In Giles Fraser's excellent Redeeming Nietzsche: On the Piety of Unbelief (Routledge 2002, p. 140) I came across the following quotation from Milan Kundera's Art of the Novel:
When I was small and would leaf through the Old Testament retold for children and illustrated in engravings by Gustave Dore, I saw the Lord God standing on a cloud. He was an old man with eyes, nose, and a long beard, and I would say to myself that if He had a mouth, He had to eat. And if He ate, He had intestines. But that thought always gave me fright, because even though I had come from a family that was not particularly religious, I felt the idea of a divine intestine to be sacrilegious. Spontaneously, without any theological training, I, as a child, grasped the incompatibility of God and shit and thus came to question the basic thesis of Christian anthropology, namely, that man was created in God’s image. Either/or: either man was created in God’s image – and God has intestines! – or God lacks intestines and man is not like Him. The ancient Gnostics felt as I did at the age of five. In the second century, the great Gnostic master Valentinus resolved the damnable dilemma by claiming that Jesus “ate, drank, but did not defecate.” (emphasis added)
It is surprising that Kundera continues to endorse as an adult his childish misunderstanding of the imago dei doctrine. Kundera's alternative rests on the false assumption that the only likeness between man and God could be a physical likeness.
Kundera's mistake, one often made, is to take a spiritual saying in a materialistic way. The point is not that God must be physical because man is, but that man is a spiritual being just like God, potentially if not actually. The idea is not that God is a big man, the proverbial ‘man upstairs,’ but that man is a little god, a proto-god, a temporally and temporarily debased god who has open to him the possibility of a Higher Life with God, a possibility whose actualization requires both creaturely effort and divine grace.
In Feuerbachian terms, the point of imago dei is not that God is an anthropomorphic projection whereby man alienates his best attributes from himself and assigns them to an imaginary being external to himself, but that man is a theomorphic projection whereby God shares some of his attributes with real beings external to him though dependent on him.
Kundera's reasoning appears to be like this:
1. Man is made in God’s image.
2. Man is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
Therefore
3. God is a physical being with a digestive tract, etc.
But that’s like arguing:
1. This statue is made in Lincoln’s image.
2. This statue is composed of marble.
Therefore
3. Lincoln is composed of marble.
The incompatibility of God and excrement that the young Kundera rightly perceived is logically comptabile with the imago dei doctrine. Now if Jesus Christ was wholly man, as orthodoxy maintains, then he did defecate. But this presents no problem in addition to the problems already raised by the Incarnation doctrine itself.