Chapter Sixteen

The Inner Man and the Outer Man — Temple, Tent, and Duality in the Epistles

A. Introduction — Two Men in One Person

Imagine you are standing in front of a mirror. What you see is real—your face, your hands, the clothes on your back. But there is something about you the mirror cannot catch. Something deeper. The thoughts you are thinking right now. The hope that lives in the place no surgeon has ever found. The quiet voice of conscience that speaks when no one else is in the room. You know those things are you—perhaps more you than the face staring back from the glass.

The apostle Paul knew it too. And he said so—repeatedly, in language so natural and unguarded that it is hard to imagine he was working from a physicalist script. Paul spoke of an "outward man" that is perishing and an "inward man" that is being renewed. He described the human body as a temple—a building that houses something, or rather Someone. He urged believers to pursue holiness in both "body and spirit," as though those two dimensions of a person could be separately addressed. He told the Colossians that though he was absent in the flesh, he was with them in spirit. Every one of these statements assumes that a human being has two distinguishable aspects: an outer, physical dimension and an inner, immaterial one.

That is the theme of this chapter. We are going to walk through six passages from the Pauline and epistolary writings that employ this kind of inner-outer, body-spirit, flesh-and-spirit language. Each one paints the same picture: the human person is not a single undifferentiated lump of matter, but a composite of body and soul, outer and inner, temple and tenant.¹

Here is what makes this chapter especially striking. Every single passage we are about to examine was completely ignored by Edward Fudge in The Fire That Consumes. Not discussed. Not listed. Not engaged at all. Six passages—all of them relevant to the question of human nature, all of them using language that naturally supports a body-soul distinction—and Fudge never so much as mentioned one of them.² That silence, as we will see, is not accidental. It is the predictable result of reading Scripture through a physicalist lens that simply cannot accommodate what Paul is saying in these texts.

Why does that matter? Because the question of what a human being is sits at the very foundation of what happens to a human being when they die. If we are only bodies—material organisms with no immaterial core—then when the body stops working, we stop existing. Full stop. There is nothing left to be "with Christ" between death and resurrection. But if we are body and soul, outer man and inner man, then the dissolution of the body is not the dissolution of the person. The inner man can persist even when the outer man is wasting away. That is exactly what Paul says. And Fudge never dealt with it.

The passages for this chapter are: 2 Corinthians 4:16, 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, 2 Corinthians 7:1, Ephesians 3:16, 1 Corinthians 7:34, and Colossians 2:5. Together they form a cluster of texts that reveal how the early church understood the architecture of the human person: an inner self housed in an outer body, a spirit dwelling in a bodily temple, a person who can be holy in both dimensions—because there genuinely are two dimensions to be holy in.

We will work through each passage carefully, paying attention to the Greek terms Paul uses, noting how they contribute to the cumulative case for substance dualism, and observing the consistent silence of The Fire That Consumes on every one of them. By the end of this chapter, the pattern will be unmistakable.

Before we begin, a word about method. Some readers may wonder whether Paul intended these inner-outer, body-spirit contrasts as statements about what the human person is—about ontology—or whether he was simply using conventional language without any philosophical intent. That is a fair question, and we will address it head-on in the synthesis section. For now, let me say this: Paul was not a philosopher writing a treatise on the mind-body problem. He was an apostle writing letters to real churches about real issues—suffering, holiness, sexual ethics, prayer, pastoral care. But precisely because he was addressing real issues, his anthropological assumptions leak through. You cannot talk about the inner man being renewed while the outer man perishes without assuming there is an inner man. You cannot call the body a temple without assuming that the temple houses something other than itself. You cannot urge holiness in "both body and spirit" without assuming there are two things to be holy in. These are not throwaway phrases. They are the unguarded assumptions of a man who believed—deeply, instinctively, theologically—that human beings are made of body and soul.

B. Passage Expositions

1. 2 Corinthians 4:16 — The Outward Man Perishing, the Inward Man Renewed

“Therefore we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.” (2 Corinthians 4:16, NKJV)

Key Terms. The phrase Paul uses for "outward man" is ho exō hēmōn anthrōpos (the outer person), and for "inward man" he writes ho esō hēmōn (the inner [person]). These are not throwaway metaphors. They are anthropological categories. Paul is describing two aspects of the human being and assigning a different trajectory to each one. The outer is decaying. The inner is growing stronger.³

Exegetical Exposition. The context here is suffering. Paul has been describing the hardships of apostolic ministry—affliction, perplexity, persecution, being struck down (4:8–9). His body is taking a beating. And yet he refuses to despair. Why? Because there is a dimension of his person that is not decaying. There is something in him that is actually getting better even while his body gets worse.

Notice the logic. Paul is not saying, "My attitude is getting better even though my body is falling apart." That would be a psychological observation, and it would not require any particular anthropology. What he is saying is more radical. He is identifying two distinguishable aspects of the human person—one that is subject to physical deterioration and one that is subject to spiritual renewal—and he is giving each one its own name. The "outward man" is the body. The "inward man" is the soul or spirit—the immaterial core of the person.⁴

John Cooper notes that Paul's inner-outer language here sets up the famous discussion of the earthly tent and the heavenly building in the very next chapter, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8.⁵ When Paul speaks in chapter 5 of being "absent from the body" and "present with the Lord," he is building on the distinction he has already introduced in 4:16. The "inner man" is the one who will be present with the Lord even when the "outer man"—the body—has been destroyed. The logic flows naturally from one chapter to the next, and it flows in a dualist direction.

David Aune, in his study of anthropological duality in this passage, argues persuasively that the inner-outer contrast in 2 Corinthians 4:16 is not merely ethical or spiritual but genuinely ontological.⁶ Paul is not simply talking about two attitudes or two perspectives on the same person. He is talking about two real dimensions of the person that can move in opposite directions at the same time. One can get worse while the other gets better. That only works if the two dimensions have a degree of real distinction—if the inner man is not simply another name for the outer man viewed from a different angle.

The physicalist reading struggles here. If the human person is an undifferentiated psychophysical unity, what is the "inward man" that is being renewed while the body decays? On physicalism, there is no inner person that exists apart from the body's processes. Everything mental, spiritual, and emotional is the product of brain activity. So the "renewal" Paul describes would have to be reducible to something happening in the brain—the very brain that is, by his own admission, part of the "outer man" that is perishing. The physicalist would have to say that the organ of renewal is itself decaying. That is incoherent.⁷

The dualist reading, by contrast, makes perfect sense of the text. Paul the person is a composite of body and soul. His body is wasting away under the pressures of ministry. But his soul—his inner man—is being strengthened and renewed by the Holy Spirit. These two processes can happen simultaneously because the inner man and the outer man, while deeply unified in this life, are not the same thing.

It is worth pausing here to note just how natural this language sounds. Everyone who has ever watched a loved one age or suffer a long illness knows exactly what Paul is talking about. The body grows weaker, slower, more fragile. But the person inside that body—the one you know, the one who loves you, the one whose eyes still light up with recognition—can be more tender, more wise, more beautiful than they ever were in the vigor of youth. Grandmothers know this. Cancer patients know this. Caregivers know this. The outer man is perishing. The inner man is being renewed. It is one of the most universally recognizable human experiences there is. And it only makes sense if there really are two things—an outer and an inner—to have different experiences.

The early church fathers read this verse the same way. Origen, commenting on the inner-outer distinction, argued that "that which is made in the image of God is to be understood of the inward man, as we call it, which is renewed and has the power to be formed in the image of the Creator."⁵⁷ For Origen, the inner man was the soul—the image-bearing, God-reflecting core of the person. And it was precisely this inner man that was capable of renewal and transformation, even when the outer body was in decline. Centuries of Christian interpretation agree: the inner man is the soul, and the outer man is the body.

Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland observe that Paul's inner-outer language here proposes strong ontological distinctions that carry forward into chapter 5, where the "outer" dimension is removed entirely at death while the person persists.⁸ The soul that was being renewed in 4:16 is the same soul that will be "with the Lord" in 5:8. The inner man does not need the outer man in order to exist. It needs the outer man in order to flourish fully—which is why Paul longs for the resurrection body (5:4). But existence without the body is not only possible; Paul seems to expect it.

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. This passage is among the clearest in the New Testament for establishing that Paul worked from a dualist anthropology. The inner man is not just a metaphor for a positive mental outlook. It is the immaterial core of the person—the self that persists even as the body breaks down. And it leads directly into the most explicit disembodied-intermediate-state passage in all of Paul's letters, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 (treated in Chapter 13).

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge completely ignored 2 Corinthians 4:16 in The Fire That Consumes. He never discussed Paul's inner-outer anthropology, never addressed the implications of an "inward man" being renewed while the body perishes, and never engaged the dualist scholarship on this text. The passage does not appear in his discussion of human nature, his treatment of the Pauline writings, or anywhere else in the book. This is a striking omission, particularly given that the verse sits just a few lines before 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, one of the most important texts in the entire body-soul debate.⁹

2. 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 — Your Body Is the Temple of the Holy Spirit

“Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.” (1 Corinthians 6:19–20, NKJV)

Key Terms. The Greek word for "body" here is sōma, the standard Pauline term for the physical body. The word for "temple" is naos, which specifically denotes the inner sanctuary of a temple—the holy of holies, the place where God's presence dwells.¹⁰ Paul is saying something remarkable: your physical body is the sacred housing for a divine Inhabitant.

Exegetical Exposition. The immediate context is sexual ethics. Paul has been arguing against sexual immorality by grounding his argument not in cultural convention or personal preference but in ontology—in what the human body is. And what the body is, according to Paul, is a temple. A dwelling place. A container for the Holy Spirit.

Think about what a temple is. A temple is a building. It has walls, a roof, a floor. But the whole point of the building is what lives inside it. Nobody builds a temple for the sake of the bricks. You build a temple because someone is going to dwell there. The building exists for the sake of the inhabitant. If you destroy the building, the inhabitant is not destroyed. The inhabitant is more important than the structure. That is what "temple" means.¹¹

Paul uses this metaphor deliberately. The body is the temple. The Holy Spirit is the One who dwells inside. And notice: Paul does not say "you are a temple." He says "your body is the temple." That distinction matters enormously. If Paul were a physicalist—if he believed that "you" and "your body" are the same thing—then saying "your body is a temple" would be like saying "you are a temple." But Paul clearly treats "you" and "your body" as related but not identical. You are the one who has a body. The body is yours. It belongs to you. You are the person. The body is your temple.¹²

Cooper makes this point effectively. Paul's temple metaphor assumes that the person who "has" the body is not simply identical to the body. The body is the dwelling, and the self—along with the Holy Spirit—is the one who dwells within.¹³ This is precisely the picture that substance dualism paints: the person is a soul-body composite, in which the soul is the core identity and the body is its physical dwelling place.

The final clause of verse 20 drives the point home: "glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God's." Here Paul explicitly names both body and spirit as belonging to God, and he distinguishes them with the conjunction "and." You are to glorify God in your body and in your spirit. Both are real. Both are God's. Both are yours. And they are not the same thing.¹⁴

A physicalist might object that the word pneuma (spirit) here refers to the Holy Spirit rather than the human spirit. And grammatically, that is possible. But the parallel with "your body" makes it more natural to read "your spirit" as referring to the human spirit. Paul is urging the Corinthians to honor God with every dimension of their being—the outer (body) and the inner (spirit).¹⁵ Robert Gundry, in his landmark study Soma in Biblical Theology, argues that Paul consistently treats sōma as the physical body of the person rather than as a synonym for the whole person. The body is something you have, not something you are.¹⁶

There is a deeper theological point here that we should not miss. Paul does not simply say, "Your body is important." He says, "Your body is a temple." The metaphor elevates the body's dignity enormously. In the ancient world, a temple was the most sacred structure in the city. It was not treated casually. It was honored, maintained, protected. But—and this is the crucial point—it was honored because of who lived inside it. The Parthenon was sacred because Athena was believed to dwell there. The Jerusalem Temple was holy because the glory of the Lord filled it. The building got its value from the inhabitant, not the other way around. Paul is applying that same logic to the human body. Your body is sacred. Why? Because the Holy Spirit lives in it. The body is the dwelling; the Spirit is the one who dwells. And where there is a dwelling and a dweller, there are two things, not one.⁵⁸

This has enormous implications for how we think about what it means to be human. On physicalism, there is no real distinction between the temple and the inhabitant. The body is all there is. You do not have a body; you are a body. But Paul's language pushes hard in the other direction. You have a body. It is yours. It is a temple. And Someone lives inside it. The architecture of the human person, according to Paul, includes both a structure and a resident. Both matter. Both are sacred. But they are not the same thing.

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. Paul's temple metaphor assumes a container-and-contents relationship between the body and the person who inhabits it. The body is the sacred structure. The person (together with the Holy Spirit) is the one who dwells inside. This is entirely consistent with substance dualism and very difficult to square with physicalism, which identifies the person with the body rather than distinguishing the two.

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge never addressed 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 in the context of human nature. The verse appears nowhere in his discussion of what a human being is, nor does he engage the dualist implications of the temple metaphor. For a book that devotes an entire section to anthropological terminology, the absence of this text is notable.¹⁷

3. 2 Corinthians 7:1 — Filthiness of the Flesh and Spirit

“Therefore, having these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God.” (2 Corinthians 7:1, NKJV)

Key Terms. The word for "flesh" here is sarx, and the word for "spirit" is pneuma. Paul uses the verb katharizō (to cleanse or purify), urging believers to deal with contamination in both dimensions of their being—the fleshly and the spiritual.

Exegetical Exposition. This verse sits at the opening of chapter 7, picking up the thread from Paul's extended appeal for separation from idolatry in 6:14–18. Having reminded the Corinthians that they are the temple of the living God (6:16—note the temple language again), Paul now draws a practical conclusion: since God dwells in us, we ought to pursue holiness in every dimension of our being.

And notice how he divides those dimensions. He speaks of "filthiness of the flesh and spirit." That is a two-part division. There is a kind of sin that contaminates the sarx—the body, the physical dimension. Sexual immorality, drunkenness, gluttony—these are sins of the flesh. But there is also a kind of sin that contaminates the pneuma—the spirit, the inner person. Pride, envy, bitterness, idolatry of the heart—these are sins of the spirit.¹⁸

Paul's logic only works if flesh and spirit are genuinely distinct. If the human person were an undifferentiated whole—if there were no meaningful difference between the fleshly dimension and the spiritual dimension—then there would be no point in distinguishing between two kinds of contamination. You would just say, "Cleanse yourselves from all filthiness." Period. But Paul does not say that. He specifically identifies two domains of contamination because there are two domains of the human person that can be contaminated.¹⁹

This is not the language of holistic monism. Holistic monism says that the person is an undivided whole, that "body," "soul," "spirit," and "flesh" all refer to the same reality viewed from different perspectives. If that were true, then "filthiness of the flesh" and "filthiness of the spirit" would be the same thing, just described with different vocabulary. But Paul clearly treats them as different. They require different kinds of cleansing. They represent different aspects of the person's moral life. And that presupposes a real distinction between the physical and the immaterial.²⁰

Moreland and Rae observe that Paul's ethical instructions often presuppose a body-soul anthropology in which different moral obligations apply to different dimensions of the person. You honor God with your body by avoiding sexual immorality (1 Cor. 6:18). You honor God with your spirit by cultivating purity of heart and mind. The fact that Paul can issue different moral directives to different parts of the person shows that he regards those parts as genuinely distinguishable.²¹

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. Paul treats flesh and spirit as two domains that can each be independently contaminated by sin and independently cleansed. This is natural on a dualist anthropology. On physicalism, the distinction collapses, because the "spirit" would just be a way of talking about brain activity, which is itself a function of the flesh.

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge never addressed 2 Corinthians 7:1 in The Fire That Consumes. The passage does not appear in his discussion of human nature or anywhere in his engagement with the Pauline anthropological vocabulary. The verse's clear flesh-spirit distinction went entirely unexamined.²²

4. Ephesians 3:16 — Strengthened with Might in the Inner Man

“That He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with might through His Spirit in the inner man.” (Ephesians 3:16, NKJV)

Key Terms. Once again we meet the phrase ton esō anthrōpon—"the inner man." It is the same expression Paul used in 2 Corinthians 4:16. Here the Holy Spirit (to pneuma autou) is the one doing the strengthening, and the inner man is the location where the strengthening happens.

Exegetical Exposition. This verse comes from one of the most magnificent prayers in all of Paul's letters. He is on his knees before the Father (3:14), and he is praying for the Ephesian believers with a request so grand it practically overflows the syntax. He asks that God would grant them, out of the vast wealth of His glory, to be made powerful by the Holy Spirit—not in their bodies, not in their muscles, not in their outward circumstances, but in the inner man.²³

This is the same inner-outer anthropology we saw in 2 Corinthians 4:16, now applied to the experience of spiritual empowerment. The Holy Spirit does not merely act upon the person from outside. He enters the inner man and strengthens from within. And that inner man is a real location—a genuine dimension of the person where divine power does its work.

What is the "inner man" here? The physicalist would have to say it is just the brain, or the nervous system, or the whole person viewed from a certain angle. But none of those options capture what Paul is describing. He is not saying, "May God make your brain more efficient." He is not saying, "May God strengthen your body." He is pointing to something deeper than the body, something the body cannot contain on its own. He is pointing to the soul.²⁴

Verse 17 continues: "that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith." The word "hearts" (kardias) here is not referring to the physical organ. It is a synonym for the inner man—the deep center of the person's spiritual life. Christ dwelling in the heart through faith, the Spirit strengthening the inner man—these are descriptions of divine-human intimacy at the level of the soul, not the level of biology.²⁵

Cooper draws attention to the fact that Paul's prayers often reveal his anthropological assumptions. When Paul prays for the inner man to be strengthened, he is assuming that there is an inner man—an immaterial dimension of the person that is a genuine recipient of divine action. This is not merely figurative language. Paul believed that the Holy Spirit actually indwells the believer, actually strengthens the human spirit, and actually causes Christ to take up residence in the human heart. If there is no immaterial dimension to the human person, then all of this language reduces to poetry.²⁶

But Paul is not writing poetry here. He is praying. And he expects his prayer to be answered in reality, not just in metaphor.

Think about it this way. If you pray for someone to be healed in their body, you are assuming they have a body. If you pray for someone to be strengthened in their inner man, you are assuming they have an inner man. Paul's prayer only makes sense if the inner man is a real thing—a genuine dimension of the person that can be acted upon by the Spirit of God.²⁷

There is also an important connection here to the Romans 7 discussion of the "inner man." In Romans 7:22, Paul writes, "For I delight in the law of God according to the inward man." There he uses the same expression—ton esō anthrōpon—to describe the part of himself that loves God's law, even while his body does things he does not want to do. "The good that I will to do, I do not do; but the evil I will not to do, that I practice" (Rom. 7:19). The inner man wills one thing; the body does another. This is not a contradiction on dualism. It is exactly what you would expect if the person has two genuinely distinct dimensions—one that delights in God's law and another that is enslaved to the habits of the flesh.⁵⁹

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, "I delight in the law of God according to my brain chemistry." He does not say, "I want to do good, but my neurons fire in a way that produces bad behavior." He locates the delight in God's law in the inner man, and the rebellion against that delight in the flesh. The inner man is not the brain. The inner man is the soul—the deepest, truest "I" of the person. And Paul treats it as something real enough to be strengthened, real enough to delight in God's word, and real enough to be the place where Christ dwells by faith.

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. Paul prays for divine empowerment specifically in the "inner man," treating the inner person as a real locus of the Spirit's strengthening work. This presupposes that the person has an inner dimension that is distinct from the outer body—precisely the picture that substance dualism provides.

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge never addressed Ephesians 3:16 in The Fire That Consumes. Paul's prayer for the inner man went entirely unnoticed in Fudge's treatment of human nature. This passage, which uses the same anthropological terminology found in 2 Corinthians 4:16, received no discussion.²⁸

5. 1 Corinthians 7:34 — Holy Both in Body and in Spirit

“The unmarried woman cares about the things of the Lord, that she may be holy both in body and in spirit. But she who is married cares about the things of the world—how she may please her husband.” (1 Corinthians 7:34, NKJV)

Key Terms. Paul uses sōma (body) and pneuma (spirit), joined by the conjunction kai (and). The phrase is hina ē hagia kai tō sōmati kai tō pneumati—"that she may be holy both in the body and in the spirit." The construction is deliberate. Paul uses the correlative kai … kai ("both … and") to link two distinct realities.

Exegetical Exposition. The context is Paul's extended discussion of marriage and singleness. He is pointing out that the unmarried woman has a practical advantage: she can devote her full attention to serving the Lord. And the way he describes that devotion is anthropologically revealing. She aims to be holy in both dimensions: body and spirit.

This is not a throwaway comment. Paul is making a specific claim about the structure of holiness. True holiness, full holiness, involves two dimensions of the person. There is a holiness of the body—the way you use your physical self, your actions, your habits, the way you treat others with your hands and feet and eyes. And there is a holiness of the spirit—the purity of your inner life, your thoughts, your desires, the orientation of your deepest self toward God.²⁹

The word "both" is doing crucial work here. If body and spirit were simply two names for the same thing, saying "both body and spirit" would be redundant. It would be like saying, "She is holy both in herself and in herself." But Paul does not traffic in pointless redundancy. He says "both … and" because he means both. The body is one thing. The spirit is another. Holiness involves each.³⁰

The physicalist might respond that Paul is simply being rhetorical—using two words to express a single idea for emphasis. That is possible in isolation. But when you consider this verse alongside 2 Corinthians 4:16 (inner man and outer man), 2 Corinthians 7:1 (filthiness of flesh and spirit), 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 (body as temple, glory God in body and spirit), and the broader Pauline pattern, the cumulative picture is unmistakable. Paul consistently treats body and spirit as two real, distinguishable dimensions of the human person.³¹

Moreland makes the broader philosophical point that when a writer consistently distinguishes two realities in different contexts and for different purposes, the simplest explanation is that the writer believes there really are two realities. Rhetorical duplication can explain one or two instances. It cannot explain a pervasive pattern across multiple letters, multiple genres, and multiple theological contexts.³²

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. Paul identifies holiness as having two domains—body and spirit—and uses language that treats them as genuinely distinct. This is a natural expression of dualist anthropology and an awkward fit for physicalism.

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge never discussed 1 Corinthians 7:34 in The Fire That Consumes. The verse's explicit body-and-spirit distinction appears nowhere in his treatment of human nature.³³

6. Colossians 2:5 — Absent in the Flesh, I Am with You in Spirit

“For though I am absent in the flesh, yet I am with you in spirit, rejoicing to see your good order and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ.” (Colossians 2:5, NKJV)

Key Terms. Paul uses sarx (flesh) and pneuma (spirit), applying each to a different aspect of his relationship with the Colossians. In the flesh—physically, bodily—he is absent. In the spirit, he is present with them.

Exegetical Exposition. Paul writes from prison. He cannot be with the Colossians in person. His body is in one place; they are in another. And yet he says he is "with them" in another way—in spirit. He is so genuinely present with them in spirit that he can "rejoice" to see their orderly faith.

Now, a physicalist might read this as mere metaphor. "I'm thinking about you. I feel close to you." We say similar things in everyday language: "I'm with you in spirit." No one supposes that a literal part of the person has detached and traveled across the room. Fair enough. But there are several reasons to take Paul's language more seriously than that.

First, Paul uses this kind of flesh-spirit contrast in contexts where he clearly does intend an ontological distinction, not just a figure of speech. In 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 (treated in Chapter 15), he says he is "absent in body but present in spirit" and then proceeds to exercise apostolic authority as though his spiritual presence has genuine causal force.³⁴ He is not merely saying nice words about thinking of the Corinthians. He is issuing a binding judgment "in the spirit." His spirit is doing real work. It is present and active in a way his body is not.

Second, this passage reflects a consistent Pauline pattern in which the spirit is treated as the dimension of the person that can transcend physical limitations. In 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, Paul describes being caught up to the third heaven "whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know." That language is unintelligible on physicalism. If the person is the body, there is no question to ask. You cannot be "out of the body" if you are identical to the body. The very fact that Paul can frame the question shows that he regards the body and the person as potentially separable—which is precisely what substance dualism affirms.³⁵

Third, even if we grant that "absent in the flesh, present in spirit" is partly metaphorical, metaphors work because they are grounded in something real. We say "I'm with you in spirit" because we believe there is a spiritual dimension to human presence that can transcend physical distance. If there is no spirit—if the human person is entirely physical—then the metaphor has no ground. It becomes empty talk.³⁶

Consider an analogy. We say, "My heart goes out to you." Nobody takes that literally—nobody thinks the physical organ in your chest has detached and traveled across the room. But the metaphor works because we believe there is a real capacity for empathy, compassion, and emotional connection that transcends physical proximity. If human beings had no interior life at all—if we were just unfeeling machines—the phrase would mean nothing. In the same way, when Paul says "I am with you in spirit," the metaphor works because there really is a spiritual dimension to the person that can engage with others in ways the body cannot. The metaphor may not describe a literal spatial transfer. But it does assume that the spirit is a real dimension of the person with its own capacities.⁶⁰

What is especially interesting about the Colossian context is that Paul adds a detail that goes beyond mere sentiment. He says he is with them in spirit, "rejoicing to see your good order and the steadfastness of your faith in Christ." He is not just saying, "I think about you fondly." He claims to perceive something about their spiritual condition—their orderly faith, their steadfastness. His spirit seems to have a kind of awareness that his body, stuck in a prison cell hundreds of miles away, could not possess on its own. Whether Paul means this literally or hyperbolically, the language assumes that the spirit is a knowing, perceiving, rejoicing dimension of the person that operates with a degree of independence from the body's physical situation.

Cooper observes that Paul's language of being "absent in body but present in spirit" makes most natural sense on a view in which the spirit is a genuine dimension of the person that has a kind of functional independence from the body. The spirit is not simply the body's self-awareness. It is the person's immaterial core, capable of engagement with others even when physical proximity is impossible.³⁷

What This Means for the Body-Soul Question. Paul treats "the flesh" and "the spirit" as two dimensions of his person that can be in different places, doing different things, at the same time. His body is in prison; his spirit is with the Colossians. This is natural dualist language. On physicalism, the person is wherever the body is, full stop.

Fudge's Treatment. Fudge never discussed Colossians 2:5 in The Fire That Consumes. Paul's claim to be absent in the flesh but present in spirit was not engaged in any of the book's discussions of human nature, the intermediate state, or the soul.³⁸

C. Synthesis — The Architecture of the Human Person

Step back now and look at what we have found. Six passages. Six different contexts. Six different purposes. And every single one of them employs a two-dimensional anthropology in which the human person has an outer, physical dimension and an inner, immaterial one.

In 2 Corinthians 4:16, the outward man perishes while the inward man is renewed. In 1 Corinthians 6:19–20, the body is a temple housing the Spirit, and the believer is to glorify God in body and spirit. In 2 Corinthians 7:1, there is filthiness of the flesh and filthiness of the spirit. In Ephesians 3:16, the Holy Spirit strengthens the inner man. In 1 Corinthians 7:34, holiness involves both body and spirit. In Colossians 2:5, Paul is absent in the flesh but present in spirit. The pattern is not subtle. It is everywhere.

And it is not merely linguistic. That is the crucial point. A physicalist might argue that Paul was simply using conventional language—inherited metaphors from his Jewish and Hellenistic environment—without any real ontological intent. "People talk about the heart without meaning the physical organ," the physicalist might say. "Paul talks about the inner man and the spirit without meaning a real immaterial substance."³⁹

But this defense fails for three reasons.

First, Paul does not use this language randomly or decoratively. He uses it systematically. In passage after passage, he distinguishes inner from outer, body from spirit, flesh from the immaterial self. And he does so in contexts where the distinction does real theological work. His inner-outer contrast in 2 Corinthians 4:16 is what sets up the disembodiment discussion in chapter 5. His body-spirit distinction in 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 is what grounds his sexual ethics. His flesh-spirit contrast in 2 Corinthians 7:1 is what shapes his understanding of holiness. These are not idle figures of speech. They are load-bearing beams in the architecture of Paul's theology.⁴⁰

Second, Paul's anthropological language is consistent with everything else the New Testament teaches about the human person. As we have seen in earlier chapters, Jesus distinguished body and soul in Matthew 10:28. Luke reports that the spirit departed from the dying girl (Luke 8:55) and that Jesus yielded up His spirit (Luke 23:46). Stephen committed his spirit to the Lord Jesus (Acts 7:59). James says the body without the spirit is dead (James 2:26). The Pauline inner-outer language is not an isolated phenomenon. It is part of a coherent, pervasive New Testament anthropology.⁴¹

Third—and this is the point Cooper presses most effectively—Paul's anthropological language is consistent with his personal eschatology. Paul believed he would be "with Christ" after death and before the resurrection (Phil. 1:21–24; 2 Cor. 5:8). He believed this state would involve being "away from the body" (2 Cor. 5:8). That is, he believed in a conscious intermediate state in which the person—the inner man, the spirit—continues to exist even after the body has died. The inner-outer language of these six passages is the anthropological infrastructure that makes such a belief possible. Without an "inner man" that is genuinely distinct from the "outer man," Paul's intermediate-state hope collapses.⁴²

The physicalist scholar Joel Green acknowledges that the dualist reading of the New Testament has some textual basis. But he does not believe the evidence is sufficient to justify the traditional position.⁴³ Cooper responds that Green's alternative readings consistently fail to account for the full range of Pauline data—especially the passages where Paul speaks of his own personal existence ("I") separated from his body.⁴⁴ These six passages compound the problem for Green's position. In passage after passage, Paul treats the person as having an inner, immaterial dimension that is genuinely distinct from the outer, physical body. At some point the weight of the evidence becomes decisive.

Rickabaugh and Moreland put the matter precisely. Paul's use of "inner" and "outer" language proposes strong distinctions that persist across multiple epistles. The "outer" dimension is the physical body. The "inner" dimension is the person's immaterial core—the self that is renewed by the Spirit, the self that can be present with others when the body cannot, the self that will one day be "with the Lord" even when the body lies in the ground. This is not Platonic dualism. It is not Cartesian dualism. It is Pauline dualism—a holistic dualism in which body and soul are deeply united but genuinely distinct, and in which the person's ultimate identity resides in the inner man, the soul, the spirit, rather than in the decaying tent of the body.⁴⁵

Fudge's silence on all six of these passages is not a minor oversight. It is part of a larger pattern we have documented throughout this book: Fudge consistently engaged passages that could be read through a physicalist lens and consistently avoided passages that most naturally support substance dualism. When Paul is talking about the body as a temple, about the inner man being strengthened, about being absent in the flesh but present in spirit—Fudge is nowhere to be found.⁴⁶

Let me put this as plainly as I can. Imagine you wrote a book about the geography of the United States, but you never mentioned the Rocky Mountains. Not once. You discussed the Great Plains in detail. You talked about the coasts. You covered the rivers and the deserts. But the largest mountain range on the continent somehow never appeared. Readers would rightly wonder: Did you skip the Rockies because they are irrelevant to American geography? Or did you skip them because they did not fit the flat terrain you were trying to describe? Fudge's treatment of human nature is like a geography that skips the mountains. The inner-outer, body-spirit, temple-and-tenant language of the epistles is a mountain range in Pauline anthropology. It towers over the landscape. And Fudge walked right past it.

To be fair, I want to acknowledge something. Fudge's book was not primarily about anthropology. It was about the final fate of the wicked. His focus was on proving that the Bible teaches conditional immortality rather than eternal conscious torment. That is a worthy and important goal, and on that question Fudge made a historic contribution. But here is the problem: Fudge did include a section on human nature. He did argue that the biblical view of the person is holistic and physical. He did claim that the soul is just a way of talking about the whole person. And he built that argument by engaging selectively with the biblical evidence—discussing the passages that seemed to support his position and ignoring the ones that challenged it. That is not good exegesis. It is confirmation bias dressed up in scholarly clothing.⁶¹

The six passages in this chapter, together with the dozens of other passages Fudge ignored (documented in Chapter 22), form an overwhelming body of evidence that the apostle Paul operated with a dualist anthropology. Paul believed in an inner man and an outer man. He believed the body was a temple that housed the spirit. He believed that flesh and spirit were two distinguishable domains of the person. He believed that the person could be "absent in the flesh" but "present in spirit." And he believed that the inner man would survive the death of the outer man and be with Christ in the intermediate state.

That is substance dualism. Not Platonic dualism—Paul did not think the body was evil or that the soul longed to escape from the prison of the flesh. Not Cartesian dualism—Paul did not speculate about pineal glands or the mechanism of mind-body interaction. But genuine, biblical, holistic substance dualism: the conviction that the human person is a deep unity of body and soul, that these two dimensions are profoundly integrated in this life, and that they can be separated at death—with the soul persisting in God's presence until the resurrection reunites them forever.⁶²

D. Cross-References and Connections

The six passages examined in this chapter do not stand alone. They are woven into a much larger fabric. Consider the connections:

2 Corinthians 4:16 connects directly to 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 (treated in Chapter 13). The "inward man" of 4:16 is the one who will be "absent from the body" and "present with the Lord" in 5:8. The inner-outer anthropology of this chapter provides the foundation for the conscious intermediate state that is the subject of Chapter 13. Without a real inner man, Paul's hope of being with Christ between death and resurrection has no home.⁴⁷

1 Corinthians 6:19–20 and the temple metaphor connect to Romans 8:10–11 (treated in Chapter 15), where Paul says "if Christ is in you, the body is dead because of sin, but the Spirit is life because of righteousness." The indwelling of the Spirit is a consistent theme: the body is the outer shell, and the Spirit occupies the inner sanctuary. In both passages, the person is more than the body, because the body is the dwelling place of a higher reality.⁴⁸

Ephesians 3:16 and the "inner man" connect to the Psalms' portrait of the soul's interior life (treated in Chapter 8). When the psalmist cries, "My soul thirsts for God" (Ps. 42:1–2), and when Paul prays for the inner man to be strengthened, they are describing the same reality from different angles. The human person has an immaterial interior that longs for God, responds to God, and is strengthened by God. Old Testament and New Testament speak with one voice on this point.⁴⁹

Colossians 2:5 and 1 Corinthians 5:3–5 (treated in Chapter 15) form a pair. In both texts Paul says he is "absent in body/flesh but present in spirit." In both texts the spirit is treated as a dimension of the person that can be active and engaged while the body is elsewhere. Together they show that Paul's flesh-spirit contrast is not a one-time rhetorical flourish but a recurring anthropological pattern.⁵⁰

The body-spirit dual holiness of 1 Corinthians 7:34 connects to 1 Thessalonians 5:23 (treated in Chapter 15), where Paul prays that the Thessalonians' "whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ." Both passages envision the person as having multiple dimensions—each of which can be addressed separately in the pursuit of holiness. The theological logic is the same: holiness is not a single-channel experience. It involves every part of who we are, and those parts are genuinely distinguishable.⁵¹

E. Pastoral Implications — Why This Matters for Real Life

So what? Why does it matter whether Paul believed in an inner man and an outer man?

It matters because suffering is real. And the way you understand the human person shapes the way you endure suffering.

If you are only a body, then physical decline is total decline. When the body goes downhill, you go downhill. There is nothing else to hold on to. But if you are body and soul, outer man and inner man, then Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 4:16 become more than poetry. They become a lifeline. "Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day." The person in the hospital bed, the believer losing physical capacity, the saint approaching the end of life—they are not merely deteriorating. The outer man is fading, yes. But the inner man may be more alive and more full of glory than ever before.⁵²

It matters for holiness, too. If there is no real distinction between body and spirit, then the call to "cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit" becomes vague and unmoored. But if there really are two domains of the person, then holiness has a structure. You address the sins of the body by disciplining the body. You address the sins of the spirit by surrendering the soul to the work of the Holy Spirit. The inner man is the locus of renewal. And that is exactly where God meets us most profoundly.⁵³

It matters for prayer. When Paul kneels before the Father and asks that the Ephesians be strengthened "in the inner man," he is not waving his hands at a vague idea. He is pointing to a specific reality. The Spirit takes up residence in your soul and does His strengthening work from the inside out. Christian spirituality depends on this. The whole tradition of prayer, meditation, contemplation, and spiritual formation rests on the conviction that there is an interior to the human person—a deep center where God speaks, the Spirit works, and Christ dwells.⁵⁴

And it matters for death. If the inner man is real—if the soul can persist when the body gives out—then death is not the end of the person. It is the end of the body. And that makes all the difference. The soul that was renewed day by day in this life enters the presence of Christ. The inner man that was strengthened by the Spirit in this age goes on to the next. That is the hope of every dying saint, and it rests on precisely the anthropology Paul teaches in these six passages.⁵⁵

Physicalism empties these pastoral convictions. If there is no inner man, then there is no one being renewed while the body perishes. If there is no human spirit, then there is no one to be "with Christ" between death and resurrection. If the person is identical to the body, then the coffin contains everything, and the promise of presence with the Lord must wait until the last trumpet. The dying believer hears "Absent from the body, present with the Lord" and is told, "Well, not really. Not until the resurrection."

Think about what that means at a bedside. A pastor sits with a family whose mother is dying. Her body is shutting down. Her breath is shallow. Her eyes are closed. The children gather around and someone reads the words of Paul: "Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day." On the dualist reading, those words are literally true. The mother's body is failing, but her soul—the inner woman, the deepest "she" of her person—is being prepared for glory. In a matter of hours, she will be with Christ. Not asleep. Not annihilated. Not waiting in nothingness for a distant resurrection. With Christ. Conscious. Loved. Home.

On the physicalist reading, none of that can be said with confidence. The body is all there is. When the brain ceases to function, the person ceases to exist. There is no inner woman being renewed. There is only a body being destroyed. The hope of being "present with the Lord" must be postponed to the resurrection—and even then, the physicalist must explain how the resurrected person is the same person who died, a puzzle that creates enormous philosophical difficulties when there is no soul to serve as the bridge of identity.⁶³

I do not believe Paul would recognize that reading. He wrote about two dimensions of the person because he believed in two dimensions of the person. He comforted himself with the hope of being "with Christ" because he believed his inner man would survive the death of his outer man. He prayed for the Ephesians' inner man to be strengthened because he knew that dimension of the person was real, receptive, and eternal.

So did the church for two thousand years. The physicalist experiment is recent, untested, and—as we have seen in this chapter—exegetically unfounded. Paul's anthropology is dualist. And the pastoral riches of the faith depend on keeping it that way.⁵⁶