Chapter 26

Biblical Anthropology and the Case for the Soul

A young man kneels in the dust outside Jerusalem. Stones are flying. He has just finished the longest sermon in the book of Acts, and now his own people are killing him for it. As he falls, his last words rise above the noise: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he prays for his killers, and he dies.¹

Read that prayer slowly. Stephen does not say, “Lord Jesus, receive me.” He does not say, “Lord Jesus, take care of my body.” He says, receive my spirit. Apparently Stephen believes there is something about him—a spirit, a him-ness—that Jesus can receive in the moment his body breaks. His body will be buried later by mourners who make “great lamentation” over the remains (Acts 8:2). But the spirit? Already gathered home.

Now along comes a careful, intelligent critic who tells us this whole picture has been read wrong. The Bible, properly understood, does not teach a separable spirit at all. Stephen’s prayer is just an old Hebrew way of speaking—poetry, idiom, nothing more. The real biblical view, the critic says, is monism: the human person is one undivided thing, and when the body fails, the person ends. There is no spirit waiting for Jesus to receive.

That critic, here, is Michael Marsh. And his argument deserves a serious answer.

A. Marsh’s Holistic Argument

Marsh devotes a whole chapter of his book to biblical anthropology, and he is not careless with it.² He has read his Hebrew. He knows his Greek. His core thesis runs like this. Hebrew thought, he says, never sliced the human person into a body and a separable soul the way later Platonic thinkers did. The Old Testament writers had no single word for “body” at all—they describe over eighty body parts, each capable of standing for the whole person. Words like nephesh (often translated “soul”) and ruach (“spirit” or “breath”) do not name detachable parts. They name the living person from different angles. The Hebrew person, on Marsh’s reading, is a “psychophysical whole” (p. 190).³

Marsh then carries this picture into the New Testament. The apostle Paul, although he wrote in Greek and lived in a Hellenistic world, was a Hebrew of Hebrews. His outlook, Marsh argues, was Hebraic rather than Hellenistic (p. 192). When Paul uses words like soma (body), sarx (flesh), psyche (soul), and pneuma (spirit), Marsh says we should not picture four detachable components stacked inside a person. These are different lenses for viewing the one whole human being. Following James Dunn, Marsh treats soma as the person-in-the-world and sarx as the person-belonging-to-the-world, with psyche and pneuma describing the godward life of the same single self.⁴

What about the harder cases? Marsh handles them quickly. Matthew 10:28—Jesus telling his disciples not to fear those who can kill the body but not the soul—looks dualistic on its face. John Cooper has long argued that the verse is simply unintelligible unless “body” and “soul” refer to two genuinely distinguishable things.⁵ Marsh waves Cooper off and turns to N. T. Wright, who suggests that Jesus is only assuring his disciples there is a life beyond bodily death, not analyzing the metaphysics of personhood.⁶ The disembodied martyrs “under the altar” in Revelation 6 get a similar treatment—apocalyptic imagery, not anthropological doctrine.

Behind these textual moves sits a larger picture. Marsh argues that the early Hebrew did not envisage immortality at all. The shadowy realm of Sheol—the “lower pit” where the breathless rephaim hover—was a vague concept the pre-exilic writers never developed, he says, and any sense of personal continuity came through one’s sons and one’s share in the corporate life of Israel, not through a soul that survived death (pp. 189–190). Talk of resurrection emerges late, mostly in post-exilic apocalyptic literature, and even then it is bodily resurrection, not a Greek-style immortal soul. Marsh ties this historical narrative to his anthropological one: a people who saw human beings as undivided wholes naturally hoped for an undivided future—the resurrection of the body, not the escape of the soul.

The conclusion Marsh draws is striking. He warns his readers that the very idea of a separable soul is foreign to most current thinking, theological and scientific (p. xxiv). NDE accounts of consciousness leaving the body, on his reading, push us toward a Platonic picture of human nature that the Bible itself rejects. If you take the Bible seriously, Marsh says, you should be skeptical of NDEs from the start, because the soul they seem to require is not the soul Scripture teaches.

That is a confident move. It is also a move with serious problems.

B. Where the Argument Strains

Three problems undermine Marsh’s case before we even get to the texts themselves.

First, his evidence is selective. Marsh reaches the conclusion that biblical anthropology is monistic by quoting the scholars who already believe that—Robinson, Dunn, Pannenberg, Macquarrie, Wright. Steve Miller, who works through Marsh’s chapter directly, points out the strange omission: Marsh fails to mention the wealth of biblical commentators and theologians who reach the opposite conclusion from the same texts.⁷ Charles Hodge, Louis Berkhof, the contributors to the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology, John Cooper’s landmark Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting—none of them appears in Marsh’s discussion.⁸ A book whose argument depends on a consensus you have not actually surveyed is on shaky ground.

Second, the “no Hebrew word for body” argument does not carry the weight Marsh places on it. Yes, Hebrew uses synecdoche freely—a part stands for the whole. Yes, ancient writers describe the person from many angles at once. But the absence of one analytical noun does not entail the absence of the underlying distinction. English has no single word for the experience that combines anticipation and dread the night before surgery. We still know it exists. We still talk about it. To run from “Hebrew lacks an isolating term for body” to “Hebrew thought rejects any body–soul distinction” is a leap the linguistic data simply will not bear.⁹

Third—and this is the deepest issue—Marsh treats “holistic” and “monistic” as if they were synonyms. They are not. Biblical anthropology really is holistic. Humans are deep, integrated unities of body and soul, made for embodied life in God’s good creation. We are not ghosts trapped in machines. Body and soul are designed to work together, and the Christian hope of resurrection makes sense only because embodiment matters. So far, every careful Christian dualist agrees.¹⁰ But monism makes a much stronger claim—that the human person has only one component, full stop, and that what we call “soul” is just a function of brain and body. Holistic dualism says body and soul are deeply integrated and distinguishable; monism says there is nothing to distinguish. The two views agree about how integrated the human person is in this life. They disagree sharply about what happens when the body fails. Marsh slides from the first to the second without ever doing the work to justify the move.

Once those three issues are exposed, the question becomes simple. Does the Bible itself ever treat soul or spirit as something that can be distinguished from the body and outlast it? Does Scripture, on its own terms, point to a person who survives the death of the body in a conscious intermediate state, awaiting bodily resurrection?

It does. And it does so often.

C. Walking Through the Texts

I want to walk through eight passages, three from the Old Testament and five from the New. None of them, taken alone, settles the matter. But together they form a pattern that is hard to dissolve. The pattern is this: Scripture repeatedly speaks of something about the human person that departs the body at death, persists in conscious relation to God, and one day will be reunited with a resurrected body.

Start with Rachel. In Genesis 35:18, Jacob’s beloved wife is dying after childbirth. The text says, “as her soul (nephesh) was departing—for she was dying—she called his name Ben-oni.” Marsh would say nephesh here just means “life” or “breath,” and that the line is poetic shorthand for biological death. But notice what happens linguistically. The body is not departing—the body remains, and is later buried at Bethlehem. Something else is going out. Whatever nephesh is here, the writer treats it as separable enough from the body that one stays and the other leaves.¹¹

The pattern shows up again, more dramatically, in 1 Kings 17. Elijah stays with the widow of Zarephath, and her son falls sick and dies. Elijah carries the boy to the upper room and prays, “O Lord my God, let this child’s soul (nephesh) come into him again.” The text reports that “the soul of the child came into him again, and he revived” (1 Kings 17:21–22). The boy’s body lay there the whole time. What returned? Whatever language Marsh wants to use for it, the writer believed something had departed and something came back.

Then there is Ecclesiastes 12, the most somber meditation on death in all of Scripture. The Preacher describes old age, then the moment of dying, and then he writes: “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit (ruach) returns to God who gave it” (12:7). Two destinations. Two distinct returns. Dust to ground, spirit to God. If the human person were a strict monistic unity, there would be one return—back to the dust, full stop. But the verse traces two paths. That is not Platonism breaking into the Hebrew Bible. That is the Hebrew Bible itself.¹²

The pattern carries straight into the New Testament, and intensifies. Jesus tells his disciples in Matthew 10:28, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Marsh’s response to this verse is to wave at Wright. But Wright never actually denies the distinction. He cautions against a Platonic reading in which the soul is naturally immortal and the body is a prison. That caution is fair, and any responsible Christian dualist accepts it. But cautioning against Platonism is not the same as collapsing the distinction Jesus draws. Cooper’s reading does not require Plato. It only requires that “body” and “soul” name two things, both creaturely, both contingent, both ultimately in God’s hands.¹³

Then comes Luke 23:43, the line spoken from one cross to another: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The thief’s body, like Jesus’s, would remain on the cross when the day ended. His body would be cut down, and either disposed of in a common grave or returned to whatever family claimed it. The promise was not that the thief’s body would be with Jesus that day. The promise was that he—the very person Jesus was speaking to, the dying penitent—would be in paradise that day. Strict monism cannot explain that promise. The thief is not raised that day. His body decays. And yet Jesus tells him: today, with me, paradise.¹⁴

Paul says the same thing in his own way. In 2 Corinthians 5, working through his hope for the future, he writes: “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (5:8). The verse only makes sense if “we” can be away from “the body.” A few chapters later he describes a man caught up to the third heaven and admits he does not know whether the experience happened in the body or out of it—but he plainly considers “out of the body” a real possibility (2 Cor. 12:1–4). And in Philippians 1:21–24, Paul holds two desires in tension: he longs “to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better,” while recognizing his continued life in the body is more useful for the church. To “depart” in this passage is not annihilation followed by future resurrection. It is a present transition, immediately better, immediately with Christ.¹⁵

Finally, Revelation 6:9–11. John sees “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God,” and they cry out, “How long, O Lord, holy and true, before you will judge and avenge our blood?” They are given white robes and told to wait. Marsh would call this apocalyptic furniture. But the apocalyptic furniture is the point: John depicts conscious, communicating, waiting persons whose bodies are emphatically dead and whose final resurrection has not yet come. They are between. The intermediate state is not invented by later theologians. It is shown to us in the text.¹⁶

Eight passages, drawn from very different parts of Scripture and very different literary genres, all pointing the same direction. Some skeptics might dismiss any one of them. The cumulative force is much harder to dismiss. The biblical writers, across the centuries, talk about death as a separation that something about the human person survives. They talk about the dead in conscious relation to God before resurrection. They talk about being “with the Lord” and “away from the body” as a coherent state. Whatever else holistic biblical anthropology means, it cannot mean that Scripture denies all of this.

D. Anticipating Two Counter-Objections

A careful reader will press back, and there are two counter-objections that deserve a direct answer.

The first is the “phenomenological language” objection. A defender of Marsh might say: of course Scripture uses departure language and arrival language and intermediate-state imagery. That is just how ancient peoples described death. None of it commits the writers to a metaphysical picture of a detachable soul. The response is straightforward. Phenomenological framing does not erase the ontological commitments behind language. When the same pattern shows up in narrative (Genesis 35), miracle account (1 Kings 17), wisdom poetry (Ecclesiastes 12), prophetic teaching (Matthew 10), historical Gospel (Luke 23), apostolic letter (2 Corinthians 5; Philippians 1), and apocalyptic vision (Revelation 6), the most economical explanation is that the writers actually believed what their language describes. Calling all of it idiom is an interpretive convenience that the consistency of the pattern will not support.¹⁷

The second counter-objection is theological. Some Christians who lean physicalist will say: yes, but resurrection is the Bible’s real hope, not soul-survival. To emphasize an intermediate state is to slide back toward Plato and away from the New Testament. The full response to this concern—the false either/or of resurrection versus soul-escape—belongs to the next chapter; Chapter 27 takes it up directly. But the brief answer is this: the historic Christian view has always been both. A conscious intermediate state, then a bodily resurrection. The early creeds confess both. The texts we just walked through assume both. NDEs, if they show anything, show the intermediate state, never the final resurrection state. No serious researcher claims otherwise.¹⁸

So where does this leave us? Marsh has read the biblical material carefully, but he has read it through one lens and dismissed the rest. Yes, the Bible’s anthropology is holistic; humans are deep unities of body and soul, made for embodied life in God’s good world. Yes, the Hebrew writers describe the person from many angles at once and prefer concrete idiom over abstract categories. Yes, the final Christian hope is bodily resurrection, not the escape of an immortal soul into a disembodied eternity. None of those points is in dispute. What is in dispute is whether Scripture also testifies that something about the human person can be distinguished from the body, can depart from it at death, can rest consciously with Christ in the meantime, and will one day be reunited with a resurrected body. The texts we just walked through say plainly that it can. Stephen prayed for Jesus to receive his spirit because he believed Jesus could. Rachel’s nephesh went out. The widow’s son’s soul came back. The Preacher said dust returns to dust and spirit returns to God. Jesus told the dying thief, today, with me, paradise. Paul longed to depart and be with Christ. John saw conscious martyrs waiting under the altar. NDEs do not invent any of this. They simply add one more line of evidence to a picture Scripture has been drawing for three thousand years. The next chapter takes up the resurrection question directly, and shows that the biblical hope and the evidence from NDEs are not enemies—they are partners pointing to the same future.