BTC Lecture 5: A History of the Soul – This one’s about US.

Bart sells his soul

Over the last weeks we have been looking at how reason and tradition intertwine in the unfolding of revelation. In particular we have focused on the movement from a human narrative of a God we encounter to a coherent account of the relationship between that God and the world as we understand it. And we have explored the sort of work that might be done in translating from the Christian language we inherit, shaped by the philosophy and science of antiquity, into a Christian language for the present, which acknowledges the way we think and talk now. But God talk is always going to be a little abstract. It is time we got personal again and faced some of the tough questions that affect our understanding of who we are and what it makes sense for us to hope for. Can I speak of my soul coherently without ignoring 20th and 21st century thought? Can I make any sense of the Christian promise of a ‘resurrection of the body’?

This talk traces the background of these ideas, faces some of the challenges from modern philosophy and neuroscience and sketches a version of a modern ‘journey of the soul’ in partial response.