Charting the New Reformation, Part XVI – The Fourth Thesis: The Virgin Birth (continued)

Column by Bishop John Shelby Spong on 6 April 2016 69 Comments
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Question

You say that the word “soul” is not a biblical idea. Yet my concordance in the King James Version records 36 instances from Genesis to Revelation where the word “soul” occurs, even omitting the best known reference in Luke in which Mary, in the Magnificat, acknowledges that “my soul doth magnify the Lord.”

It would seem that this word had a wide currency and acceptance in pre and post Christian times and while you may not like the word, it has a resonance with many Christians as being the God particle in our lives, which maintains that link with the infinite and eternal spirit of love, life, light and the essence of all being. Moreover, in Joshua 22:5, we are called upon to love the Lord our God and serve him “with all your heart and all your soul,” an injunction endorsed by Jesus in his ministry in the Great Commandment, which is repeated weekly as part of our service of Eucharist.

Moreover, many Christians celebrate “All Souls’ Day,” which maintains that link with our loved ones, who are no longer alive on earth, but who are still very much part of our lives in terms of influence, reflection and memory. You can’t just dispense with the word because you don’t like it. I don’t like the word “sin,” but it has meaning and resonance with millions of believers and I have to accept it in the vocabulary of any discussion on matters of faith and belief.

Answer

Dear Robin,

Word studies are quite deceptive. We use words to translate biblical concepts that are not necessarily the words that were used in the original Hebrew, the language of the Old Testament. The word “soul” comes to us primarily through the Greek language, not the Hebrew language. The Greeks divided the human into two parts, body (soma) and mind (psyche). The Greeks also had a word for spirit (pneuma) that over time blended in the word for mind and created something which was thought to be close to what the Hebrews meant when they used the word “nephesh,” which is the word that got translated “soul.” Nephesh did not, however, mean “soul,” as we now understand that word. Nephesh really meant something closer to “breath.” It was that breath power that they believed animated the body, but it was never thought of as an entity separate from the body, and thus called a soul.

In the Genesis story of creation, we read that God “breathed into the nostrils” of Adam. Thus it was God’s breath, God’s “nephesh” that enabled Adam to become “a living soul,” an animated being. In the primary Hebrew understanding of life beyond this life, a place they called Sheol, they did not think of it as being inhabited by disembodied souls. It was also not a place of reward or punishment. It was rather a shadowy, drab existence to which all the dead went – the good, the bad and the indifferent. It had little to do with what later came to be called “The Immortality of the Soul.”

Resurrection of the body became the Christian understanding of life after death and this understanding reflects Christianity’s Jewish heritage much more than it reflects Christianity’s later Greek heritage. The resurrected body could not simply be identified with the flesh. It rather meant the resurrection of the whole person. Heaven was not a place of resurrected bodies, but neither was it a place of disembodied souls. It rather pointed to a state of wholeness in which the individual was somehow sharing in the eternal life of God. It was an attempt to describe in human words that which was beyond the boundaries of time or space, where words always fail.

So “soul”, as it came to us out of a dualistic Greek mind and world view, is not a biblical concept whether English translators used this word or not.

Thanks for writing.
John Shelby Spong

 

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