The Relation of the Soul to the Body

I am leaning heavily on the work of J.P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae in their book, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (IVP, 2000). They construct a defense of Thomistic Dualism, the view of Thomas Aquinas on the soul and its relationship to the body, a view which says,

…a living organism has an internal, immaterial entity – in our view, its individual essence or soul – that is fully “present” at each part, that has those parts, that underlies change and that controls and regulates the types of and limitations upon part substitution and replacement according to the potentialities immanent within that individual essence.[1]

I know, that is hard to read, or better yet, hard to understand. But here are the implications of that viewpoint on the soul.

…consciousness is ultimately grounded in the soul and…the soul forms the body…The various…functions latent within the soul are what guide the development of and ground the spatially extended structure of inseparable parts (the body). Thus the substantial soul is a whole that is ontologically prior to the body and its various inseparable parts. The various physical and chemical parts and processes (including DNA) are tools – instrumental causes employed by higher-order biological activities in order to sustain the various functions grounded in the soul. Thus the soul is the first efficient cause of the body’s development as well as the final cause of its functions and structure internally related to the soul’s essence.[2]

All this is to say, the soul that God gives to each human being is the determiner of the development of the body. As God says to Moses,

Who gave human beings their mouths? Who makes them deaf or mute? Who gives them sight or makes them blind? Is it not I, Yahweh? (Exodus 4:11)

God takes accountability for how each soul develops the body. In the case of the intersex individual, that means He has planned their lives to be ambiguously sexed or gendered. This is not to say that the one who is deaf or mute, blind, sickle-celled, bi-polar or ambiguously sexed, should not seek remediation for their condition. There is just not much remediation available for the ambiguously sexed. As Lehlohonolo said, so eloquently,

I am an XY female. No mistake at all. I’m a firm believer in God and I also believe He created each and every one of us in His image and I now know that I wasn’t a mistake, a reject, or a factory fault. He knew exactly what He was doing when He made me, and that’s a fact.

God made her, this person with a male chromosome, the way she is, with Complete Androgen Insensitivity, to have characteristics of both male and female. Her soul is both male and female and so formed her body as such. Yes, we might see this as a disorder, but this was God’s purpose for her. He wants to use her as she is to bring glory to Him, even as He used Moses.

Could it be that God plans for and uses people with mixed gender, that there is admixture that we do not or maybe cannot deduce biologically? Or are we obligated to make sure everyone is categorized as only male or female, when God, in fact, does not so categorize them? Has it become faddish to claim one is a different gender than one appears to be? No doubt! But there may be many more than we can explain whose souls are more mixed than we want to admit. How should we treat them?

[1] Body and Soul, p. 73.

[2] Ibid., pages 167,205