s Revelation as the Abolition of Religion.” On Barmen and the Bonn dismissal, see Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth: His Life from Letters and Autobiographical Texts (1976).

17. Talarico, “Divine Losers.”

18. Westminster Confession of Faith, II.1.

19. Anselm, “Prayer to St. Paul”; Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chs. 58–60.

20. Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.7.

21. “James Talarico: The Bulwark LIVE from Dallas,” The Bulwark Podcast, March 19, 2026.

22. Reported by The Daily Wire and The Washington Stand, August 2026, both citing the sermon audio.

23. From the sermon; see note 1.

24. Texas Tribune, March 12, 2026.

25. Albert Mohler, The Briefing, June 2, 2026.