We think we know who we are. It’s assumed in the question, “What
happens to you when you die?” Who are you?
What are you? The naturalist says you
are essentially stardust, an organism made out of carbon and water mostly with
a lot of other trace elements thrown in for good measure, and like everything
else on earth, the moment you die you cease to exist. Decomposition begins, and, atom by atom, you disappear back into the material world.
Essentially, this is the oldest Biblical answer of what
happens when you die. You become a corpse. The ancient meaning of the Hebrew
word, nephesh (often translated
soul), was corpse or even tomb (Numbers 5:2, 6:6, 9:6, 10, 19:13, Leviticus
19:28, 22:4, Haggai 2:13). Nephesh comes from a root meaning "to
blow out" or "exhale." Ancient people saw
death as a respiratory phenomenon; that is, when people exhaled their last
breath but did not inhale, they knew they were dead. They reasoned that the
difference between someone alive and dead was the “breath of nephesh” that the Creator breathed into
Adam when he became a “living nephesh” (Genesis 2). The Old Testament is more likely to use
the word nephesh to mean “life” rather
than the medieval notion of soul as a non-material eternal self that we have become used to. The word denoted the
totality of an individual’s existence. C.S. Lewis summarized the Old Testament
view of nephesh when he wrote, “Man doesn’t
have a soul; he is a soul that has a body.” Nowhere in the Old Testament is nephesh considered something that can be separated from flesh or mind or emotion. The Israelis
of the Old Testament and even into the time of Jesus conceived of man as a
unity. In Deuteronomy 6:5, the great creed of Judaism, people are commanded to
love Yahweh God with all their heart, mind, soul, and strength. This did not
mean they conceived of Man as made of four distinct parts. This verse makes use of parallelism to broaden a concept, a literary device used throughout the Bible and especially in the Psalms. Heart
and mind were the internal aspect of love. “Soul” and strength were the
external manifestations of love. Psuche is life.
Most of us were introduced to Pythagoras in Junior High geometry. But this ancient Greek was probably the very first to theorize the immortality of the soul
and its transmigration after death into another realm. Up until Pythagoras
(570-495 BC), the Greek etymology of psuche
was identical to that of the Hebrew nephesh;
it was the breath that distinguished a corpse from a living being. But in his work on ethics, Pythagoras reasoned
that psuche was different from the body (soma).
The body would die. But your psuche
was the real “you” that would leave the body at death and begin an afterlife either in the underworld or someplace better,
depending on how ethically you had lived your life. Here is the origin of our Western ideas of
the immortality of the soul. How many Christians would be surprised to learn
that their idea of the soul going to heaven after while their body rots in the grave is not
Biblical, but Pythagorean?
In the second century after Jesus these ideas found their way into the church. Called Gnosticism, it was the non-Biblical teaching that matter was bad and spirit was good; that the
purpose of salvation was to free the soul at death to return to God. Pythagorean-Gnostic ideas were beginning to be advanced as early as mid first century when the Apostle Paul was preaching the Gospel in Greece. To avoid misunderstanding, the Apostle Paul hardly ever uses the word psuche in his letters. He
wanted to avoid confusing the Biblical view of personhood with that of the
pagan Greeks. The Greek idea of soul immortality and the inherent evil of flesh was brought into the Roman Church by Thomas Aquinas who thought Aristotle and
Plato were Christians before Jesus. Not only did we live in Aristotle’s three-story
universe, but the Church insisted people were a trichotomous amalgam of body,
mind, and soul. After 19 centuries, these
notions are baked into our language and our cultural heritage, preserved in
hymns and prayer books, and affirmed in secular media from Dante’s Inferno to
Hollywood’s latest Gnostic tale of disembodied spirits escaping to heaven after
death.
What did our Lord teach?
We must listen to Jesus and interpret the Old Testament through him and
the faithfulness of the early Church to him.
Jesus affirmed the Scriptures and the indivisibility of human
life. Psuche is the life God gave
us. Jesus speaks in Mark 10:45 that his life mission
is “to give his psuche as a ransom
for many.” Obviously, Jesus doesn't have a disembodied essence in mind, but his life. In Mark 8 Jesus begins
to teach his disciples that he must be rejected and crucified by God’s people. When Peter tries to dissuade Jesus from such
thoughts, Jesus rebukes Peter and makes a statement found in all four Gospels.
“He who would save his psuche
will lose it; but he who loses his psuche
will save it.”
(Mark
8:36, Mt. 10:39, Lk 17:33, Jn 12:25)
Jesus clearly means one's life. Losing my immortal soul is impossible in that Pythagorean way of thinking.
The only saying of
Jesus that is sometimes cited as evidence of his teaching about a body-soul
dichotomy is Matthew 10:28.
“Do not fear those who kill the body (soma) but cannot kill the psuche.
Rather fear him who can destroy both psuche
and soma in Gehenna (the garbage dump
of Jerusalem).”
Through Pythagorean
spectacles we might read this and think he is splitting soul and body. But if you read it carefully and take psuche to mean in this verse what it
means everywhere else in the teachings
of Jesus and the Old Testament, psuche
and soma are bound together. From a human perspective, people can kill the
body but they can’t kill the life God intended for you when he created you. In other
words, you were made for something beyond this life. You aren’t a body that has a soul; you are a
soul that has a body. There is no
teaching anywhere in the Bible about disembodied human souls. When Jesus loses his psuche, God will raise
him bodily from the dead, uniting forever psuche and soma.
So let me summarize. Who are you? You
are a living psuche. Jesus corrected the ancient Jewish idea of annihilation after death both in his teaching and by his resurrection. Psuche is your individual life as God
intended and which you can save by sacrificing it or lose by grabbing for
it. Changing our ideas about psuche must
necessarily impact how we understand the Bible’s message about salvation.
What happens the moment you die? In Christ, you are saved. And
to that we turn in the next part.
(To be continued)
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