2 Soul and Body
2
To see how we should live, we need first and foremost to know who and what we are. This is true throughout our lives, but particularly is it so as we grow old and are tempted, as we say, to not “be (or act) our age”—that is, to think and behave as if we are still what we were years back, and so to not come to terms with how we have changed and what has become true of us today. As we shall see, this temptation is widespread and strong, and there is a reason for that. But some basic things must be clarified before that topic can be taken up.
E M B O D I E D S O U L S, E N S O U L E D B O D I E S
Where then should we start in seeking realistic, up-to-date, present-tense self-knowledge as we age? Experience from infancy onward convinces us, when we think about it, that we are in some sense bipartite. That is, we are personal selves living in and through physical bodies, on which we depend for energy and ability to do things according to our desires, and by which we are limited, kept from doing much that we would like to be able to do. These physical bodies of ours face us again and again with the need to do things—sleep, eat, urinate, defecate, and so on—which, at least on occasion, we wish we did not need to do. But in these things we have to be their servants, just as in other things we make them ours.
Our bodies can be taught physical skills, though brainwork must accompany the dexterity in each case (think of sports skills, surgical skills, driving and piloting skills, for example); similarly, our souls can learn mental skills like logic and mathematics; and there are skills, like musical performance, in which soul and body combine. Understandably and insightfully, today’s Christian thinkers tell us that we should think of ourselves as embodied souls that are also ensouled bodies, and should regard the soul and the body as distinct but inseparable, bonded together in a whole series of ways, from birth to death.
But what then? To this question different answers are given. Centuries before Christ, the Greek philosopher Plato guessed that our embodiment is a limitation on our growth; that our bodies are like prisons and tombs, where our souls, the real persons that we are, are confined till the day the body expires. But then the soul leaves the body behind and flies away into a realm of reality where goodness, truth, and beauty, life’s supreme glories, can be known and lived with in a way that was not possible before. Many since Plato, and often quite independently of him, have embraced this idea in some form and cherished the notion that happiness is ultimately increased by being set free from our bodies—as if being embodied keeps us from fullness of life, joy, knowledge, contentment, and whatever else we feel at different stages of our existence that we never have enough of.
Christians, however, disagree. Guided by Scripture, their faith is focused on (1) the incarnation of the Son of God, whereby the second person of the Trinity took to himself all that is involved in being human, living through a body included, and (2) the resurrection of Jesus into an unending life of which his glorified humanity is a permanent part. Now they look forward to their own coming enrichment through the resurrection of their own bodies, significantly renewed and transformed as their souls too will have been. They anticipate being reimplanted in those transformed bodies and reinhabiting them to all eternity in a re-created order of reality. There they will grow, advance, bloom, and find delight in all sorts of ways through the ever-deepening communion of their flawlessly renovated personal being with Jesus Christ, their divine Savior, their Lord, and their friend. The eternal re-embodiment of their souls will, they believe, be integral to this life of glory.
It is certainly the case that as Christians age they sometimes feel that, for whatever specific reason—exhaustion, starvation, disease, irreparable structural damage to their physical system, irreversible degenerative malfunctioning within that system, and so forth—their bodies have become burdensome and restrictive to their souls, keeping them from doing and enjoying what they would be doing and enjoying were it not for their physical troubles. But to conclude from this that one’s soul—the thinking, feeling, remembering, imagining, communicating self that one is—would be freer and happier separated from one’s body than it ever can be otherwise would be a grave mistake. God’s plan for us is different, as we shall now see.
It will help us forward if the basic questions about bodies and souls in God’s revealed purpose for us are now laid out and responded to in order. Here they are.
What Are Human Beings, and Why Did God Invent Us?
All members of the human race are psychophysical units, embodied souls who are also ensouled bodies, as we have seen already. Mankind (originally, a single pair to whom God gave a procreative agenda—Gen. 1:28) was made to manage the ordered environment that God had created for his own pleasure. And with that we were to find pleasure of our own in giving God the glory of our human praise and thanks and service.
When, unhappily, sin, the defiant disregard of God and his will, corrupted human nature, as it did right at the start of the human story, God initiated a plan of redemptive restoration through Jesus Christ for the fulfilling of his original purpose in a re-created cosmic frame, and that is what humanity is involved with now. Not all human individuals actually share in this restoration; those who do are those who, confronted by the gospel, put faith in Jesus and become his disciples.
God seems always to have intended that the life of humans in this world should be probationary and temporary, and should lead in due course to some form of transformation and transition for a richer life elsewhere. And death as we know it, with discernible physical decline ordinarily preceding it, is no part of God’s good creation, but is his judgment on sin, as Genesis 3 declares.
What Are Our Souls?
The human soul, as was indicated above, is the conscious personal self, the “I” that knows itself as “me,” the built-in principle of awareness, responsiveness, interaction, and relationships. Cognitive enquiry and thought; interrogation of persons, situations, and resources; memory of things past and the sense of identity that remembering generates; feeling emotions and forming plans; perceiving and performing creative work in the arts, and grasping the reality of goodness, beauty, and truth; creative relationships with other people—all these and more are activities of our souls or, as we may prefer to say, our hearts. (In Scripture “soul” and “heart” both refer to the central core of personhood that is the inward source of all our behavior and reactions, and the words are almost identical in meaning.) Soul life will continue when physical life—body life, as we may call it—has ceased. Indeed, the personal self-awareness that is ours now will never cease, but will be enhanced and extended, for sorrow or for joy, through all eternity.
What Is the Purpose of Our Bodies?
It seems clear that God gave us bodies to live in and through for two reasons: first, to fit us for managing the material world of which we are made his trustees and stewards; and, second, to enrich our lives here and now. Bodies are demonstrably given us for experience, expression, and enjoyment:
These are samples only; the list could be extended. William Temple said, “God likes matter—he made it.” We may equally say, “God likes pleasures—he devised them.” A moment’s thought makes it obvious that life without a body would be greatly impoverished.
T E N S I O N A N D T E M P T A T I O N
But bodies wear out, and that is what we have to come to terms with as we age.
Until we are about sixty-five, or are getting on that way, most of us are likely to feel that our bodies and our souls (or, since “soul” is an antiquated word outside the church, we may choose to say “minds” or “brain cells” or “marbles”) are keeping up with each other pretty well. We are living comfortably with ourselves; we know what we can and cannot tackle mentally and physically, and we have long since ceased to fret, as perhaps we did in adolescence, at not being able to do all sorts of things we would like to do, but realize are beyond us.
Now, however, in our sixties, we find ourselves facing new limitations. We cannot do this and that as easily as once we could. Energy level shrinks; memory is not what it was; aches, pains, and shortness of breath become permanent facts of life; we tire more quickly; bones break more easily. Our bodies are wearing out, as all human bodies have done since Adam fell and God pronounced the death sentence on him. They will go on wearing out as long as we live. Exercise, medication, and careful dieting may slow down the process, but they will not reverse it.
John Wesley at eighty-five wrote in his journal that the only sign of deterioration that he could see in himself was that he could not run as fast as he used to. With all due deference to that wonderful, seemingly tireless little man, we may reasonably suspect that he was overlooking some things at this point, just as some do when they assure us that they never had a day’s illness in their life. We cannot stop our bodies aging, any more than King Canute’s say-so could stop the tide coming in.
Furthermore, as our bodies wear out, they become more vulnerable to infections, breakdowns, heart problems, and cancers. Down syndrome and schizophrenia do not vanish with age, and forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, are apt to develop. The slowing down is permanent, and with it comes one of the two temptations that are peculiar to old age—namely, to go with the flow of bodily decline and waning physical desires, and to allow our discipleship to Christ and our zeal for seeking, displaying, and advancing the kingdom of God also to slow down, or maybe I should say cool down, in a way that corresponds. This, however, is a big topic and calls for a chapter to itself.
Meantime, however, think back with me for a moment to the oldsters’ temptation that I referred to at the start of this chapter, namely, not facing up to the fact that our physical decline is actually happening. Why this obstinate unrealism? The answer is not far to seek. Behind this attitude stands pride—pride, the essence of original sin as Augustine diagnosed it; pride, the irrational, insatiable drive always to be the one on top and in charge, always honoring, serving, and pleasing the great god self; pride, that treats domination, control, and outscoring rivals as a never-ending task.
Those who have had successful careers are often in dominant positions when old age sets in, retirement becomes due, and bowing out is the appropriate action, and it should cause no surprise when they resist the prospect and try to evade or at least postpone it. Nor should it surprise us when such persons, having reluctantly left the field of what they saw as their former fulfillment, become tyrannical in their own family and among their own friends in a way that they never were before.
Proverbial Christian wisdom, backed by the Bible itself, tells us that we all face temptations from three sources: the world (circumstances and conditions surrounding us), the flesh (prideful original sin within us—the reality about which we have just been speaking—constantly generating attitudes of what we may call un-love), and the Devil (a malevolent intelligence riding herd on us and orchestrating the attacks of both pridefulness and worldliness against us). Frank acknowledgment of these sorts of temptation, and of Satan’s interest in each, is needed as we seek to plot the proper path for godly aging.