This is a lightly edited transcript of what I actually said when I taught this session at Spring Creek Bible Church on October 11, 2015, as Part 3 of The Doctrines of Man and Sin class. It differs from what I planned to say; for the prepared text, see the manuscript.
Today we’re talking about the nature of man—who and what we are as human beings—part three in our study of the doctrines of man and sin. By way of review: we’ve seen that God’s special revelation in the Bible is central for answering questions about origins and all matters of faith and life; that God created us and everything outside himself; that Adam was a real historical person and the father of all humanity; that while Scripture suggests a young earth and less than ten thousand years of human history, faithfulness doesn’t require insisting on exactly six thousand; and that God created us and all things for his own glory, without need or weakness, knowing we would rebel—part of his sovereign, wise plan to bring glory through redemption and the joy of his people.
The Bible and Science
Let me begin where we left off, on how the Bible and science relate. All truth is God’s truth: whether it’s special revelation in the Bible or general revelation in the sunrise that tells us God is glorious, both come from God, both are authoritative, and both speak infallibly—so they are in complete and perfect harmony. God’s general revelation cannot contradict his special revelation; it’s the same God and the same truth. Why, then, do the Bible and science sometimes seem at odds? Usually because we’re not really comparing God’s revelation with God’s revelation; we’re comparing our understanding of one with our understanding of the other. God’s Word and world are in perfect harmony, but our grasp of them may not be—so the problem is with us, not with God’s revelation. Because of our fallenness, our hearts and minds are prone to misunderstand what God has clearly revealed.
How should we handle these apparent tensions? In much the same way we handle apparent tensions within the Bible. When two verses seem to conflict, we use the analogy of Scripture—comparing Scripture with Scripture—knowing all of God’s revelation is consistent with itself, and we wrestle until we reach an understanding that doesn’t pit one part against another. We do the same between Scripture and general revelation: challenge our understanding, re-study the passages through careful exegesis (Who wrote it? When? Why? What did it mean in its original context?), recognizing that our grasp of one or both may be wrong and need correcting. We should be skeptical of anything that starts to unravel the rest of Scripture—if a new scientific claim would make the whole Bible fall apart, it’s right to challenge and reject it—yet we may also find a genuine insight from general revelation that corrects a misunderstanding of the Bible and, on examination, harmonizes with the rest of its teaching. So we evaluate such claims carefully rather than dismissing them outright. (As one member noted, there’s a helpful distinction between observational science—what can be repeated and tested in a lab—and historical or origins science, which theorizes about what happened when no one was there to observe; we needn’t treat those as the same kind of claim.) And though both special and general revelation are true and infallible, they aren’t equally precise and concrete, so we give priority to special revelation as we seek to harmonize the two.
Finally, we should consider the source, reckoning with the effects of sin on our hearts and minds—true of believers and unbelievers alike. Even those who have the Spirit struggle to submit fully to God, and our minds are tainted by sin. But there’s a difference between sin’s effects on the believer and on the one not yet born again. The unbeliever is God’s enemy: he knows God but refuses to acknowledge him and actively suppresses the truth. Romans 1:18–32 is the central passage—those who “by their unrighteousness suppress the truth,” who “became futile in their thinking,” whose “foolish hearts were darkened,” who “exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,” whom God gave up to “a debased mind.” So it’s right to approach unbelievers’ ideas with discernment and a measure of skepticism, since the noetic effects of sin—the effects on the mind—distort their reading of God’s clear revelation. This doesn’t mean everything from unbelievers is false. Even the unbeliever is made in God’s image and is a recipient of common grace, capable of profound insights in science, art, business, and more, from which we can learn much. But we mustn’t ignore what the Bible teaches about fallen man’s anti-God bias when weighing claims, especially those that conflict with Scripture.
What We Are: Creatures
Perhaps the most fundamental thing about us is that we are creatures—created by God. That’s the basic difference between us and God: he is the Creator, we are the creature. Four implications follow. First, God owns us. Because he made us, he owns us. (I was explaining to my daughter recently that if she draws a picture, it’s hers to do with as she wishes—a basic principle of making something.) “It is he who made us, and we are his” (Psalm 100:3); “he who created you…he who formed you…‘You are mine’” (Isaiah 43:1). We belong to God, and so does everything we have—my clothes, this building, all of it. We’re stewards of what belongs to him. It’s easy to check that box theologically and forget its implications: the spouse sitting next to you is not yours but God’s, entrusted to you; your children are not yours but God’s (I’m in the three- and five-year-old years, so we’re having some challenges—but they’re his, entrusted to us); your possessions, and even your twenty-four hours in a day, are not ultimately yours to spend however you please, but God’s, to be used in light of his ownership of all we have and are.
Second, God is the giver, and we are receivers. Everything we have is from God; all of life is an undeserved gift. “What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). “A person cannot receive even one thing unless it is given him from heaven” (John 3:27). “All things come from you, and of your own have we given you” (1 Chronicles 29:14)—when we give to God, we’re handing back his own things. “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17). This should make us humble and generous with all he has entrusted to us.
Third, God has authority over us. Because he created and owns us, he has the right to command us and set the standards we must obey. That’s exactly what Romans 1 shows: those suppressing the truth don’t want to submit to God—and neither do we in our fallen state, until he renews our hearts. It’s his authority that people want to explain away, replacing the Creator with the creature so they needn’t submit. “Who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’ Has the potter no right over the clay…?” (Romans 9:20–21). “Like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand” (Jeremiah 18:6). God possesses all authority; we owe him everything, and he owes us nothing.
Fourth, God is infinite, and we are finite. Only God is limitless; everything else has limits—a beginning, and often an end. We run out of time, energy, patience, strength, and knowledge, facing our limits constantly. It’s important to embrace our finiteness, which is God’s design to keep us dependent, humble, and resting in his sufficiency. In our busy world we often push past the limits God set—getting by on too little sleep, trying to do more than he allotted—dangerously close to mimicking his infinity and setting ourselves up as the creator rather than rejoicing to be the creature. I’m speaking to myself here. C. J. Mahaney’s book on humility first pressed on me how God’s gift of sleep is tied to humility: humble people can rest, trusting they’ve done all God requires, while pride drives us to go further so we look more accomplished than others. So we need to rest, eat, relax, and sleep—leaving many things on our to-do lists undone—as part of what it means to be finite. To sum up: we’re God’s creatures, owned by him, owing him obedience and allegiance, entrusted as stewards with all we have, living in constant dependence on his inexhaustible provision.
How Many Parts Are We?
A question theologians debate is how many parts make us up—one, two, or three? There are three views: monism, dichotomism, and trichotomism (the prefixes meaning one, two, and three). Monism holds that man is indivisibly one—no immaterial part that can exist apart from the body. A natural corollary is “soul sleep”: at death the soul sleeps with the dead body until the resurrection. Naturalists deny any soul, of course, but some Christian groups—Seventh-day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christadelphians—affirm soul sleep, pointing to passages where the dead are said to “sleep” (“many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake,” Daniel 12:2; Jesus saying of the girl, “she is not dead but sleeping,” and of Lazarus, “our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep”). But “sleep” there is a metaphor for death—when Jesus raised Lazarus, he didn’t gently wake him; he called, “Lazarus, come out.” And the Bible teaches we can exist and live consciously apart from the body: “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); “my desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23); the rich man and Lazarus conscious after death (Luke 16); “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43); Stephen’s “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7); the souls under the altar crying out before the resurrection (Revelation 6:9). So it’s better to speak of body sleep than soul sleep—the body sleeps while the soul is awake in God’s presence or under judgment. James 2:26 says “the body apart from the spirit is dead,” not the reverse. Monism doesn’t fit this evidence.
Trichotomism holds we’re three parts—body, soul, and spirit—based on passages like Genesis 2:7 (body from dust, breath/spirit, and “a living creature,” Hebrew nephesh/soul), 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (“your whole spirit and soul and body”), and Hebrews 4:12 (the Word “piercing to the division of soul and of spirit”). Dichotomism—the view I find most consistent with Scripture—holds we’re two parts: a body (material) and a soul-spirit (immaterial), “soul” and “spirit” being two ways of viewing the same inner being. Scripture uses them interchangeably and in parallelism—“I will speak in the anguish of my spirit; I will complain in the bitterness of my soul” (Job 7:11); “my soul yearns for you in the night; my spirit within me earnestly seeks you” (Isaiah 26:9)—classic Hebrew parallelism where the two phrases restate one another. A few reasons I hold dichotomism: we can exist apart from our bodies, but there’s no indication the soul can exist apart from the spirit; Scripture uses the two interchangeably more than it distinguishes them; and Genesis 2:7’s “the man became a living being” describes the whole person, not a third part (dust for the body, breath for the soul-spirit, and now a living being). Besides, if you press the trichotomist logic, it’s hard to avoid four or five parts—where do heart, mind, and conscience fit? The Bible doesn’t parse them into neat categories, so distinguishing soul from spirit starts down a slippery slope.
How the Bible Describes Our Parts
It’s worth seeing how the Bible actually speaks of our material and immaterial parts, because its vocabulary doesn’t line up one-to-one with ours. “Body” corresponds neatly to our word—our physical makeup. “Flesh” is often synonymous with body, though it’s frequently used of the desires arising from our physical nature. For the immaterial part, “soul” (Hebrew nephesh, Greek psychē) most often refers to the whole person, not just an inner part. “Spirit” is the word for wind or breath and refers to the immaterial life within us, used interchangeably with soul. Strikingly, there’s no distinct Hebrew word for “mind”—it’s the same word as “heart.” “Heart” names the physical organ but stands for the whole inner person, including the intellect (where we tend to split heart as emotion from mind as intellect, they used one word). The Hebrews even used “kidneys” to represent emotions and feelings, and the Greeks used “bowels” for compassion (“Honey, I love you with all my bowels” doesn’t translate well for us). There are also words for the will (really the desire itself, or the thing desired, not a distinct faculty), the conscience (our inner sense of right and wrong), and the passions (our desires). Notably, there’s no biblical word for “emotions.” The big point: the way we carve up mind, emotion, and heart doesn’t match the Bible’s terms or usage, so we shouldn’t force them into tidy categories—and we should beware reading our English meanings into the text. That’s eisegesis (forcing meaning in) rather than exegesis (drawing meaning out), which is why good modern translations sometimes render the word for “heart” as “mind” so it doesn’t send the wrong signal.
The Origin of the Soul
If we have an immaterial part distinct from the body, where does it come from? For Adam, God created it directly—but what about his descendants? There are three main views. Pre-existence holds that all souls were created at the beginning and assigned to bodies at conception; held by Origen and a few others, it has no biblical basis (he didn’t even try to establish it from Scripture), so we can safely set it aside. Traducianism holds that both body and soul are passed down through procreation—your soul comes from your parents. Its arguments: God finished creating and rested, so he doesn’t create new souls now; it explains how original sin passes from parents to children (and it pairs with the seminal-headship view of Adam); it avoids the problem of God creating a sinful soul; it fits the virgin birth (God bypassing normal procreation to keep Jesus sinless); and it explains why children resemble their parents in personality, not just body. But it has problems: it tends to prioritize the body over the soul, making the soul derivative; it doesn’t explain when or how the new soul arises (is it in the sperm, the egg, neither?); and it doesn’t account well for children who differ sharply from their parents.
Creationism—the more common view—holds that God creates the soul at conception. Scripture suggests God plays a similar role in the origin of every human soul as he did with Adam: “the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7); God “gives breath to the people…and spirit to those who walk” on the earth (Isaiah 42:5); the Lord “formed the spirit of man within him” (Zechariah 12:1); and God is called “the Father of spirits” (Hebrews 12:9). Creationism better preserves the twofold nature of man, with the soul standing equal alongside the body. These are complex matters that have divided theologians for centuries, and they don’t ultimately affect Christian life or the assurance of salvation. I lean toward creationism as cleaner, with fewer problems—but ultimately, with Augustine, I’ll say I don’t know for sure.
Male and Female Before the Fall
God created humanity male and female. From the early chapters of Genesis we can see several things about that relationship before the fall. Adam was created first (Paul appeals to this order in the New Testament), and Eve was created from Adam as a helper suitable to—corresponding to—him. Both were fully created in God’s image; it’s not that Adam bore the image and Eve didn’t. Both were given the mandate to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. The man in particular was given the responsibility to leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife—a charge addressed to him, not to Eve—and God held Adam accountable for the family (Eve ate first, yet Adam was held responsible). So: men and women are equally the image of God but have different roles and responsibilities, and God designed human sexuality and marriage to be monogamous and heterosexual from the beginning—which means homosexual practice and so-called same-sex marriage, as well as polygamy, run against nature and God’s design.
Some argue that Eve’s submission to Adam is a result of the fall, reversed in Christ, appealing to two texts. In Genesis 3:16 God tells Eve, “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”—so, they say, Adam’s ruling is a product of the curse, not the original design. And Galatians 3:28—“There is neither Jew nor Greek…neither slave nor free…no male and female, for you are all one in Christ”—they take as undoing it. But there are problems. This ignores the clear indications of Adam’s leadership and responsibility before the fall, and it reads more into the curse than the text supports. The curse, I believe, introduced Eve’s desire to rule over Adam—“your desire shall be for your husband” carrying the sense of a desire to master him—“but he shall rule over you.” Before the fall, Eve joyfully and willingly helped Adam; after it, that relationship became a struggle, with a desire for independence. And the New Testament continues to teach the submission of wives to their husbands, even those united in Christ—which makes no sense if Galatians 3:28 had abolished it; why would Paul, appealing to the created order, keep teaching it? So God’s design was for Adam and Eve to marry, procreate, live in faithful heterosexual monogamy, fulfill their complementary roles, and exercise dominion over the earth.
Let’s close in prayer. Father, thank you for this opportunity to look at your Word and at these questions of who we are. We thank you that you have created us—that you are a benevolent God who owns us, has authority over us, has given us all things, and is infinite. Help us today to reflect on who we are as your creatures; help us to live in humble submission to you as your stewards, using all you’ve given us for your glory. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.