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Introduction

We come now to the final letter of our Biblical acrostic TULIP. This “P” is known as the perseverance of the Saints. However, we might better remember the “P” as Preservation of the Saints? The emphasis on the perseverance of the Saints falls on the saints while the emphasis on the “Preservation of God” falls on God’s preserving power. The best way to say it would be that those in Christ actively persevere because they are actively preserved by the power of God.

Perhaps we could say it this way. The called of God as positioned in Christ by the Holy Spirit work out their faith as God works in them to will and to do for His good pleasure. (Phil. 2:13)

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. Let us examine a Whitman’s sampler of Scripture that clearly teaches this doctrine.

A.) Scripture

John 10:27 My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me. 28 And I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. 29 My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father’s hand.

Phil. 1:6 And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.

Romans 11:29 – For the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.

II Timothy 4:18 – The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen.

II Tim. 1:12 Which is why I suffer as I do. But I am not ashamed, for I know whom I have believed, and I am convinced that he is able to guard until that Day what has been entrusted to me.

II Thess. 3:3 But the Lord is faithful. He will establish you and guard you against the evil one.

II Peter 1:5 Who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.

Here we see consistently the testimony of Scripture that once the elect are planted in Christ who died for them, they do not fail of the end of glorification which is the ultimate destination of their salvation.

B.) Definition

So… gathering all these Scripture threads how might we define this Preserving of God so that the saints persevere to the end?

Perseverance of the Saints declares that by the sovereign work of the Holy Spirit consistent with the Father’s election and the Son’s atoning work God preserves every single one of those who have been united to Christ so that they continue to persevere to the very end so that sanctification (increasing Christ-likeness consistent w/ God’s law-word) becomes the gateway to glorification.

Of if you prefer our standards (Synod of Dordt) puts it this way,

Article 1 Whom God calls, according to His purpose, to the communion of His Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, and regenerates by the Holy Spirit, He delivers also from the dominion and slavery of sin in this life; though not altogether from the body of sin and from the infirmities of the flesh, so long as they continue in this world.

So as we have already noted here the doctrine of Perseverance has a two fold motion.

First, God relentlessly and without fail holds and keeps His people so that they never ever fail of their beginning

This is taught unambiguously in John 6:39-40

“And this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up on the last day. For this is the will of my Father, that everyone who looks on the Son and believes in him should have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.”

Now, note a simple point here that reinforces the perseverance of the saints. Let me put in a the form of a question.

Look at that passage in John 6… what is the adjective that describes the noun “life” in that passage.

Now, if the those united to Christ could fall away then by definition that which they were given could not be called “eternal.” So the very idea that the life we are given in Christ is eternal life sustains the idea of the perseverance of the Saints because persevered by God.

Those who teach a salvation that can be lost (Lutherans, Wesleyans, Nazarenes, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics, General Baptists etc) deny the Scripture that describes life in Christ as being eternal. It’s not eternal life if one can lose it. These Christians who believe that a genuine Christian can fall away are of a different spirit from us. There theology is in complete anti-thesis to ours. We are
glad to call them Christian but they will never be anything but milk sucking Christians. They will not be able to mature in the faith because their faith is quite distinct from the faith of the Scripture. We need to pray for them and ask that God would lead them to knowing Christ better which is a prayer we should have for ourselves as well.

But think about it. Don’t you see the vast chasm that exists between a Christian who believes that God is sovereign enough to keep His people unto glory and a Christian who believes that God’s sovereignty might be overcome by man’s sovereignty. Don’t you see that these two types of Christians are pulling against opposite sides of the rope?

Now remember we said there is a two fold motion here. We just said the first motion is that God preserves. Each member of the Trinity is involved in this preserving work. The Spirit is given as a deposit GUARANTEEING that which is to come. The Son promises that He will nothing that has been given Him. Jesus says in John 10 that no one can snatch believers from the Father’s hand. God – Father, Son, and Spirit – preserves His people.

Now this second movement in Perseverance of the saints is that the saints who are preserved by God persevere. They endure to the end.

Phil 3:13 Brethren, I do not count myself to have [a]apprehended; but one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, 14 I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.

So here we see in St. Paul what John Murray will later characterize

“Perseverance means the engagement of our persons in the most intense and concentrated devotion to those means which God has ordained for the achievement of His saving purpose. (John Murray)

Rabbit trail

Note in that quote Murray speaks of “the most intense and concentrated devotion to those means which God has ordained for the achievement of His saving purpose.” We need to understand that the means God has ordained for the achievement of His saving purpose is the gathering of the Saints unto the Preaching of the Word and the distribution of the sacraments. That means the attendance of Church where we find the means of grace is a must for those who are persevering in the faith. By gathering ot worship we find the place where God preserves us unto our persevering.

End Rabbit trail

C.) The Consistency of Perseverance of the Saints w/ Other Doctrines

1.) Unconditional Election

Several weeks ago we considered Unconditional Election. You, of course, recall it is the doctrine that teaches that God from eternity past marked out His people for salvation. Now, if we could lose our salvation … if perseverance of the saints was not true then the doctrine of Election would also not be true. But we clearly saw when we preached on this that the doctrine of election is true and therefore it impossible for the perseverance of the saints not to be true. The perseverance of the saints is merely unconditional election incarnated in space and time in God’s people. The perseverance of the saints therefore has to be true or unconditional election isn’t true.

One of our Reformed Theologians has said on this score

“A denial of the doctrine of the perseverance of the Saints is a denial is a denial of the Sovereign grace of God in unconditional election.” (J. Oliver Buswell)

2.) Insuperable Grace

We took 2 weeks looking at this Insuperable / Unconquerable grace. We said during that time that this Irresistible grace always gets its man. Now, how odd would it be that the Irresistible grace of God that calls us from the dead was also not effective enough to keep us alive in Christ to the very end? It is because of God’s continuing insuperable grace that we as God’s saints continue to persevere. God unconquerable grace doesn’t end at regeneration but continues until we are glorified.

Romans 8:28-30 proves this

28 And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose. 29 For whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son, that He might be the firstborn among many brethren. 30 Moreover whom He predestined, these He also called; whom He called, these He also justified; and whom He justified, these He also glorified.

You see that in this passage that the certainty of the end is in the beginning. Glorification is implied in calling, Our end in glorification is merely the full development of our beginning in God’s calling.

3.) Limited Atonement

We looked at the doctrine of Limited Atonement or particular redemption and saw that the Scripture teaches that Christ paid for all the sins of all God’s elect. Now, if the believer who has had all of his sins paid for by Christ fell away and consigned to hell that would either mean that said believer was paying for sins that Christ already paid for or it would mean that Christ didn’t really pay for all the elects sins. Both of those options are ridiculous.

Because Christ in His death paid for all of the sins of all the elect that means all those elect who are grafted into Christ will persevere to the very end. They can’t do anything but persevere. There sins have been paid for. They have been given the Spirit GURANTEEING that which is to come and they live their lives making it their goal to please him as being zealous for good works.

Tod deny the perseverance of the saints is to deny Limited Atonement and to deny Particular Redemption is to deny the success of Christ to accomplish what He intended to accomplish on the Cross.

4.) The Intercession of Christ

If we deny the Preserving by God of His people we deny what Scripture teaches about how Christ continues His Priestly intercessory work praying that His people would finish their course. Thus if we deny perseverance of the saints we also proclaim that the heavenly prayer life of Christ can fail. We are saying that God fails.

Hebrews 7:25 Therefore He is also able to save [a]to the uttermost those who come to God through Him, since He always lives to make intercession for them.

See also Romans 5:8-10 Remember what we are doing here. We are looking at other Scriptural doctrines that support the Scriptural doctrine of the perseverance of the saints. We are seeing the interlocking nature of Scripture. We are seeing the harmony of the Scripture. If one doctrine is true it has ripple effects across the whole horizon and consistency requires us to believe all these doctrines as they are clearly mutually supporting.

As we have said… Calvinists / Reformed Christians / Biblical Christians don’t do contradiction in our thinking. Contradiction is to a Calvinist what garlic is to a vampire. We recoil and flee at the presence of contradiction.

5.) God’s ability to Keep us / God’s truthfulness

Jude 24 Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling,

And to present you faultless

Before the presence of His glory with exceeding joy,

25  Now to Him who is able to establish you according to my gospel and the preaching of Jesus Christ, according to the revelation of the mystery kept secret since the world began

Shall we call God a liar and insist that the perseverance of the Saints is not True and he does not have the ability to keep us?

7.) The Nature of the Change in the Believers heart

II Cor. 5:17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.

Here we are these new Creations in Christ. The old has passed. A radical supernatural change is wrought in the believer. The whole principle of one’s nature has been changed.

Where in Scripture do we find any doctrine about a de-creation of those who are new creations? We don’t. The nature of the change in the Believers heart necessitates the idea of the perseverance of the Saints.

8.) Our Union w/ Christ

Scripture teaches that we are united to Christ. He is the Head and we are the members. For Christ to lose a believer would be akin to having a part of Himself amputated. Our Union with Christ is permanent and can’t be undone. This teaches the perseverance of the saints.

9.) From the Work of the Holy Spirit in the heart

Here we have the person of the Holy Spirit. He has renewed our heart. He has been given as a deposit Guaranteeing that which is to come and what is to come is glory. It’s guaranteed. That same Holy Spirit who convicts the heart at the time of conversion… who raises us up with Christ is the same Holy Spirit who continues with His people. He continues the work of conviction …. repentance …. faith… and a going on with Christ. He is the one who preserves us so we as Saints persevere.

D.) Objections to the Perseverance of the Saints doctrine.

1.) It is contrary to human freedom

Remember … we have said before that the freedom of man is defined by the nature of man. This doctrine is not inconsistent with human freedom because in Christ we have been given a new nature that desires Christ. Therefore this doctrine is perfectly consistent with a human freedom that is operating consistent with our new creation human nature.

The problem with those who argue this way is that they desire to give to man a freedom that is gained at the cost of God’s freedom. God has promised in His divine freedom to preserve His saints but those who insist on human freedom want redeemed humans to have a freedom that checkmates God’s freedom.

It is blasphemy.

2.) It leads to indolence and laxness

First of all Scripture testifies against this happening

John 10:27 – My sheep hear my voice and they FOLLOW me.

Those who were opposed to Luther had a cat call they would hurl at Luther. They would say that the reason he believed in free grace is that he wanted to live however he wanted. Luther merely turned on them and said “precisely, now look at what we want.”

The believer has been delivered from the judgment and wrath of God. He has been made a new creation. He has been given life. Having been once aware of all his danger and now aware of how He has been delivered He is bursting with gratitude and so He lives His life to the glory of God.

Anybody who used the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints to excuse themselves from pursuing Christ thus embracing indolence and laxness demonstrates that they have not yet been born again.

3.) It is contrary to the teaching of Scripture

Demas

In Philemon he is mentioned as a “fellow worker”.[Philemon 1:24]

• In Colossians he is mentioned along with Luke (the physician and writer of the Gospel of Luke and Acts).[Colossians 4:14]
  
  
• In Second Timothy, a letter traditionally ascribed to Paul, where it is mentioned that “…for Demas, because he loved this world, he has deserted me and has gone to Thessalonica.” [2Timothy 4:10a] This has led to one commentator to describe Demas as ‘Paul’s Judas’.[2]

Demas – Demas has forsaken me, having loved this present world, 

I John 2:19 They went out from us, but they did not really belong to us. For if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us; but their going showed that none of them belonged to us.

4.) The Warning passages

Matthew 24:12, Col. 1:23, Heb. 2:1, 3:4, 6:11. I John 2:6

Conclusion

Comfort of this Doctrine

In the 1961 treatise “Thought Reform & the Psychology of Totalism — A Study of Brainwashing in China,” psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton analyzed the forced political indoctrination programs used by the Chinese Communists, labeled them ‘Totalism,’ and said that it subjugates the human to the ‘ahuman.’ He explained, from Camus, that it ‘puts an abstract idea above human life, even if they call it ‘history,’ to which they themselves have submitted in advance and to which they will decide quite arbitrarily, to submit everyone else as well. Under the rubric of ‘sacred science,’ Dr. Lifton further explained the elevation of the Leftist ideology to the level of the sacred while also providing it with the status of scientific certainty thus rendering all opposition to it both immoral and unscientific. Sound familiar?

Coughlin & Higgins
Re-remembering the Mis-remembered Left; The Left’s Strategy and Tactics to Transform America — p. 121

If you’re reading along I hope you see what a masterful insight this is. Our culture is currently be run along a Maoist track of totalistic control via the means of language manipulation invested with Scientism and partaking of the aura of the sacred. Americans have become so dumbed down that they can be easily manipulated by this Maoist brainwashing technique. You’re college graduate coming home to visit on the holidays isn’t learned when they scream about how the white man destroyed native American culture. They are brainwashed and so stupid. You’re neighbor who is screaming about Climate Change isn’t smart and well read. They are stupid and have been manipulated by fake science. The Karens you meet in your life who hyperventilate about masks and the Wuhan… they are just brainwashed ditties. Any time anybody starts demanding that you bow to some “fact” that has been forever scientifically proven — never mind that the fact in question is not falsifiable for the interlocutor berating you — and so therefore is unquestionable you have discovered a Maoist.

You can’t throw a rock 15 feet in any direction and not hit one of these brainwashed dupes in our country. You know who they are … they are the ones who gasp when you note that “actually, six million Jews were not killed in the Holocaust; recent numbers as adjusted by the Jews themselves have been significantly altered downwards.” They are the ones who gasp when you say that “the white man is not the axis of all evil in the world” or when you say that “actually European colonization of the third world had many positive benefits for the third world.” They are the ones who gasp when you tell them that, “Actually, many former slaves spoke of how slavery was the good life as seen by the slave exit interviews done in the 1930’s.” They are the ones who gasp when you tell them that, “God does not love everyone and in point of fact says Himself that He hates the wicked.”

And on and on it goes. We have been circumscribed by Maoist brainwashing on what we can and cannot think in this culture.

Actually, this is a long-overdue article attempting to explain why I remain baffled that so many Christians consider the sins of unrepentant sexual immorality (porneia), unrepentant boastfulness (alazoneia), unrepentant vulgarity (aischrologia), unrepentant factiousness (dichostasiai), and the like, to be only toxic for our nation, while policies that endorse baby-killing, sex-switching, freedom-limiting, and socialistic overreach are viewed as deadly….

Therefore, Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year….

When a leader models self-absorbed, self-exalting boastfulness, he models the most deadly behavior in the world. He points his nation to destruction. Destruction of more kinds than we can imagine.

Dr. Rev. John Piper
Election Article – Desiring God

I stumbled across Piper’s article on the Drudge Report where Drudge headlined the link,

“Prominent pastor warns evangelicals of Trump’s ‘nation-corrupting’ sins.”

Now, as nearly everyone knows who reads Iron Ink or who knows me, I am no Donald Trump fan. I am not voting for Donald Trump because I believe he is a moral reprobate as well as a man of the Left. Having said that, I still find myself compelled to defend Trump from the incredible hypocrisy of John Piper, who screams, by way of innuendo (he never names Trump), that Trump’s character is so bad he can’t be elected President without saying a word about the rancid, fetid character of Joe Biden.

Now, I quite agree that Trump’s character is of Hugh Hefner quality but Piper never said a peep in that article about the Larry Flynt character of Joe Biden and I don’t think that is accidental. I think that this whole character shtick that Piper complains about is purposeful and is intended to help Biden win election. I will even go as far as to say that Piper’s article is likely part of the Biden campaign since the Biden campaign itself is seeking to make Trump’s character as the reason people should vote Biden.

But if Piper wants to talk about character let us, by all means talk about Biden’s character.

Johnny boy Piper wants to complain about Trump’s unrepentant sexual immorality. I quite agree. However, what Johnny Boy Piper failed to give us by way of innuendo is the unrepentant sexual immorality of Joltin’ Joe Biden. Hey Piper … Was Joe showing his superior character when he cornered his female assistant (Tara Reade) in the hallway of his office and sexually abused her by forcing, against her will, his fingers into her vagina? Is that the kind of unrepentant sexual immorality you’re talking about Rev. Piper? In all your self-righteousness, in the name of Jesus Christ, you took a violent swing at one unrepentant sexually immoral candidate while saying not a word about the other.

Was Joe showing his superior character every time he sniffed some 8 year old’s hair or felt her up on live television Dr. Piper? How did you miss mentioning that? Was Joe showing his superior character when he skimmed money off from Hunter Biden’s illicit gains made on the Biden name? Was Joe showing his superior character when he demanded the Ukraine Government to fire the Attorney General of that country because he was investigating Joe’s son Hunter for talking illicit monies out of Burisma so he could pass off the cream of the finances to his father? How is it Johnny Boy Piper that you can so clearly moan about Trump’s character but completely miss Biden’s character. You are a hypocrite Piper and all the more so seeking to ply your hypocrisy in oh so subtle and slithery of a fashion so as to help Joe Biden win the presidency.

Let’s keep talking about this superior character of Biden you implied existed. (And you implied it existed by mentioning Trump’s gutter character without mentioning Biden’s lower than the gutter character.) By railing against Trump’s character you put your thumb on the scale of the election and gave to Christians a moral equivalency between Biden’s desire to kill the unborn and Trump’s faulty character failing to inform us about the Biden’s fur-ball character. However, to get your Leftist thumb off the scales lets talk some more about Biden’s character.

Biden’s character includes, lying about the truck driver in the accident that killed his first wife and daughter. Biden has been lying about this for FORTY-SEVEN YEARS insisting that the man driving the truck that hit his wife was drunk when it has long been established, by the ruling judge in the case, that the man was not drunk and it was Biden’s wife who was at fault in the accident for running a stop sign. Is this the type of morally superior Character that negates Trump’s pro-life position Johnny? Is this the type of character you think should be in the White House? Rev. Dr. Piper you find this kind of sustained lying and character attack to be superior?

Want more of Joe Biden’s superior character that Rev. John Piper failed to mention while slamming Trump for his admittedly shameful character? Here we have Joe Biden who had to drop out of the 1988 for having plagiarized whole biographical sections from some other politician’s life (Neil Kinnock) in order to embellish his own life story. Biden did this while speaking from the stump. He took Neil Kinnock’s life and made it his own and he did it in order to gain votes.

Let’s remember… we are mentioning these character faults of Biden because Rev. Dr. Johnny Boy Piper insisted that Trump’s character was an issue in terms of how Christians vote but said not a word about the despicable low life character of Joe Biden thus seeking to subtly support Joe Biden’s candidacy over Trump for President.

What about Joe Biden’s lies about which college he went to and how high he graduated from his law school? Both lies. Joe said he went to a black college. Lie. Joe said he graduated in the top 50% of law school class. Joe graduated 76^th out of 85. The man is a congenital liar.

What about Joe Biden’s whopper saying that found his father telling him, when as a boy he saw two boys kissing, that “Joey, it’s simple. They love each other.” This supposedly happened in the 1950’s Scranton. We are supposed to believe this crap?

Now, remember, I stipulate that Trump is a moral reprobate. Remember, I’m not voting for Trump. My point here is that John Piper by writing this article inveighing against Trump’s character was lying by omission when he said nothing about the same sleaze-ball character of Joe Biden. Piper, in this article is subtly campaigning for Biden. He is telling Christians that a vote for Trump is not morally superior to voting for Biden since Trump is such a moral lowlife.

And yet we see here that Biden is every bit the moral lowlife that Trump is. So… if you think you have to vote for one of the two moral lowlifes (I don’t) you should probably vote for the moral lowlife who isn’t going to compound his rancid character by killing babies.

With that piece by Piper, I have no higher a view of Piper’s character than I do of Trump’s or Biden’s character. Lucifer could not have deceived as well as Piper in that article.

Just one more reason to hate America’s clergy corps.

“Notions of prisca theologia and philsophia perennis include the idea that there was a time before race, gender, and nationality; that sex was contained in an androgyne unity of opposites. If the process of moving to the perfected endpoint of history concerns the actualization of the perfected original form, then the process itself will demand a convergence of all things.

Think, for example, of the internationalist movements associated w/ the Left – the Communist International (Comintern), not to mention a global Caliphate. Perfectible futures that are equated with convergence demand that individual, individual groups, religious and national identity be converged (negated) as particular identities in order to realize the perfected universal form they will all find themselves sublated into.

This suppression (or sublimation, or negation) also includes the convergence of sex (genderism), race, religion (interfaith), and national identity (globalism — enforced mass-migrations that are destroying national identity) From the interfaith movement to the radicalizing activities directed at race, gender and the border, the dialectical engines are pervasively acting upon America in the form of operational plans from the Left oriented towards the negation of America through the destruction of identity that be purely sourced to the alchemical Hegel. For example, the multi-cultural concept of the ‘other’ (antithesis) is positioned against the ‘American’ (thesis) in a dialectical negation that claims to helically rise mankind to a new improved global citizenship (synthesis) when in fact the only thing that results is an impoverished national identity — like Venezuela.”

“Re-remembering the Mis-Remembered Left: The Left’s Strategy and Tactics to Transform America.” — p. 40

“The man of the distant future will be a hybrid. The present races and castes will fall prey to the overcoming of space, time, and prejudice. The Eurasian-Negroid future breed, externally similar to the ancient Egyptians, will replace diversity of peoples with a variety of personalities. For, according to the laws of inheritance, diversity grows with the difference of ancestors, and with the monotony of the ancestors, the uniformity of descendants. In inbreeding families one child is like the other, because they all represent one common family type. In mixed-race families, the children differ more from each other; each forms a novel variation of the diverging parental and pre-parental elements.”

R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi — Himself a child of miscegenated parents
Father — Pan European Movement
Praktischer Idealismus

Of Coudenhove-Kalergi, Whitaker Chambers once wrote,

“(Coudenove-Kalergi) is practically a Pan-European organization himself. “The Coudenhoves were a wealthy Flemish family that fled to Austria during the French Revolution. The Kalergis were a wealthy Greek family from Crete. The line has been further crossed with Poles, Norwegians, Balts, French and Germans, but since the families were selective as well as cosmopolitan, the hybridization has been consistently successful.” The Kalergis family roots trace to Byzantine royalty via Venetian aristocracy, connecting with the Phokas imperial dynasty. In 1300, Coudenhove-Kalergi’s ancestor Alexios Phokas-Kalergis signed the treaty that made Crete a dominion of Venice.” We would add that R. N. Coudenhove-Kalergi’s mother was Japanese. When Kalergi advocated for the amalgamated man he was advocating for kinism per his understanding that the alien and stranger were his kin.

The attempt to encourage by advertising and propaganda the increase of miscegenation is not accidental. The Left has a purpose in all this as we see from above and it is the Left that is pushing this. This idea of fusing all the elements goes back to ancient pagan notions of prisca theologia and philsophia priscas where mankind returns to a time when race, gender, and nationality were united in their primitive state. It is the pagan appeal for the unity of the opposites.

There is ZERO Christian thinking or reference in the idea of normalizing inter-racial marriage. The ideology of universal miscegenation is all coming from the Marxist left. Their words repeated over and over proves this. This quote from Kalergi is just one more example. Amalgamated man has been in their playbook from the beginning. Of course the Marxist left has co-opted much of the idiot Church who is completely unaware of this history of ideas.

Appealing to Scripture we find in Church history that some have taught that man is dichotomous being (body and soul). This view finds its anchor in Genesis 2:7 where we learn,

And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.

Dichotomy teaches that the constituent nature of man is body (dust of the ground) and soul (breath of life).

Others have taught that man is trichotomous being (body, soul and spirit). They would appeal (errantly) to passages like Hebrews 4:12,

“For the word of God is living and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the division of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart. ”

In Church history Watchmen Nee was one of the biggest proponents of the idea that man is a tripartate being. This view has had some pretty bizarre (read Gnostic) interpretations — not least of which was Watchman Nee.

This post is not primarily about dismissing trichotomous thinking on the nature of man but allow me to quickly dismiss it by noting that Hebrews 4:12 is not teaching that soul and spirit are two distinct natures in man that are to be divided out. The Greek verb that is translated here as “piercing” is never used in Scripture for the sense of distinguishing two different things but instead is used when referring to distributing and dividing up various aspects of the same thing (see Heb 2:4; Lk 11:17-18; Mt 27:35; Jn 19:24).

Citing Kim Riddlebarger who is citing John Murray,

“The point is not that the Word separates two distinct things–soul from spirit–but that “The Word of God judges the thoughts and attitude of the heart” (Heb 4:12). The Word does not divide soul from spirit, as though these were two distinct entities, but the Word does divide soul and spirit in the sense of penetrating into our inner most parts.”

However there is another school of thought that doesn’t get talked about much and that is the idea that man is a modified unichotomous being. This views admits that man is body and soul but sees body and soul as so integrated that to over separate them in our thinking is a serious mistake. Modified unichotomy tips its cap to the idea that man is comprised of body and soul (dichotomy) but wants to emphasize that man as a creature remains a psychosomatic unity, so that while distinction between body and soul certainly must be made a divorce of the two in the creature is not allowed. The idea that man is a modified unichotomy seeks to embrace the organic integrity that is man.

The upshot of the modified unichotomy view is that man cannot be divided between his ideological self (soul) and his corporeal self (race / ethnicity) without doing grave and serious damage to the nature of man. The implication is that who man is racially and ethnically impacts what we think ideologically and what we think ideologically cannot be divorced from who God has made us in our racial – ethnic persons. It is merely to recognize that who we are corporeally impacts who we are as incarnated thinking beings. The brain and the mind are not the same thing but neither can they be divorced from one another. The body and the soul are definitely not the same thing but while living they cannot be divorced from one another.

We are whole beings. What happens at death is altogether unnatural and will be cured when we take on our glorified bodies. Until then, what we think, and who we are as corporeal being as the inheritance from our forebears are integrated.

Holding this view allows me to say “no” to both Darwin who was a materialist and to Franz Boas who wanted to completely ignore the corporeal aspect of man and so really was a high brow Gnostic. (Boas has done more than probably anybody in the 20th century to advance postmodernism through the back door of cultural anthropology.)

The person who embraces modified unichotomy avoids both the scylla of materialism which sees man only as matter in motion and the charybdis of man as merely a unembodied thinking mind as if who man is in his wholeness has no impact on man. What we are finding among the Evangelical and many Reformed is a verbal affirmation of man as bipartate but an unwillingness to embrace the implications of that so that there is hostility to the idea that the creaturliness of man in his genetic wholeness has any impact of the non-corporeal reality of man (i.e. — his thinking, his inherited disposititons, etc.). This has the surreal result that these folks who refuse the psychosomatic unity of man are constantly flip flopping like a fish on dry ground between practical Darwinism and Boasian Gnosticism. It’s the darndest thing to witness.