Are we immortal or not?

[mattrose]

I don't think it is necessary to read Matthew 10:28 or 22:37 (as examples) in a dichotomist or trichotomist way

I wouldn't really call myself a dichotomist or trichotomist, so I don't feel compelled to defend those positions. I'm probably more in the monist camp. An individual may be called a soul. Some souls are saved and, therefore, have life that will not end. Thus, when they die, they are with the Lord. Of course, we aren't given many details about this. It could be that each saved soul is given a temporary heavenly body while they await resurrection. Or, it could be that their information is uploaded onto God's hard-drive (so to speak) to await resurrection. It doesn't much matter to me! The goal is resurrection of the entire soul.

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

This passage, I think, is most readily interpreted as referring to 2 aspects OR parts of an individual life. There is the material aspect/part (body) and the immaterial aspect/part (soul). I take no issue with someone who wants to say that flesh and spirit are 2 parts of a soul, nor that these parts can potentially be divided. Why would I be bothered by such a belief?

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.

To me, this passage is pretty clearly using the term soul in its non-traditional sense. If Jesus' were using the term 'soul' to mean the entire person.... it was pretty unnecessary to add heart and mind to that. Jesus seems to be using the 3 terms as different aspects/parts of man. I consider the debate between whether they are indivisible aspects or divisible parts to be fairly insignificant. But I can't certainly understood how someone could come to either conclusion.

Do you feel there is an important practical reason to outrightly reject the possibility of division b/w soul and spirit

[steve]

I am curious about how those who think man has no spiritual part that is divisible from the body interpret Paul's repeated ignorance as to whether the one he knew had his visionary experience "in the body or out of the body".

I am not saying it can't be answered, but I have just never personally heard it addressed.

A man was caught into heaven "whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know" (2 Cor.12:2, 3). If Paul believed that man did not have a part of him that could leave the body, why would he express this uncertainty?

[mattrose]

I'd also be interested to know what pure monists think about that

I like to emphasize the monist view of man as a means of opposing platonic and/or gnostic thought (in other words, as a way to emphasize the inherent goodness of the material realm). But I would not emphasize monism to the degree as to make division impossible. We're not who we were truly designed to be without both the material aspect (body) and spiritual aspect (spirit). Collectively, these two aspects make a soul. Can the body be divided from the soul? It seems to me that Scripture says such a thing is possible. But in such a state we are not whole, as we were intended to be. So the two aspects are technically divisible but not ideally divided.

[Paidion]

Paul meant it when he said 'absent from the body, present with the Lord'.

Paul didn't write that. Let's examine the whole passage in context and see what he actually did say:

For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. Here indeed we groan, and long to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we sigh with anxiety; not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. (2 Corinthians 5:1-4 RSV)

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, who were Greeks. They held to the Greek concept of being immortal souls clothed in physical bodies. So Paul uses this same concept so that the Corinthians will understand. He speaks of our "living in an earthly tent." He is saying in effect, that if our earthly body is destroyed, we have a resurrection body ("a building from God"). Then he says we groan for that resurrection body. NOT THAT WE WOULD BE UNCLOTHED. In other words, we don't desire to go to heaven as a disembodied spirit, but we want to be "clothed" with the resurrection body.

He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the spirit as a guarantee. So we are always of good courage; we know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord,for we walk by faith, not by sight. We are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. (2 Corinthians 5:5-8 RSV)

So Paul says that we would rather be (I'll use the King James language here) "absent from the body", that is, absent for this present mortal body, and "present with the Lord", that is, present with the Lord in our immortal resurrection body.

We have all heard verse 8 misquoted to suit a particular understanding of the afterlife: "To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord." When I said this was not in the Bible, one well-known preacher couldn't believe his ears. He checked out the Bible and found that the sentence in this distorted form was "absent from the Bible" but "present in the minds of multitudes."

[Paidion]

I am curious about how those who think man has no spiritual part that is divisible from the body interpret Paul's repeated ignorance as to whether the one he knew had his visionary experience "in the body or out of the body".

I think Paul used that figure of speech to represent an experience in which a person is not aware of his own body.

One might say that when one is dreaming, he doesn't know whether he is "in the body" but thinks he is somewhere else "in his dream body" perhaps. So it is with visionary experience.

If this "spiritual part" is separate from the body (let's call it "the spirit" for now), then why is that the experiences of that spirit affect the body? For example why should worry (which occurs in the spirit) cause stomach ulcers (a purely physical entity)? And conversely, why should a mere physical event (hitting a person on the head with a baseball bat) render the spirit of that person unconscious? Also why does aging cause disfunction of the spirit in many people? (e.g. Alzheimers and other forms of dementia, memory loss, etc.) If this "spirit" is divided from the body, then bodily events should have no effect on it and vice versa.

[mattrose]

If this "spiritual part" is separate from the body (let's call it "the spirit" for now), then why is that the experiences of that spirit affect the body? For example why should worry (which occurs in the spirit) cause stomach ulcers (a purely physical entity)? And conversely, why should a mere physical event (hitting a person on the head with a baseball bat) render the spirit of that person unconscious? Also why does aging cause disfunction of the spirit in many people? (e.g. Alzheimers and other forms of dementia, memory loss, etc.) If this "spirit" is divided from the body, then bodily events should have no effect on it and vice versa.

This seems like an odd paragraph Paidion

Nobody, I don't think, is suggesting that the 'body' and 'spirit' aren't presently integrated... so I doubt anyone has any difficulty understanding why they affect each other. The question at hand is not 'Are they presently divided absolutely so that they don't impact each other?' but 'is it possible for them to be divided.

[Paidion]

This seems like an odd paragraph Paidion

Nobody, I don't think, is suggesting that the 'body' and 'spirit' aren't presently integrated... so I doubt anyone has any difficulty understanding why they affect each other. The question at hand is not 'Are they presently divided absolutely so that they don't impact each other?' but 'is it possible for them to be divided.

Okay, let's say that they are presently integrated, and then at death, they separate. Joe, a non-Christian had dementia just prior to his death. Does his "spirit" still have dementia immediately after death? How about a Christian? Or in that case does God instantly heal him? Or does He do so whether he was a Christian just prior to death or not?

[Paidion]

Clearly, the term 'soul' referred to a living being in the creation account. I think this is the standard biblical definition of soul. But some of the NT references, it seems to me, use the term at least as a specific aspect of humanity and quite possibly in a dichotomist(Matt 10:28?) or even trichotomist (Matt 22:37) sense. Now obviously Jesus wasn't both a dichotomist AND a trichotomist (nor was Matthew as an author). The term just seems to be fairly flexible in Jesus day, like a lot of terms are in our day.

The first thing to note is that Septuagint translated the Hebrew word "nephesh" as "ψυχη" (psyche). The word "nephesh" occurs in the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible in 28 verses in Genesis. Of these 24 have been translated as "ψυχη". In Genesis 14:21, the plural form is translated as "ανδρας" — "men" (males). In Gen 36:6, the word was translated as "σωματα" (bodies).Indeed, the word "nephesh" is usually translated as "body", too, in the passage where the command was given to the Israelites not to touch a dead body. But if the word in the OT were consistently translated as "being", that problem would disappear. "You shall not touch a dead being." Actually, these may be the only two places in Genesis where the Septuagint does NOT translate "nephesh" as "ψυχη." For the Septuagint was translated from a Hebrew text which was different from the Masoretic text. I notice that in Gen 34:3 and 34:8, the Septuagint has "My son longs for the soul of your daughter" rather than "The soul of my son longs for your daughter" as in the Masoretic text.

Secondly, I do agree with you that in the New Testament, the word "ψυχη" has a different meaning. It means "self". You recall the story of the rich man who was contemplating building more barns, and talked to himself.He said,"... and I will say to my soul, 'Soul, you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.' " (Luke 12:19). Now if the soul is "the real 'you'" as some say, who would be doing the talking? However, the man could talk to himself as many people do. In today's English, the text might read, "... and I will say to myself, 'Philetus (or whatever his name was), you have many goods laid up for many years; take your ease; eat, drink, and be merry.' " I find that the word can be translated as "self" (with the idea of the conscious self) in every context in the NT and it seems to fit.

Thirdly, as for the verse that dichotomists feel supports their position ...

...and do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Mt 10:28 )

...and with our NT definition of "ψυχη" as self, we can understand this as, "Do not fear those who kill the body and cannot kill the self ..."
In other words, they cannot kill the self because God is going to resurrect that self.

"Rather fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna."

I think I have shown in other threads that the word "destroy" is often used as meaning to destroy the original form of a thing so that the new form comes forth. My example was 1 Peter 1:7

... in order that the proving of your faith much more precious than gold that is being destroyed through fire, yet being proved, may be found to result in praise and honour and glory at the revelation of Jesus Christ.

Now gold cannot be destroyed by fire. But it is through the refining process by fire (or heat of some kind) that the impurities are removed from the orginal gold ore, and the pure gold comes forth. This is the refining process which God uses with those who will be in Gehenna. It's a painful process or at least very uncomfortable, and may go on for a long time before the process is complete and the person comes out as "pure gold." So it makes sense to fear the One who will "destroy" us with this process, and repent and submit to Christ NOW, and continue on the rough road which leads to life so that we will not have to endure this painful refining process.

[john6809]

Paidion wrote, "absent from the Bible" but "present in the minds of multitudes."

[jeremiah]

matt, concering matthew 10, you said:

this passage, i think, is most readily interpreted as referring to two aspects or parts of an individual life. there is the material aspect/part (body) and the immaterial aspect/part (soul). i take no issue with someone who wants to say that flesh and spirit are two parts of a soul, nor that these parts can potentially be divided...

again mon ami, why do you think you are justified in interpreting jesus' words in this way? we in the modern west are quite accustomed to making very precise lines of difference between what we percieve as body and what we percieve as soul, and even mind and spirit for that matter. i think your comments demonstate the circularity of your argument for the soul being an immaterial part of the human. you have merely restated that it so. to my mind, you have not given a reason why jesus wouldn't be using soul here any different than the ot writers used the word, as one that has a primarily material connotation. the hebrew word n'phesh literally means breather, or maybe better: that which breaths.



your comments on matthew 22 seem to follow forth from that same assumption of an immaterial part of a human. you say if soul is referring to the entire person here by jesus, then it would be unnecesarry for him to add mind and heart. i would agree. but it hardly follows that he therefore must be speaking of an immaterial part of us. so exegetically, why would that be the only alternative, or even a likely one? if soul "traditionally" has a primarily material connotation of the whole creature, then why go so far as to suggest some immaterial part? it's simply not necesarry for jesus to mean that. especially when we consider this is jesus quoting the deut 6 sh'mah, and gives zero indication that he means anything other than when moses first said

do you feel there is an important practical reason to outrightly reject the possiblility of division between soul and spirit...

could you restate your question? when you say, "reject the possiblity of division between soul and spirit." i'm not sure if you mean the difference between dichotomy and trichotomy, or rejecting that man was created with an immaterial "real him" that can leave the body and live without it.

do you feel there is am important practical reason to maintaining humanity's constitution to include an immaterial soul?