God's Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible

by Stephen D. Moore

In this strikingly original work, Stephen Moore considers God's male bodies--the body of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, and the Father of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself in the New Testament--and our obsessive earthly quest for a perfect human form. God's Gym is about divinity, physical pain, and the visions of male perfectability.

Weaving together his obsession with human anatomy and dissection, an interest in the technologies of torture, the cult of physical culture, and an expert knowledge of biblical criticism, Moore explains the male narcissism at the heart of the biblical God. God's Gym is an intensely personal book, brimming with our culture's phobias and fascinations about male perfectability.

Genres: Theory, Religion

204 pages, Paperback

First published October 2, 1996

About the author

Professor of New Testament at the Theological School, Drew University. His many books include Literary Criticism and the Gospels: The Theoretical Challenge (Yale University Press), God’s Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible (Routledge), and Empire and Apocalypse: Postcolonialism and the New Testament (Sheffield Phoenix).

Reviews

[Andrew H · Rating 5 out of 5]

An imaginative and creative perspective on The Bible. Moore uses the world of the gym and the perfect body to reflect on how the body is viewed within Christianity. The result is a provocative piece of hermeneutics guaranteed to irritate stodgy Evangelical readers.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is exactly what I was promised, like, a decade ago when I first heard about it: A completely ridiculous but oddly compelling rereading of the Bible through the lens of bodybuilding magazines. Needless to say, probably, I disagree with much of what's here, but in the best way, where I need to be extremely clear about why.

[Duncan Swann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Eh. Not my cup of tea. Not that coherent. Best thing about this was some choice sentences and comparisons between bodybuilding and the bible, and that it made me want to read Michel Foucault.