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Abstract
Table of Contents
Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
Part V
Part VI
Part VII
Part VIII
Part IX
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Part VI: A Fresh Look at the Meaning
of the Word "Soul".
Appendices to Part VI
1. Begotten Before All Worlds
The three ecumenical
creeds -- the Apostles', Nicene, and Athanasian -- were concerned
to protect the doctrine of the deity of the Lord Jesus Christ
and His absolute equality with the Father throughout all eternity
prior to His Incarnation. The two latter creeds laid special
emphasis upon this because there were those who tended toward
the view that although Jesus was pre-eminent above all other
creatures and uniquely the agent of God's creative activity,
He was nevertheless Himself only a creature. Accordingly, great
care was taken to emphasize the fact that He was uncreated,
of one substance with the Father, sharing His glory throughout
all eternity. To this I subscribe absolutely and unequivocally.
He was eternally co-existent with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
one God, equal in majesty and power, not merely of "like
substance" as the Eastern Church has held, but of "one
substance," very God of very God.
I do not think, however, that such
oneness with the Father has ever demanded an actual familial
(Father-Son) relationship in order to establish His deity,
any more than such a familial relationship is required to establish
the deity of the Holy Spirit. The relationship as a Son to the
Father was something which came historically into effect
when the Lord Jesus, the Jehovah of the Old Testament, actually
became man by laying aside for a little while some aspect of
equality with the Father, thus taking a lower position (Philippians
2:6,7) in order to accomplish man's salvation; only that He might
receive an even greater glory with the Father when this was achieved.
The Old Testament prophecies which are cast in a future
tense with respect to this relationship became the present
fact, the "today" of Hebrews 1:5, when the Lord
of Glory entered into our world of time and space as the Son
begotten of the Father, conceived by the Holy Spirit and
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born of a virgin. The
revelation of this tremendous moment is stated with great precision
-- "This day have I begotten thee" -- and is made even
more precise by the added words, "When He bringeth the first
begotten into the world" (Hebrews 1:6). Even during fetal
development the role of divine sonship was still future: "That
which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of
God" (Luke 1:35). And Elizabeth's greeting of Mary was equally
carefully worded -- not "What is this that my Lord should
come to me" but "What is this that the mother of
my Lord should come to me" (Luke 1:43), which seems
to indicate that Elizabeth did not suppose she was actually in
the presence of the Lord Himself, but only in the presence of
a mother-to-be.
In Hebrews 1:5 what we are actually
told is that the Father in heaven that day had begotten ("brought
forth") His Son. And yet it was not inappropriate for the
creeds to state that He was "begotten before all worlds,"
for the future is always present with God. It is only historically
that the event was properly spoken of as future: in the eternal
purposes of both the Father and the Son, the event was already
accomplished, in the same sense the Lamb was prophetically slain
since the foundation of the world though historically not till
thousands of years of human history had unfolded.
The Edward VI Prayer Book of the
Church of England says that the Son was "equall to the Father
as touchying his godhead, and inferior to the Father as touchying
his manhoode." This "inferior" status reflected
the role of an actually begotten Son, but such a lower status
surely cannot have been assumed prior to the Incarnation? He
clearly sought on a number of occasions, when addressing the
disciples, to contrast His position on earth with that position
of glory which He had shared before His Incarnation, as though
the previous glory was of a different and higher order. In this
sense He humbled Himself and thought it not something that must
be retained at all costs if such a retention meant He could not
fulfill His role as a Redeemer (Philippians 2:18).
It was the underlying tendency
toward Arianism that the formulators of the creeds desired to
protect the Faith against. The Lord was God and was with God
from the very beginning. He was not merely a unique individual
who so lived to the glory of God that He was elevated to a position
of deity as Son of the Father, as a reward for His achievement
on earth. He was always God, very God of very God. It
was only when the fullness of time was come that He assumed a
new relationship within the Godhead and was begotten of the Father
that He might become the Saviour of men.
pg.2
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2. Some Notes on the Roman Catholic
View of the Soul
I believe that
anyone who has taken the trouble to investigate Roman Catholic
theology with an honest attempt to understand it will be forced
to admit that it is characterized by a refined system of logic
that is almost compulsive -- provided that one grants the
premises. This emphasis for this limiting phrase is very
necessary because it is here that some of the most important
differences between Protestant and Roman Catholic theology are
to be found.
It must be admitted also that much
of Protestant theology has not been structured with the same
rigid adherence to the laws of logic and contradiction. Scripture
itself must, of course, be excluded from this judgment, and more
especially the Book of Romans. To my mind, Calvinism makes the
nearest approach to a completely logical system. Nevertheless,
it seems to me that the system which was refined and virtually
finalized by Thomas Aquinas comes closest to being rationally
compulsive (though not morally so) -- again, granted the premises.
I know from experience that one can submit oneself to a course
of lectures in, for example, Thomistic psychology and find oneself
anticipating the professor's conclusions time and time again
merely by being logical in one's thinking. Unfortunately for
the ordinary reader there is a technical jargon which goes with
this theology, which has to be mastered before it makes sense:
and the mastery of this jargon is complicated by the fact that
Christian terminology which means one thing to us has been made
to mean something quite different for them. This applies to the
use of the word "soul." The first thing that is required,
therefore, is to establish what is meant by the Roman Catholic
theologians when they use the word "soul."
It may be a slight misrepresentation
of their thinking to say that by the word "soul" they
mean what we mean by the word "spirit," but I think
this is essentially true and this equation of terms may help
to clarify what follows.
In Thomistic theology, the "soul"
constitutes the person, but not the personality. The soul is
that which is created by God and which is added to the body to
make a soul-body entity. This soul-body entity is not really
a compound but a whole, i.e., man. They reject the idea that
the body is governed by a soul in the sense that a horse is governed
by its rider. If we are allowed to carry this analogy, man is
a Centaur, a man-horse combination. The soul cannot exist
apart from the body except, to use their rather apt phrase, "in
a state
pg.3
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of violence," and
when the soul leaves the body, the body is no longer a body
either -- it is a thing, a corpse, a miscellaneous collection
of atoms.
The created soul which is given
to every body that lives is equal in all men. When it has gained
attributes and developed its potentialities it becomes more than
a person, it becomes a personality. And while all persons are
of equal value in the sight of God, all personalities are not.
They hold that this soul is a direct
creation of God and is indivisible and cannot, therefore, be
derived from the mother and father, since the soul of the mother
and the soul of the father are both likewise indivisible. It
is not only indivisible but occupies and gives meaning to every
part of the body equally. The soul is the seat of all man's consciousness
and life processes, including the unconscious ones. It is in
no sense derived from the body. These conclusions are
important for an understanding of Roman Catholic psychology,
in that, for example, they reject behaviourism entirely, since
this would be to derive the soul from the body. While they hold
strongly for the reality (substantialness) of the soul, they
also believe that it can only find expression properly through
a body. They therefore argue, quite logically, that angels do
not have souls since they are bodiless spirits. They also hold
that the soul is the seat of emotions, but that this emotion
is rooted in the soul-body entity as a combination. And, logically
enough, they argue that angels thus do not experience emotion.
Personally, I think this conclusion is contrary to Revelation
because it seems difficult to conceive of worship without emotion,
and we seem to be given a picture not only of angels worshipping
(Isaiah 6), but also of angels rejoicing greatly when the creation
was first completed, "and all the sons of God shouted for
joy" (Job 38:7). This surely shows that it is not enough
to be logically consistent; one must start with the truth for
one's premises.
The proper subject of psychology
is the study of the soul, according to Aristotle. The proper
subject of psychology, according to Aquinas, is the soul-body
entity, in which both soul and body must always be considered
as one and yet always be regarded as being composed of two elements
each existing in their own right. Aquinas therefore was the first
to underline the importance of the psychosomatic view of human
nature. It is because of the failure to recognize this last point
that modern psychology, according to these Roman Catholic theologians,
has tended to become merely a branch of physiology. If the soul
is wholly derived from the body, then the fundamentally important
subject matter of the study of man is not
pg.4
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psychology, but physiology;
and psychology becomes a by-product. The end result is the annihilation
of man as man. To the Roman Catholic, the soul "informs"
the body, by which is meant that it gives to the body its organization,
its value, its capacity, its sanctity, its distinctiveness as
human. The body provides the soul with that whereby a potentiality
becomes a reality, a person becomes a personality. As has already
been stated, the soul cannot exist except in a state of violence
and temporarily without the body. In theory at least the body
becomes of far greater importance in this light, since every
cell within it is made human by being possessed by a human soul.
And, correspondingly, they say that every animal cell is animal
by reason of its being possessed by animal soul. Animal body
is spiritually distinct from human body. The care which is taken,
therefore, to ensure that every member of a human body (even
including amputated limbs) is given proper consideration by "decent
burial" follows quite logically from this conception. Though
it may seem rather like foolish superstition to be so greatly
concerned with an amputated limb, in the light of this system
of psychology it is logical enough. So long as it exists as a
physical thing it is more than a physical thing: it has been
identified and still is identified as part of the soul-body entity
that was the individual.
Their major criticism of modern
psychology is that it has lost sight of the soul as having a
reality by creation. Nor would they be satisfied if psychology
should admit the real existence of the soul but then treat it
as though it were acting through the body. The soul does not
act through the body, but with the body as a substantial
unity. When the Church established its official position in the
formulation of the Nicene Creed by stating that the Lord was
of one substance with the Father, it was using the word "substance"
in this sense. The unity of the body and the soul is a substantial
one. It may be said that in their view, person is the theological
aspect, personality the psychological aspect, character the moral
aspect, and function or behaviour the biological aspect of man.
In this system of psychology, "individual" differences
are personality differences, not person differences, for all
persons are of equal value in the sight of God. They are in the
habit of tracing the development of psychology from Descartes
to the present time by pointing out that with Descartes psychology
lost its soul and found its mind; with the British Empiricists,
soul lost its mind and found its consciousness; with Watson soul
lost its consciousness and found its reflexes. So the scientific
study of man without theological guidance led, in effect, to
the disappearance of the soul of man altogether.
pg.5
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In
conclusion, I think that if we make allowances for the fact that
soul in this context is perhaps more exactly spirit, in accordance
with our thesis, there is much of value to ponder in this system
of thought, however much we may disagree with some of their premises
and consequently with some of their conclusions. Until psychology
recovers its faith in the soul or spirit of man as something
which has a reality in its own right, yet which cannot exist
in completeness apart from the body, there will be little or
no advance in our understanding of man. The saving of the soul
is only possible by the saving of the whole man. Psychosomatic
medicine is a step in the right direction, but it can never be
realistic so long as the psyche is tacitly derived from the soma.
pg.6
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Copyright © 1988 Evelyn White. All rights
reserved
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