Who’s Who (2)

But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually appraised.  But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one.  1 Corinthians 2:14-15  NASB 1995

Natural man – The journey so far: If Paul uses the term psychikós (or psuchikós) in Jewish Greek, he does not mean that the “natural” man is somehow defective, and not fully what God created.  The Christian claim that “Paul uses the word natural to refer to someone still in his original (sinful) state” is not correct.  The further suggestion that “the Greek word psuchikos (‘natural’) can be defined as ‘animal,’ as opposed to ‘spiritual” casts negative aspersions on the term, implications that Paul would never have imagined.  This conflict between “natural” and “spiritual,” equated to the conflict between “life-saved” and “death-lost” is a theological construct of Christian anthropology.  It does not represent the thinking of a Jewish rabbi.

With that in mind, let’s investigate Paul’s use of psychikós in his letters.

1 Cor. 2:14. Here again psychikós means natural humanity without the eschatological gift of the pneúma. If the unbeliever is psychikós, the believer who makes no progress is sarkikós. Being psychikós is not a higher stage, then, but it also does not involve the same censure. The psychikós becomes a sarkikós when confessing faith but remaining set on what is earthly, i.e., the sárx.^[1]

We must remember that psychikós is derived from psychḗ.  As a derivative, it can be no more specific than its root.  It is an adjective.  That means it acts as a modifier to the base noun, adding some nuance to the subject.  But if the root is flexible, so is the adjective.  Jacob comments:

1 Cor. 15:44ff. psychḗ is ambiguous in the NT. It may denote either the true life that God gives or ordinary life that belongs to everyone. In the latter case the Spirit stands in sharp antithesis. Only when the Spirit is imparted either in time or eschatologically does that which is psychikós cease to be purely earthly. ^[2]

We can draw a conclusion about Paul’s understanding of the “natural” man.  “ . . . there is no thought of a soul regenerated by the Spirit and detached from the body. The psychḗ is physical life, or person, or the moral and spiritual person; Paul never assesses it negatively.”^[3]

. . .  psychḗ, then, can refer to the purely natural life that can reach an end (cf. the contrast in 1 Cor. 15:45).^[4]

To this we must add the particular Hebraic view of life.

psychḗ is authentic life only as God gives it and one receives it from him.^[5]

What is psychikós is not sinful as such but it is corruptible.^[6]

The “natural” man is an authentic human being, not a corrupted, defective sinner.  But he is a man who does not acceptthe fact of his dependence on God’s grace.  He views the world as an extension of himself, without a divine origin and divine responsibilities.  He lives in an empirical world governed by his own senses and rationalism.

Let’s put this in modern, sociological terms (á la Mircea Eliade):

The non-religious man refuses transcendence, accepts the relativity of ‘reality’ and may even come to doubt the meaning of existence . . . Modern non-religious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence.  In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen by the various historical situations.  Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world.  The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom.  He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized.  He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.[7]

Eliade contrasts this with contemporary man. “ . . . the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. . . . For modern consciousness, a physiological act—eating, sex, and so on—is in sum only an organic phenomenon, however much it may still be encumbered by tabus [sic]. . . But for the primitive, such an act is never simply physiological; it is, or can become, a sacrament, that is, a communion with the sacred. The reader will very soon realize that sacred and profane are two modes of being in the world, two existential situations assumed by man in the course of history.”[8]

Contrast this with the ancient view of man, expressed eloquently in the Torah, and the basis for Paul’s view of a fully-alive person:

The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. . . . in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. . . . desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.[9]

Paul’s words are prescient.  They might have been written just a few decades ago.

But it is only in the modern societies of the West that nonreligious man has developed fully. Modern nonreligious man assumes a new existential situation; he regards himself solely as the subject and agent of history, and he refuses all appeal to transcendence. In other words, he accepts no model for humanity outside the human condition as it can be seen in the various historical situations. Man makes himself, and he only makes himself completely in proportion as he desacralizes himself and the world. The sacred is the prime obstacle to his freedom. He will become himself only when he is totally demysticized. He will not be truly free until he has killed the last god.[10]

Who is the natural man?  As simply put as possible, he is the man without a sense of the divine, a man who does not accept God’s dominion or call.  He is, for all intents and purposes, all of us—before we realized the truth about existence.  He is not an irredeemable sinner bound for Hell.  He is simply ignorant (but perhaps not deliberately so) of the spiritual, a man “of the world” rather than a man “in the world.”  A man without hope.

Topical Index: natural man, Mircea Eliade, non-religious man, psychikós, I Corinthians 2:14-15

^[1] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 1352). W.B. Eerdmans.

^[2] Ibid.

^[3] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 1349). W.B. Eerdmans.

^[4] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 1350). W.B. Eerdmans.

^[5] Kittel, G., Friedrich, G., & Bromiley, G. W. (1985). In Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Abridged in One Volume (p. 1351). W.B. Eerdmans.

^[6] Ibid., p. 1352.

[7] Robert Palmer, “Introduction”, Walter F. Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult (Spring Publications, 1965), p. xi, citing Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, pp. 202 f.

[8] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, p. 13.

[9] Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and Profane, pp. 12-13.

[10] Ibid., p. 203.