What is the difference between soul and spirit?
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What is the difference between soul and spirit?
This would explain several things that puzzle us in scripture. How the soul can have properties of both spirit and body. How when the spirit is separated from the body there is an element that continues on (the spirit) and one that "sleeps" and begins to decay (the body) and one that ceases to exist (the soul)...
in the same way that the green ceases to exist when the blue and the yellow no longer overlap.
the words soul and spirit can be switched back and forth...
I dont know of many places where you cant switch the words around and it would not still work...
Thus the term get their own meanings only from the context of the rest of the sentence, and don't really have a understanding that is always different from each other...
Now there are some Christian teachers that have huge teachings on there being a very big difference between Soul and Spirit.
But I just think all the stuff is silly.
Most of the time, the words are interchangeable, so its not a big deal to me...
anyway, I have yet to see a verse of the Bible that makes use of one term that I could not switch and use the other term and the sentence did not still work juts fine.
I think at best the difference in the two terms is just about highlighting one thing in a sentence.
There are 3 words that seem to be used all the time to discribe the invisible world.
#1 - Spirit
#2 - Soul
#3 - Ghost
I think that the most historical meanings of the words come from other words that are talking about the breath , or the 'wind'
Wind is a lot like our breath...you can't see it, but it is real because you can feel it's effect.
You know the wind is ****ing because you can see the trees move, you can tell someone is alive because you can see their chest move when they breath.
But you cant see where the wind came from, nor where it goes.
So its very easy why such ideas were used by the writers of the bible when they had to try to describe the invisible world....or about God.