DICHOTOMY AND TRICHOTOMY

The assumption that man consists of three essentially different parts: of the (body) as the material part; the (soul) as the lower, or animal, principle of life, which man has in common with animals; and the (spirit) as the higher, or spiritual, principle of life, which distinguishes man from the animals, is not sufficiently supported in Luke 1:46-47 and 1 Thess. 5:23. In Luke 1:46-47 (“My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God, my Savior”) “soul” and “spirit” are plainly synonymous, according to the parallelism of Hebrew poetry. The thought: “My lower principle of life” magnifies the Lord, and “my higher principle of life” hath rejoiced in God, my Savior, is foreign to the context. In 1 Thess. 5:23 the words “Your whole spirit and soul and body” refer to the progressive sanctification of the Christians in view of the approaching Judgment Day, and it is certainly better to take “spirit” not as a natural part of man, but as designating the entire spiritual nature of a regenerate person, and the as specifying the , so that the meaning is: May your whole spirit, your soul as well as your body, be preserved blameless. Dichotomy is favored decidedly by passages like Matt. 10:28: “Fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul; but rather fear Him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” Man is here described according to his entire essence (his “totality”), and still only “body” and “soul” are mentioned. Matt. 16:25-26 is also conclusive: “What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” That “soul” and “spirit” are essentially the same and are interchangeable terms is also evidenced by the fact that the departed, after having laid aside the body, are called both “spirits” () and “souls” () (1 Pet. 3:19 and Rev. 6:9). Recent theologians are divided on the question;16 nearly all the older Lutheran dogmaticians teach dichotomy.17