The Human Being as a Picture of God’s Complex Unity

Human beings are made in God's image, a picture of his complex unity. Body and spirit must be united to form a soul. Each of the faculties of the soul and parts of the body together form a single, unified person.

But how can anything be both one and more than one?  Isn’t such a complex unity a logical contradiction?  No, there is no contradiction, and God even gives us two intelligible examples of complex unities that he declares to be like him, made in his “image.”  Both of these examples are identified in Genesis 1:26-27:

 Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:26-27 (NASB).

Thus, each individual human bears God’s image, including a picture of what a complex unity looks like.  You need not look beyond yourself to understand this example. Consider, first of all, that you, as a human, have both a corporeal body and an incorporeal part. This is how you were born, and this is how Adam, the first human, was created. “And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life” Genesis says, “and man became a living soul.¹” First God made the body, then he breathed in his life-giving Spirit^2,3, the breath of life⁴, and from the union of body and spirit, man became a living soul.  A body without a soul is a corpse⁵. That is why one would never do surgery to look for the “person” inside the body, any more than one would look for the “person” of God inside the created universe (even though he inhabits it):

I am a spiritual being who currently has a physical body. I occupy my body and its environs by my consciousness of it and by my capacity to will and to act with and through it. I occupy my body and its proximate space, but I am not localizable in it or around it. You cannot find me or any of my thoughts, feelings, or character traits in any part of my body. Even I cannot. If you wish to find me, the last thing you should do is open my body to take a look—or even examine it closely with a microscope or other physical instruments…

That very unity of experiences that constitutes a human self cannot be located at any point in or around this body through which we live, not even in the brain. Yet I am present as agent or causal influence with and about my body and its features and movements….

In turn, what my body undergoes and provides influences my life as a personal being. And through my body, principally through my face and gestures, or “body language,” but also verbally, I can make myself present to others…

Now, roughly speaking, God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit. In the incarnation he focused his reality in a special way in the body of Jesus. This was so that we might be “enlightened by the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6).

Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, pp. 75-76.

On the other hand, a soul without a body is incomplete⁶—hence, the need for the resurrection to bring completion to God’s design, now that sin and death have entered the world.  But a body and a soul, together, make a human being.  Not two humans somehow sharing one body, just one human.  One complex whole, which does not fully exist if either component is missing.

Consider next the human soul—the incorporeal aspect of a human being.  The soul has multiple facets or faculties.  God recognized this when he commanded us to love him with all our “heart, “soul” and “might⁷,” or, in another instance of the same command, to love him with all our “heart,” “soul,” “mind” and “strength⁸.”  Common Christian teaching today often oversimplifies the soul into just three faculties—mind, emotions and will—placing the spirit in an entirely separate category.  But the human soul was what resulted when the body and the spirit were brought together.  And the soul has far more than three faculties:  mind, emotions, and will, but also memory, conscience, imagination, aesthetic senses, culture, language (which is far more than the medium of intellectual activity and social discourse), social knowledge, the capacity to love, and many others.  Yet all of these faculties or facets of the soul, joined together, are not many people, but the incorporeal part of a single person.

The same can also be seen with the human body.  As the Apostle Paul notes in writing of the analogy of the Body of Christ, the body is one, yet has many members⁹.  The whole body is not an eye¹⁰.  My left foot is not my right hand, and my right hand is not my liver, but they are all part of my body—one body, one complex unity.  Paul’s analogy of the Church to a human body only works because we all know that we each possess one body composed of many parts.  The complex unity of the human body is self-evident in the most basic way.  It requires no proof.  But it is also a valid analogy for the nature of God himself—a complex unity.

The image of God in every human is imperfect, like all earthly analogies of God.  While a human is complex on multiple levels, as discussed above, yet one, God is undoubtedly infinitely more complex, more multi-faceted, yet one.  Further, a human is a divisible unity.  Parts of the body may be cut off, and cease to be a part of the body, even while the person lives.  Parts of the soul may become so damaged they no longer function—may, in a sense, be cut off—while life continues.  Ultimately, soul and body will separate in death.  By contrast, God is an inseparable unity.  Everything God is, he is eternally.  He is eternally, inseparably complex.