Body, Soul, and Human Life (Studies in Theological Interpretation)

The Nature of Humanity in the Bible

Green, Joel B., Bartholomew, Craig G., Green, Joel, Seitz, Christopher

• Verlag: Baker Academic
• Jahr: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781441210753
• Thema: Théologie et religion
• Thema: Critique et interprétation bibliques

Are humans composed of a material body and an immaterial soul? This view is commonly held by Christians, yet it has been undermined by recent developments in neuroscience. Exploring what Scripture and theology teach about issues such as being in the divine image, the importance of community, sin, free will, salvation, and the afterlife, Joel Green argues that a dualistic view of the human person is inconsistent with both science and Scripture. This wide-ranging discussion is sure to provoke much thought and debate. Bestselling books have explored the relationship between body, mind, and soul. Now Joel Green provides us with a biblical perspective on these issues.

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THE BIBLE, THE NATURAL SCIENCES, AND THE HUMAN PERSON

There is a new image of man emerging, an image that will dramatically contradict almost all traditional images man has made of himself in the course of his cultural history. (Thomas Metzinger)[1]

The idea that the soul can continue to exist without the body or brain, strains scientific credibility. ... The dualistic approach is also unattractive theologically. (Fraser Watts)[2]

But someone has testified somewhere, “What are human beings that you are mindful of them, or mortals, that you care for them? You have made them for a little while lower than the angels; you have crowned them with glory and honor, subjecting all things under their feet.” (Heb 2:6-8)[3]

Self-assessment is often needed, but not always welcome. In the case of an examination of humanity in the Bible, however, temptations may run in a different direction. Rather than avoiding analysis of ourselves as the human family or members of that family, we risk imagining that the Bible is “about” us. However, as Barth recognized in his 1916 lecture on “The Strange New World within the Bible,” the “stuff” of the Bible is not fundamentally about human history, human needs, human potential, human practices.

The Bible tells us not how we should talk with God but what he says to us; not how we find the way to him, but how he has sought and found the way to us; not the right relation in which we must place ourselves to him, but the covenant which he has made with all who are Abraham’s spiritual children and which he has sealed once and for all in Jesus Christ. It is this which is within the Bible.

Barth concludes, “We have found in the Bible a new world, God, God’s sovereignty, God’s glory, God’s incomprehensible love.”[4] Recent work in biblical theology has only underscored this insight, insisting again and again that the unity of the biblical witness resides in God’s self-revelation – not the “idea” or “concept” of God but God himself.[5] Given the human propensity to regard with hyperbole our significance in the cosmos, this is an important opening reminder. On the one hand, we have been reticent to acknowledge the continuity of humanity with all other animals and, indeed, the degree to which our lives are bound up with the world we indwell. On the other, we are slow to recognize our creatureliness in relation to God. Consequently, we have found ourselves humbled by scientific discovery – in the modern age, first by Copernicus, who demonstrated that our planet and, thus, we who inhabit the earth, are not the center around which the universe turns; and second, by Darwin and evolutionary biology, which has located Homo sapiens within the animal kingdom with a genetic make-up that strongly resembles the creatures around us.[6] Were we to take Barth seriously, we might entertain a further “humbling” – namely, the realization that the Bible is about God, first and foremost, and only derivatively about us.

Study of the human person in the Bible – that is, a biblical-theological anthropology or, more simply, a biblical anthropology – is thus a derivative inquiry. It is secondary. However, insofar as it struggles with the character of humans in relation to God and with respect to the vocation given humanity by God, it is nonetheless crucial. We are concerned, then, with how the Bible portrays the human person, the basis and telos of human life, what it means for humanity, in the words of Irenaeus, to be “fully alive” (Adversus haereses, 4.20). Unavoidably, this raises questions about relations within the human family, and about the place of humanity in the world.

Humanity and Human Identity in Biblical Theology

By way of setting the stage, a brief review of key voices in the discussion is in order. Although my chief concern is with more recent directions and emphases, it is impossible to consider study of biblical anthropology without first recognizing the towering and stubborn influence of the perspective on humanity developed in Rudolf Bultmann’s New Testament Theology, published 60 years ago.[7]

Bultmann’s work encompassed some six hundred pages, with almost one-third of the project devoted to humanity; this alone belies the importance of this topic in his rendering of NT theology. Another measure of the importance of anthropology for Bultmann is his location of such theological issues as God’s righteousness, grace, the death and resurrection of Christ, and the church as sub-categories of a theology of the human person. Although the center of his concern is Paul’s anthropology, we quickly discover that Bultmann sees the Pauline perspective as representative of much of the Bible’s anthropology and, in any case, as the Bible’s determinative witness. Recognizing that Paul provides nothing in the way of a theological treatise on humanity, as one might find among the Greek philosophers, Bultmann turns to the fragmentary and occasional evidence of the seven assuredly Pauline letters with a concern to clarify the peculiarity of human existence.[8] His approach takes the form of extensive, theologically shaped word studies, the primary of which is concerned with σῶμα (sōma), often, but for Bultmann problematically, translated as “body.” As Bultmann famously remarked, “Man does not have a soma; he is soma.”[9] Indeed, “man, his person as a whole, can be denoted by soma. ... Man is called soma in respect to his being able to make himself the object of his own action or to experience himself as the subject to whom something happens. He can be called soma, that is, as having a relationship to himself – as being able in a certain sense to distinguish himself from himself.”[10] The human person does not consist of two (or three) parts, then, but is a living whole. What is more, human lives are oriented toward a purpose; they live always on a quest, though the human creature can find or lose one’s self. For Paul, Bultmann observes, “Man has always already missed the existence that at heart he seeks, his intent is basically perverse, evil.”[11] This “missing” of life is sin, which is a power that dominates everyone completely.

If, until the onset of the twentieth century, Pauline anthropology was understood in dichotomous (body-soul) or even trichotomous (body-soul-spirit) terms,[12] the same could not be said by mid-century or subsequently. Credit for this transformation is due especially to the authority of Bultmann, whose reading dominated subsequent discussion.[13] Other scholars might wish to nuance his work in one direction or another – for example, by querying the subject-object relationship by which Bultmann articulated the person’s relationship with self or by urging a stronger sense of relationality in Pauline anthropology – but this emphasis on the essential unity of human existence seems to have been established. Paul is “a Hebrew of Hebrews,” as John A.T. Robinson put it, drawing attention to Paul’s wholistic understanding of the human creature.[14] F.F. Bruce echoed this sentiment two decades later, observing that, in his anthropology, “Paul was a ‘Hebrew born and bred.’”[15] Also writing in the mid-twentieth century, W.G. Kümmel observed both that, for Paul, we can speak only of the “complete” person,[16] and that other NT writers share Paul’s view of things as well.

Of particular importance among those who have registered concern about Bultmann’s basic thesis is Robert Gundry, whose monograph on Sōma in Biblical Theology appeared in 1976. His primary contribution was to counter the loss of any notion of physicality in Bultmann’s understanding of sōma – an argument he grounds in an extensive survey of the use of sōma in biblical and extrabiblical literature, an examination of the use of sōma within the framework of anthropological duality, and a wide-ranging discussion of the ramifications of his study for central aspects of Christian theology. In the end, Gundry apparently thinks that the semantic reach of sōma is limited to the notion of physicality, with the result that the terminology he prefers, “duality,” connotes not simply differences of aspect but of essence – that is, some sort of body-soul dualism.[17] On the other hand, in one of the more concentrated treatments of NT anthropology in recent years, Udo Schnelle is able to critique Bultmann on this very point without finding dualism in Paul. Even though “a person has a body and is a body” (a self-evident emendation of Bultmann’s dictum, “man does not have a soma; he is soma”), Schnelle writes, Paul nevertheless “uses σῶμα as the comprehensive expression of the human self.”[18] And in an extensive examination of Paul’s Anthropological Terms, published in 1971, Robert Jewett undermined Bultmann’s existentialist approach to Paul’s anthropology by demonstrating that Paul borrowed and recast the anthropological terms of his antagonists. That is, his anthropology emerges in historical settings wherein anthropology is a means for defending the gospel (pace Bultmann, for whom anthropology comprised the core of the kerygma). Jewett finds that the coherence in Paul’s view of humanity is found in his usage of καρδία (kardia, “heart”), which connotes the human “as an integral, intentional self who stands in relationship before God.”[19] For Jewett, Paul never uses ψυχή (psychē) in the strict sense of “soul,” and, while acknowledging occasional references to the observable human body in its physicality, he concludes that Paul uses the term σῶμα (sōma) especially to emphasize “the somatic basis of salvation” as a counter to “the gnostic idea of redemption from the body and the libertinistic actions which resulted from such an idea.”[20]

Without embracing Bultmann’s existentialism or his evacuation of physicality from the concept of sōma, a number of more recent, extensive studies have led to verdicts similarly supportive of Paul’s essential wholism. In his study of the Pauline expression “the inner person,” for example, Theo Heckel underscores Paul’s emphasis on embodied life in this world and the next, while combating body-soul dualism.[21] In his dissertation on “Hebrew Perspectives on the Human Person,” Graham Warne argues that “Paul maintains an Hebraic perspective which emphasizes the wholeness of the human person’s existence, both in the present life and beyond it.” Warne’s study is of special interest since it demonstrates how, from within a roughly analogous philosophical and theological milieu, Paul and Philo reach contrasting views of the human person.[22]

With reference to the anthropology of the OT, the consensus has continued to support a unified portrait of the human person. Indeed, that the OT does not think of the human being as made up of or possessing “parts” is often passed over quickly, as if it were an unassailable truism, in the service of other theological considerations. Thus, having noted that the OT “is familiar neither with the dichotomy of body and soul nor a trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit,”[23] Horst Preuss goes on to survey the anthropology of each of the major voices represented in the OT, concluding that the basic, common framework of OT anthropology includes the human’s basic dependence on God in community with whom authentic life was possible; the covenantal relationship of humanity and God (i.e., the human’s dialogical responsibility before God); an egalitarianism of status among persons; the formation of humans for community; God’s control over life and death; the framework of life as purposeful under God’s providential guidance; and the residence of a person’s character in his or her practices.[24]

Earlier, Brevard Childs had reminded his readers that, even if the OT views humanity from different wholistic perspectives, the human creature “does not have a soul, but is a soul” – that is, the human is “a complete entity and not a composite of parts from body, soul and spirit.”[25] Moreover, humanity is set within a relational nexus – with God, whose own activity in drawing humanity to himself constitutes the basis of human openness to God; and with other humans, with relationships determined by righteousness. The OT, too, recognizes sin as disruption, alienation, and falsehood among humans and in relation to God. On such points as these, Childs finds basic coherence between the Old and New Testament witnesses to the nature of humanity.[26]

Walter Brueggemann observes that to speak of humanity in the divine image is to speak especially of the human person in relation to God. Indeed, in his description of “The Human Person as Yahweh’s Partner,” he stakes his claim on a relational, dynamic notion of personhood, eschewing any interest in an essentialist definition of the human creature. As such, the human person is utterly dependent on Yahweh for life, experiences human vitality only in relation to God, is a “living being” that precludes any notion of dualism, and is human only in relation to the human community.[27]

In addition to Gundry’s work, and more influential than Gundry in subsequent discussion, a key voice in support of an anthropological dualism in the Bible has come from the philosophical theologian John Cooper. The concerns of his book, Body, Soul and Life Everlasting, are, as the title suggests, primarily eschatological. More particularly, he argues that the Bible teaches the existence of an intermediate state and that this intermediate state requires an ontologically distinct soul that guarantees personal existence between death and resurrection. As he summarizes in the preface to the book’s second edition, “The Old Testament notion of ghostly survival in Sheol, eventually augmented with an affirmation of bodily resurrection, is developed by the Holy Spirit into the New Testament revelation of fellowship with Christ between each believer’s death and the general resurrection at Christ’s return.”[28] Cooper articulates his position in terms of a wholistic dualism: though composed of discrete elements, the human person is nonetheless to be identified with the whole, constituting a functional unity. The significance of Cooper’s work can be measured by the fact that, not only philosophers like himself,[29] but biblical scholars as well have employed it as a foundation for maintaining a dualistic anthropology of the Bible.[30] Although his perspective on the biblical data seems not to have changed, in his characterization of the human person Cooper more recently has moved away from the language of wholistic dualism in favor of terminology that makes “unity” the more basic term, in support of his developing view that the soul is neither a substance nor an entity.[31]

By way of drawing this survey of the lay of the land in biblical anthropology to a close, let me turn finally to three recent studies that expand somewhat the range of issues under consideration. Adriana Destro and Mauro Pesce have examined issues of “self” and “identity” in John’s Gospel and the Pauline letters, emphasizing especially the spatial categories each theologian deploys – in the case of Paul, “inner” and “outer”; in the case of John, “above” and “below.”[32] The struggle between these opposing parts constructs a dualism of sorts, but a dialectic rather than an ontological division. To substitute chronological for spatial images, the center of this dialectic is the embodied metamorphosis of the old person into the new, a transformation instigated in “new birth” (John) or “new creation” (Paul) by the work of the Holy Spirit. Destro and Pesce introduce into their analysis a potentially helpful ambiguity when they speak of “the non-bodily parts” of the human, and when they claim that “the Spirit is in contact not only with the mind, but transforms the body, taking over the entire man.”[33] They deny that Paul works with “a radical dualism,...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsement
• Contents
• Dedication
• Series Preface
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1 The Bible, the Natural Sciences, and the Human Person
• 2 What Does It Mean to Be Human?
• 3 Sin and Freedom
• 4 Being Human, Being Saved
• 5 The Resurrection of the Body
• Suggested Reading
• Bibliography
• Index of Modern Authors
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Literature
• Notes