Appendix E

Why Human Nature Touches Everything

How the Soul Question Shapes the Heart of Christian Doctrine

When people hear the phrase “the doctrine of human nature,” their eyes sometimes glaze over. It sounds like a classroom topic. Something for specialists. But what if I told you that the question What am I? quietly holds together some of the most important truths in the Bible? What if getting human nature wrong could unravel the doctrine of Christ, empty the cross of its power, and strip the resurrection of its promise?

That is what this appendix is about. Throughout this book I have made the case that you are more than a body. You are a body joined to a soul, and the soul survives the death of the body.¹ The evidence from near-death experiences and the witness of Scripture agree on this point. But the soul question is not a niche interest. It is a hinge on which the great doctrines of the faith turn.

In Chapter 5 I built the full case that a purely physical view of human nature breaks the doctrine of Christ. Here I want to step back and show the wider picture. The soul question touches at least five great themes. It touches who Jesus is, which theologians call Christology. It touches how Jesus saves us, which is the atonement. It touches the hope of our future bodies, the resurrection. It touches what it means to be made in God’s image, the imago Dei. And it touches the comfort of the Christian hope itself. I will move through each one briefly.

My goal is not to repeat what earlier chapters have already said. It is to help you see that a sound view of human nature is not an add-on to the faith. It is woven into its deepest truths.

The God-Man Who Did Not Come Apart

Start with Jesus. The ancient church met at Chalcedon in AD 451 and made a confession. The eternal Son of God took on a full human nature. He became fully God and fully man in one Person. The two natures were joined but not mixed, united but not confused.² That confession is called the hypostatic union. It stands at the center of the Christian faith.

Now ask the simple question I raised in Chapter 5: What happened when Jesus died on Good Friday? His body was laid in the tomb. But where was the God-Man on Holy Saturday?

On a dualist view, the answer is clear. Jesus had a human soul as well as a human body. When His body died, His human soul lived on. He could say to the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), and He meant it. The union of God and humanity was never broken. Only the body lay dead until Easter morning.³

On a physicalist view, where a human being is only a body, the picture cracks. If Jesus had no human soul, then when His body died, His human nature ceased to exist. For three days the God-Man was reduced to God alone. The union broke. Or, in the most extreme version, God the Son Himself ceased to exist for three days. That would undo the eternal Trinity itself.⁴

John Cooper puts the problem plainly. He argues that the intermediate-state teaching, which assumes a dualist view, “would generate no christological difficulty. In fact it would solve this problem.”⁵ Cooper goes further. He argues that the extinction-and-re-creation view of the resurrection amounts to two separate incarnations rather than one incarnation followed by a resurrection. That puts it closer to the heresies Chalcedon rejected than to the faith Chalcedon affirmed.⁶

Michael Wilkinson, in his Crowned with Glory and Honor, presses the point into anthropology. He argues that the person-nature distinction the church worked out for Christ should also guide how we think about ordinary human beings. The incarnate Son is a divine Person who exists in a human nature made of body and soul. If that pattern is sound, then ordinary humans too are persons who exist in a body-and-soul nature.⁷ Wilkinson’s governing principle is that Christ, as the man par excellence, must shape how we define ordinary humanity, the man par ordinaire.⁸

The stakes reach even higher. If, on the extreme physicalist view, the Son of God ceased to exist for three days, then the Trinity was briefly reduced to two. The Father and the Spirit carried on without the Son. That strikes at the heart of who God is. The Trinity is not a committee that can lose a member and keep going. It is the eternal nature of the one true God. If one Person can stop existing, even briefly, then God is changeable at the deepest level. My dissertation calls this one of the most damaging results of physicalist Christology.²⁷

I will not rebuild the full argument here. Chapter 5 does that work. But notice the direction. A question about human nature is really a question about who Jesus is. Get the anthropology wrong and the Christology falls with it.

A Savior Whose Humanity Did Not Blink Out

The doctrine of Christ does not sit by itself. It reaches straight into the doctrine of the atonement, which is the teaching about how Jesus saves us. And the soul question follows it there.

The Bible teaches that Jesus stood in the place of sinners and bore the penalty they deserved.⁹ This is what the church calls penal substitutionary atonement. A substitute must share the nature of those he represents. An animal cannot truly stand in for a human. That is why the Old Testament sacrifices pointed forward to something greater. They were temporary and typological by design, as Wilkinson argues.¹⁰ Only a genuine human being could take the place of human sinners before God.

Now watch where the soul question bites. If Jesus had no human soul, then at death His humanity vanished. And if His humanity vanished, then the substitute was gone in the very moment the substitution was most needed. Who bore our sins between Friday and Sunday? A body in a tomb cannot bear anything. A divine nature alone cannot represent human beings. The atonement requires a Savior who remained fully human through the entire ordeal of death and burial.¹¹

Joshua Farris sees the same thing from the side of theological anthropology. He notes that the challenge for any physicalist account of Christ comes at the point of His death. Farris writes that when Christ’s body died on a physicalist account, “Christ would cease to be human.” And that raises worries about “his representational work on behalf of humans during the intermediate state.”¹² On a dualist account, the worry disappears. The human soul of Christ survived death. His humanity was intact the whole time. The substitute never left the courtroom.

In my doctoral research I examined what physicalism does to essential Christian doctrines. The atonement stood out as one of the most damaged.¹³ If Christ ceased to exist as a human being, the question “Who bore our sins?” has no good answer. The cross does not become meaningless on a physicalist view. But it loses the unbroken thread of a living Savior whose humanity held firm through death, burial, and resurrection. Dualism keeps that thread whole.

“Being truly and fully human is an ontological requirement for Christ to succeed as the Redeemer of man.” — Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor

Think about what this means in practice. A pastor at a funeral does not say, “Christ bore your loved one’s sins, except during the three days when His humanity did not exist.” No one would find comfort in that. The comfort comes from a Savior who never stopped being one of us. And that requires a soul.

There is another angle worth seeing. The New Testament calls Jesus our “one mediator” between God and man (1 Timothy 2:5). A mediator must stand in both camps. He must be fully God and fully human at the same time. If Jesus’ humanity blinked out at death, then for three days the world had no mediator. No high priest stood between sinners and a holy God.²⁸ The writer of Hebrews says that Christ “always lives to make intercession” for His people (Hebrews 7:25). Always. Not “always except for a weekend in Jerusalem.” The continuity of His human nature through death is not a minor detail. It is the ground on which the whole work of salvation stands.

A Soul That Waits for a Body

One of the most common objections I hear goes like this: “If you believe in a soul, you must not take the resurrection of the body seriously. Isn’t dualism just Platonism in Christian clothes?”

I understand why people ask this. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato taught that the body is a prison and the soul longs to escape it forever. If that were what Christians meant by the soul, the critics would be right. But it is not. Not even close.

The Christian hope is not a disembodied forever. It is a re-embodied one. Paul says it clearly:

“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.” (2 Corinthians 5:1, ESV)

And again, in one of the most breathtaking passages in the New Testament:

“What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” (1 Corinthians 15:42–44, ESV)

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say the body is thrown away. He says it is raised. Transformed. Made new. The same person who dies is the same person who rises, now clothed in a body that will never wear out. That is not escape from the body. It is the body’s rescue.¹⁴

So what does dualism add? It explains the gap. Between the moment a person dies and the day their body is raised, something must account for the person’s continued existence. The soul provides that account. Cooper calls the intermediate state “temporary and not the ideal state.” He describes it as “an abnormal condition caused by sin and death.”¹⁵ The soul without the body is real and conscious. But it is not the finish line. It is a waiting room.

Paul himself groaned for something better. He did not want to be “unclothed,” stripped of his body. He wanted to be “further clothed,” given his resurrection body on top of the life he already had (see 2 Corinthians 5:4).¹⁶ The soul’s survival was good news, but it was not the best news. The best news was the body to come.

Paul tells the Philippians that Christ “will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body” (Philippians 3:21, ESV). Cooper connects this passage with Romans 8:18–23 and shows that Paul places the resurrection at the second coming. The dead are with the Lord, conscious and glad. But they are still waiting for their bodies.¹⁷

This is why Cooper argues that the New Testament teaches two truths side by side. It teaches “not only that each of us will undergo bodily resurrection, but that believers continue to exist ‘with the Lord’ until the resurrection.”¹⁸ The two truths need each other. A surviving soul without a coming resurrection would be Plato. A coming resurrection without a surviving soul would leave the dead in oblivion until the end. The Bible gives us both. Dualism holds them together.

There is a practical side to this, too. Without a surviving soul, physicalists face what is sometimes called the continuity problem. If a person ceases to exist entirely at death and is then re-created from scratch at the resurrection, is the risen person really the same person? Or is she a copy? A duplicate who carries the original’s memories but is not, in the deepest sense, the same “I”?²⁹ This problem does not touch the dualist. On a dualist view, the same soul that lived in the body before death is the same soul that receives a glorified body at the resurrection. The “I” who dies is the same “I” who wakes. No gap. No copy. Just the same person, raised and restored.

Made in the Image of God

Turn now to a different thread. Before there was any talk of death or salvation, God made a declaration about what human beings are:

“Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.’ … So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” (Genesis 1:26–27, ESV)

And then came the act of forming:

“Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” (Genesis 2:7, ESV)

What does it mean to be made in God’s image? The church has given three main answers over the centuries. Some say the image is a structure, like our reason or our will. Some say it is a relationship, our ability to know God and be known by Him. Some say it is a function, our calling to rule over the earth on God’s behalf.¹⁹ I think all three catch part of the truth. And none of them catches all of it without the others.

But notice something about Genesis 2:7. God takes dust and breathes life into it. The result is a “living creature” (Hebrew nephesh chayyah, “living soul” or “living being”). From the very first page of the Bible, a human being is two things joined into one: earth and breath, body and the life God gives.²⁰ If we erase one half, we lose the picture God painted.

Farris sees a close link between the image of God and the soul. He points to Calvin, who taught that the soul holds the primary seat of the divine image. Yet Calvin also said that “there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.”²¹ The image is holistic. It includes the body. But it is anchored in the soul. We bear God’s image because we are not merely physical stuff. We are persons with minds and wills and the capacity to love, to choose, to worship. Those are capacities of the soul, even though they are expressed through the body.

Farris traces the image through three stages: creation, fall, and redemption. At creation, humans bear the image in seed form. Through redemption, God’s grace shines a light on the creational image and begins to restore it. And in glory, the image reaches its fullest expression.²² At no stage does the image require only a body. At every stage it requires the kind of being that can know God, respond to God, and be transformed by God. That is a soul-bearing creature.

Wilkinson adds a Christological layer. Christ, he argues, is the fully human archetype who puts the image of God on full display. Adam bore the image in a typological way. But in Christ the image is “both revealed in truth and restored in full.”²³ And if Christ’s full humanity requires both body and soul, then so does ours. We are most truly the image of God when we see ourselves as what God made us: body-and-soul creatures, designed for fellowship with Him and destined for glory.

Here is what I find striking. The image of God was not destroyed by the fall. Scripture says even after sin entered the world, human beings still carried the divine image (Genesis 5:1–3; 9:6).²⁴ The image was damaged. It was distorted. But it was not erased. If the soul is at the heart of that image, then the soul’s survival through death is not a strange idea. It is what we should expect. The image-bearing creature does not vanish at death. The soul carries forward what makes us us until the body is raised and the whole person is restored.

Why This Steadies the Christian Hope

I want to close by pulling these threads together. They lead somewhere warm and real.

Think about what we have seen. A sound view of human nature protects the doctrine of Christ, because the God-Man did not come apart at death. It protects the atonement, because the Savior’s humanity did not blink out at the moment it was most needed. It explains the gap between death and resurrection, because the surviving soul awaits a body rather than falling into nothing. And it deepens the meaning of the image of God, because we are body-and-soul creatures designed for a glory that neither death nor the grave can take from us.

These are not separate topics. They are one story told from different angles. And the character at the center of that story is the God who made us body and soul, who kept the Son’s humanity alive through death, who promises to raise our bodies, and who meets His people at the edge of life.

I have spent years studying near-death experiences. I have read thousands of cases in which dying men and women found themselves awake, aware, and often in the presence of Jesus Himself.²⁵ Those accounts line up with what the doctrines in this appendix lead us to expect. The soul survives because God made it to survive. The dying meet Christ because Christ is alive and His human nature never ceased. The dead are conscious because the intermediate state is real. And the hope of the resurrection means that what the dying glimpse is not the end of the story. It is a preview of something even better.

Wilkinson closes his own study by listing areas where a Chalcedonian anthropology can still do good work. He names the ethics of life, the intermediate state, and “the hope of glory in the life to come.”²⁶ I agree. When we understand ourselves as persons made of body and soul, created in the image of God, redeemed by a Savior who remained fully human through death, and destined for resurrection, the whole landscape of the faith comes into sharper focus.

The comfort we offer the grieving is not a pious guess. It is grounded in the way God made us and in what God did in Christ. When a pastor tells a widow that her husband is with the Lord right now, that claim rests on the same foundation as the doctrine of Christ and the doctrine of the cross. It is all one piece.

Consider what happens when these doctrines hold together. A dying woman has a near-death experience. She meets Jesus and comes back changed. We can say: that fits. The soul survived because God made it to survive. She met a Savior whose own human soul survived death. He is alive right now as the God-Man, and He promises to raise her body on the last day. The experience did not create those truths. But it confirmed them, the way a footprint confirms that someone walked this way before.

Or consider the family at a hospital bedside, watching their grandfather slip away. He opens his eyes and says he sees his wife who died years ago. He says the room is full of light. And then he is gone. What do we tell that family? If we hold to a sound view of human nature, we can say something honest and strong. God made your grandfather body and soul. His body has stopped, but his soul has not. He is alive with the Lord. And one day his body will be raised. That comfort is not wishful thinking. It rests on the same truths that hold up the Person of Christ and the work of the cross.³⁰

The soul question is not a footnote in the back of a theology textbook. It is written into the deep structure of everything Christians believe. A sound doctrine of human nature does not simply allow for the great truths of the faith. It holds them up.

And that is why the soul that survives matters so much. Not as a curiosity. Not as a debating point. But as the thread that ties your comfort, your hope, and your worship together in the hands of the God who made you body and soul, who keeps you through death, and who will one day raise you whole.