Posted by Remo J. Williams on June 04, 19100 at 01:13:54:
In Reply to: Re: "hall of souls" or The Guf posted by Bryan on November 04, 1998 at 01:08:10:
The "Guf" and the Treasury of Souls
In the movie "The Seventh Sign," centered around the Seven Seals which are released by the Lamb or Jesus Christ, there is a reference to the Guf or "Hall of Souls." Is this a biblical concept?
The concept of the Guf of a Hall of Souls is not at all biblical. It is similar to the Catholic concept of the "Treasury of Souls." This was a theological idea that developed as a rational necessity to answer a logical problem that had arisen when Christianity recast some biblical concepts into Greek philosophical categories.
In clical Greek philosophy (Plato and Plotinus), there is a radical distinction between physical existence (the body) and "spiritual" reality (the soul). Human beings were understood to be made of two basic parts that had no fundamental relation to each other, a physical and a spiritual. They were only temporarily joined since the physical is temporary while the spiritual is eternal (for a brief survey of this idea, see Body and Soul: Greek and Hebraic Tensions in Scripture).
The umption was that the "soul" was immortal since it was the "spark of the divine" that animated physical existence. As the logic developed, the joining of the body with the soul was umed to occur at a certain time (conception or birth, it was debated) and ended at a certain time (death). Since the soul survived death and since it was immortal (incapable of not existing) then the logic forced the umption that the soul existed before it was joined to a body as well. As the logic continued, it was umed that God had created all of the souls that he would ever need when he created the universe. Logically, then, they had to be stored somewhere until they were needed, so thus developed the idea of the "Treasury of Souls" where these pre-created souls were kept awaiting a body to be conceived into which to put them.
Not only is this system of logic contorted and nowhere close to being represented anywhere in Scripture, any number of umptions along the way can be demonstrated to have little logical or theological basis. And much of Christianity now no longer umes even the basic framework and umptions of the Greek philosophical categories (a radical metaphysical dualism) as a model for explaining biblical and Christian theology.
In other words, it is nice fantasy or mythology, but is nowhere a part of biblical belief, and not accepted in most areas of Christianity today, including most modern Catholics