"Vandergraaf, Chuck" wrote:
> Allen,
>
> I seem to remember one of my philosophy professors mentioning that "the body
> is an expression of the soul." That would seem to fit with your reading of
> the Bible that the soul eats, gets hungry etc.
>
> When God takes the soul to heaven, the soul has no further need for the
> earthly body.
This last sentence shows how problematic the "soul" concept can be. It
is unpleasantly close to the idea held in different ways by Plato, the gnostics,
&c. that that the soul is imprisoned in the body & is released at death to go to
its true home.
The genuinely Christian idea is that we are not fully human without our
bodies. The Christian hope is not "immortality of the soul" but "resurrection
of the body." Even if one believes that we "have" souls which are separable
from our bodies, their state between physical death & the resurrection is an
interim one - in "heaven" or wherever. We should really be content to say with
the "The souls of the righteous are in the hand of God" (Wisdom 3:1).
Shalom,
George
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Oct 17 2000 - 07:43:09 EDT