The biblical understanding of the human person is holistic. It makes no distinction between body and soul. The human person is not a soul living in a body, but an animated body, so perfectly integrated that the person in his totality can express himself/herself and be apprehended in any part. “It is the body rooted in the cosmos and related to other human beings, which gives the person his or her identity.”
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Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body... Someone who accepts — as I myself do, taking it on trust — the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.
I think there is a biblical and Judeo-Christian anthropology about who human beings are, made in God’s image, having a dignity that cannot be taken from them, equal in respect of their personhood, made as man and woman, made to fulfil certain purposes in the world, which include the family, but also the building of civilization and the treatment of the rest of creation. I talk about creation, not nature. And this biblical anthropology, if you like, is at odds with the dominant, post-Enlightenment anthropology which begins with isolated individuals, gathering into community to protect themselves. It will be in conflict at many different points. Marriage is clearly a battlefield, but it is not just marriage; it is also the sanctity of the human person at every stage of life which is under attack. There is now a movement to redefine death from brain-stem death to loss of consciousness. If that happens, it will release enormous amounts of resources. It releases people from all sorts of dilemmas. It is a conflict of worldviews and in the end, we will have to choose. Nations will have to choose which view we are going with, because the two are irreconcilable on a number of points.
But this is at the same time a vivid way of saying that your soul, or rather your essential Self, is the whole cosmos as it is centered around the particular time, place, and activity called John Doe. Thus the soul is not in the body, but the body in the soul, and the soul is the entire network of relationships and processes which make up your environment, and apart from which you are nothing.
We may treat of the Soul as in the body — whether it be set above it or actually within it — since the association of the two constitutes the one thing called the living organism, the Animate. Now from this relation, from the Soul using the body as an instrument, it does not follow that the Soul must share the body's experiences: a man does not himself feel all the experiences of the tools with which he is working.
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.... In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.
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