Started a new book last week, Knowing the Doctrines...

I am nearly finished with John Bevere's "Driven By Eternity" book, but in the meantime I started a book written by Myer Pearlman called "Knowing the Doctrines of the Bible."

It is a way expanded version of the little fundamentals of truth, those one sentence statements of faith, that churches and ministries publish in their brochures and web pages. I guess that by knowing these statement of faiths, we are supposed to know if their beliefs are aligned with ours, or at least Christian anyway. But that isn't what I was going to write about.

The last few days, I have been reading his section on what the Bible tells us about man. Yes, you, me, and the person sitting next to you.

This author contends that we are triune in nature rather than two-part. Which based on all the reading I have done in the Bible, is my view. He does make the distinction that we are two-part in that we are composed of a material substance and an immaterial substance (body and soul). However, he goes on to say that the Bible then introduces a second immaterial substance (in the New Testament) being the spirit part of man.

However he goes on to say that both views are actually correct since soul and spirit are inseparable. He describes this as "They permeate and interpenetrate each other." Evidently even though the words "soul" and "spirit" are used interchangeably in the Bible translations because they are so connected, there are certain places where they distinctly say something very different. It is when we look at those instances that we discern that that man is comprised of three parts: body, soul, spirit.