Lecture 3-3: Soul and Relationality — What Makes a Human Human

Genesis 2:7 (World English Bible): "Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul."

Genesis 2:18 (WEB): "Yahweh God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.'"

Genesis 3:9 (WEB): "Yahweh God called to the man, and said to him, 'Where are you?'"

3.1 What is left after reason and emotion are accounted for

Suppose a future system somehow satisfied every criterion this chapter has raised so far: suppose it understood its own outputs in whatever sense would answer Searle and Bender, and suppose it were somehow embodied, at genuine risk, capable of something functionally like Damasio's somatic marking. Would that be enough to call it a person in the full theological sense? This lecture argues that the biblical narrative of human origins points to something further that reason and embodiment, even granted together, do not automatically supply: a capacity for relationship that shows up in Genesis not as an achievement of the first human, but as a divine judgment about a lack, and a divine act of address.

3.2 "It is not good for the man to be alone"

Genesis 2:18 is a striking verse to sit with carefully, because of what God identifies as deficient. Genesis 1 has already declared each stage of creation "good," building toward "very good" once humanity is made (1:31). Genesis 2:18 is the first and only time in the creation narrative that God names something "not good" — and it is not a lack of knowledge, not a lack of dominion, not a lack of any capacity this chapter has discussed so far. It is aloneness. "Yahweh God said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make him a helper comparable to him.'" The remedy God supplies is not more information, more reasoning capacity, or a better body; it is another person, a companion "comparable to him" — one who corresponds to him, who can be addressed and can answer.

This is a striking anthropological claim in its own right: on Genesis's own telling, being a fully realized human being requires relationship with another as a constitutive element, not an optional enrichment added on top of an already-complete individual nature. Adam, before Eve, is not depicted as a diminished or incomplete cognitive agent — he is already reasoning well enough to name the animals (2:19-20) — but he is depicted as incomplete as a human being, precisely for lack of relationship. If relational capacity is this fundamental to the biblical picture of what a human is, then any account of "what makes us human" that stops at reason and emotion, however sophisticated both, has stopped short of the text's own emphasis.

3.3 "Where are you?"

Genesis 3:9 supplies the same point from a different angle, after the fall rather than before it. Adam and Eve have hidden themselves, and "Yahweh God called to the man, and said to him, 'Where are you?'" The question is famously not a request for information — an omniscient God does not need to be told Adam's location. It is an act of address: God summons Adam by calling out to him, treating him as one who can be spoken to, who is expected to answer, who bears responsibility for a reply. This is personhood modeled as being-addressed and being-answerable, a category logically prior to (and different from) either reasoning ability or emotional life. A person, on this account, is constituted in part by standing in a relationship where one can be called by name and is expected to respond — which is precisely why the fall's damage is depicted relationally (hiding, blame-shifting) rather than as a loss of intelligence or feeling.

Put alongside 2:18, the pattern is consistent: the biblical narrative locates something essential about human personhood in relationship — in not being alone, and in being one who is addressed — well before it says anything explicit about the metaphysics of a soul.

3.4 Two serious ways to name what is left: Grenz and Moreland

Contemporary Christian theology has offered more than one serious account of how to cash out this relational and personal remainder philosophically, and this lecture presents two without adjudicating between them.

Stanley Grenz, in The Social God and the Relational Self (2001), develops a thoroughly relational anthropology: drawing on a social, Trinitarian understanding of God (the persons of the Trinity are constituted in their relations to one another, not as prior individuals who then happen to relate), Grenz argues that the human self is likewise constituted relationally rather than as an individual substance that then, secondarily, enters relationships. On this view, the "residue" this lecture has been pursuing is not a hidden metaphysical ingredient (a soul-stuff) but the human capacity for genuine relationship itself, grounded in and reflecting the relational life of the triune God. This account fits naturally with the reading of Genesis 2:18 and 3:9 given above, and it is attractive to theologians who want to avoid what they see as an overly individualist, Greek-philosophical import into biblical anthropology.

J. P. Moreland represents a different, also serious tradition: contemporary Christian substance dualism, defended at length in works including Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (co-authored with Scott Rae, 2000). On this view, a human being is composed of two really distinct substances — a physical body and an immaterial soul — and the soul is the bearer of personal identity, consciousness, and (on many versions) the capacity that survives bodily death prior to bodily resurrection. Moreland argues this view is not merely a philosophical add-on to Scripture but is required to make sense of biblical texts that speak of a person existing, however provisionally, apart from the body (such as Paul's language in 2 Corinthians 5:6-8 of being "away from the body" and "at home with the Lord"), and he argues relational or purely physicalist accounts struggle to explain personal identity across radical bodily change and interruption.

This is a point where readers will not agree. Grenz's relational anthropology and Moreland's substance dualism are both defended by serious, orthodox Christian scholars, and this course does not adjudicate between them. What both views share, despite disagreeing sharply about the metaphysics, is a rejection of the claim that "personhood" reduces to functional information-processing capacity of the kind an AI system might in principle possess. Grenz locates the human self in an irreducibly relational reality that a computational system, which does not stand in genuine covenantal or Trinitarian-imaging relationship, does not possess. Moreland locates personal identity in an immaterial soul that a computational system, being wholly physical and constituted by its silicon substrate and program state, is not a candidate for at all. On either account, a language model is not a plausible bearer of whatever this remainder is — not because the debate between Grenz and Moreland has been settled, but because both sides of that debate agree the remainder is not merely a more sophisticated information-processing capacity, which is the only kind of thing an AI system, however advanced, actually has.

3.5 Dust and breath, revisited

This lecture closes by returning, for a third time in this course, to Genesis 2:7: "Yahweh God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Lecture 1-3 introduced this verse as an early positive counter-claim to computationalism: embodiment and divine breath, not information processing, as the biblical account of what a living being is. Lecture 8-2 will return to it again as a rebuttal to mind-uploading. Here, at the close of chapter 3, it functions as this chapter's anchor text precisely because it names both halves of the human being this chapter has spent three lectures examining, and refuses to let either half stand alone: "dust" (embodiment, the material and vulnerable body examined in 3-2) and "breath" (the personal, relational gift of life from God himself, not a property inherent in the dust). "Man became a living soul" is not, on the most straightforward reading of this verse, the addition of a third, separable ingredient to body and breath; it is the description of what dust-plus-breath, joined by a personal act of God, amounts to: a living, relational being, addressable and answerable, exactly as 2:18 and 3:9 depict him. Whatever is philosophically underdetermined about the further nature of "soul," this verse is clear about what is not on offer for a computational system: dust it could perhaps be said to have an analogue of (its physical hardware), but the breath — the personal, relational, life-giving act of God — is not something any engineering process supplies, or has ever claimed to supply.