Bible Stories

We are ‘flesh‘, made of the ‘dust of the earth’. We are part of creation; we eat, excrete, procreate, suffer and die just like the other creatures. The very idea of ‘dust’ describes our creaturely status. No humanist could speak more definitely of our lowly origins. Far from making us too otherworldly, the Bible cuts us down to size: ‘You take away their breath, they die and return to the dust,’ says the Psalmist. But if the Bible writers are realistic, they are in no way negative. The Bible affirms life, and joyfully encourages us to enjoy life’s pleasures. It tells us that if God has seen fit to create us as physical beings there is nothing in our make-up or anatomy to be ashamed of.

More than animal

But the Bible never stops there. Humankind is mortal, but we are not purely animal. To speak as if we were gives the lie to the idea of the image of God. And so the Bible uses other terms as well: soul, heart, spirit and body.

Taken together with ‘flesh‘, they give us an account of our nature as being open to the worlds both of flesh and of spirit.

The Bible has an integrated view of human nature. It never sees us as the sum total of different compartments: flesh, soul and spirit. The Bible writers were certainly people of their own time and used their own terms to describe humanity. Yet they believed most firmly in what we today call the ‘psychosomatic unity’ of the person - the interdependence of body, mind and emotions. Body, soul and spirit are terms the Bible uses to show us as people at home in this world, but with the capacity to reach beyond ourselves to the world of the spirit.

The biggest mistake is to think of ourselves as owning a soul as we would a suitcase or an umbrella. This was the way the ancient Greeks thought. Greek or ‘Hellenistic’ culture was the background to the first centuries of the church. In Alexandria, for instance, theologians tried to relate their faith to this way of thought. Not surprisingly, this Greek view of ‘soul‘ and ‘body‘ infected the early church, whose catch phrase was ’soma-sema’, the body a tomb. To their mind, the soul was released from its prison at death and set free.

The same idea is expressed in the song: ‘John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on.’ It seems to assume that there are two John Browns, the physical John who went to war, now dead, and the spiritual John, now in heaven. It shows how easy it is to fall into thinking that the real ‘me’ is somehow different from my physical body.

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