Soul Eradication

God created the first man, Adam, a psycho-physical fusion--a wholistic duality (Genesis 2:7). God's "breath of life" (HB: neshama) is or possibly brought about another fusion, a fusion of life force together with individual self-conscious identity, an identity reflecting select attributes of God's own personality. With God's creation, mankind is said to a living being (HB: nefesh khayyah)--sometimes translated soul.

Soul eradication then, is an erroneous belief that the seat of man's intellect, emotions, and volition, the unique attributes which make up his personality, are exclusively or largely related to the fallen First Adam and the corrupted life force inherited from that representative Head. For this form of eradication the new nature should be "of the spirit," while the imago Dei is made synonymous with the "flesh". Does this sound strange and confusing? It is!

In their view, spiritual growth via the truth of identification (the application of the Apostle Paul's teachings of our identification with Christ's in His death and resurrection), rightfully leads to a spirituality characteristically anti-intellectual, emotionless, and passivity ("let go, let God"). For them, human "soulishness" is in need of being crucified!

Currently for me, the origin of this belief is hard to identify. The view is held and promoted by a number of individuals and groups (past and present) within the "Christian deeper life" community--and some who even embrace the works of Miles Stanford. The error seems to gain traction from speculative-forms of tripartite anthropology. For example, the official website for Watchman Nee states:

The Tripartite Man - In the early years of his Christian life, Watchman Nee came to see that man is composed of three parts: spirit, soul, and body (1 Thes. 5:23). He came to see that the soul is the personality of man; the body is the outward part of man for contacting the physical world; and the spirit is the inmost part of man for contacting the spiritual world. Since God is Spirit, we must worship and serve Him in our spirit (Rom. 1:9; John 4:24). Believers are regenerated by the Spirit of God in their spirit, the Spirit of God witnesses with their spirit (Rom. 8:16), the Lord Jesus is with their spirit (2 Tim. 4:22), and they are one spirit with the Lord (1 Cor. 6:17). The spirit must be divided from the soul (Heb. 4:12) so that believers can walk, live, and work in their spirit (Gal. 5:16, 25) and be spiritual men (1 Cor. 2:14-15).

These view were likely assimilated while Nee with under the ministry of T. Austin-Sparks, just prior to the release of Spark's 1939 book, What Is Man? In the Preface to the book, Sparks makes this self-indicting admission.

No claim is made to any expert knowledge. The contents represent more the result of observation and experience amongst Christian people over a wide area during a good number of years, than of study of the subject itself.

So much for basing one's doctrine on the written Word of God. While the tripartite concept may be correct, it needs scholarly evaluation and grounding using the original Hebrew and Greek text, not anecdotal speculation based on experience and observation.

On a practical level, these particular trichotomists, who claim to have experienced "crucifixion of their soul-life," often cast a jaundiced eye or comment toward those brethren whose expression of intellect, emotions, and will differ from their own. Most often, their system of belief leads to an arrogant and legalistic attitude, a sectarian spirit, and division amongst those who love the Lord.

Christian growth author, Miles Stanford attempted to counter this erroneous view. In chapter Seven of Position To Person, he wrote:

Your Essential Identity - Your Father, in eternity past, formed you positionally as an individual in His mind. He formed you actually (condition), as a later date, in your mother’s womb. The fall did not unmake you as that particular person; neither did your new birth unmake you as that same person. What is intrinsic to your personhood you never lose; your identity is eternally the same.

Whatever alteration you pass through in your new birth as to soul and spirit, whatever change awaits your body at the Rapture, you will never lose your essential identity in which your Father conceived you prior to the foundation of the world.

And in Chapter 39 of The Complete Green Letters, he gave this summation:

The following quotation from a message by Norman F. Douty seems to sum up what we have been seeking to share.

When we say that Christ's life has come into us to displace ours, what do we mean? We do not mean that this life of the Lord Jesus has come in to displace our personality. When I speak of our fallen life, I do not mean the human personality as such. I mean the poison which permeates our personality, the poison of sin which has degraded and defiled and distorted our humanity.

It is not that this new life of the Lord Jesus comes in to take the place of our personality, to take the place of our faculties created by God, but it comes in to take the place of the sinful life which is operating in our personality and employing our faculties. The vessel is the same, but the contents are different--the same vessel, the same person, the same faculties, but the contents different. No longer this sinful element, but the very holy nature of the Lord Jesus Christ filling, interpenetrating, permeating.

Our Father is not seeking to abolish us as human beings and have the Lord Jesus replace us. He is seeking to restore us as human personalities so that we may be the vehicle through which Christ will express Himself. Therefore you find that whenever God gets hold of a man, instead of abolishing his personality, He makes it what He intended it to be.

Redemption is the recovery of the man, not the destruction of the man. And when the Lord Jesus in us is brought to the place He is aiming for, there will not be an atom of the old life left, but the man will be left--glorified in union with the Lord Jesus Christ.

When it comes to personal tastes or cultural preferences, which do not directly or indirectly violate moral precept, there can be danger in standing in judgment on other believers. J. B. Stoney wisely wrote:

We as members of the Body of Christ are made for heaven, we are heavenly; not of the earth, though on it. When this truth first came out, we tried to carry it out in the wrong way, turning away from this thing and that thing in order to be heavenly. That is legality. (Ministry II:246).

Also see, Christian Mysticism--the True and the False.

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