Soul. Man.

... then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)

I was thinking about "soul" this morning, and I thought of this passage from Genesis. It's very peculiar for a couple of reasons.

First, the Hebrew word for "living being" is nephesh, which we normally translate as "soul".

Second, we're told here that the man became a nephesh. He became a soul.

I was beginning to wonder if the word "soul" is descriptive of what we are, as opposed to something we possess. Many passages of Scripture make it appear as if we are infused with this "ghost in the machine" called a soul, and it's clanking around inside of us like a bumblebee in a glass jar, which then escapes at the moment of biological death and "goes to heaven" (whatever that might mean). It could be that our interpretation of Scripture is faulty as we impose our Greco-Roman, Neo-Platonic mindset onto its pages.

I know it's a bad practice to base a teaching on one passage of Scripture, and I have criticized this hermeneutic many times. But Genesis 2:7 seems quite clear to me. Soul is presented as a description of our being. We don't possess souls. We are souls!

This would require a gargantuan paradigmatic shift in our thinking to embrace this. But ponder the implications this would have in our relations with one another! Before I delve into this, I want to first examine where we've been and what the old paradigm has done to us.

With our western left-brained mindsets we have viewed others as bodies which contain an animating, invisible force which we have called "soul". Our physicality is then seen as the greater reality of our being. We have essentially reduced ourselves and others as objects to be used according to baser desires for our own advantage. Sex, violence, and drugs readily come to mind. What this means is that we have become a gnostic society-- indulge and/or punish the body in order to free the soul so that it can take on wings of magical flight back to its source. In short, the traditional view, so imbedded in our thinking, has actually succeeded in turning us against each other. We consume one another. But we don't bat an eyelash over it because people contain immortal souls anyway, which will escape them at death and travel to realms of unbridled bliss. Give 'em hell now; heaven comes later.

But what if we rethought all of this? What would change if we thought of ourselves as being souls, as opposed to having souls? What if you and I are souls? What is "soul" anyway? Here's how I would define the term:

Soul is who you are as you are shaped and given identity in union with God and all other sentient beings through the Spirit of Christ.

To put it more simply, a soul is a person who is fully reconciled to God and others solely by the grace of God.

To put it even more simply, heaven is a gift that is bestowed and not an ethereal destination which is completely unknowable until we die.

In this paradigm, people (including you) are no longer objectified. Our connections with God and one another are more profound than what we had first thought. This is the greater reality that we must train ourselves to more fully realize. This will take effort. I willing to expend this effort. Won't you join me?

Please give your thoughts on this. I'm not so brash and arrogant as to believe that I'm completely right.