Reply To: Anthropology Discussion Board 1

[Pchris]

Man is a threefold being which means , man is a spirit who has a soul and lives in a body. My focus in this essay is on the soul. There are different views on the origin of the soul but for this purpose , I am going to be looking at the three (3) major theological views on the origin of the soul and they include :
1) SOUL CREATIONISM
Soul creationism is a theological view held by some christians which states that God creates a soul for each body that is generated. It goes further to state that the origin of the soul cannot be by spiritual generation from the souls of parents because human souls, been essentially and integrally simple and indivisible, can give forth no spiritual germs or reproductive elements. I disagree with this view as it is a conjecture to the origin of the soul.
The Word of God says in Genesis 2:2 ( ” And on the seventh day God ended His work which He had done and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done.) NKJV.
If I have to agree with the view of soul creationism that for each body, God creates separately a new soul when he/she is born , then I do not herein affirm that He makes anything which He had already made. God had already made man after His own image on the sixth day and this work of His is unquestionably to be understood with reference to the rational soul of man.
I believe this view originated from John 5:17 ( My Father is at work until now , so I am at work) . This theory has difficulties because , how is the sin nature transferred if God gives everyone a soul apart from the parents ? Does He give them souls that are prone to sin from birth unlike how He created Adam? Because this seems unlikely. It is true on one hand ,that God rested from creating things which previously did not exist and equally true on the other hand that He continues still to work, however not only in governing what He has made, but in multiplying what already existed.

2) TRADUCIANISM
The word traducian come from the Latin word tradux which means ” branch of a vine ” . This means that every human being is a branch off of his / her parents.
This is a theological view that states that both soul and body are generated by father and mother. This is in opposition to the creationist view that says God creates every new soul directly. I agree with this view because God gave man the dominion mandate and in order to do so, man must procreate his own kind. Gen 1:28 (Then God blessed them and God said to them , ” Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it, have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves on the earth.) Because of the dominion mandate given to man to multiply his own kind , the traducian view holds that the parents are only the instrumental cause of the new human soul. To strike a balance with this view, I will rightly state that God is still the efficient cause.
A strength of traducian theory is that it best explains human depravity. In reference to Paul Enns : (If the parents pass on the non material nature , then it explains the propagation of the sin nature and the tendency from birth of every human being to sin. The sin nature cannot be explained if God creates each soul directly.)
In considering the transfer of the sin nature of man , Romans 5:12 says ” Therefore just as through one man sin entered the world , and death through sin and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.
Also in Psalm 51:5 ” Behold , I was brought forth in iniquity and in sin may mother conceived me.
A strength of this view is the hereditary factor. Not only are we like our parents physically, but also commonly in personality, intelligence and emotions which are components of a soul. If God directly transmitted the souls apart from the parents , then these traits would not be as prevalent.
3) PREEXISTENCE THEORY
This view teaches that God originally created a number of souls and some are joined to human bodies at conception or sometime later. I disagree with this view as there is no clear statement in the scripture that supports this view.

IN CONCLUSION
God is the creator of man . Man was made in His image as a direct , special creation . God formed man from the dust and breathed into him the breath of life and he became a living soul (Gen 2:7) . However after God ceased His creation of the heavens and the earth and everything in them, He commonly creates now through secondary process which He developed in the original creation.