Third World Souls — the Research

Third World Souls — the Research Brief

Barclay · Willard · Moreland & Craig · the full Greek + ESV scripture thread

This brief gathers the scholarship behind the sermon Spiritual Formation of our Third World Souls: John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift on what a gift meant in the Ancient Near East and the first century; forgiveness as royal debt-release from the old empires to the Jubilee; Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart on how souls are formed and re-formed; and J. P. Moreland & William Lane Craig on the reality of the soul and why Jesus could say the Son does not know the day or hour. It began as a page of handwritten study notes — transcribed below exactly as written.

John M. G. Barclay's "Paul and the Gift" (Eerdmans, 2015) begins with an anthropology of gift built on Marcel Mauss: in the ancient world there was no such thing as a "free" gift in our modern Western sense. Gifts were the glue of society — they created bonds, obligated a return, and circulated inside ongoing relationships. The Greek word charis (grace) is simply the ordinary word for gift/favor/gratitude and covers the whole circle of giving, receiving, and returning; it does not by itself mean "unmerited." Givers — human and divine — were expected to give discriminately, to WORTHY recipients (Seneca's De Beneficiis opens by naming failure to "pick out those who are worthy" as the chief cause of ingratitude). Barclay then shows that "grace" is not one thing but can be "perfected" (pushed to an extreme) along six distinct lines — superabundance, singularity, priority, incongruity, efficacy, non-circularity — and that the great interpreters (Marcion, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Barth) each perfected different combinations, which is why they talk past each other. Surveying five Second Temple Jewish texts (Wisdom of Solomon, Philo, the Qumran Hodayot, Pseudo-Philo, 4 Ezra), he finds that "grace is everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, but not everywhere the same": most held divine giving to be congruous with worth, while the Hodayot and Pseudo-Philo perfected incongruity. This repositions E. P. Sanders: covenantal nomism was right that Judaism ran on grace, but wrong to flatten grace into one thing — Sanders quietly assumed that priority entails incongruity.

Barclay's central claim about Paul: the Christ-gift is perfected as INCONGRUOUS — God gives His supreme gift without regard to the recipient's worth (ethnicity, status, gender, virtue), "justifying the ungodly" (Rom 4:4-5; 5:6-8) — but it is NOT perfected as non-circular. The gift lands with expectations: the "obedience of faith," a transformed life, new communities where Jew and Gentile share one table because worth has been recalibrated by the cross rather than by law, lineage, or achievement. His signature formula: "The divine gift in Christ was unconditioned but it is not unconditional" (p. 500) — no prior conditions of worth, but real subsequent claims. Grace is undeserved yet "strongly obliging"; it "is designed to produce obedience" (p. 492), creating "agents who are newly alive, required to live the life they have been given" (pp. 518-19). Crucially, the return does not repay or earn the gift — Barclay calls the dynamic "energism," God's grace energizing the very response it expects.

For a sermon on the gift of forgiveness, this frame is gold. Forgiveness in Scripture is literally gift-language: Colossians 2:13 says God "graced away" (charisamenos) all our trespasses, canceling the cheirographon — the handwritten certificate of debt — by nailing it to the cross. The Greek word for forgiveness, aphesis, is the Septuagint's word for the Jubilee "release" of debts and slaves (Lev 25:10 LXX; Luke 4:18), echoing the ancient Near Eastern royal practice of debt-cancellation edicts at a king's accession. So forgiveness is the incongruous gift par excellence: given to debtors precisely because they cannot pay, yet — like every ancient gift — it binds the receiver into relationship and sets the gift circulating: "forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you" (Eph 4:32; cf. Matt 6:12; 18:23-35). Forgiveness does not merely acquit; it obligates, transforms, and creates a forgiving community.

Key points:

In their own words:

Handle with care — what not to overstate:

Long before Israel, the Ancient Near East already knew one form of total debt-forgiveness: the royal clean slate. Old Babylonian kings — most famously Ammi-ṣaduqa of Babylon (c. 1646–1626 BC, Hammurabi's great-great-grandson, whose mīšarum edict is the only one surviving nearly complete) — proclaimed mīšarum ("justice/equity") and andurārum ("release, return to origin"; Sumerian amargi, often glossed "return to the mother") at their accession and at intervals afterward. Tablets recording barley debts were declared void, foreclosed land went back to families, and debt-slaves walked home free — signaled, in Hudson's reconstruction, by the king raising a torch associated with Shamash, god of justice. Crucially, this was pure sovereign initiative: no debtor could earn, purchase, or demand it; it flowed entirely from the king's throne and was timed to the KING's new reign, not the debtor's merit. Israel took this royal act and transformed it: instead of the whim of a new king, the divine King legislated release into the calendar — every seventh year all debts released (Deut 15, deror's cousin: shemittah), and the fiftieth-year Jubilee proclaiming deror (cognate to andurārum) "to all its inhabitants," announced by trumpet on the Day of Atonement itself (Lev 25:9-10), grounded in God's ownership of land and people ("the land is mine," Lev 25:23; "they are my servants whom I brought out of Egypt," 25:42). The exegetical hinge for preaching is the Septuagint: Lev 25:10 renders deror with ἄφεσις (aphesis), and the Jubilee is literally the "ἐνιαυτὸς ἀφέσεως," the Year of Aphesis; Deut 15's debt-release is likewise aphesis; Isa 61:1 LXX has the Anointed One proclaiming aphesis to captives — the very text Jesus reads at Nazareth (Luke 4:18) before announcing "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled." Aphesis is the New Testament's standard word for "forgiveness of sins." Every time the NT says forgiveness, Greek-speaking ears heard the Jubilee trumpet — and 11QMelchizedek (11Q13, c. 100 BC) proves Second Temple Jews were already reading Lev 25 + Isa 61 as an end-time Jubilee in which iniquities themselves are released and atoned.

Gary Anderson (Sin: A History, Yale 2009) supplies the second movement: in the First Temple period sin was predominantly a BURDEN to be carried (nasa' 'awon, "bear iniquity"; the scapegoat carries sins away), but in the Second Temple period, under the influence of Aramaic — where ḥôb/ḥôbâ means both "debt" and "sin" — sin became a DEBT to be remitted. Jesus, an Aramaic speaker, teaches exactly this idiom: "forgive us our debts (ὀφειλήματα)" (Matt 6:12; Luke 11:4 makes the equation explicit — "forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone indebted to us"), and dramatizes it in the unforgiving servant's absurd, unpayable ten thousand talents (roughly 200,000 years of a laborer's wages) forgiven in a moment by a king's pity. Behind all this stands Israel's core confession, Exod 34:6-7 — the most re-quoted verse within the OT itself — naming YHWH as the God who forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin; and the sacrificial system, rightly read, is not man's payment upward but God's gift downward: "I have GIVEN it to you on the altar to make atonement" (Lev 17:11) — God provides the very means of forgiveness he requires, climaxing in the Day of Atonement he himself instituted.

The first-century Greco-Roman frame makes the gospel's distinctiveness measurable, and here John Barclay's Paul and the Gift does its work. Ancient gift-giving was discriminating: you gave to WORTHY recipients (Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca's De Beneficiis), and gifts created bonds of obligation and return. Caesar's celebrated clementia was a sovereign's power-display toward defeated enemies that turned them into obligated clients; Seneca (De Clementia, Book II) even argued the truly wise man does not grant venia (pardon), because "pardon is the remission of a deserved punishment" and thus offends justice — clemency yes, forgiveness of the undeserving no. Much Jewish theology, too, expected God's mercy to track repentance and covenant worthiness (grace was "everywhere in Second Temple Judaism, but not everywhere the same" — Barclay). Against both backdrops, the gospel proclaims a forgiveness that is FULL (the cheirographon, the signed debt-note, blotted out and nailed publicly to the cross, Col 2:14), PRIOR (while we were still sinners, Rom 5:8), INCONGRUOUS (God "justifies the ungodly," Rom 4:5 — the very thing Exod 23:7 and Prov 17:15 say a righteous judge never does — made just through Christ's blood, Rom 3:25-26), THROUGH CHRIST (redemption-aphesis "according to the riches of his grace," Eph 1:7, where debt-release and gift meet in one verse; Luke 7:42's forgiveness verb is literally ἐχαρίσατο, "he gifted the debt away"), and KINSHIP-CREATING (the released debt-slave is not merely freed but adopted — Gal 4:5-7). Barclay's summary: the Christ-gift is unconditioned (no prior worth required) but not unconditional (it expects and empowers a transformed, forgiving life) — which is exactly why the forgiven servant of Matt 18 and the "as we forgive our debtors" of the Lord's Prayer describe what forgiven people become, not a fee they pay. Key sources: J.J. Finkelstein's edict translation (ANET); Michael Hudson, ...and forgive them their debts (2018); Moshe Weinfeld, Social Justice in Ancient Israel; Anderson, Sin: A History; Barclay, Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans 2015); 11Q13.

Key points:

In their own words:

Handle with care — what not to overstate:

Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart (NavPress, 2002) argues that spiritual formation is not an optional religious hobby but a universal human fact: every person's spirit is being given a "form" by something — family, culture, wounds, habits, media — and "the most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation." The only question is what kind. Christian spiritual formation, by contrast, is "the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself" (p. 22), so that the outer life becomes a natural expression or outflow of Christ's character. Willard's key text is Galatians 4:19 — "until Christ is formed (μορφωθῇ) in you." His diagnosis is that the human self has six interlocking dimensions — thought, feeling, will (which he equates with spirit and heart, the "executive center"), body, social context, and soul — and that sin has left all six in ruins: the soul is "lost" in the precise sense of being out of place, away from God, and therefore malfunctioning. What is needed is not information, willpower, or behavior management but renovation: "The greatest need you and I have — the greatest need of collective humanity — is renovation of our heart."

The book's practical engine is VIM: Vision, Intention, Means — "If we are to be spiritually formed in Christ, we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention, and means" (p. 85). The Vision is life now in the range of God's effective will (the kingdom); the Intention is an actual settled decision to be Christ's person; the Means are the disciplines and graces that retrain each dimension. Two Willard distinctives matter enormously for preaching this: (1) the body is not the enemy but our God-given "power pack," the "focal point of our presence in the physical and social world" and "our primary area of power, freedom, and — therefore — responsibility" — our small kingdom, since "our 'kingdom' is simply the range of our effective will" (The Divine Conspiracy, p. 21), which is why Romans 12:1 begins renovation by presenting the σῶμα to God; and (2) grace does not exclude effort: "Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action" (The Great Omission). The disciplines are means of receiving grace, never merit.

The outcome Willard envisions (final chapter, "The Children of Light") is people whose obedience has become routine, easy, and natural — a lamp that shines without straining — because thought, feeling, will, body, relationships, and soul have all been re-organized around God. For the sermon "Spiritual Formation of our Third World Souls," Willard supplies exactly the needed picture: souls that were built for glory but whose infrastructure is broken — power grid down, water lines ruptured, everything running on a corrupted operating system — and a God who does not merely repaint the exterior but guts the house to the studs and rewires it from the inside, restoring the soul (Ps 23:3 LXX: τὴν ψυχήν μου ἐπέστρεψεν) until Christ is formed in us.

Key points:

In their own words:

Handle with care — what not to overstate:

Substance dualism, as defended by J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig, is the claim that you are not your brain: the self is an immaterial substance — a soul — that has and uses a body, rather than a property, program, or byproduct of brain chemistry. The most rigorous recent statement is The Substance of Consciousness: A Comprehensive Defense of Contemporary Substance Dualism by Brandon Rickabaugh and J. P. Moreland (Wiley-Blackwell, Nov 2023) — Rickabaugh is lead author and should be named. They defend "Mere Substance Dualism": the human person is comprised of a soul (a fundamental, immaterial substance) and a physical body; the person can exist without the body but not without the soul; and the soul is what possesses and unifies the whole mental life. Their core arguments: consciousness is not identical to brain states (by Leibniz's Law — mental states have properties like first-person subjectivity and "aboutness" that no brain state has); the unity of consciousness at any moment requires one single experiencer, not a committee of neurons; the same "I" endures through total physical change (their Mereological Argument); we have direct introspective acquaintance with the self; and neuroscience only ever establishes correlation between brain and mind, which is not identity. Moreland's accessible version, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters (Moody, 2014), adds the biblical anthropology (nephesh, ruach, psyche; Gen 35:18; Eccl 12:7; Matt 10:28) and explicitly says the fourth reason the soul matters is that understanding the immaterial nature of the human spirit is crucial to grasping spiritual growth. Craig defends the same body-soul dualism in Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (co-authored with Moreland, IVP 2003/2nd ed. 2017, Part on Philosophy of Mind) and in popular teaching: humans are body-soul composites, the soul is the seat of consciousness and personal identity, and it survives death in a conscious intermediate state awaiting resurrection.

On Mark 13:32, Craig's proposed model of the Incarnation (Philosophical Foundations, the Incarnation chapter; Reasonable Faith Q&A #410; Defenders lectures) holds that during the state of humiliation "the divine elements of Jesus' personality were largely subliminal" (verified, 2017 ed., p. 607): "the Logos allowed only those facets of his person to be part of Christ's waking consciousness which were compatible with typical human experience, while the bulk of his knowledge and other cognitive perfections, like an iceberg beneath the water's surface, lay submerged in his subconscious" (verified wording). Christ therefore remains truly omniscient — the knowledge is really his — but in his waking human consciousness he genuinely did not know the day or hour, and spoke plain truth in Mark 13:32; Craig adds that Christ "could have drawn upon his subliminal knowledge, had he chosen to do so, but he refrained from doing so, thereby having an authentic human consciousness" (verified, Q&A #410). Honesty requirements for the pulpit: this is Craig's proposed POSSIBLE model, offered to show Chalcedon (one person, fully God and fully man) is coherent, not dogma; a different plank of his model (the Logos serving as Christ's rational soul) is labeled "neo-Apollinarian" — a label Craig accepts with qualifications and critics press hard — so the sermon should use only the subliminal-knowledge insight, framed as "one way faithful scholars explain it," never denying the Son's deity or omniscience. The classical alternative is to attribute the ignorance to Christ's human nature per Chalcedon's two-natures reading (Athanasius, Cyril, Aquinas: the Son knows the day in his divine nature, not in his human knowledge; Augustine's variant: "does not know" = "is not his to make known").

The sermon payoff is strong and fair to the sources. Just as who Jesus was — the divine glory — lay beneath his waking consciousness, real and whole though not accessed by his human senses or introspection, so who the believer is in Christ is written deeper than the conscious mind: "your life is hidden with Christ in God" (Col 3:3 ESV). You do not always feel like a forgiven, adopted child of God, but the identity is objectively there, and spiritual formation is the Spirit's work of bringing that hidden identity up into waking, everyday life (Rom 8:16; 2 Cor 4:16-18). This is exactly why the soul matters for formation: Dallas Willard — a professional philosopher, committed substance dualist, and Moreland's teacher and father-figure at USC — defined spiritual formation as "the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself" (Renovation of the Heart, p. 22, verified). If you are only a brain, "renovation of the heart" collapses into chemistry management; because you are a soul, there is a real inner person that God can actually transform and that outlasts the body (Matt 10:28; 2 Cor 4:16-18). And because the soul is immaterial, it "lives in a dimension the five senses cannot reach": no instrument detects it — not because it is unreal but because instruments only read matter — while the God who made the hearing ear and the seeing eye (Prov 20:12) reads the person directly (1 Sam 16:7).

Key points:

In their own words:

Handle with care — what not to overstate:

Every passage that carries the sermon, set out per our practice: Septuagint (LXX) for the Old Testament, Greek New Testament for the New, with the ESV beside it and the load-bearing Greek word explained.

Key word: οὖς ous = ear; ὀφθαλμός ophthalmos = eye; κυρίου ἔργα kyriou erga = 'the works of the Lord.' The LXX reads literally 'an ear hears and an eye sees — both are the Lord's works': the very faculties of perception are His workmanship.

The sermon's anchor — your five senses are themselves gifts from the One who gives ears to hear and eyes to see, so the unseen dimension of the soul can only be known when He grants the perceiving.

Key word: ψυχή psychē = soul, set against σῶμα sōma = body (the pastor's SOMA note); μὴ δυναμένων ἀποκτεῖναι mē dynamenōn apokteinai = 'not able to kill' — the soul is beyond the reach of every physical weapon.

Jesus Himself distinguishes soul from body and declares the soul unkillable by material means — the soul is a real, irreducible substance, a 'third-world' reality the five senses cannot touch.

Key word: ὁ ἔσω ἄνθρωπος ho esō anthrōpos = 'the inner person'; ἀνακαινοῦται anakainoutai = 'is being renewed' (present passive — continuous renovation); τὰ μὴ βλεπόμενα ta mē blepomena = 'the things not seen.'

Paul locates the real, eternal you in the unseen inner self under daily renovation — the soul's dimension outlasts the sense-world that is wasting away.

Key word: οὐδὲ ὁ υἱός oude ho huios = 'nor the Son'; οἶδεν oiden = 'knows.' In His incarnate humiliation the Son's divine omniscience was not held in His waking human consciousness.

If even the incarnate Son carried depths beneath His earthly conscious mind, then what is truest about a person is not exhausted by what the conscious mind can access — the identity runs subliminal, deeper than the five senses.

Key word: κέκρυπται kekryptai = 'has been hidden and remains hidden' (perfect passive of κρύπτω kryptō — a settled, standing state).

The believer's true identity — 'who you are in Christ,' conscious and sub-conscious — is stored in God Himself, hidden deeper than introspection can dig, waiting to be revealed by Him.

Key word: συσχηματίζεσθε syschēmatizesthe = 'be molded to the schema' (outward pattern-pressing by the age); μεταμορφοῦσθε metamorphousthe = 'keep being transformed' (metamorphosis, from the inside out); ἀνακαινώσει τοῦ νοός anakainōsei tou noos = 'renewal of the mind.'

This is the sermon's thesis verse — all people are spiritually formed by the world's schema; re-formation is a divine metamorphosis worked through a renewed mind, not a self-improvement project.

Key word: νοῦν Χριστοῦ noun Christou = 'the mind of Christ,' from νοῦς nous = mind — the same word renewed in Romans 12:2 (τοῦ νοός).

The re-formed mind is not generic positivity but a shared possession — Christ's own nous — already given to believers whether or not the conscious mind has caught up to it.

Key word: φρονεῖτε phroneite = 'keep minding / set your habitual mindset' (present imperative of φρονέω phroneō) — a settled disposition, not a single thought.

The command to actively inhabit the mind that is already 'yours in Christ Jesus' bridges who you are in Christ (position) and how you think day by day (formation).

Key word: χαρισάμενος charisamenos = 'having graced/forgiven as a free gift' (χαρίζομαι charizomai); χειρόγραφον cheirographon = the handwritten IOU, the certificate of debt; ἐξαλείψας exaleipsas = 'having wiped clean/erased.'

Forgiveness pictured as a debt-document wiped out and nailed to the cross — the incongruous gift given to people who were dead, not merely struggling.

Key word: χάριτι chariti = 'by grace' (χάρις charis); δῶρον dōron = gift; ποίημα poiēma = 'workmanship, thing made' (root of English 'poem') — believers are God's crafted artwork.

Grace as pure gift, and ποίημα as the formation word itself — the re-formed soul is God's craftsmanship, the 'creativeliness' of the pastor's SOMA note answered by God's own creativity.

Key word: ψυχή psychē = soul (the psalmist preaches to his own soul); ἀνακαινισθήσεται anakainisthēsetai = 'shall be renewed' — the same ἀνακαινόω renewal-root as Romans 12:2 and 2 Corinthians 4:16. Numbering: ESV Psalm 103 = LXX Psalm 102.

The soul commanded to remember forgiveness, healing, redemption, crowning, satisfaction — and infinite east-west removal of sin — makes forgiveness the engine of the soul's renewal.

Key word: ἄφεσιν aphesin / ἐνιαυτὸς ἀφέσεως eniautos apheseōs = 'release / year of release.' The LXX names the Jubilee with ἄφεσις aphesis — the very word the New Testament uses for the forgiveness of sins.

In the Greek Bible this church reads, Jubilee IS aphesis — debts cancelled, slaves freed, everyone sent home — so 'forgiveness of sins' carries the full economics of release.

Key word: ἄφεσις aphesis appears twice in Luke's line ('liberty... at liberty'); ἔχρισεν echrisen = 'anointed' (root of Χριστός Christos); ἐνιαυτὸν κυρίου δεκτόν eniauton kyriou dekton = 'the acceptable year of the Lord' — the Jubilee year of Lev 25:10. Note: 'recovering of sight to the blind' (τυφλοῖς ἀνάβλεψιν) is the LXX reading of Isa 61:1, and it is the LXX form Jesus reads in the Nazareth synagogue.

Jesus announces His whole mission as Jubilee-aphesis — He is the anointed One who proclaims the release, opening blind eyes to see (Prov 20:12) in the dimension the senses cannot reach.

Key word: καρδίαν καινήν kardian kainēn = 'a new heart'; λιθίνην lithinēn = 'of stone' vs. σαρκίνην sarkinēn = 'of flesh'; δώσω dōsō = 'I will give' — three times, all God's doing.

Re-formation is not renovation of the old equipment but a divine heart-transplant — God alone can replace the world-hardened center of the inner dimension.

Key word: καινὴ κτίσις kainē ktisis = 'new creation' — the same καινός kainos ('new in kind') as Ezekiel's new heart; ἐν Χριστῷ en Christō = 'in Christ,' the location of the new self.

The 'in Christ' identity from the pastor's notes stated at maximum voltage — the re-formed person is a fresh act of creation, not the old self lightly edited.

Key word: χαριζόμενοι charizomenoi, from χαρίζομαι charizomai = literally 'to grace, to grant as a free gift' — the same root as χάρις charis (grace/gift); ἐχαρίσατο echarisato = 'God gift-graced you.' In Paul's Greek, forgiving one another IS gift-giving: not the ledger-word ἀφίημι here, but grace handed on.

The overflow movement — the forgiven soul becomes a forgiver, and Paul's very vocabulary makes our forgiving each other an act of passing along the incongruous gift we received.

Key word: ποταμοὶ ὕδατος ζῶντος potamoi hydatos zōntos = 'rivers of living water'; κοιλίας koilias = literally 'belly, innermost cavity' — the deepest interior of the person, below the conscious surface.

The image of the overflow: what God pours into the hidden interior does not pool there but rivers out — forgiveness received becomes forgiveness spilling over to others.

Key word: εὐοδοῦται euodoutai = 'is prospering, is on a good road' (εὖ eu 'well' + ὁδός hodos 'road'); ψυχή psychē = soul — the prospering soul is the benchmark for every other kind of prospering.

The closing benediction — John measures a whole life by the health of the unseen soul, sending the congregation home to tend the third-world dimension God has re-formed.