How would we define the "soul?" Is it the image of God ala Calvin? Is it the ghostly, neo-Platonic aspect of man? How would we define it?

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J. B. Atken
John Knox PCA
Layman, M.A. student at Louisiana College

I think I will go make pop-corn & then sit back and watch this thread unfold.

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Kevin Rogers
Sovereign Community Church, PCA
Moncton NB

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Andrew Myers
Husband of Jessica, Father of Jackson, Katie and Samuel
Member, Presbyterian Reformed Church of Northern Virginia
Warrenton, VA USA
Editor, The Matthew Poole Project

"Let your Morning Thoughts, and your last Evening Thoughts, be what shall become of you to all Eternity." -- Matthew Poole

Hmmmm...good question.

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Pergamum


"If a commission by an earthly king is considered a honor, how can a commission by a Heavenly King be considered a sacrifice?"
-- David Livingstone

I hope this isn't a thread derailment, but I always wondered what is the difference between the soul and spirit ?

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Mark Li
International University Church
New South Wales, Australia

I assumed them to be synonymous since I held to a dichotomous view.

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J. B. Atken
John Knox PCA
Layman, M.A. student at Louisiana College

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~James Helbert~, Wytheville, VA
Providence Reformed Presbyterian Church, RPCUS
TheBibleAlone.com / The Edinburgh Inn
"Is this not a brand plucked from the fire?” - Zechariah 3:2

2 Corinthians 5:8 says, "We are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord."

2 Corinthians 4:16 says, "Therefore we do not lose heart, but though our outer man is decaying, yet our inner man is being renewed day by day."

Could the soul be one's identity or inner man?

Some people believe that the soul is defined as just the body and one of the ways they try to prove is by using Genesis 2:7, which says in the King James Version, "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." They would say that man is a soul, not that he has a soul. How would you respond to this?

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Curt Hayashida
member, Community Bible Church (Non-denominational)
Vallejo, CA

In the OT it seems to me be described as more of the breathing full-of-life body, and in the NT it appears to focus more on the inner person. Since death is described as unnatural in scripture, it seems that it is unnatural that the "soul" survives after death, so the fact that it does makes me think that it is sustained supernaturally. Which means, I guess, that I do think it is associated with our "identity or inner man." But than again I don't really know, that's just the impression I get reading scripture.

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C. Gorsuch
Glencullen Baptist
Portland, Oregon

I get the impression that the soul is the combination of our mind (our identity/self awareness) and our spirit (our essence of eternity). That is - the mind being finite, since it has a beginning and the spirit being infinite, since it proceeds directly from God.

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-JD
1Thess5:21
Ordained Deacon, PCA
Serving in the SBC
MS

Team blog: ChristianSkepticism.org | Personal:...a Longmire rambles | facebook

Wilhelmus a'Brakel, The Christian's Reasonable Service, Vol. I, pp. 309-310:

This is a brief definition by a'Brakel. For further discussion of the soul's attributes, and the distinction between the souls of animals and people, etc., and more, see pp. 309-314.

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Andrew Myers
Husband of Jessica, Father of Jackson, Katie and Samuel
Member, Presbyterian Reformed Church of Northern Virginia
Warrenton, VA USA
Editor, The Matthew Poole Project

"Let your Morning Thoughts, and your last Evening Thoughts, be what shall become of you to all Eternity." -- Matthew Poole

since Christ always is the god-man, the human interceding for us, and since he was without body for three days (round abouts), this would seem to imply that he was not human for this time.

I'd say that the soul is a substance that grounds identity over time, has the capacity for rational thought, makes compatibilistly free decisions, and *has* properties like: a body, intellect, etc.

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

I go with Calvin, with a little elaboration. It seems that the soul is our essence--who we really are. In perfection, the soul is united with its body. They are one unit, I think we see them separately only because of corruption. (Romans 7:24 and the "body of death).

It's not supposed to be that way, it's a post-fall long-term anomaly.

And that's why Christ's body had to die too. Col 1:22: "In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight." Even with the body dead, he is always Christ, but putting that part of his being through death reverses the separation for his people.

That's why we look forward to the resurrection. Our essence becomes reunited.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

anyone who thinks we are without bodies while we wait for our resurrected bodies must say that they are *in fact* separate entities. Now, it is natural, best, the intention, etc., that we be *joined* or *united* with our bodies, but that doesn't mean that they are not logically distinct.

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

One of the best books on the subject, bar none:

Amazon.com: Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting:...

Cooper argues for holistic-dualism.

Cooper argues that any kind of monism can't make sense of (among many other things, but mainly) the intermediate state and the identity of the person with a new, resurrected body.

and here's some of the blurbs

Amazon Online Reader : Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (click on "back cover")

If you'd like a well-thought-out defense of thomistic dualism, I thought this was a good read

Amazon.com: Body & Soul: Human Nature & the...

For a variety of essays, including defenses of Christian physicalism (or, constitutionalism) see this book:

Amazon.com: Soul, Body, and Survival: Essays on...

There's a few others I could recommend, but the above should suffice...

...well, let me include some robust defenses of Cartesian dualism:

Amazon.com: The Immaterial Self: A Defence of the...

Amazon.com: The Conscious Self: The Immaterial...

Amazon.com: Consciousness and the Mind of God:...

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

Doesn't that prove to much? Wouldn't those who have lost limbs and wait to be reunited with them at the resurrection also prove that limbs are separate entities and thus force us to divide the essence of a human up into even more separate entities? Look: I can in one sense think of a human as essentially one. When do they cease to be human? I can, pardon the way I'm expressing this, chop off their finger. Still human. Chop off their legs. Human. Arms. Still a living human. Then I can destroy the rest of their body. I can say a soul (think, "a human") can not be destroyed by cutting off their body. The soul remains. The human remains. They are still human because as God was sustaining them before, he is still sustaining them. But they are not being sustained by God through what we call "natural processes." So to me it makes sense that we might say that they are being sustained through "supernatural processes." They continue to exist as a human. We just can't see that existence any more, and their existence is not being sustained by God through the processes of their natural body anymore. However, we don't have the ability to see that continued existence that scripture tells us is true. We humans experience ourselves two "parts": the seen and the unseen, and this is particularly pointed out at death when we cease to see God sustaining their existence. It appears to me that we see this dichotomy because of the limits of our senses. This limit of ours + the scriptures revelation that God sustains after death means we as Christians experience human existence as a dichotomy.

At least that is what makes sense to me right now. Who knows what I'll think a year from now

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C. Gorsuch
Glencullen Baptist
Portland, Oregon

I'll have to read up on holistic dualism, give me some time, though. I'm swamped with stuff like the Internal Revenue Code for the next few months.

But I'm not so sure about your first statement here. I acknowledge that there appear to be separate entities, but I'm not sure that there are "in fact" separate entities. I'm wrestling with the idea that the body is only a "body" when the immortal soul interfaces with time/space creation. Sure, when the soul is departed from time/space creation, some bones, etc. remain, but is that really a body at that point? I think it is more of a reminder that the particular soul operated in the physical world, and that it will again upon redemption of the universe.

The soul remains whatever it is--our essence. But when it is in physical world, I think it fair to say that it always is integrated with a body. A weak analogy might be something like an object that is red, and looks red, but only if there is red light in the light spectrum illuminating it. The "redness" may be an isolatable quality (analogous to the body), but it is not separate at all.

Pressing the analogy probably way too far, I might say that a soul demands a body, is created for living in time/space, but can and does survive outside of that fallen realm, just as a red object is created to look red, but does not look red if there is no red light.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

According to Leibniz's law of identity, you just gave another proof for soul/body dualism. You can attribute properties to the one while not the other. Your soul cannot be cut, your body can.

You're talking like a dualist. *Their* body. As if it's something they *have.*

The point was that the *person* or *soul* exists and lives while the body doesn't. If the body is "in the ground" and the soul is "present with the lord," then bidy and soul are not the same.

Now,

Do you mean people who are waiting during the intermediate state? I'd say you're just playing language games. Those people are waiting for their entire body, arm included.

Do you mean a guy who has lost an arm and is (rest of) bodily present when the Lord returns? Well, an Thomist would argue that the arm has its identity as a human arm in relation to the whole. In that it can fulfill its function. When it gets lopped off and is laying on the ground, it's not a human arm anymore. So, the separate human entity argument wouldn't work against an Thomistic dualist.

Or, one could argue that it may be a separate entity while it is lying on the ground in the it is spearate from the body, and you could attribute properties to it that you couldn't to the rest of the body, but it's not a different *kind* of spearate entity.

Or, one could say that they still wait until they get their resurrected *body* (as in the noraml human body - head, arms, legs, etc) and they don't have it right now. That is, to say the arm is separate from the *body* is wrong. They only have *part* of a body.

There's much that could be said. But (much to the Scripturalists chagrin) the Bible doesn't give us a worked out position on the matter. It seems that something like substance dualism fits the data best, but the many details are missing.

Lastly, it's not that the arguments for substance dualism are just from naive people who base their thoughts on the matter from experience or sensation. If you get the books I linked to above you can see that they have (a) theological arguments for their position, (b) philosophical arguments for their position, and (c) empirical arguments too.

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

if it makes you feel better, perhaps "not identical" is a better word.

Some forms of dualism would maintain that it is *integrated* with the body. C Stephen Evans had an article on that, but I can't find it on the web anymore (except for at Apollos ws, but you have to be a member to read it). That is is never spearate that way.

But, they key notion for the dualist is that of *logically separate.* Even if they never became disintergrated, they could still be distinct substances since properties could be true of one but not the other.

Last, you seem to imply that abstracta do not exist except if they are instantiated in concreta. I'd have to disagree seeing that "redness" is a concept in the mind of God, and it has existence apart from being instantiated in concreta. Or, I could look at a red apple, get the mental image, and "see" red in my minds eye. Light waves and the like are out of bounds here.

Your last paragraph affirmed substance dualism.

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Regards,

J.J.
PCA
Suffix

Yes, I feel much better now.

Fair enough, I follow. I'm just not convinced that we can call both "substances" in the same sense.

Not at all, my mistake for coming across this way. I'm merely acknowledging that we can't see the "redness" without red light. It is always there, created by God, and therefore it must be be a concept in the mind of God. In a weakly similar way, we (presently) do not experience the soul except as it is integrated with the body. Of course, absent our body we still will still be self-aware (judging from the limited information we have from scripture), but I think we have support for the idea that we will also feel "out of our element". A fundamental expression of our essence is missing. That's all I meant from the weak analogy that the red object will not appear red, even though it is.

But I'm afraid I've gone far enough in speculating. I dare not go futher. I'll try to read up on it as I can.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

Oops, TB. It looks like I grabbed your quote but you weren't finished. When I wrote the above, I didn't see these last two sentences. I wasn't trying to selectively quote.

I don't really follow, but that is probably more a function of my unfamiliarity with your argument than anything else. I admit the analogy is weak, even very weak. I'm not trying to argue empircal observations or physics, but I do think subjective impression (lack of total information because our experience is limited to linear time) impairs our ability to really grasp what is going on.

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R.Vic Bottomly
Providence Reformed Baptist Church, Tacoma, WA

Click to get: Board Rules -- Signature Requirements -- Suggestions?

I know Pentecostals believe that the body, soul, and spirit are all different. Man being made in the image of God, who exists as a Trinity, mimics this with three essences that make up man.
They believe the soul can be saved but not the spirit and vice versa. This is the basis for the "carnal christian."

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Erick Bohndorf, Covenant Baptist Church, KS
http://qayaqtraveler.blogspot.com/
The question for us today is, will we be like the majority of Israel and continue to look in fear at the giants in the land and urge our fellow Christians to be "realistic," or will we be like Joshua and Caleb and faithfully follow our king, trusting to fulfill every one of his promises completely?