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WHAT IS THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN PERSON?

Are human beings composed of two parts, a material body and a nonmaterial soul or mind? Or are human beings physical beings with mental and spiritual attributes or capacities? My guess is that most Christians assume the former, and assume, furthermore, that such a belief is an essential part of Christian teaching. This question is not often raised in church circles but it should be, since many philosophers, scientists, and others have come to assume a monistic, or holistic, or physicalist account of the person. We need to know whether or not there is an essential conflict. The purpose of this essay is not to settle the issue but to identify the questions that need to be answered.

Christian views of the person have been greatly shaped by ancient philosophy, especially by Plato (427-347 BCE). According to Plato a human being is a soul imprisoned temporarily in a body. The soul accounts for consciousness, and is immaterial and eternal. It has three “parts”: reason; the spirited element, which initiates action; and the drives and appetites.

Plato had a significant impact on the early development of theology, largely through the Neoplatonists, who incorporated his ideas into religious systems. Augustine (354-430 CE) made great use of Neoplatonist philosophy. However, he had to make some modifications in the Platonic conception of the soul. A human being is a rational soul using a mortal and material body, not imprisoned in the body. The Augustinian soul is also tri-partite, but the “parts” are slightly different: our modern conception of the will is an Augustinian notion, and Augustine saw it, rather than reason, as the highest or dominant aspect of the soul. Finally, while the soul is immortal, it does not exist eternally before incarnation.

In general, what we see in Greek philosophical speculation and Medieval theology is the recognition that human beings have some remarkable capabilities all their own (such as doing mathematics and relating to God) and others that they share with animals (sensation). It did not seem possible to attribute these powers to the body, so they developed theories about an additional component of the person to account for them. Since living persons can do all of these things and corpses cannot the soul is also the life principle.

There have always been philosophical problems connected with the soul. For example, Plato said that the body could not affect the soul; so how could the senses provide it with perceptual knowledge? In the Modern period (ca. 1650-1950) such problems have become acute, leading most philosophers and many theologians to conclude that a different account of the person is required.

The philosophical reasons for this change have largely to do with the difficulties (or impossibility) of explaining how a non-material entity could interact with a material body. These problems have been exacerbated by a variety of scientific developments. Theological reasons include, in addition, claims that dualism is not biblical and that theology ought to reject Greek conceptions in favor of the Hebraic thought informing much of the Bible, and also that dualism has led to an unChristian depreciation of the physical creation.

The problem of mind-body interaction suddenly became more difficult in the Modern period because of the replacement of Medieval conceptions of matter by a revised version of atomism. Aristotle (384-22 BCE), who influenced late Medieval thought, taught that matter and form were correlative, form being the active principle and matter passive. So the soul, as one type of form, was conceived of as exactly that which animated, moved, the body. The early modern conception of matter as developed by I. Newton also conceived of matter as inert, passive. But rather than being moved by immanent forms, it is moved by external forces—physical forces. Now there is a dilemma: hold on to the immateriality of mind (note the modern shift from talk of “soul” to talk of “mind”), and there is then no way to account for its supposed ability to move the body. Interpret it as a quasiphysical force, and its effects ought to be measurable and quantifiable as is any other force in nature. But nothing of this sort enters into modern physics.

A variety of philosophical theories have been tried “Psychophysical parallelism” holds that mental events and physical events occur in parallel chains, only appearing to interact causally because of a pre-established harmony. “Epiphenomenalism’ is the view that brain events cause mental events, but mental events have no causal effects of their own. Epiphenomenalism is problematic because it simply denies that the mental, qua mental, makes any difference in the world. It is brain events that make things happen.

These problems have led most secular philosophers to conclude that we are better off not postulating minds as entities at all. We may speak, instead, of mental events, but these are in some way identical with brain events. That is, we call them mental as we experience them “within”; physical as we imagine a neuroscientist looking on from outside.

So early modern science, with its new conception of matter, created philosophical problems for mind-body dualism that many have judged to be insoluble; this has led to wholesale rejection of the concept of a substantial mind. Meanwhile, more recent science has shown the fruitfulness of taking the brain to be the seat of all those mental faculties that earlier theorists had attributed to the soul.

One sort of research involves locating various cognitive and affective functions in specific regions of the brain. This began with the study of victims of brain damage, correlating lost faculties with localized damage discovered during autopsies. With the development of CAT scans, MRI scans, and PET scans it has become possible to correlate localized brain activity with the performance of specialized cognitive tasks. For example, Broca’s area in the left frontal area lobe is involved in speech. Furthermore, more specifically located lesions can selectively affect the person s command of color vocabulary, of common nouns, highly specific nouns, and proper names (P. Churchland, The Engine of Reason, the Seat of the Soul: A Philosophical Journey into the Brain [MIT, 1995] 159-60). There are also, apparently, social regions of the brain, such as those allowing for facial recognition and perception of emotion.

On the theological side of the issue, critical church history has recognized significant doctrinal development, including the Hellenization of Christian thought—the “translation” of doctrines into the thought-forms of Greek culture. This process, already begun in NT times, accelerated in the Patristic era. One response was a call to purify theology of its Greek accretions. This led to questions being raised whether body-soul dualism was in fact biblical teaching, or whether both OT and NT conceptions of the person had been distorted by translation into other languages, and then interpreting the relevant words in accordance with dualistic philosophies.

Ray Anderson (among others) argues that the Hebrew term nephesh, often translated “soul,” designates the life of the body. It is often used in parallel with basar (“flesh”), but never in contrast with it. Ruach (“spirit”) means “vigorous life” or “inspired life.” Lev (“heart”) is the seat of intelligence. He finds the same anthropology in the NT. The Greek term psyche is used as an equivalent of nephesh, and is translated “soul” or “life.” He points out that “… Paul’s use of the terms body (sarx, soma), soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma) presents difficulties in translating into English so as to remain faithful to Paul’s essentially Hebrew concept of the unity of the self while, at the same time, respecting his psychological depiction of persons who are controlled by either spiritual or unspiritual desires and actions.

“Those whom Paul describes as ‘fleshly’ (sarkikos) are also ‘soulish’ (psychikos). Paul never uses the body and the soul as contrasts for spiritual and unspiritual, or for mortal and immortal, as do the Greeks. Instead, he uses the terms to designate qualities of life expressed through both the physical and the nonphysical life. ‘Spirit’ and ‘spiritual’ signify a divine quality of life, received as a gift from God and having a share in God’s Spirit. ‘Flesh’ and ‘carnal’ do not signify merely a natural or physical quality of life but a corrupt, self-centered and mortal kind of life. It is not human nature that is the enemy of the spirit, but distortion or corruption of that human nature that is the enemy” (“Christian Anthropology” in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Modern Christian Thought, ed. A.E. McGrath [Blackwell, 1993] 5-9 [6]).

He concludes that if Hebrew anthropology is determinative for a Christian view of the human self, then a strict dualism between body and soul, as well as a trichotomy of body, soul, and spirit, must be rejected. “What is distinctive about human beings is not that they have a ‘soul’ which animals do not possess, nor that they have a ‘spirit’ which other creatures do not possess, but that, as ‘ensouled body’ and ‘embodied soul,’ the ‘spirit’ of that existence is opened towards God in a unique way as the source of life. The whole of human life, body and soul, is thus oriented towards a destiny beyond mortal and natural life” (7).

However, there are those who disagree with Anderson. John W. Cooper argues for an ontological dualism on the grounds that both Scripture and later authorities teach a doctrine of “the intermediate state.” That is, Christians are assured that between death and the general resurrection they survive to await judgment. Therefore, the human person must be “constructed in such away that at death it can ‘come apart,’ the conscious personal part continuing to exist while the organism disintegrates” (Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate [Wm.B. Eerdmans, 1989] 1). He takes biblical evidence such as Anderson cites to show merely that body and soul function in an integrated way prior to death.

Second, Christians have had to distinguish between the teaching of Scripture and the assumptions, concepts, and theories of the time that are used in order to convey the teachings. It is common to speak of God’s revelation being accommodated to the thought-forms of the ancient cultures. An important example is the use of ancient cosmology in the OT. So if it is shown that the NT speaks of an intermediate state (or otherwise presumes some sort of dualism) an important question is whether this is biblical teaching or merely accommodation to the thought of the times.

A larger theological issue concerns the relation between anthropology and the doctrine of salvation. Critics of dualism claim that it fosters a too-narrow account of salvation as merely saving souls for the after-life; a more biblical and generally more adequate account of salvation involves saving the whole person, and is as much a this-worldly concern as a concern for the final state. The conception of salvation as “getting to heaven” is Neoplatonic, closely related to Plato’s view that the proper abode of the soul is the realm of the Forms. Wolfhart Pannenberg claims that a more authentic Christian view involves the ultimate transformation of the entire cosmos, similar to the transformation of Jesus body in the resurrection.

Despite these arguments for holistic anthropology, a powerful reason for holding on to dualism in the Modern period has been that the major alternative has been a reductive materialist account, which seemed to imply determinism. I believe that the most pressing philosophical issue is whether it is possible to identify mental states with brain states, but avoid the implication that the mental, emotional, and spiritual life is determined by physical laws. Thus, we must see whether there is an alternative to reductionism.

The American philosopher R.W. Sellars (1 880-1973) pioneered a “nonreductive physicalist” view of the person. Sellars’ position is opposed to both Cartesian mind-matter dualism and reductive materialism. According to Sellars, the natural world is one great complex system, displaying levels of complexity. These levels can be represented by a hierarchical ordering of the sciences that study them. Physics studies the simplest entities and is thus at the bottom, then chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology, ethics, and theology. The pressing question is whether physics is determinative of the behavior of higher-level systems. Reductionists say it is; Sellars disagrees.

In rejecting reductive materialism, Sellars argues that “[o]rganization and wholes are genuinely significant”; they are not mere aggregates of elementary particles. Reductive materialism overemphasizes the “stuff” in contrast to the organization, but matter is only a part of nature. “There is energy; there is the fact of pattern; there are all sorts of intimate relations.” “Matter, or stuff, needs to be supplemented by terms like integration, pattern, function” (Principles of Emergent Realism: The Philosophical Essays of Roy Wood Sellars, ed. W.P. Warren [Warren H. Green, 1970] 136-38). “It will be my argument that science and philosophy are only now becoming sufficiently aware of the principles involved in the facts of levels, of natural kinds, of organization, to all of which the old materialism was blind. I shall even carry the notion of levels into causality and speak of levels of causality” (The Philosophy of Physical Realism [Russell and Russell, 1966] 4).

Despite Sellars’ belief that science and philosophy were already in his day becoming aware of the facts of levels and natural kinds, there are many ardent reductionists, and theirs has been by far the predominant position in philosophy and science up to the present. However, I believe that the balance is beginning to shift from reductive to nonreductive physicalism, as evidenced by developments in the philosophy of mind, as well as in science.

It is becoming widely recognized by scientists working at a variety of levels in the hierarchy of the sciences that while analysis and reduction are important aspects of scientific enquiry, they do not yield a complete or adequate account of the natural world. In simple terms, one has to consider not only the parts of an entity, but also its interactions with its environment in order to understand it. Since the entity plus its environment is a more complex system than the entity itself (and therefore higher in the hierarchical ordering of systems) this means that a “top-down” analysis must be considered in addition to a “bottom-up” analysis. Biochemists were among the first to notice this: chemical reactions do not work the same in a petri dish as they do within a living organism. The new science of ecology is based on recognition that organisms function differently in different environments. Thus, in general, the higher-level system, which is constituted by the entity and its environment, needs to be considered in giving a complete causal account.

What this implies for an understanding of the person is that if human beings are considered holistically, as physical organisms whose complex neurological system allows for the emergence of both mental and spiritual capacities, these higher functions cannot be reduced to biological processes, and must be recognized as having their own causal significance.

The nonreductive physicalist position developed in our day in response to the scientific discoveries and the philosophical problems associated with dualism may in fact be more in accord with biblical views of the person. If this account of the person is indeed acceptable theologically and biblically, as well as scientifically and philosophically, a variety of consequences follow in the fields of ethics, spiritual development, medicine, and psychotherapy. Most important, I believe, is that the necessary emphasis on resurrection rather than immortality of the soul will bring us back to a more authentic understanding of Christian hope.

By Nancey Murphy, Fuller Theological Seminary; author of Reasoning and Rhetoric in Religion (Trinity, 1994).