Outside the realm of evangelical thought we find yet another view, the idea that man cannot exist at all apart from a physical body, and therefore the “soul” can’t exist separately after the body dies (although this view can allow for the resurrection of the whole person at some future time). When scholars assemble everything the Bible says about the soul and spirit, there’s still some room for interpretation. The three main schools of thought come down to how many “parts” humans are made of: Three parts: Body, soul, and spirit I saw thrones on which were seated those who had been given authority to judge. And I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded because of their testimony about Jesus and because of the word of God. They had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life and reigned with Christ a thousand years.” —Revelation 20:4

Learn more in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology online course. First: Can we be sure that humans have souls? Others argue that “spirit” is not a separate part of man, but simply another term for “soul,” and that both terms are used interchangeably in Scripture to talk about the immaterial part of man that lives on after our bodies die. The view that man is made up of two parts (body and soul/spirit) is called dichotomy. Those who hold this view often agree that Scripture uses the word spirit (Hebrew “ rûach”, and Greek “ pneuma”) more frequently when referring to our relationship to God, but such usage (they say) is not uniform, and the word soul is also used in all the ways that spirit can be used.

Some people believe that in addition to “body” and “soul” we have a third part, a “spirit” that most directly relates to God. This view is called trichotomy. While this has been a common view in popular evangelical Bible teaching, there are few scholarly defenses of it today.

Learn more in Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology online course. Trichotomy: Body, soul, and spirit?

In John 12:27, Jesus says, “Now is my soul troubled,” whereas in a very similar context in the next chapter John says that Jesus was “troubled in spirit” (John 13:21). Similarly, we read Mary’s words in Luke 1:46–47: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” This seems to be an example of Hebrew parallelism—a poetic device that repeats the same idea using synonymous words.