Quote:
Originally Posted by Mephibosheth
I'm generally inclined to agree with you, though I'd reverse your order and hazard to say that it is the soul which is an aspect of the spirit, rather than the other way around. Let me explain. If you journey back to the creation of Adam, you will find that after God formed Adam's body out of the ground, He then breathed Adam's spirit into him, and then Adam 'became a living soul': According to the text, God did not specifically create or form Adam's soul. Adam's soul 'became' or 'came about' as a direct result of the interface between his formed body and the spirit breathed into him (this is an important distinction that was later remarked upon by the apostle Paul in his epistle to the Corinthians). Therefore, the soul, per se, is not really a separate entity on its own, but the product -or hybrid, if you will- of the spirit and the flesh. The three (but really two acting in synergy), together, constitute the whole person.
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I would have to take a different approach to it. It is generally stated that the other animals have a form of soul, and what is missing is the spirit.
Besides, the breathing of God into man to make him become living is the addition of breath. It is interesting that the word for breath is the one also used for what we call spirit. But that does not mean that we are constantly inhaling and exhaling "spirit" in the sense that we mean spirit in these discussions (and in the sense of what is spoken of in the Bible). Otherwise, everyone would always be filled with the spirit because they are filled with breath.
No. The soul was to be part of man with or without a spirit. It was the spirit that was added that, as someone pointed out, gave us a different connection with God. Yet it is not simply some organ that we can locate. We kind of think we have located a lot about our soul. But to the extent that the spirit is in any way different, it is not findable. Yet it must be essentially "married to" the soul because the two cannot be distinguished so easily. (Of course the comment in Hebrews about the difficulty in distinguishing is juxtaposed with "joints and marrow" which we can fairly easily distinguish on a medical anatomy chart.)
But either way, the point is that if you go find Nee's verses on soul and spirit and read them carefully (without simply accepting his determination about what it means) you will see that the ones concerning the aspects of the spirit are things that you would attribute to your mind, will, emotions — your soul. Therefore the spirit is not some separate thing, but more of an identification of the soul in connection with (or not in connection with) God. It could be that the divider of soul and spirit is not like dissection, but observation of the source of speaking and actions. When put up against the Word, the actions of the soul are simply human while those of the spirit are beyond human.
I'm sure that this is a pathetic way to look at it, but that is what was coming to me as I was writing. I don't know if I would try to sell this version of the difference between soul and spirit. But I'm pretty sure that there is no identifiable "organ" in man that can be described so perfectly as all those verses tied to that three-concentric-ring diagram.
Man is not "tripartite." He is a unit. A whole. We are not little trinities. My body does not go off to do things without my mind (although my wife might disagree sometime).