Theology

Your Soul and Your Spirit Are Not the Same

by J.W. Phillips
05/27/25
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Your Soul and Your Spirit Are Not the Same

When it comes to the nature of man, there are no words loftier in theme and more revealing in content than the words Jesus spoke to Nicodemus that night declaring that he (and really, we) “must be born again.”

To be born again means that the essence of man, whose source had been Adam, is radically changed so that a new life, whose source is Jesus, reconstitutes man’s inner being.

With profound understanding, A.B. Simpson wrote, “Christianity is the religion of the spirit.”¹

Watchman Nee added, “To fail to distinguish between spirit and soul is fatal to spiritual maturity.”²

There are very practical reasons why this distinction is critical. This topic isn’t the mere fussiness of airhead theologians.

Setting forth these practical benefits, however, first requires proving why these two parts of our inner life are different.

Much of the church, for most of the time, has failed to make the distinction between soul and spirit.

This wasn’t true in the first three centuries; but since that time, beginning with Augustine in the fourth century, it has largely been true.

Wayne Grudem, an esteemed theological professor in Arizona who wrote his own systematic theology, supports that theological shift. He concluded: “It is not just that one part of us (called the spirit) has been made alive; we as whole persons are a ‘new creation’ in Christ (2 Corinthians 5:17).”³

Really? The soul is alive to the same extent the spirit is? And our bodies are also alive in some way different from the bodies of the Old Testament faithful? This doesn’t make sense, for we all know what our bodies are like; and we also know what our souls are like. Therefore, hope sinks and encouragement deflates if the new nature is presented in terms like these.

In I Corinthians 15:45 (KJV), Paul teaches “And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.”

John Laidlaw rendered these words, “For the first head of the race was made a living psyche; the Second Adam is a life-giving Pneuma (1 Corinthians 15:44—47).”⁴

Here, a contrast is made between soul and spirit that contradicts the claim of those who contend that these components of our inner lives are the same. They are not. They are different!

According to the apostle, Adam and his offspring, from Eden to Zion, were limited by the incompetence of the soul. But all the offspring of Jesus, those truly born again, have something inside them far better, a spirit which is none other than the spirit of Jesus.

Jesus himself said, “that which is born of the Spirit is spirit” (John 3:6). The miracle of the new birth—indeed, the necessity of the new birth—is this need for a spirit, literally of God and not just from God, a spirit which is so perfect in essence and divine in character that the ability to control the soul was at last made possible.

In his classic book, The Bible Doctrine of Man, the nineteenth-century Scottish professor John Laidlaw further explained this point by observing the distinctions between psychical man, having to do with the soul, and pneumatic man, having to do with the spirit.

The psychical or “soulish” man is man as nature now constitutes him, and as sin has infected him … The pneumatic or spiritual man, again, is man as grace has re-constituted him, and as God’s Spirit dwells in him and bestows gifts upon him (I Corinthians 2:15).⁵

When Paul says in I Corinthians 6:17, “he who is joined to the Lord is one spirit,” he indicated a commonality of essence between a New Testament believer and God. Willing to take a stand where the Bible does, A.T. Pierson rightly declared: 

In this language we have represented the highest conceivable unity. The stones of the building may be removed; the branch may be cut off from the vine and the limb severed from the body; the sheep may wander from the shepherd, the child from the father; the bride may be divorced from the bridegroom; but you cannot divide spirit asunder.⁶ 

Jessie Penn-Lewis wrote, “It is important to distinguish things that differ. When Scripture speaks of the soul it does not mean the spirit.”⁷

When Paul speaks of the struggle between flesh and spirit in Galatians 5:17 and proceeds to delineate the works of one and the fruit of the other, the term “spirit” in each instance refers to the new nature and not, as such, to the Third Person of the Trinity.

This is a view that was held by Martin Luther ⁸ and C.H. Lenski⁹ among others, since the focus in this Galatians, chapter 5 passage is on two parallel capacities: our flesh, operating in the soul, and our spirit, which is inhabited by the Holy Spirit. Calvin thought the spirit in Galatians 5 refers to both the Holy Spirit and the recreated human spirit.¹⁰

Norman Grubb argued, “We have to learn how to discern between soul and spirit (Hebrews 4:12). We have to refuse in our spirit, our real selves, to be dominated by the reactions of the emotions or the reasons—our soul.”¹¹

Unless this division between soul and spirit is understood and utilized, Satan gains continual and considerable advantages over the believer.

In I Thessalonians 5:23 Paul clearly divides man into three distinct parts when he describes our makeup as a believer in terms of spirit, soul, and body. The very fact that there is a different name for each part affirms the obvious: that each part is different!

Also, the fact that each part is connected by the conjunction “and” reinforces the declared and obvious differences between each part. These are not stacked synonyms or a phrase that links indistinguishable parts.

Fausett contends that this verse describes man as originally designed in Genesis and later restored in the New Testament. It does not refer to every human being.¹²

In her book, Soul and Spirit, Jessie Penn-Lewis says that the soul is the domain for self. Citing Tertullian, the third century Montanist, she wrote:

The soul stands between the spirit and the body, for “direct communication between spirit and flesh is impossible; their intercourse can be carried on only by means of a medium”—the soul being that medium.¹³

What the soul should never be relied on to do is to function as the primary medium between God and man.

Both Adams originated a nature. The first nature, created by Adam, became badly flawed and under judgment. But the second nature, created by Jesus, is absolutely perfect and has already been glorified.

British scholar John B. Heard asserts, “The psyche is like the flesh, prone to evil, and remains so, yea, even in the regenerate. But the pneuma or godlike in man is not prone to evil—indeed it cannot sin.”¹⁴

Notes:

1. A.B. Simpson, The Fourfold Gospel, (Alachua, FL., Bridge-Logos, 2007), p.65.

2. Watchman Nee, The Spiritual Man, Volume 1, (New York, Christian Fellowship, 1968), p.22.

3. Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology, (Intervarsity Press, 38 De Montforth Street, Leicester LE17GP, Great Britain, and by Zondervan Publishing House, 5300 Patterson Avenue S. E., Grand Rapids, Michigan, USA., 1994), p.481.

4. John Laidlaw, The Bible Doctrine of Man, (Edinburgh, T. & T. Clark, 1895), p.94.

5. Ibid., p. 94.

6. A.T. Pierson, webpage 6.

7. Jessie Penn-Lewis, The Story of Job, (Ft. Washington, PA., CLC Publications, 1996), p.154.

8. Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, ed. Philip S. Watson (Westwood, NJ: Fleming H. Revell, n.d.), p.501.

9. C.H. Lenski, The Interpretation of St. Paul’s Epistles to the Galatians, to the Ephesians, and to the Philippians (Columbus, OH: Wartburg Press, 1946), p.281.

10. Norman Grubb, The Key to Everything, (Fort Washington, PA., CLC Publications, 1960), p.42.

11. Jessie Penn-Lewis, Soul and Spirit, (Fort Washington, PA., CLC Publications, 2005), p.146

12. Jessie Penn-Lewis, Soul and Spirit, p.109.

13. Ibid., p.12.

14. John B. Heard, The Tripartite Nature of Man, (Edinburgh, T & T Clark, 1875), p.218.