Chapter 28

The Trinity, Personhood, and the Physicalist Challenge

Introduction: Why the Trinity and Personhood Matter for This Discussion

We have been building a case throughout this book that physicalism — the view that a human being is nothing more than a physical organism, with no immaterial soul or mind — creates devastating problems for the doctrine of the Incarnation. We have seen that physicalism cannot adequately account for the triduum mortis (Chapter 21), the death of Christ and the continuity of the hypostatic union (Chapter 22), the descent to the dead (Chapter 23), the resurrection and personal identity (Chapter 24), the virgin birth (Chapter 25), the ascension and permanent Incarnation (Chapter 26), or Christ's sinlessness (Chapter 27). In each of these cases, the absence of an immaterial human soul leaves physicalism struggling to preserve the coherence of what the church has always believed and taught about Jesus Christ.

But there is another problem — one that strikes at the very foundation of Christian theology itself. It does not target the Incarnation alone. It targets the doctrine of the Trinity and the very meaning of the word "person." The problem is this: if physicalism defines a human person as a purely physical organism — with no immaterial soul or mind distinct from the body — then the concept of "person" in Trinitarian theology becomes deeply problematic. Why? Because the three Persons of the Trinity are not physical organisms. The Father is not a body. The Holy Spirit is not a brain. And the eternal Son, considered in His divine nature apart from the Incarnation, is not a physical being. If "person" for humans means "physical organism," then when we call the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit "Persons," we are using the word in an entirely different sense. The analogy between divine personhood and human personhood — an analogy that has been central to Christian theology from the very beginning — breaks down completely.

This chapter will argue that physicalism severs the analogical link between human personhood and divine personhood in a way that damages not only Christology but also the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the imago Dei (the image of God in humanity), and the coherent use of theological language itself. I want to show that dualism — the view that a human being is composed of both a physical body and an immaterial soul — preserves this analogy in a way that physicalism simply cannot.

Here is the plan. First, we will look at the standard Trinitarian doctrine — the teaching that there is one God who exists as three distinct Persons. We will define the key terms carefully. Second, we will trace the historical development of the concept of "person" in Christian theology, from the early church through the medieval period. Third, we will show how the analogy between human personhood and divine personhood works on a dualist understanding of human nature. Fourth, we will demonstrate how physicalism collapses this analogy and makes the word "person" equivocal — meaning something completely different when applied to God than when applied to humans. Fifth, we will explore how this problem spills over into the Incarnation specifically, compounding the difficulties we have already identified. Sixth, we will consider how the imago Dei doctrine depends on an analogical coherence between divine and human personhood that physicalism undermines. Finally, we will briefly address some potential physicalist responses and show why they fail.

I. The Standard Trinitarian Doctrine: One God in Three Persons

Before we can understand the problem that physicalism creates for the doctrine of the Trinity, we need to have a clear picture of what the Trinity actually is. So let us take a few moments to lay out the classical Trinitarian faith as the church has confessed it for nearly two thousand years.

The Christian doctrine of the Trinity affirms three things simultaneously. First, there is only one God. The Bible is emphatic about this: "Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one" (Deut 6:4, ESV). Christianity is a monotheistic faith. There is one divine being, one divine essence, one God. Second, there are three who are truly and fully God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Each is fully divine. The Father is God. The Son is God. The Holy Spirit is God. Not one-third of God each, but each fully possessing the whole divine nature. Third, these three are distinct from one another. The Father is not the Son. The Son is not the Spirit. The Spirit is not the Father. They are three distinct "Persons" — three distinct subjects of consciousness, will, and action — who exist in an eternal relationship of love, knowledge, and mutual indwelling.

Now, the church had to develop careful language to express this mystery. The New Testament clearly teaches all three of these truths, but it does not give us a single, tidy theological formula that wraps them all together. That formula came through centuries of prayer, reflection, debate, and conciliar definition. And the language the church settled on used two critical technical terms that we need to understand.

The first is ousia (οὐσία). This is a Greek word that means "essence," "being," or "substance." It refers to what something is — the nature or kind of thing it is. When we say that God has one ousia, we mean that there is one divine nature, one divine essence, one divine being. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit share this one identical divine nature. They do not each possess a separate copy of divinity. They possess the very same divine essence — numerically one, not merely generically similar.

The second term is hypostasis (ὑπόστασις). This word literally means "that which stands under" — a foundation or underlying reality. In Trinitarian theology, it came to mean "person" — a distinct, subsisting subject. Each of the three Persons of the Trinity is a hypostasis: a distinct "who" that possesses and subsists in the one divine ousia. The Father is one hypostasis. The Son is another hypostasis. The Spirit is a third hypostasis. But all three hypostaseis (that is the plural form) share the numerically identical divine ousia.

In the Latin-speaking Western church, the equivalent terminology developed alongside the Greek. The Latin word persona was used to translate hypostasis, and the word substantia or essentia was used for ousia. (There was some early confusion because the Latin substantia could translate either ousia or hypostasis, which caused misunderstandings between Eastern and Western Christians. But eventually the terminology was sorted out.)¹

So the Trinitarian formula is: one ousia (essence), three hypostaseis (persons). One what, three whos. There is one "something" that God is — the divine essence, with all its attributes (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, perfect goodness, eternality, and so on). And there are three "someones" who are God — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, each fully possessing that one divine essence, each distinct from the others in their eternal relations (the Father begets, the Son is begotten, the Spirit proceeds).

I want us to notice something crucial about this formula. The three hypostaseis — the three Persons — are not physical. The Father does not have a body. The Holy Spirit does not have a brain. The Son, in His eternal divine nature (before the Incarnation and apart from the assumed human nature), is fully immaterial. The divine ousia is immaterial. Each divine hypostasis is an immaterial, conscious, willing subject who subsists in the immaterial divine essence. There is nothing physical about the inner life of the Trinity.

This fact is going to be enormously important when we ask what the word "person" means — and whether it can be applied coherently to both God and human beings on a physicalist anthropology.

II. What Does "Person" Mean? The Development of the Concept in Christian Theology

The word "person" did not always carry the technical meaning it has in Trinitarian and Christological theology. Its development is one of the most fascinating and consequential stories in the history of Christian thought. And tracing that development will show us something very important: the classical understanding of "person" was never physicalist. The church fathers who hammered out this concept always assumed an immaterial dimension to personhood.

A. From Stage Masks to Theological Substance

The word persona came into Latin from the world of Greek and Roman drama. The Greek word prosōpon (πρόσωπον) originally referred to a "mask" — the face-covering that an actor wore on stage to represent a particular character. Over time, it came to mean the "role" or "character" that an actor played. By extension, it began to refer to the individual identity of a real person — who someone is, as distinct from what they are.²

Early Christian theologians adopted this word and began filling it with far deeper meaning than it had ever carried in the theater. When they spoke of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as three prosōpa or three personae, they were not saying that God merely wears three "masks" or plays three "roles" (that would be the heresy called Sabellianism or modalism). They were saying that the Father, Son, and Spirit are three genuinely distinct subjects — three real, eternal "someones" — within the one God.

But the word prosōpon by itself was not strong enough for this task. It could too easily be misunderstood as implying mere "roles" rather than genuine distinctions. That is why the Greek-speaking church eventually settled on hypostasis as the preferred term. Hypostasis carried a much stronger ontological weight — it meant a genuinely existing reality, a subsisting subject, something (or rather, someone) who truly is in his own right.³

B. The Cappadocian Achievement

The great Cappadocian fathers — Basil of Caesarea (c. 330–379), Gregory of Nazianzus (c. 329–390), and Gregory of Nyssa (c. 335–395) — were the theologians who did the most to clarify the distinction between ousia and hypostasis. Before their work, these two words had often been used interchangeably. Even the Council of Nicaea in 325 had treated them as near-synonyms. The Cappadocians argued that they must be carefully distinguished if we are to confess the Trinity faithfully.

Basil of Caesarea insisted that ousia refers to what is common — the shared divine nature — while hypostasis refers to what is particular — the distinct identity of each Person. As Basil put it, "ousia has the same relation to hypostasis as the common has to the particular."⁴ The divine nature (omniscience, omnipotence, eternality, etc.) belongs to all three Persons equally — that is the ousia. But the Father's unique identity as "unbegotten," the Son's as "begotten," and the Spirit's as "proceeding" — these are the hypostatic properties that distinguish the three Persons.

Gregory of Nyssa further clarified that the three hypostaseis do not divide the divine essence into three parts. Each Person fully possesses the one divine essence. The Father is fully God. The Son is fully God. The Spirit is fully God. Yet they are three distinct subjects — three distinct "whos" — who exist in eternal, coinherent (mutually indwelling) relationship.⁵

What I want us to notice is what the Cappadocians understood a "person" to be. A hypostasis, in their usage, is a distinct, conscious, willing subject who subsists in a nature. The hypostasis is the "who" — the one who knows, the one who wills, the one who acts, the one who loves. The ousia is the "what" — the nature that this "who" possesses and acts through. And in the Trinity, these three "whos" are entirely immaterial. They are not bodies. They are not brains. They are not physical organisms. They are pure, spiritual, personal subjects — infinite in knowledge, power, and goodness — subsisting in the one immaterial divine essence.

This is critically important for our discussion. The very concept of "person" in Christian theology was forged in the context of speaking about immaterial beings. The Trinitarian Persons are the original "persons" — and they are radically non-physical.

C. Boethius and the Classical Definition

In the early sixth century, the philosopher and theologian Boethius (c. 480–524) offered what became the classic definition of "person" in Western theology: "an individual substance of a rational nature" (naturae rationabilis individua substantia).⁶ This definition identified three key elements of personhood: individuality (being a distinct particular, not a universal), substantiality (being a real, subsisting thing — not merely an attribute or a property of something else), and rationality (having a nature endowed with intelligence and will).

Boethius intended this definition to apply to both divine and human persons — and also to angels. All three are "individual substances of rational natures." A divine Person is an individual subsistence in the divine rational nature. A human person is an individual subsistence in a human rational nature. An angel is an individual subsistence in an angelic rational nature. The definition is broad enough to capture what is common to all persons while allowing for the vast differences between divine, angelic, and human persons.

Now, Boethius's definition has been criticized over the centuries. As the theologian Jean Galot has observed, by using the word "substance" (substantia), the definition risks confusing person with nature — because a nature is also a kind of substance.⁷ This confusion became a real problem in Christology, as we will see. If a "person" is simply an "individual substance of a rational nature," then Christ's complete human nature — which is an individual substance and which is rational — would seem to qualify as a person in its own right. That would imply two persons in Christ, which is the heresy of Nestorianism.

The later tradition — especially the pro-Chalcedonian theologians like Leontius of Byzantium (c. 485–543) and Leontius of Jerusalem (c. 600) — had to sharpen the person-nature distinction beyond Boethius's formulation. They clarified that a hypostasis is not just a particular substance but a subsisting subject — the "one who exists," the ontological foundation that gives existence to a nature. A nature exists, but a hypostasis exists in itself. As Michael Wilkinson summarizes the tradition, "The ontological foundation of being is not nature but person. Nature does not exist except in a hypostasis."⁸ A person is the ontological "who" that gives concrete existence to a "what." Person is always a who and never a what; nature is always a what and never a who.

But regardless of whether we follow Boethius's particular formulation or the later, more refined versions, the common thread is this: personhood involves consciousness, rationality, will, and self-subsistence. And none of the classical definitions even hints at the idea that personhood requires physical constitution. The classical concept of "person" was designed to apply to beings who are entirely immaterial (the divine Persons, angels) as well as to beings who are embodied (human beings). Physicality was never part of the definition.

D. Aquinas and the Analogical Use of "Person"

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) built on Boethius's definition while adding important refinements. Aquinas affirmed that "a person is nothing other than a hypostasis or suppositum of a rational nature."⁹ A suppositum is a concrete, subsisting individual — the underlying subject that bears properties and performs actions. A person, then, is a suppositum that has a rational nature. Aquinas was careful to emphasize that this definition applies analogically to God and to humans. When we call the Father a "Person" and when we call Peter a "person," we are not using the word in exactly the same sense (univocally), nor in a completely different sense (equivocally), but in an analogical sense — there is a genuine resemblance, a real proportion, between divine personhood and human personhood, even though the differences are vast.¹⁰

This analogical usage is essential to Christian theology. Without it, we cannot speak meaningfully about God at all. When we say "God is good," we do not mean "good" in exactly the same sense as "Peter is good" — God's goodness infinitely surpasses Peter's. But we also do not mean something completely unrelated. There is a genuine analogy — God's goodness is the source and archetype of Peter's goodness. The same analogical relationship holds for the word "person." Human personhood is a finite, creaturely reflection of divine personhood. We are persons because God is a Person — because we are made in His image. Our personhood is derived from and patterned after His.

And here is the crucial point: for this analogy to work, there must be something genuinely in common between divine personhood and human personhood. The two cannot be utterly different kinds of things. If divine personhood is entirely immaterial — involving consciousness, will, knowledge, relational capacity, and self-subsistence — and if human personhood is entirely physical — involving neurons, synapses, brain chemistry, and bodily organization — then the analogy is not an analogy at all. It is an equivocation. The word "person" would mean two completely different things. And if that happens, the entire structure of Trinitarian and Christological language begins to crack.

III. The Analogy Preserved: How Dualism Maintains the Connection Between Divine and Human Personhood

On a dualist understanding of human nature, the analogy between divine personhood and human personhood is natural and robust. Let me explain why.

Dualism holds that a human being is composed of two fundamental realities: a physical body and an immaterial soul. The soul is the seat of consciousness, rationality, will, and personal identity. It is the "I" — the self, the subject who thinks, feels, chooses, and acts. The body is the physical instrument through which the soul interacts with the material world. The soul is not reducible to the body; it is a distinct substance that can, in principle, exist apart from the body (as it does in the intermediate state between death and resurrection — a topic we addressed in Chapter 3).

Now, on this view, what makes a human being a "person"? It is the soul — the immaterial, conscious, rational, willing subject. The body contributes to the full human experience, certainly. It provides the physical senses, the location in space and time, the capacity for embodied action. But the core of personhood — the "who" that I am, the "I" that thinks and chooses and loves — is the soul.

And here is where the analogy to divine personhood becomes clear. A divine Person — the Father, for example — is an immaterial, conscious, rational, willing subject who subsists in the divine nature. A human person — Peter, for example — is an immaterial, conscious, rational, willing subject (a soul) who subsists in a human nature (which includes both soul and body). Both divine Persons and human persons are, at their core, immaterial subjects of consciousness and will. The difference is enormous — the divine Person is infinite, eternal, uncreated, and omniscient, while the human person is finite, temporal, created, and limited in knowledge. But the basic structure is analogous: both are immaterial personal subjects who possess a nature and act through it.

This analogy is not a minor point of theological aesthetics. It is fundamental to the Christian understanding of what it means to be made in the image of God. Genesis 1:26–27 teaches that God created human beings in His own image — imago Dei. But what is the image of God? What is it about us that reflects God's nature? The traditional answer, shared by virtually the entire Christian tradition until quite recently, is that the image of God resides primarily in the human soul — in our capacity for rationality, moral agency, self-consciousness, relational love, creativity, and spiritual communion with God.¹¹ These are the very capacities that make us "persons" in the theological sense. And these are the capacities that we share, by analogy, with the divine Persons. We image God precisely because we, like God, are personal subjects — immaterial centers of consciousness, will, and relational capacity.

On dualism, the analogy is elegant. God is a Trinity of immaterial Persons. Humans are embodied immaterial persons. The common element — immaterial personal subjecthood — provides the link. The soul is the seat of the imago Dei. It is what makes us "like" God, even though we are infinitely smaller, weaker, and more limited than He is. The analogy is imperfect, of course — all analogies between the Creator and the creature are imperfect. But it is a genuine analogy. The word "person" means something proportionally similar when applied to God and to humans.

IV. The Analogy Destroyed: How Physicalism Makes "Person" Equivocal

Now let us see what happens when we replace dualism with physicalism.

On physicalism, a human person is a purely physical organism. There is no immaterial soul. There is no separate substance of mind or spirit distinct from the body. What we call "consciousness," "rationality," "will," and "self-awareness" are all functions of the brain — they are either identical to neural activity (reductive physicalism) or they emerge from neural activity and are entirely dependent upon it (nonreductive physicalism). Either way, a human person is a physical organism. Take away the body — and specifically, take away the functioning brain — and you take away the person entirely. There is no residual "self" that persists. No soul. No immaterial subject. Just a body.

This means that on physicalism, human personhood is constituted by physical properties. What makes Peter a person, on this view, is his physical brain — its neural architecture, its electrochemical activity, its functional complexity. Peter's "personhood" is a property of his physical organism. It is something that matter does when it is organized in a sufficiently complex way.

But now consider the divine Persons. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not physical organisms. They do not have brains. They do not have neural architecture. They do not have electrochemical activity. They are purely immaterial — spiritual beings with no physical constitution whatsoever. If "person" for humans means "a physical organism with a sufficiently complex brain," then what does "person" mean when applied to God?

The answer, on physicalism, is that it must mean something completely different. For humans, "person" means "physical organism." For God, "person" means "immaterial subsistence in the divine essence." These are not analogously similar — they share almost nothing in common. The word "person" is being used equivocally — like the word "bank," which means one thing when you are depositing money and something entirely different when you are sitting by a river. Words used equivocally carry no real information across from one usage to the other. When we say "I went to the bank," the word "bank" does not tell you anything about rivers. And if "person" is equivocal between divine and human usage, then calling God a "Trinity of Persons" tells us nothing meaningful about what a "person" is in the human sense, and calling a human being a "person" tells us nothing meaningful about what "Person" means in the divine sense.

This is a theological disaster. The entire structure of Christian theology depends on the word "person" carrying analogical weight — on there being a genuine, meaningful resemblance between divine personhood and human personhood. The doctrine of the imago Dei depends on it. The doctrine of the Incarnation depends on it (the divine Person assumes a human nature — but if "person" means something completely different for God and for humans, what exactly is happening in the Incarnation?). The ethics of human dignity depend on it (every human being has inherent dignity because every human being is a person made in the image of the personal God). The doctrine of salvation depends on it (we are called into personal relationship with a personal God — but if "person" is equivocal, what does that relationship even mean?).

Let me put this as clearly as I can. On dualism, the analogy between divine and human personhood works like this:

God is an immaterial Personal being. Humans are embodied beings with immaterial souls. The soul is the immaterial personal core of the human being. Both God and human souls are immaterial personal subjects. The analogy is real.

On physicalism, the "analogy" collapses into equivocation like this:

God is an immaterial Personal being. Humans are entirely physical organisms with no immaterial dimension. What makes God a "Person" (immaterial subjecthood) has nothing in common with what makes a human a "person" (physical organization). The word "person" means completely different things in each case. There is no genuine analogy.

Some readers might wonder whether I am being too harsh here. After all, couldn't a physicalist say that the common element between divine and human personhood is not immateriality but rather consciousness, rationality, and will — whatever their underlying ontological basis? That is, couldn't a physicalist say that God has consciousness, rationality, and will (on an immaterial basis), and humans have consciousness, rationality, and will (on a physical basis), and this shared set of capacities constitutes the analogy?

This response has some initial plausibility, and I want to take it seriously. But I think it ultimately fails, for several reasons that I will address more fully later in this chapter. For now, let me note one immediate problem: on physicalism, consciousness, rationality, and will are functions of the physical brain. They are not properties of a subject that exists independently of the brain. They are what the brain does. But on the divine side, consciousness, rationality, and will are properties of an immaterial subject who exists entirely without any physical substrate. These are fundamentally different kinds of things. A function of a physical organ is a very different kind of reality from a property of an immaterial spiritual being. Calling both "consciousness" does not make them analogous — any more than calling the electrical signal in a computer and the sensation of pain in my fingertip both "information" makes them analogous in any deep metaphysical sense.

V. The Incarnation Problem: Compounding the Difficulty

The equivocation problem is already serious enough when we are just talking about the Trinity. But when we bring the Incarnation into the picture, it becomes even worse.

The Incarnation, as we have discussed throughout this book, is the doctrine that the second Person of the Trinity — the eternal Son, the divine hypostasis — assumed a complete human nature and became a human being without ceasing to be God. The Son is one divine Person possessing two complete natures — divine and human. This is the hypostatic union, defined at the Council of Chalcedon in 451.

Now, the Incarnation is, at its core, the union of a Person and a nature. And the word "person" must mean something coherent and consistent for this union to make sense. The Son is a divine Person — an immaterial, conscious, willing subject who subsists in the divine essence. This divine Person then assumes a human nature — a complete set of human properties including a human body and (on the orthodox view) a human rational soul.

On dualism, this union involves the following: an immaterial divine Person unites with a human nature that consists of a body and an immaterial soul. The immaterial dimension provides a natural "bridge" or "point of contact" between the divine and the human. The divine Person is immaterial. The human soul is immaterial. And the human soul is naturally connected to the human body. So the union has a coherent metaphysical structure: the immaterial divine Person is united to the immaterial human soul, which in turn is united to the human body. The soul functions as a mediating link between the divine and the physical.¹²

On physicalism, the union looks very different. An immaterial divine Person is united to a human nature that is a purely physical organism — a body with a brain, and nothing else. There is no immaterial human soul to serve as a bridge. The union is between the purely immaterial (the divine Person) and the purely material (the human body). How does an immaterial divine Person "personalize" (give personal existence to, subsist in) a physical organism? What is the metaphysical "point of contact" between a spiritual, infinite, omniscient divine subject and a collection of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen organized into a brain?

I want to be fair here. I am not arguing that this union is logically impossible on physicalism. God can do anything that is logically possible, and I am not going to claim that it is logically impossible for an immaterial Person to be united to a purely physical organism. But I am arguing that it is metaphysically puzzling in a way that dualism avoids. On dualism, we have an immaterial Person united to an immaterial soul united to a physical body — and the immateriality of both the Person and the soul provides a natural metaphysical connection. On physicalism, we have an immaterial Person united directly to a physical organism with no metaphysical bridge at all. The union is, in a sense, maximally mysterious — because the two things being united (an immaterial divine subject and a purely material body) have absolutely nothing in common ontologically.

And here is where the equivocation problem compounds the difficulty. On dualism, the word "person" means something analogically similar for God and for humans: an immaterial subsisting subject. So when we say that a divine "Person" assumed a human "nature," the word "person" carries its analogical weight smoothly. We understand what kind of thing a "person" is — whether divine or human — and we can at least begin to grasp what it would mean for a divine Person to unite with a human nature.

On physicalism, the word "person" means something radically different for God and for humans. For God, a "person" is an immaterial subsistence. For humans, a "person" is a physical organism. So when we say that a divine "Person" assumed a human "nature," we are saying that an immaterial subsistence assumed a physical organism. But wait — if a human "person" just is a physical organism, then is the assumed human nature a "person" or not? On physicalism, a sufficiently complex physical organism with a functioning brain is a person. So the assumed human nature — a complete human body with a functioning brain — would seem to be a person in its own right. And now we have two persons in Christ, which is Nestorianism. The physicalist has a very hard time explaining why Christ's complete human body-with-brain is not a human person, when on her own view, that is exactly what a human person is.¹³

As we discussed in Chapter 15, the orthodox tradition solves the "two persons" problem by saying that Christ's human nature never had its own independent personal existence (anhypostasia) but was always personalized by the divine Person of the Son (enhypostasia). But this solution requires a clear distinction between person and nature. The person is the "who" — the subsisting subject. The nature is the "what" — the set of properties and capacities that the person possesses. On dualism, this distinction maps cleanly: the person (soul) is the subsisting subject; the nature (body + soul together) is what the person has. On physicalism, the distinction is much harder to maintain: the person is the physical organism, and the nature is the physical organism. Person and nature collapse into the same thing. And if person and nature are the same thing, then having a complete human nature just is having a human person — and the Christological problem is insoluble.

VI. The Imago Dei and the Foundations of Theological Language

The problems we have been tracing are not limited to the technical details of Trinitarian and Christological theology. They reach all the way down to the foundations of how we talk about God, how we understand ourselves, and how we understand the relationship between the two.

The doctrine of the imago Dei — the image of God — teaches that human beings are made in God's image and likeness (Gen 1:26–27). But what does this mean? What is it about human beings that reflects the nature of God?

Throughout the vast majority of Christian history, theologians have answered this question by pointing to the immaterial dimensions of the human person: reason, will, moral agency, creativity, relational capacity, and the ability to know and worship God. These are the capacities that set human beings apart from the rest of the physical creation. Animals have bodies — many of them far stronger and more physically capable than ours. But animals (at least in the traditional understanding) do not have rational souls. They do not reason about abstract truth. They do not make moral choices. They do not pray. They do not create works of art. They do not worship.

The imago Dei, on this traditional view, resides in the human soul — in our immaterial capacities for rationality, morality, and relationship with God. And this makes perfect sense on dualism: we image God because, like God, we are personal beings with immaterial souls. God is an infinite, immaterial personal being. We are finite, embodied, but still immaterial (at the soul level) personal beings. The image is real — we genuinely resemble God in a way that rocks, trees, and even animals do not.

On physicalism, however, the imago Dei becomes far more mysterious. If human beings are entirely physical — just bodies and brains, with no immaterial dimension — then in what sense do we "image" a God who is entirely immaterial? Our bodies do not resemble God's nature (God has no body). Our brains do not resemble God's being (God has no brain). The only candidate for the image would be our functional capacities — our ability to think, choose, create, and relate — but on physicalism, these capacities are entirely physical. They are what neurons do. And what neurons do is fundamentally different, on a metaphysical level, from what an immaterial divine Person is.

I want to be careful not to overstate the argument. It is possible for a physicalist to affirm the imago Dei in a functional sense — to say that we image God through what we do (exercise rationality, make moral choices, enter relationships) rather than through what we are (immaterial personal subjects). This is a possible move, and some physicalist theologians make it. But it is a significant departure from the traditional understanding, and it weakens the doctrine considerably. The traditional view is that we image God both functionally (in what we do) and ontologically (in what we are — personal, rational, moral, immaterial subjects). Physicalism can preserve the functional dimension but loses the ontological dimension entirely. And it is the ontological dimension that grounds the functional one: we do things that reflect God because we are the kinds of beings that reflect God. If we are not ontologically like God in any deep sense — if we are purely physical organisms and God is a purely immaterial being — then our functional resemblance seems more like a coincidence than a genuine imaging.

There is another important implication here for theological language more broadly. Classical Christian theology has always held that we can speak meaningfully about God by using analogical language — language that is neither univocal (meaning exactly the same thing when applied to God and creatures) nor equivocal (meaning completely different things) but genuinely analogical (meaning something proportionally similar). We can say "God is good," "God is wise," "God is loving," "God is personal" — and these statements tell us something real about God, even though God's goodness, wisdom, love, and personhood infinitely surpass our own.

But analogical language requires a genuine ontological connection between the creatures and the Creator. The analogy of being — the analogia entis, as it is known in the tradition — depends on creatures genuinely participating in or reflecting the divine perfections. If creatures are purely physical and God is purely immaterial, the ontological connection is at its weakest. The analogy is strained to the breaking point. We might still be able to say "God is good" and mean something by it, but the metaphysical grounding for that statement is thin. On dualism, the ontological connection is robust: our immaterial souls genuinely participate in the kind of being that God is. We are immaterial personal subjects — finite and created, but genuinely immaterial and genuinely personal, like God Himself. This provides a solid ontological foundation for analogical language about God.¹⁴

VII. The Patristic Witness: The Church Fathers Never Defined Personhood in Physicalist Terms

I want to strengthen our argument by showing that the church fathers — the theologians who developed the concepts of hypostasis, persona, and ousia in the first place — never conceived of personhood in physicalist terms. This is important because if someone objects that our argument is merely philosophical and not rooted in the historical tradition, we can point to the historical evidence and say: the tradition is on our side.

We have already discussed the Cappadocian fathers, Boethius, Leontius of Byzantium, and Leontius of Jerusalem. But let us add a few more voices to the chorus.

Augustine of Hippo (354–430), the most influential theologian in Western Christianity, devoted his masterwork De Trinitate (On the Trinity) to exploring the mystery of God's triune nature. And throughout that work, Augustine repeatedly used the human soul — specifically, the soul's capacities for memory, understanding, and will — as an analogy for the Trinity. He called these three capacities a "trinity" within the human soul, and he argued that they reflect, in a creaturely way, the eternal relations of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Now, Augustine's psychological analogy for the Trinity has been both praised and criticized over the centuries (critics worry that it is too individualistic and risks modalism). But for our purposes, the key point is this: Augustine located the image of the Trinity in the soul — not in the body, not in the brain, not in physical organization. The human soul, with its immaterial capacities, is where we most closely mirror the triune God.¹⁵

John of Damascus (c. 675–749), the great synthesizer of patristic theology, also assumed an immaterial dimension to personhood. In his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, he repeatedly affirmed that Christ possesses a human rational soul (psychē logikē, ψυχὴ λογική), and that this soul is the seat of Christ's human intelligence, will, and personal experience. John's anthropology is explicitly dualist: a human being consists of body and rational soul, and the soul is the immaterial component that bears the rational, volitional, and moral capacities of the person.¹⁶

Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662), perhaps the most profound Christological thinker of the patristic era, developed his understanding of Christ's two wills and two operations (energies) on the explicit assumption that Christ's human will is a faculty of His human rational soul — not a brain function. For Maximus, the human will is the soul's natural capacity for rational desire and deliberation. It is a soul-property, not a body-property. The physicalist would have to say that Christ's human will is a brain function — a neural event — but this is not what Maximus or any other patristic author meant by "will."¹⁷

The point is not that the church fathers were infallible philosophers. The point is that when they developed the very concepts and language that we use to talk about the Trinity, the Incarnation, and personhood, they did so within a thoroughly dualist framework. The concept of hypostasis — "person" — was never defined in physicalist terms. It was always understood as an immaterial subsisting subject. And this means that physicalism about human nature represents a fundamental departure from the conceptual framework within which orthodox Trinitarian and Christological theology was formulated. To adopt physicalism is not merely to update the anthropology while keeping the theology intact. It is to change the underlying concept of "person" — and that change ripples through every doctrine that depends on that concept.

VIII. The Person-Nature Distinction and Its Dependence on Immateriality

At this point, I want to go deeper into why the person-nature distinction — which, as we have seen, is essential to both Trinitarian theology and Christology — is far more natural and stable on dualism than on physicalism.

The person-nature distinction says that every concrete being has two distinguishable (though inseparable) dimensions: a "who" (the person, the hypostasis) and a "what" (the nature, the ousia). In the Trinity, there are three "whos" (the Father, Son, and Spirit) and one "what" (the divine nature). In Christ, there is one "who" (the divine Son) and two "whats" (divine nature and human nature). In an ordinary human being, there is one "who" (the human person) and one "what" (the human nature — body and soul together).

On dualism, this distinction maps onto reality in a clear way. The "who" — the person — is the immaterial soul, the subsisting subject who bears and acts through the nature. The "what" — the nature — is the composite reality of body and soul together, with all their properties. The person (soul) is the underlying subject; the nature (body + soul) is what this subject is and what it acts through. There is a real ontological distinction between the subject (person) and the properties and capacities that the subject possesses (nature).

On physicalism, this distinction becomes very difficult to maintain. If there is no immaterial soul — if the person just is the physical organism — then the person and the nature are the same thing. The "who" is the body. The "what" is also the body. There is no underlying subject distinct from the bodily properties. The person is just the bundle of physical properties taken as a whole. And if person and nature are not genuinely distinct, then the entire framework of Trinitarian and Christological theology loses its conceptual foundation.

As Wilkinson argues in Crowned with Glory and Honor, the person-nature distinction in Christology was grounded in the person-nature distinction in Trinitarian theology. The church took its orthodox ontology and extended it from God to the God-man: "In the same basic way that God is three hypostases in one ousia, Christ is one of those hypostases in a human ousia distinct from his divine ousia."¹⁸ This extension only works if hypostasis and ousia are genuinely distinct ontological categories — if the "who" is a different kind of reality from the "what." And this genuine distinction is precisely what dualism provides and physicalism undermines.

The pro-Chalcedonian tradition made this even more explicit. Leontius of Byzantium formalized the principle that "the ontological foundation of being is not nature but person. Nature does not exist except in a hypostasis."¹⁹ The hypostasis — the person — is ontologically prior to the nature. The person gives existence to the nature, not the other way around. This is a deeply anti-physicalist principle. If the person is ontologically prior to the nature — if the "who" gives existence to the "what," rather than being a product of the "what" — then the person cannot be a mere function or emergent property of the physical body. The person must be something more fundamental than the body. And that "something more fundamental" is the immaterial soul.

On physicalism, by contrast, the person is a product of the nature. Consciousness, rationality, and personal identity emerge from the physical brain. The "who" is generated by the "what." This reverses the ontological priority that the pro-Chalcedonian tradition insisted upon. And this reversal creates serious trouble not only for Christology but for the coherence of the person-nature distinction itself.

IX. The Trinitarian Persons and the Problem of Relational Personhood

Some theologians — particularly those who lean toward physicalism or who want to avoid the language of substance dualism — have proposed a "relational" or "functional" understanding of personhood. On this view, what makes someone a "person" is not an underlying immaterial substance (a soul) but rather a set of relational capacities — the ability to be in relationship, to communicate, to love, to be addressed by others, to respond. This relational understanding has been developed in various forms by theologians like John Zizioulas, who argues that personhood is constituted by relationship rather than by substance.²⁰

This relational approach has some real strengths, and I do not want to dismiss it entirely. It captures an important truth: personhood is indeed deeply connected to relationship. The Trinitarian Persons are, after all, constituted partly by their eternal relations — the Father is Father precisely because of His relation to the Son; the Son is Son precisely because of His relation to the Father; the Spirit proceeds from both (or from the Father through the Son, depending on one's tradition). Relationship is at the very heart of divine personhood. And human personhood, too, is deeply shaped by our relationships — with God, with one another, and with ourselves.

But a purely relational or functional account of personhood cannot do the work that theology requires. Here is why.

First, relational capacities presuppose a subject who has them. A relationship is a relationship between subjects. Before the Father can be "in relationship" with the Son, the Father must first be — He must exist as a subsisting subject, a "who," who then enters into (or, in the case of the Trinity, eternally exists in) relationship with the Son. The relationship does not create the person out of nothing. The person must exist in order to be in relationship. And the question is: what kind of being is this person who stands in relationship? On dualism, the person is an immaterial subsisting subject. On physicalism, the person is a physical organism. The relational capacities do not resolve this underlying ontological question — they presuppose it.

Second, a purely relational or functional account of personhood makes personhood contingent on the existence of relationships. If I were the only being in existence, with no one to relate to, would I cease to be a person? Surely not. A person stranded alone on a deserted island, with no other persons to relate to, is still a person. Personhood cannot be simply constituted by relationships — it must involve some intrinsic ontological reality that grounds the capacity for relationship.²¹

Third — and most importantly for our purposes — even if we grant a relational account of personhood, the equivocation problem does not go away. On physicalism, human relational capacities are brain functions — they are what neurons do. On the divine side, the Trinitarian Persons' relational capacities are properties of immaterial beings. Calling both "relational" does not resolve the fundamental metaphysical difference. We are still left with a physical organism on one side and an immaterial being on the other, and the word "person" (now understood relationally) still means something fundamentally different in each case.

X. The Son's Eternal Personhood and the Incarnation

There is one more dimension of this problem that deserves careful attention. It concerns the eternal personhood of the Son — and what happens to that personhood in the Incarnation.

Before the Incarnation, the Son existed eternally as a divine Person — a hypostasis of the Trinity. His personhood was purely immaterial. He had no body, no brain, no physical dimension whatsoever. He was an infinite, immaterial, conscious, willing subject subsisting in the divine nature.

At the Incarnation, this same divine Person assumed a human nature. He took on a body, a brain, a complete human existence. But His personhood did not change — Chalcedon insists that the Incarnation occurred "without change" (Greek: atreptos, ἀτρέπτως). The Son did not stop being who He was and become someone else. The same Person who eternally subsisted in the divine nature now also subsisted in a human nature. The Person remained the same; a nature was added.

Now, on dualism, this makes clear sense. Before the Incarnation, the Son was an immaterial Person. At the Incarnation, this immaterial Person united Himself to a human nature (body + soul). The Son's personhood — His immaterial personal subjecthood — remained unchanged. He simply added a human nature to His already-existing immaterial personal reality. The soul of the human nature serves as the natural "bridge" or "interface" between the immaterial divine Person and the physical human body. The Person acts through the human soul and body as His own, without any change in His essential personal identity.

On physicalism, this is far more puzzling. Before the Incarnation, the Son was an immaterial Person. At the Incarnation, He united Himself to a human nature that is a purely physical organism — a body with a brain and nothing else. How does an immaterial Person — who has existed from all eternity without any physical dimension — "become" or "personalize" a physical organism? What does it mean for a purely spiritual being to subsist in a collection of matter?

Again, I am not saying this is logically impossible. I am saying it is metaphysically far more puzzling than the dualist alternative. And the reason it is more puzzling is precisely because of the equivocation on "person." The Son's eternal personhood is immaterial personhood. The human nature's kind of "personhood" (on physicalism) is physical-organism personhood. These two concepts of personhood share so little in common that we struggle to understand how one could be the same kind of thing as the other — let alone how one could be assumed by the other in a hypostatic union.

On dualism, the Son's eternal immaterial personhood and the human soul's immaterial personhood are genuinely analogous. They are both immaterial personal subjecthoods — one infinite, the other finite. And because they are analogous, we can understand (at least in part) how the infinite immaterial Person could take up the finite immaterial soul and, through it, the body. The analogy does real explanatory work. On physicalism, there is no such analogy, and the explanatory work is left undone.

XI. Potential Physicalist Responses and Why They Fail

I want to be fair to the physicalist position. Several responses might be offered to the argument I have been developing. Let me consider them carefully.

A. "The Analogy Is Functional, Not Ontological"

The most common response is the one I mentioned earlier: the physicalist might argue that the analogy between divine and human personhood is a functional analogy, not an ontological one. That is, what makes both God and humans "persons" is not that they share the same kind of being (immaterial subjecthood) but that they share the same kinds of capacities — consciousness, rationality, will, relational ability, moral agency. Whether these capacities are grounded in an immaterial nature (God) or a physical brain (humans) is irrelevant to the analogy. What matters is the function, not the substrate.

This response has some appeal, but it faces several serious problems.

First, as I noted earlier, the kinds of consciousness, rationality, and will are very different on each side. On the divine side, consciousness is not a process that begins and ends, that can be disrupted or destroyed, that depends on anything external. It is an eternal, self-sustaining, infinite awareness. On the physicalist-human side, consciousness is a fragile, temporally bounded, entirely brain-dependent process that can be eliminated by a blow to the head or the cessation of blood flow. Calling both "consciousness" is a bit like calling both a lightning bolt and a flashlight "lights" — technically true, but the underlying realities are so different that the word does very little analogical work.

Second, and more importantly, a purely functional analogy is too thin to ground the theological claims that depend on it. The doctrine of the imago Dei does not merely say that humans do things that are somewhat similar to things that God does. It says that humans are made in the image of God — that there is a deep ontological resemblance between the Creator and the creature. We are not just functional imitators of God; we are genuine images of God — created reflections of His very nature. This requires an ontological connection, not just a functional one.

Third, the functional analogy cannot explain why personhood has the moral weight that Christian theology assigns to it. Every human person has inherent dignity — a dignity that does not depend on whether their brain is functioning well, whether they are conscious, whether they can currently exercise rational capacities. A person in a coma is still a person. A person with severe intellectual disabilities is still a person. A person in the womb who has not yet developed higher brain functions is still a person. If personhood is functional — if it consists in the exercise of certain capacities — then personhood comes and goes as capacities come and go. But if personhood is ontological — if it consists in being a certain kind of subject (an immaterial soul united to a body) — then personhood is stable and inherent, regardless of what functions the person is currently exercising. The moral weight of personhood requires an ontological, not merely functional, account.²²

B. "God Can Unite With Physical Things Directly"

A second response is simply to assert that God can unite with anything He wants — including a purely physical organism — and that we should not impose metaphysical constraints on divine action. If God wants to personalize a body directly, without any immaterial bridge, He can do so. After all, the Incarnation is a mystery and a miracle. We should expect it to transcend our philosophical categories.

I have some sympathy for this response. It is true that the Incarnation is a mystery. It is true that we should not expect to fully comprehend it. And it is true that God is not bound by our philosophical frameworks.

But this response proves too much. If we appeal to mystery whenever our theology creates a metaphysical puzzle, we lose the ability to do theology at all. The church fathers did not simply say "it is a mystery" when Apollinarius denied Christ's human soul. They offered careful philosophical and theological arguments for why Christ must have a complete human nature. They did not simply say "it is a mystery" when Nestorius seemed to divide Christ into two persons. They offered precise conceptual tools — the person-nature distinction, anhypostasia, enhypostasia — to show how the unity of Christ's Person is preserved. Mystery is not a license to ignore genuine philosophical problems. The church has always believed that faith and reason work together — that theological claims should be coherent, even when they transcend our full understanding.

Moreover, the point of our argument is not that the union is impossible on physicalism. It is that dualism provides a more natural, more coherent, more explanatorily powerful framework for understanding the Incarnation. Even if we grant that God could unite with a purely physical organism, we are still left with the question of which anthropology best fits the Incarnation as the church has understood it. And the answer, I believe, is clearly dualism.

C. "The Church Fathers Were Wrong About the Soul"

A third response is more radical: the physicalist might simply say that the church fathers were wrong about the soul. They were working with outdated pre-scientific assumptions. Modern neuroscience has shown that mental states are brain states, and the church's theology needs to be updated accordingly.

This response faces two major problems. First, as we have argued extensively in earlier chapters (see especially Chapters 3–5), the case for an immaterial soul is not merely a pre-scientific assumption. It is grounded in Scripture, philosophical argument, and empirical evidence (particularly the evidence from near-death experiences). The Bible teaches that the soul survives death (Matt 10:28; Luke 23:43; Phil 1:21–23; Rev 6:9–11). The philosophical arguments for dualism — from the unity of consciousness, from intentionality, from free will, from the conceivability of disembodied existence — remain powerful. And the NDE evidence provides intriguing empirical support for the survival of consciousness after clinical death. The soul is not a pre-scientific relic; it is a well-supported metaphysical conclusion.

Second — and this is the point that matters most for this chapter — even if the church fathers were wrong about the soul, this would not solve the equivocation problem. It would only make it worse. If the concept of "person" was developed within a dualist framework, and if that framework turns out to be wrong, then the concept of "person" as it functions in Trinitarian and Christological theology was built on a mistaken foundation. We would need to either (a) rebuild the concepts of hypostasis and persona from scratch on a physicalist foundation, or (b) admit that the Trinitarian and Christological doctrines as formulated by the councils are incompatible with physicalism and need to be revised. Neither option is attractive for a Christian who takes the ecumenical councils seriously.

Option (a) is enormously ambitious and has never been successfully carried out. No physicalist theologian has produced a comprehensive reformulation of Trinitarian and Christological theology on a physicalist foundation that preserves the substance of the conciliar definitions. And there is good reason to think it cannot be done: the conciliar definitions presuppose the kind of person-nature distinction that only dualism provides.

Option (b) is a concession that physicalism is incompatible with orthodox Trinitarian and Christological theology — which is precisely the conclusion this chapter is arguing for.

D. "Analogy Does Not Require Shared Ontological Categories"

A fourth, more philosophically sophisticated response might argue that analogy does not require the things being compared to share the same ontological category. A shepherd's care for his sheep and a king's care for his people are "analogous" even though sheep-herding and governance are ontologically very different activities. Similarly, divine personhood and human personhood might be analogous even if one is immaterial and the other is physical.

This is a thoughtful objection, and it deserves a careful answer. I grant that analogies can span different ontological categories to some extent. But there are limits. An analogy must involve some genuine point of similarity — otherwise it is not an analogy but an equivocation. The shepherd-king analogy works because there is a genuine common element: both involve the exercise of protective authority over those in one's care. Remove that common element, and the analogy collapses.

In the case of divine and human personhood, the common element — on the traditional, dualist understanding — is immaterial personal subjecthood. Both divine Persons and human persons are immaterial subjects of consciousness and will. Remove this common element (as physicalism does, by making human personhood entirely physical), and the analogy loses its anchor. What is the new common element supposed to be? "Subjecthood" itself? But subjecthood, on physicalism, is a brain function for humans and an immaterial property for God. These are as different as the financial bank and the riverbank.

For an analogy to function in theological language — to actually tell us something meaningful about God — there must be a robust point of ontological contact between the analogue (the creature) and the thing signified (the Creator). The thicker the ontological contact, the more informative the analogy. Dualism provides thick ontological contact: both divine and human persons are immaterial personal subjects. Physicalism provides thin ontological contact at best: both divine and human persons have... consciousness? But consciousness understood in radically different ways. The analogy becomes paper-thin — too thin to bear the theological weight that the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the imago Dei place upon it.²³

XII. The Wider Implications: Worship, Prayer, and Relationship with God

Before we close, I want to point out that the problems we have been discussing are not merely academic. They have implications for the lived Christian life — for worship, for prayer, and for our relationship with God.

Christians are called into personal relationship with a personal God. Jesus said, "And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent" (John 17:3, ESV). Eternal life is knowing God — personally, relationally, intimately. We are invited into the very fellowship of the Trinity — to share, by grace, in the love that the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit have for one another.

But this invitation to relationship assumes that we are the kind of being that can be in relationship with God. It assumes that we are persons who can know, love, worship, and commune with a God who is personal. And if the word "person" means something completely different for us than for God — if our personhood is entirely physical and God's is entirely immaterial — then what does this "relationship" actually look like? How does a physical organism enter into personal communion with an immaterial divine being?

On dualism, the answer is clear: the human soul — which is immaterial, like God — is the seat of our spiritual communion with God. We know God, love God, and worship God in our souls. The soul is the faculty of spiritual perception, the capacity for divine encounter. On physicalism, we know God with our brains. We love God with our neurons. We worship God with our synapses. And while there is nothing wrong with acknowledging that our brains are involved in worship (of course they are — we are embodied beings, and our brains are part of our embodied existence), the idea that worship is nothing but brain activity — that there is no immaterial dimension to our encounter with God — seems to impoverish the spiritual life in a fundamental way.

The great mystics of the Christian tradition — from the Desert Fathers to Teresa of Ávila to John of the Cross — all understood the spiritual life as an encounter between the human soul and God. The "interior castle" of the soul, the "dark night of the soul," the "prayer of quiet" — all of these classic descriptions of the spiritual life assume that the soul is a real, immaterial reality that can be drawn into deeper and deeper communion with God. If there is no soul — if the "interior castle" is just a pattern of neural firings — then the entire mystical tradition of Christianity is built on a mistake. And I, for one, am not prepared to say that.²⁴

XIII. Conclusion: The Trinity Demands the Soul

We have covered a great deal of ground in this chapter, so let me pull together the main threads of our argument.

The doctrine of the Trinity teaches that one God exists as three distinct Persons — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — each fully divine, each a distinct hypostasis, each subsisting in the one divine ousia. These three Persons are entirely immaterial. Their personhood consists in immaterial personal subjecthood — consciousness, will, rationality, relational capacity — subsisting in the immaterial divine nature.

The word "person" has been used analogically in Christian theology from the beginning — applied to both divine Persons and human persons. This analogy is not a mere convenience; it is the foundation of the imago Dei doctrine, the conceptual framework of the Incarnation, and the basis for the person-nature distinction that structures both Trinitarian and Christological theology.

On dualism, this analogy works naturally and robustly. Both divine Persons and human persons are immaterial personal subjects. The common element — immaterial subjecthood — provides a genuine ontological link between the Creator and the creature. The person-nature distinction is clear and stable. The Incarnation — the union of an immaterial divine Person with a human nature that includes an immaterial soul — has a coherent metaphysical structure.

On physicalism, this analogy collapses. If human personhood is entirely physical — if a person is just a body with a brain — then "person" means something completely different for God and for humans. The analogy degenerates into equivocation. The imago Dei loses its ontological grounding. The person-nature distinction becomes unstable. The Incarnation becomes more puzzling than it needs to be. And the theological language that the church has used for nearly two thousand years loses its coherent foundation.

This does not mean that physicalism is logically impossible. God can, in principle, do anything logically possible. But it does mean that dualism provides a vastly superior framework for understanding the Trinity, the Incarnation, and the relationship between God and human persons. The church fathers who developed the concepts of hypostasis and persona were working within a dualist framework. The ecumenical councils that defined Trinitarian and Christological orthodoxy assumed a dualist anthropology. And the deep structure of these doctrines — the person-nature distinction, the analogical use of "person," the metaphysical coherence of the hypostatic union — depends on dualism in ways that have not been adequately appreciated.

The Trinity, like the Incarnation, demands the soul. A purely physical understanding of human nature not only impoverishes our anthropology — it undermines the very language and concepts we need to confess the deepest mysteries of our faith.

As we prepare to move into the next chapter, where we will examine additional Christological problems that physicalism creates for the doctrines of the beatific vision, theosis, and sanctification, I want to leave us with a thought that ties everything together. The God who made us in His image made us to be like Him — not in every way, of course, but in the most important way: we are personal beings, immaterial subjects of consciousness and will, capable of knowing and loving the God who is Himself an infinite personal being. Our souls are the point of contact between us and God. They are the seat of the imago Dei, the organ of worship, the capacity for communion with the divine. Without the soul, we lose not only our best understanding of what it means to be human — we lose our deepest connection to God Himself.