Central to Christian anthropology stands the question of man’s basic nature. Is he spirit? Is he flesh? Is he both? Is he more truly one or the other? The answer to this question will echo across theology, from Christology and understanding the Incarnation to eschatology to the theology of medicine, physical and mental. False answers to this have, if you dig deep enough, been critical parts of many a heresy and many an error.

I could give you my answer now, but first, we should define the problem and the terms.

The Problem and the Terms

Today we deal with three substances, three states, and five plausible combinations.¹ The three substances are: body, spirit, and Spirit. The three states are: excluded, non-essential, and essential. The five plausible combinations…. We’ll get to that.

‘Body’ and ‘spirit’ are two terms at once comprehensible and extremely difficult to define. If I were to attempt: body is everything which can be expressed in quantity, and spirit is what cannot be expressed in quantity. That definition fails hard, though, and is really just a description. Suffice to say that the body is what science deals with and the spirit what morality deals with. Both are an is, though, and both have the relationship of is to ought, so even that description is lacking. These are, frankly pseudo-irreducibles, as I allude to here.² ‘Spirit’ (hereafter ‘Divinity’) is the substance the Creator God, of which He Himself is the sum and singular constituted (inasmuch as His substance is identical to Himself).

As for the states, these factors are questions of what importance the substance has to the existence-identity of the constituted, of man. If a substance is excluded from man, it never constitutes any part of man. Divinity is excluded from man; we reflect His glory, but we do not become in substance Divine. Saying otherwise is heresy at best.³ A non-essential substance, while included in man, can be removed from him without compromising his nature, though not without damaging him overall; an essential substance is not only included in man but integral to him. In bodily analogy, the brain is essential; fingernails and fingers are non-essential; granite is excluded.

The five plausible states are generated from these. In all cases, Divinity is exclusively God’s, excluded from the rest and essential to Him.⁴ Further, we can leave out the total-exclusion theory of man for now: man is either body or spirit, at minimum, not a third category. We can also leave out all theories which have no essential substances, as they are in principle not different from the total exclusion theory (what’s non-essential can be discarded). This leaves us with five states:

And Body-Essential / Spirit-Essential. WordPress ate the chart’s middle section, apparently.

The Answer

Scripture is our guide, here, as ever (2 Tim. 3:16-17). From the beginning we are given this answer: man is body-and-soul (Gen. 1-2). Both are essential to man’s nature; man is an integration of both in a single identity, coherent when in right relationship with God. Thus, to touch our bodies is to interact with our souls; thus, to touch the soul is to interact with the body. Thus, a heart attack can be caused by shock, and thus, a brain disease can ravage the soul’s ability to remember.⁵

This position accords with the classic Christian refutation of Christological heresies like Docetism. Christ in His incarnation is clearly a man in body and in spirit both (Heb. 4:15). He in His resurrection was of the same body; the places of the wounds were evidence of His identity, whether they remained or only their signs (John 20:27). The change in quality (John 20:19), insofar as we are shown it, does not include a change in identity; what was sown has been raised imperishable, rather than what is raised being other than what was sown (1 Cor. 35-37,42-44).

Objections: Exclusion

If man is not actually his flesh or not actually spirit (true immaterialism or materialism, i.e. what non-essentialism easily becomes in practice), Genesis 1-2, Christ’s Incarnation, and vast swathes of the Bible stop making sense. While this position deserves a rebuttal at some point, this article isn’t the place. Scripture gives no real support to this position, not to the mildly unprejudiced eye, and adherents generally end up being heretics in many other ways as well.

Objections: Spirit Non-Essential

This position is not particularly popular in the plausible church (i.e. those parts that aren’t obviously heretical). Making man out to have a disposable spirit and a non-disposable body is not really workable with Christian metaphysic except by exploiting the fuzzy definitions to put most of the qualities of ‘spirit’ into ‘body.’ Man has to be capable of outlasting physical death, for instance (1 Cor. 15:13-17). Further, Scripture is pretty clear that God has given life to man, an attribute hard to include without effectively including spirit-by-another-name.⁶

Objections: Body Non-Essential

Now, here’s the big boy. Many a Christian explicitly or implicitly holds that we are essentially soul, with a body conveniently and even preferably attached, but at the core entirely spiritual. The position is congenial to our inherited bolus of Greek dualism and Enlightenment rationalism and generalized mysticism, but it’s not correct.

The biggest evidence for this position, as I see it, is that people die, our bodies rot, and the man persists nevertheless. Ecclesiastes 12:7 certainly seems to take this position: “[Before]… the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (We’ll get back to this in a minute.) This alone would be a problem, but we have also the evidence of Revelation 6:11, which suggests a disembodied heavenly state (necessarily disembodied, given it is after death and before final resurrection).

Now, post-body, pre-resurrection consciousness is uneasily and thinly proven, particularly given the Psalms’ opinion on Sheol (Ps. 6:5), which could be taken to suggest a cessation of consciousness. But that alone would be little aid to my position, as men would have to keep on being, and if they continue being sans body, the body must not be essential.

The crucial point here is that we’ve no good reason to think men are truly disembodied in this state. In the Christian mind, death is notcessation of existence. After all, men go walking around with dead souls all the time (Eph. 2:1). When a man dies-in-body, he does not cease to have a body; he just starts having a dead body instead of a living one. This is not really to suggest that the corpse is still the body of the person dead (though Christians historically have respects for the bodies of the dead). But a dead body isn’t no body at all, any more than a dead soul, such as that of the pagan, is no soul at all. It’s just non-functional.

A dead body does result in a horrific disjointure of body from soul, it seems clear. If Ecclesiastes 12:7 and Revelation 6:11 are taken in this context, they speak not of souls without bodies but of souls whose bodies are elsewhere, departed from the soul for a moment but still integral to the person. Indeed, this continuity is required by Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians. In Chapter 15:35-49, Paul states that the body which is sown is the body which is raised (v36-37), altered in quality (v42) but not in identity (v43). If men cease to have bodies when their bodies died, as this proof of body’s non-essentiality requires, this verse is a real head-scratcher; no body exists to be raised. The ‘sowing’ must be exceedingly metaphorical. Since that complete cessation is not required by the texts, though, we should take the more plausible interpretation: men continue to have bodies while their bodies are dead, however disjoined their souls are from those bodies.⁷

Conclusion

Man is body-and-soul. Both are essential to our nature, by His design. We therefore cannot neglect one or glorify the other. We must accord each what the law accords it, caring for the temple of the Lord (1 Cor. 6:19-20) with due assiduity. The body and the soul are our first stewardship, not truly lost even when we die. Let us not be slack in upholding it.

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Footnotes

1. ‘Plausible’ because many of the combinations are heretical. ↩︎
2. I am very dubious of the value of ‘spirit’ and ‘body’ as distinguishing two truly separate substances. ‘Creaturely’ and ‘Creator’ are clearly substantively different; ‘spirit’ and ‘body’ end up having remarkable overlap in qualities, with the only easily consistent distinction seeming to be that some things are obviously sorted into one or into the other. It is more accurate and helpful, I think, to consider them two categories within the same substance. ↩︎
3. I’m aware Eastern Orthodoxy has a theory of ‘apotheosis.’ Frankly, I’ve not found a comprehensible explanation. It seems, so far as I understand it, to be at best a dangerously phrased statement of some truth, with some iterations being heretical. ↩︎
4. One complication to the taxonomy is that the God possesses the other two substances without compromising His total Divinity or their creatureliness, due to the Incarnation. That’s another way of saying that the hypostatic union is definitely more puzzling than the Trinity. ↩︎
5. Both types of damage, of course, are reversed in the final resurrection. ↩︎
6. The fact that you could do this, at the cost of being confusing and misleading, illustrates my unease with the division in creaturely substance. ↩︎
7. A rough analogy to demonstrate the possibility of continuing connection is this: imagine you stick your hand through a sci-fi portal, letting it emerge 100 miles away. Is that hand still yours? Yes. Is it connected to you? Yes. Do you understand precisely how? Probably not. I certainly have not answers for you. The lack of known mechanism of connection is no issue in light of the Scriptural teaching affirming the connection, particularly when we have so little comprehension of the ‘mechanics’ of the spirit. ↩︎