Heart, Mind and Soul

This week our theological discussions turned to Eschatology, the most speculative of theological subjects, “that part of Christian doctrine concerned with the final end of man”……….covering such theological subjects as the second coming, the resurrection of the dead, the immortality of the soul, etc.(1)

Considering the speculativeness of this broad range of subjects I kindly request your indulgence in my own speculativeness regarding the soul, its immortality or otherwise. As A Handbook of Theological Terms notes, “There is no developed conception of the soul in either the Old Testament or the New Testament”. (2)This was an interesting line of thought for me, in that over time I had come to not believe in a soul as proclaimed in Christianity.  Further investigation of the Hebrew concept of the soul expounded that the Hebrew word nepeš translated in the KJV of the Bible as “soul” referred to man’s whole life. “The soul that a man is is simply the living being a man is. The soul that a man has is simply his life, in any manifestation of that life. In the Hebrew concept the nepeš a man is and the nepeš a man has are one and the same; namely, the life that constitutes a man a living being and the living being so constituted. It is but a trick of language, accentuated by the difficulties of idiomatic translation, that appears to separate this comprehensive meaning into two”.(3)

In Pre-Exilic Hebrew thought, there is no soul separate from man and certainly no immortal soul. The soul which is man’s life eventually dies. Any thought of a soul that exists separate from the body is a direct influence of Greek thought and is nonbiblical.  “The Living God created all other living beings. God, the great nepeš, created every other nepeš. As He, the Great Living One, is a nepeš in His higher sphere of existence and activity, so man, is creature, is a nepeš in his sphere.(4) 

My disbelief in a soul separate from the body that lives on after death has very much been influenced by my studies in Buddhism.  In Buddhism there is no soul, no self, only life and it is One.  The early Hebrew writers are pointing to One Presence, One Power and One Life. The life that God breathed into us at the

beginning was God’s life and It, as God, is One life.  Jesus understood this when he said, “I and the Father are One” (John 10:30).  He confirmed it again when he said the greatest commandment of loving God with our whole heart, mind and soul was the same as loving our neighbor as our self (Matthew 22:37-39).  He states this truth again when he says, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).  If we truly believe in Omnipresence, how can it be otherwise?

Consider this, God manifests as life infinitely, but it is One Life.  In the Hindu concept of Maya, life in this realm is an illusion and God plays hide and seek with Himself.  In the Christian concept of Kenosis God empties Itself of all Its God like attributes in order to incarnate on earth in human form. In Buddhism everything is Buddha Mind where form is emptiness and emptiness is form, mater and spirit is the same; there is only doing and no doer. Quantum Physics points us to a wholeness where everything is interconnected and anything done in any part of the universe affects every part of the universe.

We are free to write the stories of our lives as we please, but they are nothing more than the interwoven stories of fictionally separate selves, who each are appointed to die at some point in the fiction of time, only to awaken in another story that continues forever. There is only One Life, and so any story is no more true than the previous story, but one intimately connected to and continuing the previous one.  They are only stories taking part in the Mystery of what is. So, does how we write and live our story matter? Oh, yes!  More than you will ever know! But then again……not at all.

1. Van A. Harvey, A Handbook of Theological Terms: Their Meaning and Background Exposed in Over 300 Articles (New York: Touchstone, 1997), 226
2. Ibid.
3. E.W. Marter, The Hebrew Concept of "Soul" in Pre-Exilic Writings, Helderberg College, Somerset West, Cape, South Africa, accessed November 1, 2013, http://www.auss.info/auss_publication_file.php?pub_id=378
4. Ibid., 107-108