What Makes Us Human? A state of the theological debate, and a question that must be answered when studying anthropology. A fundamental shift is currently occurring in the West from a view of the self as a semidivine entity that transcends body, time, and change to a view of the self as a physical, malleable social construction of chemical interactions. Neither account is willing to receive identity from another—supremely God—as both a gift and a responsibility. Platonist or idealist ontology, with its spirit-matter dualism, has played a dominant role in philosophical and theological views of personhood. The real or “higher” self, which distinguishes humans from the nonhuman creation, is the immortal spirit (or soul or mind). This is also where the imago Dei (image of God) is centered. The body is something we inhabit and use for now but is not who we really are, certainly not forever. The closely related Neoplatonist distinction of persons into three aspects—spirit, soul, and body—a position known as trichotomy, has been a perennial temptation among a small minority of Christians.
If for Platonism all that is truly real is spiritual, then the opposite form of reductionism is materialism: there is no such thing as the soul or continued existence after bodily death. All we are and do as humans has a physical explanation. Modern science seems to support some form of materialism. Many liberal Protestant and Jewish scholars also suggest that the Old Testament is at best silent on the question of the soul and does not teach life after death. Reacting against Platonist dualism, some Christians advocate a modified monism, arguing that humans are such a unity of physical and spiritual that neither aspect may be separated or conceived distinctly from the other.
Scripture presupposes and directly affirms a distinction between the body and the soul or spirit (the dichotomy position), seen pointedly in the living soul’s presence with God after death, apart from the body. Dichotomy is not dualism; human nature is not to be identified exclusively or even primarily with the soul. The real self is the whole self, body and soul. Scripture addresses persons in their wholeness; we should not deny the (temporary) separability of body and soul in the intermediate state. While Platonism sees embodiment as a curse, biblical faith understands disembodiment as a curse.