Let’s recap the first three posts in this series on Otis Q. Sellers’s 1939 What Is the Soul?
Part I documents Sellers’s understanding of Scripture’s plenary inspiration based on its character as theopneustos (θεόπνευστος, 2 Timothy 3:16), which determines the approach to particular words.
Part II begins to survey the data of words traditionally rendered “soul”: the Hebrew נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) and its Greek equivalent ψυχή (psyche).
In Part III we show that in Genesis נֶ֫פֶשׁ (nephesh) applies to creatures that “move from place to place … [and] have sensation and consciousness” (for not all creatures do) and how the translators of the King James Version inexcusably obscured this truth.
We will now introduce the biblical figures God condescended to use to communicate truth about the soul. “Let us consider,” Sellers writes, “these two parts of living man which constitute him a living soul.”
First, there is the body: it was created out of something already in existence [but also created], that is, the dust or soil of the earth. A man may love his body, care for it, protect it and nurture it, yet it is just so much soil, and at death it must return to the soil from whence it was taken.
(In a note, Sellers explains that “I use the word dust … although the word soil is preferred. To us dust means soil without moisture, powdered fine. This does not fit the Hebrew word here, but our word soil seems to fit it perfectly.”)
“It may be humiliating to accept it,” he continues, “and that which humiliates is often rejected, but God has the material for making myriads of bodies, for these bodies are just so much soil.”
God could fashion stones into human beings with the DNA that would mark them as children of Abraham (Matthew 3:9). “God, if He so desired, could duplicate every one of us a thousand-fold.” Continue reading “Soil-Body, Blood-Life, the Human Spirit, and the Divine Atmosphere It Breathes: Sellers on the Soul—Part IV”