ontolawhut?
[Unless otherwise noted, all quotes are from Bullinger’s Decades and have been lightly adapted.]
Humans lose things. It’s part of life. One member of my marriage tends to lose things…keys, wallet, phone, etc. It happens so often that I think it’s almost enjoyable for this individual. The sheer panic 30 seconds before we attempt to leave the house, ‘Where’s my keys/wallet/phone/etc?’ It’s rather like a game.
But ideas can be lost as well. And unlike the accessories mentioned above, when ideas are lost, we can lose something about how we think of ourselves. We can lose something at great cost to our souls. Think of the Protestant Reformation. The simplicity of the gospel had been lost amidst the medieval Catholic sacramental system. Canon law had crusted over the pure offer of salvation. The knowledge of the certainty of salvation had been lost.
But few Protestants today seem to understand that ideas were lost after the Reformation as well. Bullinger’s sermon focuses on two ideas: the rational soul of man, and the certainty of salvation after death. Of these ideas, the first is the one we’ve lost today.
All men confess that the rational soul of man has a certain similarity to the spirits, nor is there any wise man who denies that the knowledge of the rational soul of man – of which the scripture teaches so many things diligently – is most wholesome and necessary to all the godly.
The knowledge of man’s soul is wholesome and necessary to the godly. Do we believe that?
To answer that question we need to understand what the soul is. And this is where we start to realize that ideas have been lost since the Reformation. The question of the soul is part of the study of ontology, or the science of being. Ontology is a subset of metaphysics, the study of foundational knowledge. And already I’m hearing my readers tune out. ‘Sounds too philosophical.’ ‘Worldly wisdom much?’ ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’
But Bullinger had none of this silliness. The knowledge of man’s soul is wholesome and necessary…to the godly. If we want to be godly, we need the pure and essential understanding of who we are.
So who are we? Well, we are a soul rather than having a soul. The soul is what makes something a living being.
For who doesn’t know that there are commonly understood to be three principal powers of the soul? There is the vegetative soul which works in plants; there is the sensitive soul, which doesn’t exist without the vegetative soul, and it gives life to brute beasts and other creatures given life and feeling; and there is also the rational soul which men have been given, and it’s furnished man with other powers or abilities, and it includes both the vegetative and sensitive souls as well. So anima, the soul, is taken from scripture for the breath which men draw in and let out again, and also for the life of man or of a living creature.
Now, funny enough, Bullinger’s approach in this sermon is precisely why these ideas get lost in the first place. He doesn’t have a single reference to Aristotle in this chapter, and the only time he references Aquinas is when he’s arguing with him about purgatory. But the quote above is just straight up Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. Know who does get a lot of references? Augustine. There are lengthy Augustine quotations. And who was Augustine drawing from in his ontology? Classic Greek philosophy, including Aristotle and Plato. He doesn’t openly say, ‘now this bit is from Greek philosophy and this bit is from exegetical theology’, so he’s much safer for Bullinger to quote, at least as far as optics go. But make no mistake, Bullinger is drawing from the best of a western philosophical and psychological and theological tradition on how we are to understand the soul of man, he just didn’t want to admit his sources. That was kind of a common problem among Reformation-era writers.
What’s also fascinating to me as a 21st century pastor, Bullinger wouldn’t have seen philosophy, psychology, and theology as three separate disciplines. Nor would Augustine or Thomas Aquinas, and nor did the Puritans. Nor should we today. Bullinger, were we to ask him, would have said, ‘This is how God created us as men in his world, so it’s to our benefit to understand – whether from natural theology or from special revelation – who and what we are.’ Or, more simply, ‘The knowledge of man’s soul is wholesome and necessary to the godly.’ Godliness requires us to understand how God created us. That includes our understanding of the soul. Many of us who are pastors spend a great deal of time exegeting the difference between Moses and David and Isaiah and Peter and Paul and James and John, including their personality differences or differences in writing styles, and yet we can completely ignore the differences in personality or stylistic differences between Bob and Gary and Jane and Beth. In other words, many pastors are much better at exegeting their Bibles than they are at exegeting their sheep. And, since the Bible commands us to shepherd our own flocks, if we’re not all that good at exegeting our sheep, that means we’re also not all that good at exegeting our Bibles.
To be honest, Bullinger’s description of the soul in this sermon is cumbersome. The bones are all there, but his description doesn’t have the clarity you’d find in writers like John Owen (Pneumatologia) or Richard Baxter (The Christian Directory) or even Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica). So I’m going to give a brief sketch summarising Reformation and post-Reformation ontology and why it matters today. I’ll even throw in a Bullinger quote or two to show I’m not just making this stuff up.
The soul is what makes us living beings. Classic ontology has three parts to the soul of man: mind, will, and affections (Bullinger thinks there are only two, mind and will; the affections would be a subset of the will). The mind is what we use to think, the will is what we use to choose, and the affections are what we use to feel. Scripture makes clear that this is how God has created us in Genesis 3.6 and 1 John 2.16. There’s also reference to this in Jesus’ temptations.
These faculties or powers interact with each other and with our bodies in a complicated way. The way our body functions can impact how we think (try solving a sudoku with a splitting headache). What we’re meditating on can have a real impact on our bodies (stomach ulcers from worry). Physical health, mental health, and spiritual health have a complicated and intertwined relationship with each other. Sorting out what is causal and what is symptomatic is extremely complicated, for physician, psychologist, and pastor alike.
In the excellent study of the soul there is great labour. For the soul fights fiercely against the world and the flesh, and it’s never safe and at rest from the assaults or invasions of Satan, but being strengthened by the Lord, the soul goes away with notable victories and triumphs. The souls of saints and holy men therefore, work holiness in all kinds of ways, just as the souls of the wicked commit heinous sin in all sorts of ways. There are many other operations of souls, which I’m not going to go into, lest I should preach longer than would be appropriate.
In other words, this matters for our sanctification, and there’s much much more he could go into on this topic. But he doesn’t have time. He’s not saying this topic is either unimportant or unedifying. If Bullinger thinks the study of the soul is necessary and useful for godliness today, perhaps we should as well.
Notice his delight in the glory God has bestowed upon man (he begins by quoting Augustine).
‘Let us therefore consider what is the proper force of the soul of man. Weigh with me the wonderful power of understanding and reasoning, not common memory as brute beasts have, but a memory of innumerable things that are commended to us and kept in mind by signs and deep consideration. Consider with me so many devices of craftsmen, tilling of lands, building of cities, obvious wonders of many buildings and devices. The inventions of so many forms in letters, in words, in gestures, in sounds, in pictures and drawings, so many tongues of nations, so many things planned, so many new things, so many things reformed, so many books, and so many that are useful as monuments to useful memory and providing for those who come after us. The various orders of offices, powers, honours and dignities, either in families, or in the common good in peace or in war, either in profane or in holy matters.…’ These truly are great powers or operations in the soul of man, but they are common to the good and the bad. Therefore, true goodness and praise follow from the godly man’s use of the powers of his soul.
I want to draw some applications from this all-too-insufficient (mine, not Bullinger’s) treatment of ontology.
1. God created us as complicated beings. We have bodies, and we have souls. Our bodies are complicated, and our souls, being mind, will, and affections, are complicated. We need to know this about ourselves, because self-knowledge in this area is part of living according to God’s design for humanity.
2. All of us have these three faculties, mind, will, and affections, but we all have slightly different orderings to the priorities we place on these faculties. Some people emphasise thought more, others are more decision driven, still others are motivated by their affections/emotions. And our own priorities are constantly shifting. Please note: few of us are accurate in our own self-assessments of which of these faculties is actually the driver in our own lives.
3. Spiritual growth, the work of the Holy Spirit, takes place in these faculties. What does it mean in passages like Romans 8.9 or 2 Corinthians 1.22 which talk about God’s Spirit being in us? What does that mean? Where is God’s Spirit within us? The Spirit’s regenerating work takes place in our souls, that is, in our minds, our wills, and our affections. God Spirit is within us, renewing us, renovating us, in our capacities to think and reason, to desire and choose, and to feel and respond. This is a powerful driver for our sanctification. We can grow in how we think, in how we choose, and in how we feel.
4. Pastoral ministry is from souls to souls. We minister as pastors, with our minds, wills, and affections, to the souls of our church members, their minds, wills, and affections. That means preaching isn’t merely giving information, nor is it simply willing our people to change or stoppit, nor is it trying to emotionally manipulate our people into godliness. It’s working from this whole soul triad ourselves, to the whole soul triad of those under our care. For those of you who are pastors, brothers, we must understand this triad in ourselves and in our people. Working with the grain of the Spirit’s work in them is critical for our effective care of their souls.
5. We need better philosophy, psychology, and theology. These ideas were largely lost in English-speaking Protestantism by the end of the 1800s or the beginning of the 1900s. RL Dabney is one of the last American theologians to reference this model of faculty psychology. Herman Bavinck has some allusions to it, but it’s pretty faint in his writings. Then Freud comes in the early 1900s, and older models of the soul are swept away. Why didn’t the church protect these ideas? How did we lose such a valuable understanding of who we are and how God created us? We need a better, ie more biblical and more fully human, understanding of who we are as men and women created in the image and likeness of God.
The second half of Bullinger’s sermon focuses on the salvation or damnation of the soul after death.
I simply affirm with the scripture that souls separated from bodies are taken up either into heaven itself, or else are drowned in the depth of hell.
Why does this teaching on the soul matter? Because God created us as beings with immortal souls. After this death we live forever, either in heaven or in hell. After death believers are resurrected and united with a glorified body. Those who have not believed are also resurrected and cast bodily into hell. Who and what we are matters, not just for this life, but also for the life to come.
What then is our hope?
The Lord gave himself up to be a sacrifice for our sins, so that we might be sanctified and purged from our sins truly, fully, most perfectly.
So we know we shall be saved, body and soul, if we trust in the mercy Jesus offers to all who come to him in repentance and faith.
Next, on the church
