Why The Bible Says We don’t have souls
The way that people commonly think about the ‘soul’ – an immortal spirit which is who we really are that dwells in some way ‘within’ us – is not actually Biblical. We do not have souls in the way people frequently use the word. In this blog, I’m going to set out what a biblical understanding of the soul looks like. Given that my covenant as an officer begins by saying I will make the salvation of souls my first priority, and that The Salvation Army has for many years said its mission is to ‘Save souls,’ understanding what we mean when we talk about the soul is, I think, pretty important.
False Ideas of the Soul
We are commonly accustomed to thinking about our souls as a kind of spiritual element to our life that, in some way, dwells within us. We see this in cartoons when a character dies and a little ghost figure emerges from the body, ascending to heaven or descending to hell. Or we think about our soul as the ‘real me’, which in some way is separate from the body. It is so common, including in Christianity, to think that the soul is different from the body and perhaps is more important than the body.
Some think that the soul pre-exists our life – that is, there is a great repository of souls in heaven which are then sent down into a body and return when they die. We often see elements of this when people talk about heaven as our home and this Earth as a temporary place we are only journeying through.
The thing is, none of that is a biblical way of understanding the soul. It comes from pagan philosophy, Enlightenment reason, and modern media portrayals. The way we commonly think about souls is effectively rooted in the work of Plato, the ancient Greek philosopher whose ideas have influenced Western culture, philosophy, and religion for over two thousand years. It is from Plato that we get the idea that our soul existed before our body did, that our soul properly belongs in a spiritual realm, and is imprisoned in our mortal and imperfect flesh, before it is finally released upon death to return to the spiritual realm. This is the foundation for a dozen different heresies and, unfortunately, has become a standard assumption about what the soul is.
Plato’s thought has been developed and expanded by people like Descartes, who emphasised the preeminence of the mind over the body and a preference for the soul over the body. The sense of self, the ‘I’, is separated from the body. The body becomes a possession of the mind, or of the soul, because the mind and soul become intermingled. This is a consequence of rationality being associated with the soul, as reason is held up as the highest virtue by those philosophers and theologians doing the writing.
Ultimately, any conception of the soul as a kind of spiritual element which is the locus of our existence and ‘I’ which existed before our body, is immortal, and will return to where it came from after our death, is not Christian and is not Biblical. The idea of our soul being something hidden away inside of us that leaves when we die may be common, but it is not accurate.
What Makes a Human?
There is an old nursery rhyme that lists all the things that make a person, such as “iron enough to make a nail.” We are more than just the sum of our parts. You cannot just mix together a load of elements in a bowl and make a human. We are also more than just a very clever animal. We are also not a soul trapped in a body, or a mind controlling a flesh puppet. We are human.
The Bible has a consistent theme regarding what it means to be human, which is that we are created beings made in the image of God. Everything else, every other term, is used in different ways and is not systematised into one set of words and themes. Paul, in particular, uses over a dozen different terms to discuss what it means to be human. The theme that Paul uses, which is often picked up and explored to understand what it means to be human, is known as the tripartite view of humanity. Which is normally used to refer to the body-spirit-soul or mind-spirit-soul. However, once again, mistakes creep in.
It is commonly assumed that the tripartite view of humanity, which posits that we are composed of three distinct parts, implies that we are comprised of three separate elements. So that to be a complete human means we have a body, a soul, and a spirit. However, that is not what Paul is trying to say. The tripartite view of humanity does not denote separate parts of who we are, but rather different points of reference: in space, in reason, and in animation. To talk about our soul, or our body, or our spirit, is to talk about ourselves from a particular frame of reference or within a certain kind of expression and experience. It does not denote one part of our existence, but one way of talking about and framing our existence.
Another common mistake comes when the words for mind, soul, and spirit are used interchangeably to mean the same thing. We may not be constituted of separate parts, but that does not mean we can talk about our human existence using the same words for every experience. The terms mind (nous), soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma) are not interchangeable; they mean different things. For example, Paul urges the Romans to be transformed by the renewing of their minds, not their souls. Jesus warns against gaining the whole world but losing the soul, not your mind. The different words mean different things and speak to different aspects of the human experience, but not to different elements that make a human being.
Ultimately, what it means to be human, our different experiences and expressions, must be held in tension with the reality of our coming resurrection life. Our human existence is given meaning through what is called eschatological integration, which means that who we are will be known by our participation in the being of Christ. Now, we start to experience that in part as we are made ‘in Christ’ through the Holy Spirit. In the future, in the resurrection, when Christ will be all in all, we will be integrated fully into the body of Christ, just as the Church is currently a promise of that future. To be human means being understood in relation to being joined in the Messiah, which is what determines our existence as the image of God.
It is our relationship with God, more than our human experience, which determines our humanness.
The Breath of God, The Spirit of Flesh
The key to understanding what the Bible means when it discusses the soul is the distinction between being alive and being a person.
The Bible’s use of the word psyche for soul when the Greek translation of the Old Testament (the Septuagint) is written, is different from how Plato or the Platonic world used it. We cannot assume a simple transference of ideas from one culture to another simply because the same word is used. When the Bible uses the word psyche, which in English is translated as soul, it is closer to the Hebrew word Nephesh, which means a living, breathing creature. It is the difference between a dead body and a living person. In Genesis, God breathed into the unalive human, nishmath hayyaim, and the mud became a living human being, Nephesh Hayyah. It is the breath of God which animates the mud, which makes the human not just a body but a created being, makes the human a person.
The translation of Nephesh into Psyche does not indicate a kind of Platonic soul but rather a living being, perhaps better translated as a person or our personhood. That which makes us us, and which is more than simple flesh and blood. The word soul is perhaps best understood in this frame as a kind of shorthand for our ‘I’ or our ‘me-ness.’ In technical terms, it is our quiddity, or what makes me me rather than you. This particular human being, called Chris, who has my memories, experiences, and personality, and not just any random human being. This is what Rowan Williams describes as the ‘form of the body’, which means the kind of thing which gives meaning, form, to my existence.
So, our soul is shorthand for who we are as a person, but it is also a way of talking about ourselves as living beings. Psyche means the whole human person in our natural life as an individual person – it is that which makes us unique and denotes I as an I and not You. The language of soul and spirit is to do with where our animative power comes from, in other words, where does our life come from. This is the difference between the language of the soul and the spirit.
The soul, that which we are, is the breath of God, giving us life and existing as a person, is life that will fade and fail. This is the kind of animating life which Paul describes as Psychikos, as opposed to the life which is granted to us through Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit in foretaste of our resurrection body, which is called Pneumatikos. We see this distinction in 1 Corinthians 15:44-46, with what the NRSV translates (incorrectly) as a physical body (Psychikos) and a spiritual body (Pneumatikos). But the reality of this passage should not be understood as a distinction between physical and spiritual, but between where the enervating energy of our life comes from. Is it from our mortal existence (our soul) or is it from the indwelling power of the Holy Spirit (the spirit) as we are conformed to Christ?
The difference between person and spirit, between body-soul-spirit, is not a difference between physical and non-physical. To reiterate, the body is how we experience our reality in the world. The soul is our mortal animation and shorthand for our existence as an ‘I’, and our spirit is the divine energy enervating our life. So that when Paul talks about the difference between spirit (Pneuma) and flesh (Sarx), he is not contrasting physical and non-physical. He is bringing out the difference between the life we lead in God and our fallen and sinful existence in ourselves. The flesh is not our physical existence, but our experience of sin in the world and in our lives.
The word body doesn’t denote a particular part of a person; it is the whole human being as a natural object within the present historical and spatial reality – the mind is not a separate part of the person but the way of understanding the person from the point of view of thinking, reflecting, remembering, and deciding. The Soul is our existence as a distinct person, in all our particularity.
Understanding our existence through this lens, and not as a kind of ghost in the machine, demands that we rethink our understanding of human value. Human existence cannot be reduced to reason or rationality, nor to particular kinds of bodies. When being human is derived from the breath of God, then every human has infinite value because they are bestowed with the image of Christ in us. No one can limit what it means to be human, or set boundaries on what makes a human valuable, when our understanding of what it means to be human begins with God’s attention and love being formative for who we are. So that our sense of self, our ‘I’, our ‘soul’, comes from the breath of God still flowing through our body and mind.
The Resurrection and the New Creation
A consequence of the difference between soul and spirit in what gives us life is understanding that our existence is not, by nature, immortal. The soul is not a spiritual being dwelling inside our bodies, which is immortal in distinction to our mortal and fragile flesh. We are not in possession of an immortal soul. If nothing else, because we are not in possession of a soul at all. If anything, our soul is just that part of us that is the ‘I’. The Bible tells us that only God is immortal (1 Tim 6:16). Our Psychikos existence, animated by the breath of God, understood as our soul, is affected by sin, and so is subject to death. As such, our mortal experience becomes termed as sarx.
Any future immortality we possess, the promise of heaven and then the resurrection into the new creation, is not because of anything to do with our nature. It is entirely the faithful gift of God to us through Christ. Nor is this future immortality in the new creation limited only to our ‘soul’ in some spiritual or non-physical sense, but is a promise for our entire being, including our body. This is part of what we spoke about as our eschatological integration in Christ.
We make a mistake when we talk about the salvation of souls if by it we mean a spirit part of us leaving our body on death, escaping this world, and going to heaven. Salvation is not about escaping the world, nor is it about our ‘souls’. Salvation is about the whole of creation just as it is about the whole person. We are saved as people, not as souls. Creation is redeemed as a whole, not left to be destroyed. This is the heart of the Gospel. That God is redeeming and restoring that which is broken and lost. So that when we talk of resurrection and new creation, we are not talking about an eternal spiritual existence in another dimension but about a physical resurrection. Not only of us, but of this entire creation.
Just as God made everything out of nothing (ex nihilo), so God will restore and redeem everything in the new creation through the transformation and resurrection of this already existing creation (ex veterae). There is, in some way, continuity between this world and the new creation. This is where our understanding of our life as animated by our flesh or by the Holy Spirit comes in. As we are made in Christ through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we receive the foretaste of what it will mean for us to exist as resurrection bodies in the coming new creation.
Just as we are now animated through the indwelling Holy Spirit, so too in the new creation will all of creation be indwelled by the Holy Spirit, giving it the kind of life which Christ has already given to us. Now, because we know that this is our future, we are given the command to make that future a present reality, which is what we mean when we pray that ‘thy kingdom come on Earth as in Heaven.’ The point is not to get to heaven, but to bring heaven into existence on Earth in expectation and promise of the coming new creation, which is what we really mean when we say we are a citizen of heaven. Not that we belong in heaven and this place is just somewhere we are passing through, but that we are acting on behalf of heaven to extend the Kingdom of God, God’s rule, into and throughout our world.
The more we understand that we do not possess an immortal soul waiting to go to heaven, and that when we say soul we mean that which makes me me, then we will grasp that salvation is about body and mind and soul and spirit all bound together, and that salvation is for creation as well as us. It is about the here and now. The future, the new creation and resurrection, is what gives meaning and reality to our present existence, but that does not take away from the fundamental importance of our current lived reality. It also means we have to shift and take seriously the way we approach ideas of healing, disability, and resurrection, but that is for another time!
Conclusion
We do not have an immortal soul which was put into our body at some point, and which will return to heaven when we die. When we use the word soul, in the way that the Bible talks about it, we are referring to our experience of ourselves as an I, distinct and particular from other I’s, which is brought into existence through the breath of God, which gives us life. Our body is the physical expression of this self, given form and meaning by our sense of ‘I’, and which is the locus of our activity in the world and our relationship with other people. As such, it is through our body that love is known and shown. Our mind is our expression of self in reasoning, reflecting, and deciding, and must be transformed just as all of our existence must be renewed through Christ.
Our current existence has been corrupted by sin, so that our life can be described as being in the flesh, sarx, by which we mean subject to death and sin. But through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit by gift of Christ, our life is empowered by the Spirit as we are made ‘in Christ’ to reflect the renewed image of God in us, which was broken and damaged by sin. As we are made in Christ, we receive the present reality of our future experience in the new creation by which we are kept safe in Christ upon our death. For our existence is not by nature immortal, but we are preserved in Christ through his Spirit in expectation of the resurrection in the new creation.
In the new creation, our fragmented and broken existence will be healed through our direct experience of Christ and in our resurrection. However, we now get to live that out through the indwelling Holy Spirit and in the Kingdom of God on Earth. When we grasp this, we grasp the promise of salvation for the world as it is, here and now, and can reorient ourselves away from a focus on our inner experiences, the quest for the soul, and instead direct our attention towards our neighbour so that we can love Christ as we love our neighbour.
We do not have a soul; my soul is who I am, as is my body and mind. I am a person, united in being, and given life and meaning through Christ, who imparts his Spirit to me.
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