Who are we? Who are you? Who am I? These questions of identity rank among Leroy Forlines’s “inescapable questions of life.”[1] And as Forlines notes, these inquiries are not the result of mere curiosity; they are instead our entire beings’ profound cry for answers.[2] Understanding who we are, both in body and in soul, is essential to understanding our purposes and perceptions in and of the world. Much of the foundation of our lives and our practices is dependent on how we understand who we are in substance, function, and purpose. Matthew Anderson is right in noting, “What the body is shapes what the body does.”[3] The nature of the human person, both body or the soul, directs how the person behaves.
On this issue, the Treatise of the National Association of Free Will Baptists reads, “God created man, consisting of a material body and a thinking, rational soul.”[4] This statement of faith regarding personhood is of importance for the purposes of this essay. The Treatise alludes to some form of substance dualism, which stands in contrast to other positions, such as the monist view, that will be discussed later in this essay. The question, of course, is how the understanding of the human person (both body and soul) may fit within historical, orthodox Christian beliefs.
The Debate
A significant issue to evaluate concerning the understanding of personhood is what philosophers call the “mind-body problem.”[5] That is, we are to “wonder what sort of relations there can be between mental entities and their properties on the one hand and physical things and their properties on the other.”[6] At the center of this discussion and debate is seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. Descartes argued that the mind was substantively different than the physical body. This view, which emphasizes a distinction between mind (or soul) and body comprises the essence of “substance dualism.”
Substance dualism, of one form or another, has been the majority position throughout church history. While this view is an umbrella term for a variety of other views, the basic concept is that “your mind and your brain are two distinct things.”[7] Discussions on substance dualism include questions on the spatial, substantive, and epistemic differences between the mind and the body.[8] As John Cooper puts it, this means, “Human beings are an ontic duality of body and soul.”[9]
If Cartesian substance dualism is one end of the spectrum, the view of “monism” is the other. While dualism sees a fundamental difference between the mental (or non-material) and the physical, monism argues that mind/spirit and body are all made up of one of kind of thing.[10] More specifically, monists “argue that the phenomenological experiences that we label ‘soul’ are not reducible to brain activity and represent essential aspects or capacities of the self, rather than a substantial, ontological entity such as a ‘soul.’”[11] One author notes, “If monism or ontological holism were true, then there would be an unbreakable connection between a person and her body, the same body she ensouled throughout life.”[12] Views on monism seemed to rise with new discoveries in neuroscience concerning how the brain and the body interact at a physical level. Much of this tension between substance dualism and monism is discussed in debates concerning the philosophy of mind.
If a person is, in fact, composed of two substances—one material, the other immaterial—then man’s composition helps to reconcile some tensions related to eschatology. That is, from a substance dualist view, when the body dies, the entire person does not necessarily perish. By understanding that each person has two distinct substances, one can perceive how the human person can still exist without requiring both body and soul.
A Free Will Baptist Perspective
As opposed to an extreme Cartesian substance dualism listed above, John Cooper argues for a “holistic dualism.” This is contrasted to what seems to be a more extinction-recreation monist view of Joel Green.[13] Since the Free Will Baptist Treatise argues for a form of dualism and does not rule out a holistic approach, adopting Cooper’s perspective seems to be the best synthesis of positions. Holistic dualism “posits that the human person, though composed of discrete elements, is nonetheless to be identified with the whole, which constitutes a functional unity.”[14] This approach seeks to reconcile the distinction of body and soul with the interconnectedness of the human person.
While space does not allow for a full exploration here, much debate persists concerning how much the Hebrews of the Old Testament understood a substance dualism or how much of this thought has been anachronistically added via Greek philosophy. While the debates continue, the Old Testament writings leave open the possibility for dualism. Moreland and Rae note, “[T]he Old Testament . . . includes an ontological duality of immaterial-material components such that the individual human being can live after biological death in an intermediate state while awaiting the future resurrection of the body.”[15] Cooper argues “that the truth combines elements of the two extremes—that the Hebrew view of human nature strongly emphasizes living a full and integrated existence before God in this world, but that it unquestionably also includes the belief in a continued existence after biological death.”[16]
This tension finds its culmination in the New Testament in the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself “continued to exist as a God-man in the intermediate state of his earthly body. Whatever it was about Jesus that allowed him to continue to be a human, it could not be his earthly body. The most reasonable solution is that Jesus continues to have a human soul-spirit.”[17] If Jesus was completely man (and He was), then He is also our model for understanding personhood.
Forlines, in agreement with Cooper’s position, writes, “A human being consists of a body and a spirit. Viewed as a functioning unity as a conscious thinking, feeling, acting being, a human being is called a soul or person. A human being still remains a soul after the death of the body, but is not complete. He or she awaits the resurrection of the body.”[18] Cooper’s definition is similar. At length, he states,
Holism . . . affirms the functional unity of some entity in its totality, the integration and interrelation of all the parts in the existence and proper operation of the whole. It views an entity as a single primary functional system, not as a compound system constructed by linking two or more primary function systems. It recognizes entities as phenomenological and existential unities. It implies that the parts do not operate independently within the whole, and that they would not necessarily continue to have all the same properties and functions if the whole were broken up.[19]
Cooper gives plenty of examples to substantiate his position. He notes how those who appear from the dead retain a personal identity (e.g., Samuel, Moses, Ezekiel). Even more, their personal identity is manifested in a quasi-bodily being. That is, their form is that of an earthly body, even though it is made of an ethereal mode.[20] This is consistent not only in the Old Testament but also the in the New, with prophets reappearing after their death in ways that make them physically identifiable.
In many ways, Cooper’s position is at odds, or at least inconsistent with, a Cartesian or even Platonic dualism that argues for strict difference between essential substances. Further, he states that his position does not “require adoption of Aristotelian form-matter or Kantian noumenal-phenomenal categories.”[21] Cooper, as well as Forlines, argue for a dualism in as much as the human person can “come apart,” though they both argue that this separation is not ideal, and it is not the final “form” of the human person. Thus, while we may rightly refer to the position as dualist, it is in contrast to a form of dualism that affirms full distinction between the parts of a person. Both Cooper and Forlines have a view of dualism that conceptualizes identity in regards to the whole person. This is opposed to a more Carteisan or Thomistic dualism that places identity primarily or exclusively on the mind/soul.[22]
Conclusion
We should not pursue discussions
on personhood purely in the abstract. While we can say much about the substance
and function of the person in philosophical dialogue, our understanding of
personhood has direct implications not only for the individual person, but also
for his relation to other persons. It has both present and future implications.
Many have criticized substance dualism as a view that leads to a sacred-secular
divide.[23]
Yet, if the body and soul (and spirit) are holistic, and thus dependent upon
one another for fullness, then this bifurcation is a false one. Both the
material and immaterial will be present in the eschaton. Our renewed material
bodies are implicated in the final resurrection; thus, our material bodies should
not be vilified. In fact, they will be redeemed in the end of time. Because of
this truth, we should be careful how we both think of and use our bodies in the
here and now.
[1]F. Leroy Forlines, The Quest for Truth: Theology for Postmodern Times (Nashville: Randall House, 2001), 135.
[2]Ibid., 135.
[3]Matthew Lee Anderson, Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2011), 53.
[4]A Treatise of the Faith and Practices of the National Association of Free Will Baptists (Nashville: Executive Office, National Association of Free Will Baptists, 2013), 5.
[5]Throughout the essay, I seek to refer to the mind-body problem in terms of soul and body, since that is the way many have couched this debate theologically. However, one will note that theologians like Leroy Forlines would probably define this more precisely as a spirit-body distinction, using the word soul to refer to the entirety of the person. While I agree with Forlines on this point, varying the terminology may cause greater confusion in this brief essay.
[6]Pete Mandik, This Is Philosophy of Mind: An Introduction (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 7.
[7]Ibid., 16.
[8]Ibid., 17–18.
[9]John W. Cooper, Body, Soul & Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eedrmans, 1989), 2.
[10]Mandik, This Is Philosophy of Mind, 8.
[11]Joel B. Green, “Body and Soul, Mind and Brain,” in In Search of the Soul: Four Views of the Mind-Body Problem, ed. Joel B. Green and Stuart L. Palmer(Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2005), 14.
[12]Cooper, 165.
[13]See Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible, Studies in Theological Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008)
[14]Green, “Body and Soul, Mind and Brain,” 13.
[15]J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature & the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2000), 27.
[16]Cooper, 37.
[17]Moreland and Rae, 35.
[18]Forlines, 151.
[19]Cooper,45.
[20]Ibid., 59.
[21]Ibid., 163.
[22]Moreland and Rae, 20–21.
[23]“If matter and spirit are separate, then we may despise the material dimension, neglect it, abuse it, pollute it” (David Myers, The Human Puzzle [San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978], 88; as quoted in Cooper, 30.
Recent Comments