Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Man, Part 8.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

We have surveyed briefly the biblical data concerning the nature of man, and so now let's

talk about different attempts to systematize these biblical data.

Some people take human beings to be trichotomous in nature.

That is to say, human beings have three parts that go to make them up.

The body, the soul, and the spirit. This is the view of human beings that prevailed among the early

Greek-speaking church fathers and represents

the heritage of Platonism. On Platonic doctrine, the soul is that which animates the body.

It makes the body alive. So,, being animate, have souls as well as human beings.

But the spirit is a higher faculty that is distinct from the soul. The spirit would be what seems to make us self-conscious, rational

persons not just alive. It seems to be roughly equivalent to the mind.

Now, by contrast, the dichotomous view holds to dualism of the body and the soul or spirit.

It doesn't really matter which word you use to refer to the immaterial part of man.

The point is that we're made up of two parts, the material

part and the immaterial part. And this is the view that prevailed among the Latin-speaking

Western Church Fathers. Today, many theologians eschew any sort of differentiation between material

and immaterial constituents in man. They would espouse a unitary view of human nature,

what we might call anthropological monism.

That is to say, human beings are made up just of a single constituent which is physical in nature.

We just are physical bodies. You are your body. There is no immaterial

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