Blogging The Institutes: Day 31 1.15.1 - 1.15.3

Only humans were created in such a manner as to be part body and part soul, and as Calvin points out, the soul is really the defining difference between man and other created beings. But this division of man into soul and body is not widely accepted to be true. We know, as having this idea imprinted on our hearts, as the image bearers of God, that we are indeed both body and spirit. And of utmost importance, the spirit is an immortal spirit for as Solomon speaks of death saying that the spirit returns to God who gave it, and Jesus speaks of his commending his spirit to the Father, and Stephen speaks of his spirit ascending to Christ, "that when the soul is freed from the prison-house of the body, God becomes its perpetual keeper."

In defense of the immortality of the spirit Calvin lays out very helpful arguments:

"Conscience, which, distinguishing between good and evil, responds to the judgment of God, is an undoubted sign of an immortal spirit. How could motion devoid of essence penetrate to the judgment of God, and under a sense of guilt strike itself with terror? The body cannot be affected by any fear of spiritual punishment. This is competent only to the soul, which must therefore be endued with essence. Then the mere knowledge of a God sufficiently proves that souls which rise higher that then world must be immortal, it being impossible that any evanescent vigor could reach the very fountain of life."

"But the swiftness with which the human mind glances from heaven to earth, scans the secrets of nature, and after it has embraced all ages, with intellect and memory digest each in its proper order, and reads the future in the past, clearly demonstrates that there lurks in man a something separated from the body. We have intellect by which we are able to conceive of the invisible God and angels -- a thing of which body is altogether incapable. We have ideas of rectitude, justice, and honesty, ideas which the bodily senses cannot reach. The seat of these ideas must therefore be a spirit. "

"No, sleep itself, which stupefying to man, seems even to deprive him of life, is no obscure evidence of immortality; not only suggesting thoughts of things which never existed, but foreboding future events."

How true.