Teología del corazón

Cardtheology

The biblical anatomy of man

Introduction

Bible book of theology and anthropology

Man created in the image of God

This is a big deal

27 God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. Genesis 1:27 (NASB95)

the pause of significance

Fact one regarding the image of God

God’s image centers around a spirit that relates to Him

Man has a Spirit to relate to God

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. Ge 2:7.

Literally it can be translated a “Living Soul”or a “living being”. It is a Spirit that God put in man which is given up in death:

Spirit enables man to relate to God

Made by God for God

Every time we look at each other or talk to each other as men and women, we should remember that the person we are talking to is a creature of God who is more like God than anything else in the universe, and men and women share that status equally. Therefore we should treat men and women with equal dignity, and we should think of men and women as having equal value. Wayne Grudem, “The Key Issues in the Manhood-Womanhood Controversy, and the Way Forward,” in Biblical Foundations for Manhood and Womanhood, ed. Wayne A. Grudem, Foundations for the Family Series (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2002), 20.

Man’ body is related to the image of God

The concentration of views on the immaterial

Gen 1:27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

What it does not mean

The views of the Anthropomorphites

The view of the so-called Anthropomorphites (or Audiani, 4th century) that man is physically the image of God, who is also, therefore, physically embodied.

God is a Spirit

Christ became man not himself

Man’s body part of the image

And though the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and the heart, or in the soul and its powers, there was no part even of the body in which some rays of glory did not shine. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 1997).

The spirit presents the divine image immediately: the body, mediately. The scholastics called the soul the image of God proprie; the body they called the image of God significative. Soul is the direct reflection of God; body is the reflection of that reflection.

Augustus Hopkins Strong, Systematic Theology (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1907), 523.

It is man in his unity and integrity who is made in the image of God (gen 1:26, 27; 2:7 9:6 Man is body, and it is not possible to exclude man in this identity from the scope of that which defines his identity, the image of God. John Murray, Collected writings Volume 2 p. 39

It is just these conceptions—his unity and his moral and valuational authority—that the image of God most naturally assures. We have seen that the likeness cannot be applied to man’s spirit over against his body. It is man as man, as a unity, that has been created in the image of God and is somehow like God, with the potential for relationship with God. The Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society, electronic edition. (Garland, TX: Galaxie Software, 1998).

Packer

I like how Packer puts it. The original design of God was for man to be an embodied soul. So while the body is not directly linked to God’s image it is indirectly linked to it.

God’s image centers around a spirit that relates to Him

Man’ body is related to the image of God

Man’ inside is made of one part

Ge 2:7. 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.

Man a two not three sliced being

Tripartite or bipartite?

In the theological terms. kids put on thinking caps, is he tripartite, three parts body soul and spirit or bipartite, Body and soul. Is he trichotomous or dichotomous. (trichotomous, from τρίχα, ‘in three parts,’ and τέμνω ‘to cut,’ = composed of three par

The biblical evidence

Apparent trichotomous verses

Body soul and spirit

1 Th 5:23. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Division of soul and spirit

Heb 4:12. For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart.

Trichotomy disproved

No distinction that spirit is used for the higher and soul lower end

The use of soul for brute creation

Rev. 16:3 The second angel poured out his bowl into the sea, and it became like the blood of a corpse, and every living thing died that was in the sea.

the term “living thing” is literally every living soul.

The use of spirit for the brute creation

Eccl. 3:21— Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down into the earth?

Both word in the hebrew are spirit Ruach and it does not seem to be that the spirit is that part that just relates to God, because here it uses spirit for beasts that relate only to the earthly, also to talk about going down into the earth.

ψυχή is utilized for God

The Lord God has sworn by himself, declares the Lord, the God of hosts: “I abhor the pride of Jacob and hate his strongholds, and I will deliver up the city and all that is in it.”

(lit. ‘by his soul,’ LXX ἑαυτόν)

Isa 42:1 Behold my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights;

The disembodied dead are called ψυχαί (souls)

the highest exercise of religion are attributed to ψυχαί

Mark 12:30—“thou shalt love the Lord thy God … with all thy soul” Luke 1:46—“My soul doth magnify the Lord”; Heb. 6:18, 19—“the hope set before us

Spirit is also taken as the totality of life

James 2:26 For as the body apart from the spirit is dead, so also faith apart from works is dead.

Thrichotomous sounding verses explained

First text

Hebrews 4:12 For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart

John Murray

Confirmation of this meaning is derived from the anatomy of joints and marrow. These are not adjacent so as to require a sharp sword to get in between to separate. The text does not speak of bones and marrow. So obviously, the thought is not that of getting in between two to separate, but that these are the most inaccessible parts of our physical frame and illustrate the piercing power of the word, by a metaphor, it is said to sharper than a two-edged sword.

“soul” and “spirit” are both genitives governed by the participle “dividing.” The verse is saying that the Word of God “divides” the soul, even the spirit. But it does not say that the Word of God divides between soul and spirit (that would require some such word as μεταξύ, metaxu) or divides the soul from the spirit. The verse no more intends this than it intends, when it goes on to say that the Word is the judge of thoughts and of intents of the heart (again, two genitives governed by the noun “judge”), that thoughts and intents are ontologically distinct things. Clearly, intents are simply one kind of thought. What the verse is actually saying is that the Word of God is able to penetrate into the deepest recesses of a man’s spirit and judge his very thoughts, even the secret intentions of his heart. Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: T. Nelson, 1998), 421–422.

Second text

1 Th 5:23. Now may the God of peace himself sanctify you completely, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This text fall under the category of those verse in scripture where there is a list of things mentioned that are not a description of separate entities or things but an accumulation of overlapping things to express completeness.

All you got! | God sanctify all that is you

Difference between Spirit and Soul

No ontological | emphasis

In establishing the conviction that man is dichotomous and not trichotomous, that he only has two parts, the immaterial and the material, that both Soul and Spirit have been used interchangeably in the Scriptures we mean there is no ontological distinction there are emphasis distinctions

Augustus Strong

We conclude that the immaterial part of man, viewed as an individual and conscious life, capable of possessing and animating a physical organism, is called ψυχή; viewed as a

rational and moral agent, susceptible of divine influence and indwelling, this same immaterial part is called πνεῦμα (spirit) . The πνεῦμα, then, is man’s nature looking Godward, and capable of receiving and manifesting the Πνεῦμα ἅγιον (Holy Spirit); the ψυχή (soul) is man’s nature looking earthward, and touching the world of sense. The πνεῦμα is man’s higher part, as related to spiritual realities or as capable of such relation; the ψυχή is man’s higher part, as related to the body, or as capable of such relation. Man’s being is therefore not trichotomous but dichotomous, and his immaterial part, while possessing duality of powers, has unity of substance.

Hendriksen

When Paul mentions both spirit and soul, he indicates not two substances but one and the same immaterial substance. However, he views this substance first from the aspect of its relation to God—as a recipient of divine influences and as an organ for divine worship (“spirit”)—, then from the aspect of its relation to the lower realm—as the seat of sensations, affections, desires, etc. (“soul”). To this one immaterial substance, viewed from two aspects, Paul adds the body. It is in this sense that he writes, “and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless.

Camaleon

If you put it among rocks in desert he looks rocky if he is placed in vegetation he looks leafy. the are not two skins but one.

The important part of man is the soul

Body not disdained as greeks

The Souls has the primacy

Where as we have established that the Bible does not have a second rate view of the Body as the greeks, that felt that the Soul is trapped and is liberated when it departs from the Body, the scripture nonetheless points to the soul, the immaterial part of man as primary, as the epicenter of God’s image in man

The verses that show the primacy of the soul

Mt 6:25. “Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life (soul), what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life (soul) more than food, and the body more than clothing?

Mt 16:26. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?

G.K Chesterton

once said that one of the most difficult things to accept in Christianity is the worth that it give to the the individual soul

Older Christian writers

Would say that God has hidden the majesty of the soul from our eyes lest we should be destroyed by our vanity

Emphasis Scripture: soul | inner man

Conclusion

Man made in the image of God

This truth is not only to express that his life should be devoted to God, should be vertical this is to also because while he is not divine, he was made from Godness. Made in a way that he could relate to God like no other creature in creation

material and immaterial

Having said that we spoke about the fact the the imprint of the image of God is directly that he was an immaterial part just as God is immaterial, and also he has a physical aspect to him which is indirectly the image of God, Man was made to be an embodied soul.

Soul and spirit are one

When we talk about the immaterial part the inner man is not made of two slices but one, but that inner man has two names, Mr Should and Mr. Spirit. Mr. Soul is used when talking as how he relates to the earthly things and Mr Spirit when he is influenced and driven by the spirit of God, when that inner man is performing acts of worship

The soul is the most important aspect of his being