The human being is a kind of middle creature. Neither purely spiritual, like the angels, nor purely physical, like the beasts, the human being stands in the middle of spiritual and physical creation. Scripture witnesses to our constitution by God as psychosomatic unities, creatures who are always both physical and spiritual. We can think of the human being as an amphibian of sorts:7 like the newt that lives both on land and in water, we live and relate to God and one another both spiritually and physically.
