Part XXXVIII Matthew - The First Confirmation Class

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 22 January 2015 1 Comments
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Question

My question is: What is the soul? Is it separate from the body and what happens to it when we die? I really enjoy your books, but have not yet found the answer. None of us around the table here seem to know.

Answer

Dear Janah,

I suspect that you are not alone in wondering about the meaning of “the soul.” It is used in such a loose way that almost everyone who speaks the word makes it mean whatever they want it to mean.

The word “soul” is not a biblical idea. It comes into Christian history as a product of Greek thinking; there it means the opposite of body. It was a word meant to reflect our spiritual side as opposed to our physical side. It is a word that has very little meaning for me so I tend not to use it. God to me is an experience which I cannot finally put into words. Soul to me is a word that people living in another time used to speak about a spiritual dimension of life that most of us seem to recognize. So let me try to speak of that side of life without appealing to the word “soul.”

I believe that I experience God as the Source of life, the Source of love and the Ground of Being. I do not see God as a spiritual reality different from a physical reality. I meet the “holy” in life not by withdrawing from life. I am not interested in going on a retreat to get away from life in order to find God; I would prefer to go on an “advance” to engage life where I experience God to be real.

I believe in life beyond this life, but I do not think it has anything to do with reward and punishment or with heaven and hell. So I do not ever use the word “soul” to refer to life after death. So I am not surprised that none of you “around the table here” seem to know what it is.

When I wrote about life after death (Eternal Life: A New Vision-Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell-- Harper-Collins 2009), I started not with a concept of a “soul,” but with the meaning of life itself and then I tried to delve into that meaning so deeply that I could transcend its limits and view life after death from a totally different perspective. Writing that book was thus a profound spiritual exercise for me and I discovered in the process, in an indelible way, the limitations of all human words. We have nothing else to use, however, when we talk about “God” or “soul,” but until we embrace the limitation of words we will always turn our definition of God into being God and our definition of “soul” into reality. That is the meaning of idolatry.

I hope this helps.

John Shelby Spong

 

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