Der Pilger
Puritan Board Freshman
I came across the following explanation on another forum in a thread about Calvinism vs. Arminianism. I thought I'd post it here to see what others thought of it. I agree with it insofar as the distinction between soul, spirit and body goes, but I'm not sure of the rest of it. What do you make of it?
This is much like the trinity issue; there are well-developed doctrinal views built in place of an understanding of man as spirit-soul-body. (1Thess. 5:23, Gen. 2:7, Heb. 4:12). It's difficult to strip away the "free will" contention and deal simply with man's will (boule/boulema) and God's will (thelo/thelema). A series of word-studies is important, since man's will and God's will aren't the same type of will. Man's will functions freely as opposed to being externally coerced, but it has extremely limited capability of itself and is internally bound to the influences of the body of sin/death. (See my post in the free will thread.)
The real issue is the fact that man's soul-spirit roles were "inverted" by original sin; and they need to be "redistributed" by dividing asunder of the Word. The mind-will-emotion faculties of the soul weren't designed to function initiatively; they were designed to respond to God's Spirit through the faculties of man's spirit. God doesn't deal directly with man's will; the structural flow is from God's Soul-Spirit through man's spirit-soul. That flow has been disrupted and must be restored by the indwelling Christ of the Holy Ghost. It is a wholly intrinsic structural function that requires God's own indwelling presence to reconnect.
Man's soul is totally depraved; man's spirit is inherently good, though tainted by the filth of the flesh. (Flesh is a whole 'nother study; it isn't just the body.) Man's soul has no conscience-communion-intuition faculties to directly communicate with God; those are man's spirit faculties. Since man's will must access God's Will from a spirit-Spirit interface that has been separated by sin... the "free will" concept becomes pragmatically meaningless. It's an issue of strutural composition, not will-function.
There are volumes and volumes of teaching, but this topic is dismissed in favor of well-established tangents. EVERY principle of the Word is tied to the operational structure of man's constitution and God's. Predestination, foreknowledge, and election must all be understood in light of God's character of doing everything decently and in order.
It's not an issue of various teachings being incorrect so much as it is being incomplete. All things must be reconciled to Him, and thus to each other.
I can lay out a thesis on many other vital interrelated subjects, but most reject the foundation of God as Spirit-Soul-Body and man as spirit-soul-body. Most don't even really comprehend what a soul is, and contend that we can't know much because the Word seems to say little about it. Yet... these entire opposing theological systems are built on differing fundamental premises of one of man's soul faculties versus God's.
The whole Calvi/Armi debate is a futile engagement over an abstraction: "free will". The relevant truth is about His constitution and ours.