What Is A Spirit?

If someone uses the word "spirit" in your presence, what comes to mind as to the definition of the word?  I do not mean spirit as in "the spirit of an age"; I do not mean a prevailing ideology of an era, but a spirit in the sense that one might mean when one refers to a human soul or a theological entity.  What is a spirit?  The answer holds immense ramifications for a great deal of philosophy and theology.

What people generally mean when they use the word spirit (and what I mean by the word spirit) is nothing more than a consciousness that is not metaphysically restricted to a body by logical necessity and that can possibly animate or move certain physical objects.  A spirit is a immaterial, animating force, a thing that perceives and experiences.  Can one prove that at least one spirit exists?  Of course!  If a spirit is a consciousness, then I am a spirit housed in a body (it is possible to prove to oneself that one has a body as well as a mind; see part six of my series Examining The Meditations in a footnote below).  I am not an unembodied mind like the Christian conception of Yahweh (John 4:24).  I have both a nonphysical conscious mind and a material body of some sort.

Every conscious being has a type of "spirit", although it seems that "spirit" is not the word that people in my society prefer to use when referring to a mind.  According to James 2:26 human death occurs when the spirit/mind of a person no longer inhabits his or her body.  Defined in this way, a conscious person knows with absolute certainty that he or she has a spirit!  To doubt one is conscious one must be conscious; consciousness cannot be an illusion [1].  That I have a spirit is one of the only immediate certainties I can have and one of only a handful of things that cannot be false.

The Biblical teaching that humans have spirits is an area where defining a word differently might lead to people understanding the concept differently, in a way that facilitates comprehension and acceptance.  If someone thinks the concept of a spirit is a notion of some unverifiable thing that might not even exist within a person, he or she might reject the concept entirely; if he or she realizes that a spirit is just a conscious mind that can animate a body or exist on its own [2], that person can see that it is rationally impossible for no spirit to exist as long as there is some thought or perception anywhere in existence.  I hope that more Christians will come to see the easy defensibility and verifiability of the Bible's affirmation of the existence of the human spirit!

If I have a spirit and if my spirit is not part of my body (and both are true), then my spirit--my conscious mind that animates my body and that comprises my "self"--can survive after the death of my body as described in Scripture.  The mind and its consciousness are not the brain or any other body part, but even if they completely died with the body that would not logically mean that no afterlife is possible--God could resurrect the body and the mind with it.  Interestingly, I rarely hear this possibility mentioned (an afterlife that is accessed exclusively with a body)!

Thus, even if my consciousness is extinguished upon the biological shutdown of my body and my mind/spirit does not travel to the afterlife by itself (for a time before the resurrection of my body), it does not follow logically in any way that my consciousness will never experience an afterlife or that one does not exist at all.  Christian doctrine ultimately teaches that the bodies of the saved will be resurrected (see 1 Corinthians 15), so Christians need not mistakenly think that their eternal life consists of existence as permanently disembodied minds.  It still remains true that the death of the body does not logically necessitate the death of the mind/spirit.

A spirit is not some unverifiable fantasy; it is not some unconfirmed myth.  As long as I think, perceive, will, dream, or experience anything at all, my spirit is immediately proven to me!  Whether or not it survives the shutdown of my body is not a question that I can answer with deductive reasoning.  But the concept of the afterlife as a place where spirits can reside before the resurrection of their bodies is not some logical impossibility.

How someone answers the question "What is a spirit?" may tell much about his or her worldview, for it is a highly important question to reflect on for those who have yet to arrive at the truth of the matter.  The answers we provide do generate great ripples that affect other facets of our philosophies and theologies, so Christians must not shy away from understanding both the question and its answer.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/10/consciousness-cannot-be-illusory.html

[2].  See here:
A.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/the-immateriality-of-consciousness.html
B.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/08/examining-meditations-part-5-i-am-i.html
C.  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/09/examining-meditations-part-6-mind-body.html