Thomasius, however, in his Christi Person und Werk, 1:164-168, quotes from Luther the following statement, which is clearly dichotomous: “The first part, the spirit, is the highest, deepest, noblest part of man. By it he is fitted to comprehend eternal things, and it is, in short, the house in which dwell faith and the word of God. The other, the soul, is this same spirit, according to nature, but yet in another sort of activity, namely, in this, that it animates the body and works through it; and it is its method not to grasp things incomprehensible, but only what reason can search out, know, and measure.” Thomasius himself says: “Trichotomy, I hold with Meyer, is not Scripturally sustained.” Neander, sometimes spoken of as a trichotomist, says that spirit is soul in its elevated and normal relation to God and divine things; ψυχή is that same soul in its relation to the sensuous and perhaps sinful things of this world. Godet, Bib. Studies of O. T., 32—“Spirit = the breath of God, considered as independent of the body; soul = that same breath, in so far as it gives life to the body.”
The doctrine we have advocated, moreover, in contrast with the heathen view, puts honor upon man’s body, as proceeding from the hand of God and as therefore originally pure (_Gen. 1:31_—“_And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good_”); as intended to be the dwelling place of the divine Spirit (_1 Cor. 6:19_—“_know ye not that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit which is in you, which ye have from God?_”); and as containing the germ of the heavenly body (_1 Cor. 15:44_—“_it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body_”; _Rom. 8:11_—“_shall give life also to your mortal bodies through his Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—here many ancient authorities read “_because of his Spirit that dwelleth in you_”—διά τὸ ἐνοικοῦν αὐτοῦ πνεῦμα). Birks, in his Difficulties of Belief, suggests that man, unlike angels, may have been provided with a fleshly body, (1) to objectify sin, and (2) to enable Christ to unite himself to the race, in order to save it.
Three theories with regard to this subject have divided opinion:
This view was held by Plato, Philo, and Origen; by the first, in order to explain the soul’s possession of ideas not derived from sense; by the second, to account for its imprisonment in the body; by the third, to justify the disparity of conditions in which men enter the world. We concern ourselves, however, only with the forms which the view has assumed in modern times. Kant and Julius Müller in Germany, and Edward Beecher in America, have advocated it, upon the ground that the inborn depravity of the human will can be explained only by supposing a personal act of self-determination in a previous, or timeless, state of being.