Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Paperback)

by John W Cooper (Author), Cooper. John W. (Author) "From earliest times Christians have affirmed continuing personal existence after biological death..." (more)
Key Phrases: immediate resurrectionist, ontic duality, affirm the intermediate state, Old Testament, New Testament, Grand Rapids (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This widely acclaimed study of biblical anthropology is available once more along with a substantial new preface by the author. Fully engaged with theological, philosophical, and scientific discussions on the nature of human persons and their destiny beyond the grave, John Cooper’s defense of “holistic dualism” remains the most satisfying and biblical response to come from the monism-dualism debate. First published in 1989, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is required reading for Christian philosophers, theologians, psychologists, and students interested in the mind-body question.

Product Details

• Paperback: 280 pages
• Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company (October 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802846009
• ISBN-13: 978-0802846006
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.9 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #701,488 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Holistic Dualism Now and Forever, September 29, 2006

By	Robert W. Kellemen "Doc. K." (Crown Point, IN United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Cooper defends what he states has been the major view throughout church history: holistic dualism. By that term he means that human nature is of one substance with two primary modes of existence: body and soul inseparable in this life and the next. Cooper sees all other views of the nature of human nature as lacking biblical, theological, and historical support.

His study of Hebrews anthropological terms, while interesting, diminishes the conclusions of the classic work by H. W. Wolff. Though Wolfe would agree that there is great semantic overlap among the various terms, he expertly explains that the terms do have a semantic emphasis, and that we can develop a biblical anthropology from those terms. When all is said and done, Wolff's view might be called "Holistic polychotomy"--human nature is one nature with many functions, summarized as relational, rational, volitional, emotional, and physical.

Reviewer: Robert Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Biblical Psychology," "Soul Physicians," "Spiritual Friends," and "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction."

16 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An indelicate stomp through muddy waters, October 16, 2005

By	Micah Newman (Austin, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book wasn't quite what I expected. What I thought it would be is a thorough survey of Biblical anthropology--that is, human nature as presented in the Bible--and a philosophically-minded hermeneutics thereof to extract some data with respect to the mind/body and monism/dualism question. And it is that, sort of. But a more complete description of what it is is an opinionated quasi-screed against monism as the philosophical Zeitgeist of our age. The author has an agenda, and he minces no words furthering it. The thing is, this kind of book is just the thing that could always stand more word-mincing, so to speak. I have no problem with the author having an opinion on his chosen subject and being open about it, it's just that the tone of his particular approach comes out sounding to this reader like at least two parts rhetoric for every one part argumentation.

To begin the book, we're harangued repeatedly with the reminder that if traditional dualism is false, then almost all of Christendom has believed a fundamental falsehood about human nature. Then, the traditional dualist view is presented as under attack from all fronts in Christian scholarship and direly needing defending. This dichotomy sort of sets the tone for the rest of the book.

The OT portion of the book mainly analyzes the various uses of the Hebrew words "ruach" and "nephesh," especially with respect to Sheol. I found all this thoroughly confusing, but Cooper, from somewhere, pulls the conclusion that the data _in toto_ support his own "holistic dualist" view. Then there's a lot of space given to analyzing such language in the intertestamental Apocrypha, and I just did not find this of much interest, these works being noncanonical in the Protestant church. There are all *kinds* of loopy stuff in the Apocrypha, and I really did not understand the point of trying to extract a coherent anthropology from it all. In total, the emphasis of this first 40% or so of the book seemed to be on "What various people through the ages have believed" rather than "What the Bible teaches or assumes". That's kind of disappointing.

Around the middle of the book, where the NT is discussed, a serious and identifiable problem emerges in Cooper's methodology: he sets up a trichotomy between dualism, and, with respect to the resurrection, "extinction-recreationism" and "immediate resurrectionism." Now, "immediate resurrectionism" seems all but untenable Biblically, yet the author spends a lot of time debunking it next to dualism. So all that just comes off as so much straw-man-beating. The deeper and purely philosophical problem with this approach is in Cooper's other straw man, "extinction-recreationism." He simply equates death with nonexistence, and this is a thesis that needs argument, not assumption. In fact, it seems to practically beg the question in favor of his own position.

To me, the mere future fact of the general resurrection just prima facie points to an anthropology of human persons as essentially material beings, to where there needs to be an independent reason shown for thinking that we're consciously disembodied in the interim before being reunited with our bodies: otherwise, it just seems blatantly arbitrary that there should be a resurrection. Cooper does not address this issue by giving reasons for thinking of ourselves this way, but rather simply demolishes some suspiciously gerrymandered-looking strawmen, leaving his own view as the sole remaining competitor. He does say against "extinction-recreation" that if a person is to be re-created, it is logically possible for duplicates of the person to be re-created, and hence there is a fundamental problem with reinstantiation of the original identity rather than duplication of the originally-born person. Here, at last, is an interesting philosophical argument (although not quite a persuasive one, seeing as how it leans on purely "logical possibility," which I'm inclined to be maximally skeptical about--it's "logically possible" I could wake up tomorrow morning as a centipede, but I'm also quite sure it's 100% metaphysically impossible, and hence impossible _tout court_, that I will, or could); unfortunately, it's about the only one in the book I could detect.

At the end of the book, I am still not sure what "holistic dualism" is and how to picture it conceptually. What it does smack of is giving a name to a sort of mathematical mean of all different positions and thereby trying to get the best of all worlds, rather than presenting a unified, explanatory, and independently desirable picture of human nature.

Up to now it probably sounds like I almost hated the book, yet I gave it three stars. Really, I'm being more cranky than I should (largely because it's late and I'm tired); _Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting_ is not totally unhelpful. Although lots of ink is spilled jostling ham-fistedly with strawmen or otherwise being awfully contentious, Cooper is quite conversant with the scholarly Biblical literature, although somewhat less so with the contemporary philosophical literature. The book does give a broad survey of views on the topic; it's just that I found the author's approach far more irksome than winning.

2 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars to be an acsetic or not, June 22, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Body, Soul and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Paperback)

cooper's book goes into great detail the question people must ask themselves when they read much of Paul's books. Did the body-hating Christians of the first millenium have it right? his answer is very Biblically based, and probably not too surprizing to most who've thought of this question before.