The Unlocatable Soul

Two things need to be placed together near the beginning of any exploration of the soul as treated in Jesus' ministry.  One, as I mentioned in the previous post, is the fact that the soul must be reckoned potentially severable from the body, the mind, or the emotional life of the individual.  The notion that we reside necessarily in our bodies (or, most typically, behind our eyes and between our ears) is a very tempting one, but it is a limiting notion as regards our understanding of the soul.  As many theologians have pointed out, it is really a perversion of belief to insist (even with a defiant sort of conviction) that one has a soul.  It is far more correct to insist that one IS a soul, generally understood to be equipped with a body.

The second thing that needs to be mentioned is Jesus' insistence on the idea--laid out in the most graphic of terms--that the notion of great things being possible through great faith is misleading.  Jesus declares that even an immeasurably small degree of faith can achieve virtually any conceivable thing.  Neither proportion nor limitation applies to the potential efficacy of faith, and this lends necessarily to any number of incredible propositions about what is possible.  Put these two notions together (the unlocatable soul together with its unbounded possibilities), and the sort of "anything" that Jesus says can be effected through faithful prayer becomes plainer.

A person as understood in the teachings of Jesus--a person associated most crucially with a supernatural soul and associated also with potentially unlimited prayer-driven possibilities--is a person who is not limited by time or space, nor even by the limitations of time and space that we associate with what we think we need to stay alive.  The disciples sent two by two on their missions, possessed of eternally-existing souls, possessed of the power to raise the dead, possessed of the unlimited potential of prayer, would have (virtually by definition) been able to raise corpses and to inhabit them.  A sense of propriety or of piety might have militated against doing such things, but to call such things "impossible" is to call into questions Jesus' characterizations of the believer.

Far more likely would it be, then, for the dimension-dissociated thing called individually a "soul" to be placed by God into situations that defy our understanding of the natural universe.  Jesus did not make it an indispensable article of faith for his disciples to accept that John the Baptist was Elijah, but neither are Jesus' followers duty-bound to conjecture that the John-Elijah identification is either merely evocative or merely an example of the "type" trope of the apologist: John as a "type" of Elijah (or is it the other way around?)  Whatever is the true substance of Elijah was seen by Jesus' disciples in the form of John--or the narrative is disingenuous.

The same reasoning would hold true for the disembodied apparition of Samuel at Endor.  No theological contortions of the salvation economy or of the afterlife need be invoked to justify such startling possibilities within the idea-constellation of Jesus' teachings.  Such things can be expected to happen to souls.  The fact that Christianity is so bound up with the fate of the ostensibly immortal body--headed for a glory-state or bound for actual immersion in a lake of fire--coupled with the fact of Christianity recoiling with savage vigor at the idea of reincarnation, makes it sadly unsurprising that Christianity behaves so often not as an awe-struck community of galvanized souls, but as a collection of mind-and-body godlings, searching their physical and intellectual experiences for clues about what God will or will not do, can or cannot do.

The Christianity of today and throughout the ages finds its origin even back in the earthly days of Jesus, when his pained figure--pained already by the humanly-shared experience of the loss of Lazarus--is pained all the more that his disciples would insist on having it spelled out for them that dear Lazarus was dead rather than sleeping--when the distinction was all but meaningless to anyone who conceived of Lazarus as a supernatural soul.