Doctrine of Man (Part 7): Systematizing the Biblical Data Concerning the Nature of Man

Systematizing the Biblical Data Concerning the Nature of Man

We have surveyed briefly the biblical data concerning the nature of man. Now let's talk about different attempts to systematize these biblical data.

Some people take human beings to be trichotomous in nature, that is to say, human beings have three parts that go to make them up: the body, the soul, and the spirit. This is the view of human beings that prevailed among the early Greek-speaking church fathers and represents the heritage of Platonism. On Platonic doctrine, the soul is that which animates the body. It makes the body alive. So animals, being animate, have souls as well as human beings. But the spirit is a higher faculty that is distinct from the soul. The spirit would be what seems to make us self-conscious, rational persons, not just alive. It seems to be roughly equivalent to the mind.

By contrast, the dichotomous view holds to dualism of the body and the soul (or spirit). It doesn't really matter which word you use to refer to the immaterial part of man, the point is that we're made up of two parts: the material part and the immaterial part. This is the view that prevailed among the Latin-speaking Western church fathers.

Today many theologians eschew any sort of differentiation between material and immaterial constituents in man. They espouse a unitary view of human nature, what we might call anthropological monism. That is to say, human beings are made up just of a single constituent, which is physical in nature. We just are physical bodies. You are your body. There is no immaterial constituent to your being. These thinkers will often ridicule those who believe in a mind distinct from the body as believing in a “ghost in the machine” (to quote the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle[1]). Our bodies are like a machine supposedly inhabited by this ghost (that is to say, the soul) which animates it and moves it about. Ryle rejected any such dualistic view of the mind and body as absurd.

Similarly in the early 20th century, in theology many theologians tried to play off the doctrine of the resurrection of the body against dualistic views of human nature. It became a sort of watchword among these theologians that the Bible does not teach the immortality of the soul but rather the resurrection of the body. To believe in the immortality of the soul is supposedly to reject the Jewish view of immortality, which is the resurrection of the physical body, and to subscribe instead to a Greek view of immortality, according to which the body, being material, is something evil and is sloughed off in death. In death the soul is freed from the prison house of the body that drags it down, and it will fly away to heavenly realms. These theologians said that this Greek view of the soul and the body, which depreciates the body in favor of the soul, is fundamentally un-Jewish and therefore unacceptable. The Jewish view of immortality is the resurrection of the physical body, and therefore we should reject dualistic views in favor of some sort of anthropological monism. We just are our bodies, and these will be raised from the dead to new life.

So we've got three alternatives to evaluate: the trichotomous, the dichotomous, and the monistic views of human beings. Which of these represents the most biblically faithful view?

I would argue that some form of dualism-interactionism best represents the biblical view. By that I mean that a human being is made up of two components: a body and a soul (or spirit) and that these interact with each other in order for that human being to function as a human person in this life. You'll recall from our previous discussion that in the Old Testament we don't have clear terminological distinctions drawn between the soul and the body. Nevertheless, the Hebrew idea of a shade in Sheol seems to be the Hebrew equivalent of the Greek idea of a disembodied soul. The people who go down to Sheol are regarded as wraiths – having a kind of shadowy existence in the nether realms of the dead. It's not that they are extinguished at death. Rather, they still seem to exist as disembodied souls – not really fully human but nevertheless still existing.

During the intertestamental period dualism became the standard Jewish belief. In order to illustrate Jewish beliefs during the intertestamental period, permit me to cite a few passages from very interesting Jewish pseudepigrapha (which are pseudonymous works written in Jewish culture during this intertestamental period). For example, in II Baruch the author envisions the souls of the righteous dead as kept by God in treasuries – some sort of treasure box. When the day of the resurrection comes, the bodies of the deceased will be raised. Then the souls of the righteous dead will be taken from these treasuries and united with their bodies, and they will then go into the immortal state. But the souls of the wicked will face torment. In II Baruch 30:1-5 the end of the world is described as follows:

And it will happen after these things when the time of the appearance of the Anointed One has been fulfilled and He returns with glory, that then all who sleep in hope of Him will rise. And it will happen at that time that those treasuries will be opened in which the number of the souls of the righteous were kept, and they will go out and the multitudes of the souls will appear together, in One assemblage, of one mind. And the first ones will enjoy themselves and the last ones will not be sad. For they know that the time has come of which it is said that it is the end of times. But the souls of the wicked will the more waste away when they shall see all these things. For they know that their torment has come and that their perditions have arrived.

So the text contemplates an intermediate state of the dead, both righteous and unrighteous alike, prior to the resurrection of the body.

Similarly, in the book of IV Ezra 7:26-44 we have a vivid description of the Last Judgment. The author writes:

For behold, the time will come, when the signs which I have foretold to you will come to pass, that the city which now is not seen shall appear, and the land which now is hidden shall be disclosed. And every one who has been delivered from the evils that I have foretold shall see my wonders. For my son the Messiah shall be revealed with those who are with him, and those who remain shall rejoice four hundred years. And after these years my son the Messiah shall die, and all who draw human breath. And the world shall be turned back to primeval silence for seven days, as it was at the first beginnings; so that no one shall be left. And after seven days the world, which is not yet awake, shall be roused, and that which is corruptible shall perish. And the earth shall give up those who are asleep in it, . . . and the chambers shall give up the souls which have been committed to them. And the Most High shall be revealed upon the seat of judgment, and compassion shall pass away, and patience shall be withdrawn; but only judgment shall remain, truth shall stand, and faithfulness shall grow strong. And recompense shall follow, and the reward shall be manifested; righteous deeds shall awake, and unrighteous deeds shall not sleep. Then the pit of torment shall appear, and opposite it shall be the place of rest; and the furnace of hell shall be disclosed, and opposite it the paradise of delight. . . . Then the Most High will say to the nations that have been raised from the dead, ‘Look now, and understand whom you have denied, whom you have not served, whose commandments you have despised! . . . Look on this side and on that; here are delight and rest, and there are fire and torments!’ . . . This is my judgment and its prescribed order; and to you alone have I shown these things.

Here the prophet is given a vision of the resurrection of the dead, and we find the same thing that we saw in II Baruch, namely, the Earth gives up those who are sleeping in it – the bodies of the dead are raised – and then the chambers in which the souls of the dead are preserved are opened, and the souls are reunited with the body. This is the typical Jewish view of the resurrection which combines the immortality of the soul with the resurrection of the body.

Just one more passage from the Jewish pseudepigrapha to indicate this. This is from the book of I Enoch 22:1-5. The author writes:

Then I went to another place, and he showed me on the west side a great and high mountain of hard rock and inside it four beautiful corners; it had in it a deep, wide, and smooth thing which was rolling over; and the place was deep, and dark to look at. At that moment, Raphael, one of the holy angels, who was with me, responded to me; and he said to me, “These beautiful corners are here in order that the spirits of the souls . . . of the children of the people should gather here. They prepared these places in order to put them, that is, the souls of the people, there until the day of their judgment and the appointed time of the great judgment upon them.” I saw the spirits of the children of the people who were dead, and their voices were reaching unto heaven until this very moment.

Here the spirits of the souls of the dead are safely sequestered until the eschatological resurrection.

So the view of anthropological dualism is abundantly attested in the Jewish intertestamental literature. The standard view in Judaism came to be that when a person dies his body (and in particular the bones) rest in the ground until the day of judgment, and his soul goes to be with God, where it is safely kept until the Judgment Day. Then the soul and the body will be reunited, and the person will be judged.

When we come to the New Testament, the language of the New Testament is indisputably dualistic throughout. It consistently differentiates the soul and the body. That this distinction is meant to be literal rather than just figurative or metaphorical is clearest when we consider the intermediate state between death and resurrection. For example, in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10, which we have already examined, you recognize that Paul is expounding the typical Jewish belief about the intermediate state in anticipation of the resurrection. As we'll see in a moment, Paul believed that those who are still alive at the time of the return of Christ will be immediately transformed into their resurrection bodies without the need of first passing through that state of nakedness, in which the body is stripped away from the soul. That is what Paul himself really wants. His real desire (if he had his way) is to live until the return of Christ and not have to go through that intermediate state.

This powerfully suggests that soul-body dualism is not just a metaphor or a figure of speech, rather it is ontological. There really is a soul which survives the death of the body and which will eventually be reunited with the body at the return of Christ. Compare in this regard what Paul has to say in Philippians 1:21-23. Here Paul is contemplating his own possible execution, and he writes,

For to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain. If it is to be life in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I cannot tell. I am hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.

So for Paul, even though the death of the body would mean a state of disembodiment, which is a less than fully desirable state, nevertheless it brings him closer to Christ and therefore it is actually better to die and go to be with Christ.

For Paul's doctrine of the resurrection of the body, look at I Thessalonians 4:14-17. Paul says,

For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

What Paul is describing is the second coming of Christ – the return of Christ – bringing with him those who have died (those who have fallen asleep). He brings the souls of the departed dead with him to receive their resurrection bodies. Then the Christians who are still alive at that time are immediately transformed into their resurrection bodies.

So on Paul's view, the immortality of the soul does not imply that our ultimate state is to go into some sort of ethereal disembodied heaven. Paul's view is not the Platonic idea of the escape from the prison house of the body, but neither is it the annihilation of the soul at death. Rather, the soul upon bodily death goes into a conscious, blissful communion with Christ to await the date of Christ's return and the resurrection of the body and its reunion with the body – the reunion of the soul with its body.

In summary of Paul's view, when a Christian dies, the soul goes to be with Christ until the second coming. When Christ returns, the remains of the body (if any) will be transformed into a resurrection body which Paul describes in I Corinthians 15 as incorruptible, immortal, powerful, and Spirit-filled. The soul will be simultaneously united with that resurrection body. Then those who are still alive will be similarly transformed into their resurrection bodies. I think you can see that Paul's view is essentially the same view as the traditional Jewish view of the judgment and resurrection except that now Christ is the agent who will conduct the judgment on that day. It is at the return of Christ that the dead will be judged and raised. So although Paul changes the Jewish view by adding this Christological element to it, he basically affirms the same dualistic view that was traditional in Judaism at that time.