The Word in Focus with Dr Larry Taylor

I’ll Fly Away?

The dominant philosophy in the ancient Roman empire was Platonism. Augustine was influenced by Aristotle, who was a student of Platonic thought. Plato believed that the conscious everyday world in which we exist is only a shadow of reality. Reality is nonmaterial. The real person is a nonmaterial soul that is imprisoned in a body and that is finally released at death. 

Through Augustine, Christians came to believe that the real person is the nonmaterial soul that will fly away to heaven at death. This life is seen as nothing but preparation for the next. All that matters is “getting people saved” so they can go to heaven. Concerns about the environment, poverty, and justice are secondary. 

The problem is that that is not the biblical view. The Hebrew word nephesh, which was translated “soul” by Tyndale and the KJV literally means “throat.” It is used as a metonymy to refer to a whole, living, breathing person.  The New Testament Greek equivalent of the Hebrew nephesh is psyche.

Nephesh is never used to refer to a disembodied nonmaterial part of ourselves. In Hebrew thought, the nephesh is the entire person. Therefore, in Old Testament thought, when a person dies, they are dead until the future resurrection at which time the entire person, the nephesh is once again alive, this time in an unkillable body.

Psyche is used the same way in the New Testament – to describe the whole person –  with two exceptions. In Matthew 10:28, Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the psyche; rather, fear the one who can destroy both psyche and body in Gehenna.” In Revelation 6:9, John the revelator says, “I saw under the altar the psyches of those who had been slaughtered for the word of God and for the testimony they had given…”

Those exceptions prove the rule. Both nephesh and psyche refer to the whole person. Paul speaks of being absent from the body and present with the Lord (2 Corinthians 5:8), and of departing to be with Messiah (Philippians 1:23).

The difference between what Paul believed and what Augustine taught is that for Paul, John, and Jesus, there is a temporary state between death and resurrection in which a person is conscious and with Messiah, whereas what Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine taught (and what many believe today) is that the body stays dead and disintegrates while the disembodied nephesh or psyche lives on. 

The difference matters. At death, we do not fly away to a better place, at last able to escape the bodily prison. That’s Platonism, not biblical Christianity. That belief leads to downplaying the importance of our bodies and the material world. It leads to bodily disrespect and environmental exploitation. We think the material world matters very little.

The biblical witness teaches that at death, we enter an in-between state in which we are with Jesus, awaiting the resurrection of our physical bodies at Jesus’ Parousia. When we realize that we are nephesh or psyche, not just that we have a nephesh or psyche, we embrace God’s creation as a complete whole. We can love God and all God created with our whole beings, our nephesh, our psyche. 

Similarly, the Hebrew word ruach and its Greek equivalent, pneuma, which are both normally translated as spirit, literally mean animating life energy, the divine breath that makes things alive, rather than implying that there is a disembodied you that can exist apart from the body.

The whole thrust of the biblical narrative leads to resurrection. Resurrection of our bodies and of the cosmos, of all that exists. The material universe is to be redeemed, made new, not destroyed. 2 Peter 3 and Revelation 19 are mistranslated in the KJV to imply that God will wipe out the cosmos and start over again. God is making all things new. God will refine by metaphoric fire, but not destroy. 

The Bible teaches that the material universe, including our bodies, is good. Scripture points to the time when heaven comes to earth and the two are united once again as described in the opening verses of Genesis. The goal, the telos, is heaven expanding to include all there is, not us dying and flying away. It’s about renewal, not escape.