This entry, and the related entries to follow on this
topic (see links below), are part of a personal Bible study I did on the topic
of the concept of body, soul, and spirit.
As a Christian and medical researcher, I feel that it is important to
understand what scripture says, and doesn't say, about topics I am likely to
encounter in my professional and personal life.
I need to know what principles are clearly laid out in scripture. I have personally decided that science does
not supersede scripture - that is part of my fundamental beliefs - but I also
know that frequently Christians start arguing against science over things that are not clear in scripture. So...I
needed to know where the boundaries were, based on as thorough a study of
scripture as I could muster. Having gone
through it now, it seemed that it might be helpful to other Christians in a
similar situation. So, this is just my
personal study and notes, summarized in a hopefully helpful way.
As word of caution:
this and the related entries are written purely from a Christian perspective
and I haven't made any attempt to be
more broadly inclusive. If you don't happen to believe that the
Bible is true, or that it should be used as the basis of determining truth,
then this whole series won't make sense to you. If that is your situation, I really wouldn't
bother reading this series. You might find my series on "Theory of the Soul" more palatable. But, if you
do believe the Bible is the Word of God, then maybe this series of entries will
be helpful in guiding you in your own study so you can come to your own
conclusions.
I began this study with the goal of trying to understand
the proper spiritual view of terms like “soul” and “spirit” in order to help me
to know how to view neuroscience discoveries about the workings of the
brain. There are certain “discoveries” –
or rather interpretations of data – that seemed contrary to a proper Christian
view. For example, there is a body of
work in which experimenters try to show that “free will” is a
misconception. Rather, they claim, the
material brain’s decisions are already made before we are even aware of
it. I believe this work is very
misguided and flawed [see here], but should
I view it as an affront to basic Christian beliefs, or just bad science? Even more deeply baked into much of
neuroscience is the idea of the completely materialistic brain and
materialistic human. Words such as "soul"
and "spirit" have no meaning in their view, and their scientific
interpretation is based on that. That’s
ok – science kind of has to be materialistic – but I wanted to be sure I knew
the boundaries of plain Christian (i.e. scriptural) views on these topics.
I was taught, when I was a younger Christian, that the
proper Christian view was the idea of “body-soul-spirit” in three concentric
rings, and that each person had a body, a soul, and a spirit. Also, the soul was divided into “mind, will,
emotions.” I had kind of taken that whole
concept for granted, but I was recently wondering whether this was really
scriptural or just an abstraction of scripture or just Greek thought imposed on
scripture. So…I began studying the Greek
words in the New Testament that had to do with body, soul, spirit.
Methods: I read and studied every verse that had at least one of the following Greek words in them:
I went through verse by verse and made notes, with a focus on the general topic at hand. I tried to note how each particular word was used and the relationship between different words. That took me about a year and a half to do. Then after I had a whole series of fairly random notes, I wanted to have some way of coalescing them into some kind of useful summary. So, in an effort to do that, I established a series of questions on the topic, and then tried to answer those questions based on what I found in my study. The questions I came up with are listed below. If you click on them, it will take you to the entry on that topic (once I get them all written up!).
As a practical bookkeeping note, when I am writing a Greek word in my notes, I put it in the arrow brackets ("<>"). That's just my personal style and has no deeper meaning.
Again, this is just my personal, plain reading of scripture. Also, as you might note, I haven't gone through the Hebrew in the Old Testament yet. That will take a long time to do...not sure if I will ever get to that!
3. Do human beings have a soul and a spirit, and are they different?
4. Is the human “spirit” the same as the “Holy Spirit”?
5. Is the “body” the same as the “soul”?
6. When the Bible uses the term “body”, does that only refer to our physical, material, body?
8. Can the body die? Can the soul die?
10. Christians get a new body, but do they get a new soul?
11. When Jesus was resurrected, was it the same body that he had when he was crucified? Was it the exact same molecules? If he had a new body, why was his old body gone?
12. Does conversion happen to/in the body or soul or spirit?
13. Does the flesh change at conversion?
14. Who sins? Is it my body? My soul? My spirit?
15. Is the "total depravity" of Calvinism in reference to the <sarx> alone? Is the <psuche-pneuma> totally depraved?
16. Can you really have "good intentions" but do the wrong thing? Is that any different than having "bad intensions" and doing the wrong thing? If you had "good intentions" then why did you do the wrong thing? Can the <sarx> overrule the <psuche-pneuma>?
17. Is the concept of "tabula rasa" consistent with Scripture?
18. What is the point of bodily discipline, habits, and spiritual disciplines?
19. Do animals have
souls? Spirits?
Also - some "non-scriptural" questions...
20. What would it take for science to verify the existence of the human soul?
21. What would it take for science to verify the existence of the Holy Spirit?
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