The Deep Unity of the Self
What does it mean to be a human self? What constitutes it? We will all be familiar with a similar vocab bank: body, soul, spirit, mind, heart, etc. It’s also probably not much of a stretch to assume that most of us have been taught that human beings are composed of two (or three) parts: body and soul (and spirit).
It’s often of assumed that these composite parts of the human self are separate and discrete things that we can treat in isolation. But in Scripture there is a lot of overlap between these terms. Different biblical authors (and writers throughout the church’s history) use these words differently. Sometimes they use them with a lot of precision in order to make important distinctions, but sometimes precision isn’t the goal.
For instance, words like spirit/soul can be completely interchangeable in some biblical texts. Think of Mary’s song in Luke 1:47, “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Is Luke using this language to make a distinction between the soul and the spirit? Is he trying to be precise? Do souls have the specific job of magnifying and spirits handle the rejoicing? Some might want to make that case, but in my reading this is sort of a poetic doubling, a literary device.
I think what’s being communicated is that Mary–as one whole person–is magnifying and rejoicing. It’s not so much that there are two regions inside her—one called “soul” and the other called “spirit”—Mary is the single subject here. The act of magnifying and rejoicing is something that involves Mary’s whole person. Not simply her soul and spirit but also her body (lungs, vocal cords, and lips as she sings)!
Biblical authors and theologians might intend to be precise and make distinctions at times, but very often there is a lot of overlap in the way these terms get used. It all depends on the writer and the context.
But I do think this is key: there is no hard and fast way of using the language of soul, spirit, mind, heart. Our problems come when we decide in advance exactly what these terms have to mean and then read our own arbitrary definitions into the biblical texts. You have to read a biblical author/theologian on their own terms and try to figure out what’s important to them and see the distinctions they want to make.
There isn’t one easy schema that the Bible always uses. But that’s what many of us will have learned. Think of the common saying: “You are a soul but you have a body.” Or: “You are a spirit, who has a soul, that lives in a body.” The problem with systems like this is not that they claim humans have spirits and souls and bodies. The problem is that these words are not always used in technically precise ways that are uniform across Scripture.
Something in us craves for these neat and tidy definitions and distinctions, though. I think it is a uniquely modern craving. We view ourselves as machines or computers and those have separable parts. And the key to scientific knowledge—or so we think—is to break everything down to its smallest components. The smaller the better.
Breaking things down and taking them apart allows us to analyze them. And we think that what something is in its smallest parts reveals the deepest truth of it. Knowledge comes by dissection.
But say you are in a biology class that is dissecting a cat. The professor says, “We are going to split up into groups and this group will study the heart, this group the brain, this group the stomach, etc… and when we come back together we will share what we’ve found.” You will definitely gain plenty of information about the anatomy of the cat. But there is one thing you won’t have access to: the cat! Because in order to dissect it, you had to kill it.
I think the truth of what it means to be human is found not in dissecting us down to our parts and studying them in isolation from one another, but rather the deepest truth is found in the whole. Being analytical and breaking things down to their smallest bits is a really helpful thing, but true knowledge comes on the other side of analysis. It comes in encountering.
This doesn’t mean we can’t distinguish between the parts of the human self. We can. But those parts aren’t what they are in isolation from the other parts.
Our thinking needs to be more christological. Jesus Christ has two natures. He is fully divine and fully human. But the truth of who he is can never be found by breaking him down into his natures, but only in the wholeness of his person. Does Jesus ever say or do anything without being simultaneously fully divine and fully human? No. To truly know Jesus we encounter the him in his personhood.
Put otherwise, full knowledge comes not in mere analysis (breaking things down into parts), but in synthesis (unity of the whole).
Neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues that because our brains have two hemispheres we have two ways of attending to the world: analysis and synthesis.1 Breaking things down to grasp the bits and the parts on the one hand, and seeing the whole picture on the other.2 Obviously you need both, but the end goal should be synthesis.
One of the most fascinating examples McGilchrist gives to show the difference is a semi-rare condition called “face-blindness.” People with face-blindness (prosopagnosia) have a harder time recognizing faces. This is usually due to a traumatic injury or developmental issues in the right hemisphere of the brain.3
But here’s the weird thing. People with face-blindness are not blind. It’s not that they can’t see faces. They can. They can see facial features like noses, eyes, ears, and mouths. But what they are unable to do is recognize whose face it is. They can see the parts of the face, but they can’t see the whole thing at once and identify it.
For most of us, it’s the opposite. We see faces as wholes, as singular things, and we might even struggle to describe the parts of a person’s face that we know very well.
(I could talk about face-blindness for hours. Malcolm Gladwell recently had an episode on his podcast Revisionist History on face-blindness that was really great. One man they interviewed said that he will regularly have to pause a movie to ask his wife who a character is. She usually says something like: “Honey that is still Robert De Niro, he just has a hat on now.”4)
Of Earth and Spirit
The truth is that the typical hard and fast distinction and separation of soul from body (“You are a soul and you have a body”) is not quite right. In Genesis 2:7 we read: “...then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.”
The human being that God creates in his image is taken from the earth. Humanity is derived from a piece of earth. That’s who it is. The church’s temptation from the beginning was to see the body as dirty, defiling, and evil. The body is bad so it needs to be shed.
But in Genesis we get a completely different picture. Human beings are taken from the dust of the ground but that ground is not the cursed ground of Genesis 3, it is the blessed ground. We are taken from the earth that God called “good!” Your body is a good gift from God. Without it you wouldn’t be you.
The christianities that have shaped many of us have often undercut the importance and the goodness of the body (“You only have a body.”) But the truth is that a person’s body belongs intimately to who they are. Our bodies aren’t prisons, or shells, some exterior thing that can just be cast off.
I think we can put it this strongly: Human beings do not ‘have’ bodies. We are bodies.
But we are not only bodies. God doesn’t just mold us from the dust of the ground. He breathes the breath of life into the body. This breath/soul is life, it animates the human being. The soul is not an abstract gas that floats around until it is pumped into human lungs. The soul (nephesh in Hebrew and psyche in Greek) is the concrete bodily life of a creature. The soul is the whole person.
We have to hold both things simultaneously: We are embodied souls and we are ensouled bodies.
Without either one we are not in the image of God. And neither one is what it is made to be without the other.
Oftentimes people will point to 2 Corinthians 5:8 to prove that we are souls who only have bodies. Paul writes, “We would rather be absent from the body and to be present form the Lord.” On the first reading it does sound like it is our body that needs to be shed in order to be present with the Lord.
But if you read the whole passage you will find that Paul is actually making the exact opposite point.
“For we know that, if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to be further clothed with our heavenly dwelling, for surely when we have been clothed in it we will not be found naked. For while we are in this tent, we groan under our burden because we wish not to be unclothed but to be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.” (2 Cor. 5:1-5).
Paul seems to think that a disembodied existence would be a dreadful thing. It would be sub-human. We do not want to “shed this mortal coil” and be a “naked” soul. That wouldn’t be comfortable or fitting for us.
The goal is not to take off this body and become a naked soul, but rather to be “further clothed” with a resurrected body, a body that is incorruptible.
To be disembodied is to be less than human.
Being Re-Membered at The Lord’s Supper
This separation and dismembering of the human person can lead to misunderstanding what salvation actually is. God intends to redeem us as whole persons: body and soul.
Think of another popular passage we regularly misread. In Revelation 3:20 Jesus is speaking to the church in Sardis: “Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in and eat with you, and you with me.”
We usually hear this verse and think that it is talking about “asking Jesus into your heart.” But the passage says nothing about that. (We easily forget he is talking to people who are already in the church.)
So, what is it about? It’s about eating with Jesus. And not a spiritualized eating. Really eating—bodily. Jesus calls his church to gather at his table and eat a meal of bread and wine. It would be hard to do that without your body.
But eating with Jesus does not only involve your body. It involves the whole of who you are. The communion meal is bread and wine, but it is not merely bread and wine. In eating this meal we are participating in the very life of Jesus (1 Cor. 10:16).
The earliest Pentecostals were adamant about this. The communion meal is not merely a meal of bread and wine that brings Jesus to our memory. They insisted that Jesus is actually present in the meal.5 We feast with him as we feast on him.
When we eat the bread and drink the cup we are communing with Jesus as whole persons. Our bodies are engaged along with our souls (and our spirits, hearts, and minds). The supper is an all-embracing reality.
God created human beings as body and soul, and that’s how he is saving us. In the incarnation Jesus has taken to himself the totality of what it means to be human. He has a human heart, a human mind, a human soul, a human spirit, and a human body. If he didn’t take all of these things to himself, then we would not be completely saved.6
Our tendency is to denigrate the body and exalt the soul, as if that’s what’s really important. The truth is that most of us would rather not be human. We would prefer to be something more, something more lofty. That was Adam and Eve’s sin. In wanting to become more than human they tried to become like God. But they didn’t realize that God is God precisely as a human.
C.S. Lewis says that the perennial human temptation is to be more spiritual than God. But:
“There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life in us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.”7
Jesus has ordained that our fellowship with him take place at a meal.
The Lord’s Supper is a remembering. But it is also a re-membering. It takes the broken and disconnected pieces of our lives and re-members them, makes us whole.
This is the work of Jesus. Jesus is out to re-member you. And he does this by calling us to eat this meal “in remembrance” of him. As often as we eat the bread and drink the cup we re-member Christ. He makes us members of his own body in our eating. The Spirit gathers us up—body, soul, heart, mind, spirit—and brings us into the wholeness that is Christ.
And all this happens over a shared meal.
As Rowan Williams memorably put it, “It is, perhaps, the most simple thing we can say about Holy Communion, yet it is still supremely worth saying. In Holy Communion, Jesus Christ tells us that he wants our company.”8
He wants your company. Not just a piece of you. Not just your soul or your mind or your heart. He wants to eat with the entirety of you in order to make you entirely you.
Analysis and synthesis are my words, not his.
See Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.
McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, pp. 58—61.
Malcolm Gladwell, Revisionist History Podcast, “Face Value” episode.
For more see Chris E.W. Green, Toward a Pentecostal Theology of the Lord’s Supper.
As Gregory of Nazianzus famously put it, “That which is not assumed is not healed.”
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, p. 64.
Rowan Williams, Being Christian, p. 41.
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