Losing your Soul

Several years before I retired from Missouri State University in 2005, I was so caught up in an active academic career, involved in campus life, community activities, professional activities, and serving in the Army Reserve that I felt like my very soul was at risk. Somewhere between completing a terminal degree (1977) and retiring from Missouri State University (2005), my soul seemed to have gone missing or was so shriveled I could not find it. Souls need attention, special feeding and watering, to flourish. I suspect that I am not the only person to come to this realization.

            You might not think it possible for people to lose their souls, but Jesus thought so. “What is the profit,” he said, “in gaining the world and losing your soul” (Mark 8:36). Charles Dickens also thought so, and in his novel (A Christmas Carol) portrayed Ebenezer Scrooge as a soulless man, who rediscovers his soul at the end of the novel. “Soul” is the essence of being truly human—a quality always pushing us, come hell or high water, toward moral excellence. A man or a woman with no soul has lost the qualitative edge of being human, of keeping life in balance and everything in perspective—in other words, “losing yourself to gain the world” (Luke 9:25) distorts perspective and throws life into serious imbalance. Clearly Scrooge was disoriented. He had fed his soul so much material “stuff” that he had lost touch with humanity—particularly his humanity. In my case, somewhat like Bob Cratchit, I sat in a tiny windowless office cluttered with neglected professional projects (real soul food by the way), and fed my soul unimaginative papers by incurious students, but in the grand scheme of things virtually irrelevant. Souls cannot survive on such an unbalanced diet.

            Can governments lose their souls? Certainly, they can. Government at every level involves people who set a tone for the administration and carry out its policies. National socialism in Hitler’s Germany, at best, was government without conscience or humanity, and its systematic massacre of Jews and other eastern Europeans clearly qualifies it as soulless. The same is true of Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi government, for attempting to annihilate its own citizens, the Kurds. In our own country, the suppressive disfranchisement (and worse!) of black citizens in the deep south for over one hundred years can only be explained by the shriveled souls of white citizens. And what should we say about attempts in various states to eliminate budgetary support for our most vulnerable citizens—the mentally ill, disabled, children, and the elderly? At best, it is not an action that anyone would confuse with moral excellence. And Mr. Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” by congress? The Congressional Budget Office estimates that its passage may cause some 10 million American citizens to lose their health insurance by 2034, with some $900 billion in cuts to Medicare. Only shriveled souls could be pleased at such an inhumane result.¹

            Can a church lose its soul? You wouldn’t think so, but in my religious tradition it has been happening for some time now. For the sake of what some in the tradition regard as “right” theology, Southern Baptist intolerants dismantled a fellowship of, more or less, independent cooperating churches. They centralized their authority and have been, since 1985, purging the denomination of diversity. Shortening the borders of the tent and shallow thinking make for better control but do not encourage the development of healthy souls.

Without a healthy soul, we will never find our way to the moral high road, or as Paul put it, to the more excellent way (1 Cor 12:3–13:13). Without soul one is condemned to sit among the mattresses of the dead (a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens, The Man on the Dump). Allowing a soul to shrivel away is bad enough. Being unaware of the loss altogether is a crisis of epic proportions!²

Charles W. Hedrick
Professor Emeritus
Missouri State University

¹https://www.cbpp.org/research/health/by-the-numbers-republican-reconciliation-law-will-take-health-coverage-away-from#:~:text=as%20their%20employment.-,Medicaid,had%20an%20illness%20or%20disability

²This essay, reedited and updated in part, was first published in the newspaper, the Springfield News Leader, Springfield, MO, before 2009, and republished in my book, House of Faith or Enchanted Forest? American Popular Belief in an Age of Reason (Cascade, 2009), 34-35.

Do Gods have Souls?

I don’t know much about God, or Gods in general; I only know what I have read and what others are happy to tell me. But I began wondering a day or so ago about the following question: do Gods have souls? The question is fraught with difficulties—defining God and defining the soul being the biggest two. Some Christian readers may even think it a silly question because the Bible describes God as spirit (John 4:24). Is it possible for spirits to have souls? In the Christian West we popularly think of ourselves as “having” souls; that is to say, an eternal immaterial aspect of a human being that leaves the material body on death. But God in the Judeo-Christian tradition does not have a material body, so how could God have a soul? Spirits (if spirits there be) have neither shape nor distinguishing form. So how can invisible spirit be indwelled by a shapeless, formless soul? The Bible says that we human beings are created “in the image of God” (Gen 1:26-27; 5:1-3; 9:6); so if we have a soul wouldn’t it logically follow that God, our prototype, also has a soul? Perhaps we do not have (as we think) souls (psyche) in the Greek sense:

In Homer the psyche is what leaves the body on death (i.e. life, or breath?) but also an insubstantial image of the dead person existing in Hades and emphatically not something alive. But some vague idea of psyche as the essence of the individual, capable of surviving the body (and perhaps entering another) is well established by the 5th century B.C.E.¹

Like God, soul is also a slippery concept. We human beings don’t all agree that there is an eternal immaterial aspect of the human being that leaves the body on death. There most certainly is, however, an animating principle in all living beings, which the authors of Genesis recognized as appertaining to Adam (Gen 2:7): “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (which is translated in the RSV as “being”).² Adam was created a living soul (psyche is the Greek word; nephesh is the Hebrew word). So perhaps we do not “have” soul; we are soul; that is, we are simply animated matter having no eternal aspect and when our matter loses its animation (i.e., dies) our matter returns to the dust from whence it came—at least that appears to be the Hebrew concept.

There is a third way of thinking about “soul” that I want to consider in connection with the question do Gods have souls. Soul by this third (dictionary) definition is “a strong positive feeling (as of intense sensitivity and emotional fervor) conveyed especially by black American performers,”³ particularly in “soul music,” which “is characterized by intensity of feelings and earthiness.”⁴ Soul by this last definition suggests, among other things, the capability of being touched to the core, among other things, by tragedies of the human condition. Does God in Western religious traditions evince such a capability? We find a few such moments in his youth during the Israelite phase of his maturation process into Christianity. Since his conversion to Christianity, however, some of his earliest votaries have been far more optimistic as to God’s ability to be deeply touched by the tragedies of the human condition; nevertheless, before his conversion, God’s behavior as depicted in the Old Testament was scarcely up to Christian standards.

If God is spirit, one can only wonder how spirits possess the capability of “feeling” deeply about anything. Feeling is one of the basic physical senses, which comes to be applied to one’s emotional demeanor. One can also wonder how it comes about that soul can be so intimately associated with spirit. At least two authors in the New Testament find spirit and soul to be two different immaterial aspects of the human constitution (1 Thess 5:23; Hebrews 4:12).

Truth be told: we humans invent our Gods;⁵ given that, why should we not, if we chose, conceive of a Great Eternal Invisible Spirit with soul in spite of Western religious traditions? The prospect of a soulless God is a terrifying thought.

How do you see it?

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

¹Christopher Rowe, Oxford Classical Dictionary (3rd ed.), 1428.

²In the Greek translation of the Bible (the Septuagint) psyche translates the Hebrew nephesh, which is rendered as “being” in the RSV.

³Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983), s.v. “soul.”

⁴Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1983), s.v. “soul music.”

⁵Blog: Wry Thoughts about Religion: “God does not Exist,” May 17, 2016.

Pondering the Human Spirit

Do human beings have an indwelling spirit, or do they have spirit? Answering affirmatively to the first question (i.e., humans have an indwelling spirit?), then one seems to be thinking dualistically. That is to say, human beings possess an inner ethereal spiritual "essence" that is distinguishable from the "stuff" of the material body.

 

            In the Western literary tradition the idea that human beings are dualistically comprised is found as early as Homer (8th century BCE?): "In Homer, the psyche [soul] is what leaves the body on death (i.e., life, or breath?), but also [it is]an insubstantial image of the dead person, existing in Hades and emphatically not something alive. But some vague idea of psyche as the essence of the individual, capable of surviving the body…is well-established by the fifth century…"¹ In the Western Philosophical tradition the survival of the soul (psyche) is well established in Plato's writings (5th century?): "Throughout the dialogues Plato expresses that a person's soul is an entity distinct from the living embodied person, attached to it…"²

 

            Among the Greeks this survivable essence of human beings was also described as spirit (pneuma), a term coterminous with psyche (soul): "[a]t death it (pneuma/psyche) is separated from [the body], for, breath-like, it escapes with the last breath, returning to fulfill its higher destiny in the element from which it came or in the upper region to which it is by nature related, in the atmosphere of heaven or the aether…"³

 

            The Apostle Paul used similar language (e.g., 1 Thess 5:23) and embraced the idea that after death there was still a future for a regenerated human being (Phil 1:19-24). Nevertheless, Paul did not share the Greek idea that the human body was a perishable shell housing an eternal spirit or soul; rather, Paul shared the Hebrew idea (Gen 2:7) that people are living beings whose perishable nature in the end will become imperishable, immortal, and spiritual (1 Cor 15:35-57; what is transformed is the whole person not an ethereal spirit or soul that indwells the body and leaves the body behind at death. Although at times he certainly sounds dualistic (2 Cor 5:1-10).⁴

 

            In a secular modern sense, however, the human spirit is regarded as "an attitude or principle that inspires, animates, or pervades thought, feeling, or action."⁵ To judge from human behavior the human spirit can be either evil or idealistic—that is, it can inspire actions that are either egregiously harmful or inspirationally helpful to the human situation. The seat of attitudes lies in the mind, and arises from our intellect, emotions, fears, passions, creativity, and will, and is conditioned by our nurture and personal experiences.

 

            Hence, if the Greeks are correct, human beings are dualistically conceived; they are comprised of an eternal spirit/soul housed in a perishable body. If Paul is correct, human beings do not house either a spirit or a soul but are living beings. If current secular sentiment is correct human beings have spirit, that is to say they have attitudes that excel, flounder, or lie somewhere in between. How does it seem to you?

 

Charles W. Hedrick

Professor Emeritus

Missouri State University

 

¹Christopher Rowe, "Soul," Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1428.

²Kenneth Dover, "Plato," Oxford Classical Dictionary, 1192.

³Hermann Kleinknecht, "pneuma," Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, 6.336.

⁴For a discussion of Pauline anthropology see Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament, 203-10.

⁵Random House Dictionary, s.v. "spirit."