The Makeup of the Soul
1 Corinthians 15:44, “It is sown a
natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body, and there
is a spiritual body.” There is a natural body and there is a spiritual body. We
have seen that the word “natural” is not the word THUSIS [qusij] which is the
word related more to nature, but it is the word PSUXIKOS [yuxikoj], from the
root word PSUCHE [yuxh] meaning soul. So when Paul says it (the physical
body that we are born with) is sown a natural body he is saying it is sown a
soulish body. That means that this physical body that we have is particularly
designed to express the soul. We also know from 1 Corinthians 2:14 that we are
born a natural man, and that natural man is, again, a PSUCHIKOS person or a soulish person. A
soulish person is a person who does not have a human spirit. We are born
without a human spirit and there needs to be an act of
God called regeneration where we are made spiritually alive at the instant of
salvation. We are told that we have a physical or natural body that is sown a
soulish body but the natural body is raised in resurrection a spiritual body.
The body that we are born with in time has an affinity primarily to the soul,
but the resurrection body has an affinity to the human spirit and to the new
position that we will have in heaven in relationship to God. The Scriptures are
clear that there is this distinction. However, as L.S. Chafer in his Systematic
Theology points out, “In many case the term soul and spirit can be used
interchangeably because the writer of Scripture is not emphasizing the
distinction between the two. However, in some passages when the writer does
have a distinction in mind, then he will use them in a technical sense where
the soul refers to one part of man and the human spirit refers to another.”
b)
Emotion. When
we start talking about emotion and where emotion is located, and say emotion is
not in the soul but in the body, people start getting a little bit
controversial over that. But this is not something new,
it is something that a number of people have held over the years, that emotion
is physically based. What is the word we use for emotion? Feeling. How do you
feel today? That is a physically based term. But we do have to raise the
question: Where is emotion located? The question is important for a number of
reasons. First of all, if emotion is in the soul rather than in the body then
an argument can be made for emotion being in God—because the immaterial
part of man is in the image and likeness of God and reflects the nature and
character of God. So if emotion was in the soul then
we would see emotion in some analogous sense. There are a number of passages
that people tend to go to who think that God has emotion. There are passages
that talk about the anger of God, that God demonstrates wrath or that God is a
jealous God, or that God is a God of love. They take all of these terms as
terms of emotion. The question, though, that we must ask is: Are these terms
used in a literal manner or are they used in a figurative manner? What emotion
is: Emotion is a response mechanism. When we have certain emotions they are a
response to certain things that are going on in our thinking. They are a
response to thought, to attitudes, and to belief. Emotions are the result of
what we believe to be true. Whether it is true or not is irrelevant. It has to
do with what is going on in the thinking of the soul, the response to certain
attitudes in the soul and a response to certain beliefs. It
is also affected by certain chemicals. There are hormones, all kinds of
things going on inside the body, exercising can give rise to certain other
chemicals and they give a sense of euphoria; other times we wake up tired
physically and so our mental state is depressed. All that is
affected specifically by things going on in the body, so we have to
recognize that emotions are responders to certain thoughts, beliefs and
attitudes in the soul; but they also have a certain physical orientation. In
fact, one writer has stated very succinctly that when we believe something has
happened or we have certain thoughts there is an almost instantaneous visceral
response, for example a feeling that we have been kicked in the gut. So
emotions usually produce profound visceral reactions. The term visceral
describes something as relating to or affecting the viscera or the internal
organs. It should be noted when we talk about this that many of the terms for
emotions in both Hebrew and Greek relate to the viscera, the internal organs.
In fact, there is no word in either Hebrew or Greek for emotion per se. You may
have individual emotions mentioned but you don’t have a word for emotion as a
category per se. There are some interesting words to describe some of these
emotions. For example, in Greek there is the word SPLANCHNON which
refers first and foremost in a literal sense to the kidneys. It came to be used
to refer to compassion. In much of the ancient world the kidneys were the seen
as something of the negative emotions, but in Greek thought it was related to
compassion and mercy. So often in the New Testament when we read about being
merciful it is a translation of the word SPLANCHNON, it is taking the concept of
compassion and expressing it through terms of the viscera or the internal
organs. The word in its verb literally means to be moved in one’s bowels. It is
a term for compassion, that you feel something so deeply and profoundly that
you feel it in your gut. Another word that is used in the Hebrew is the word kilyah
which has the same idea. This refers to the kidneys, sometimes
translated “reins” in the King James Version. It is better understood as the
inner person or the emotions. For example, Jeremiah 11:20, “who tries the
feelings” NASB, and the word for “feelings” is the kidneys, kilyah; “and
the heart,” another organ that is used to represent the totality of the inner
person. Sometimes “heart” has a primary sense of the mentality, in a few places
it has the idea of emotion, and in a couple of other places it has the idea of
volition; but as a concept “heart” primarily is looking at the center of
something, the inner man, the soul as a whole, emphasizing one or more of the
various characteristics of the soul, and usually that is the mentality.
Jeremiah 17:10 uses the word kilyah in the same sense: “I the LORD search the heart, I try the reins [kilyah], even
to give every man according to his ways, and according to the fruit of his
doings.” If this is physical then we know that this doesn’t relate to God at all.
If God doesn’t have emotions and if emotions are not in the soul but are in the
human body then it doesn’t indicate that God necessarily has emotion in any
sense of the way we do, or have emotion at all. There are some other problems
with this that get more profound when we talk about the use of language in the
Bible. Exodus 32:9, “And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and,
behold, it is a stiff-necked people: now therefore let me alone, that my wrath
may wax hot against them, and that I may consume them: and I will make of thee
a great nation.” So what we have here is a situation that occurs in 1446 BC. Note that
there is not a word for anger in the Hebrew. The word that is in the Hebrew is aphcharah [aph = Heb.
for nose; the verb charah = burning]. It doesn’t say God was angry, it says God’s nose
burned. Does God have a nose? No. So it is not a literal expression of God’s
anger, it is a figurative term. So when it speaks of God being angry it is
using an anthropomorphism, attributing to God part of
human anatomy that God does not actually possess in order to communicate
something about God’s plans, policies and purposes within a frame of reference
that a human can understand. The other word that comes into play here is the
word anthropopathism. There is a lot of debate among scholars as to whether or
not there are any legitimate anthropopathisms in Scripture. Pathos = emotion.
An anthropopathism is the idea that you attribute to God human emotion which He does not actually possess in order to
communicate God’s purposes, policies and plans to man in a frame of reference
that man can understand. Anthropomorphism is actually a sub-category of
anthropopathism. What we are saying here, simply, is that when it talks abut God’s anger it is using terminology about God that He
doesn’t actually possess. He doesn’t have a nose, so why do we have difficulty
in going to the next stage and saying He doesn’t possess anger? There is
another problem here, a profound theological problem. Did God know about this
idolatrous event in Exodus 32 when He delivered the Jews out of Egypt at the
Exodus? He did. Was He angry then? If anger is the consequence of a thought or
a belief or something you know, then if God knew just as about that rebellion
some months earlier as He did when it actually occurred, why wouldn’t He be
angry about it earlier if it is an emotion? We are talking about the fact that
in God’s omniscience He knows all the knowable. Therefore if we attribute
emotion to God in any sense like human emotion, then God has to be learning
something, acquiring some new knowledge, in order to generate this kind of
emotion. This also affects the doctrine of immutability. So perhaps, when we
read passages that talk about the anger of God and the wrath of God and the
jealousy of God, the author is using a figure of speech in order to communicate
something to us. Emotion, then, is housed in the human body. When we talk about
emotions we are talking about a physically based response to what is received
in the mentality of the soul.
c)
The human soul.
That is the core of the imageness. When man is said to be in the image of God
that relates to everything because the image is placed inside of a physical
body. That physical body is designed to be the highest and best possible
expression of that image. The image itself, the soul, is a finite replica and a
finite representation of the infinite character of God and of divine essence.
So we want to make some connections between these four elements of the human
soul and God’s character. To do this we go back to the essence box, our ten
characteristics of God. Man has four elements: self-consciousness, volition,
mentality, conscience. God is sovereign. What does
that mean? That God is the ruler and the final authority in the creation. In
other words, it relates to His will. He is the final determiner of history. It
is His will, not the creatures will, that is the ultimate determiner in human
history. The correspondence to that in man is volition, but the volition of man
is not the same as the volition in God. God’s volition is the volition of the
creator and man’s volition is the volition of the creature. There is a
tremendous debate between sovereignty and free will that has been going on for
centuries. How do you relate the sovereignty of God to the free will of man?
One of the things that we have to deal with is the fact that free will implies
real contingency in human history. But sovereignty guarantees that God’s will
always overrides and overrules, and He brings about His plans and purposes in
human history. So what are we really talking about when we are talking about
will? We are talking about causation. What is the ultimate cause in history?
There have been many attempts to define the meaning of causation, free will and
sovereignty. Going too far in one direction ends up in determinism, and this is
the problem with hyper-Calvinism. No matter how much they talk about the fact
that ultimately it is a loving personal God that determines everything you end
up with no real choice and no real contingency in human history. You just have
a God who ultimately determines in everything and choice is just an appearance
or an illusion, you really aren’t making that decision that you think you are,
it is just a sort of psychological appearance; it is not true. The theological
problem: If there’s no contingency, then when Jesus came at the first advent
and offered the kingdom to Israel it is not a real offer. That means it is a
hoax, because Israel was determined by God in eternity past to reject that
offer. That plays into the hands of Reformed and replacement theology because
they have a very narrow look and the plan and purpose of Jesus Christ at the
first advent. And if it was not a real offer and their negative volition was
determined in eternity past then that is consistent with a view of replacement
theology and Israel is now out of the plan completely. In dispensational
thought, even though most dispensationalists came out of a Calvinistic
heritage, they recognized legitimate contingency. That is why there tends to be
almost a schizophrenic attitude among dispensationalists on free will and
sovereignty because they have to admit that there is real, genuine contingency
there in the plan of God, and that Jesus’ offer was contingent, and that God
has greater purposes and plans for mankind than simply salvation. This is a
problem with Reformed theology. It limits the plan of God and the purposes of
God in history to soteriology. Soteriology doesn’t cover everything. It doesn’t
cover God’s purpose and plans for the angels, it doesn’t cover a number of
other issues that take place in all of creative history. And in
dispensationalism the ultimate purpose for history is to glorify God; it is a
doxological purpose. So you have a certain consistency here where you have in
dispensational thought real contingency in the offer of the kingdom to Israel,
which indicates that they had the ability to choose or reject Him, and this
ultimately leads to being consistent with the dispensational, multipurpose plan
of glorification of God. It would include, of course, soteriology but much
more. The problem that we have in history is that of understanding contingency.
Contingency goes back to the idea of causation. Aristotle in his
philosophy—and this is not saying he was right—pointed out
something that needed to be attended to as we think about ultimate causation.
Is it God, is it man, or can God in His greatness include different kinds of
causation so that He is the ultimate cause but He allows for real contingency
in creaturely causation? Aristotle said that there were four kinds of causes.
The first was material cause. So if you were going to build a house the
material cause would be t he construction materials. The second kind of
causation would be the efficient cause. This would be the builder, the one who
is causing the home to be constructed. The third cause was the formal cause.
The formal cause of the house being constructed would be the blueprint or the
plan. Then the final type of cause would be the final or purpose cause, and
this would be the purpose for which the house is being constructed or its end.
This is what we need to think about, that there are different kinds of
causation. So we need to make a distinction between the causation at the
creator level and creation at the creaturely level. What happens is that when
we try to think through the whole idea of who ultimately causes what in the
universe and that Jesus Christ controls history, well that means that He must
cause things to come to pass, and how can He cause things to come to pass
without somehow forcing or manipulating man to do what he wants them to do? We
are thinking in terms of causation at the creaturely level. Then we try to
impose that upon God at the level of the creator. What we have to realize is
that there are different levels of causation, so that God as the creator can
override and overrule history without at the same time overriding and
overruling creaturely decisions. And He can include a plan that is broad enough
to include real contingency on the part of creatures and still produce what God
knows the end result will be without God getting in and manipulating or forcing
man to do what God wants him to do. The sovereignty of God, which is the
location of divine will, corresponds to human volition. The righteousness of
God, on the other hand, is God’s standard of right and wrong, of absolutes, and
God’s justice is the application of that standard. And God’s righteousness and
His justice combined, along with His veracity and His immutability, relates to
human conscience. The human conscience is where we store our norms and
standards. Before the fall the only standards that Adam had were the absolute
standards that were provided for him by God, and these standards reflected
God’s absolute righteousness and justice. Conscience is one of those
interesting things that always shows up somewhere no
matter how rebellious someone gets, and it always betrays the fact that they
are in the image of God. So conscience relates to the absolute standards of God
and it always betrays that. That is Paul’s argument in Romans chapter two when
he shows that the very presence of the conscience shows that people have
rejected God and know that God exists. Then we look at the idea of God’s
omniscience. We link His omniscience to His love. Omniscience is knowledge and
love is related to knowledge. We know love is not an emotion. Jesus said, “If
you love me you will keep my commandments.” We may not feel like it; we may be
drawn by our sin nature to do many different things that are not obedience to
God’s commandments. So love there means that we have to first of all know His
commandments, and secondly it involves volition. So love relates to knowledge
and it relates to an understanding of absolutes. But we will look at love as it
relates to thinking because it is mentality, a mental attitude. So we will
connect love and omniscience to mentality. Omnipotence is defined in God as the
ability to do whatever God wants to do. It doesn’t mean God can do anything.
Why? Because there are certain things God can’t do. God can’t sin; God can’t
make a square a triangle. Omnipotence relates also to His will. So omnipotence
and sovereignty link together in relationship to human volition. Righteousness,
justice, veracity and immutability are mirrored in the human conscience. Love
and omniscience are linked up in man’s mentality. Eternality is not part of
man’s make-up because man is finite, the same as omnipresence. There is nothing
really corresponding in either of those in man because man is localized and
finite. Self-consciousness in the human soul has to do with identity and
recognition of who we are. And God as well has self-consciousness; He knows who
He is. So in relationship to man as the image of God we see that he is a finite
replica of God’s essence and character. It primarily relates to his immaterial
make-up but that immaterial make-up is necessarily housed in a body. The soul
does not exist independently of a body ever.