What about Terri's Schiavo's soul?
John E., whose aunt has been diagnosed in PVS for 12 years, asks in an email:

Does Terri Schiavo, my aunt, or other people in a clinical PVS, still have a soul? ... If Terri Schiavo can't think because her brain is irreparably damaged and has in fact shrunken and, literally, died off, is she still "alive" in either a physical or metaphysical sense? Hence, is removing her feeding tube not simply permitting her body to finally rest along with the soul that departed her long ago?

The concept of the soul is almost universal among human cultures. While the idea of survival after physical death is nearly universal, the idea of individual, personal survival after death is not. Some cultures, mostly in the Far East, believe that the ultimate fate of a human soul is to become wholly merged with a universal consciousness.

In our western culture, the idea of the soul has been most strongly shaped by Greek philosophy. In the ancient Mediterranean world, the Greeks were generally acknowledged to be the most refined, educated and sophisticated people. In education, no one rivaled them but the Jews. Greek religion was less stringent than Judaism and didn’t require anything as drastic as circumcision to practice. Rome at the peak of its power openly plagiarized Greek religion and philosophy.

I point this out because Christianity did not survive in the Jewish homeland. It came to thrive in lands that were dominated by Greek ways of thinking and Greek world views. The post-apostolic church was a time historians call the time of the Church Fathers, lasting from about 100 – 325. It was when the survival of the church was uncertain. The church was consistently and sometimes vigorously persecuted by the Romans. It was frequently torn within by theological dispute. A supremely serious challenge for the Church Fathers was to establish a unified Christian doctrine so that Christian faith and practice would not lose their distinctiveness, while persuading the political powers that the Christian religion was sensible, reasonable and theoretically coherent.

The Church Fathers were not Jews. Greek was either their native or early second language. They had been schooled in Greek schools and trained in Greek ways. When they argued in favor of Christianity, they argued using Greek ways of thinking to authorities who would accept no other ways. In Christian theology the Greek world view supplanted the Hebrew–Jewish world view and has remained dominant to our day. For example, during the Protestant Reformation Martin Luther theologically aligned himself with Saint Augustine to argue against Catholic doctrine, which was mostly derived from Thomas Aquinas. Augustine had seen the world through Plato’s eyes and Aquinas had seen it through Aristotle’s eyes. The Reformation was, to a significant degree, a major salvo in the centuries-old series of broadsides that Greek philosophers and their successors hurled at one another.

Led by Luther, most Protestants have followed Plato’s doctrine that soul and body are distinct orders of reality. Implicit in much Protestant teaching is that the body entraps the soul, so that upon death the soul is blissfully released to travel to its true home in heaven. Catholicism emphasizes a greater closeness between the soul and the body. Catholic thought holds that the soul is an incomplete substance. It has a natural aptitude and need for existence in the body, in conjunction with which it makes up the unity of human nature. But both Protestantism generally and Catholicism officially maintain that the death of the body releases the soul to exist independently in its eternal reward.

While the Greeks had a very strong idea of the soul, the Hebrews’ and Jews’ concepts of the soul were much less developed and in fact, less important to them.

The word "soul" has a very different meaning for the biblical writers from the understanding that we usually assign to it. The Hebrew word often translated as “soul” basically means "breath," and is often used simply to designate "a living being" (not always a human, sometimes an animal). The Hebrew word, along with its New Testament Greek equivalent, can mean "life," and even "person" or "self." Both the Hebrew and the Greek words used in the Bible can stand for the unity of personality, since the Jews conceived of human beings as a unity, rather than as a duality of body and soul. In fact, there is no distinctive word for "body" in Hebrew; one is not needed because there is no separate part of a human being, distinct from that person's "soul," that needs to be so distinguished.

In the New Testament, Paul uses "body" as a collective noun for the unity of the flesh and soul. He never makes a hard and fast distinction between the two. The biblical view of human being is we are whole persons with no part detachable. We do not have bodies, we are bodies. We are flesh-in-unity-with-soul. (Derived from "Soul," in The Abingdon Dictionary of Theology.)

So what happens to us when we die?

Paul calls death an enemy of humanity and of God. Paul declares that death is a cosmic power which defeats and destroys human beings. To die is to cease to exist. We think more like Greek philosophers than Jewish prophets, so we tell one another that death is really just passing into another realm of existence. We fool ourselves that the persons we bury somehow are not really dead. We tell mourners at funerals that their loved one is in a better place. We imagine that our deceased loved ones "look down from heaven."

Unfortunately, none of that is biblical. In the Bible, death is the destruction of the entire person. When we die, we really are dead. Our bodies eventually disappear in decay. Yet for the Jews and Jesus and the apostles, the fact of death was not the major issue, bad as they recognized death to be. The issue was not death, but extinction. English philosopher John Locke used the phrase, "perpetual perishing," to describe the deepest problem – the fact that nothing actually lasts. All that exists seems eventually to fade into nothingness: "The dead know nothing; they have no further reward, and even the memory of them is forgotten" (Eccl 9:5b).

Jesus taught that it is not human destiny to disappear into nothingness. He said,

Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God; trust also in me. In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, I would have told you. I am going there to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. You know the way to the place where I am going (John 14:1-7).

Paul is most emphatic that, "Neither death, nor life, . . . nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."

God does not stop being God simply because we die. That means that God’s power, God’s will to save and God’s love remain fully in force at the moment we die and after. We can face death with certain confidence that God's care endures beyond the grave. Both Jesus and Stephen (the first Christian martyr, killed by stoning)committed their spirits to God. They gave over to God all that they were, the entire unity of existence the world knew as Jesus of Nazareth or as Stephen of Jerusalem.

Like them, we may live in the certain knowledge that God's care and love for us does not cease just because we breathe no more. The Psalmist wrote that he could rejoice and rest secure because he knew God would not abandon him to the grave.

We die in God’s grace. Though dead, we are not abandoned. We are not forgotten by God to oblivion. The promise of Christian faith is the resurrection. The thrust of Jesus’ and the apostles’ teachings is not that we continue to live after death, but that we will live again after we die. By the power of God we will live again in the resurrection yet to come. We know this because Jesus Christ lived and died and was resurrected. Paul knew Jesus' resurrection was the first of the general resurrection yet to come. Jesus Christ is God's bond and proof that God will accomplish what God promises: that we will live again, and forever, after we die. God, having created us once, will re-create us again.

Endnote: One of the theological difficulties inherent in applying biblical guidance to modern medicine is that, by standards of biblical days, even a feeding tube is high technology. The ancient peoples almost without exception believed that death occurred when the heart stopped beating (Islamic law still says so). That's still true today, of course - or is it? We can, after all, keep someone's heart beating by technology even when there are no other significant signs of life. So we moderns have generally decided that the death of the brain is the death of the person.

If one believes, as I do, that the Bible teaches that the death of a human being is the destruction of his/her totality of existence, then the question of when the soul is "released" from the body is moot, because the body is not a container which holds the soul (as Neal Boortz wrote in Townhall.com earlier this week).

Please note before you flood my inbox or comment box: I well understand that some passages of Scripture can be cited to support the idea that the soul departs the body at death and exists independently of the earthly body. Trust me, I do get that, I have studied the passages, and for many years believed it myself. I am not trying to get anyone to change his/her mind. I am simply answering, as best I can, a question asked me.

But my theology in this matter has some good company - Martin Luther, for example, who said that after death there is a timeless period of "soul sleep" until the general resurrection. In one's subjective experience, then, the next moment of awareness after death is the resurrection. In this way it makes perfect sense to say that when one dies s/he goes immediately to be with the Lord because, as far as the person is concerned, that's what happened. Subjectively, one passes instantly from death to new life.

Update: Joe Katzman, founder of Winds of Change, is one of my earliest blog buddies; he and I have exchanged many emails on many subjects over the last couple of years. Joe has posted and excellent essay in response to this post of mine, called "Hasidic Wisdom: Death and Memory." Quoting Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan,

"We know that God is ominiscient. He knows all and does not forget. God knows every thought and memory that exists in our brains. There is no piece of information that escapes His knowledge.

What, then, happens when a man dies? God does not forget, and therefore all of this information continues to exist, at least in God's memory.

....We may think of something existing only in memory as being static and effectively dead. But God's memory is not a static thing. The sum total of a human personality may indeed exist in God's memory, but it can still maintain identity and self-volition, and remain in an active state. ...

This sum total of the human personality existing in God's memory is what lives on after a man dies."

This very much mirrors some contemporary Christian process theology, which is founded in neither Hebraic nor Greek thought. I even used the idea in a sermon once:

Every computer user knows that the hard drive of a computer is liable to fail without warning, to die, in other words. (In fact, that’s how we put it when some mechanical device fails. "My car died," we say.) So computer users back up the data on the hard drive, say onto magnetic tape. If you have a current backup, your hard drive’s death causes only temporary distress. You can take the dead hard drive out and smash it to pieces with a hammer if you want. You install a new hard drive and restore the data off the backup tape onto it. Nothing is lost. All the information is restored perfectly. The new hard drive is indistinguishable from the old one. No one can tell the difference between the old one and the new one.

God remembers us perfectly. And God will perfectly restore every "backed up" detail of who we are into our resurrected bodies in the age to come.

The computer analogy seemed to make a lot of sense to many of my folks.

Read all of Joe's essay!

by Donald Sensing, 3/26/2005 08:58:00 AM. Permalink |