What a Human Being Is

The oldest form of this question is arithmetical. Is a human being two things joined, a body and a soul, or three, a body and a soul and a spirit? The first is dichotomy and has been the majority view across most of Christian history in both East and West. The second is trichotomy and has a real pedigree of its own.

The trichotomist case rests principally on two texts and on a distinction of usage. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 asks that 'your entire spirit, soul, and body be kept blameless', naming three. Hebrews 4:12 says God's word 'pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow', which appears to set soul and spirit apart as things that can be divided from one another. 1 Corinthians 2:14-15 then contrasts the natural person, psychikos, who does not accept the things of the Spirit, with the spiritual person, pneumatikos, and 1 Corinthians 15:44-45 sets a psychikos body against a pneumatikos body. On this account the soul is the seat of mind, will and emotion, the life a human being shares with the animals, while the spirit is the faculty by which a person knows God and which is dead in the unbeliever and made alive in the believer. Defenders have included Franz Delitzsch in A System of Biblical Psychology in 1855, the Anglican J. B. Heard, and in the twentieth century Watchman Nee in The Spiritual Man and a great many writers in the dispensational and Pentecostal streams. The pastoral attraction is obvious and should be granted: the scheme gives a clear account of what regeneration changes.

The dichotomist case rests on a different set of texts and on a point about how Hebrew and Greek lists work. Matthew 10:28 pairs body and soul and nothing else. Ecclesiastes 12:7 has the dust returning to the earth and the spirit returning to God who gave it, two things. 2 Corinthians 7:1 speaks of defilement of body and spirit. James 2:26 says the body without the spirit is dead. And critically, the same conditions are described with soul in one place and spirit in another: Jesus is troubled in spirit at John 13:21 and his soul is troubled at John 12:27; Mary's soul magnifies the Lord and her spirit rejoices in God her Savior at Luke 1:46-47, which is Hebrew parallelism, where the second line restates the first rather than adding a part. On this reading spirit and soul name the one immaterial aspect of a person under two descriptions, spirit stressing relation to God and soul stressing the living self.

Here is why the arithmetic cannot settle it. Mark 12:30 uses four terms, heart and soul and mind and strength, and nobody proposes quadrichotomy. 1 Thessalonians 5:23 sits in a closing benediction whose whole point is completeness, and the rhetorical function of the list is to leave nothing out, which is exactly what a preacher does when he says he wants your heart and mind and hands and voice in the service. Hebrews 4:12 is harder for that answer, but note what its clause actually does: the word of God pierces even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. The English can be read two ways, as dividing soul from spirit or as reaching through both of them. Nobody thinks joints and marrow are two separable substances; the image is of a blade going through to where nothing is hidden. Read that way, the verse is about the penetration of God's word, not about a seam in human nature.

The honest summary is that the New Testament uses a fluid vocabulary for the inner life and never sets out to analyse it, and that both schemes require their proponents to explain away some texts. A third way of putting it has become common among Old Testament scholars: the terms are not parts but aspects, ways of naming the whole person from a particular angle, as when we say someone has a good head or a strong back without meaning to divide him. H. Wheeler Robinson and Aubrey Johnson developed that line, and Hans Walter Wolff's Anthropology of the Old Testament is its best-known statement. One caution belongs with it, and it comes from the Hermeneutics track: the aspectival reading was often sold with a sweeping contrast between the unified Hebrew mind and the dualistic Greek mind, which James Barr demolished in The Semantics of Biblical Language in 1961, taking Thorleif Boman's Hebrew Thought Compared with Greek as his target. The linguistic argument for that contrast collapsed. The exegetical observation about how nephesh and ruach actually function did not, and it is the observation, not the slogan, that should be carried forward.

The English word soul is a problem for this lesson, because four hundred years of hymns and funerals have loaded it with a specific meaning: an immaterial and immortal part that leaves the body at death. Some of that is in the Greek. Very little of it is in the Hebrew. Until you have felt the difference, you cannot read the debate.

Genesis 2:7 is the decisive verse and it is normally quoted the wrong way round. The BSB reads: 'Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living being.' The Hebrew phrase rendered living being is nephesh chayyah, and the King James Version puts it 'a living soul'. Notice that the BSB's 'living being' is a translators' choice that already leans toward the reading this section argues for, and that the KJV's 'living soul' leans the other way; both render the same two Hebrew words. A dualist can fairly reply that the verse shows what nephesh can mean without showing that no human being has an immaterial aspect, and the rest of this section should be read with that reply in mind. The grammar matters enormously. The man does not receive a nephesh. The man becomes a nephesh. Dust plus breath equals a living being, and the word we translate soul is a word for the whole result, not for an ingredient added to the mix. Compare Genesis 1:20-21, where the same phrase nephesh chayyah describes the swarming sea creatures and birds. The word is not reserved for humanity at all.

The range of nephesh across the Old Testament is wider still and worth walking through, because each use pulls in a different direction. In Leviticus 17:11 the nephesh of the flesh is in the blood, so it is bound up with physical life. In Numbers 6:6 a Nazirite must not go near a dead nephesh, which the BSB prints as 'a dead body', a corpse, the exact opposite of an immortal part. In Psalm 42:1-2 the nephesh pants for God as a deer for water, which is the thirsting self. In Psalm 103:1 the nephesh is called on to bless the LORD. It can mean appetite, throat, life, person, self, and in the counting formulas of Exodus 1:5 and Genesis 46:26 it simply means a head to be numbered (the BSB there prints only 'seventy in all' and 'sixty-six persons', so the word does not show in English). What it does not straightforwardly mean anywhere in the Hebrew Bible is a detachable immortal substance.

Psyche in the New Testament inherits a good deal of that range, because the Septuagint translators used it for nephesh. Acts 27:37 counts two hundred and seventy-six psychai on Paul's ship, which is simply people. In Matthew 16:25-26 the psyche a man may lose or save is his life, and the saying trades on both senses at once. But psyche in Greek also carries what Hebrew did not, and some New Testament texts use that. Matthew 10:28 distinguishes those who can kill the body but cannot kill the psyche from the one who can destroy both in hell, which presupposes that the two can come apart. Revelation 6:9 has the psychai of the martyrs under the altar, calling out, after their bodies have been killed. Those texts cannot be dissolved into the Hebrew range, and any reading that flattens them is doing to the New Testament what the flat-immortality reading does to the Old.

So the responsible conclusion is untidy and should be stated as such. The Old Testament's vocabulary does not by itself yield a doctrine of the soul as an immortal part. The New Testament, writing in Greek and after the resurrection, says things that at least some of the time imply that a person continues after bodily death. Building either half into a complete anthropology by itself is how both of the next section's positions have historically overreached.

This is no longer only a question for exegetes. Christian philosophers have argued it hard for forty years, and the state of play is genuinely open, which is why the three positions are set out here at comparable length and from their own defenders.

Substance dualism holds that a human person is composed of a material body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul is the bearer of consciousness and can exist without the body. Richard Swinburne argued it at length in The Evolution of the Soul, J. P. Moreland, Stewart Goetz and Charles Taliaferro have defended versions of it, and John Cooper's Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting in 1989 is the book that put the biblical case back on the table, arguing from the intermediate-state texts and from Second Temple Jewish sources for what he calls a holistic dualism: the person is a unity, the body is not a prison, and yet the person can exist temporarily and abnormally without it. The texts the position leans on are Matthew 10:28, Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 5:6-8, Philippians 1:23, Revelation 6:9-11 and Ecclesiastes 12:7. The strongest philosophical arguments are about the unity of consciousness, which does not obviously belong to any part of a brain, and about personal identity through radical bodily change.

Thomistic hylomorphism is a distinct position often filed under dualism and resistant to the label. On Aquinas's account the soul is not a thing lodged in a body but the form of the body, the organising principle that makes this matter a living human being, and it is therefore one substance and not two joined. The rational soul is nevertheless subsistent, able to exist after death, though in a diminished and unnatural condition. Eleonore Stump has given the best modern statement of it. This is the position with formal magisterial backing in the Roman Catholic Church: the Council of Vienne in 1312 defined the rational soul as per se and essentially the form of the human body, and the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513 condemned the denial of the soul's immortality. Aquinas himself drew the sharpest line against any view that makes the soul the person, writing in his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15 that my soul is not me, anima mea non est ego, which is why he held that a man is not saved until his body is raised.

Christian physicalism, sometimes called non-reductive physicalism or constitution materialism, holds that a human person is a material being with no immaterial part, whose mental life depends on the body, and who survives death only because God raises the dead. Its defenders insist that this is not reductionism: Nancey Murphy, in Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, argues that the higher-level capacities of persons are real and not simply brain chemistry described differently. Kevin Corcoran and Lynne Rudder Baker developed a constitution view on which a person is constituted by a body without being identical to it, as a statue is constituted by bronze. Peter van Inwagen and Trenton Merricks have argued the metaphysics of resurrection for materialists. On the biblical side Joel Green's Body, Soul, and Human Life makes the New Testament case, reading psyche through its Hebrew background and arguing that the scriptural hope is resurrection rather than survival. The texts the position leans on are Genesis 2:7, the Old Testament's reticence about the dead in Ecclesiastes 9:5-10 and Psalm 6:5, the emphasis on bodily resurrection throughout 1 Corinthians 15, and 1 Timothy 6:16, which says He alone is immortal.

Behind the modern physicalists stands an older monism from biblical theology rather than philosophy. Oscar Cullmann's 1955 Ingersoll Lecture, published as Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, argued that the New Testament hope is resurrection and that the Greek doctrine of an immortal soul is a foreign import that has muffled it; he pointed to Gethsemane, where Jesus is distressed by death in a way Socrates in the Phaedo conspicuously is not. The lecture caused an uproar and Cullmann said afterwards that no publication of his had produced such angry letters. His argument is not the same as physicalism and he did not draw the metaphysical conclusion, but the pressure he applied is the pressure the physicalists still apply.

A note on fairness that should be made explicitly. None of these three positions is heresy, and the people holding them are not dividing over the resurrection, the incarnation or the authority of scripture. What divides them is how to hold together two sets of biblical texts, plus a set of philosophical commitments about minds and matter that scripture does not address. Roman Catholic teaching does constrain its own members here in a way the others do not, through Vienne and Lateran V, and that should be said plainly rather than passed over. Elsewhere the argument is live, and if you are told otherwise you are being told about your teacher's tradition rather than about the state of the question.

Every position in this area is tested at one place, and knowing where is more useful than knowing the positions.

The pressure on the monist and the physicalist is the intermediate state. If a person is a living body and nothing more, then when the body dies the person ceases, and there is nobody between death and resurrection. But Jesus says to the thief, 'Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.' The BSB, like most English versions, puts its comma before 'today', which attaches the word to 'you will be' and so supports an immediate presence with Christ. The Greek of the earliest manuscripts has no punctuation, and some who deny a conscious intermediate state place the comma after 'today' instead, reading the saying as 'I tell you today, you will be with Me'. That is a live argument about punctuation that no English text settles, and the plain sense of the sentence with the BSB's comma is not the only grammatical one. Paul says his desire is to depart and be with Christ, 'which is far better indeed', and he means better than remaining in the body and fruitful in labour, which is a strange thing to say about a state of nonexistence. He says he would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord. John sees the souls of the martyrs under the altar, crying out and being told to wait. Three answers are given and each has a cost. Some accept soul sleep, or Christian mortalism, on which the dead are genuinely unconscious until the resurrection and 'today' and 'depart' are said from the standpoint of the one who experiences no interval; this has a history, argued by William Tyndale against Thomas More, and remarks of Luther have been read this way, though what Luther finally held is disputed. Some argue for immediate resurrection, that the person is raised at death into the new creation, so that there is no gap at all from the dying person's point of view even though history continues here; Murphy and Green are sympathetic to versions of this. Some argue for re-creation, that God simply raises the same person later, and that a gap in existence is no bar to identity; van Inwagen and Merricks work this ground. The cost in each case is the same: the intermediate-state texts have to be re-described rather than read off, and the re-description has to be argued.

The pressure on the dualist runs the other way and is about the resurrection body. If the real person is the soul, and the soul is with Christ and that is far better, what is the body for? Why does Paul make the resurrection the hope, and why does he call the denial of it in 1 Corinthians 15 the collapse of the whole gospel? A dualism that cannot say why the body matters has drifted towards the Phaedo, and Cullmann's charge lands. The best dualist answers are textual. 2 Corinthians 5:4 says that we groan, 'because we do not wish to be unclothed but clothed', which says explicitly that the disembodied state is not what Paul wants; he wants a body. Cooper's holistic dualism takes that as decisive: the intermediate state is real, conscious, blessed and incomplete, an abnormality on the way to the thing itself. Aquinas said the same thing with his anima mea non est ego. So a dualism that takes the body seriously is available, and the tradition has usually held it. The cost is that it must keep insisting on a point its own structure makes easy to forget, and the history of Christian piety, with its talk of going to heaven when we die and its comparative silence about the raising of the dead, shows how often it has been forgotten.

A worked note on 1 Corinthians 15:44, because it is routinely misread in the opposite direction. 'It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.' Spiritual here translates pneumatikos, and the contrast is with psychikos, not with physical. Paul is not saying the raised body is made of spirit. He uses the same adjective pair in 1 Corinthians 2:14-15 of two kinds of person, and nobody thinks the spiritual person is immaterial. The natural reading is a body animated and governed by the Spirit rather than by ordinary created life, which is why verse 45 calls the last Adam a life-giving spirit, and why the risen Jesus eats fish. Whatever your position on the soul, the resurrection body in Paul is a body.

A last question, older than the modern debate and still worth knowing because of what each answer was trying to solve. If a person has a soul, where does each one come from?

Creationism, in this sense, holds that God creates each soul directly and immediately, ordinarily at conception, and joins it to the body forming in the womb. Its texts are Ecclesiastes 12:7, where the spirit returns to God who gave it; Zechariah 12:1, where the LORD formed the spirit of man within him; Numbers 16:22, addressing God as the God of the spirits of all flesh; and Hebrews 12:9, contrasting our earthly fathers with the Father of our spirits. It was held by most of the Greek fathers, by Jerome, and by Aquinas, and it is the Roman Catholic position, stated in Pius XII's encyclical Humani Generis in 1950 and repeated in the Catechism at 366. What it is trying to solve is the immateriality of the soul: a simple substance with no parts cannot be split off from a parent and handed on, because there is nothing there to divide. Its acknowledged difficulty is original sin. If God makes each soul fresh and clean, how does the soul come to be fallen, and does God then create souls into a condition of guilt?

Traducianism holds that the soul is propagated along with the body, from parents to children, so that the whole human being comes from the parents under God. Tertullian argued it in De Anima; Lutheran orthodoxy generally adopted it, and among Reformed writers W. G. T. Shedd and A. H. Strong defended it at length. Its texts are Genesis 2:2, where God rests from the work of creating; Genesis 5:3, where Adam fathers a son in his own likeness, after his own image, which is the language of Genesis 1:26 applied to ordinary human generation; John 3:6, that flesh is born of flesh; Psalm 51:5; and Hebrews 7:9-10, where Levi is said to have paid the tenth through Abraham while still in the loin of his ancestor. What it is trying to solve is exactly what creationism struggles with, the transmission of a fallen condition from Adam to his descendants without making God the author of it, and, relatedly, the unity of the human race. Its acknowledged difficulty is the mirror image: how a simple immaterial substance can be generated or divided at all, and what then is to be said about the conception of Christ, which every traducianist has to treat as an exception.

Pre-existence holds that souls exist before the bodies they come to inhabit. Origen argued a version of it in On First Principles, and his motive was theodicy: if souls are made equal and simultaneous with bodies, the gross inequality of human starting conditions, one child born to health and instruction and another to disease and cruelty, looks arbitrary, whereas if souls have a prior history the differences of condition are just. That is a serious problem and the answer was a serious attempt at it. The position was rejected in the East in the sixth century, in a series of anathemas against Origenism associated with the emperor Justinian and a synod at Constantinople in 543, and usually also linked to the Second Council of Constantinople in 553; whether the ecumenical council itself issued the anathemas is disputed among historians, and you should say so rather than assert it. The one substantial living tradition holding a doctrine of pre-mortal existence is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is outside the historic creeds and whose version is not Origen's.

How much turns on this? Less than the vigour of the old arguments suggests, and you should say so. Nobody's doctrine of salvation depends on it, the scriptural evidence is thin on all sides, and a Christian physicalist has no stake in the question at all, since on that view there is no separate soul to originate. It is worth knowing chiefly because it shows the shape of theological reasoning at its most characteristic: two positions, each generated by a real problem, each solving the other's difficulty and creating its own, and a tradition that lived with both for fifteen hundred years without splitting over it. Hold that as a pattern. It will help you recognise, in the next two lessons, which disputes are of this kind and which are not.