hedrick@topaz.RUTGERS.EDU (Charles Hedrick) (09/24/85)
I should point out that the distinction between soul, mind, and body is currently considered a bit suspicious by some theologians. In the OT, "soul" is often used where the whole person is meant, even in fairly prosaic cases. (e.g. in accounts of battles, where it is said that N souls were killed) I don't know Hebrew, but I am fairly sure we are dealing with the same underlying word in Gen 2:7 "then the Lord God ... breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a *living being*." I believe it is fair to say of the ancient Hebrew view that "man does not *have* a soul -- he *is* a soul." On the other extreme we have the Greek neo-Platonists. For them, the soul and the body were very separate, almost antagonistic, things. The soul had become entrapped in the body, and much of our evil was a result of this entrapment. When we die, our soul is freed from our body, and flits off into heaven. The NT is somewhere between these two. There are certainly passages that treat the soul as a separate entity, e.g. Mat 10:28: "And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell." On the other hand, there is not a consistent division of man in the neo-Platonist sense. There is certainly not a consistent three-fold division into body, soul and spirit. Paul tends to oppose flesh and spirit. But he seems to be talking of these as influences or tendencies within our will, and not separate parts of our being. Other passages refer to body and soul. To see that these discussions do not add up to an actual division of the person into body, soul, and spirit, consider the discussion of the resurrection of the body and the spiritual body in I Cor 15. Paul does not preach immortality of the soul, as the neo-Platonists would have it, but resurrection of the body. And he seems to be willing to use the term spirit to refer to this resurrected body (note vs 45). This issue is important because it is no longer clear to all Christians that a human being has a separate, invisible part of himself that should be called the soul or spirit. I'm not saying that I am sure that the traditional idea of soul is false. I'm not sure. But I think Christianity should also be able to accomodate the idea that man is a unified, fully physical being. It is clear that there is something in us that is more than just chemical reactions. But that something may be a process, and not a separate invisible part. As computer users, it is clear to us that there is more to a computer than simply a collection of transistors. When they function, there arises a process (almost an entity) that we can interact with. In a physical sense, there is nothing there beyond the circuitry. But in another sense, there is much more. We can see the soul in a similar light, as something which both is and is not more than the body. The resurrection body would then be (to continue the analogy) new hardware implementing the same process. I think some such view is more consistent with what Paul is trying to say in I Cor 15 than is the traditional body/soul model.