Doctrine of Man (Part 8)

We've been looking at the apostle Paul's doctrine of the body and soul particularly with respect to the intermediate state of the soul between bodily death and bodily resurrection. We saw that in Paul's letters we have evidence that Paul thought of the soul as a free-standing ontological constituent of human beings that can survive the death of the body and be with Christ until the time of the eschatological resurrection. But this is not a doctrine that is peculiar to the apostle Paul. In addition to Paul's letters, let's look at a couple of other New Testament passages that suggest that we are in fact dealing with an ontological dualism of body and soul.

For example, in the teachings of Jesus himself found in Luke 16:19ff we have Jesus’ parable of The Rich Man and Lazarus. Jesus said,

There was a rich man, who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, full of sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man’s table; moreover the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried; and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes, and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus in his bosom. And he called out, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy upon me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in anguish in this flame.’ But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.’

Now, it's always risky, I grant, to try to draw doctrine out of a parable because a parable is meant to teach a central point, and you can't press the circumstantial details of the parable for doctrinal precision. Nevertheless, it does seem clear here that Jesus is assuming the traditional Jewish view of the intermediate state – that when a person dies that person doesn't simply cease to exist; rather, after bodily death, the souls of the evil and the souls of the righteous are separated from one another and there is a continued conscious existence in that intermediate state. So Jesus’ parable would support a dualism of soul and body.

Next, 1 Peter 3:18-20. Peter says,

For Christ also died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit; in which he went and preached to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark . . .

Here Peter is talking about that state between Christ's death on the cross and his resurrection on Sunday morning, and he says that even though Christ was dead in the flesh nevertheless he was alive in the spirit, and in this state he went and preached to the spirits in prison. Who are these spirits in prison? On the basis of texts like 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6, 7 one might plausibly take them to be the so-called sons of God of Genesis 6:1-4 who took as wives the daughters of men and sired the Nephilim. Let me read 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6 for this.

For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of nether gloom to be kept until the judgment . . .

Then in Jude verse 6 refers to the same thing:

 And the angels that did not keep their own position but left their proper dwelling have been kept by him in eternal chains in the nether gloom until the judgment of the great day.

In Jude and 2 Peter we find the sons of God of Genesis 6:1-4 equated with angels along with additional information concerning the angels’ fate which is not inferable from Genesis 6, specifically their being bound by God with chains in the underworld. So it might be plausibly thought that these spirits in prison that 1 Peter 3 refers to just are these angelic spirits bound in chains in eternal darkness.

But are the spirits in prison in fact angels, or are they just as plausibly the wicked human contemporaries of Noah now deceased? I think the modifying clause in 1 Peter 3 – “who formerly did not obey when God's patience waited in the days of Noah during the building of the ark” – is a much more apt description for Noah's contemporaries than for the angels of Genesis 6:1-4 who are not said to have disobeyed God, tried God's patience, or sinned during the building of the ark, as Noah's contemporaries are implied to have done. In the Jewish pseudepigraphal book that we looked at last time, 1 Enoch, the expression “spirits” is variously used to refer to human beings, to the Nephilim, and also to angels. You can find references of the word “spirits” to all three in 1 Enoch. As we saw last time, in 1 Enoch deceased persons now disembodied and awaiting the eschatological resurrection and judgment are frequently referred to as “spirits” – the “spirits of the righteous” are separated from the spirits of men who were not righteous but sinners as each awaits their respective fate. Indeed, in the context of the intermediate state the referents of the word “spirits” is virtually always to human beings in 1 Enoch, not to angels. So if we take the spirits in prison to be the wicked deceased of Noah's day who did not heed his preaching, then this means that Christ visited not the fallen angels of Genesis 6:1-4 but rather the disembodied spirits of people who once lived and were then disembodied. Not only are they alive during this intermediate state, but Christ himself exists in this intermediate state between the death and resurrection. So once again the assumption, I think, is that this is a real state. This state of the disembodied dead prior to the resurrection is not simply a metaphor but an actual state in which Christ himself once existed and in which he went and visited these so-called spirits in prison.

Finally, look at Hebrews 12:22-23. The author says,

But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to a judge who is God of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect, . . .

Here he is talking about the saints who have gone to be with Christ and are awaiting the final return of Christ, the resurrection, and the Judgment Day. He refers to these glorified saints as “the spirits of just men made perfect.” So here again we have the notion of a disembodied soul in communion with Christ in a blessed state waiting until the time of the eschatological resurrection.

In summary, it seems to me that we have ample biblical grounds in the teaching about the intermediate state of the soul for believing that the soul-body dualistic language in the Scriptures is to be taken seriously, and that we are, in fact, composite entities made up of a soul and a body that are capable of existing independently of each other and therefore are ontologically distinct from each other.

In addition to that, I want to point out that the denial of the reality of the soul is not only unbiblical, but has theological consequences that are extremely serious and indeed undermine all of Christian theology. Let me mention four such consequences.

1. Notice that God is an unembodied mind. God just is an unembodied soul in the same way that we will become disembodied souls when we die. If you do not believe that unembodied souls are possible, it's very difficult to see how you can believe in the existence of God because that's exactly what God is. I recall that the first time I met Nancey Murphy (who is a professor of theology at Fuller Theological Seminary) at a conference at the University of Notre Dame, she said to me, “I'm a materialist.” I was stunned. I said, “Well, what about God?” And she replied, “Oh, well, I make an exception in God's case.” Now, I'm glad that she did make such an exception, but I think that seems a rather ad hoc move on her part, don't you? If God can be an unembodied soul, then why can't there be created souls who are in his image?

2. Free will seems to be impossible without the reality of the soul. If we are just physical electrochemical machines, then there isn't any room for free agency to enter in. Everything we do is going to be determined by our physical makeup and the inputs of our five senses, what the American philosopher W. V. O. Quine called the irritation of your surfaces by the various influences impinging on your nerve endings. These will determine everything that you think and do. Philosophers called this the causal closure of the physical: everything you think and do is the effect of purely physical causes. There is no room for mental causation. Without freedom of the will, we are just machines; we are not moral agents who can do good or evil or who can be held responsible by God or who can respond freely to God's love. We would just be automata. So free will, I think, is essential to a Christian view of man, and yet that is undermined if we are just purely physical entities. Again, I'm glad that Christian materialists affirms the freedom of the will and hence moral responsibility, but if you can't make sense of free will on a materialist anthropology, then perhaps this ought to lead us to question physicalism or materialism in favor of a body-soul dualism.

3. The resurrection of the body threatens to reduce to God's creating a replica of you rather than actually raising you from the dead. If you just are your body and you cease to exist when your body dies and your body is destroyed (say, vaporized in an atomic explosion), then when God raises the dead on the Judgment Day, why is that you rather than just a duplicate of you? What makes that you rather than a replica of you with all of your memories and other things restored? To illustrate, typically materialists would say that what makes this podium the same podium that was here last Sunday is its material continuity. There is material continuity between the podium last week and the podium today. But suppose that we were to create out of nothing an exactly similar podium – a duplicate of it – not in the future but right now here on the platform next to it. Just being in a perfectly similar state wouldn’t make them the same podium, would it? So say that the podium were destroyed and God in the future were to make a podium that looks exactly like it (it's in exactly the same state), why would it be this podium rather than a duplicate of this podium? Similarly, maybe it's not really you that is raised from the dead. You died and ceased to exist when your body died. But then at the resurrection God produces a duplicate of you. That is certainly not the biblical doctrine of the resurrection – that God is going to make clones of all of us on the Judgment Day. On the materialistic view, one has really got some explaining to do as to why God's production of the similar person on the resurrection day is really you rather than just a duplicate of you. By contrast, on dualism the soul persists through the death of the body and the intermediate state and thus ensures personal identity with the person who died and the person who then is raised on the Judgment Day.

4. The incarnation becomes very difficult, if not impossible, on a materialist view. If human beings are purely material entities, then how could the second person of the Trinity become a man? The doctrine of the incarnation is not the doctrine that the second person of the Trinity – the Logos – turned himself into a human being. It is not like the ancient mythological stories of Zeus transforming himself into a bull or a swan. I have proposed a model of the incarnation that presupposes that man has an immaterial constituent of his nature which the Logos can stand in for. But how the Logos could become flesh or have a human nature is very difficult to understand, I think, on a materialist anthropology.

In sum, it seems to me that we not only have good biblical grounds for affirming the reality of the soul and the body as distinct, but also that the denial of the soul’s reality has some very serious theological consequences which should make anyone reluctant to embrace such a monistic, materialistic anthropology.