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Nancey Murphy, professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Seminary, is no shrinking violet when it comes to making her voice heard in the marketplace of ideas. And people are taking notice of what she says, not only because Murphy is forthright about speaking her mind, nor because she writes with an uncommon blend of authority, clarity, and rigor—though that certainly helps!—but because what she says, if true, has far-reaching consequences for how Christians understand themselves and their relation to God's created order.
In recent years, Murphy has been saying that human beings do not have a soul, at least not in the way that soul has traditionally been defined—"the spiritual part of a human being that is believed to survive death," as one popular dictionary has it, or as the seat of personhood and individual identity. The soul as traditionally conceived has been identified with the divine "breath" referred to in Genesis 2 that most intimately connects us to God our creator. It is closely linked with, if not identical to, consciousness and the "self." Christian philosopher J. P. Moreland defines the soul as "a deep unity of parts, properties, and capacities [that is] diffused throughout the body and can enter into complex cause-effect interactions with that body."
In place of this traditional conception—dualism, as it is commonly known—Murphy advocates an understanding of the human person rooted in what she calls "nonreductive physicalism." As she explains,
"Physicalism" signals our agreement with the scientists and philosophers who hold that it is not necessary to postulate a second metaphysical entity, the soul or mind, to account for human capacities and distinctiveness. "Nonreductive" indicates our rejection of contemporary philosophical views that say the person is "nothing but" a body. That is, many physicalist accounts of the person are reductive: they aim to show that human behavior can be exhaustively explained by means of genetics or neurobiology. So the difficult issue is to explain how we can claim that we are our bodies, yet without denying the "higher" capacities that we think of as being essential for our humanness: rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most important, the capacity to be in relationship with God.1
What we have traditionally identified as the soul, Murphy's colleague Warren Brown writes, is "a dimension of human experience [that] arises out of personal relatedness," and the capacity for personal relatedness is itself "an emergent property of human cognition." It is the human brain, with its rich network of neural connections, that makes us conscious creatures and allows us the ability to relate to one another and to God. But, Brown is quick to add, although the emergent properties traditionally identified with the human soul or mind or both are dependent on the cognitive capacities from which they emerge (and indeed cannot exist without them), they cannot be fully understood by, or reduced to, neurobiology. And these emergent properties in turn exercise a causative influence—"top-down causation"—on the "neurophysiological systems that instantiate them."
At first glance, this attempted redefinition of the soul might seem like a matter of academic interest, at best. After all, throughout the history of the church, philosophers have carried on esoteric debates about the precise nature of soul that had little impact on believers in the pews. So what's new? What really matters is that, as believers in Christ, we know that when we die, our souls will not perish. We will be in heaven with the saints who have gone before us, awaiting the Second Coming of Christ, when we will be restored to bodily life in a new, imperishable form. Right?
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