Making Sense of Man and Sin by Wayne A. Grudem

Author:Wayne A. Grudem [Grudem, Wayne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-310-49379-2
Publisher: Zondervan Academic
Published: 1994-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

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THE ESSENTIAL NATURE OF MAN

What does Scripture mean by “soul” and “spirit"?

Are they the same thing?

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EXPLANATION AND SCRIPTURAL BASIS

A. Introduction: Trichotomy, Dichotomy, and Monism

How many parts are there to man? Everyone agrees that we have physical bodies. Most people (both Christians and non-Christians) sense that they also have an immaterial part—a “soul” that will live on after their bodies die.

But here the agreement ends. Some people believe that in addition to “body” and “soul” we have a third part, a “spirit” that most directly relates to God. The view that man is made of three parts (body, soul, and spirit) is called trichotomy.1 Though this has been a common view in popular evangelical Bible teaching, there are few scholarly defenses of it today. According to many trichotomists, man’s soul includes his intellect, his emotions, and his will. They maintain that all people have such a soul, and that the different elements of the soul can either serve God or be yielded to sin. They argue that man’s spirit is a higher faculty in man that comes alive when a person becomes a Christian (see Rom. 8:10: “If Christ is in you, although your bodies are dead because of sin, your spirits are alive because of righteousness”). The spirit of a person then would be that part of him or her that most directly worships and prays to God (see John 4:24; Phil. 3:3).

Others have said that “spirit” is not a separate part of man, but simply another term for “soul,” and that both terms are used interchangeably in Scripture to talk about the immaterial part of man, the part that lives on after our bodies die. The view that man is made up of two parts (body and soul/spirit) is called dichotomy. Those who hold this view often agree that Scripture uses the word spirit (Heb. rûach, and Gk. pneuma) more frequently when referring to our relationship to God, but such usage (they say) is not uniform, and the word soul is also used in all the ways that spirit can be used.

Outside the realm of evangelical thought we find yet another view, the idea that man cannot exist at all apart from a physical body, and therefore there can be no separate existence for any “soul” after the body dies (although this view can allow for the resurrection of the whole person at some future time). The view that man is only one element, and that his body is the person, is called monism.2 According to monism, the scriptural terms soul and spirit are just other expressions for the “person” himself, or for the person’s “life.” This view has not generally been adopted by evangelical theologians because so many scriptural texts seem clearly to affirm that our souls or spirits live on after our bodies die (see Gen. 35:18; Ps. 31:5; Luke 23:43, 46; Acts 7:59; Phil. 1:23 – 24; 2 Cor. 5:8; Heb. 12:23; and Rev. 6:9; 20:4).

But the other two views continue to be held in the Christian world today.

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