B 02 Soul and spirit used parallel with

2. Soul and spirit are used as parallel with each other.

Thus Mary in her song says: " My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour " (Luke 1:47). As this song is constructed on the principle of the Hebrew parallelism, we must regard soul and spirit here as synonymous, different names of the same thing.

(iii.) The same qualities, acts, and emotions are ascribed to the soul and to the spirit. Thus, Jesus is said to have sighed deeply in His spirit (Mark 8:12), to have groaned in His spirit and been troubled (John 11:33), to be troubled in His spirit (xiii. 21); and so also we read that His soul was exceed ing sorrowful (Matthew 26:38), that His soul was troubled (John 12:27); and we read elsewhere of the spirit being refreshed and of the soul being in prosperity, etc. (2 Corinthians 7:13; 3 John 1:2). We have also the apostle speaking of his spirit being refreshed (1 Corinthians 16:18, etc.), and in Matthew 11:29 the same expression is used of the soul. Again, what in one place is called " filthiness of the spirit " (2 Corinthians 7:1), is in another described as lusts that war against the soul (1 Peter 2:11). Objects to which the same qualities and susceptibili ties are thus ascribed cannot with any propriety be regarded as specifically distinct and different.

(iv.) In reference to salvation we have the phrase " to save the soul," and the phrase "to save the spirit," both used with out any perceptible difference of meaning (comp. 1 Thessalonians 5:23; Hebrews 10:39; James 5:20, with 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Peter 4:5); and so, on the other side, we read of perdition as a killing of the soul, a losing of the soul, whilst salvation is set forth as living according to God in the spirit (1 Peter 4:6). It is evidently of one and the same object that these things are said.

(v.) The departed are spoken of sometimes as souls and sometimes as spirits. " Thou wilt not leave my soul in Hades" (Psalms 16:10; Acts 2:27; Acts 2:31); John saw under the altar the souls of those that had been slain for the word of God (Revelation 6:9), and the souls of them that had been beheaded for the witness of Jesus (Revelation 20:4). On the other hand, when the disciples saw Jesus walking on the sea they thought they had seen a spirit (Luke 24:37; Luke 24:39); the Sadducees say that there is neither angel nor spirit (Acts 23:8); believers are come to the spirits of just men made perfect (Hebrews 12:23); Christ went and preached to the spirits in prison (1 Peter 3:18). It is evident from these instances that the immaterial and immortal part of man may be designated either soul or spirit.

(vi.) Death is sometimes called a giving up of the spirit and sometimes a giving up of the soul, as restored life is spoken of as a returning of the soul, or the soul being still in a man (comp. Matthew 27:50; John 19:30; Acts 7:59, with John 10:17; Acts 20:10; Genesis 35:18; 1 Kings 17:21).

(vii.) God, who is emphatically a " Spirit " (comp. John 4:24, and this frequently-recurring phrase " Spirit of God," or " God the Spirit "), speaks also of Himself as a soul (Matthew 12:18; Hebrews 10:3).

(viii.) In fine, as men when they agree are said to be of " one soul " (Acts 4:32; Php 1:27), so the believer in union with the Lord is said to be joined to Him in " one spirit " (1 Corinthians 6:17); and believers who are exhorted to stand "in one spirit," are in the same connection admonished to strive together "in one soul" (Php 1:17). With these instances before us of the free interchange and synonymous usage of the words soul and spirit in Scripture, it is vain to attempt to maintain that they designate radically distinct parts of human nature; in other words, that soul is different from the spirit, in the same sense as the body is different from both. We must therefore hold by a dichotomy as the scriptural view of man’s constitution: he consists of body and soul, or of body and spirit. 1 ii. But whilst we cannot regard the soul and the spirit of man as numerically different, it would be an error on the other side were we to maintain that they are in no sense whatever to be distinguished from each other. As we have already seen that the material part of man may be indifferently called " body " or " flesh," and yet that these terms present that one object under different aspects, so in regard to the immaterial part of man, it may be called either soul or spirit, and yet in strict propriety these terms designate that object under different aspects, or in respect of different characteristics.

Every one must feel that there are certain connections in which it is more proper to use the one term rather than the

1 " Impossibile est in uno homine esse plures animas per essentiam differentes, sed una tantum est anima intellectiva, quse vegetativse, et sensitive, et intellect! vse officiis fungi tur." Aquinas, Sum. TheoL, P. 1. qu. 76, a 3. other. For instance, when the apostle says, " I serve God in the spirit," or when he speaks of praying in the spirit, or of the Divine Spirit witnessing with our spirit, etc., we feel that it would not be proper in such passages to substitute soul for spirit. Again, when our Lord speaks of a man losing his soul, or when we read of the redemption of the soul, we feel that it would quite alter the meaning were we to substitute spirit for soul. We find also the sacred writers sometimes using soul and spirit as distinct from each other, as, e.y. t when the word of God is said to divide soul and spirit (Hebrews 4:12), or when the apostle prays God to sanctify believers, body and soul and spirit. It is evident, then, that in some sense there is a difference between soul and spirit. In ivkat this differ ence consists, however, it is by no means easy to say. If from nothing else, this is evident from the variety of answers which have been given to the question.

Thus Tholuck says on Hebrews 4:12, "According to our view TI here denotes the faculty that goes out upon the sensible , the faculty that is directed to the non-sensible; " and he regards this as the general though the invariable usage of. these words as well as the corresponding Hebrew & aJ and nn.

He would thus make the Biblical analysis of our mental constitution very much the same as that proposed by Locke, who ranks all mental phenomena under the two heads of sensation and reflection.

Delitzsch distinguishes them thus: " Trvev/jia is the creative life-principle in man as an immaterial agent, ^f%?7 is the same as an agent bound to matter; the latter has the idea of body inseparable from it, it is the soul, i.e. The spirit organi cally united to body; " and he adds, " The human soul stands related to the human spirit as the divine Soga to the triune divine essence." So also, in reference to the Hebrew words, Oehler says: " nn is the name given to man’s soul from its substance, which is the fountain of the body’s life itself separate from the earthly material of the body; it is called K BJ, from the life which it has or had in the body and con joined with the body; nil is that in the living being from which and by which it lives; t^S3 is the being itself which lives." 1 Nitzsch says: " The soul is the unity of spirit and body, 1 De V. T. Sentent. de rebus post mortem futuris, p. 15. the individual life, the finitude of the spirit. The concept of the individual, with its relation to spirituality and conse quently to real personality, is afforded by the soul alone. It is the Ego construed in its universal first self-consciousness, in its universal definitiveness. But as human, not brutal, the soul is also spiritual, rational, capable of self-determination, and made and designed for this, in the concreated consciousness of dependence on God and freedom in God to go in and out as the sensuous emotion may give occasion."

These extracts, if they do not throw very much light on the subject, yet serve to show how difficult it is to enunciate in any clear and distinct manner the difference between the soul and the spirit of man. Perhaps all that can be safely said on the subject is that the spirit has primary and chief reference to that part of our inner nature which has to do with thought as thought, while the soul has respect rather to that part of our nature which occupies the ground common to body and mind, the region of sensation, appetite, and sensuous emotion. iii. I proceed to make a few remarks on this inner nature of man, whether called soul or spirit, in order to bring out what the Bible teaches concerning it.

(i.) Various names are given to the inner nature of man viewed under different aspects. Thus it is called vovs in regard to its being the seat of knowledge and will (Romans 14:5; Ephesians 4:23; Php 4:7; 2 Thessalonians 2:2); Sidvoia, evvoia, voyfiara, and such like, with the same reference; and tcapBim as the personal seat and collocation of the entire mental energies and susceptibilities, whether of sensation, thought, or emotion (Matthew 12:34-35; Romans 8:27; Romans 9:2; Romans 10:10; 1 Corinthians 4:5; 1 Corinthians 14:25; Ephesians 5:19, etc.).

(ii.) In the soul or spirit lies the proper personality of each man. Each man has his own soul or spirit; to speak more exactly, is his own soul or spirit. The body is his, not he. Hence the Scriptures speak not only of the spirit as within the body, subsisting there as a distinct substance, but they identify the soul or spirit with the man himself. Thus St.

Paul when he says, " Therefore we are always confident, knowing that whilst we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord j " and again, " We are willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord " (2 Corinthians 5:6; 2 Corinthians 5:8), evidently identifies himself with his soul as separate from his body; the soul is the we that are to be pre sent with the Lord after its present home in the body is broken up; that which thinks, wills, and feels within us constitutes, according to the apostle, the real Ego, that which makes the proper being of the man.

(iii.) This soul or spirit is immortal, not indeed essen tially and by its own original propriety, for God alone hath immortality, and that which has begun to be can never abso lutely and in itself rise above the possibility of ceasing to be; but by the divine grace and decree, %a/?m T?}? rov \6jov /AeToiWa?, as Athanasius expresses it. " God," says the book of the Wisdom of Solomon, " created man to be immortal; and made him to be an image of His own eternity" (ii. 23). This truth, indicated with varying degrees of clearness in many parts of the 0. T., is enunciated with unqualified distinctness iii the New. Comp. Matthew 10:28; Matthew 20:32; John 12:25; 1 Cor. 15:32; 2 Corinthians 5:1, etc.

Whilst, however, it is maintained that the soul is not neces sarily and in itself immortal, but has received this from God, and holds it by His will and ordinance, it has, on the other hand, to be maintained that the soul has not in itself any principle of dissolution or cause of decay; so that it can cease to exist only by a special act of the divine power. This must ever present a serious objection to the doctrine of annihilation; for unless proof can be adduced that God directly puts forth His power to destroy the soul He has put into man, the presumption is that it continues to exist though separated from the body at death. " It is probable had man not fallen, that after a continuance in the earthly state for a period of probation adapted to effect the best and most useful exercise of all His physical, intellectual, and moral faculties, each individual would have been translated (as Enoch?) to an eternal confirmation of holiness and happiness, in a higher condition of existence." 1 iv. A question has been raised as to the way in which the succession of souls is kept up; and at one time this furnished occasion for keen discussion among theologians. Three different views have been advanced on this point.

1 Dr. J. Pye Smith, Theology, p. 357.

(i.) That each soul descends from a pre- existent state and enters into the body, which, by natural processes, has been prepared for it. This doctrine, which seems to have been honoured from Plato’s idea of an avd^vqo-^, was held by the Jewish writer Philo, and, among the Christian Fathers, by Origen. It was condemned by the Council of Constantinople in A.D. 543. Strange to say, it has found in recent times an advocate in Kant, who, in order to account for the radical evil which he was obliged to admit is to be found in man, adduces the fact of a pre-existent state in which man was evil, and from which the soul came bearing the taint of its former state. Other German writers have espoused this idea, and even Julius Miiller seems to favour it in order to account for original sin. A strenuous advocate of it has appeared in Mr. Beecher, an American divine; and something like it seems to have been in the mind of Wordsworth, though he presents it under a different aspect and with an opposite intent when, in his famous ode on " Intimations of Immor tality," he wrote, "Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting : The soul that rises with us, our life’s star, Hath elsewhere had its setting, And cometh from afar; Not in entire forgetfulness And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home." The opinion, however, is one not only wholly unsupported by Scripture, but directly opposed to some of its clearest state ments; as, for instance, the account of the Fall in Genesis 3:1-24., and the apostle’s declaration that " by one man sin entered the world," which could not be did each man derive his sinfulness from his pre-existent state.

(ii.) Creationism. According to this view each soul is created directly by God and placed by Him in the body. Jerome says this is the orthodox view; and certainly it is the one supported by most of the Fathers, who believed, as Clement of Alexandria expresses it, that ovpavoOev Tre^Trerat 77 ^rv-^r).

It was also held by many of the schoolmen; and it is the view generally held by divines of the Eomish Church, as well as by many evangelical theologians. It is supposed to find support from such passages as Isaiah 57:16; Zechariah 12:1; Acts 17:24; Hebrews 12:9. But these prove nothing more than that God is the former of man’s spirit no less than of his body; and say nothing as to the place where or the time when the spirit is formed, or as to the manner of its union with the body. Of those who hold this view some regard the soul as coming pure from the hand of God, and as becoming corrupt through connection with the body; which involves the heathen and Gnostic notion of the inherent vileness of matter.

(iii.) Traducianism. Those who hold this view deny that each soul is created immediately by God, and maintain that it is derived by traduction from the parents just as the body is. The whole man, body and soul, they regard as begotten and derived. Some hold this view in connection with a materialistic view of the soul, and some have even gone the length of asserting that the soul is divisible, and that a por tion of the soul of the parents is communicated to the child. By those who hold this view, whether in its extreme or its more moderate form, reference is made in support of it to Genesis 5:3, where, in announcing the birth of Seth, it is said that Adam " begat a son in his own likeness, after his image." An appeal is also made to our Lord’s words, " That which is born of the flesh is flesh." But these passages really prove nothing as to the point in question; the former only asserts that Seth was wholly like his father, and the latter that like produces like. It is urged also by Traducianists that only on this hypothesis can we account for the transmission of a sinful nature from parent to child. But this assumes that a sinful nature is actually transmitted from parent to child, an assumption which many who hold that all mankind are involved in Adam’s guilt refuse to accept. At any rate, it is hardly competent to bring in one hypothesis to support another. On the whole, I cannot help thinking that the safest course is to hold none of these views, but to leave the subject in that obscurity in which it seems to be left by God in the Bible. " De re obscurissima," says Augustine, " disputatur non adjuvantibus divinarum Scripturarum certis clarisque documentis." If, however, one of these views must be adopted, I think the second, that of Creationism, is on the whole the one least burdened with difficulties, and most in accordance with the general representation of Scripture and with the nature of the soul as immaterial and indivisible.