The Complete Person
A little over ten years ago, a young counselor named Kelly Turner was working with cancer patients when she first encountered something she calls radical remission. She defines radical remissions as cases where a person’s cancer goes away either without the use of conventional treatment, using alternative treatments after the failure of conventional treatment, or through a combination of both types of treatments in the face of a dire prognosis.[1]
Kelly began searching for other such cases and, to her surprise, found over a thousand in medical journals. Her disbelief was increasingly mixed with frustration, though, as she realized that conventional doctors were not interested in learning more about what these patients had done to get better. Kelly soon decided to dedicate her life to finding, analyzing, and sharing such stories.
In 2014, Kelly published a book entitled Radical Remission, Surviving Cancer Against All Odds. In it, she describes how she traveled extensively, conducting over 100 in-person interviews and analyzing over one thousand published cases of radical remission. She identified 75 factors that potentially played a role in healing and reduced that list to nine key factors that were mentioned far more than the others. Kelly wrote, “the majority of Radical Remission cancer survivors I study [employed] all nine of these factors, at least to some degree.”[2]
The nine key factors are radically changing your diet; taking control of your health; following your intuition; using herbs and supplements; releasing suppressed emotions; increasing positive emotions; embracing social support; deepening your spiritual connection; and having a strong reason for living.[3] For me, the most fascinating thing about this list is that only two of the nine factors are physical (nutrition and supplements). The remainder of the list involves emotional, cognitive, and spiritual factors. This seems to cast a shadow on conventional medicine’s over-emphasis on surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation in the treatment of cancer.
As if she’s anticipating the typical arguments of Western doctors when confronted with such evidence, Kelly writes, “Radical Remission cases may not be explainable—at the moment—but they are true.”[4]
Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
Human beings are an absolute marvel in their complexity and function. This was captured beautifully by King David thousands of years ago when he wrote that we are “fearfully and wonderfully made.” The Hebrew words that David used to describe man and God’s creativity in Psalm 139 indicate something that we should be astonished by, something that is extraordinarily difficult to design, create, and understand.
When you consider the many organs and systems that manage, regulate, and sustain each of us, it’s awe-inspiring. Organs such as the eye, brain, and heart are amazing in their design, function, complexity, and elegance. There are also many systems that govern the proper functioning of a human being including the cardiovascular, pulmonary, neuromuscular, cognitive, emotional, limbic, endocrine, and adrenal systems. There’s even an endocannabinoid system that regulates a host of physiological and cognitive processes as it mediates the effects of marijuana on a person. These all work together in wonderful harmony to sustain life and enable the functionality we take for granted.
An ever-increasing number of scientists, researchers, and doctors realize that in order to properly care for ourselves and promote healing when we are sick, we need to consider all of these systems and organs as an integrated whole. Among other things, this realization has led to the emergence of something called integrative medicine, a healthcare discipline that recognizes the close interplay between factors like those that Kelly Turner identified. By caring for the whole person, we can improve health, prevent disease, and treat illness.
The Bible reveals that, at the most basic level, every person consists of three parts: spirit, soul, and body. Theologians use words like “tripartite” to describe this. The apostle Paul wrote the following to the church at Thessalonica:
Now may the God of peace make you holy in every way, and may your whole spirit and soul and body be kept blameless until our Lord Jesus Christ comes again.[5]
This verse has led many to conclude that a whole/complete person is made up of spirit, soul, and body. The apostle John seemed to support this view when he wrote that “these three are one.”[6]
A tripartite view makes sense when one remembers that God made man in God’s image, and that God is a Trinity, i.e., God consists of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit—three parts.[7] This also makes sense when Paul writes that we are God’s Temple in a letter to the church at Corinth.[8] We know from the Old Testament that the Temple had three fundamental parts: the outer court, the Holy Place, and the innermost Holy of Holies where God dwelled. One might also conclude that the order in which the spirit, soul, and body are mentioned to believers in Corinth indicates their order of importance, with the spirit being the preeminent part (the Holy of Holies in the Temple), the body the lowest (the outer court), and the soul standing between the two. This is often represented using three concentric circles with the spirit, soul, and body represented by the innermost, middle, and outermost circles, respectively.
The body is the easiest and most obvious to grasp of the three. It’s the physical part of our being that interfaces with the material world through the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. We also experience physical pain in our bodies.[9]
The soul of a person is a little trickier to define. In the beginning of the Bible, the word soul describes a person’s entire being. Man became a living soul when God created him; a living, breathing creature. He wasn’t given a soul. This is borne out by the account of man’s creation in Genesis 2:7 where it says, “Then the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into the man’s nostrils, and the man became a living person.”[10] The Hebrew word for person is nephesh, which is translated as soul in the King James Version of the Bible.
Note that God used both physical and non-physical elements (dust and His breath) when He created man. This reflects the integrated nature of man. Man is neither a soul contained in a body nor a body merely possessing a soul. He is an integrated being. One interesting example of this can be found in the book of Leviticus: “The life of the body is in its blood… The life of every creature is in its blood.”[11] The Hebrew word for life is also nephesh. This verse demonstrates the supernatural integration of our physical and non-physical beings. It also shows that the word soul is often used for animals.[12]
Throughout the remainder of the Bible, the soul is also described as a non-physical entity characterized by our emotions, mind, and will. The Bible links our soul to many emotions including love, hatred, desire, joy, mourning, longing, anguish, and discouragement.[13] It also links our soul to matters of the mind like knowledge, memory, and humility.[14] Finally, it links our soul to the choices we make, our struggles with our thoughts, our decision to bless or curse others, and our choosing to wait for something.[15] The fact that our will is seated in our soul is incredibly important. It means that our soul determines whether or not we yield to the influence of God’s spirit, our own spirit, or evil spirits.
The soul is the part of a person that serves as the conduit between our physical body and inner spirit. The soul is central to who we are. It distinguishes each of us as a person and gives us our personality.
The soul is not immortal. There are various scriptures that describe the death of the soul.[16] In perhaps the most important of these Bible passages, Jesus says, “Don’t be afraid of those who want to kill your body; they cannot touch your soul. Fear only God, who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”[17] The Greek word for destroy is apollymi, which means to destroy fully, either literally or figuratively.
The spirit is non-physical and unseen. The Bible reveals that every living creature has a spirit that was given to it by God. This spirit gives life, and when God removes it, a living being dies. Man’s spirit was formed by God, and it returns to God when we die.[18] It’s the “breath of life” referenced in Genesis 2:7. In this context, the spirit combines with our body to create a soul—a living creature.
The Bible also reveals that God is fundamentally spirit, and we can receive His spirit inside of us.[19] This is known as being “born of the Spirit” and occurs when a person recognizes, confesses, and repents of sin, and accepts the sacrifice of Jesus Christ for the penalty for sin.[20] Absent that decision and action, a person lives in a suboptimal spiritual state, guided by his own spirit and/or evil spirits.
Looked at another way, our spirit is the deepest part of our being and the place where we can experience God. It’s where we can connect with God, receive His presence and divine nature, interact with Him, and follow Him. Like a radio that can receive and “interpret” invisible electromagnetic radio waves, our spirit, when properly tuned, can “receive” and come to know God. The soul and body cannot do this. But we must make the choice to invite God’s spirit into our lives. This choice must be made in our soul according to our individual will. As a result, there are two “spirit states” of a man: one in which the spirit of man is under constant attack by the devil[21] and the other in which God’s Spirit joins with our spirit and God adopts us as His children.[22]
Our spirit is most commonly thought to consist of conscience, fellowship, and intuition. Among other things, our conscience helps us judge right from wrong, deeply troubles us when we see sin and injustice, and confirms truth.[23] Our spirit also relates to God (i.e., fellowships with Him) through worship, jubilation, prayer, service, and crying out to Him.[24]
Google dictionary defines intuition as “the ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning. [It’s] a thing that one knows or considers likely from instinctive feeling rather than conscious reasoning.” One helpful way of viewing this is to consider what happens when the hair stands up on the back of your neck when you're around someone bad or something bad is about to happen. You sense something without really thinking about it. That’s intuition.
The spirit of a person is something deeper than thoughts, knowledge, and imagination; feelings, love, and emotional desires; and ideas, opinion, and determination of the will. The interrelationship between the spirit, soul, and body can be viewed in a number of ways. One was set forth by a Chinese Christian minister and author named Watchman Nee. Nee likened the three parts of man to a lit-up light bulb:
Within a bulb, there is the electricity, the filament, and the light. The body is like the filament, the spirit is like the electricity, and the soul is like the light. Electricity is the source of light, and light is the consequence of electricity. The filament is a physical material for conducting electricity and for emitting the light. When the spirit and the body combine together, they produce the soul. The soul bears the characteristics of the combination of the spirit and the body; it is the product of the union of the two things. The spirit is the motivating force behind the soul, while the body is the means to express the soul.[25]
I like this analogy because of the use of light. Jesus tells us that His followers are the light of the world, and this illustration captures that.
Another analogy can be drawn using a computer (body), its software (soul), and its power source (spirit), which is nicely summarized by Timothy Jenkins in his book The Aging Brain.[26] For followers of Jesus, the operating system is upgraded when we receive God’s Spirit and are connected to an uncorrupted source of power. When we die, our software is stored in the cloud, so to speak, ready for download into the new computer we will receive when Jesus returns. It is possible to erase/destroy the software, but the energy source lives forever.
We say a computer is “asleep” or “sleeping” when it is powered down. Remarkably, this is the same language that Jesus and the Apostle Paul used when describing people who had died.[27] They knew that there are two deaths. The first is the one people experience at the end of their lives. The second is the one that affects people who don’t surrender their lives to Christ. The first death is considered sleep because everyone will eventually be resurrected for judgment. With the second death, a person ceases to exist. Watchman Nee has this to say:
The soul is the master of a person because man's will is part of the soul. When the spirit controls the whole being, it is because the soul has yielded itself and has taken a lower position. If the soul rebels, the spirit will not have the power to control it. This is the meaning of “free will” in man. Man has the absolute right to make his own decisions. He is not a machine which turns according to God's will. He has his own faculty of deliberation. He can choose to obey God's will, and he can choose to oppose God's will and to follow the devil's will. According to God's arrangement, the spirit should be the highest part and should control the whole being. Yet the main part of man's personality, the will, is of the soul. Man's will (soul) has the power to choose to let the spirit rule, to let the body rule, or to let the self rule.[28]
Once we come to a genuine relationship with Christ, God’s Spirit enters us and encourages us to live in a way that pleases God. The Spirit influences our conscience in a way that bears witness to our conduct,[29] good and bad. It endows us with wisdom, understanding, good counsel, power, knowledge, deep reverence for God, inner strength, love, self-control, and virtue. Its fruits are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.[30] The degree to which we surrender control to God’s Spirit varies, though, so it is possible to have both “spiritual” and “carnal/worldly” believers. A table comparing the characteristics of the body, soul, and spirit is included below:
(Asterisk note: This is not the opinion of the majority of Christians. Please check out this blog post for a description of my position.)
The Heart
The scriptures use four principal terms to describe the immaterial parts of a man: spirit, soul, mind, and heart. We have already described the first three. Let us briefly address the heart.
A BibleGateway.com search reveals 884 occurrences of the word heart in the King James Version of the Bible. In some cases, it refers to the physical heart. Since the life of the body is in its blood, the primacy of the heart follows from the fact that it circulates blood throughout our bodies.[31]
In the vast majority of times that the word heart is used in the Bible, however, it refers to the whole of our innermost being, including our thoughts, intents, emotions, and conscience.[32] The heart is a combination of our soul and elements of our spirit. As a result, it reflects who we are. This is summed up nicely in the following excerpt from a Dallas Baptist University article:
[To] know a person’s heart is to know the actual person. It is the mirror image of a man or woman. As Proverbs 27:19 puts it, “As in water face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects man.” Since the heart holds the key to one’s essential makeup, its content and condition must be regularly examined. “Watch over your heart with all diligence,” admonishes the sage in Proverbs 4:23, “for from it flow the springs of life.”[33]
The relationship between the heart and soul is also worth noting, and nicely summarized as follows:
The soul is the person himself, but the heart is the person in action. This means that whenever you act, you act by your heart. Therefore, we may say that our heart is our representative in action. We have something in our inner being that represents us, and this representative is our heart.[34]
This is supported by Jesus where He is recorded as saying, “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks;” and, “A good person produces good things from the treasury of a good heart, and an evil person produces evil things from the treasury of an evil heart.”[35]
The heart is central to and reflects man’s character, so it only makes sense that we are told to, “Guard [our] heart above all else, for it determines the course of [our] life.”[36] In the New Testament, we’re told that God’s peace will guard our hearts and minds if we pray about everything, with thanksgiving, as we “live in Christ Jesus.”[37] The importance of guarding our hearts is critical.
The heart is also the place where God dwells in a believer. The Scriptures explicitly tell us that Jesus Christ and God’s Spirit both dwell in the hearts of believers.[38]
FOOTNOTES
[1] Radical Remission, Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, Kelly A. Turner, 2014, Harper Collins.
[2] Ibid, page 9.
[3] It’s worth noting that exercise is not on the list. This came as a surprise to me. Kelly addressed this by noting that most people are too sick to exercise when they begin their healing journey, and that “almost all of them eventually exercise regularly.” She acknowledges that movement and exercise are essential to good health.
[4] Radical Remission, Surviving Cancer Against All Odds, Kelly A. Turner, 2014, Harper Collins, page 10.
[5] 1 Thessalonians 5:23.
[6] 1 John 5:7 (KJV).
[7] Genesis 1:26, 2 Corinthians 13:14, Matthew 28:19.
[8] 1 Corinthians 3:16.
[9] Job 14:22.
[10] See 1 Corinthians 15:45 as well.
[11] Leviticus 17:11,14. See also Deuteronomy 12:23.
[12] See, for example, Genesis 1:21, 24 and 30.
[13] Deuteronomy 6:4-5, Mark 12:29-30, Song of Solomon 1:7, 2 Samuel 5:8, Proverbs 13:4, Psalm 86:4, Job 14:22, Genesis 34:3 and 42:21, Numbers 21:4 (KJV all).
[14] Psalm 139:14, Lamentations 3:20.
[15] Job 6:7, Psalm 13:2 and 77:2, Psalm 104:1, Psalm 130:5.
[16] One example is Ezekiel 18:4 and 20.
[17] Matthew 10:28.
[18] Psalm 104:24-30, James 2:26, John 6:63, Job 32:8,18; Zechariah 12:1, Ecclesiastes 12:7, Acts 7:59.
[19] John 4:24, 1 Corinthians 2:11-12, 3:16-17 and 6:19-20.
[20] John 3:5-6, Acts 2:21,38 and 10:43.
[21] Ephesians 2:2.
[22] Romans 8:16, 2 Timothy 4:22.
[23] 1 Corinthians 5:3, Acts 17:16, John 13:21, Romans 9:1.
[24] John 4:23-24, Luke 1:47, 1 Corinthians 14:15, Ephesians 6:18, Romans 1:9, Romans 8:15.
[25] Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man, Vol. 1, Living Stream Ministry, Anaheim, CA, 1998, page 7.
[26] Timothy R. Jennings, MD, The Aging Brain, Baker Books, Grand Rapids, MI, 2018.
[27] John 11:12-13, 1 Thessalonians 4:13.
[28] Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man, Vol. 1, Living Stream Ministry, Anaheim, CA, 1998, page 10.
[29] Romans 9:1.
[30] Galatians 5:6,22-25, Isaiah 11:1-2, Ephesians 3:16, 2 Timothy 1:7.
[31] Leviticus 17:11.
[32] Hebrews 4:12 (NIV), Matthew 9:4, Acts 11:23 (KJV), Genesis 6:6, John 16:6&22 (KJV), Romans 9:2-3, Psalm 13:2, Psalm 42:5, Hebrews 10:22 (KJV), 1 John 3:20 (KJV).
[33] The Biblical Concept of the Heart, Dallas Baptist University, 2001 Summer Institute in Christian Scholarship, July 11, 2001.
[34] Witness Lee, Life-Study of 1 and 2 Thessalonians, Living Stream Ministry, Anaheim, CA, July 2001.
[35] Matthew 12:34 (ESV), Luke 6:45.
[36] Proverbs 4:23.
[37] Philippians 4:6-7.
[38] 2 Corinthians 1:22, Romans 5:5, Ephesians 3:17, and Galatians 4:6.