they just speculate, as they have no real knowledge (Veda)

[Kulapavana]

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer

Published: July 20, 2003 Author: Tirdad Derakhshani

Thinkers who question if there's a self separate from the body say they're faithful to biblical roots.

 

By Tirdad Derakhshani

Inquirer Staff Writer

 

Won't somebody tell me, what is the soul of a man?

 

I'm going to ask the question, answer if you can.

 

- Blind Willie Johnson, "Soul of a Man"

 

Soul is one of those ever-present words in our daily lives - from "soul food" to "soul care" to political patter about "the soul of the nation" - but how many of us could really define it?

 

Is soul just a metaphor or is it a real thing, an actually enduring substance?

 

The question is puzzling given our cultural atmosphere: We live in an age of unprecedented scientific advances, which have led many to reject the view that we have a separate mind or soul in addition to our bodies. Yet we are awash in books, films and TV shows devoted to the soul and spirituality.

 

In the popular imagination, there is some spiritual stuff inside us, created by God, which will survive our physical death. For Christians, this immortal substance will be reunited with the body, in a "general resurrection," at the end of history.

 

But Touched by an Angel notwithstanding, there is no consensus in the Christian community about the correct definition of the soul - or whether such a thing even exists. To survey Christian scholars, theologians and members of the clergy is to come up with a dizzying variety of answers.

 

"There is no such thing as a soul," declares theologian Nancey Murphy of Fuller Theological Seminary, a center of evangelical Christian teaching in Pasadena, Calif.

 

Murphy is a leader in the ranks of those who deny there is a separate or substantial soul different in nature from the body. Others passionately defend "substance dualism," the philosophical idea, which has been part of Western culture since Plato, that we are composed of two radically different parts. There is a material body, and then there is a nonmaterial soul made up of an enduring spiritual or mental substance that is intimately connected with God.

 

Others prefer to use the term soul in a looser, metaphorical sense and defer to God's intentions as an unsolvable mystery.

 

But whether they are substance dualists, nondualists or atheists, these thinkers loosely agree on one startling point: The talk about spirituality in popular American Christianity is far too one-sided, preoccupied with the soul.

 

A modern dilemma. Some scholars say that the very idea of pursuing a clear definition of the soul is uniquely modern. They attribute it to the Enlightenment idea that truth can be arrived at only by defining things in the clearest and most distinct way possible.

 

"For most of Christian history, the concept of the soul was never thought of as such a clear-cut thing," said E. Ann Matter, a religious-studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

 

Matter said Christian theologians in the classical and medieval eras were comfortable with a more flexible outlook. They did not so much try to define soul in contrast to the physical world but discussed it in relation to other human faculties and to God.

 

St. Augustine, the fifth-century theologian who is a founding father of Christian theology, did not even use the word soul in his definition of the self.

 

"For Augustine, inside us we have memory, intellect and will," she said. "These three components are reflections of the trinity." Memory correlates with God the Father, intellect with the Son, and will with the Holy Spirit.

 

To Matter and others, the kind of strict dualism many people associate with Catholic and Protestant teaching flows not from the Bible or even Plato but from the Enlightenment. In particular, they cite Rene Descartes, the 17th-century French philosopher. For Descartes, our bodies, like the world around us, are composed of matter - but we also possess a soul-substance that is radically different in kind from our bodies. A principal problem of philosophy came to be how this mind/soul connects to the physical world.

 

A new-old holism. In recent Christian theological thinking, one major unifying trend is a rejection of radical dualism in favor of a more holistic view.

 

Some scholars, primarily liberal Protestants but also some evangelicals, insist the Hebrew Bible presents an integrated picture of the self that does not draw sharp distinctions between soul and body. This has led some of them to reject the concept of the soul as a separate substance.

 

"What we are saying is that there is no such thing as a soul," said Murphy. She and Warren S. Brown, a neuropsychologist and director of Fuller's Travis Research Institute, are coeditors of Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, a provocative collection of essays.

 

They say they are committed to evangelical Christian teachings, yet believe developments in cognitive science and evolutionary biology call into question a dualistic definition of humans.

 

"As neuroscientists associate more and more of the faculties once attributed to mind or soul with the functioning of specific regions or systems of the brain, it becomes more and more appealing to say that it is in fact the brain that performs these functions," Murphy writes in the book's introduction.

 

"Nearly all of the human capacities or faculties once attributed to the soul are now seen to be functions of the brain."

 

In a phone interview, Murphy said the original Christian understanding of salvation dealt with the resurrection of the body, or "resurrection of the dead," which "is entirely distinct from the concept of the soul." She insists that Christians must drop the idea of some intermediate state after death in which the soul awaits resurrection.

 

Brown, whose research has focused on the structure connecting the left and right brain, said, "I basically believe that humans are physical beings and would not think that the soul is a psychical entity, a little ghost in the machine."

 

He defends a complex position called "non-reductive physicalism," which holds that human beings are physical through and through. But he also maintains that we have developed cognitive and emotional capacities that cannot be reduced to biological or chemical processes.

 

These capacities, which he calls our "soulishness," enable us to be relational beings. "Soul language in traditional religious talk is suggestive of relationship with one another and our internal self-relationship, and our relationships with God," he said.

 

The Rev. Pamela Cooper-White, an Episcopal priest who teaches pastoral theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary in Mount Airy, shares Murphy and Brown's nondualist stance. She credits the shift toward a more holistic conception to feminist reevaluations of Christian ideas.

 

"A lot of feminist theologians would say that the whole Greek mind-body split goes back to antiquity and got picked up in the New Testament," she said. "You don't see that as much in the Old Testament, which does not posit a separate soul in addition to the body."

 

She points out that the Hebrew Bible term nefesh, which is often translated as "soul" in English versions of the Bible, can also be translated as "breath" or "life force." She defines it as "the breath of life" and believes that the question "Where does this life go when you die?" is a mystery humans can never answer.

 

An enduring dualism.Brown said his ideas are deeply antithetical to the popular American view of the self - which he said is dualist to the point of resembling gnosticism.

 

Gnosticism was an early Christian heresy that held that the spirit is the true self created by God and that the body is a degraded "prison" created by a lower divine being known as the Demiurge. Salvation involves the soul's freeing itself from matter and reclaiming a primal unity with God.

 

"This dualism creates a view of ourselves that the real me is somewhere inside, and it's somehow better than the outer me who acts in the world. And that creates this situation in which I can excuse my behavior," Brown said. He urged that pastors "stop talking that way and just be clear about embodiment and ourselves and our moral responsibilities to the embodiment of others."

 

Hank Hanegraaff is a fellow evangelical Christian who passionately disputes Brown and Murphy's position. Hanegraaff, best known for his syndicated radio show, Bible Answer Man, is president and chairman of the board of Christian Research Institute International in Southern California. He is also author of Resurrection (Word Publishing), a book devoted to the question "What happens when we die?"

 

Speaking from his office in Rancho Santa Margarita, Hanegraaff agreed with Murphy and Brown that "Christians have always believed in the physical resurrection" as the culmination of history.

 

But, he asks, if there is a general resurrection but no immaterial soul, "how then do you retain personal identity? How does the same human being, having died, rise again as the same person?"

 

Hanegraaff holds that if there is no center of human identity - mind or spirit or soul - then "you could not be held accountable for a crime that you commit a year from now." He said that it's "the sameness of soul" that ensures we are responsible for our identities and our actions.

 

He also made "the argument from libertarian freedom" that "if we base everything on brain actions, then all of it goes down to chemical processes which follow rules of nature and do not account for freedom of will or responsibility."

 

At the same time, Hanegraaff believes that Christians today tend to be too dualistic.

 

"For example, if you do talk to Christians and you ask them about the idea of heaven, you would think we are Casper the Ghost. That we fly away to some realm without our bodies," he said.

 

Catholic views. The Roman Catholic Church seems relatively united on its position of substance dualism.

 

According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, "soul and body together form one unique human nature." The teaching, heavily influenced by the 13th-century theologian Thomas Aquinas, is that the soul "does not die with the body, from which it is separated by death, and with which it will be reunited in the final resurrection."

 

That said, some Catholic priests downplay the substantial reality of the soul and concentrate on ethical and existential questions.

 

The Rev. Stephen Dougherty, who teaches pastoral counseling at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Overbrook, echoes Cooper-White in emphasizing the mystery of the soul.

 

"The human being is a very unique creature," he said. "I like to use the word human being, because it takes both aspects - humus, which is the earth, and that concept of being, which is the spiritual aspect.

 

"I think one of the traps we fall into is that we put the emphasis on one side or the other. If all the emphasis is on the being part, we forget that we are incarnate beings."

 

Edward T. Hastings, who teaches in the departments of education and pastoral counseling at Neumann College, a Catholic college in Delaware County, says overemphasis on spirituality has undermined viewing the self as a soul-body unity.

 

Hastings attributed the disharmony to the cultural inheritance from Descartes and the Enlightenment, but said he believes the Catholic Church has been complicit, getting away from some of its own foundations.

 

"The idea that pure spirit is closer to God than the body is heretical in terms of Catholic teaching, but we haven't really lived that way," he said.

 

"On a pastoral level, the church got messed up and had this degrading notion of the human body. It had to do with sexuality, and the idea that the body and its parts and its acts are unclean."

 

Hastings urges a more practical, and existential, definition of the soul as "the essence of the self."

 

Narcissism or distress? Richard Fenn, a professor of Christianity and society at Princeton Theological Seminary, has little patience with the theological debates. Still, he sees something vitally important about what he calls "the outburst of apparent interest in the soul... and of spirituality" in contemporary American culture.

 

"The demand for spiritual helpers, angels and so forth, is just this narcissism let loose and... American individualism run loose," he said, "or is this a sign of real distress?"

 

To him, soul is a metaphorical expression for that part of the self that resists the dehumanizing effects of modern life and helps maintain individuality. "I share the Freudian notion of the soul as an emergent property. It's largely repressed, and it's a potential," he said. "It's the inner source of inspiration and of animation."

 

Robert C. Fuller is also impatient with the Christian disputes. A professor of religious studies at Bradley University in Illinois and author of Spiritual But Not Religious, a study of nonconventional spirituality in American culture, Fuller flatly states, "I don't believe in the soul stuff."

 

Fuller sees the current debates as a sign that believers are trying to reconcile Christian teachings with modern science. He believes that the confrontation will only erode key Christian ideas.

 

Concepts such as the divinity of Jesus, the existence of an immaterial soul created by God, and bodily resurrection invariably are weakened in the confrontation, he said.

 

At the same time, he said, congregations that hold fast to traditional doctrine and deny the findings of science miss out on fresh metaphysical explorations about life and its purpose.

 

"If the universe is anything, it's one huge miracle. And that doesn't lead me to Bible creationism. It leads me to wonder, and I think wonder is the root of all spirituality."

[theist]

We can be thankful that Srila Prabhupada spent his own personal time and effort in giving the western world clear definitions on what is the soul. We are the soul. We don't possess a soul, we are soul/self.

 

And this is just the basic platform of what he taught. They are actually arguing that there is no self and yet we see there are titling themselves as Christian leaders.

 

Real knowledge descends. It is not a product of the subtle universe which afterall is based on not knowing or non-knowledge. Mix it up as we like into a infinite number of ways and still no realization will ever be produced.