6 THE BIBLICAL TEACHING ABOUT THE HUMAN BEING AND ITS EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE

6.1 Introductory Remarks

The problem of body-soul, mind-body or mind-matter is a perennial feature of Western philosophy (Fowler, 1991:3) and has become a problem in Korean Christianity as well. The influence of Platonic dualism is widespread in church life (Lee, 1988:88-91). It can be detected in disciple training, preaching, teaching, education as well as in the concept of labour and in social life. Korean churches tend to emphasize missionary fervour, evangelism, church-centred life and spiritual gifts strongly, and to disregard the social responsibility of congregants such as providing for the less fortunate and living a life that bears the fruits of the Holy Spirit (Kim, 2004a:372-374). Because of this misguided and unbiblical view of human integrity, Korean Christianity and churches have become confused concerning other important philosophical questions such as the relationship between faith and practice, faith and science, sacred and secular, talk and walk.

6.2 The Central Issue

The central issue here is whether the soul can survive and function apart from the body. In other words, is human nature constructed in such a way that, at death, it can come apart, the conscious personal part continuing to exist (in another dimension), while the human being as an organism disintegrates (Cooper, 1989:1-6)? The further question is: is the body a sort of house for the soul; or is it better to think of the soul as the captain of the ship of the body, the driver of a horse-cart (cf. Platonic Realism)? Or, should we rather think in terms of an interpretation of body and soul (Flower, 1991: 3)?

The church as a whole has never taught that body and soul are related in terms of struggle and conflict between them. The biblical witness to the essential unity and wholeness of the personal self is antithetical to a dualism that posits an evil body and good soul (Jewett, 1996:35). Despite this, the human being has often been thought of as consisting of distinct "parts" or "components" that can be abstracted from the whole. So, in Christian circles, the human being has been thought of as consisting either of "body" and "soul," or of "body," "soul," and "spirit" (Hoekema, 1982: 203).

The words "body" and "soul"afford a good example of the terms that we use quite frequently in ordinary discourse, but which at the same time cover ideas of central importance to philosophy (Van Peursen, 1966: 1). Is human nature constructed in such a way that at death body and soul can "come apart," the conscious personal part continuing to exist while the organism disintegrates? Traditional doctrine and the beliefs of millions of Christians have answered these questions positively (Cooper, 1989: 1-2). But is it true and biblically justifiable? Since our concern is with a biblically justifiable anthropology, we have to look anew at the Biblical teaching about the human being to see whether this is so. We will now proceed to do so in the following sections, albeit in a roundabout manner by commencing with ancient Greek ideas about the essence of the human being.

6.3 Historical and Philosophical Thought about the Body and Soul problem

6.3.1 Ancient Greek thought

The body-soul problem has a long history. It is from the Greek philosophers first and foremost that modern people have inherited the idea of soul and body as distinct and separate entities (Van Peursen, 1966:87). The question of the relationship between soul and body is a core part of ancient Greek philosophy (Je, 1998: 1). In the thought of the ancient Greek period soul and body are knit so completely together that not only is the soul inseparable from the body but the concept "body", as partner to that of "soul", is unknown (Van Peursen 1966: 87). Zurcher (1969: 9) said that the monistic concept of the world of the Greek philosopherwould logically lead him to an anthropology which we would call materialistic. The soul is generally considered by them as the product of the organization of a unique material, the only primordial reality; accordingly, it must vanish with the decomposition of the organized body.

The Greek word Psyche (ψυχη) means "soul." Since Homer is the earliest source for the occurrence of Psyche (soul), we shall start with his poems. The first striking fact about Psyche is that it is only rarely mentioned as being part of the living human being, and then only at times of crisis. From these Homeric passages it emerges that without psyche a human being can not survive (Bremmer, 1979: 13). In the Homeric period body and soul are distinguished and death consists of their separation (Gundry, 1987: 85).

Where ideas of separation between body and soul appear in Greek literature they are usually labelled "Orphic." Whether or not there was a well-defined religious cult called "Orphism" is a disputed question. The "Orphic" myth of the human being’s origin is assigned by Pausanias to the sixth century B C. This is the familiar story of the soul’s transmigrations, recounted by Plato in several of his dialogues. According to the myth, souls existed at first in the highest heavens,but some fell and were forced into bodies; they are condemned to successive reincarnations for a period of ten thousand years; at the end of this time, if they have sufficiently purified themselves, they will return to their heavenly home. A quite definite anthropology is suggested by these myths. The human being consists of two independent substances, a soul and a body. The soul comes from, and by nature belongs to, a higher, heavenly realm. It is therefore never at home in the world but passes through it as an unwilling alien. Physical existence is a punishment and a calamity; the bodily appetites and pleasures are bad and must be suppressed (Owen, 1956: 34-36).

6.3.1.1 Plato (c. 429-347 B C)

Plato was one of the persons especially associated in philosophy with propagation of the body-soul dualism. Plato, a Greek philosopher, drew a sharp dividing line in his philosophical system between soul and body. Under the influence of Platonic concepts, which appear time and again throughout the centuries, the body is usually characterized, where the soul is concerned, as something inferior (Van Peursen, 1966: 34).

The most common abstract words in any language frequently defy exact translation. ψυχη, which as a rule we translate as "soul", does not in fact mean "soul" as Westerners understand it at all. For instance, when Socrates argues at length that the soul is immortal, a modern thinker would conceptualise its existence and consider immortality to belong to such existence. But the Greek word primarily means the principle of life in any being, and whatever is alive must possess it by that very fact (Grube, 1980: 120). The conception of the soul as the highest part of the human being seems to have been imported into Greeceby mystical teachers and prophets who are usually somewhat summarily lumped together as the Orphics. Under the influence of the Orphic religion, Plato understood the human being as not only united soul and body but also soul and body as essentially different elements. This doctrine came from the East where the body was thought of as the prison or tomb of the soul, as they pithily expressed it. The human being then aims at the purification of this soul, and after several incarnations, the soul can rise to perfection and is absorbed or reabsorbed into the divine (Je, 1998: 8-9, cf. Phaedo, Buchanan, ed., 1977: 62b, 82).

The aim of the food prohibitions of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans seems to have been to prevent the eating of the ψυχη in its various bodily abodes. Orpheus was honoured without the body and believed to containwhat was immortal (Onians, 1954: 112). For the Orphic, the union of soul and body was the punishment for an original sin, imputable to the murder of Dionysus by the Titans (Zurcher, 1969: 11). In the Phaedo, Plato stressed that the soul survives death and that to be freed from the body is a release from evils and an entry into a better state.

According to Plato, the Orphics made their anthropology even more explicit in the theory that the body is the prison of the soul - the famous soma-sema doctrine (Owen, 1956: 36; cf. Lee, 1977:25). Plato also says the body is a source of endless trouble to us. By reason of the mere requirement of food the body is always breaking in upon us, causing turmoil and confusion in our enquiries (Phaedo, Buchanan, ed., 1977: 203-205).

In the Phaedo (Buchanan, ed., 1977:77-80), where Plato takes as already proven his theory of absolute unchanging forms and his belief in the existence of the soul before birth, he goes on to argue that the disembodied soul survives to enter into a better world after death (Stevenson, 1981: 37). He says when the soul and the body are united, then nature orders the soul to rule and govern, and the body to obey and serve. The soul is the very likeness of the divine, immortal, rational, uniform, indissoluble and unchangeable, but the body is the very likeness of the human being as mortal, irrational, multiform, dissoluble and changeable. Plato thought soul to be pure at departing and draws after itself no bodily taint, having never voluntarily during life had connection with the body (Stevenson, 1981: 42-43).

Plato thought of the soul as an individualized instance of the rational essence of the universe. As such, it is antithetical to the body, which is a part of the material world of flux and change (Jewett, 1996). Plato conceived of the intellect as the noblest and immortal part of the human being, of salvation through knowledge (Grube, 1980: 121). In the Republic (Buchanan, ed., 1977:514-519), Plato likens the unenlightened human condition to that of prisoners chained in a cave, and speculates on how some may gain knowledge of the realities outside the cave and be induced to apply their knowledge for the benefit of the rest of humanity (also see Stevenson, 1981: 37). The soul is immortal insofar as it shares in the vision of the Idea (Hogan, 1994: 57). According to Plato, death is the separation of soul from body and it is the aim of the soul to free itself, even during life, from obstacles such as distracting pleasures and confusing sensations, which the body puts in the way of the soul’s development (Grube, 1980: 125).

For Plato, immortality of the soul means that the soul existed before being reincarnated in the body. Why does the immortal soul come into the prison of body? Plato borrows from myth to explain the relationship between soul and body (Je, 1998: 10). In the Phaedrus 246 a, Plato likens soul and body with a team of two horses and a charioteer:

To describe the nature of the soul is an altogether superhuman task and a long story, but it is a lesser task and within human power to say what it resembles. So let us do that. The soul is like a team of winged horses and a charioteer that have grown into one. Now the horses and charioteer of the souls of the gods are all good themselves and of excellent lineage, but those of other souls are mixed. Our charioteer rules over the pair he drives; one of his horses is beautiful and good and of similar parents, the other the opposite in both respects, and our driving is therefore necessarily difficult and troublesome (re-quoted in Grube, 1980:131-132).

Two further principles of some importance in this connection surface in this dialogue. First the soul is the originator of all movement, and therefore of all life, a principle of the greatest importance in subsequent philosophical thinking. The point not argued, it is dogmatically stated and made the basis of another proof, viz. that the soul is immortal. Theimmortality of the soul then, as the beginning or first principle of motion is here added to the theory that it is the origin of all life, that without soul there is no life in Phaedrus 245c (Grube, 1980: 139-140). This curious dualism is the result of following to its logical conclusion the theory that the soul is the origin of all motion and all life, for some human actions at least are not directed towards a proper goal and yet their origin must be traced to a soul as their cause.

From first to last in Plato we find that the soul is the highest and noblest part of the human being, the part one should primarily care for and develop (Grube 1980: 146-147). Such then is Plato’s account of the soul-and-body relationship. What strikes one about it is the element of dualism. This strand in Plato’s thinking, usually conjoined with some disparagement of the physical aspects of existence, has had a considerable influence on the history and course of human thought. Many ideas which were long regarded, and accepted, as basic to Christianity - such as the doctrine of a subsistent and immortal soul, an ascetic attitude towards the things of the body, and the view of sexuality as in itself "the sinful lust of the flesh"- are really rooted in Platonic thought. For Plato this dualism is ethico-religious in character (Van Peursen, 1966: 44-45; cf. Park, 2000: 46).

For Plato, the true status of the soul is its disembodied existence in the realm of pure reason which is both its origin and its destiny. It is true that in the Republic, Plato modifies the extreme dualism of the earlier dialogues. In the Timaeus, written after the Republic, reason is seen as the human being’s true soul; it is this alone that is divine and immortal and that will ultimately escape from the limitations and corruptions of the body into the realm of pure, universal reason. Plato remains to the end an anti-physical dualist. It is he and his followers who most of all are responsible for imposing a "religious"dualistic anthropology on Western thought (Owen, 1956: 40-41).

6.3.1.2 Aristotle (384-322 B C)

Plato despised the bodily, for he distrusted sensory experience and held that reality was other than it appeared. He is the forerunner of all later "objective realists" in supposing that true reality is other than our experience of it. It is both unlike our present experience and separate from our possible knowledge. Aristotle, in denying both these in favour of a reality which is, in the end, self-explanatory and which cannot be separated, even in the thought, from God’s experience of it, also finds a more congenial place for the bodily. "The body is no-body without its use, and the body is the use", was his position (Clark, 1975: 197-198).

Aristotle who was Plato’s great student, the only other claimant to the role of Greece’s greatest philosopher, made a determined attempt to interpret the human being in other than dualistic terms. Aristotle’s views of the relationship between "soul" and "body" have been intensely discussed in recent years with respect to the higher faculties of the soul (Freudenthal, 1999: 20). He sharply criticized Plato’s dualism (which he called separation), both in reality in general and in the human being in particular.

For Aristotle, reality is not to be divided into two radically different realms (Owen, 1956: 40-41). He expresses a different understanding of the concept of mind or soul, which undercuts both the Platonic doctrine that the soul is an incorporeal substance and the materialist view that it is made of atoms. His analysis suggests that the soul is not a thing at all, whether material or immaterial, but rather a property or set of properties or ability, of the living body (Stevenson, 1981: 66). He provides the major alternative to the Platonic concept of soul by rejecting the idea of the soul as an entity separable from the body and taking the soul to be the structure and functioning of the body itself, or, as he put it, the "form" of the living human body. Since one cannot have the form without the body which has that form, the soul cannot exist disembodied (Shaffer, 1968: 2).

Aristotle rejects any theory which affirms the existence of the soul separated from the body (Zurcher, 1969: 26). He thinks he can give an adequate account of soul and its relation to body by relying on his distinction between form and matter. He therefore defines soul as "the form of a living body having life potentially within it."Since the form of a living entity is its nature, it turns out that soul is the nature of living things; the inner principle of change and rest. Form is the actuality of a body, matter is its potentiality, so soul is the actuality of the living organism.

Aristotle distinguishes different grades of actuality, however. He says soul is the first actualityof a living body. Form and matter are not two distinct ingredients which, when mixed, constitute a living organism. Soul is not a special ingredient which breathes life into a lifeless body; it is a certain aspect of a living organism, and a living organism is a paradigm of a functioning unity (Lear, 1998: 96-97).

Aristotle tries to overcome the old body-soul dualism by insisting that the human being does not consist of two distinct and radically different parts. The human being is, rather, a unified substance in which soul and body are not two different kinds of thing but simply the form and matter of the same single substance. And since the substance is the ultimate reality, and since every substance necessarily consists of both form and matter, we expect Aristotle to go on to say that neither can exist apart from the other.

But it is just at this point that Aristotle is unable to resist the pressure of the tradition of thought to which he belongs; he returns to dualism (Owen, 1956: 42). He quite evidently distinguishes the mind - that is, the reflective faculty peculiar to the human being - from the soul in general. The mind is independent vis-a-vis the body and is not confined to this or that particular organ. Mind comes exclusively from without and is divine: in its mode of operation it exhibits no affinity with the body. The human being’s mental activity is a component of her soul-life; but it also manifests the presence of a superior, divine potency.

Concealed here behind the unity of soul and body there are the rudiments, at any rate, of a new dualism - one which opposes soul-body on the one hand to mind on the other (Van Peursen, 1966: 111-113).

Though Aristotle tried to overcome dualism, he joined Plato in thinking of a divine and immortal elementin the human being. He developed a different dualistic view of the human being, viz. that of mind (reason) and matter, form and matter. Under the influence of Plato and Aristotle, the dualistic body-soul view became a mainstream position during the Middle Age. Medieval and later Reformed theologians also insisted on dualistic concepts of human being and on the immortality of the soul (Je, 1998: 17).

6.3.2 Early Christian church

6.3.2.1 Early Church

In the early Christian church, some held that humans consist of three parts - body, soul and spirit. They are called trichotomists. Spirit is the essential human self which relates to God. Soul is that dimension of persons which mediates and conjoins the components body and soul (or spirit). Dichotomists on the other hand generally take "soul" and "spirit" as synonyms. Death cuts body and soul apart. Hence the term "dichotomy". Since this view entails that human beings consist of two metaphysically different and separable components, philosophers label it "dualism." This became the standard doctrine in Western theology and philosophy for more than a thousand years (Cooper, 1989: 9).

6.3.2.2 Church Fathers

For the Patristic writers, the person was an integral unity composed of body and soul. Bodily life was seen positively for the most part, and the eschatological expectation was the unity of body and soul, destroyed by death, which would be restored through the resurrection. Irenaeus, who was overseer of Lyons, says the soul and spirit are certainly a part of the human being, but certainly not a human being; the perfect human being consists in the commingling and the union of the soul receiving the spirit, and the admixture of that fleshly nature which was moulded after the image of God. Irenaeaus holds that salvation is available for the body as well as the soul, since both body and soul together form the person who has either faith or unbelief (Gousmett, 1993: 34-35).

Theodore of Mopsuestia holds that human nature consists of a body and a soul, and insists that the person is not the soul alone, but soul and body together (Norris, 1963: 151). The early Christians correctly realized that God had revealed the truth about the "composition"of the human being in His Word. They were, however, also aware of the fact that Greek philosophy had attained many moments of valuable insight. Many of the converts were philosophers who could not immediately rid themselves of their pagan convictions, and even those who enjoyed a Christian upbringing were still daily surrounded by pagan culture.

To defend Christianity against Greek philosophy, Christians had to use a terminology which they borrowed from pagan philosophy. The result was that all kinds of Greek ideas crept into Christian thought (Van der Walt, 1978a: 62). Just as New Testament writings strongly affirm the goodness of the body and material universe, they also provide evidence that the early Church was already involved in a struggle with dualistic influence. The term "Gnosticism," derived from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge, encompassed a variety of dualistic movements which become especially problematic in the opening centuries of Christianity (Prokes, 1996: 7-8). Gnostics developed the metaphysical dualisms of soul and body, and of gods as good and material as evil. They thoughtknowledge, and it alone, was redemptive. They taught that the universe itself was the result of a fallen condition, and that the body was useless and deceptive compared to the spirit within it. Gnostics hoped to take flight to the divine (Park, 2000: 65).

In contrast to the anti-physical bias of the contemporary pagan philosophy and despite the Greek tendency to denigrate the body, the Church Fathers generally adopted a "high"view of the body. This "high" view of the body is stated by many of the early apologists (Owen, 1956: 52).

Christianity must have been rooted early in Alexandria. It was the second city of the Roman Empire and there was a large Jewish population there. It was the home of Hellenistic Judaism of which the Jew philosopher Philo’s works are the outstanding monument. The young Christian movement began developing there (Oulton & Chadwick, 1954: 15). The fourth century historian Eusebius of Caesarea reports that the Apostle Mark was the first Bishop of Alexandria, a statement which does not take us beyond the realm of legend (Park, 2000: 78). Clement of Alexandria, who was principal of the Christian school at Alexandria, was a great Christian philosopher and theologian in his own right. Modern scholars have found Platonic, Stoic and Aristotelian elements in his writings. Because of this, Clement has alternatively been considered either as a Platonist or as a Stoic, or even an Aristotelian (Lilla, 1971: 1). Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others, have been described significantly as "the Christian Platonists of Alexandria."

According to Origen, God’s first creation was a collectivity of rational beings which he calls logika. Although Origen speaks of the logika as being created, they were not created in time. Creation with respect to them means that they had a beginning, but not a temporal one. These souls were originally created in close proximity to God, with the intention that they should explore the divine mysteries in a state of endless contemplation. They grew weary of this intense contemplation, however, and lapsed, falling away from God and into an existence on their own terms, apart from the divine presence and the wisdom to be found there. Thus departing from God, they came to be clothed in bodies, at first of a fine ethereal and invisible nature, but later, as souls fell further away from God, their bodies changed from a fine, ethereal and invisible body to a body of a coarser and more solid state. The purity and subtleness of the body with which a soul is enveloped depends upon the moral development and perfection of the soul to which it is joined. Origen states that there are varying degrees of subtleness even among the celestial and spiritual bodies. When a soul achieves salvation, according to Origen, it ceases being a soul, and returns to a state of pure "mind" or understanding. However, due to the fall, now no rational spirit can ever exist without a body (Kwon, 2002: 38). Only the bodies of redeemed souls are "spiritual bodies", made of the purest fire.

In the third century, the Latin father Tertullian went so far as to claim that the soul was corporeal. He wrote in his Soul’s Testimony that without the soul, we are nothing (Palmer, 2005: 9). What precisely he meant by this is by no means clear since he also insisted that the soul, in contrast to the body, was spiritual and immortal. Gregory of Nyssa, in the next century, continued this line of thought. He recognized, in a strikingly modern way, both the thoroughgoing interaction of mind and body and also the physiological basis of sensation and thought. This approach is fatal to a radical body-mind dualism (Owen, 1956:74).

6.3.3 Augustine of Hippo (354-430)

The fact that Augustine was a Platonist before his conversion is evident in his Christian doctrine of human nature. He has been called a Christian Platonist for holding that souls are not created but are by nature self-sufficient and have existed in eternity. His anthropology is recognizably Platonic. For one thing, he identifies the essential self with the soul rather than emphasising the body-soul composite, and he conceives of the soul as operating in the body. He insists on the unity of human nature.

Some of his later works emphasize that the human being is not just a soul, but a soul-body unity (Cooper,1989: 10-11). He had once also been a Manichean. Manicheans regarded the visible world as evil. They therefore banned marriage and considered having a baby as great sin. The Christian conception of the human being certainly rests, in its origin, upon a totally different anthropology.

The Christian philosophy founded by Clement of Alexandria and Origen and continued by Augustine developed into a vast system which became the doctrine of the Church. In the process, the pre-eminence of fundamental elements ofPlatonic anthropology was soon established. In the Middle Ages the first of the scholastic philosophies borrowed several of their ideas from Plotinus and through him from Plato (Zurcher, 1969: 32; cf. Han, 1970: 253). Han (1970: 256) says Augustine got acquainted with "the books of Neo-Platonism" during his nine year Manichean period. He read most of Plotinus’works during that time.

According to Cooper (1989: 11), the soul is superior to the body in Augustine’s philosophy / theology because it alone bears the image and knowledge of God. The body tends to divert the soul from spiritual things and to tempt it with sinful desires. The soul is also superior because it alone is immortal. Its immortality is conferred by God, to be sure.

Augustine’s anthropology is a two substance dualism. Human beings are composed of spirit and matter intimately conjoined and the soul permeates and animates the entire body. Where the body depends for its existence and activity upon the soul, the reverse is not true. According to Han (1970: 252-277), Augustine obeys two truths after his conversion, one is the traditional faith of the Church, and another is Platonic philosophical truth to which he has been exposed for a long time. For Augustine, the Biblical view was in fact supported by Platonic philosophy. Han also stresses that Augustine’s early works were seen to be the same as the Platonic philosophy. Even though Augustine wanted to use the Platonic philosophical system for extending Christian faith, it seems like he did not succeed in converting it to Christianity, but rather to a form of syncretism.

With respect to Augustine’s desire to find a viable alternative to the awkward and intractable moral dualism of the Manicheans, there can be little question that his embracing ofNeo-Platonism is a positive development. For Augustine, the individual human being is a body-soul composite, but in keeping with his Neo-Platonism there is an asymmetry between soul and body. As a spiritual entity, the soul is superior to the body, and it is the province of the soul to rule the body. This view presents a fairly positive conception of the soul-body relation, one that clearly runs counter to the Manichean picture of the soul’s entrapment (O’Connell, 2000: http://Plato.Stanford. Edu/ entries/ augustine).

In Augustine, also we find the idea of the intermediate state interpreted in unmistakably purgatorial terms. The interval between the death of the individual and the end of all things is used by God to purge the soul of the evil that clings to it because of its earthly misdeeds: "In this intermediate time, between the lying down and the receiving back of the body, souls will either be punished or rest in peace according to the deeds performed in their bodily existence" (Owen, 1956: 61-62).

Augustine’s De Civita Dei (The city of God) and his Civita terrena (The city of the world) are clearly also separate in deep principle. For him, Romanitas and church are obviously in dualistic opposition (Han, 1970: 318-322). Though Augustine does not himself propound the two-realm theory in the form of nature-grace, it has been shown that he adhered to a certain type of two-realm theory - possibly under the influence of Manichaeism. The idea of the desiderium naturale, so important to the nature-grace theory, can however be observed in the Platonic dualism which influenced Thomas Aquinas (Van der Walt, 1978a: 77-78).

6.3.4 Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274)

Thomas Aquinas was a great medieval thinker, a representative scholarof the Scholastic philosophy (Park, 2000: 155). He built up a philosophical system which in all kinds of ways rests on an Aristotelian foundation (Van Peursen, 1966: 116). Thomas’demonstration of the union of soul and body in the human being was an extension and completion of Aristotelian principles (Zamoyta, 1956: 24). In his massive Summa Theologicaand other works, Thomas built an impressive intellectual synthesis of Aristotelian and Christian ideas, which was new and controversial at the time, but hassince become Roman Catholic Orthodoxy (Stevenson, 1981: 73). In his anthropology Thomas cleverly combined important features of the Aristotelian body-soul relation with a basically Augustinian dualistic framework. In book 1, Question 75 of the Summa Theologica, Thomas proceeds "to treat of the human being, who is composed of a spiritual and a corporeal substance."This is clearly a two-substance dualism in line with Augustine. With Augustine, he holds that "the soul of the human being is a principle both incorporeal and subsistent" (Cooper, 1989: 12).

Aquinas revised Aristotle’s doctrine of a supra-personal mind. For Thomas mind is the soul-form that confers real stature and individuality upon the human being and that persists as personal being. The human being is indeed of a higher order than the animals but that is because it is mind in a personal context (intellectus agens), and this mind is the immortal soul.

In Thomas’s explanation of the body-soul relationship there is a greater measure of dualism than in Aristotle’s. For Aristotle, a soul that survives on a personal basis is inconceivable, because the soul is rendered concrete by the body. So the mind (soul)itself has for Aristotle a character of pure potentiality, since a basis for that would again have to be sought in the body. Thus where the relationship of soul to mind is concerned, there is a degree of vagueness in Aristotle’s system. In this respect, Thomas is more of a dualist than Aristotle, in that the latter envisages the soul wholly in terms of the empirical, sensibly perceptible order of living things (Van Peursen, 1966: 116).

Owen (1956: 62-63) insists that Thomas began his anthropology by following Aristotle closely. According to him, for Thomas the human being is not a composite of twodifferent substances, but rather a single unified substance in Aristotellian sense. Every substance in nature has two aspects, its form and its matter. Soul and body are thus inseparable aspects of one and the same substance and each requires the other in order to exist at all.

By the 13th century the doctrine of the immortality of the soul in the Greek sense had become so much a part of Christian thought that Thomas could not bring himself to deny it. In order to maintain this brief he had, in the end, to return to Aristotle’s dualism. His opinion changed gradually (cf. Stevenson, 1981: 73) and he arrived in the end with his own version of soul-body dualism. Prokes (1996: 15-16) says that Thomas rejected Platonic dualism and its disdain of the body by accepting Aristotle’s theory of hylemorphism, which affirmed body-soul unity. On the one hand, he held that there is no existence of soul apart from existence of the body. It is the nature of the soul, he said, to be the "form"of the body. On the other hand, Thomas said, it is the intellective principles that determine "the human being"as a species, and while the body has no part in the operation of the intellect, the soul has sensory powers which requires it to be a body. He concluded that the soul was a substance in its own right and did not die with the body. Thomas also says that thought is an activity of the soul alone and thus that the soul, having independent activity, is capable also of independent existence as incorruptible substance in its own right (Kenny, 1973: 80).

At the same time there was alongside the Thomistic synthesis a strong Neo-Platonic tradition of long standing in medieval thought. Thomas, in his synthesis, attempted to think Scripturally but exhibited an ambiguous attitude in trying to acknowledge Aristotle as well as the Bible (Van der Walt, 1978a: 139). This Neo-Platonic tradition in Christian thought enjoyed a revival in the 14th and 15th centuries. Its anthropology and ethics were prevalent and influential when the Protestant Reformers appeared on the scene (Owen, 1956: 65-68). Because of Thomas’s influence on the reformational labours of Luther, and Calvin in particular, Protestant theology relapsed into Aristotelian and Thomistic patterns (Van der Walt, 1978a: 133).

6.3.5 John Calvin (1509-1564)

There can be no doubt that the name of John Calvin is one of the great names in the history of the Christian church (Fowler, 1984: 339). The connection between belief in the immortality of the independent soul and a dualistic analysis of human nature is found again in the Reformers (Owen, 1956: 71) like Calvin. Calvin succeeds Augustine by continuing the tradition of Augustinian Platonism into the Protestant Reformation (Min, 2002: 43). According to Calvin, for example, ancient Philosophers "hardly one, except Plato, has rightly affirmed immortal substance". He says,

It would be foolish to seek a definition of "soul"from the philosophers. Of them hardly one, except one, has rightly affirmed its immortal substance. Indeed, others like Socratics also touch upon it but in a way that shows how nobody teaches clearly a thing of which he has not been persuaded. Hence Plato’s opinion is more correct, because he considers the image of God in the soul (Calvin, Institutes: І, 15, 6 Shults, 2003: 169).

Calvin says the human being consists of soul and a body. The human being was taken from earth and clay. For nothing is more absurd than for those who not only "dwell in houses of clay", but who are themselves in part earth and dust, to boast of their own excellence. But since God not only deigned to give life to an earthen vessel, but also willed it to be the abode of immortal spirit, Adam could rightly glory in the great liberty of his Maker (Calvin, Institutes: І, 15, 1) The body is the house of clay in which the noble soul lives for the time being. It is no help to the soul but rather fetters the soul as in a prison (Calvin, Institutes: І, 15, 2). The soul is the part of the human being that naturally attracts him or her towards heaven while the body is that part that naturally ties them down to the earth. It is not just the body that is sinful but the body in its own nature that has this earthbound character that weighs down, fetters, imprisons and limits the soul (Calvin, Institutes: І, 15, 3). He stresses that "the body is earthly by nature; the soul is heavenly by nature"(Calvin, Tracts and Treatises, Vol. 3: 443. re-quoted in Fowler, 1984: 343). He thus makes a distinction between "earthly things" and "heavenly things" (Calvin, Institutes: П, 2, 13).

In Calvin’s view, soul and body are two distinct "essences"or "substances." There is "one person" in the human being, composed of two elements joined together and two diverse underlying natures that make up this person. Though these essences, elements or substances are joined together in the human being "yet neither is so mingled with the other as not to retain its own distinctive nature" (Calvin, Institutes: П, 14, 1). Soul is immortal and heavenly by nature, bearing the image of God, and intended to rise above the earthly creation to God (Calvin, Institutes: П, 2, 12).

In Calvin’s Institutes, his conception of body and soul is the same as in the Platonic dualistic anthropological structure (Kim, 1994: 37). Calvin generally follows the dualistic anthropology of Western ancient philosophy according to which the human being has two substances, soul and body (Lee, 1985: 118-120). For earthly matters natural reason is sufficient, but for heavenly matters it requires the restoration of supernatural gifts to lift it above the earthly. It is only as the soul is illuminated by the Holy Spirit in the restoration of the supernatural gifts that it "takes on a new keenness, as it were to contemplate the heavenly mysteries, whose splendour had previously blinded it" (Calvin, Institutes: П, 2, 12). So, in Calvin’s anthropology the human being is composed of two distinct substances or essences, soul and body. The body is animal, earthbound, unable to participate in heavenly things. It is a weight and a restriction on the human being’s life.

Besides the dualism of body and soul in Calvin’s anthropology there is also a dualism of the natural and the supernatural in the functioning of the soul. Dualistic anthropology is matched in Calvin by a dualistic view of the world, although this is not spelt out as explicitly as his anthropology. His anthropology demands a dualistic world view, however, and it may well be asked whether it is not his anthropology that drives him to a dualistic world view (Fowler, 1984: 345-346). Broadly speaking, Calvin tended toward Platonic dualism, which makes sense in light of his preference for the patristic Christology of Antiochenes, who distinguished between the two natures of Christ.

6.3.6 Modern Thought

6.3.6.1 René Descartes (1509-1564)

The Frenchman RenéDescartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution, being a mathematician, experimental scientist and philosopher. His philosophical dualism of body and soul provided an obvious solution to the problems involvedin applying science to the human being, because the body could be understood as the subject of a deterministic, mechanical explanation, whereas the distinctively human attributes of thought, rationality, and freedom could be located in the incorporeal soul, beyond all reach of science (Stevenson, 1981: 81). He, in adducing a sharp division between soul and body, has had an enormous influence on philosophy after him. Actually, what he does is to enunciate clearly something of which whole modern culture is the living expression: duality of the spiritual and the material. Descartes maintained the separateness of body and soul consistently and with extraordinary clarity (Van Peursen, 1966: 19). He says, among others,

But what is the human being? Might I not say a "rational animal"? No, because then I would have to inquire what "animal" and "rational" mean. . . Now it occurred to me first that I had a face, hands, arms, and this entire mechanism of bodily members, the very same as are discerned in a corpse, and which I referred to by the name "body." It next occurred to me that I took in food, that I walked about, and that I sensed and thought various things; these actions I used to attribute to the soul. But as to what this soul might be, I either did not think about it or else I imagined it a rarefied I-know-not-what, like a wind, or a fire, or either, which had been infused into my coarser parts. But as to the body I was not in any doubt (Descartes, 1993 Meditation two: 26).

He believed that in actual fact a human being is an "intimate union" of mind and body. In saying that I (or my mind, or my soul) am separate and distinct from my body, he meant to be speaking only of what is possible. As far as the concept of myself and my body are concerned, I could exist without a body. Descartes did not mean merely that I, having dwelt in a union with my body for some years, might be separated from it and yet survive in a disembodied condition. He meant that I might have to exist without ever having hada body. In that state what would my mental life be? Logically speaking, it could have been the same as it is and has been. For my nature is to doubt, understand, affirm, deny, will, imagine and feel. As a bodiless mind I would do those things (Malcolm, 1972: 5-6).

According to Van Peursen (1966: 32-33), Descartes has to shoulder the responsibility for every single instance of dualism in philosophy. It would be more true to say that in some sense he interprets what had been latent for a long time in the climate of Western philosophy and even now persists as an active influence in the body-and-soul debate. Though Descartes never taught a thoroughgoing dualism, he hovers in the vicinity of dualism when he says,

It is certain that I am truly distinct from my body, and can exist without it (Cooper, 1989: 15).

We are likely to call on the observation that each human being has a mind and a body; that they are interdependent; that they are essentially and distinctively a human mind and body; that there is no understanding of being of that kind - being a the human being - without a better understanding of how each such being depends on the existence of his mind and body (Almog, 2002: 153). For Descartes, during this life body and soul interact. The soul causes the body to move, and the body delivers sensations of itself and the external world to the soul. Transactions occur in the pineal gland, where "animal spirit"rarefies and condenses, thereby bearing information back and forth from soul to body. Thus Descartes’ anthropology is called dualistic interactionism (Cooper, 1989: 15-16), or interactionist dualism (Bunge, 1980: 27).

6.3.6.2 Thomas Hobbes (1588-1678), George Berkeley (1685-1753), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)

The materialism of Thomas Hobbes, a contemporary of Descartes, is exhibited in his treatment of life as a motion of the limbs, of sensation as a motion in the organs within the body, and of desire as the inner cause of bodily movement. There is no mention of soul (Stevenson, 1981: 86). The Hobbes-Gassendi type of materialism produced an anthropology that was unacceptable not only because of the difficulty it encountered in satisfactorily explaining human consciousness, but also because it entailed a flat denial of human freedom in any sense whatever (Owen, 1956: 87). Hobbes held that all creatures consist of only one substance. According to him, the notion of an incorporeal substance is incoherent. Persons are not some combination of matter and spirit, but are wholly corporeal beings. Psychological states and events are produced in us by the motion of the body’s complex machinery. Consciousness is not the essential feature of an immaterial substance, but the result of the conjunction of all these effects of the body’s internal motions (Cooper, 1989: 17-18).

Irish philosopher Berkeley goes a fairly long way towards denying the existence of matter and representing the mind of the human being as a fixed point or centre. He reached the following conclusion: matter does not exist, but minds do (the mind of God and the minds of the human being, in particular). Nor does he deny the existence of the body. Only for him, the body (his own body just as much as things) is a symbol of the presence of mind (Van Peursen, 1966: 65). There are no material "things" or substance, only collections of sense-qualities or ideas. But though he rejected the existence of material substance, Berkeley, rather oddly (he later became a bishop), retained the notion of spiritual substance or souls. Reality consists of spiritual substances, or minds and their ideas (Owen, 1956: 91).

The Dutch Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza determines to treat human phenomena as subject to the same laws of nature as everything else - and therefore, in his rationalist viewpoint, capable of explanation by the deductive methods of mathematics. Then he declares his faith in the future progress of a science of human nature, suggesting very perceptively that the physical complexities within the body greatly exceed what could then be conceived. This faith makes more intelligible his identification of mind and body as different aspects of one complex whole, and his statement that the mind has no power of its own to act independently of what is going on in the body (Stevenson, 1981: 94).

The ontologies of these three philosophers are monistic because reality as a whole is defined as one absolute substance. In the case of Spinoza, this single whole can be considered in two ways, thus displaying two aspects or modes of existence. Viewed one way, reality is God; viewed another, it is Nature. That single substance, therefore, is neither exclusively spirit nor matter but possesses properties of both, each available to human apprehension from a different standpoint (Cooper, 1989: 19-20).

6.3.6.3 Modern scientists

The 19thcentury was when the various sciences began to concern themselves more and more with the study of human nature. Science concluded that there is a vast array of natural, material conditions that play a large part in shaping human life, including such factors as thought, choice, morality, and character which were formerly ascribed to the independent soul. Science has taught us to look at the human being as a unified psychosomatic organism. In the scientific view, the human being is a unitary being in whom the physical aspects are so completely interrelated and overlapping that no clear lines can be drawn between them, except more or less arbitrarily for purposes of analysis (Owen, 1956: 97-98).

Scientifically, the most plausible view to date is that of a one-one (or at least a one-many) correspondence of mental states and neuro-physiological process patterns. The investigations of Wolfgang Kohler, Edgar D. Adrian, Wilder Penfield, Donald O. Hebb, Warren S.McCulloch and others, strongly confirm such a correspondence in the form of an isomorphism of the patterns in the phenomenal fields with simultaneous patterns of neural processes in various areas of the brain (Stevenson, 1981: 312-313). Brain physiologists and psychiatrists noticed the direct casual influence of cerebral functioning on states of consciousness. Mental capacities such as thought, memory, understanding, and even the use of the senses were found to be correlated with specific areas of the brain. Consciousness, mental capacities and personality characteristics are rooted in the brain of the organism, not in some immaterial substance or unobservable entity called the soul or mind (Cooper, 1989: 22-24).

Nancy Murphy’s (2006: 55-56) argument in brief is that all of the human capacities once attributed to the mind or soul are now being fruitfully studied as brain processes - or, more accurately - processes involving the brain, the rest of the nervous system and other bodily systems, all interacting with the socio-cultural world.

6.4 Different Views ofHuman Nature

6.4.1 Dualism

6.4.1.1 Trichotomy

One popular view in conservative Protestant circles has been termed "trichotomism."A human is composed of three elements, according to this view. The first element is the physical body, the second is the soul, and the third the spirit. Trichotomism became particularly popular in the Alexandrian school, and also with Gregory of Nyssa. It fell into disrepute after Apollinarius made use of it in constructing his Christology, which the church determined to be heretical (Erickson, 2001: 539).

The word "trichotomy" is Greek for "to cut into three parts" (Baker, 1991: 43). It was taught in the 19th century by Franz Delitsch, John B. Heard, Johann T. Beck and Gustav F. Oehler. More recently it has been defended by such writers as Watchman Nee, Charles R Solomon, and Bill Gothard (Hoekema, 1986: 205). Berkhof argues that such tri-partite conception of the human being originated in Greek philosophy, which conceived of the relation of the body and the spirit / soul of the human to each other after the analogy of the mutual relation between the material universe and God (Berkhof, 1971: 191-192). Trichotomists hold that the soul is earthbound and is common to the human being and animals, but spirit is the consciousness of God / god which no animal has (cf. Erickson, 2001: 539).

The widely used Scofield Reference Bible also teaches trichotomy (Clark, 1984: 38-39). Thessalonians 5: 23 note 1 reads in part:

The human being is a trinity. That the human soul and spirit are notidentical is proved by the fact that they are divisible (Hebrews 4:22), and that the soul and spirit are sharply distinguished in the burial and resurrection of the body . . . 1 Corinthians 15:44. . . The distinction is that the spirit is that part of the body . . . which "knows" (1 Corinthians 2:11), his mind; the soul is the seat of his affections, desires, and so of emotions, and of the active will, the self. . . The word translated "soul" (נפש) in the O T is the exact equivalent of the N T word for soul (Greek ψυχη), and the use of "soul"in the O T is identical with the use of that word in the N T (see e.g. Deuteronomy 6:5; 14:26) . . . because the human being is "spirit" he is capable of God-consciousness . . . because he is "body" he has, through his sense, world-consciousness.

6.4.1.2 Dichotomy

The church’s attack on trichotomy was carried out in spite of the fact that Scripture uses expressions which seem to imply such a threefold division of the self (Anderson, 1982: 208). Probably the most widely held view throughout most of the history of Christian thought has been the view that the human is composed of two elements, a material aspect (the body) and an immaterial component (the soul and spirit).

Dichotomism was commonly held from the earliest period of Christian thought. Following the Council of Constantinople in 381 A D it grew in popularity to the point where it was virtually the universal belief of the church. Many of the arguments for dichotomism are arguments against the trichotomist conception (Erickson, 2001: 540). Dichotomism has been much more widely held than trichotomism (Hoekema, 1986: 209). While Berkhof, according to Baker (1991: 43), insists on the unitary nature of the human, he expounds dichotomism. He says, among others:

The prevailing representation of the nature of the human being in Scripture is clearly dichotomy (Berkhof, 1971: 192).

On the one hand the Bible teaches us to view the nature of the human being as a unity, and not as duality, consisting of two different elements, which move along parallel lines but do not really unite to form a single organism (Berkhof, 1971: 192)

At the same time it also contains evidence of the dual composition of the human being’s nature. We should be careful, however, not to expect the later distinction between the material element, and the soul as the spiritual element, of human nature, in the Old Testament (Berkhof, 1971: 193 ).

The operations of the soul are connected with the body as its instrument in the present life; butfrom the continued conscious existence and activity of the soul after death it appears that it can also work without the body (Berkhof, 1971: 196).

Gordon Clark also believed that dichotomy is the teaching of Scripture. He argued from Hebrew 4:12, which is sometimes quoted to defend a division between soul and spirit.The basic division in this verse is not three-fold but twofold: soul and spirit versus joints and marrow. The verse therefore closely conjoins them, and in this instance too it favours dichotomy (Clark, 1984, 33-45).

6.4.2 Monism

Many philosophers have been unable to stomach an ultimate dualism of mind / spirit / soul, and matter, and have been drawn to various forms of monism (Malcolm, 1972: 60). Monism is the theory that the human being consists of one substance only.

As the authority of church and traditional theology waned after the Reformation, alternative approaches to philosophical anthropology were introduced. One dominant modern challenge to dualism is materialism, the view that human beings, both body and soul, consist solely of matter and its functions (Cooper, 1989: 17). Materialism fastens its attention on physical processes. Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872), who was the most eminent and most refined thinker among the German materialists of the 19th century, maintained that just as there is no other thing, no mysterious substance, no soul behind the body, so likewise there is no God to be discovered behind natural order.

His anthropology is based on science which concerns itself with the concrete, sensory human being, and consequently he will have nothing to do with the soul or with "spirit."Feuerbach sees the encounter and bond between men as events belonging wholly to the physical realm of the senses. That alone is real which can be related directly to the senses and combined with them. The soul and body substances are abstractions which the intellect isolates. Feuerbach’s philosophy then is a refined materialism - materialism because in it the soul is ultimately reduced to the category of the physical (Van Peursen, 1966: 54-57).

Dialectical materialism, which represents an important advance on the older materialism in philosophy, comes down to the assumption that the physic is a product - the least and highest product - of matter; it is a function of the extraordinary complex bit of matter which forms the human brain. Thinking is a function of its organ, the brain, and so consciousness is secondary, derivative, a figuration of matter (Van Peursen, 1966: 60).

Herbert Feigl is best known for his materialist answer to the mind-body problem - the so-called "identity theory"- which says that all mental events are actually physical events in the brain and central nervous system (Stevenson, 1981: 310). Materialism maintains that consciousness is a form of brain activity; that it is either some fine and subtle kind of matter, or (more commonly) some form of energy, either kinetic or potential (Pratt, 1922: 11-12).

Twentieth century Behaviourism defines thoughts and intentions as the dispositions of bodily beings to react to external circumstances in particular ways. The mind-body identity theory holds that thoughts and sensations are just events in brain. Also Epiphenomenalism believes that thoughts and sensations are directly generated by the brain (Cooper, 1989: 18-19). In the Behaviourist view, mental descriptions are not descriptions of the human being’s mental part. They are descriptions of his behaviour and his dispositions to behave (Campbell, 1980: 60; For a general account of several contemporary forms of materialism see Campbell, 1980; Owen, 1956: chapter 5; Armstrong, 1968; Margolis, 1978; Bunge, 1980; Shaffer, 1968; Stevenson, 1981 Corcoran, 2005).

6.5 The Biblical View of the Human Being

6.5.1 Words with Anthropological Relevance in the Old Testament

6.5.1.1 Nephesh (נ פ ש)

The concept nephesh (נ פ ש) characterizes human existence in a distinctive manner. Localized in the throat, the organ through which nourishment is taken (Psalms 107:5, 9), it calls attention to human need and desire; the longing, seeking and yearning of human beings (Psalms 24:1-2, 35:25, 42:1-2). It also represents the seat of spiritual feeling and inner conditions. The human being is "soul," which approximates what we mean by person, the "I" (cf. Psalms. 54:3; 84:2) (Hogan, 1994: 244).

Although nephesh has frequently been translated as "soul", it has a variety of meanings. Nephesh is used of animals as well as people in the sense of "living creature", and occasionally it even means "dead person" (Numbers 5:2; 6:11) (Cooper, 1989: 42-43; Jewett, 1996: 37). Nephesh is the human being, manifold in aspect, but in nature indivisible. Nephesh sorrows, hungers and thinks because each of these functions requires the whole personality to perform it, and the distinction between emotional, physical and mental is not made (Stacey, 1956: 85-87).

Nephesh also refers to "the inner being of the human being," "living being" (used of human beings and animals), "the human being himself" (often used as a personal pronoun: myself, himself, etc; in this sense it may mean the human being as a whole), "seat of the appetites", "seat of the emotions".

It is clear, therefore, that the word nephesh may often stand for the whole person, and the best translation in many instances is "person" (Hoekema, 1986: 210). Baker (1991: 83) argues that nephesh has a range of meaning that includes the whole person, a unity of the body, will, life, and emphasizes personal desire or inclination.

6.5.1.2 Ruach (ר ו ח)

The Hebrew word ruach (ר ו ח) is generally translated as "spirit," meaning wind, breath of life, life-giving power (Genesis 2:7). The divine breath enters and makes one into a living being in unity and wholeness, and when the breath departs the human being returns to dust (Psalms 146:4) (Hogan, 1994:245). So ruach is a vital force, power or energy which animates living creatures. Ruach overlaps in meaning with nephesh. Ruach, therefore, must not be thought of as a separable aspect of the human being, but as the whole person viewed from a certain perspective (Hoekema, 1986: 210-211). The same principle of the whole human being represented by each aspect holds good for parts of the body, as for nephesh and ruach. Each physical organ can be thought to represent the full personality (Stacey, 1956: 91).

6.5.1.3 Leb (ל ב), lebab (ל ב ב)

At the centre of human life is the leb (ב ל) or lebab (ל ב ב) in Hebrew. These words are usually translated as "heart." This is the site of all thought, planning, reflection, explanation, ambition and decision (Psalms 4:4, 10:6, 15:2). In the Psalms, the heart with its depth dimension is characterized and interpreted in relationship to Yahweh (Hogan, 1994: 244-245). Von Meyenfeldt, in his study of the word, concludes that leb or lebabusually represents the whole person and has a predominantly religious significance (Hoekema, 1986: 211). The key part of the human being, in Old Testament terms, is not body, soul, or breath, but "heart."The heart is thus significant as a physical reality, and is depicted as the source of our attitudes and actions, whether evil (Genesis 8:21), joyous (Psalms 105:3), obedient (1 Kings 14:8), courageous (Psalms 27:14), or repentant (Psalms 34:18), for example. God "looks on heart" (1 Samuel 16:7), not merely on outward appearance, and salvation is described as being given a new heart and a new breath / spirit, a "heart of flesh" and not of "stone" (Ezekiel36:26). This centrality of "heart" indicates the unitary emphasis of the Old Testament on human life, and this continues into the New (Romans 2:5; 5:5). We are clearly fleshly, but not only that; heart, kidney, bowels, and even the liver are spoken of as typifying various facets of human existence (Sherlock, 1996: 215-216).

6.5.1.4 Basar (ב ש ר)

Human beings are basar (ב ש ר) in Hebrew, frequently translated as "flesh". The flesh is subject to attack, injury, damage and decay. Human beings are flesh in the form of the physical body which is weak, vulnerable and perishable (cf. Psalms 16:9, 102:5, 38:3; Hogan, 1994: 243-244). Basarhas a variety of meanings; it can refer to the muscle tissue in distinction from bones, fat, tendons and sinews, as in Ezekiel 37 (Cooper, 1989: 44-45).

The word basar is often used to describe the human being in his or her weakness (Jeremiah 17:5). It may sometimes denote the entire person, not just the physical aspect. But it may also be joined with nephesh in ways that refer to the whole human being. In the Old Testament basar, with emphasis on the external side, is often used to denote the whole person. Thus, the thought-world of the Old Testament totally excludes any kind of dichotomy or dualism that would picture the human being as made up of two distinct substances (Hoekema, 1986: 21-213).

All the Hebrew terms discussed above point to the human being as a total, integrated and whole being, personality without abstract divisions. The term used in a particular context is the one that will embrace a particular aspect of human life in the most appropriate way in that context. This conclusion points to the fact that Hebrew psychology was synthetic, and that the drift of Hebrew thought was towards understanding the human being and her actions as a whole or a totality. Every aspect of the human being should therefore be understood only in relation to human wholeness (Stacey, 1956: 93-95).

6.5.2 Words with Anthropological Relevance in the New Testament

6.5.2.1 Psyche (ψυχη)

The Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, whereas the Greek term is psyche (ψυχη), from which English derives such word as "psychic" and "psychology." In the New Testament, psyche appears mostly in the narrative parts, especially the synoptic gospels and the book of Acts. In Acts 27:22 it means "the life," in Acts 3:23 the "whole person," in Acts 14:2 a place of feeling, in Mark 8:35-36 the "supreme good," and in Matthew 10:28 it is used in contrast with the body (Baker, 1991: 83-84). When so used, psyche (ψυχη) connotes life not only in the biological but also in the spiritual sense, as when Jesus asks what would profit one to gain the whole world and lose one’s life (Mark 8:36 Jewett, 1996: 37-38).

Owen (1956: 181-182) argues that the Lord spoke Aramaicand not Greek, and that the meanings of the words and phrases must be sought not in the Greek, but in the Hebrew background out of which, humanly speaking, he sprang. In Hebrew thought, as we have seen, the word translated "soul" regularly stands simply for the personal pronoun and means the self. And the phrase "body and soul,"though its occurrence is rare in both Testaments, stands for the Hebrew idea that the human being is an "animated body" and not for the Greek view that he is an "incarnated soul."

The three elements of the psyche- intellect, will, and emotions - are all interrelated and are further grounded in spirit and manifested on the level of the bodily. The human being is a complex unity with the integrated person holding a creative tension in all the dimensions of her life (O’Grady, 1976: 127-129).

Psyche is often used in the Gospels to describe the whole the human being; it is clear, that psyche, like nephesh, often stands for the whole person (Hoekema, 1986: 213).

In the writings of Paul, a variant of psyche is found, namely psychikos, which is used in contrast to pneumatikos (spiritually) and means "natural" (see 1 Corinthians 2:14). Also, it is used to contrast the present physical, mortal body with the future resurrection body in Corinthians 15:44. The Bible tends to use another word for this eternal aspect of humanity –spirit - although ultimate humanity is taught as a unity of the physical and spiritual after the resurrection takes place (Baker, 1991: 84). Paul never uses it in the strict sense of the "soul" i.e. the God related portion of the human being (Jewett: 1971).

"Soul" is not a "part" of the human being. It is also not a vague and shadowy substance. The word "soul"denotes the concrete, earthly personality for whom breathing and circulation of blood, emotional life and so forth are most important (Van der Walt, 1978b: 109). The Arndt-Gingrich Lexicon(1957) of New Testament Greek lists a number of meanings for the word, some of which are "life-principles," "earthly life itself," "seat of the inner life of the human being (including feelings and emotions)", "seat and centre of life that transcends the earthly", "that which processes life: a living creature".

6.5.2.2 Pneuma (πνευμα)

Pneuma (πνευμα), is the same word as ruach in the Old Testament, and is where English gets such words as "pneumatic" and "pneumonia." Pneuma is almost always the word used for translating ruach in the LXX, and in the New Testament it means approximately the same thing (Baker, 1991: 84-85). It is spiritthat gives the human being her apparently limitless possibilities. The gift of intellect can be meagre, the power of the will affected by outside influences, the emotions can be confused, but on the level of spirit, the human being can become ever more ashe commits himself to a value, to an ideal, to purpose and meaning in life. The spiritual level is most properly the possibility of human life since it is here that the human being can transcend the limitations imposed on him by his psyche and his body.

Spirit is free; spirit is the possibility of growth in self-awareness (O’Grady, 1976: 126). In Paul’s writing, pneuma (πνευμα) refers to human psychological functions (1 Corinthians 7:34), the whole person (2 Corinthians 2:13) and the "new I" of the person of faith (1 Corinthians 5:3) (Baker, 1991, 84-85). The spirit of the human being is not a separate higher substance in the human being. Spirit is the human being himself, the human being himself is spirit.

Spirit may also be viewed as the seat of different emotions or a constant power which causes vitality, an inner concentrated motive force (Van der Walt, 1978b: 109-110). The Arndt-Gingrich Lexicon (1957) gives eight meanings of pneuma, including the following: "the spirit as part of human personality," "a person’s self or ego," "a disposition and state of mind." Pneuma may also refer to life after death. Hebrew 12:23 describes deceased saints as "the spirits of righteous men made perfect," and both Christ (Luke 23:46) and Stephen (Acts 7:59) as they are dying commit their spirit to God the Father or God the Son. Pneuma, it is clear, is often used to designate the whole person; it, like psyche, describes an aspect of the human being in her totality (Hoekema, 1986: 213-214).

6.5.2.3 Kardia (καρδια)

Kardia (καρδια) is the New Testament equivalent of the Hebrew leb and lebab, usually translated as "heart." Arndt-Gingrich (1957) gives the main meaning of this word as "the seat of physical, spiritual and mental life." It is also described as thecentre and source of the whole inner life of the human being, with its thinking, feeling and volition. The heart is also said to be the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit (Hoekema, 1986: 214-215). The New Testament kardia coincides closely with the Old Testament understanding of the term: the inner life, centre of personality and the place in which God reveals himself to human being.

It is clear that kardia in Paul continues the general Old Testament usage (Stacy, 1956: 197). For example, it is the centre of physical life (Luke 21:34) and of spiritual life (2 Corinthians 3:14). Sin can dominate the heart (Mark 7:21). It is the seat of the will (Acts 11:23), and it is that which determines moral conduct (Luke 16:15) (Baker, 1991: 87). The meaning of heart is the innermost "part,"the central point, the most important constituent, the nucleus of the human being.

Because of this, "heart" has a representative use. It is the genuine, the essential, the authentic in which something is completely represented. It represents the whole person. The representation may be distinguished but it cannot be separated from the whole of the human being. The heart of the human being is not her "second half," and use of the word does not imply a dualistic anthropology. The human being’s whole life is an outflow from his heart. The whole of life is religion (Van der Walt, 1978b: 110-111). Herman Bavinck in his Biblical and Religious Psychology says that the "heart in Holy Scripture is regarded as the base and starting point of the entire physical, and….the entire physical life of the human being." The Reformed philosopher Dooyeweerd claims to have captured the Biblical view of the heart in his concept of a pre-functional, supra-temporal ego or religious self (Dooyeweerd, 1980: 181, 186, 189). Dooyeweerd (1955:299) in his A New Critique of Theoretical Thought says that "only in the heart does the function of faith find its religious concentration, and from this spiritual root of our existence the direction of our believing is determined." Jesus describes the human being’s religious relationship (i.e. love) as the "greatest commandment," reiterating an appeal to the whole person (Matthew. 22:37-38; Luke. 12:29) (Sherlock, 1996: 216).

6.5.2.4 Sarx (σαρχ)

In the New Testament there are two words for body: sarx (σαρχ) and soma (σωμα). Arndt-Gingrich(1957)lists eight meanings for sarx, among others "body", "a human being", "human nature", "physical limitation", "the outward side of life", and "the willing instrument of sin"(particularly in Paul’s writing) (Hoekema, 1986: 215). The use of the word "flesh"in Romans is characterized on the one side by a more consistently negative definition as the circumcised flesh and thus the whole range of human achievement which can provide a means of self-justification. Paul uses "flesh" as the source of corruption and sin (Jewett, 1971: 455). Only in the New Testament does the word "flesh" (sarx) take on a metaphorical or abstract meaning that corresponds to something in inner humanity. In Pauline theological usage it means that which is oriented toward the self, which pursues its own ends in self-seeking independence of God.

Elsewhere in the New Testament, "flesh," along with "blood,"is sometimes contrasted with God (Matthew 16:17), and "fleshly desires"are seen as waging war against the soul (Baker, 1991: 87-88). Van der Walt (1978b:110) insists that in the Bible we sometimes find a close relationship between flesh and sin. In such cases, flesh does not indicate a lower part of the human being as sinful, but the whole un-regenerated sinful human being.

Also Hoekema argues that sarx in the New Testament, then, has two main meanings: (1) the external, physical aspect of the human being’s existence - in this sense it may be used of the human being as a whole (cf. Owen, 1956: 191); and (2) flesh as the tendency within the fallen human to disobey God in every area of life. In this second sense, found chiefly in Paul’s epistles, the meaning of sarxshould not be restricted so as to refer only to what we commonly call "fleshly sins" (sins of body). So even when the word sarxis used in the second sense, it looks at the whole person, and not at a part of him (Hoekema, 1986: 216).

Van der Walt (1978b: 110) also concludes that the words soul, body, spirit and flesh do not refer to the human being in her component parts.

6.5.2.5 Soma (σωμα)

The word soma (σωμα) is commonly translated as "body." Arndt-Gingrich (1957) gives five meanings of the word, among which the following: "the living body", "the resurrection body" and "the Christian community or church" (Hoekema, 1986: 216). In the Christian tradition there has often been the sin of contempt for the bodily. There has been a tendency to refuse to accept the limitations of the body and to concentrate on the more spiritual activities of the human being. But a human being without the body is not a human being. A strict materialism will deny any spiritual element in the human being and will try to explain all through the manipulation and control of genes and chromosomes (O’Grady, 1976: 132-133).

It is clear that Scripture treats the body and bodily organs of the human person as the visible and object life of the soul. According to Tracey (1956: 190-191), both here and hereafter soma is the centre of the personal life; this has led to the supposition that it comes nearest to our conception of personality.

6.5.3 Conclusion with Respect to Biblical Words and Expressions relevant to the "Composition" of the Human Being

Owen insists that the human being as sarx cannot inherit the Kingdom of God (1 Corinthians 15:50), but the human being as soma (and only soma) can. He believes that the human being is a unity. In this personal unity the human being can be called a whole either in terms of soma (body), psyche (soul), sarx (flesh) or pneuma (spirit), depending on the point of view from which the human is considered.

The point is that none of these terms refers to a part of the human being; they all refer to the whole person, each from a particular perspective or vantage point. It follows that if the human being is an indivisible unity, there is no detachable part of him that can survive death (Owen, 1956: 196). "Body," for instance, indicates the unity and relationship between persons (Jewett, 1971: 456-458). It refers to the whole or total person, considered from the point of view of her external, physical existence (Robinson, 1963: 17-18). "Body"is not to be thought of as detached from the human being herself, as though it were only the material-sensual organization of the person: the human being not only "has" a body, but is a body (Ridderbos, 1978: 59). Van der Walt (1978b: 109) concurs with this view in saying that "body"does not indicate a part of the human being, for instance the lower part, as has frequently been thought in the history of philosophy. It denotes the whole concrete the human being.

Whereas most New Testament scholars, as far as could be ascertained, believe that there is an abstract use of the Greek word soma to indicate the whole person, Gundry has recently propounded the idea that soma never means more than the physical body as the instrument for doing righteousness or doing sin (Gundry, 1987: 6). Baker (1991: 89) has the same view.

We can summarize the discussion of the biblical words used for describing the various aspects of the human being as follows: the human being must always be understood as a unitary, whole and total being. She has a physical as well as a mental, spiritual and soul side; these can be distinguished but can and should never be separated. The human person must be seen in his totality, not as a composite of different "parts." This, in brief, is the clear teaching of both Old and New Testaments (Hoekema, 1989:216). The body, which is often denigrated as the "lower part" of the human being, is in fact a gift of God for the human person’s whole being: "Glorify God therefore in your body" (I Corinthians 6:20).

6.5.4 The Biblical View of the Human Being: The Wholly Integrated Person

The "composition" of the human being has always been a most vexing problem (Niebuhr, 1996: 1). The body-soul problem is not a dead issue, an old fashioned theological or philosophical topic which no one cares about any more. It is exactly the body-soul question that bears on our personal beliefs, hopes and how we educate young people, also in the context of the church as a societal relationship (Cooper, 1989: 1).

According to the traditional theological view of the human being, we find that the human being has often been seen as composed of a material, transitory and perishable body and of an immaterial, rational and eternal soul. These "components"were conceived of as united in one substance. Nevertheless, according to this view, the rational soul continues to exist as an independent substance after separation from the body, i.e. after death. This view of the human being was taken from Greek philosophy, which sought the centre of human existence in reason, i.e. in the intellect (Dooyeweerd, 1980: 57-58). This anthropological dualism tends to instil anthropological schizophrenia in theologians, philosophers, educationists and educators: on the one hand the human being is taken to live bodily or physically and on the other hand she is taken to be a spiritual being.

History has proved that it is not easy keep a balance between the two (Van der Walt, 1978b: 106). However, thesedualistic (dichotomous; trichotomous) views of human nature supported by many must be rejected (Hoekema, 1986: 205). One way of doing so, is to follow Gundry’s advice that "duality"rather than dualism is indeed taught in both Old and New Testament, particularly in the writings of Paul (Gundry, 1976: 83). Still, we can argue that the human being is not just matter plus awareness plus an immortal spirit. The human being’s body is not just lifeless matter. Scripture does not make a distinction between an animal soul and a human spirit (cf. Isaiah26:9; Luke 1:46-47), which trichotomists do. Scripture also nowhere teaches that the human being has an "immortal spirit" as do neo-Platonic trichotomists (Lee, 32-33).

In terms of biblical perspectives, dichotomy as well as trichotomy should be rejected. They are not accurate descriptions of the Biblical view of the human being. The core of both "dichotomy" and "trichotomy" is the Greek word temnein, meaning "to cut."These two terms therefore implies that the human person can be "cut" or divided into two or three "parts."According to the Bible, this is not possible; it describes the human person as a totality, a whole, a unity (Hoekema, 1986: 204-210). Scripture never pictures the human being as a dualistic or pluralistic being, but rather that in all its varied expressions the whole human being comes to the fore, in all his guilt and sin, his need and oppression, his longings and his nostalgia. Body and soul / spirit are not, therefore intrinsically opposed substances or "components" (Price, 2002: 162).

Although the Bible makes use of a variety of terms to describe the human being, the human being remains a total and holistic being, as has been concluded in the previous section. The Biblical terms body, soul, flesh, mind, spirit, heart all refer to different aspects, features, characteristics, modalities of human existence, much like the different facets of a polished diamond (Van der Walt, 2002: 103). Different words like soma (body) or psyche (soul) or sarx(flesh) or pneuma (spirit) can be used to refer to the human person, depending on the point of view from which the person is being considered. None of these terms refers to a part of the human being; they all refer to the whole.

It follows that if the human being is an indivisible unity, then there is no detachable part of him that can survive death. The New Testament, therefore, does not teach a doctrine of the immortality of the separated soul. Instead, it promises a resurrection of the whole human being (the soma) (Owen, 1956: 196). In Thessalonians 5:23-24, the vocabulary is certainly "tripartite" –body, soul, spirit – but the stress is on the sanctification of the whole person. Humans have been created as whole beings, and Christians look to the time when they shall be remade in Christ as whole persons, as members of the new humanity. Christians therefore preach a Gospel of wholeness, but this wholeness will be fully seen only in the resurrection (Sherlock, 1996: 212-227).

Jesus does not develop an explicitanthropology, but he always addresses whole persons and calls them to a new relation with God that transforms all of their embodied conscious life. Although Paul distinguishes between living according to the "flesh" (sarx) and according to the "spirit" (pneuma), this language does not necessarily imply substance dualism. The "spiritual"person is one whose whole self is oriented to the Spirit; the "fleshly" person is one whose whole self is oriented toward fulfilling the passion of worldly desire (cf. Romans 8:16; 1 Corinthians 2:10-11; 6:17).

Overall, then, Scripture depicts the human person as a dynamic unity, which it considers from various perspectives by using terms such as "soul," "body," "flesh," and "mind." Distinguishing these dimensions or facetsof human existence is important, but the Bible is concerned with the salvation of the whole person in community and in relation to God (Shults, 2003: 176-178). We must conclude, then, that the human body and the human soul / spirit are intimately related to each other; that both are indestructible (inasmuch as the body too, after its resurrection, will exist indestructibly for ever and ever). In earthly life, and in everlasting life on the renewed earth-to-come, there is an essential unity between body and soul, so that the word "body" indicates the whole living personality in Scripture, and the word "soul" refers to the whole human being.

6.6 Implications for Church Education

The implications of this biblical view of the human person (anthropology) are clear. Education, whether it takes the form of preaching (the sermons) during church services, as we have especially described in the previous two chapters, or whether it takes the form of parental (covenantal) education in the homes of Christian believers, should not be dualistic, whether in the form of a trichotomy or a dichotomy. No "part" or "component"of the educand (the members of the church who attend the sermons and listen to their minister or pastor preaching, or the children being educated in the parental home) should be considered more important than any other. Educators should, for instance, not emphasise religious or moral education more than any other form of education, say physical or practical, because the former is assumed to nurture the "higher part, component or aspect"of the educand. Education should be aimed at developing, guiding, nourishing, nurturing, leading, equipping and enabling the educand to become an optimally functioning total, whole and integrated human being.

Education should therefore take the form of what the ancient Greeks used to call enkyklos paideia, i.e. a form of education that makes of a person the highest, the finest, most exemplary form of human being possible – roughly in modern parlance, the fully actualised and self-realised person. This can only be achieved if the educand is viewed as a total, integrated and whole being.

6.7 Conclusion

No human act can ever be reduced to a mere physical, biotic or psychic activity. When one acts, her of the whole body, in its totality, is involved and activated (De Graaff, 1977: 141-142). In biblical anthropology the concept of the human body refers to the wholeness of the human being in the rich diversity of his temporal existence, but seen externally in a great variety of irreducible dimensions. When we affirm that the human being is unity, there is more to it than the complex interrelationship of different dimensions, because the totality of these cannot constitute the unity. The Bible reveals the concentric unity of the human being as a radical oneness and wholeness (Hart, 1977: 89-90). The human being’s normal state is one of psychosomatic unity. At the time of the resurrection he or she will be fully restored to the unity and will thus once again be made complete (Hoekema, 1986: 222). Every anthropological dualism has therefore to be rejected.