C. Michael Patton and Rhome Dyke · The Theology Program · 55 minutes
Lecture by C. Michael Patton, Th.M., and Rhome Dyke, Th.M., from The Theology Program, published on their public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Having settled why God created man, the course turns to what God created. Close your eyes and picture a soul, the teachers say, and notice that it looks like a faint outline of you. But what is it? What happens to the real you at death, and what does a cremated body in a small box have to do with the person you loved? Before the teachers give their own view, they build the strongest case they can for the position most evangelicals have never heard of: monism, the view that there is no soul separable from the body at all. Listen for why the teachers, who reject monism, still say its advocates have seen something the church has forgotten.
The teachers open by gathering last week’s conclusion: God created man because he is a creative and self-giving God, and man’s purpose as the created is to glorify him. Now the course asks what exactly God created. This session and the next take up the constitution of man; after that come the creation of the soul, with its weight for questions like abortion, and the image of God. As always, the teachers promise to make the best case for every position before answering it, so that we know where people are coming from and answer arguments we have actually heard.
One of the teachers tells of the death of Angie, whose body was cremated and placed in a small container. Is this box her? What part of her is it, and what does it matter what is done with it now? If she is conscious somewhere, what is that consciousness in relation to what she was: the same memories, or only some, the same personality, the same tendencies, or does the body contribute to personality in ways the soul leaves behind? What makes up a person at all? The class answers: genetics, which shape appearance and inborn dispositions; experiences and memories, good and bad; the capacity to learn and what has been learned. Then the pressing question: which of these, if any, survive the body? Even a lost finger raises it: if I cut off my finger, is there less of me? The teachers answer yes, because the physical is truly part of the person, which is why a bodily resurrection would restore it.
A detour to the cemetery turns out to be theology. Cemeteries sit on hills, and bodies are buried east to west, never north to south, apart from hillside or water-table exceptions, so that the dead in Christ will rise facing east. And in Bhutan, a closed country whose underground church is barely a decade old, the believers’ first request, ahead of every other need, was money to buy land for a secret cemetery, because Buddhism cremates and the Christians wanted their bodies buried, ready for resurrection. The body matters. Evangelicalism, the teachers observe, often downplays the body to the point of being anti-physical, and one of them makes a charge he promises to defend before the unit ends: most evangelical funerals are effectively pagan, teaching something theologically unorthodox about what a person is.
What did God create in six days? The physical. The whole creation narrative is physical, with never a word about a spiritual side being made alongside it. How did we meet our God? Physically, in the incarnation; that is its wonder. What kind of resurrection did Jesus have? Physical. So the relation of body to soul and spirit is not a question the Christian can wave away by treating the body as a shell to escape. The physical is essential to what man is, and the course will keep returning to that.
Scripture uses a whole cluster of words for the constitution of man: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, flesh, sometimes of the sinful nature and sometimes of the mere material self, and even the bowels, the guts, for the deepest part of a person, an idiom we keep when we call a betrayal a kick in the gut. The debate ahead is over how these words relate: whether they name separable parts of man or different aspects of one indivisible whole. And the teachers draw one distinction the discussion depends on: the brain is physical; the mind, in this discussion, names something immaterial.
Two main alternatives frame everything: physicalism and dualism. Physicalism divides in two. Naturalism, met back in the worldviews lecture, denies any soul because it denies anything beyond the physical at all. Monism, by contrast, is held by professing believers, including some who confess an inspired and inerrant Bible, who hold that there is no soul or spirit separable from the body. Dualism holds a plurality within man, either dichotomy, two parts, or trichotomy, three. One, two, or three: those are the live options. The teachers add a word of charity up front: they do not place this question among the essential doctrines a person must believe to be saved.
Monism, from the Greek monos, one or alone, teaches that mind, soul, and body are essentially the same and that the mind or soul does not exist without the body. It commonly travels with the doctrine of soul sleep, the teaching that the dead have no conscious existence until the resurrection. Adherents include Jehovah’s Witnesses, who hold soul sleep explicitly, Christian Scientists, Christadelphians, and figures in neo-orthodoxy such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. On the monist picture, at death nothing departs; the body remains, and the person’s entire hope lies ahead at the resurrection.
The teachers build monism’s case in five arguments. First, when the Bible speaks of death, it speaks of sleep: in 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul comforts a church anxious about believers who have died, and he does not say what we would say, that the body in the grave is not really them and their soul is in a better place. He points them wholly to the resurrection: God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep, and the living will not precede them. Second, the Old Testament saints show no sign of belief in an intermediate state; the dead go to Sheol, the grave, and hope rests on resurrection alone. Job 17 makes his bed in the darkness of Sheol and asks where his hope is. And Joseph makes Israel’s sons swear to carry his bones out of Egypt, as Abraham insists on a grave in the promised land, because they expected to rise there, and because, on this argument, those bones simply are Joseph: what other part of him is left?
Third, some biblical writers seem to say outright that there is no intermediate state. Psalm 6 pleads that in death there is no remembrance of God, and asks who gives him thanks in Sheol. Psalm 30 asks what profit there is in the psalmist’s blood: will the dust praise God? Psalm 88 numbers the writer among those forsaken in the grave, whom God remembers no more. Isaiah 38 says Sheol cannot thank God and death cannot praise him, and Ecclesiastes 9 says the dead know nothing, and there is no activity, planning, or knowledge in Sheol. Not funeral readings, the teachers admit. Fourth, the argument runs, the very idea of an intermediate state is Greek: the Hebrews believed in a holistic self whose hope was resurrection, while the Greeks despised the body and welcomed death as release, and readers who find a plurality of parts in man are reading the Bible through Hellenistic eyes, missing that body, soul, and spirit are used the way we use mind, heart, and soul, as aspects of one whole.
Fifth, the modern argument. Science has demonstrated a tight correspondence between the neurological activity of the brain and our feelings, memories, personality, and attitudes, which makes a separate soul look not just unnecessary but untenable. Damage one part of the brain and specific memories are gone beyond recovery; alter another and the person’s disposition changes. Since the soul has traditionally been defined as exactly these things, the memories and the personality, the brain appears to be what we were calling the soul. The philosopher William Rowe presses the inference: our mental life is dependent on bodily processes, above all the brain, so when the brain ceases at death, the reasonable conclusion is that the mental life ceases with it.
The responses come in order. Sleep is a metaphor, a euphemism for death that describes the body, not the whole person, though the teachers pointedly agree with the monist that Paul’s comfort is the resurrection, and they will return to that. The Old Testament’s silence is a matter of progressive revelation: the saints had little light on the intermediate state, but little light does not disprove existence, any more than their ignorance of the new heaven and new earth disproves those. The despair passages describe what the dead cannot do, proclaim God’s praise and wisdom to people on earth, and their writers can be genuinely disillusioned, as Ecclesiastes is, without being inaccurate; here the analogy of Scripture must govern, the obscure interpreted by the obvious, and the teachers freely grant that their theology shapes their reading, which is precisely why theology must be orthodox. The Greek-origin argument commits the genetic fallacy, ascribing falsehood to an idea because of its source: the Greeks also believed in God, in souls, and in moral distinctions, and we discard none of those on that account; and the New Testament, not Plato, is the primary source of the church’s view. As for the brain, linked to is not the same as equal to. The window illustration helps: picture a person in an attic with a single window. The window is the brain, the person is the soul, and if the window is damaged or dirty, the person sees the world and is seen only through that damage, yet the person is not the window. For readers who want the full philosophical treatment, the teachers point to Moreland and Craig’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview. And the one explicit Old Testament resurrection text is read in full: Daniel 12, where many who sleep in the dust of the ground awake, some to everlasting life and some to everlasting contempt.
The last stretch introduces trichotomy, from the Greek for cutting in three: man as body, soul, and spirit, where the body is all that is physical, the soul is reason, emotions, memories, personality, and will, and the spirit is the seat of our being, the part that relates to God, the part made alive when we were dead in trespasses and sins. Its adherents run from Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa to Watchman Nee, Bill Gothard, and C. I. Scofield. Three defenses are laid out. First, Scripture seems to name the parts: 1 Thessalonians 5 asks God to sanctify you entirely, spelling out spirit and soul and body, and Hebrews 4 says the word of God pierces to the division of soul and spirit. Second, man made in the image of a trinitarian God might himself be expected to be threefold, an argument its own advocates admit is supporting rather than proving. Third, the spirit is presented as what relates to God: in Genesis 2, God warns that in the day Adam eats he will surely die, and since his body and soul lived on, the trichotomist argues it was his spirit that died, the state Ephesians 2 calls being dead in trespasses and sins and Romans 8 reverses, the body dead because of sin but the spirit alive because of righteousness. Along the way the teachers note the wordplay in Adam’s very name, drawn from adamah, the ground: made from dust, he returns to dust, so that salvation is rescue from the ground, and death, Satan’s strongest weapon, is exactly what Christ defeats. The responses to trichotomy wait for next week.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all seventeen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What conclusion from last session do the teachers carry into this one?
2. Why does the teachers’ account of Angie’s cremation open the session?
3. What did the underground church in Bhutan name as its first need?
4. Which three great acts do the teachers stack up to show that the physical is essential?
5. What distinction between mind and brain does the discussion depend on?
6. How do the teachers map the possible positions on the constitution of man?
7. Which of the following belongs to the definition of monism?
8. What is monism’s first argument, drawn from 1 Thessalonians 4?
9. On the monist reading, why did Joseph bind Israel’s sons to carry his bones out of Egypt?
10. What do the psalms of despair, with Isaiah 38 and Ecclesiastes 9, appear to say, on the monist argument?
11. What is the fifth, modern argument for monism?
12. How do the teachers answer the Old Testament’s near silence about an intermediate state?
13. What does the window illustration grant and deny about the brain?
14. Why is the Greek-origin argument said to commit the genetic fallacy?
15. What does trichotomy teach, and which part died in Eden on its argument?
16. Which passages form trichotomy’s chief scriptural defense?
17. What does the wordplay on Adam’s name preach about salvation?
All seventeen correct. Lecture 2 is complete.
The teachers say we instinctively comfort the grieving by saying the body is not really them and their soul is in a better place, yet Paul in 1 Thessalonians 4 comforts with the resurrection. What has shaped your own funeral instincts, and what changes if the body in the grave is truly part of the person Christ will raise?
The believers in Bhutan asked first for a cemetery. What does your own treatment of the body, in health, in sickness, and in death, say about what you actually believe a person is?
The teachers built the strongest case they could for a view they reject before answering it. Think of a belief you dismiss quickly. What would it cost you, and what might it gain you, to state its best case fairly before responding?
Daniel 12 carries the Old Testament’s one explicit promise of resurrection: many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, some to everlasting life, and the wise will shine like the brightness of the sky above.
The teachers point students wrestling with the brain and the soul to Moreland and Craig’s Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview, which treats the mind-body question at full philosophical depth. The first case study, on the constitution of man, is now live: talk the positions through with someone this week. Next session the dichotomists and monists answer trichotomy’s arguments, and the teachers give their own view of what man is made of.