129 Christian Anthropology and the (W)Holistic Approach 3 our brain (…) The idea of an immortal human soul that resides in the body, goes back much more to Greek-philosophical roots than having a Biblical background. (van den Brink & van der Kooi, 2012, p. 248) Justly, Peels (2015) posed some critical questions regarding the position adopted by van den Brink and van der Kooi (2012) here. To validate man as mainly the physical body does not match with what the Belgic Confession claimed in Article 37 about the resurrection of the body and its reunion with the soul, nor with what Sunday 22 of the Heidelberger Catechism confessed about it. Peels (2015), therefore, proposed a more moderate ‘holistic dualism’, which he—remarkably—connected to Cooper’s (2009) ‘dualistic holism’. Ouweneel (2018) perceived Dooyeweerd’s cosmonomic philosophy as a radical Christian answer to the question about the unicity of humanity. It opposes other answers, such as the scholastic-dualistic and the strictly evolutionistic answers (p. 153). Man is not to be seen, as in the scholasticdualistic answer, as mainly a dichotomy or a trichotomy (in some charismatic circles, it is even common to say that man has a spirit, is a soul and lives in a body). Nor is man to be seen as an ennobled type of animal, as the strictly evolutionistic answer proposes, which is prone to dualism and reductionism. Man is much more than a further developed variant of a group of pre-Adamic hominids (pre-people). Ouweneel (2018) considered Calvin, Berkouwer and, especially, Dooyeweerd extensively, reaching the following conclusion (5): ‘For myself I find it simply not understandable how such an exalted vision on man could be reconciled with the evolution picture’ (p. 185). Ouweneel (2018) not only called for attention regarding the ‘humanity structures’ that he based on Dooyeweerd’s theory of modal aspects but also concerning three central dimensions of humanity: the cognitive, the creative and the conative dimension (knowledge, imagination and will). Dooyeweerd (1969), Berkouwer (1962) and Ouweneel (2018) agreed on the central position of the heart; an aspect that is less clear in van den Brink and van der Kooi’s (2012) systematic theology. In addition, Golverdingen (1995) did the same in his pedagogical anthropology (p. 75). Scripture depicts man as both an individual and a communal being, created in relation to God (religious dimension), to the neighbour (social dimension), to the environment (stewardship dimension) and to himself (inner dimension) (Golverdingen, 1995, p. 52). Although Dooyeweerd hesitated to approximate his cosmonomic idea too much from a legal perspective, it has a strong connection with the law (nomos) of God. The Ten Commandments concern the relation to God and to the neighbour. They have, as O’Rourke Boyle (2018) proved, everything to 5 Translation from Dutch is mine.
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