What is the soul?
While this question may seem, depending on who you are, overly shallow or overly deep, it is, nevertheless, one of the most important questions in all of Anthropology. Theologians have struggle for…ever…to come up with a comprehensive and coherent answer to this question, and despite our best efforts, there is no consensus. And, really, there is no consensus today. But, let me propose an idea, that may go in the way of getting us closer to an answer, and look at its implications for other aspects of Theology.
So, what is the soul? Well, let’s look at one of the first places that the “word” is used, in relationship to people. Genesis 2:7 says:
וַיִּיצֶר֩ יְהוָ֨ה אֱלֹהִ֜ים אֶת־הָֽאָדָ֗ם עָפָר֙ מִן־הָ֣אֲדָמָ֔ה וַיִּפַּ֥ח בְּאַפָּ֖יו נִשְׁמַ֣ת חַיִּ֑ים וַֽיְהִ֥י הָֽאָדָ֖ם לְנֶ֥פֶשׁ חַיָּֽה׃
And Yahweh God formed the Earth-One [from the] dust from earth and breathed in his nostrils the breath of life, and the Earth-One was a living soul.
Notice the order, because this is significant. The Earth-One is made from the earth, fashioned, secondarily, not spoken into existence, but made of existing material. And AFTER the Earth-One is formed God breathes into his nostrils and the Earth-One becomes a “living soul” – a Nephesh Chaiyah. Now, interestingly, while we think of the “soul” being distinctly a human quality, that’s not how Genesis portrays it. Genesis describes animals as being or having Nephesh Chaiyah. The word “soul” comes to us in English through a strange route, not worth discussing here. But it is crucial to understand that the Hebrew concept of Nephesh, and it’s LXX translation ψυχή “Psoochay” are not 1-1 with the concept we have. Nor is the Latin “Anima”.
Much of our thinking is influenced by Greek Philosophy, and that’s OK, so far as it goes. The Greeks distinguished the Intellect from the Emotions (we’d say the head and the heart). Which is why the Greatest Commandment in Hebrew involved loving God with all your “Heart”, “Soul”, and “Strength”. And the Greeks wanted to break this into “Heart”, “Mind”, “Soul”, and “Strength”. But to the Hebrews there was no distinction between the “Heart” and the “Mind”. The Intellect and the Emotion were encapsulated in the term for “Heart”.
Now, insofar as we use these words as descriptors of distinguishable capacities of the human person, they’re perfectly useful. Note the writers of the NT had no problem breaking up “Heart” and “Mind” for the Greek audience, to accommodate them. This suggests that the dividing of the “parts” (even though that’s an unfortunate word) of the human person is always artificial, it isn’t imagined. People are complex and this complexity seems to seek description and taxonomy. God had no problem with a further and more careful description of personality as an accommodation to a different worldview.
Where this gets us into trouble, however, is when it tends towards Gnosticism and the belief that the “soul” (whatever people mean by that) is entirely distinct from the Body. Which, of course it isn’t.
But let’s define terms here so that we can stop using quotation marks. By soul, for our purposes, let’s use the term consciousness. Granted, consciousness is not well understood, but this seems to be a fair accommodation. The body can exist without consciousness, but in this mortal sphere the consciousness cannot exist without the body.
Remember, consciousness (the soul – Nephesh) came AFTER the physical/ material form of man was fashioned. Man doesn’t become a “living creature” until AFTER the Earth-One is formed from the Earth.
And this, I fear, has been overlook by Christians (or at least by me, heretofore). What this means is that God did something to a physical/ material form that caused that form to become (it wasn’t before) a living-creature. The soul arises within and OF the material form after God breathes the breath of life into its nostrils.
This has implications. What this seems to mean to me, and it seems that science would agree, is that there is no “Ghost in the Machine”. There is no secret-you inside of your brain. Your brain, and other parts of your nervous system which control thought and impulse and the will ARE your consciousness. In other words the brain is the mind and the mind is the brain. This would seem to suggest that the “will” is also one-in-being with the Central Nervous System.
Now, I know that some are going to push back. This seems to Materialist. It seems too mechanical and chemical. But isn’t this what we should expect? If life arose in the form of the dust shouldn’t we expect the dust to be the mechanism through which the “soul” functions?
Moreover, this would seem to answer one of the age-old questions about life. When is a soul (or, if you’d prefer, when is a person who has the capacity for consciousness, the exercise of will, and who possesses personaity and personality) created? It’s created when a new human being is formed. The soul exists at conception because conception creates not only a new physical person, but insodoing creates a new psychological person. This would seem to militate against Mormon thinking, or the Jewish mystical concept of the Guf.
This may seem like making a mountain out of a mole-hill. But let’s consider that human reproduction is a physical act that requires physical material. Sperm and Egg are needed – these are physical materials about which we know a little. We know that when these fuse life is created. Does God supernaturally implant “a soul” into every zygote upon fusion? Maybe. But how? Isn’t it possible that God superintends the fusion of sperm and egg and uses the mechanism of physical reproduction to create a soul, rather than a supernatural implantation of a “Ghost in the Machine”. It seems, at a minimum to be worthy of consideration.
Moreover, this would be in line with the Biblical description of the Sin Nature. The Sin Nature is called “the flesh”. Again, this is not to prop up some Gnostic/ Platonic idea of the badness of bodies, but to consider that what is tainted isn’t some immaterial “part of us” but our very hardware itself! The “flesh” is the hardware and the software because the software is inseparable from the hardware. The soul is inseparable from the body – at least while living.
Sin is passed on from generation to generation, and the Bible warns that some sins are national and familial. Is it possible that it isn’t simply “nurture” that causes certain people to be predisposed to certain sins, but “nature”, as well. It would certainly seem so, when we consider how strongly IQ and other personality traits are correlated to genetics. Naturally, this doesn’t mean these traits are fixed, but that they are heritable.
The Bible’s routine description about the inheritance of sinfulness is that it is passed on through physical reproduction. Why should we spiritualize this? There is no need to. We ought to take these concepts at face value.
Sin is passed on through human reproduction, because the sin nature is nothing less than (though it may certainly be more than) the corrupted neural hardware that has causes human beings to do evil, through various impulse reward mechanism and natural predispositions. It may, in fact, be possible that sin has instinctually programmed us to hate God – to have antipathy towards Him, or at minimum, to desire autonomy and the reject God’s rule.
In short, the soul is sinful because the will is sinful because the brain and body are sinful because our bodies came from sinful bodies that were corrupted in the first sin. Adam’s hardware was corrupted in the first sin and ever since, all our hardware has been corrupted. It requires a New Birth to give us the ability to begin defragging and deleting corrupted software with good stuff. This is the work of the Holy Spirit, often called sanctification.
It is nothing less than what Paul said: we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. Literally, we become like Christ when, by the agency of the Holy Spirit, we reprogram our brains to obey God, to love righteousness and holiness, to hate sin. Some day our hardware will either be fixed or replaced. Until that day we continue passing on corrupted brains. But, hope there is. Someday we will be fixed. Someday all that’s wrong will be made right. Someday our brains and bodies and souls will be fixed and we will be like Christ.