Who is Man? What’s his nature? Is he primarily a spirit who has a soul living in a body or is he a living soul? Is he merely material or more?
Man is a common but mysterious creature. G.K Chesterton remarked in his ‘Everlasting Man’ that man is the queerest of all creatures. There is more than a hint of familiarity that causes us to forego the definition of ourselves, wondering whether it is worth our time.
And yet let a stranger ask us to define what it means to be human and most of us will either choke on our saliva or scramble for words scratching below the surface of our junior level grammar.
The question of what it means to be human is at the heart of the gender confusions in the world today.
My intention of penning this piece is to refute the teaching that tends to present a hierarchical dichotomy or trichotomy of man in our Christian circles.
I speak concerning the teaching that man is a spirit having a soul living in a body. This idea suggests that the spirit is the most crucial part of us, the soul comes next, while our bodies are only good for serving us here before we die.
You have heard it said, and perhaps believed it yourself. I would like to submit that this is not biblical.
The Judeo-Christian idea from the beginning rejected any dichotomy or trichotomy between the spiritual and the material. We read in Genesis chapter one that God pronounced the physical creation ‘good.’
The statement ‘and God saw that it was good’ is repeated in one chapter as God’s pronouncement on the beauty, usefulness, and value of the material world. And this is before sin entered the world.
When God created man, He ‘saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good’ (Gen 1:31).
In Genesis chapter two God made man. This man is called ‘a living soul’ (Gen 2:7). But we are told by the same verse that God formed man out of the dust of the ground. This means that whatever man is, he is dust at least. Not less. Any definition of man that excludes dust or makes the body peripheral to the human identity is flat out wrong.
The words of Genesis 2:7 are pretty clear. God formed man out of dust. Man is molded dust. But he is not just that. He is more. We are told that God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.
The Hebrew word for ‘breath’ (ru’ach) is the word for spirit. Even in Greek, πνεῦμα which is sometimes translated as ‘spirit’ also means ‘breath’ or ‘air’ or ‘wind.’ Thus, to say that man has a spirit is another way of saying that he has breath or air. Which is why to ‘give up the spirit’ is synonymous with to die, to have no breath left in your body.
God breathed into the nostrils of man precast from dust, and this is what made man a living soul.
The creative power and wisdom of the Spirit (Breath) of God gave man life, and unique cognitive faculty and self-awareness without which man would be merely another animal. Remember that animals also were formed from dust (Gen 2:19). That is why we share so much DNA with animals.
None of the other animals were made in the image of God and endowed with such cognitive power.
But what we need to see is that man is a unity. He is a living soul, a result of the breath (or spirit) animating the flesh. We can say that a soul is a product of the union of the body and the spirit.
The breath (spirit) alone is not man. Neither is the flesh alone. But the flesh animated by the spirit, this is man. He is a living soul. This is the Jewish understanding of the nature of man, right from Genesis.
The Greeks held (and I think rightly) that what distinguishes man from animals is rationality. For them, man is a rational animal. They undoubtedly held that man is body, soul, and spirit. But they, like the Jews, believed that the spirit signifies the ‘life-giving principle.’
That is why their word πνεῦμα means wind, breath, air, spirit. They never saw man as a spirit. They saw man as a rational animal. They also saw man as a unity.
The Greeks, of course, prized the soul above the body, which is the genesis of the hierarchical dichotomy or trichotomy of man in our Christian circles.
But in both worlds, man has a material and spiritual dimension to him. And because of this, he was charged with being a steward of creation by God. He ‘bridges’ heaven and earth as a priest since he has both earthly and heavenly origins.
Those who deny or cast a shadow on his earthly origin deny his uniqueness as a steward of creation as God intends. And those who reject his heavenly origin fail to capture man’s grand call and destiny that breathe meaning even in the mundane things.
Humanity is a product of the union between the material and the immaterial. Because of this, what we do in the flesh not only matters but reveals our spiritual state. Our bodies are not merely temporal.
Those who say that man is a spirit with a soul living in a body have forsaken the biblical picture and reality and risk entering the realm of heresies through the territory of false and fatal fantasies.
We are called to worship God with all our heart, strength, soul, and mind.
To be truly spiritual is to ensure that every aspect of us, whether material or immaterial, loves the God who formed us from dust and breathed into our nostrils the breath of life. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!
Related reading: Concerning Phaneroo