Hawkingfan

spurly,

Good for you. I hope you make the right conclusions.

I wouldn't listen to this if I were you, spurly. Nothing is found in your heart except blood. The heart is a muscle in your body that is responsible for your blood's circulation. Thought processes take place in your BRAIN. Please use it when you are working through this. I hope you the best.

ax

I also think that one of the great reason's why I am not a theist is the whole "Babies sent from god" idea. Oh how wonderous this gos must be that sends babies that only live afew days or a few years and are born with curable deseases but not in a country with the ability to do so. I know I'd sure worship a god like that.
Note sarcassam.

Amos

Only if the human heart has a mind of its own to be "responsible" for circulating blood--which it does not--while heart aches and ecstacy is felt in the human heart.

Amos

Yes but God is only responsible for creating life (not babies) and sinful humans do the rest. This makes them co-creators with God and after Lord God they are the third cause in the formation of babies.

ax

amos: Yes but obviously he is fine with doing his part when he knows well what the outcome will be. There's a thread about this in elsewhere.

Amos

Certainly not because of the free will given to our human identity which is dominant while in exile. God is persistents and loving but not dominant, the Christian would say.

Hawkingfan

That's bull. And I never said the human heart had a mind.

NOGO

??????

A book cannot speak to something that does not exist.

Show me where the concept of the soul as you know it today can be found in the Bible.

Explain why Jesus resurrected bodily and not spiritually?

Explain why we will all resurrect bodily if the final purpose is a spiritual life.

The fact is that the NT writers had one kind of afterlife and that was here on earth and with our bodies. They knew nothing else.

"Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven."

So the Kingdom of God is on earth and in a bodily form since we are to resurrect back into our bodies to enter it.

Daniel 12:13
"But as for you, go your way to the end; then you will enter into rest and rise again for your allotted portion at the end of the age."

So Daniel is to die and wait till the end of the world before he gets his due. Why wait dead until the end of the world?

Because there is no such thing as a soul.

Iasion

Greetings all,

NOGO wrote:
Well, the NT was written by many people with different views, over some period. Much of the NT is strictly materialist, but some is NOT.

In fact, this issue about souls and the body of the afterlife, and its physicality is one of the mainsprings of the 2nd century debates (Consider James' warning about those who deny Christ came in the flesh, Thomas testing the physicality of Jesus' body, the Gnostics who argued that Jesus was a non-material phantom).


Paul, in particular, EXPLICITLY claimed the resurrection was in a spiritual body, NOT a physical body :
1 Corinthians
"15:42So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown in corruption; it is raised in incorruption. 15:43It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. 15:44It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. There is a natural body and there is also a spiritual body."

The previous verses set the context of the "doxas" or "glories" :

1 Corinthians
"15:40There are also celestial bodies, and terrestrial bodies; but the glory of the celestial differs from that of the terrestrial. 15:41There is one glory of the sun, another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars; for one star differs from another star in glory."

These doxas may mean something like higher bodies.


Paul also notes that when he is caught up into the third heaven, he does not know if he is in his body or out of it.


Many church fathers discuss this issue of spiritual bodies and/or the comment by Paul - Clement, Origen, Ireneaus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Archelaus, Methodius, Ambrose, Augustine, Basil.

Clement discusses how by initiation into the Christian mystery one "becomes" (rises into?) a spiritual body and receives some sort of higher benefit :
For he who conducts himself heathenishly in the Church ...He who in this way "is joined to the harlot," ... becomes another "body," not holy, "and one flesh," ... "But he that is joined to the Lord in spirit" becomes a spiritual body by a different kind of conjunction. Such an one is wholly a son, ... and in spirit itself, being brought close to the Lord, he may receive the mansion that is due to him who has reached manhood thus. Let the specimen suffice to those who have ears.


The concept that humans have multiple bodies was one of the issues discussed by spiritual seekers of the day - e.g. Plutarch describes us as having higher bodies "flame-like bubbles" in his <a href="http://members.iinet.net.au/~quentinj/Christianity/PlutarchVision.html" target="_blank">Vision of Aradeus (from On the Delay of Divine Justice by Plutarch)</a>


The Corpus Hermeticum also discusses the soul, spirit and bodies of humankind, and the Sepher Yetzirah alludes to these issues as well - both from slightly after Paul.


So,
while most of the NT has a physical, literalist view of the resurrection - Paul did not - he wrote in Gnostic terms of a spiritual, higher body, and SOME Christians and Gnostics followed his views.


Quentin David Jones

[ December 24, 2002: Message edited by: Iasion ]</p>

-DM-

A number of Christians today confuse "soul" and "spirit," and there seems to be some confusion here as well. The two are not one in the same, biblically speaking; whereas both humans and animals possess soul--the breath of life--only humans possess spirit, spirit which allegedly transcends death.

--

In the English translations, "Soul" is derived from the Hebrew word 'nephesh' (H5315); properly a breathing creature, that is, animal or (abstractly) vitality; used very widely in a literal, accommodated or figurative sense (bodily or mental), soul.

It is similar in the case of the Greek. The English "Soul" is derived from psuche (G5590) and means breath, life, soul.

--

In English, "Spirit" is derived from the Hebrew word rauch (H7307). It means breath, wind, spirit. It is used of the Spirit of God, the spirit of life, the spirit of jealousy, the spirit of wisdom, a willing spirit, a faint spirit--that which only applies to man, God, and spirit beings (not animals).

"Spirit" is derived from the Greek pneuma (G4151), which can also mean breath, wind, spirit. But this is the same word that is used for the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God, an unclean spirit which a man may possess, the spirit that Jesus talks about when he says that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, the spirit that he yielded up when he died on the cross, etc.

--

Thus it is the spirit which allegedly goes to heaven when one dies, not the soul (even though Christians these days talk about the "immortal soul").