Chapter 15
If you have been following the argument of this book so far, you have seen something remarkable. From Genesis to the Psalms, from the Prophets to the Gospels, from the narratives of death and return to the visions of the departed in Revelation, Scripture paints a consistent picture: human beings are more than their bodies. We are body and soul. Body and spirit. Dust breathed into by God, animated by something that transcends the dust itself.
We now turn to the apostle Paul and to the other epistolary writers of the New Testament. And what we find is that the same anthropological framework we have traced through the Old Testament and the Gospels appears here too—often in strikingly explicit language. Paul speaks of spirit, soul, and body as distinct dimensions of the human person. The author of Hebrews describes the Word of God as dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow. James writes that the body without the spirit is dead. Paul tells the Corinthians that he is absent in body but present in spirit. And in Romans, Paul distinguishes between the human spirit and the Holy Spirit in a way that presupposes both are real.
These are not obscure passages buried in footnotes. They are some of the most theologically concentrated statements in the entire New Testament. And they all point in the same direction: toward a view of human nature that includes an immaterial dimension—a spirit or soul that is genuinely distinct from the physical body.
Here is what makes this chapter especially important for our conversation with Edward Fudge. Of the six passages we will examine in this chapter, Fudge discussed only two—1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12. The other four—Romans 8:10, Romans 8:16, 1 Corinthians 5:3–5, and James 2:26—are never addressed in The Fire That Consumes.1 He simply passes them by. This is a pattern we have seen throughout this book: when a passage clearly distinguishes body and spirit in a way that supports substance dualism, Fudge either reinterprets it through a physicalist lens or ignores it entirely.
That pattern matters. Because when you take all six of these passages together—and when you read them alongside the dozens of passages we have already examined in earlier chapters—the cumulative weight becomes very difficult to dismiss. Paul’s anthropological vocabulary is not confused. It is not careless. And it is not merely “synecdoche,” as the holistic monists so often claim. It reflects a genuine understanding of human nature as composite—body and spirit joined together in life, separated at death, and reunited at the resurrection.
So let’s look at the texts. Let’s see what Paul and his fellow apostolic writers actually say. And let’s ask honestly: does the evidence support the physicalist reading that Fudge assumes, or does it support the substance dualist reading that the church has affirmed for two thousand years?
Text (NKJV): “Now may the God of peace Himself sanctify you completely; and may your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.”
This is one of the most discussed anthropological texts in the entire New Testament, and for good reason. Paul prays that the Thessalonians be sanctified completely—and then he specifies what he means by “completely.” He asks that their whole spirit (pneuma), soul (psyche), and body (soma) be preserved blameless at Christ’s return.
Three terms. Three distinct Greek words. And the adjective holokleron (“whole” or “complete”) governs all three, suggesting that Paul envisions the sanctification of the entire person in all of that person’s dimensions.2
Now, what are we to make of these three terms? Some interpreters have used this verse to argue for trichotomy—the view that human beings consist of three distinct parts: body, soul, and spirit. Others have pushed back hard, insisting that Paul is merely using three overlapping words to emphasize the totality of the person. The monist reading says: Paul is simply piling up synonyms for emphasis, like saying “heart, soul, mind, and strength” in the Great Commandment. He is not trying to give us a philosophical anatomy of human nature.
There is a kernel of truth in the monist objection. I do not think Paul is teaching trichotomy here. Most substance dualists throughout church history have been dichotomists, holding that “soul” and “spirit” are two ways of referring to the same immaterial reality, not two separate substances.3 Cooper makes this point well: while trichotomy was popular among some Greek-speaking church fathers like Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa, dichotomy emerged as the more dominant and eventually orthodox view, especially among the Latin fathers and given lasting status by Augustine.4
But here is where the monist interpretation overreaches. The fact that Paul is not teaching trichotomy does not mean he is teaching monism. There is a vast middle ground between “three separate compartments” and “one undifferentiated substance.” The dualist reading says: Paul distinguishes the immaterial dimensions of the person (spirit and soul) from the material dimension (body). He may use “spirit” and “soul” to pick out different aspects or functions of the same immaterial self—spirit as the aspect that relates to God, soul as the aspect that encompasses personal consciousness and emotional life—but both are distinguished from the body. The triad is not three separate substances. It is one immaterial self viewed from two angles, plus the physical body.
Cooper acknowledges that this passage is “philosophically indeterminate” in the strictest sense—that is, it does not by itself prove any particular metaphysical theory.5 He is right about that. You cannot build an entire anthropology on a single benediction. But Cooper also makes a crucial observation that the monists tend to overlook: this passage is perfectly compatible with dualism, and it does absolutely nothing to support monism. As Cooper puts it, Paul’s mode of expression “underdetermines all philosophical theories alike. But of course it then supplies no ammunition for monism against dualism.”6
That last point is worth pausing over. Physicalists like Fudge often cite 1 Thessalonians 5:23 as evidence for their “whole person” anthropology—as if the presence of the word “whole” proves that human beings cannot be divided into parts. But that is a non sequitur. Saying that God sanctifies the whole person does not mean the person has no distinguishable parts. When a doctor says she will examine you “from head to toe,” she is not denying that heads and toes are different body parts. She is emphasizing thoroughness. Paul is doing the same thing. He wants God’s sanctifying work to reach every dimension of the believer’s existence—the spirit that communes with God, the soul that feels and chooses and desires, and the body that acts in the physical world. The emphasis on wholeness actually requires that there be distinguishable dimensions to sanctify.
Think about it this way. If Paul believed that human beings were simply physical organisms with no immaterial dimension, why would he mention “spirit” and “soul” at all? Why not just say, “May God sanctify your whole body”? On a physicalist view, that should be sufficient—because the body is all there is. The very fact that Paul adds pneuma and psyche to the list suggests that he understands the human person as more than a body. He names these additional dimensions because they are real—and because they, too, need God’s sanctifying work.7
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does mention 1 Thessalonians 5:23 in The Fire That Consumes, but only in the context of his broader claim that biblical anthropological terms refer to the “whole person” rather than to separable parts. He treats the verse as evidence for his holistic reading, essentially arguing that “spirit, soul, and body” are three ways of saying “you.”8 What he does not do is engage the dualist reading of this text or explain why Paul would bother listing three terms if they all referred to the same undifferentiated whole. This is a recurring weakness in Fudge’s exegesis: he notices the holistic emphasis without asking what the holistic emphasis is about. Sanctifying the whole person presupposes that the whole person has distinguishable parts.
Text (NKJV): “For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.”
This magnificent verse describes the penetrating power of God’s Word. The imagery is vivid: a double-edged sword that cuts so deeply it reaches the boundary between soul (psyche) and spirit (pneuma), between joints and marrow. Nothing in the human person is hidden from the Word of God. It discerns the thoughts and intentions of the heart itself.
The key Greek phrase is merismos psyches kai pneumatos—“division of soul and spirit.” The word merismos means “division” or “separation.” The author is saying that the Word of God is so sharp, so penetrating, that it can reach the place where soul and spirit meet—and it can distinguish between them.9
The monist reading of this passage argues that the author is actually supporting holism. The reasoning goes like this: joints and marrow are not normally separable. They are organically bound together. So “dividing joints and marrow” does not mean pulling them apart into separate substances; it means penetrating so deeply that even the most intimate connections are laid bare. By analogy, “dividing soul and spirit” does not mean they are two separable things. It means the Word of God searches the deepest recesses of human inner life, where everything is bound together in a seamless whole.10
Cooper acknowledges this reading as possible. He writes that one could argue that the terms “suggest a separability of referents,” but that “in neither text is the suggestion strong enough to justify the claim that one member of the pair could survive separation from the other at death.”11 This is a careful, honest assessment. And it is one more reminder that no single verse, taken in isolation, proves dualism beyond all dispute.
But I want to press the point a bit further than Cooper does here. Consider what the monist reading actually requires. It requires us to believe that the author of Hebrews chose a metaphor of division—of cutting between two things—in order to communicate unity. That is an unusual rhetorical move, to say the least. If you wanted to emphasize that soul and spirit are inseparable, would you really describe the Word of God as dividing them? The imagery of a two-edged sword cutting between things naturally suggests that there are two things to cut between. The analogy with joints and marrow actually helps the dualist here: joints and marrow really are distinct realities, even though they are intimately connected. You need a very sharp instrument to find the boundary between them. The point is not that they are the same substance—the point is that the Word of God can reach even the most hidden boundaries within the human person.12
Furthermore, this verse does not exist in a vacuum. It appears in a letter that also refers to “the spirits of just men made perfect” (Heb. 12:23)—a phrase that clearly describes the disembodied righteous dead in the heavenly Jerusalem. If the author of Hebrews believes that the spirits of the righteous dead exist apart from their bodies, then the distinction between soul and spirit on one hand and the body on the other is not merely rhetorical. It reflects a genuine anthropological conviction.13
And here is the deeper issue. Even if Hebrews 4:12, taken strictly on its own, does not conclusively prove dualism, it certainly does not prove monism either. The monist must explain why the author chose the language of division between psyche and pneuma if he believed there was nothing to divide. At very minimum, the author assumes that soul and spirit are meaningful, distinguishable realities within the human person—not identical terms for the same undifferentiated whole.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not directly exegete Hebrews 4:12 at length in The Fire That Consumes, but his broader treatment of anthropological vocabulary implies the same “whole person” reading we see elsewhere. He treats “soul” and “spirit” as overlapping terms for the living person rather than as references to distinct immaterial realities. Once again, what is missing is any engagement with the dualist reading of the passage or any explanation of why the language of “division” would be chosen if soul and spirit were truly indistinguishable.
Key Argument: The two passages Fudge actually discusses in this chapter’s set—1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12—are treated by him as evidence for a holistic, undifferentiated view of the person. But in both cases, the text itself uses language that distinguishes immaterial and material dimensions of the human person. Paul names spirit, soul, and body as distinct dimensions requiring sanctification. Hebrews describes the Word of God dividing soul from spirit. The holistic emphasis in these texts is about the thoroughness of God’s work, not about the absence of real distinctions within the person.
Text (NKJV): “And if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness.”
Romans 8 is one of the most theologically rich chapters in all of Scripture. It announces the cosmic power of the gospel—the assurance of salvation, the work of the Holy Spirit, the renewal of creation, and the unshakable promise that nothing can separate the believer from God’s love in Christ. Within this grand sweep, Paul makes a remarkable anthropological statement in verse 10.
The key exegetical question is whether pneuma (“Spirit” or “spirit”) in this verse refers to the Holy Spirit or to the human spirit. English translations are divided. Some capitalize it (“the Spirit is life”), suggesting the Holy Spirit. Others lowercase it (“the spirit is life”), pointing to the human spirit. The Greek text, of course, does not distinguish between uppercase and lowercase.14
The context helps us navigate this. The preceding verses (Rom. 8:5–9) have been discussing the contrast between those who live “according to the flesh” and those who live “according to the Spirit.” The Holy Spirit is clearly in view throughout. But verse 10 introduces a new contrast: the body is dead because of sin, but the spirit is life because of righteousness. The structure of the sentence sets “body” and “spirit” as two contrasting realities within the believer’s experience. If pneuma here refers exclusively to the Holy Spirit, then Paul is comparing the believer’s body (a human thing) with the Holy Spirit (a divine Person)—which is an oddly asymmetric comparison. It makes better sense to read verse 10 as saying: even though your physical body is subject to death because of sin, your spirit—your immaterial self, now indwelt and animated by the Holy Spirit—is alive because of the righteousness of Christ.15
On this reading, Paul is making an anthropological distinction. The body and the spirit are not the same reality viewed from different angles. They are two dimensions of the believer’s existence that have two different conditions: the body remains mortal, headed for physical death; the spirit is alive, already participating in the life that Christ’s righteousness has secured. This distinction only makes sense if the spirit is genuinely different from the body. On a physicalist reading, where the “spirit” is just a way of talking about the body’s functions, it would be incoherent to say that the body is dead but the spirit is alive. You cannot have part of a purely physical organism be dead while the same organism is simultaneously alive—unless you are distinguishing between material and immaterial dimensions of the person.
Cooper’s essay in Christian Physicalism draws attention to the broader theological implication of Romans 8: the chapter climaxes with the declaration that nothing—not even death—can separate us from the love of God in Christ (Rom. 8:38–39). Cooper argues that this promise only makes full sense if believers actually continue to exist after physical death. The love of God is interpersonal and reciprocal; it is not God loving the memory of someone who no longer exists. The substance dualist has a coherent reading here: at death, the spirit continues in fellowship with God even as the body lies in the grave. The physicalist has no such resource.16
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not address Romans 8:10 in The Fire That Consumes. This is a significant omission. A verse that contrasts the deadness of the body with the life of the spirit in the same sentence is directly relevant to the anthropological question. Fudge’s silence here leaves unaddressed one of Paul’s clearest statements of the body-spirit distinction.
Text (NKJV): “The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”
Just six verses later in the same chapter, Paul makes another statement with enormous anthropological significance. The Holy Spirit, he says, bears witness with our spirit (symmartyrei to pneumati hemon) that we are God’s children.
Notice the structure. There are two spirits in this verse. One is the Holy Spirit—“the Spirit Himself” (auto to pneuma). The other is “our spirit” (to pneuma hemon). The prefix sym- on the verb symmartyrei means “together with.” The Holy Spirit testifies together with our spirit. Two witnesses. Two spirits. One divine, one human.17
This is remarkably clear language. Paul presupposes that the human person possesses a spirit—a pneuma that is genuinely the person’s own, distinct from the Holy Spirit, and capable of receiving and registering the Spirit’s testimony. The human spirit is not just a metaphor for the “whole person.” It is a real dimension of the human person that can interact with the divine Spirit in an act of mutual witness.
The physicalist might respond: “But ‘our spirit’ could just mean ‘our inner life’ or ‘our consciousness’—it does not have to mean an immaterial substance.” Fair enough, as far as it goes. But the physicalist still has a problem. If the human spirit is just a way of describing brain activity or the functioning of the body’s nervous system, then Paul is saying that the Holy Spirit—the third Person of the Trinity—testifies together with a set of electrochemical impulses. That may be what the physicalist is committed to, but it seems a rather deflating reading of Paul’s language. The natural reading is that the human spirit is a genuine immaterial center of consciousness—the “deep self,” as some scholars put it—and that this deep self is capable of communion with God at a level that transcends ordinary bodily experience.18
J. P. Moreland argues that the existence of a human spirit that can receive direct testimony from the Holy Spirit is exactly what substance dualism predicts. If human beings are entirely physical, it is hard to see how a divine, immaterial Person could “bear witness with” a purely material system. But if humans possess an immaterial spirit that is ontologically suited to interact with the divine Spirit, the passage makes elegant sense.19
Furthermore, the verb symmartyrei implies a kind of cooperation or joint testimony. It is not just the Holy Spirit testifying to us (as if we were passive recipients). It is the Holy Spirit testifying with us—alongside our spirit. Our spirit is an active participant in the testimony. That requires the human spirit to be a real, functioning entity capable of bearing witness—not just a figure of speech for the body’s overall state.20
There is something else worth noticing here. Paul does not say that the Holy Spirit bears witness to our brains or to our bodies or to our neural networks. He says the Spirit bears witness with our spirit. The locus of this divine-human encounter is the human pneuma—the immaterial core of the person. This is the same reality that other New Testament writers call the “inner man” (2 Cor. 4:16; Eph. 3:16) and the “hidden person of the heart” (1 Pet. 3:4). It is the deep self that is known by God and capable of knowing God in return. And it is described in terms that consistently transcend the merely physical.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge does not address Romans 8:16 in The Fire That Consumes. This is another conspicuous absence. A verse that explicitly names a human pneuma as distinct from the Holy Spirit’s pneuma—and describes the two as bearing witness together—is directly relevant to whether humans possess an immaterial spirit. Fudge’s silence leaves this important piece of evidence untouched.
Insight: Romans 8:10 and 8:16, taken together, present a powerful picture. The body is mortal, but the spirit is alive (v. 10). The Holy Spirit testifies together with the human spirit that we are God’s children (v. 16). Paul treats the human spirit as a real, distinguishable dimension of the person—one that has its own condition (alive vs. dead) and its own capacity (to receive divine testimony). This is not the language of a writer who thinks humans are just bodies.
Text (NKJV): “For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.”
This passage arises from one of the most painful situations in Paul’s ministry. A man in the Corinthian church is living in sexual immorality of a kind that even the surrounding pagan culture would consider shocking (1 Cor. 5:1). Paul, writing from a distance, pronounces judgment on the man and instructs the church to take disciplinary action. And in doing so, he makes a striking anthropological statement: “I am absent in body but present in spirit.”
The Greek is apon to somati paron de to pneumati—“being absent in the body but being present in the spirit.” Two contrasting participles. Two contrasting prepositional phrases. Paul’s body is in one place, but his spirit is in another. He draws a clear distinction between where his body is (far from Corinth) and where his spirit is (present with the Corinthian assembly in the act of judgment).21
Now, the physicalist will immediately object: “Paul is just speaking figuratively. He means that although he is physically absent, he is thinking about them and has made his judgment known through this letter. It is not really different from us saying, ‘I’ll be there in spirit.’”
I understand the objection. And yes, there is a colloquial sense in which we say things like “I’m with you in spirit” without meaning it ontologically. But consider two things.
First, Paul’s language is more specific than a casual idiom. He does not just say “I’m thinking of you.” He says his spirit will be present when they gather. He uses the same contrastive structure—body in one place, spirit in another—that he uses in 2 Corinthians 5:6–8 when he speaks of being “absent from the body and present with the Lord.” In that passage, the body-spirit contrast is clearly anthropological, referring to the state of the person after death. Paul uses the same kind of language here, which suggests he is drawing on the same anthropological framework: the person is not reducible to the body. The spirit can be “present” in a way that the body is not.22
Second, the passage goes further. In verse 5, Paul instructs the church to deliver the offending man to Satan “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.” Here Paul explicitly contrasts two dimensions of the man’s existence: the flesh (sarx) and the spirit (pneuma). The flesh is given over for destruction; the spirit is aimed at salvation. Whatever exactly “destruction of the flesh” means—and commentators debate this—the point is that Paul treats the flesh and the spirit as having different fates. The flesh may be destroyed, but the spirit can be saved. That is a distinction between material and immaterial dimensions of the person, and it only makes sense if the spirit is something genuinely other than the flesh.23
This passage also has implications for the intermediate state. If the spirit can be “present” independently of the body (even in some qualified sense during this life), and if the spirit can be “saved in the day of the Lord” even when the flesh is destroyed, then Paul’s anthropology includes an immaterial dimension that is not dependent on the body for its continued existence. That is exactly what substance dualism affirms.
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge completely ignores 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 in The Fire That Consumes. He never addresses Paul’s explicit body-spirit contrast in this passage, nor the distinction between the destruction of the flesh and the salvation of the spirit. This is a passage where Paul’s dualist language is hard to miss, and Fudge’s silence is telling.
Text (NKJV): “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
James is not writing a treatise on anthropology here. He is making a point about the relationship between faith and works. Faith without works, he says, is like a body without a spirit—dead. It is a simple analogy. But simple analogies only work if they are based on something the audience already accepts as true. And the assumed truth behind James’s analogy is this: the body without the spirit is dead.
Think about what that statement presupposes. It presupposes that the body and the spirit are two distinguishable realities. It presupposes that the spirit is what gives life to the body. And it presupposes that when the spirit departs from the body, the body dies. In other words, James is assuming the very anthropological framework that substance dualism teaches: the human person is a union of body and spirit, and death is the separation of the two.24
The Greek word used here for “spirit” is pneumatos (genitive of pneuma). Some translations render it “breath” rather than “spirit”—and the physicalist might seize on this. “A body without breath is dead. That is just a biological observation, not a metaphysical claim.” But this objection does not hold up well under scrutiny. As we have seen repeatedly throughout this book, the biblical words for “spirit” and “breath” overlap in their semantic range—ruach in Hebrew, pneuma in Greek—precisely because the ancient writers understood that the “breath of life” was more than just respiration. It was the life-force, the animating principle, the immaterial reality that God breathes into the body to make it a living person. When Genesis 2:7 says God breathed the “breath of life” into Adam’s nostrils, it is not talking about oxygen exchange. It is talking about the gift of life itself—a reality that comes from God and transcends the material.25
James 2:26 mirrors the creation account in reverse. God put the spirit into the body, and the body became alive. When the spirit departs, the body dies. This is the same pattern we see in Ecclesiastes 12:7 (“the spirit returns to God who gave it”), in Genesis 35:18 (Rachel’s soul departing at death), and in 1 Kings 17:21–22 (the child’s soul returning to his body at Elijah’s prayer). The consistent biblical picture is that death is the departure of the spirit from the body—and life is their union. James takes this for granted. He does not argue for it. He simply assumes it as common knowledge that his readers will immediately recognize.
And that assumption matters. If the earliest Christian readers of James’s letter would have instantly understood that “a body without the spirit is dead” is a statement about the real relationship between body and spirit, then the anthropological framework of the apostolic church included a genuine distinction between the material body and the immaterial spirit. James did not need to prove this. He assumed it. It was woven into the fabric of early Christian belief.
Moreland and Rae draw attention to the fact that James’s analogy works precisely because the relationship between body and spirit is a natural, well-understood relationship in the biblical worldview. The spirit gives life to the body. Works give life to faith. Remove the spirit, and the body is dead. Remove works, and faith is dead. The analogy collapses if the body-spirit distinction is merely figurative—because then James would be comparing a real thing (faith needing works) with a non-real thing (a body supposedly not actually needing a spirit). The analogy requires the body-spirit relationship to be real.26
Fudge’s Treatment: Fudge completely ignores James 2:26 in The Fire That Consumes. This is perhaps the most surprising omission in this chapter’s set. Here is a verse that states, in plain and unambiguous language, that the body without the spirit is dead. It treats the body-spirit distinction as a basic, uncontroversial fact of human existence. And Fudge says nothing about it. For a book that builds an entire anthropology on the claim that human beings are holistic, undivided wholes, the silence on James 2:26 is a significant gap.
Common Objection: “James is just speaking figuratively. ‘The body without the spirit is dead’ is a common-sense observation about breathing, not a philosophical statement about substance dualism.”
Response: This objection undersells what James is doing. His analogy relies on a real, recognized relationship between body and spirit. If the body-spirit distinction were merely a figure of speech—if there were no real spirit that gives life to the body—then the analogy would have no force. You cannot compare a real relationship (faith needs works) with a fictional one (the body supposedly does not really need a spirit). James’s point works because his audience already believed that the spirit is the real, life-giving principle that animates the body. And that belief—shared across the Old and New Testaments—is a core commitment of substance dualism.
We have now walked through six passages from the Pauline and general epistles. Two of them (1 Thessalonians 5:23 and Hebrews 4:12) Fudge discussed, though briefly and without engaging the dualist reading. Four of them (Romans 8:10, Romans 8:16, 1 Corinthians 5:3–5, and James 2:26) Fudge completely ignored. Together, they paint a consistent picture—one that confirms and extends everything we have seen in the Old Testament and the Gospels.
That picture has several features.
First, Paul and the other epistle writers use anthropological vocabulary that consistently distinguishes the immaterial from the material. They speak of spirit and body as two different dimensions of the person. They contrast the deadness of the body with the life of the spirit. They describe the person as present in spirit while absent in body. They assume that when the spirit departs, the body dies. This is not the language of monism. It is the language of a genuine ontological distinction between material and immaterial.
Second, these writers are not confused or careless in their use of these terms. Paul distinguishes between the Holy Spirit and the human spirit with precision (Rom. 8:16). He contrasts body and spirit as having different conditions and different fates (Rom. 8:10; 1 Cor. 5:3–5). James uses the body-spirit distinction as the basis for a theological analogy that only works if the distinction is real (James 2:26). These are not accidental word choices. They reflect an underlying anthropological conviction that the human person includes both a material body and an immaterial spirit.
Third, these passages are entirely compatible with substance dualism and deeply problematic for physicalism. The substance dualist reads these texts naturally: the spirit is the immaterial dimension of the person, genuinely distinct from the body, capable of existing in a different state or location than the body, and responsible for giving life to the body. The physicalist must explain all of these passages away—treating “spirit” as a metaphor, reducing it to bodily function, or dismissing the language as merely idiomatic. That is a heavy exegetical burden, especially when the physicalist interpretation requires the same reductive moves in passage after passage after passage.
Cooper makes a vital observation about the cumulative weight of this evidence. He notes that if all occurrences of anthropological terms in the New Testament were cases of synecdoche—where “soul” or “spirit” simply meant “the whole person”—then monism might be a reasonable inference. But if there are cases where these terms genuinely imply a distinction between material and immaterial, then the most reasonable conclusion is that the New Testament teaches an anthropology that is both holistic and dualistic.27 The passages we have examined in this chapter are precisely such cases. Paul and James are not merely using “spirit” as a synonym for “person.” They are treating the spirit as a genuine, distinguishable reality within the person—one that has its own condition, its own capacity, and its own relationship to the body.
The strongest physicalist counter-argument is the synecdoche defense: when Paul says “spirit,” he just means “me.” When James says “body without the spirit,” he just means “a dead person.” But as we have seen, this defense collapses when pressed. Synecdoche works when a part-term refers to the whole, like saying “all hands on deck.” But in these passages, spirit and body are explicitly contrasted—set over against each other as having different conditions, different locations, different fates. You do not contrast something with itself. If spirit and body are just two words for the same thing, the contrasts make no sense. But if they are two genuinely distinct dimensions of the person, the contrasts are perfectly natural.28
Rickabaugh and Moreland observe that the New Testament writers inherited an anthropological framework from the Old Testament and from Second Temple Judaism that already included a real distinction between body and spirit. The Pharisees, with whom Jesus sided against the Sadducees on the question of the resurrection, affirmed the existence of spirits and angels (Acts 23:8). The intertestamental literature consistently depicts the dead as conscious spirits awaiting resurrection. Paul, trained as a Pharisee, would have absorbed this anthropological framework as part of his theological formation. When he writes about spirit and body, he is not importing Greek philosophy into his theology. He is articulating a view of human nature that was already part of his Jewish heritage—refined and confirmed by his encounter with the risen Christ.29
And this brings us back to Fudge. Of the six passages examined in this chapter, Fudge discussed two and ignored four. The two he discussed were treated as evidence for holistic monism—despite the fact that their language actually distinguishes immaterial and material dimensions of the person. The four he ignored are among the clearest body-spirit contrasts in the entire New Testament. This is not a minor oversight. It is a pattern we have documented throughout this book: Fudge’s physicalist framework causes him to bypass, reinterpret, or simply not notice the biblical evidence for substance dualism. The epistolary evidence examined in this chapter makes the pattern unmistakable. Paul’s anthropology is not monistic. It is dualistic and holistic at the same time—recognizing both the unity of the person in this life and the genuine distinction between body and spirit that becomes visible at death. The two are not in conflict. They are two sides of the same biblical coin.
The passages in this chapter connect powerfully with texts we have examined elsewhere in this book. The body-spirit distinction in Romans 8:10 and 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 echoes the same distinction we saw in the creation account of Genesis 2:7 (Chapter 5), where God formed the body from dust and breathed into it the breath of life. The body comes from the earth; the spirit comes from God. These are two distinct sources, two distinct “ingredients,” as Cooper puts it, that come together to form the living person.30
James 2:26’s statement that “the body without the spirit is dead” is the New Testament counterpart to the Old Testament death narratives examined in Chapter 6—Rachel’s soul departing as she died (Gen. 35:18), the child’s soul returning at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 17:21–22), and the spirit returning to God at death (Eccl. 12:7). All of these passages assume the same thing: death is the separation of spirit from body, and life is their reunion. James takes this pattern for granted. It was common knowledge among the first Christians.
The contrast between body and spirit in 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 anticipates and parallels Paul’s more famous statement in 2 Corinthians 5:6–8 (examined in Chapter 13): “absent from the body, present with the Lord.” In both passages, Paul uses the same contrastive structure—absent in body, present in spirit—to describe the separability of the person’s material and immaterial dimensions. This is not a one-time slip of the pen. It is a consistent pattern in Paul’s anthropological language.
Romans 8:16’s reference to the human spirit receiving testimony from the Holy Spirit connects to Jesus’s distinction between “spirit” and “flesh” in Matthew 26:41 (Chapter 11): “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” In both cases, the inner, immaterial dimension of the person is contrasted with the outer, physical dimension—and the two are treated as genuinely distinct realities with different capacities and conditions.
Finally, 1 Thessalonians 5:23’s prayer for the sanctification of spirit, soul, and body connects to the broader Pauline theme of the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15:35–49 (Chapter 18). Paul’s vision of the resurrection requires both a body and an immaterial continuity. The soul or spirit is the thread that connects the earthly person to the resurrected person. Without it, the resurrection is a recreation from scratch—and the resurrected person is a copy, not the same individual. We explored this problem in detail in Chapter 10 (Matthew 10:28) and will return to it in Chapter 31. The Pauline anthropology we see in this chapter provides the framework within which the resurrection makes sense.31
Why does this matter for the church? Because the Pauline anthropological framework is not just an academic curiosity. It shapes how we understand our relationship with God, our experience of sanctification, and our hope in the face of death.
When Paul prays for the sanctification of spirit, soul, and body, he is telling us that God’s transforming work reaches every dimension of who we are. He is not just renewing our behavior (body). He is renewing our desires, our affections, our deepest self (soul and spirit). A physicalist anthropology flattens this. If the “spirit” is just a way of talking about brain states, then sanctification is ultimately just neural rewiring. But Paul’s language suggests something deeper: God is at work in an immaterial dimension of our being that is real, that relates to Him directly, and that can be transformed by His Spirit.32
When Romans 8:16 tells us that the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God, it is describing an intimate, person-to-person encounter at the deepest level of our being. This is not just a theological proposition we accept with our brains. It is a reality we experience in our spirits. Every Christian who has felt the inner assurance of God’s love—that deep, wordless knowing that you belong to Him—has experienced what Paul is describing. The physicalist says that experience is nothing more than a pattern of neural activity. The dualist says it is the Holy Spirit communing with your spirit. Only one of those readings does justice to what believers actually experience.
And when James tells us that the body without the spirit is dead, he is telling us something profoundly hopeful about the Christian dead. Their bodies are in the grave. But their spirits are not. The spirit is what gives life—and the spirit of the believer is with Christ (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8). Death is real. Death is painful. But death is not the end of the person. The spirit survives, and the body will be raised. That is the Christian hope. And it only makes sense if substance dualism is true.33
For those of us in the conditional immortality movement, these pastoral implications are not optional extras. They are at the heart of what we believe. CI teaches that immortality is a gift of God, not an inherent property of the soul. Absolutely. But CI does not require us to deny the soul’s existence. It requires us only to deny its inherent indestructibility. The soul is real. The soul is created and sustained by God. And the soul can be destroyed by God if He chooses (Matt. 10:28). Between now and that final judgment, however, the souls of believers are with Christ. And the Pauline anthropological framework we have examined in this chapter makes that hope concrete, personal, and deeply comforting.
The physicalist alternative—that the person ceases to exist at death and must be recreated from scratch at the resurrection—robs us of that comfort. If my deceased mother does not exist right now, then she is not with Christ right now. She is nowhere. She is nothing. And the promise that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” is just a figure of speech—a phenomenological description of something that is not actually happening. I do not believe that is what Paul meant. I do not believe that is what James assumed. And I do not believe it is what the church should teach.
Consider the difference this makes at a funeral. When we stand at the graveside and tell a grieving family that their loved one is “with the Lord,” are we telling the truth? On a substance dualist reading, yes—absolutely. The body lies before us, but the spirit has departed to be with Christ. The person is not gone. The person is more alive than ever, held in the presence of the God who loves them. On a physicalist reading, we are at best using poetic language. The person has ceased to exist. What lies before us is not a body that has lost its spirit—it is all that remains of someone who is, for the moment, simply not. The pastor who whispers to the grieving spouse, “She is with Jesus,” is not describing a present reality but expressing a future hope—that someday God will recreate her. Do you see the difference? One reading offers immediate comfort. The other asks the bereaved to find solace in an absence.
We are more than dust. We are spirit and body. And the God who formed both will preserve both—through death, through judgment, and into the glory of the resurrection. The Pauline witness we have examined in this chapter confirms it. And Fudge’s silence on four of these six passages only underscores how much of the biblical evidence his physicalist framework has left unaddressed.
↑ 1. A careful search of Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes (third edition) confirms that Romans 8:10, Romans 8:16, 1 Corinthians 5:3–5, and James 2:26 receive no substantive anthropological treatment. The first two passages are mentioned briefly in other contexts; the latter two are absent entirely from his discussion of human nature.
↑ 2. The adjective holokleron (from holos, “whole,” and kleros, “portion” or “lot”) means “complete in all parts.” See BDAG, s.v. “ὁλόκληρος.” The word itself implies that there are parts that together constitute the whole.
↑ 3. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1994), 472–478, argues for dichotomy and treats “soul” and “spirit” as two terms for the same immaterial reality, used with different nuances depending on context.
↑ 4. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, chap. 1, “The Traditional View of Body and Soul.” Cooper notes that trichotomy was “more popular among the Greek and Alexandrian church fathers who were influenced by Plato, among them Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa,” while dichotomy “emerged as the more dominant and eventually orthodox view,” especially through the influence of Augustine.
↑ 5. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, “The Holistic Emphasis of the New Testament.” Cooper writes: “While this, too, may be a simple case of synecdoche or perhaps refers to distinct but inseparable aspects of human existence, it might also be consistent with a trichotomist anthropology. There is nothing in this passage either to prove trichotomy or to rule it out.”
↑ 6. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper concludes: “Paul’s mode of expression underdetermines all philosophical theories alike. But of course it then supplies no ammunition for monism against dualism.”
↑ 7. This point is made effectively by Robert Gundry, Sōma in Biblical Theology: With Emphasis on Pauline Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), who argues that Paul’s use of soma always refers to the physical body as distinct from the immaterial self.
↑ 8. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–28. Fudge follows Wolff and Nikolainen in treating Pauline anthropological terms as overlapping ways of referring to the whole person. He does not engage the dualist reading of 1 Thessalonians 5:23 or explain why Paul lists three terms rather than one.
↑ 9. The noun merismos appears only here and in Hebrews 2:4 in the New Testament. In 2:4 it refers to “distributions” of the Holy Spirit. In 4:12 the sense is clearly “division” or “penetration to the point of separation.” See William L. Lane, Hebrews 1–8, Word Biblical Commentary 47A (Dallas: Word, 1991), 102–103.
↑ 10. This holistic reading is summarized by Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5: “One could argue that bones and marrow are not normally separable but are organically bound together. The same might therefore be true for soul and spirit.”
↑ 11. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper acknowledges that the terms “suggest a separability of referents” but cautions that the suggestion is not strong enough on its own to prove dualism from this single text.
↑ 12. F. F. Bruce, The Epistle to the Hebrews, rev. ed., New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1990), 112–113, notes that the imagery of the two-edged sword “penetrating to the very core of one’s being” presupposes distinguishable layers within the human person, not an undifferentiated whole.
↑ 13. Hebrews 12:23 refers to “the spirits of just men made perfect” (pneumasi dikaion teteleiomenon). Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, argues that these are “most probably” the righteous dead in the intermediate state, awaiting the “better resurrection” of Hebrews 11:35. This is examined in detail in Chapter 13 of this book.
↑ 14. The oldest Greek manuscripts are written entirely in uncial (capital) letters, so the distinction between “Spirit” (Holy Spirit) and “spirit” (human spirit) is a decision made by translators and editors, not something inherent in the original text.
↑ 15. Douglas Moo, The Epistle to the Romans, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), 491–493, discusses the interpretive options and notes that the body-spirit contrast in v. 10 most naturally refers to the mortal body and the regenerated human spirit, even though the Holy Spirit is the agent of that regeneration.
↑ 16. Cooper, “Absent from the Body … Present with the Lord,” in Christian Physicalism, chap. 16. Cooper argues that the love of God described in Romans 8:38–39 is “interpersonal and reciprocal” and cannot be reduced to God loving the memory of a nonexistent person. The substance dualist reading provides the metaphysical framework for the believer’s continued existence with God between death and resurrection.
↑ 17. The compound verb symmartyrei (from syn, “with,” and martyreo, “to bear witness”) clearly implies two parties engaged in a common act of testimony. See BDAG, s.v. “συμμαρτυρέω.”
↑ 18. Thomas Schreiner, Romans, Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 1998), 424–425, writes that “our spirit” refers to the deepest dimension of the believer’s inner self, the aspect of the person that is responsive to the Holy Spirit’s work.
↑ 19. J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014), chap. 4. Moreland argues that the existence of a human spirit capable of direct communion with the divine Spirit is a natural implication of substance dualism and a significant difficulty for physicalism.
↑ 20. C. E. B. Cranfield, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, vol. 1, International Critical Commentary (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1975), 403, notes the active, participatory role of the human spirit implied by symmartyrei.
↑ 21. Gordon Fee, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987), 203–205, discusses the body-spirit contrast and argues that while the language may have rhetorical force, it draws on a genuine anthropological distinction in Paul’s thought.
↑ 22. The structural parallel between 1 Corinthians 5:3 (“absent in body, present in spirit”) and 2 Corinthians 5:6–8 (“absent from the body, present with the Lord”) is noted by many commentators. In both cases, Paul uses the same contrastive framework: the person’s body is in one condition or location, while the person’s spirit or self is in another. See Anthony Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 390–391.
↑ 23. The phrase “for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved” (eis olethron tes sarkos, hina to pneuma sothe) sets flesh and spirit in explicit contrast as having different eschatological destinies. Whatever the precise meaning of “destruction of the flesh” (physical suffering, death, or the mortification of sinful desires), the point is that the spirit is distinguished from the flesh and has a different fate.
↑ 24. Peter Davids, The Epistle of James, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), 135, notes that James’s analogy presupposes the standard Jewish and early Christian understanding that the spirit is the life-giving principle that animates the body.
↑ 25. The semantic overlap between “breath” and “spirit” in both Hebrew (ruach, neshama) and Greek (pneuma) reflects the ancient understanding that the breath of life is not mere respiration but the life-force given by God. See the discussion of Genesis 2:7 in Chapter 5 of this book.
↑ 26. J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 26–27, observe that biblical analogies based on the body-spirit relationship (such as James 2:26) only work if the relationship is understood to be real, not merely figurative.
↑ 27. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper writes: “If there are such cases [where the terms imply dualism], they should be carefully examined to discover whether the implication stands up. If it does, then the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that the New Testament implies an anthropology which is both holistic and dualistic.”
↑ 28. Cooper makes the important observation that synecdoche works when a part-term is used to refer to the whole, but it does not work in contexts where the terms are explicitly contrasted with one another. See Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, where he discusses the limits of the synecdoche argument.
↑ 29. Rickabaugh and Moreland, The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism, chap. 2, “The Biblical and Theological Case for Substance Dualism.” They note that Second Temple Judaism overwhelmingly affirmed the continued existence of the dead as conscious spirits, and that Paul as a Pharisee would have inherited this framework. See also Acts 23:8, where Luke notes that the Pharisees “confess both” angels and spirits.
↑ 30. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, describes the Old Testament picture of human nature as constituted from “two different and mutually irreducible sources, elements, ingredients”—the dust of the ground and the breath or spirit from God.
↑ 31. The personal identity problem for physicalism is discussed at length in Chapters 10 and 25–27 of this book. If the person is entirely physical and the body is destroyed at death, the resurrected person must be a new creation, not the same individual. The soul or spirit provides the thread of continuity that makes the resurrected person genuinely the same person who died.
↑ 32. Moreland, The Soul, chap. 6, argues that the reality of spiritual transformation—sanctification—is best understood within a substance dualist framework, where the immaterial self is genuinely renewed by the Holy Spirit in ways that are not reducible to neurological changes.
↑ 33. Cooper, “Absent from the Body … Present with the Lord,” in Christian Physicalism, chap. 16. Cooper argues that the Christian hope for the dead—that they are consciously with Christ—depends on a dualist anthropology in which the person’s spirit survives the death of the body.