Dooyeweerd’s Third Letter to the Curators
March 19, 1938 [Excerpts]

Translated by Dr. J. Glenn Friesen

The text below is a provisional translation. Copyright is held by the Dooyeweerd Centre, Ancaster, Ontario, and publishing right is held by Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York. A definitive translation will be published in the series The Collected Works of Herman Dooyeweerd.

Note: This third letter by Dooyeweerd to the Curators of the Vrije Universiteit consisted of 19 propositions. The following is a translation of proposition 7 of it, as it appears in Verburg, p. 226:

Proposition 7 of Dooyeweerd’s March, 1938 letter:

For the reasons named, a true Christian, Calvinistic philosophy cannot accept a view of soul and body that is oriented to the traditional substance idea. The “body,” which is put off [afgelegd] at death, is in the Philosophy of the Law-Idea rather understood in the sense of the entire earthly existence of man in all temporal spheres of life, just as this existence is created in an interweaving of individuality structures. Bodily death is the severing [losmaking] of all earthly relations, and not just the putting of a problematic “material body,” the existence of which is supposed to be closed up in the physical-chemical aspects of temporal reality. And the “soul,” whose continued existence after death is assured to us beyond any doubt by Scripture and Confession, may from the Christian standpoint not be understood as a part of this temporal earthly existence, or rather as the theoretical abstraction from a “substance” that is supposed to have only psychical and normative functions. It [the soul] is much rather man’s full human selfhood, his heart in the sense of the centre of his entire existence, or which the “body” is the temporal organ [organon].

Dec. 26/05