There Cannot Be a Person Without a Body: Greek and Hebraic Tensions Over Body and Soul
“Part of the problem is the dualistic way that we have conceptualized human beings through most of Christian history. Simply, this holds that human beings are made up of two (dichotomy) or three (trichotomy) distinct parts, one physical (body) and one spiritual (soul, spirit, mind). In either di- or tri- models, death is the breaking apart of the spiritual, which is immortal, from the physical, which is the part that dies. The real person is the spiritual since the body is only a shell that is discarded at death. For the real us, death is not really real; it is only a doorway through which the soul/spirit passes between worlds or planes of existence.
A dualistic view of reality understands there to be two (thus dualism) levels of existence. The top level (a logical metaphor, not a spatial term) is ultimate reality, and consists of ideas, such as truth, beauty, goodness, justice, perfection. In other words, the ultimate reality is non-corporeal, or non-physical. It is the level of spirit and deity.
The lower level is the physical world which in which we live. It is the opposite of ultimate reality, thus it is not real in the sense that it is not ultimate. It contains the imperfect physical manifestations of the ideas that exist in the perfect plane, so by definition it is characterized by falsehood, ugliness, evil, injustice, imperfection.
[…] As noted, the basic starting point in this conception is that the physical world is inherently evil, and unredeemably so, which leads to a radical dualism in how reality and human beings are understood (body/physical=bad; soul/spirit=good). It fits very well with a classical Calvinistic system, since for Calvinists sin is rooted in the physical world and thus the body. This leads to a position that humanity, as long as they exist in a physical world, can never be other than sinful…The Hebraic view that dominates Scripture does not conceptualize human beings this way. There is only a whole person animated (alive) by the breath of God. They are either alive, and have breath (same word translated as “spirit”), or they are dead and do not have breath. The biblical writers could certainly distinguish between different aspects of humanity, such as the difference between thought and hunger, or between pain and love, but never developed dualistic notions of a person being made up of divisible parts. The person was the whole. Anything less than the whole, was not a person. This extended even to how they conceptualized death. For us, it is a biological fact. For them, anything that diminished life was a form of death…All this says, from the biblical view there cannot be a person without a body. That’s why the biblical conception of afterlife requires a bodily resurrection that has a physical dimension, including scars!”
The above passage come from Dennis R. Bratcher, PhD, a Methodist and Nazerene minister and retired professor and scholar of the Hebrew Bible.
I read Bratcher’s little essay on the Greek and Hebraic tensions in scripture regarding “body” and “soul” recently and found it to be quite the enjoyable refresher; I’ve studied this topic before (and have written about it) but it’s been a while. And after reading about Robert Alter’s new Hebrew Bible translation I was inspired to brush up on this topic again. I do find it all very fascinating and, perhaps not surprisingly, I do still come down on the side of Ancient Hebrew vs. Ancient Greek, i.e. I think I still fall into that naturalistic, radically empirical, pneu-materialist sort of camp when it comes to this topic… Additionally, I still resonate quite a bit with process theologian, John Cobb here:
“Individuals exist only momentarily…we must think of the soul as that society composed of all the momentary occasions of experience that make up the life history of the human. The soul is not an underlying substance undergoing accidental adventures. It is nothing but the sequence of the experiences that constitute it.”
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Painting above: “Body and Soul” by Udo Hohenberger
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