Secular Pinoy

What's the biblical view(s) on the soul? Is the idea of an immaterial and eternal soul a Jewish idea, or did they get it from other ethnic groups in the region? Reading Ecclesiastes, it seems that the author believed that death is final. Does he believe in souls, perhaps immaterial but not eternal? What about the New Testament writers?

Amos

Our soul is that part of us that we do not know and once we know who we are our soul will be gone.

In the NT our soul is the celestial sea, or the water on the right side of the boat, or the netherworld and maybe other metaphors are used to describe our soul.

Doctor X

Except that interpretation is not in the biblical texts.

Part of this has been argued on another thread, but I think the conception depends on the text and the time of writing. My "favorite" is Saul summoning Samuel through the Witch of Endor. This "soul" reminds me of the very "classical" conception that what makes us alive persists "down there" and sort of . . . well . . . just hangs about. It is not a very pleasant concept; it is not an "afterlife" as believed by most modern people who believe in an after life.

I will leave it at that, since a bunch of other posters have posted opinions on other passages.

--J.D.

Secular Pinoy

Uhm, thanks Amos for that really informative post backed up with boatloads of proper references and tempered with critical but fair exegesis.

Anyways, Doc X, might you be able to refer me to the threads/posts that has discussed this? Thanks!

Doctor X

Secular:

Well, the Bishop Durnam thread discusses this. Toto states he will split off the discussions of souls from a discussion on the existence of Pontius Pilate. I suggested to him privately he may want to add the "souls stuff" to here . . . I do not know how feasible that is.

--J.D.

Toto

You might check these threads:

Bishop of Durham denies we have a soul

Innovation in religious belief

Greeks eschew resurrection

Or perhaps some of the participants in those threads will drop by here and summarize their postions.

Amos

Of course it is in the text but if our idea of soul is wrong we would not know what to look for.

For example, eternal does not mean 'forever' but just means in the absense of time and here our right brain is exactly the place where time as such is not known. In this sense can we be eternal in our right brain and die just like other people which now means that eternal life is part of this life but as seen from our right brain.

Afterlife means that we can have a life after we die and if we are eternal in our afterlife it would make sense that we must die to our left brain identity but only to our left brain identity when we die the first time.

The above is easy enough to follow but it might be easer said than done.

Take Peter, for example, who, according to the text, was left naked when all doubt was removed from Thomas. Thomas was the twin of Peter because faith cannot be conceived to exist without doubt, and hence, when all doubt was gone no faith was left and so Peter was left naked and wanted to go fishing to get some clothes on again (he had a church to built). They fished all night on the left side of the boat and caught nothing to prove that all faith and doubt in the left brain were gone and when Jesus told them to cast their nets on the right side they caught large fish and they were easy to catch because their nets did not tear despite the heavy load. Clearly, this means that they needed to go by the right side of their brain and their intuition supplied them with large chunks of meat. Next we see Peter put on his cloak of faith and dive head-first into the celestial sea so the gates of hell will not prevail against her.

The netherworld is a similar story but with a different scene.

Doctor X

Unfortunately, your mere claim does not make it so, particularly when it does not exist in the text.

Irrelevant.

As I advised before, when you start making things up about the brain, I must conclude that you are no longer discussing texts and reality but what you, personally, believe.

A thousand apologies, but I am really not interested in someone else's personal religion. Perhaps you can get your own forum.

--J.D.

CJD

I will be writing generally since I'm at home with no texts before me.

A "biblical view of the soul" is a difficult concept to systematically formulate.

The Tanak is very cloudy on afterlife/soul issues. When you're dead, you're dead. On the other hand, there seems to be veiled hints of something going on after death (I am thinking of Job specifically: "I know that in my flesh [or, without my flesh?] I shall see God"). Some kind of resurrection was increasingly affirmed in Jewish thought, an idea the Hellenists disdained.

(The whole Saul/Samuel/Endor thing is really enigmatic. Saul hears him, Endor sees him, and the vestige is pissed off about being summoned. Not the kind of stuff doctrine is formulated from . . . . I can go on about this episode, but I don't think it tells us anything about the soul per se.)

The NT perspective seems to mostly spring from Jewish conceptions--not the philosophical Greek, in my opinion (though the two during the first century are not mutually exclusive, of course). I think the general conception in both the OT and the NT is that the soul is immaterial (though very real--not wispy or ghost-like), yet mortal. I understand this (in a tentative fashion) as follows:

1. Jesus was fully human, yet without sin (cf. 1 Peter).

2. So sin must not be inherent in human nature.

3. Yet Jesus came able to die (e.g., he grew in stature, not to mention he died, etc.).

4. So mortality must be inherent in human nature.

5. Thus, the first Adam would have been able to die, yet without sin.

6. The reward, then, for his obedience would have been eternal life. Instead, he secured the curse--spiritual death.

7. So, when the body dies, so does the soul.

(Now, what I think Jesus accomplished as the Second Adam rectifies this mortality, but that is another matter entirely.)

Wright is right about the Platonic intrusion of certain ideas regarding the soul. The most base of course was the pre-existence of the soul, which the orthodox rejected. But a popular view in the early church (c. 3-4th centuries) was that God creates a soul every time a human is conceived (or born, etc.). Once God created this soul, he/she then lived on into eternity. A bit Platonic, to be sure. "Traducianism" suggests something a bit more natural: the soul is passed down naturally via procreation. The soul is just that which animates life (whether in Jewish or Greek thought; see Genesis: "And God breathed into him the breath of life," etc.). Eternality of the soul in the Bible is only clearly spoken of in reference to those souls who have been redeemed. It is difficult to systematize, to be sure.

Whatever the Bible teaches, I am pretty sure it does not teach the ethereal harp, wings, and cloud scenario imagined by many.

Regards,

CJD

Devilnaut

"A thousand apologies, but I am really not interested in someone else's personal religion."


But you seem very interested in the gospel writer's personal religion...