Lecture 3: The Constitution of Man, Part 2: Dichotomy and Conditional Unity

The lecture, section by section

1. Teaching to think

   The session opens with the program’s reason for existing. Patton has been rereading Os Guinness’s Fit Bodies, Fat Minds and returns again to Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, whose famous first sentence says it all: “The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Noll’s charge is not that evangelicals lack good theology; many have been handed sound doctrine. It is that they have been indoctrinated rather than taught to think, and when the church walled itself in against liberalism in the 1920s it kept its theology and lost contact with the world. So the teachers refuse to shoot everything down the middle. They present every position’s best case and let students decide, accepting the same risk Luther accepted when he put the Bible into ordinary hands. Confused faces are welcome; theirs are confused a whole lot too. The posture they ask of the class is teachability.

2. Where we are, and where this is going

   The review: monism holds that there is no soul apart from the body, arguing from the psalms of despair and the Old Testament’s silence; trichotomy holds three parts, arguing chiefly that something in Adam must have died the day he ate, and it was not his body or his soul, so it must have been his spirit. The teachers also flag what is coming: a session on the theological meaning of male and female, and, sooner, a hard exercise in understanding others, an examination of a real theology, held by professing Christians, that allows for abortion, studied not to adopt it but so that our answers engage what people actually believe.

3. Answering trichotomy: Mark 12 and the counting problem

   The dichotomist’s first response: Scripture often names different aspects of a person with descriptive terms without dividing the person constitutionally. Mark 12 commands love for God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. If every listed term is a separate part, the trichotomist has counted wrong: that verse yields four parts, or more. Nobody takes heart and strength to be distinct compartments of the self; they are overlapping ways of saying all of you. The same, the dichotomist argues, holds for spirit and soul.

4. Answering trichotomy: the Trinity analogy

   To the argument that a triune God would make a threefold image, the dichotomist answers: take the analogy seriously and it proves far too much. The three persons of the Trinity are three centers of consciousness. If man’s composition mirrored that plurality, body, soul, and spirit would each be a person, and every human being would be three persons. Since no one holds that, the comparison is inconsistent and carries no weight even by the trichotomist’s own admission that it supports rather than proves.

5. Answering trichotomy: dead means separated

   The strongest trichotomist argument was that something died in Eden. The response: the word dead is being taken too literally. In Scripture death ordinarily means separation, not extinction: when the body dies, the person is separated from the body, not annihilated. So when Adam died that day, and when Ephesians 2 calls us dead in trespasses and sins, the meaning is that the entire being is separated from God, body, soul, and everything else, not that one compartment switched off while the others hummed along. Then Patton says something Dyke flags as quietly radical: if all of you is dead, then all of you must be regenerated. Salvation is not the rescue of a spirit out of a body; it reaches the whole person, which is why the Spirit’s indwelling shows up in things as embodied as self-control and changed behavior, and why the question of what exactly is being saved will return at the end of the hour.

6. Dichotomy, the church’s majority view

   Dichotomy teaches that man is two essential parts, most often stated today as material and immaterial: the material is all that is physical, and the immaterial is the soul and the spirit, which are the same. Its adherents include Augustine, Calvin, and Charles Hodge, and the teachers, with Dyke concurring as the resident historian, note that this has been the majority position of orthodox Christianity through most of church history. Its defense: where Scripture seems to distinguish soul from spirit, the distinction is functional, not ontological, like our idiom of accepting something with the mind while the heart cannot accept it; nobody thinks the heart is a second cognitive organ. The trichotomist’s comeback is fair as far as it goes: often synonymous does not prove always synonymous.

7. Conditional unity: you are a body and a soul

   Now the teachers’ own position, which Patton frames as drawing the strengths of monism and dichotomy together and Dyke frames as dichotomy correctly defined: conditional unity. It affirms two things that sit in deliberate tension: the essential unity of the material and immaterial in man, and the existence of a conscious afterlife. The hinge is a distinction of verbs: a person does not have a body and a soul; a person is a body and a soul, neither of which alone makes up the whole person. The favored illustration is water becoming steam: at death the person is not split into separable components, the person passes into another state, real and conscious, but fractured, a form we were never meant to occupy.

8. Complete with sin, incomplete without it

   The picture yields a striking formula. Now, you are a complete person with sin. In the intermediate state, you are an incomplete person without sin. Only at the resurrection are you a complete person without sin. Paul supplies the vocabulary in 2 Corinthians 5: separated from the body we are naked, unclothed, groaning not for escape from the body but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal is swallowed up by life. Being present with the Lord overshadows the nakedness, which is why Paul can call it better, but it is not yet the hope. The hope is resurrection, because our salvation is ultimately salvation from death, and every believer who dies before Christ returns still passes through the very thing salvation rescues from. Salvation is therefore technically incomplete until the resurrection, when death, the last enemy, is finally abolished, and the dead in Christ rise to a resurrected body in the new heaven and new earth.

9. What funerals leave out

   Here Patton pays the debt from last week’s charge about evangelical funerals. When a believer dies after a long battle with cancer, we say: finally, she is rid of that body. But that is not the hope, and stated alone it is closer to paganism than to Paul. What is true, that she is free of suffering and present with the Lord, is only part of the truth. The full hope is that the Lord will restore that very body, give it back perfected and cancer-free. Our funerals are not so much wrong as incomplete: there is more hope available than we ever get to, and the part we omit, the resurrection of the body, is the part the whole New Testament leans on.

10. Judged as whole people

    A second defense of conditional unity: the unredeemed will also be resurrected, because judgment, like redemption, falls on whole people. God does not judge a soul; he judges a person, and the person must be whole to be judged. Daniel 12 says many who sleep in the dust will awake, some to everlasting life and some to disgrace and everlasting contempt, and in John 5 Jesus says an hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, some to the resurrection of life and some to the resurrection of judgment. A student asks whether the condemned receive perfected bodies to endure judgment, and the teachers reach for Jonathan Edwards’s hard wrestling: the condemned glorify God in his attribute of justice as the forgiven glorify him in his mercy, so that God is glorified in the full variety of his attributes. The teachers present it as Edwards struggling honestly with a genuinely difficult question.

11. One person, linked in both directions

    The positive implications gather up the whole unit. Scripture speaks of a unified self in judgment and in redemption: man fell as a whole person and is redeemed as a whole person. And experience confirms the union daily, in both directions. When the soul is troubled, the body feels it; when the body is unhealthy, unexercised, or chemically depressed, the soul suffers and worship comes harder. The Christian does not have to deny any of this to answer monism. The body and brain are intrinsically linked to the soul without being identical to it: linked to, never equal to.

12. Gnostic dualism, the heresy in the pews

    The unit closes with an alternate position the teachers present only to bury: Gnostic dualism, the view that the body is a burdensome, temporary confinement out of which we must escape. It was the view of the Gnostics, the first-century heresy that grew from Platonic thought, in which every physical thing is a poor copy of a perfect immaterial form. And, the teachers say with a straight face, its modern adherents are most uninformed Christians who have not taken this course. Its effects are corrosive: it turns God-given physical pleasures like food into suspects, whispers that this life does not really matter, and disillusions people about eternity, when in fact the same whole person continues, a comfort Patton’s own wife found when she heard it. The correction is everywhere in Scripture. God’s first commands in a perfect world were physical: tend the garden, name the animals. And Christ’s chosen memorial is not standing beside a tree thinking spiritual thoughts but eating bread and drinking the cup, a remembrance that engages nearly every sense God gave us. The closing charge: do not present a gospel that divides people up into sections.

1. The teachers distinguish being handed good theology from being taught to think. Which have you mostly received, and what would it look like in your own study of Scripture to state an opposing view fairly before answering it?

2. Now a complete person with sin, then an incomplete person without sin, finally a complete person without sin. Which part of that formula most reshapes how you think about death, and how would you now comfort a grieving friend differently than you might have a month ago?

3. Where has a quiet Gnostic dualism shaped you: in how you treat your body, how you value ordinary physical life, or what you imagine eternity to be? What would change this week if you took seriously that God redeems the whole person?