Board index ‹ Soul, Souls, and Ensoulment

[Subjects]

Is the soul something you have or something you are?

Further, how would you describe the nature of the soul? What is it like? What is it made of? Is it possible to experience the nature of the soul directly?

[jimwalton]

According to Genesis 2.7, the soul is something we are: "Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living soul." It is equivalent to "self"—the life of an individual.

Though other verses of Scripture seem to indicate that humans are bi-partite (body and soul) or tri-partite (body, soul, and spirit), those categories don't hold since it was never the intent of the author to be making that point. In every one of the Scriptures, the author's intent was something different, so we can't depend on an argument asserting that the author was trying to make that theological point.

The soul is the part of us that connects to God. Whether it's your self, your life, or a separate part of you is pretty tough to tell, and I'm not sure that it matters. It does seem that when we die our body remains here until the resurrection, implying that something of us goes on to be with Jesus, though this is also debated.

Essentially, we are designed to connect to God, and the word "soul" is how we usually label that.