Fundamentals: The Story of Heaven Part I

Hear, O Israel, the LORD your God, the LORD is one.

You shall love the LORD with all your heart,

with all your soul

with all your mind

and with all your strength

Going to Sunday School in junior high I heard all about how we have a body, which I could see, a mind, which I could on occasion exercise but chose not to, and a soul, which was . . . you know, kind of like . . . your emotions and stuff.  To be honest, there was always a vague and ultimately unsatisfying discussion of “soul”.  Spirit was sometimes in there, with soul taking on the attributes of mind and then spirit used to identify those unclear pieces of emotion and whatnot. 

I guess the whole thing was supposed to reflect the Trinity.  We saw the Trinity and our own trinitarian nature is everything: apples (red skin, white interior, seeds), eggs (shell, white, yolk), water (solid, liquid, gas)V, even the chocolate, caramel, cookie crunch goodness of the Twix bar. 

So leave it to the Bible to contradict the West’s traditional (Greek) theology of the human person as tri-partate: 1) Body, 2) Mind 3) Soul.  Heart + mind + soul + strength = four pieces.  One more reason to love the Bible.

And humanity comes in two genders, and my hands have ten (or eight) fingers, and despite my other symmetry, I have only one heart.  Maybe seeking evidence of the divine Trinity in nature or humanity is just shouting down empty wells. 

Then, to be honest, I’m still not sure what “soul” or “spirit” mean, though I do have an intuitive sense of these words.

For instance, you’ve no doubt experienced a writer’s spirit in her work, or an artist’s soul.  In encountering a piece of art, no matter the medium, I often feel like I’m actually in touch with the best part of the artist.  I imagine it’s the same for a lit of people.  Maybe that best part of a person is their soul or spirite.

But it should also be noted that mind and soul and spirit are emergent properties of bodies.  That is to say that they are physical, or in some sense dependent on physicality, rooted in the flesh and blood material world, even if that physicality is electrical impulses and chemical interactions.  Continuing the vein of art, you realize that the transcendence of art is rooted in the physical.  Without the page or the canvas, the vibrations of air and tiny ear bones, waves of light, optic nerves and brains, the artist is not present to you.  Human beings are physical creatures, not souls locked in these cages of bone and flesh, and we appropriate the world though our physicality.  We have no other means.  There is no such thing as a mind apart from a body.  The same is true of soul, psyche, spirit, essence, or whatever words we can use to describe those immaterial parts of ourselves we wish might live forever.

When I was a young pastor I found a book in the church’s tiny library.  It was mainly about proper doctrine and why it’s important.  It was written from a very conservative fundamentalist/evangelical perspective§.  In the section about “MAN”, I read, “Man was created with an immortal soul.”  Then I threw the book away.  In the trash.  I didn’t tell anyone, either.  I just got rid of it.  The audacity of claiming to possess anything with a shelf life of always is astounding.  We’re naturally finite beings, with a beginning, middle, and an end.

Whenever I have questioned the validity of the immortal soul among Christians, the conversation always comes around to one specific issue.  “But if people don’t have an eternal soul or spirit, what about hell?”  It troubles some to contemplate a universe wherein some poor souls do not suffer forever.  Or, less cynically, maybe it makes it harder to grasp salvation.  What is it Jesus saves us from, if not hell?  And, if there is no threat of eternal damnation, why accept Jesus?  Why seek friendship with God, if no to be rescued from God’s terrific anger?

In talking about the spirit/soul, the science of emergence has a lot to offer.   From a hectic conglomeration of atoms, empty spaces, electrical impulses, an ever changing cast of characters, your body emerges.  Every day, despite the lack of any centralized authority, despite this rotating roster of players, your body remains the same, at least externally.  You remain the same.  That, to me, is an amazing thing.  Coherence comes not from the constituent parts, but from something else: the whole is greater. 

In one sense, it should come as no surprise.  After all, we are physical creatures.  People who have appropriated the Jesus story should especially appreciate this.  The Creed says, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.”  In one sense the Creed just says something we already know intuitively, naturally.

Beyond that, the gospel message is that Jesus took on flesh, not as a ghost shrugging on a skin suit, a disguised divinity, but entering into the realm of humanity.  It is in flesh, as flesh, for flesh.  That’s the Incarnation.  The material world is where salvation is worked, not in an ethereal space beyond imagining, but here, where I live, where I can touch it and it can touch me.

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V Did you know that H₂O is the only compound that exists in nature in the three forms of matter?  I’m not sure what that means in the big picture, but it’s pretty interesting in itself.

e The best part as soul or spirit should make ghostly haunting stories difficult for me.  I heard a story a few years ago about a couple who spent three nights in the refurbished barn of an Italian castle, feeling a strange presence.  On the last night they were there, the husband told me later, he saw a man dressed in “old style clothes” standing above him, leaning down.  When he told his wife next day what he’d seen, she said she’d seen the same figure floating near the ceiling when she looked into the room.  They weren’t surprised to learn that a man had hanged himself in the barn, right above where their bed stood.  What my friends had seen, they believe, was the same tableau from different angles.  Is it possible that such a traumatic event might leave a psychic stain like an artist leaves in her poetry?  Is that kind of understanding of hauntings less dissonant with Christian theology than full fledged angry ghosts flitting about the attic?

§ I know, fundamentalist and evangelical are two different points of departure.  Evangelicalism was a form of 19^th century liberalism, working for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth.