EighthDayTheology

It’s not often that I get into conversations about our souls and where they come from, but in the last couple of weeks it’s happened to me twice.

So I want to write a few thoughts about (1) what souls are and (2) where they come from. To do so, I’ll also need to touch on (3) what happens to our souls after our bodies die. And my attempts at answering these three questions beg a fourth, so we’ll end by asking (4) how can we know?

I’m going to give an answer from a Christian perspective. Bear with me, I’ll have a go at explaining why when we get to the fourth question. But perhaps it’s best to describe what I believe before getting to why I believe it.

Enough preamble. Here we go…

(1) What are souls?

Everyone agrees we humans have bodies. Our bodies begin life in the womb, grow and mature, get sick and (hopefully!) recover, deteriorate and (eventually) decompose. Medicine is the discipline of keeping our bodies as healthy as possible.

But we’re more than just bodies. There’s a conscious, rational, immaterial part of us too, which makes us capable of reasoning, willing, conversing, and loving God and other people. This is our soul (Greek: psyche), and the discipline of psychology seeks to keep our souls as healthy as possible.

People are unique in all of creation, because we are both body and rational soul, in contrast to animals (no rational soul) or angels/demons (no body). There’s something about our being, body and soul, which means we humans are uniquely made in the image of God.

As the creation account puts it:

So God created man in his own image,

in the image of God he created him;

male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 (ESV)

It gets more complicated when we try to define exactly what a soul is. We can’t measure a soul with a ruler or a scale. It’s not contained in any particular part of our body, like a presence dwelling in our head controlling all we do.

The biblical Greek and Hebrew words we translate as soul (Greek: psyche; Hebrew: nephesh), rather than being technical terms, have quite a broad range of meaning. Depending on the context, they could mean life, persons, or relate to the inner life, emotions and powers of a person.

But whatever the precise metaphysical nature of our souls, it seems obvious to most people through history and around the world that we have one. We just are embodied souls, and both body and soul together give us our personality, our mode of existence, our self.

(2) Where do souls come from?

All right. Let’s talk origins. We know where our bodies come from. They grow organically in the womb through a combination of genetic material from our mother and father. How about our souls?

We’ve got two broad options. Either our souls existed first, and somehow get joined to our newly formed bodies in utero, or our souls came into existence when our bodies did.

As far back as the 4^th century BC Plato thought souls were eternal, and that when a person’s body dies, their soul enters another body. If a soul has been wicked, it might be sent into an inferior person, or an animal. This version of reincarnation resonates with forms of Buddhism and karma, which come to the same idea via a very different philosophical stream. The ancient Gnostics also saw the body as the prison for the soul, and believed that through their secret knowledge, the soul could eventually be released into a purer, bodyless form of existence.

Notice that this view tends to be quite negative about the body. We’ll come back to this in a bit.

Christians have long held that our souls began at the same time as our body, either directly created by God (Creationism), or formed through the union of a mother and father, in the same way as our bodies (Traducianism).

The Bible doesn’t give much explicit detail about the soul’s beginning, but from the following passages I think it’s clear enough that our souls as well as our bodies are lovingly created by God, at the same time as our body is first formed in the womb.

Genesis 2:7 shows God’s intimate involvement in the creation of mankind, body and soul/spirit. It describes Adam’s body being formed from dust, and then God breathing life into him, such that he becomes a living creature, or a living soul:

the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature [Hebrew: nephesh].

Genesis 2:7 (ESV)

The same intimacy in creation is sung of every person in the poetry of Psalm 139:

For you formed my inward parts;

you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.

I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

Wonderful are your works;

my soul knows it very well.

My frame was not hidden from you,

when I was being made in secret,

intricately woven in the depths of the earth.

Your eyes saw my unformed substance;

in your book were written, every one of them,

the days that were formed for me,

when as yet there was none of them.

Psalm 139:13-16 (ESV)

In Zechariah 12:1 God begins a prophetic oracle by reminding Israel that he is the one who created them, body and spirit:

Thus declares the Lord, who stretched out the heavens and founded the earth and formed the spirit of man within him…

Zechariah 12:1 (ESV)

Nowhere in the Bible are we given any hints that our soul existed in heaven before we were born. Sure, there are passages which speak of God’s foreknowledge, but there’s nothing to suggest we had an existence outside of the body before we were babies.

It’s hard to prove a negative, but if it had been important, we’d expect there to be more clear detail about our pre-embodied life. Instead, the Bible has plenty to say about our soul’s life after our body’s death, and it’s clearly different to the reincarnation or escape taught by other systems.

Let’s turn then to the question of what happens to our souls after death, and see if there are any clues there about what came before.

(3) What happens to our soul after our body dies?

Remember the view of the body shared by Plato, the Gnostics and the Buddhists? It’s a prison, a punishment, something to be escaped and transcended. Now there’s a grain of truth in this. Paul taught that our present bodies are like tents. Depending on how much you enjoy camping, you might agree that tents are uncomfortable and fragile! But at the very least, like our bodies, they’re temporary, which is the point Paul is making in his second letter to the Corinthians:

For we know that if the tent [physical body] that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. ² For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, ³ if indeed by putting it on we may not be found naked. ⁴ For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. ⁵ He who has prepared us for this very thing is God, who has given us the Spirit as a guarantee.

⁶ So we are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord, ⁷ for we walk by faith, not by sight. ⁸ Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord. ⁹ So whether we are at home or away, we make it our aim to please him. ¹⁰ For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

2 Corinthians 5:1-10 (ESV)

Paul’s great hope is that when our bodies finally fail, our souls will be ‘at home with the Lord’ until they gain a better dwelling place. Unlike Plato, Buddha and the Gnostics, the aim isn’t to escape the physical – that would leave our souls ‘naked’ – but to gain a more permanent and perfect body for our soul.

Paul speaks of this new body at length in his first letter to the Corinthians. He calls it a resurrection body. It’s a passage worth quoting in full:

⁴² So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. ⁴³ It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. ⁴⁴ It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body. ⁴⁵ Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam [i.e. Jesus] became a life-giving spirit. ⁴⁶ But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. ⁴⁷ The first man [Adam] was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man [Jesus] is from heaven. ⁴⁸ As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. ⁴⁹ Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

⁵⁰ I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. ⁵¹ Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, ⁵² in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. ⁵³ For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. ⁵⁴ When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

                                    “Death is swallowed up in victory.”

                  ⁵⁵               “O death, where is your victory?

O death, where is your sting?”

⁵⁶ The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. ⁵⁷ But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:42-57

What a great hope! When we die, our soul leaves our body, and awaits a new and better body, which will come on the day when Jesus returns to this world, to judge all those who have sinned, to save all those who have believed in him, and to renew and make perfect the whole of creation.

Until then, our souls won’t get a second chance at living. Hebrews teaches that:

 …just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, ²⁸ so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.

Hebrews 9:27-28

Likewise, Ecclesiastes 12:7 teaches that when body and spirit part ways, the body decomposes, but the spirit returns to the One who created it:

the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.

Ecclesiastes 12:7

If this is true, it cannot be that a person’s soul cycles around various lives in various bodies. That would be an uncertain and dreadful existence! Many people in the part of the world where I live believe the soul goes to the underworld after death, until it’s been punished and taught enough to have another go at living in a different body. There’s no hope of heaven. Little sympathy for a tough life now, which is probably deserved punishment for wrongs done in a past life. No certainty of a better life to come. No promise of ultimate justice. Just dread of the underworld. No-one here assumes they’ve done enough to earn their way to a better state. All that leaves is the certainty of suffering.

An endless cycle of new bodies is no good when the soul knows itself to be tainted and bent out of shape.

The witness of the Bible is straightforwardly different: one soul lives one life in one body, then faces judgment. For our wickedness and failure to love God and neighbour, either our soul will be judged with being cast out of God’s presence into hell, or we will be given eternal life in a resurrection body, because Jesus bore our punishment in our place on the cross, and gave us his righteous record as a free gift. That’s the grace of the gospel. But it needs to be believed and received. That means more than just a quick prayer. Those who believe that Jesus is Lord ought to live like he is Lord of their life too.

(4) But who’s to say you’re right?

How can we know the truth about souls? We’re talking about what happened before we can remember, and what will happen when the clock of this age stops and space itself is rolled up. Who could possibly know these things, that we should believe them?

Only God.

If there’s no God, we have no way of knowing. We might guess, but this knowledge is beyond our discovery.

But if there is a God who created us, loves us, and has a rich plan of salvation for us – a God who is beyond being contained in time and space – an eternal, infinite, all-wise God, perfect in love and righteousness, holiness and goodness – rich in beauty, abounding in life and joy and creativity – in other words, if a God like the Bible describes does exist… well then it makes perfect sense that he’d make a way of telling us what we need to know to enjoy life with him for ever.

The wonderful thing is that he didn’t just give a few visions, or leave enough clues in the scientific record for us to find our way to him. He himself came to us. He sent his Son.

2,000 years ago, a man called Jesus spoke these words, recorded by a disciple who was there to hear them:

²⁵ At that time Jesus said, ‘I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. ²⁶ Yes, Father, for this is what you were pleased to do.

²⁷ ‘All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

²⁸ ‘Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. ²⁹ Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. ³⁰ For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.’

Matthew 12:25-30

Jesus’s followers saw him die, just as he’d predicted he would, and they witnessed him rise from death, just as he’d predicted he would. They watched him ascend to heaven, and heard angels promise that he would return. They received the Holy Spirit, and many died still witnessing to the truth of what they’d seen and heard. The Bible is the record of their witness, the story of salvation. It claims to be the living and active word of God. This word still speaks, every time it is read.

What do you make of it? Will you believe it? Has your soul found rest in its Saviour?