Do you have a soul?

I’m not talking about whether you can get down to Aretha Franklin or not. Rather I am asking: should we think of human beings as beings in two parts, or two aspects? Are we merely physical and bodily, or is there something else to us in addition to this? When you die and your body decays, where will ‘you’ go? And in what form? Is there something in us which is intrinsically immortal?

Christian theologians have traditionally thought of the human person dualistically – that is as a being composed of both a body and soul. This was reflected in the Council of Chalcedon of 454 AD which is famous for defining the two natures of Jesus Christ. In trying to describe the full humanity of Jesus it spoke about him dualistically:
…our Lord Jesus Christ, the same perfect in Godhead and also perfect in manhood; truly God and truly man, of a reasonable [rational] soul and body.

What the Council was trying to affirm was that the soul wasn’t some divine ‘bit’ in Jesus’ otherwise human nature. He was wholly man – thus constituted of a reasonable soul and a body.

But how are we to think of this ‘soul’? And what does the Bible commit us to in this regard? Must we understand ourselves to have an identifiable ‘self’ which is distinguishable but usually inseparable from our bodies?

The question is sharpened by the advance of modern neurology, which claims to be able to identify the physical manifestations of all of our thoughts and feelings. The notion of a ‘soul’ seems surplus to requirements. Must theologians insist upon it?

A lot of the theological debate focuses around several passages in the New Testament which seem to give us grounds for thinking that there is some way in which we will continuously exist between our deaths and the resurrection of the dead. For example, Paul speaks in Philippians 1:20-24 of his desire to die and ‘be with Christ’ as opposed to living ‘in the body’. Likewise, in 2 Cor 5:6-9, Paul says: ‘as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord.’ The parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16, the appearance of the ‘ghost’ of Samuel to Saul via the Witch of Endor and the thief on the cross to whom Jesus said ‘Today I will be with you in paradise’ are also passages that are brought in as evidence that there is a period in between our death and the resurrection in which we exist as disembodied souls.

The implication of this line of argument is that, if we will one day consciously exist but not in our bodies then as we exist currently we must be composed of bodies and souls.

But does the Bible commit us to this view? Given the overwhelming emphasis in the New Testament on the resurrection of the body, then it seems odd for us to think of ourselves as potentially disembodied souls. It seems to sit oddly with the way Scripture thinks of the ultimate human future as physical. Aren’t we guilty of importing the influence of Greek philosophy when we think of ourselves as having these twin natures?

Certainly, the Old Testament word often translated ‘soul’ – nephesh - doesn’t mean what ‘soul’ has come to mean in much of Christian thought. The human person not have a nephesh, he or she is a nephesh. What's more, as OT scholar Hans Walter Wolff writes:
We must not fail to observe that the nephesh is never given the meaning of an indestructible core of being, in contradistinction to the physical life, and even capable of living when cut off from that life.

We ought to notice, too, that in none of the passages usually listed in defence of the distinct ‘soul’ idea is the word ‘soul’ (in its Greek or Hebrew form) mentioned. In fact, in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus it seems quite specific that there is a physical afterlife – after all, the Rich Man asks if Lazarus can cool his tongue with his finger.

The word ‘body’ in Paul’s usage need not be contrasted to ‘soul’, either, since he could easily be speaking of his old, decaying body in contrast to his future embodied existence.

Furthermore, it seems a doubtful theological method to sketch a view of the human person on the basis of these references. They don’t seem to be teaching us specifically about the composition of the human person, nor about cosmology. In the case of the parable in Luke 16, Jesus is using the pop-theology of the day rather than making a concerted case for a particular view of the afterlife. That’s not his point.

The absolutely crucial piece of theological information, I reckon, is that Jesus Christ is now in heaven reigning as an embodied person. Heaven is not somewhere, in other words, that only disembodied souls can enter. This is surely the truth that must govern the way we think about the body and the soul. Whatever ‘soul’ means, it doesn’t not mean something separable from our bodies as if we have a shadowy other haunting our every move. If we are in Christ when we die, we are ‘with him’ in the sense that we are with him in heaven now. Paul says to the (living) Colossians ‘our lives are hid with Christ in God’ and there is no sense in which he is saying there is a soulish bit of them in heaven now.  Likewise when we die: it is perfectly consistent with the NT to say we are with Christ without saying that we have a ghostly other self actually located with him. Our ‘with-Christ-ness’ consists in his life and the promise it holds for our resurrection on the final day.

The biggest problem that still remains, however, is this: how can there be a continuity between my identity now and my identity at the resurrection? If I am given a new body at the resurrection, then in what sense will it be ‘me’ and not some other being simply implanted with my memories? This is a very good question to which I think there is no easy answer. I think that, as I have already suggested, the union with Christ that we already experience is probably the key. But I don’t think the traditional dualist has a more plausible answer.