228 - Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate

Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting:
Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate
By John W. Cooper
Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1989. 262 pp. $16.95.

In a time when the traditional theological distinction between soul and body, or between spiritual and corporeal aspects of human nature has frequently been dismissed as an unbiblical and psychologically untenable dualism, John Cooper offers a balanced and well constructed argument in defense of the traditional perspective. He surveys a series of classic statements of the "dualistic" and "monistic" approaches and then works in detail through biblical materials, with great attention to the anthropological and eschatological thought of St. Paul. He then examines and indicates the insufficiency of the various objections to traditional "dualistic" anthropology, distinguishing carefully between the "holistic dualism" of Thomas Aquinas, an identification of the soul as the form of the body, and both the Platonic and the subsequent Cartesian dualisms that identify two distinct substances in the human being. It is this middle path between monism and a thoroughgoing dualism that Cooper finds characteristic of most Protestant and Catholic theology since the time of Aquinas-and that he convincingly argues to be both in fundamental accord with the biblical witness and acceptable in the court of modern science and philosophy.

Richard A. Muller
Fuller Theological Seminary
Pasadena, Calif.