The Hebraic worldview refuses to fit neatly into either a Cartesian dualism or some type of monism. In Deuteronomy, we see heart, soul, and might listed as different aspects of a human being. We must not, however, picture these as separate components which are capable of isolated examination:
You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
The human being is more than the sum of her or his parts. The Semitic thought of Holy Scripture rejects the Cartesian view of the human who is a mind and has a body. Instead, the Hebraic conceptual framework offers a human who is the intersection, or union, of soul and body.
The Greek text of the New Testament adds a fourth noun to the total, substituting ‘mind’ and ‘strength’ for ‘might’:
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.
Perhaps it is best not to regard these substantives as clearly distinguished modules of a human being, but rather to conceive of them as varying aspects or facets of single indivisible entity. These four traits are therefore perhaps not completely separable from each other.
Like the proverbial two sides of a coin, a human can’t be disassembled into parts. Author Wendell Berry offers his analysis:
The formula given in Genesis 2:7 is not man = body + soul; the formula is soul = dust + breath. According to this verse, God did not make a body and put a soul into it, like a letter into an envelope.
To be sure, it is operating at a disadvantage to discuss these matters in English. A study of Hebrew and Greek are indispensable. The name ‘Adam’ is simply a linguistic variation of the word for dirt. The text tells us that with the breath of God, Adam ‘became a living soul,’ which begs the question, what exactly is a non-living soul?
We must note, in passing, that Wendell Berry is not a trained philosopher or theologian, although his engagement with spiritual matters seems to be informed and sincere. His analysis of what it means to be human continues:
The dust, formed as man and made to live, did not embody a soul; it became a soul. “Soul” here refers to the whole creature.
There might lurk, however, a danger in the honorable attempt to do justice to the Hebraic anthropology. In trying to do justice to the text and its Semitic vision of human nature, and in trying to avoid Neoplatonism, it is possible to veer too far in the opposite direction, and lapse into something akin to materialism, which could unwittingly deny the immortality of the soul.
There is a paradox in the fact that soul and body are not simply detachable from one another, and yet eternal life is possible even when the body has returned to the state of scattered dust.
Paradoxes are, however, exactly what we should expect when trying to understand a design produced by the mind of God, who says
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
On the one hand, we wish to reject a Platonic view that an immaterial soul and a physical body are essentially separate and distinct, and merely happen to coincide for a segment of time. But on the other hand, we must be careful not to identify the human being too closely with the physical body, because that body does eventually end up as dust.
Among some followers of Jesus, the Cartesian formula, “I am a mind and I have a body” has become too influential and nudged them away from the ontology of the text. The Hebraic metaphysic of Scripture might be closer to something like “a human being is a mind and a body.”
A document written by the CTCR correctly moves away from Neoplatonic dualism, but does it, in citing Wendell Berry, embrace too materialistic a worldview? If, as Berry writes, “body + breath = soul / living creature,” then what becomes of the person when the breath stops and the body disintegrates? Has Berry gotten rid of Plato at the expense of eternal life?
Platonism has often been associated with the immortality of the soul, while materialism has been associated with a concept of personhood which ends at death. How do we conceptualize an eternal soul which is somehow inherently bound to a material body? The CTCR writes:
Not only did God form us from the ground but He made us “nephesh.” Nephesh has often been translated in the past as “soul,” but it is often more accurate to render it as “living creature.” Again, we start with Genesis 2:7, “Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature [nephesh].” This is an important text for it describes our nature as human beings. Wendell Berry rightly observes that this text does not support a dichotomous view of the human creature that consists of two discrete parts glued together. He notes that the formula is not: body + soul = human creature. Instead, the formula is body + breath = soul / living creature. “He [God] formed man of dust; then, by breathing His breath into it, He made the dust come alive ... Humanity is thus presented to us, in Adam, not as a creature of two discrete parts temporarily glued together but as a single mystery.” The theme continues. “When his breath departs, he returns to the earth” (Ps 146:4; Ps 104:29).
By embracing Berry’s formulation, does the CTCR somehow open the door to an interpretation which has no room for life beyond the death of my current physical body?
The challenge of articulating the Semitic worldview of Scripture is compounded by the fact that Scripture itself seems, at some points, to drift toward some type of dualism. Consider the book of Ecclesiastes:
The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
One starting point for this investigation would be a word study of ‘body’ and ‘bodies’ - and their Greek equivalents - in the New Testament. The human being seems to be intrinsically linked to the notion of having a material body. This would do away with the Platonic image of heaven as an afterlife of disembodied souls.
But while the human being seems necessarily to have a body, it may not necessarily need any one particular body. Hence the New Testament’s image of souls receiving new bodies (II Corinthians 5).
