50 Key Concepts in Theology

The Soul
An inner spiritual dimension within each human being.
Concepts of an inner spirit, soul, self or consciousness have been crucial
to the Christian understanding of what it means to be human. And although
most theologians would confidently say that we do possess an inner spiritual
identity, fewer would be able to explain satisfactorily exactly what this inner
person is, and how it relates to our physical bodies.
In Jewish and early Christian thought, the soul was not regarded as a
distinctively spiritual substance. Genesis refers to God blowing the breath of
life (ruah) into the physical body to create a living human being, and this
concept of ‘breath’ continues into the New Testament, where the ‘spirit’ is
called pneuma – a life force acting like wind or breath. But pneuma is
physical stuff and not fundamentally different from the physical substance of
the body.
The dualistic view of humans as body and spirit has its roots in the
thinking of Plato, who regarded the soul as immortal and the body as a
temporary physical container for use during the earthly phase of our
existence. The Platonic soul is composed of three parts: reason (nous); noble
desire (thymos) and appetite (epithemia). In the Phaedrus, Plato compares the
soul to a chariot with two horses. The first horse is focused and full of noble
desire, the second is skittish and is pulled this way and that by its appetites.
The charioteer represents reason (nous), which must ensure that the horses
pull in the same direction, towards a worthy goal such as truth, or justice, or
love.
Aristotle took Plato’s basic concept, but tried to show how the soul
relates to the body, arguing that the soul is the ‘form’ or ‘idea’ of the body.
Like Plato, Aristotle believed that the soul was best governed by reason.
The dominant Platonic–Christian dualistic view was given new vigour in
the seventeenth century by Descartes, who argued that the world is made up
of two kinds of substance: ‘thought’ and ‘extension’ (i.e. ‘physical form’).
Descartes was unable to demonstrate how the soul and its thoughts are
connected with the body, and subsequent philosophers tried to address this
problem. In particular, the Jewish theologian Baruch Spinoza developed
Aristotle’s thinking in order to overcome Descartes’ dualism. Spinoza argued
that the soul and the body are flip-sides (different ‘modes’) of the human
person, and not separate substances. The soul is the person considered from
the point of view of ‘thought’, and the body is the same person considered

---

from the point of view of ‘extension’.
Some scientists and philosophers of consciousness argue that there is no
reason to posit the existence of an inner human spirit or self. David Hume
argued that the self is just the sum of its sensual perceptions, and a similar
view is held today by the American philosopher Daniel Dennett, who sees no
special ‘problem’ with consciousness: consciousness is simply the brain’s
response to stimuli. Even a thermometer has a conscious ‘self’, says Dennett,
because it is aware of different thermal states. Evolutionary biology (and not
God) explains how our complex human consciousness has developed.
Dennett’s emphasis on biology is significant, even if we do not reach his
atheistic conclusions. Western Christianity has vastly over-emphasised the
spiritual dimension of the relationship with the divine: the individual soul
connecting with God’s spiritual reality. The physical world is too often
regarded as the mere clothing for our spiritual existence, a regrettable
necessity rather than something with equal religious significance. After all,
we human beings do not merely have bodies, we are bodies.
As a corrective, modern theologians are now paying attention to
theologies of the body. Pope John Paul II, for example, published The
Theology of the Body, affirming the integrated view of the human person as
mind, soul and body. Although a welcome move towards the Christian
affirmation of physical human existence, John Paul’s theology was still
dominated by conservative ideas about sexuality. More radically, some
theologians (see James Nelson below) have affirmed the physical body as the
primary means by which we relate to God and each other.
That we are embodied creatures can hardly be denied, but we do also
have the experience of an inner identity and personhood which is not manifest
in our bodies. We all experience an inner life – of thoughts, feelings and
perceptions – which is crucial to what we mean by our ‘self’. We believe that
this inner person can exercise freedom and make choices about how our
bodies will behave. We also believe that the identity of this inner person
remains continuous even as our bodies change radically from birth to old age.
Although the theology of the body is an important development, the puzzle of
the human soul, self or spirit will surely persist as one of the basic questions
of human existence.
THINKERS
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881–1995) emphasised the materiality of
creation: ‘The prevailing view has been that the body … is a fragment of the

---

Universe, a piece completely detached from the rest and handed over to a
spirit that informs it. In the future we shall have to say that the Body is the
very Universality of things … My matter is not a part of the Universe that I
possess totaliter: it is the totality of the Universe possessed by me partialiter’
(Science and Christ, Harper & Row, 1968).
James B. Nelson (1930– ) has argued that bodily experience must be the
starting point for theology: ‘Christian faith at its core is about the embodiment
of God in our own daily flesh-and-blood encounters’ (Between Two Gardens,
Pilgrim Press, 1983).
Gilbert Ryle (1900–1976) argued in The Concept of Mind (1949) that
consciousness can be explained without having to posit the existence of a
‘ghost in the machine’.
IDEAS
Anima: the Latin word for ‘soul’.
Bundle theory: from David Hume, the idea that the self is not an entity
but ‘a bundle or collection of different perceptions’.
Mind–body identity: the idea that the mind is a physical part of the body.
Mind–body problem: the difficulty of explaining how an immaterial
world of thought can connect with the material world of physical objects.
Monad: a concept most closely associated with Leibniz, who argued that
the world is made up of basic spiritual entities (monads).
Pre-existence of souls: the Platonic concept (supported by the Christian
theologian Origen) that the soul exists before being incarnated into a body.
Problem of other minds: the difficulty of knowing whether other people
really have minds like ours, when we can only observe their bodies.
Psyche: the Greek word for the ‘spirit’ or the spark of life.
Traducianism: the idea that one’s soul, like one’s body, is derived through
natural generation from one’s parents.
Transcendental ego: a term used by Kant and others to describe the inner
self which synthesises all our conscious experiences.
BOOKS
James B. Nelson, Body Theology (Westminster/John Knox, 1992)
Anthony Kenny, The Anatomy of the Soul: Historical Essays in the

---

Philosophy of Mind (Blackwell, 1973)