 |
Open Theism Discussion Board > Public Forums > Tearing down walls > (No Subject)
| Forum Quick Jump
|
 | 
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/1/2004 9:45 AM (GMT -6) |   | quote:
Originally posted by Sahid
What makes a person a person? A soul. Except that word seems to have lost its meaning. Maybe the image of God is better. But what is the image of God? So is there a difference between a human soul and the image of God? Is there a difference? I've got my own ideas...
Maybe the image of God is the ability to be like Him, to love, create, understand. I encourage all to inform me of how misguided I am.  Oh, so misguided. 
Image = ability, as you said.
Likeness (term used in EO, and sometimes Calvin) = actually developing those virtues in us.
Soul -- different issue. Don't try to compare. Just as you can have hands that develope Christlikeness (which still wouldn't make them the likeness of God; but this ia by analogy), so too your soul may or may not be transforming into the likeness of God.
Greeks would say "I HAVE a soul. Hebrews would say "I am a soul." the Hebrews are right. You are a UNITY of body AND soul.
Fini | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 3:29 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Sahid
My understanding is that the Hebrews roughly equate "living being" or "living soul" (Gen 2) with the Greek body and soul put together. I know that's not exact. It is apples and cursive. But I don't think the oversimplification hurts that much.
It is also my understanding that God breathing into man's nostrils is what imparted this "living soulness", and that is what makes us "in His image".
So am I correct in saying that without the breath and/or image, we would just be physical, not "spiritual"? And if so, is this breath/image/Greek soul entirely nonphysical?
The first paragraph is golden!
What's the basis for the second? Overly literal reading? "Breath and spirit are the same thing. The picture in that narrative is that man is created directly by God. Being created by God for fellowship with him, and as priests to offer the world back to God is what makes us in his image.
As to the third, there never was a time when we were limp-flesh. God created us "TO" be what we are. | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 3:40 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by Sahid
So am I correct in saying that without the breath and/or image, we would just be physical, not "spiritual"? And if so, is this breath/image/Greek soul entirely nonphysical?
I think that the important point is that it is unnatural to consider a soul as by itself. That is a comdemned heresy: Origin believed in the pre-existance of the soul, and for a short time certain Vatican theologians taught that too, and influenced the portrayal of Eve under God's arm in Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam" on the Sistine Chapel ceiling.
DEATH is the unnatural even par excelance. It is the rending of soul from body.
But it is Christian belief that there IS a resurrection of the dead. And we shall not remain bodiless.
"Without 'breath' (not being literal)" as you say, there would not be a body either. | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 3:44 AM (GMT -6) | | But what is LARGER is the issue of physical versus material in God's creation. Our society, with its recent emphasis on Communism and the sustained emphasis on capitalism (both of which are materialist philosophies. Both RAVAGE the planet!!!).
I found this post on a medical-bioethics site:
quote:
The sacramental use of material means (such as water, oil, bread, wine, etc.) for spiritual purposes also illustrates Eastern Orthodoxy's comprehension of the intimate relationship of matter and spirit, For bioethics, this key concept is important because it leads to a serious affirmation of the psychosomatic unity of human life. "Body" and "soul" are the constituents of human existence; the Orthodox emphasis on the Resurrection confirms its view that human life and human fulfillment are inextricably bound to both the physical and the spiritual dimensions of human existence. In more contemporary terms, body and personhood are essential for the fulfillment of human potential (Antoniades, 1:204-208).
For the Health of Body and Soul: An Eastern Orthodox Introduction to Bioethicsby Stanley S. Harakas
www.goarch.org/en/ourfaith/articles/article8076.asp
| | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 5:06 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by DLW
Pow has a good post on Soul in the super-long abortion thread that I started and we've been reposting on as of late. I think it was towards the end of the first page or at the beginning of the 2nd page.
You may find it interesting or rather repetitive to actually just read the whole thread, Sahid, if that really is your name.
dlw
Thanks, DLW!!!
Soul, Y'all.
quote:
Christos Yannaras
"Man": Elements of Faith
(T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1991), Chapter 7: pp. 53-88.
http://www.jbburnett.com/yannaras/yannaras-man.html
b. Soul
The word soul is among the most difficult words in the Bible and in Christian literature. Moreover, confusion was added to the meaning of the word, since the Greeks used it with a different meaning. Today, most people, almost self-evidently, understand the word "soul" more with the ancient Greek (particularly Platonic) and less with its biblical meaning. They believe that, as there exists within the body of man blood, lymph, bone marrow, in the. same way there exists an immaterial element, spiritual, essentially different from our material composition and precisely this is the soul– something transparent and indefinte, which leaves us with the last breath when we die and goes "somewhere else".
But this is not the biblical meaning of the word. The Seventy translators of the Old Testament carried over into Greek with the word psyche ("soul") the Hebrew nephesh, a term with many meanings. Anything which has life is called a soul, every animal, but more commonly within the Scripture it pertains to man. It signifies the way in which life is manifested in man. It does not refer just to one department of human existence– the spiritual, in opposition to the material– but signifies the whole man, as a single living hypostasis. The soul does not merely dwell in the body, but is expressed by the body, which itself, like the flesh or heart, corresponds to our ego, to the way in which we realize life. A man is a soul, he is someone, since this constitutes the sign of life, as much an external manifestation as interiority and subjectivity. But if the soul is the sign of life, it does not signify that it is also the source or cause of life, as the Greeks believed. It is, rather, the bearer of life, and therefore it is often identified in the Old Testament only with the manifestation of life on earth (the soul dies, it is handed over to death, but it also is raised, when life returns to the dead body), while in the New Testament it appears also as a bearer of eternal life, and therefore the salvation of the soul is identified with the possibility of life which does not know corruption and death.
The Fathers of the Christian Church interpreting the Scripture respected absolutely the very important meaning of the word "soul" and did not try to define it with only one interpretation. They saw both in the soul and in the body of man two differentiated and often co-inhering modes by which the image of God in man is revealed. But they refused to schematize the content of the "image" in a particular definition; they sought to preserve the mystery of the mode of the divine Existence and its imprinting on human existence from the danger of intellectual schernatization.
Much later, chiefly in the middle ages and afterwards and especially in the European West, when Christian theology began to succumb to the temptation of intellectual schematization, the "image" was interpreted with "objective" categories; it was identified with particular properties which characterize the "spiritual nature" of man. The most general understanding of man received in the West a strong influence from ancient Greek thought, with, though, exaggerated simplifications. The Greek definition of man as an "animal having reason" (animal rationale as it was put in the West) was interpreted in the form of a real, antithetical distinction of soul and body, matter and spirit. Man was thought of as, in principal, a biological being endowed additionally with a soul or with a soul and Spirit.
Within the scheme of this opposition, the "image" was limited to one of these two "parts" of the nature of man, the spiritual "part", that is, the soul– since the bodily, material "part" is by definition unable to represent the immaterial and spiritual God. The soul, then, of man– each one's individual soul– was endowed with three properties which characterize God himself, and therefore impart His image to man: rationality, free will, and dominion.
| | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 9:37 AM (GMT -6) | | If this definition does not make expediency for conforming belief to current political fads, then so be it.
The human soul IS a mystery. Prof. Yannaras, as a theologian and an ethicist, did a wonderful job.
The waters are only "muddied" if we expected to see simple answers. Reductive answers.
And "ending" reflection on what humanity is would itself be tragic.
But WE should honor (as Dave actually has said twice now today, and perhaps will admit) ALL human life!
| | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 10:02 AM (GMT -6) | | Christos Yannaras
"Man": Elements of Faith
(T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1991), Chapter 7: pp. 53-88.
http://jbburnett.com/resources/yannaras/yannaras_elements7-man.pdf
b. Soul
The word soul is among the most difficult words in the Bible and in Christian literature. Moreover, confusion was added to the meaning of the word, since the Greeks used it with a different meaning. Today, most people, almost self-evidently, understand the word "soul" more with the ancient Greek (particularly Platonic) and less with its biblical meaning. They believe that, as there exists within the body of man blood, lymph, bone marrow, in the. same way there exists an immaterial element, spiritual, essentially different from our material composition and precisely this is the soul– something transparent and indefinte, which leaves us with the last breath when we die and goes "somewhere else".
But this is not the biblical meaning of the word. The Seventy translators of the Old Testament carried over into Greek with the word psyche ("soul") the Hebrew nephesh, a term with many meanings. Anything which has life is called a soul, every animal, but more commonly within the Scripture it pertains to man. It signifies the way in which life is manifested in man. It does not refer just to one department of human existence– the spiritual, in opposition to the material– but signifies the whole man, as a single living hypostasis. The soul does not merely dwell in the body, but is expressed by the body, which itself, like the flesh or heart, corresponds to our ego, to the way in which we realize life. A man is a soul, he is someone, since this constitutes the sign of life, as much an external manifestation as interiority and subjectivity. But if the soul is the sign of life, it does not signify that it is also the source or cause of life, as the Greeks believed. It is, rather, the bearer of life, and therefore it is often identified in the Old Testament only with the manifestation of life on earth (the soul dies, it is handed over to death, but it also is raised, when life returns to the dead body), while in the New Testament it appears also as a bearer of eternal life, and therefore the salvation of the soul is identified with the possibility of life which does not know corruption and death.
The Fathers of the Christian Church interpreting the Scripture respected absolutely the very important meaning of the word "soul" and did not try to define it with only one interpretation. They saw both in the soul and in the body of man two differentiated and often co-inhering modes by which the image of God in man is revealed. But they refused to schematize the content of the "image" in a particular definition; they sought to preserve the mystery of the mode of the divine Existence and its imprinting on human existence from the danger of intellectual schernatization.
Much later, chiefly in the middle ages and afterwards and especially in the European West, when Christian theology began to succumb to the temptation of intellectual schematization, the "image" was interpreted with "objective" categories; it was identified with particular properties which characterize the "spiritual nature" of man. The most general understanding of man received in the West a strong influence from ancient Greek thought, with, though, exaggerated simplifications. The Greek definition of man as an "animal having reason" (animal rationale as it was put in the West) was interpreted in the form of a real, antithetical distinction of soul and body, matter and spirit. Man was thought of as, in principal, a biological being endowed additionally with a soul or with a soul and Spirit.
Within the scheme of this opposition, the "image" was limited to one of these two "parts" of the nature of man, the spiritual "part", that is, the soul– since the bodily, material "part" is by definition unable to represent the immaterial and spiritual God. The soul, then, of man– each one's individual soul– was endowed with three properties which characterize God himself, and therefore impart His image to man: rationality, free will, and dominion. | | Back to Top | | |
|
PotOnWheel
Registered Member
Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 9890
| Posted 7/2/2004 10:10 AM (GMT -6) | | quote:
Originally posted by PotOnWheel
Christos Yannaras
"Man": Elements of Faith
(T&T Clark: Edinburgh, 1991), Chapter 7: pp. 53-88.
http://jbburnett.com/resources/yannaras/yannaras_elements7-man.pdf
But why should we exclude that what each man is as a unique, distinct and unrepeatable personal existence is owed exclusively and only to the differentiation of the biochemical composition of its chromosomes and by extension to the function of the various “centres” of its brain? Why do we restrict the role of biochemical composition and biological functions solely to the activity and manifiestiation of the hypostatic otherness of each man, and do not extend it also to its foundation and composition?
. . .
“What is the body and what is the soul of man?” with the criteria of the ecclesial tradition: Both the body and the soul are energies of human nature, that is the modes by which the event of the hypostasis (or personality, the ego, the identity of the subject) is given effect. What each specific man is, his real existence or his hypostasis, this inmost I which constitutes him as an existential event, is identified neither with the body nor with the soul. The soul and the body only reveal and disclose what man is; they form energies, manifestation, expressions, functions to reveal the hypostasis of man.
Said so well. | | Back to Top | | |
|
timlings
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2002
Total Posts : 130
| Posted 7/2/2004 1:25 PM (GMT -6) | | Sahid
Good question mate!
I've got a bit of an old-skool understanding of the soul, influenced a lot by Watchman Nee.
Basically, our soul is our personality. It has three parts or functions - our mind (thinkin), our affection (feelings) and our will (decision making). But we also have a body and a spirit. The body is the physical stuff of me (flesh and bones) and the spirit is the innermost part of me that can interact with the supernatural (eg. prayer and worship to God, or rather less savoury things).
If you look in the creation accounts, it says that God formed man out of dust (the physical body), breathed his breath into him (his spirit), and then he became a living soul/being. A soul isn't pre-existent as it's a combination of body and spirit. It's kinda like the middle-man.
I am a soul. I have a body and I have a spirit (correct me if I'm wrong). It's all very much linked together, but still three separate parts. Think of it like the Trinity - three persons, one God. I am three parts but one person.
The bible says that God wants to save us, spirit, soul and body. Interestingly enough, we get a new spirit when we're born again, and at the resurrection we get a new heavenly body. But we keep our soul! This life is spent God working out his salvation in our soul, to save it - renewing our thinking, feeling and deciding (basically our character).
Does that help? Am I terribly outmoded in my metaphysics?
love
Timlings | | Back to Top | | |
|
Bobber
Registered Member
Date Joined Jun 2004
Total Posts : 199
| Posted 7/18/2004 12:34 PM (GMT -6) | | I believe we are a three part being 1) Spirit 2)Soul and 3)physical body. Having said this however it does not mean you as a spirit for we are like God in the sense that we are spiritual beings, it doesn't mean if you could see my spirit I would be an invisible nothing, or like a cloud or vapor. To a spirit spiritual things are substantial. My spirit has a body with a head, arms feet etc, but it is of the substance of a spiritual order. So we are number 1 a spirit. We don't have a spirit. We are a spirit. Now if you stick with the Old Testament I don't think you get the fullest revelation of this subject. Go into the new. The Bible is progressive revelation in some of these matters but after the New Testament I don't believe there is any new revelation. Reading the Bible you'll see one poor man died and it said the angels carried him to Abraham’s bosom.
It wasn't the poor mans physical body they picked up and carried. Men took care of that. It was talking about his spiritual body. Well there was a man who on earth was a rich man in hell fire who lifted up his eyes and saw with Abraham the man who was the poor man. The scripture states however that he lifted up his eyes and saw them. Well the physical body of that rich man had rotted away in the grave so this wasn't this mans physical eyes which saw Abraham but rather his spiritual eyes. So man is a spirit, he has a soul and he lives inside a physical body. If we study it out I think soul is referring to mans capacity to reason from the natural mind. For example scripture states trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding. So what's your understanding mean. It means the way you reason naturally.
But what’s the heart? It has to be different? Its really talking about the core of a persons existence the real them, and that is spirit. So in other words he's stating is trust in the words of the Spirit of God with your spirit. God's spiritual truth may go against natural, the way we see things from the natural, but we trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not to how we respond in just the natural way. The Book of James talks about the salvation of our souls but he was writing to people who already were Christians so it couldn't have been talking about the spirit being saved. No it was talking about your natural mind will be saved in the sense of finding peace when you trust in the word of God. Romans 12 states we are transformed by the renewing of our minds. Its not talking about spiritual salvation here but character development as a Christian the mind needs to come in line with the spirit. So I would say its really spirit, soul and body or you could say spirit, mind and body. 
| | Back to Top | | |
| Forum Information | Currently it is Monday, November 09, 2026 2:41 PM (GMT -6)
There are a total of 97,718 posts in 6,040 threads.
In the last 3 days there were 0 new threads and 0 reply posts. View Active Threads
|
Forum powered by dotNetBB v2.42EC SP3
dotNetBB © 2000-2026 |
|
|