Anthropology is the theological study of man. “Anthropos” is Greek for human. When the Bible speaks of man as a living soul, body and soul, the spirit of man, having human nature, what exactly is “man?” This is the question Anthropology discusses.
What is man
Alva Huffer in his Systematic Theology follows a very simple and straightforward explanation of what man is. Body + spirit = soul. He uses the creation of Adam as a template for what all men are. “Adam” after all, literally means “human.” When God made the first man (Genesis 2:7), it is described in these three steps:
- God made man from the dust of the ground
- He breathed into his nostrils the breath of life
- He came to be a living soul
We find he is made from dust (body), breath is given to him (spirit) noting that breath and spirit are the same word in both Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma), and he came to be a living soul. The union of life energy, or spirit, and the body creates a soul. Spirit is not something man is but rather something he has. The human is a body that is energized, much like a machine that has no power until it is plugged in. Spirit is much like an electrical spark. The human body is very similar to a battery. Our brain is powered by electrical shocks which send neurotransmitters over synaptic gaps. This is how our brain cells correspond to each other, more or less. When the human dies, his spirit goes out (Psalm 146:4, Ecclesiastes 12:7). The body does not have life anymore. No more electrical pulses. The cord to the machine is cut. While the machine is powered, this is what we call “a soul.” A living entity.
What about animals? Are they not living bodies as well? Yes they are. This is why they too are called “souls” (Genesis 1:20, though the word is often translated “creatures” the Hebrew word nephesh, soul, is actually used of the animals here and in many other places). A soul is not a ghost which man possesses and is released at death. It is not specific only to man. It is also a living animal as well.
Somatology
Soma is the Greek word for “body,” somatology is the theological study of the body. You are your body. You are a living body. “Dust you are and to dust you will return.” We often speak of the body idiomatically as if it is something else, or our minds and thoughts as if they are something other than ourselves. But we are our bodies and our brains. The body is celebrated in the Bible, and is spoken of as a good thing. Much of life’s pleasures come from our bodies. The enjoyment of a romantic relationship, eating good food, having a drink, the pleasures of the body. But we have to keep our bodies in check. Sin wants to push us to gluttony. Paul speaks very negatively about “the flesh,” and many have mistaken his statements as if they are gnostic. Paul isn’t talking about the physical body being a bad thing, he celebrates the time when our bodies will be clothed with immortality (1 Corinthians 15:53, 2 Corinthians 5:4). The “flesh” refers to sin, those carnal desires that our bodies would pursue if our minds didn’t keep it in check. Desire is balanced, and that is what the Law was made for. To teach man how to set limits. To sex, to violence, to eating and drinking, etc. The body should not be damned as the gnostics did, but should be appreciated and respected. As the Apostles Creed stated: “we believe in the resurrection of the body.”
Death
Life is when a human receives spirit. When a human is conceived in the womb, they receive spirit from God which energizes them. They grow into bodies which are born and live their lives until death. Death is when the body loses its life force. Their spirit which has energized them. “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7). God has given man the ability to conceive and form a body, but God is the giver of life to all of us, individually. Each of us receives our spirit from God and each of us owes him our lives. Just as God breathed life into Adam, he does so with everyone who is conceived.
Psychopannychism/Soul Sleep
Psychopannychism is the belief that the soul sleeps in death. The idea that the soul is in a sleeplike condition, not aware of time, not conscious of its surroundings, not animated or able to effect others. The most common metaphor for death in the Bible is “sleep” (1 Kings 2:10, 11:43, 14:20, 22:50, 2 Kings 14:16, 15:7, 16:20, 20:21, 21:18, Job 14:10, 12, Psalm 13:3, 17:15, Ecclesiastes 9:5, Jeremiah 51:57, Daniel 12:2, Mark 5:39, John 11:11, Acts 7:60, 13:36, 1 Corinthians 7:39, 11:30, 15:6, 20, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18). This is because not only is the body in a sleep like state, outstretched laying down (Job 7:21, 14:10), and for the reasons listed above, but also because those asleep can be called awake. There is a time when the dead will rise (John 5:28-29). The dead are in this state of unconsciousness, but they will be called awake for judgement. Everyone must appear before the judgement seat of Christ, whether living or dead, righteous or unrighteous (2 Corinthians 5:10). Until that time, the “intermediate” state of the dead are to be asleep. Not a disembodied spirit or soul who can be contacted from beyond the grave, not a spirit which haunts a location, not granting the living signs and strength. They are as active in your life as they are when they were asleep.
Mortalism
Mortalism is the belief that a soul can die. Sometimes this and soul sleep are blurred together, but I distinguish them slightly. The soul is asleep in death, because it will be awakened and brought back to life at judgement (Hebrews 9:27). Those who are judged to righteousness are granted our reward of immortality. The soul is now “life-giving spirit” (1 Corinthians 15:45, compare 2 Corinthians 3:18, and Philippians 3:21). For those souls which are resurrected for judgement, and are judged to receive death, the second death, the soul dies. The soul is “destroyed.” This contrasts with the typical assumption that the soul is immortal and cannot die. However, “the soul which is sinning, it itself will die” (Ezekiel 18:4, 20). “Fear the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna” (Matthew 10:28). The soul is mortal. It can die. Every soul which is not granted immortality will be put to death.
Conditional Immortality
Conditional immortality is antithetical to the idea of natural immortality. Natural immortality is the assertion that man is naturally immortal. Immortality is not something which has to be given or granted by God on their view. Natural immortality assumes that immortality is unconditional, every soul is immortal because souls are naturally immortal. If the soul is immortal and cannot die, and every human is an immortal soul, then every human is naturally immortal. This seems quite obviously wrong, given as we’ve seen above, that souls can die and be destroyed, but also because immortality is a gift, it’s the reward for righteousness (Luke 20:36, John 3:16, 6:50, 8:51, 11:26, Romans 2:7, 6:23, 1 Corinthians 15:22, 54, 2 Timothy 1:10, 1 Peter 1:23, Revelation 20:4-6). In these passages, we see that receiving “eternal life, immortality,” and “the second death has no hold over,” are all rewards we receive for believing in Jesus, keeping his commandments, giving up our lives for him, and being righteous. There are conditions to receiving immortality. Man is not naturally and inherently immortal, endowed with an immortal soul which survives death to be alive in another form/state.
The Soul
In Plato’s book “the Phaedo,” we have the last moments of Socrates before he is sentenced to death. Socrates followers mourn for him, and much to the surprise of every normal individual, Socrates scolds them, harshly, for weeping for his death. Socrates sees death as a victory. As a philosopher, one of the greatest things to him in life is the ability to think, reason, and rationalize. To engage in debates and conversation. His body got in the way of that. Needing sleep and to be fed and taken care of were all stopping him from doing the great work of philosophy. Death would finally give him a way of doing so. He would be freed from this ankle weight called a body. He states: “is not death just the separation of the soul from the body?” His soul could do the great work of philosophy forever without the holding back of the body.
A common belief about the soul is that the body cannot possibly do immaterial things, such as think, love, feel. How does a physical object like a rock express thought and emotion? It can’t. The alchemical golem, which has some sort of metaphysical life given to it can now possess these qualities. The rock needs something immaterial to express these immaterial things. This is what many people thought, so anything which seemed as if it couldn’t be the result of a physical object, was attributed to “the soul.” Some metaphysical ghost in the body which did these immaterial things. Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick, wrote a book called: The Astonishing Hypothesis (the scientific search for the human soul). In this book, he explores these very things and makes note of what we now all know today. These so called “immaterial” processes, such as thought and emotion, are actually very much from the physical brain. When Phineas Gage had a metal railroad rod blown through his head, a normal man with normal emotions became wildly animalistic. When SM-046 had part of her brain (the amygdala) calcified, basically turned into stone, she could no longer feel fear. When physical things happen to the physical brain, this shouldn’t effect the metaphysical “soul” if it truly is the ghost within us. After studying these sorts of issues, Crick comes to the astonishing hypothesis: “we are nothing more than a pack of neurons.” The scientific search for the human soul shows that, if there is such a metaphysical thing such as a soul, it isn’t responsible for these things people like Socrates attributed towards it. It is undetectable. People thought that we are souls, trapped in a body, waiting to escape into the Astral realm, or “heaven.” It seems that this is incorrect.
The early gnostics had a very similar view as Socrates. They believed that the material realm, the physical world, is fallen and corrupted. It is the “black cube” in which we are trapped, the lowest world from the fall of kabalah. You had to achieve gnosis (knowledge) to escape this world. They believed that when you died, this immaterial part of you would try and leave this physical world of existence and knowledge is how you navigated in the afterlife. Many of the early church fathers believed in Socrates definition of the soul as well, and thus, anthropologies which involve the human soul leaving the human body and escaping to heaven started to form and develop very early on from platonic philosophies. This theory didn’t come from the Biblical worldview. This came from some mistaken interpretations. The belief that the human soul is an immaterial part of the human which escapes the body at death was defined in these exact terms by Socrates, not the Bible.
In Numbers 6:6, we read: “All the days of his life as a Nazirite for the LORD he shall not come up to a dead person.” That word for “dead person” or in some translations, “a dead body,” is the Hebrew word for soul, nephesh. Quite literally, he shall not touch a dead soul (see also Leviticus 19:28, 21:11, Numbers 9:6, 10, 19:11, 13, for more references to dead souls). The dead soul is the body that is laying there. It shouldn’t be touched or the soul that touches the dead soul is unclean. Dead persons are dead souls. Note this as well: Psalm 16:10: “For You will not abandon my soul to Sheol, nor will You let Your Holy One see decay.” Sheol, or Greek Hades (compare the LXX or Acts 2:27) is the realm of the dead. It is where the dead are. If a soul goes to the realm of the dead, are we really to say that the soul is “still alive?” In Thayer’s Greek lexicon, under ψυχή, one definition and usage is: “the soul as an essence which differs from the body and is not dissolved by death.” Under this, it gives Acts 2:27 and 31, which quote the above Psalm, as justification for this definition of an immortal soul which survives death. The claim being that when David asks God not to abandon his soul to the realm of the dead, the soul must be alive going somewhere. The soul is alive in the realm of the dead. In verse 31, this is applied to Jesus. The question must be, “was Jesus in Hades for 3 days?” If the answer is yes, then the claim is that a soul which is alive is in the world of the dead and not dead. In fact, nothing dead is in the realm of the dead. If the answer is no, then Jesus did not spend 3 days dead. Did Jesus even die? Did just his body die but Jesus is actually an immortal soul that didn’t die? Do any of us die, then, if we are immortal souls? Is it true that the punishment of sin is death, or do none of us truly ever die? Was Satan correct when he told Eve “you surly will not die?”
The Bible does make a distinction between body and soul. We are not saying that the body and the soul are identical. The soul is the body when it is endowed with life. When the body does not have life, the person is a dead soul. When living, this person is a living soul. Notice how the Bible distinguishes body and soul: “Because of this I say to you, do not worry about your soul, what you should eat or what you should drink; nor your body, what you should put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” (Matthew 6:25) Do not worry about giving your soul food and water to live, or giving your body clothing. Notice the distinction. The soul needs food and water to live. Man doesn’t need clothing to live. If the soul is this immortal immaterial entity, then why does it need food and water? Does the body need food and water? The soul is the whole living body. Even a dead body can be clothed. We clothed the dead appropriately before burial. But to live, to be a living soul, you must have food and water.
The Resurrection Body
Part of the gospel message is our reward in the kingdom of our spiritual resurrection bodies. It is sometimes rather concerning to hear mainstream Christians attempt to explain how an immortal soul leaves the body and goes to heaven, but why Paul speaks about the mortal putting on immortality and receiving everlasting life. They do not seem to truly believe that there is a resurrection body.
As we have seen above, man is, now, a living soul. When he does, his life goes out, and he is a dead soul, in a sleeplike state. The first resurrection occurs at what many call “the rapture.” This is the return of Jesus where all of his servants will be caught up together with him in the clouds and we will all be changed. This is the change into our resurrection bodies. The dead receive theirs first, as they are being raised in those bodies. The living will receive theirs as they meet together. This is the wedding of the bride of Christ when we are joined in one body, the resurrection body. The second resurrection are those who are raised to judgement. If they are judged righteous, they are part of what we call “the wider hope.” They didn’t receive the second death, but they didn’t accept Christ in their lives and endure to the end. Those who are judged to punishment will be thrown into the lake of fire, to be annihilated. This is the death of the soul permanently.
What, then, is the resurrection body? Philippians 3:21 says: ” by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body.” Our resurrection body will be like Jesus’ resurrection body. So if we study his body, we will see what ours will be like. When Jesus was raised from the dead, many people wonder if he was flesh until the ascension and became a spirit, or if he was raised as a spirit and not flesh.
Some will say Jesus was raised as a spirit, because he appeared to people in a different form (Mark 16:12), and to the apostles in a way they did not recognize. They surely would have known it was him if he was raised in his same body (Luke 24:13-31).
Then, others will say: Of course Jesus was raised in his body of flesh. The body in the tomb was missing because that body got up when it was raised from the dead (John 20:1-13). Thomas touched the holes in the hands and side of the body which was crucified. Surely Jesus didn’t just materialize as a spirit and fake these holes to pretend to be in that same body (John 20:25-27). Jesus even denies being a spirit in Luke 24:39: “Look at my hands and my feet. It is I myself! Touch me and see; a spirit does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have.”
So is Jesus flesh or is he spirit? He is both. That’s what a new creation is. This self same body of flesh clothed in spirit. It was the actual body of Jesus appearing in a locked room and yet having the same holes of his crucifixion. So why does Jesus say “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as I have?” He is not just a spirit like an angel who appears as a man. These angels appear as men and are sometimes mistaken as men, but they do not have flesh and bones. He is a new creation. A new creation does have flesh and bones as he does. Doesn’t Paul say that flesh and blood can’t enter heaven? So then how can Jesus be flesh still when he ascends? No, Paul doesn’t say this. In 1 Corinthians 15:50 says: “flesh and blood is not able to inherit the kingdom of God, nor does decay inherit immortality.” Flesh and blood doesn’t inherit the kingdom of God. That is the kingdom in heaven, and also upon the earth. Notice what he says in the next verse: “Behold, I tell to you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed… the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.” We can’t enter the kingdom of God as we are now as flesh and blood. We must be changed. We must put on immortality. Looking at Jesus’ resurrection body, we note that he was not resurrected in the same unchanged body that went into the tomb. He had to be changed. He became clothed in the Spirit. So also must we be changed. We can’t enter as we are now, sinful, corrupted, mortal. We must be perfected, incorruptible and immortal. How? We must be clothed in, not just any spirit, but the Holy Spirit of God. When Jesus was raised in his resurrection body, he was raised with his body of Spirit, that is, Holy Spirit. 2 Corinthians 3-5 speaks about something very similar to 1 Corinthians 15, the statements about the resurrection body. In 2 Corinthians 3, Paul is speaking of the ministry of death as opposed to the ministry of the Spirit. In verses 17-18, he says that “the Lord (Jesus) is the Spirit, and we are being conformed to the same image.” In chapter 4:5 he says we preach Jesus as Lord, there can be no question as to who he means by “The Lord” and what he means by “the Spirit.” Compare 2 Corinthians 5:4 with 1 Corinthians 15:53-54. Putting on immortality. This body putting on the Spirit of life. The Holy Spirit. This is why we, now, receive the Spirit as a deposit, or a down-payment (Ephesians 1:17). We receive the Spirit in full when we receive immortality in our resurrection bodies, just as Jesus did. This is why Jesus can breathe the Spirit onto his disciples (John 20:22). What was once his own breath/spirit, is now the Spirit of God. Breath is a sign of life. When someone is living, breathing, they are alive. When granted the Spirit of immortality, your mortal body has been consumed in immortality. The first Adam was a living soul. He was mortal. He was alive so long as he ate the fruit of the tree of life (Genesis 3:22). The fruit is what kept his soul alive. The last Adam is life-giving Spirit (1 Corinthians 15:45). He does not need to eat fruit to live. He is not a soul which can die. The mortal has been swallowed up by immortality. The soul is now the immortal Spirit. Many people think our resurrection bodies will be just a copy of Adam’s before the fall. No. Our bodies will be greater. The earth will be greater than the garden of Eden. There’s a greatness of new creation which exceeds the original creation. If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation (2 Corinthians 5:17). Why? Because he is the first of the new creation (Colossians 1:18). Born of the dead, born of the Spirit (Acts 2:33, 13:30-33). “We no longer know Christ according to the flesh” (2 Corinthians 5:16). Jesus was a creation like Adam “in the days of his flesh,” when he learned obedience and became perfected by it (Hebrews 5:7-8). Now, we know Christ according to the Spirit. He is the comforter/parakletos from the Father (compare 1 John 2:1 to John 14:16). He is a new creation. This is the resurrection body. This is our reward.