Plato and Paul
In my previous post, I dealt with the Christian view of the body. I submitted that the view of the body as a prison from which our soul seeks to escape is not the teaching view. Of course, finding that Scripture did not teach that our bodies are prisons from which we seek to escape, one cannot help but wonder where such teaching is found. Surprisingly, one finds it in Plato. According to Cary, In Phaedo, Plato claims that our bodies are prisons for the soul whose real home is “above†in another world. In Phaedrus, he tells us that our souls began their existence without bodies, but somehow “fell†into physical bodies. Being in a body is a bad or “fallen†state. Eventually, the soul escapes back into that disembodied state for which it is intended. N.T. Wright states:
For Plato…, the soul, being immortal, existed before the body, and will continue to exist after the body is gone…Because the soul is this sort of thing, it not only survives the death of the body, but is delighted to do so. If it had known earlier where its real interests lay it would have been longing for this very moment. It will now flourish in a new way, released from the prison that had hitherto enslaved it. Its new environment will be just what it should have wanted…Death is frequently defined in terms of the separation of soul and body, seen as something to be desired.
Wright contrasts Plato’s views with that of the apostle Paul. According to Paul, being human or an embodied human is not bad.
What is bad is being a rebellious human, a decaying human, a human dishonored through bodily sin and death. What Paul desires…is not to let the soul fly free to a supposed astral home, but to stop the ‘soul’, the psyche, from being the animating principle for the body…He sees that the true solution to the human plight is to replace the ‘soul’ as the animating principle of the body with the ‘spirit’ – or rather, the Spirit.
According to Plato, we do not really belong here on earth or in physical bodies. We belong in a disembodied state in some other existence. I’ve heard this same sentiment many times from the mouths of Christians. But it does not seem to be a scriptural concept. Rev. 6:9-11, speaks of the disembodied souls of the saved who are not happy, but waiting for God to finish his work of judging the world, after which they will be reunited with their bodies. It is not “natural†for us to be without bodies. Plato feels that we will return to some un-embodied primal state. However, Paul does not teach this, but alternatively teaches that we will find redemption from sin and death which has corrupted the primal state. There is no scriptural teaching that we were once pre-existing immaterial souls without a body that were placed into bodies at some point in time. Our souls have always been associated with bodies. Those bodies which have suffered corruption through sin, in a future bodily resurrection will be created anew. As Wright asserts:
He (Christ) will enable other humans, not to escape from the physical world back to an original ‘image of God’, but to go on to bear, in the newly resurrected body, the ‘image of the man from heaven’.
Next…another place we find the Platonic view of the soul.