The YouTube algorithm served me up a video offering a refutation of Hell as eternal conscious torment. The presenter was a pastor named Daniel Wilson who has about 550 subscribers – I don’t know anything else about him, but I thought he made a decent and concise argument.<\/p>\n\n\n
What really caught my attention, though, was a thought-provoking analogy Wilson used to answer a question I have had for years:<\/p>\n\n\n
What is the difference between our soul and our spirit?\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Are those terms synonymous or do they indicate two different aspects of human existence? If they are different, in what way do they differ?<\/p>\n\n\n
“Soul” and “spirit” are two different terms in Greek.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
In Matthew 10:28 Jesus says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul<\/b>. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul <\/b>and body in hell.”<\/p>\n\n\n
“Soul” here is the Greek psuche<\/i>.<\/p>\n\n\n
Whereas “spirit” – as in “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” (Mark 14:38) – is the Greek pneuma<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Granted, from what I can tell, most uses of pneuma <\/i>in the New Testament\u00a0refer either to the Holy Spirit <\/i>or to “unclean spirits<\/i>“. But it is clear that man has <\/i>a spirit as well. Stephen’s last words are a cry to Jesus to “receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59).<\/p>\n\n\n
So it seems clear that psuche\/soul and pneuma\/spirit are not synonymous in biblical thought.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Back to Pastor Wilson’s analogy …<\/p>\n\n\n
Wilson says the human body is like a lightbulb – it is the part of us made of physical substance. The spirit which God breathes into us is like the electricity coursing through the lightbulb.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
The soul, then, is the magic of “light” which results from the combination of bulb and electricity, body and spirit.<\/p>\n\n\n
What do you think? Does that make sense?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The YouTube algorithm served me up a video offering a refutation of Hell as eternal conscious torment. The presenter was a pastor named Daniel Wilson who has about 550 subscribers – I don’t know anything else about him, but I thought he made a decent and concise argument. What really caught my attention, though, was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6675","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6675"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6676,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6675\/revisions\/6676"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6675"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6675"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6675"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}