128 Chapter 3 many times, interchangeable or partly overlapping and otherwise separated. Berkouwer supported the non-substantial, non-dualistic speech of the Roman Catholic Council of Vienna (1311) and of Reformed confessions such as the Heidelberger Catechism and the Belgic Confession about body and soul, as they underlined the ‘ontical unity’ of both elements. The reason Berkouwer sought a subtle balance with regard to body and soul (duality, not dualism) was the insight he acquired from Dooyeweerd’s cosmonomic vision: There is a widespread feeling that this theory of man does not propose a duality-in-unity but rather a tension-filled dualism, which is not at all abrogated by saying that soul and body are related to each other, in some explicable (or inexplicable) way. The argument thus concerns dualism rather than duality. When the Dutch Calvinist philosopher Dooyeweerd (and his philosophy of law spheres) made his sharp attack on the teaching of the two substances in man, he nevertheless spoke of a distinction between ‘heart’ and ‘body’ (‘functiemantel’) and declared more than once that he was not opposed to the idea of dual moments; he held that a substantial dichotomy implied much more than a duality, and that it dualistically destroyed the unity of human nature. (Berkouwer, 1962, pp. 212–213) Berkouwer’s focus on the unity of body and soul raised a question about what effect this has on the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. He considered this question in his next chapter, again referring to Dooyeweerd, this time especially to his distinction between the temporal and the supratemporal. Berkouwer did not deviate from the Reformed confessions, as he ended with a standpoint that is today defended by John W. Cooper (2009) as ‘dualistic holism’: ‘The existential unity but temporary separation of body and soul’ (p.32). The work of van den Brink and van der Kooi (2012) deviated more significantly from traditional Reformed confessions. They referred to Berkouwer (1962) but also to recent developments in biology, psychology and neurosciences, concluding (4): We humans are much more an organic unity of soul/spirit and body than we supposed for over a long time. Our ‘higher’ abilities and actions always prove to have a physical substrate in our body, especially in our brain. There is much reason to say that we are our body instead of saying that we (just) have a body. Ideas of the soul as the non-visible, untouchable core of human existence that carries our psychological functions (awareness, thinking, feeling, etc.) have scientifically been proven untenable. Because these functions are controlled by physical and neurological processes in 4 Translation from Dutch is mine.
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