Knowledge and the Natural Man

An “enemy to God”? Maybe—but not for the reasons we usually think

You can listen to the audio version of this essay here.

My friends, welcome back to Climbing the Rainbows. I don’t know if you’ve missed it, but I sure have.

And we’re actually returning one week early. There were essays every week from July 2022 to July 2023, and then we took a summer break, and the original plan was to start again on September 1. But the more I thought about it the more I felt that there was something additional we could talk about one week before that, to connect us to what’s already happened in previous essays as well as what’s coming up in future ones.

That something is the idea of the “natural man,” both as it appears in the Book of Mormon and in the New Testament. I’d like to interpret that idea in a way that will probably seem unfamiliar, but that I think is both truer to the source material and a lot more helpful than other ways in how we think about ourselves and our relationship to God.

So consider today’s thoughts a sooner-than-expected return to our study of revelation and the gospel, written by someone who just couldn’t wait to get back into it. Since I wasn’t planning on writing this, you’ll see that next week’s essay has a bunch of “welcome back, here’s what we’ve been doing, here’s what we’ll do this fall”-type stuff. I’ll forego all of that here so we can jump right into the goodies. Hopefully what I’ve got for you on this last Friday of August serves both as a new take on a familiar topic and as a bridge to a fresh set of ideas on knowledge, truth, repentance, and many other things in the restored gospel.

So let’s get started!

The Book of Mormon and the Bible

One of the most important and difficult questions in understanding the Book of Mormon is figuring out what to do with the Bible. The Bible isn’t always relevant—there’s a lot of material in the Book of Mormon, both the content and the specific language, that doesn’t really have a parallel in the Old or New Testaments. But there’s clearly a lot of other material that does, and when you run into it, you face a bit of a puzzle.

We confronted one aspect of this puzzle a few months ago, in our close study of 2 Nephi 28:30. Our focus was the phrase “line upon line,” which on the surface seems like a pretty clear statement of the fact that divine revelation is a constructive process, building upon itself a bit at a time. But the “line upon line” language comes from Isaiah 28:10 and so its original source is biblical. We might therefore wonder how to arrive at the correct interpretation of the Book of Mormon passage—do we have to include the Bible and Isaiah, or can we take the verse in Nephi on its own? If we do include the Bible, are we committed to thinking that the Book of Mormon passage has the same meaning as its counterpart in Isaiah? Is it legitimate for us to derive a reading of Nephi’s remark that departs from established scholarly views of the “line upon line” phrase in the Bible? More generally: to what extent must the Book of Mormon answer to the Bible, and why?

Full answers to these questions will have to wait for another time, but the way to begin is to figure out what kinds of things the scriptures are in the first place. From a really broad perspective, the scriptures are a permanent source of revelation and divine instruction for all God’s children. Since the scriptures are for everyone, the words must be able to provide guidance no matter what background beliefs or assumptions or interpretive approaches a reader brings to them. Like a maze of many starting-points, we all come at it from a different angle and take a different path, while ultimately seeking the same thing. This is one of the reasons those words are primarily about Christ, who is the no-matter-what guidance for everyone.

When we learn more about the Bible and its relationship to the Book of Mormon, we change our background beliefs and interpretive approaches to reflect our new views. The more we get of these views, the more we’ll be able to bring new information and understanding to what we read, and this process continues as we try to fit everything we’re learning into a picture of Christ’s gospel and how it works. So in the back of our mind we have what I’ve called the “zeroth principle,” or the idea that all truth can be circumscribed into one great whole. Whatever we learn about anything, it must be able to fit, with suitable adjustments, into a single multi-faceted picture.

So to what extent must the Book of Mormon answer to the Bible? It depends on who you are, and what you know. But the more we know, the more insightful and comprehensive our picture is likely to be.

This is the way I want to look at the “natural man” in the Book of Mormon. Let’s see what else there is to learn about the idea, in order to take what we learn and apply it for a new interpretation. There is a lot to say here and some important points to make, leading to an approach to the natural man that is both kinder to us in some respects, and a lot more demanding in others.

The “natural man” in Mosiah 3:19

You might be familiar with the most prominent occurrences of the phrase “natural man” in the Book of Mormon, which are in Mosiah 3:19. A king named Benjamin is speaking to his people and close to the middle of his discourse he says this:

For the natural man is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.¹

The words “natural man” occur twice here, and both occurrences make it seem like something bad: the natural man is an “enemy to God,” pretty strong language, and something to be “put off” as a response to the “enticings of the Holy Spirit.” Then the verse gives us a long list of qualities to develop in place of the natural man, and since the qualities are some we usually associate with Christ, the natural man comes off looking even worse.

By far, like by really really far, the most common way I’ve seen of understanding the natural man has it involving things like sexual desire and anger (almost always), greed, vanity, and gluttony (usually), the desire for praise or boasting (sometimes), laziness (occasionally), and so on. Basically it’s all bad. We appear to get this common understanding by brainstorming stuff we already believe to be bad and then, since the natural man is so clearly bad in the verse, we just associate that bad stuff with it. I mean, why not bake whatever is bad into the idea of the natural man? Eventually we need to put it all off anyway, right?

This approach to the verse also fits with a certain way of understanding the term “natural.” Hardly anything is more natural to us than sexual desire, anger, and vanity; everyone feels them in one way or another, and they’re just part of nature. We might even connect them to “nature” as the creator of our bodies by evolution—those things are part of the natural man because they’re things that preserve survival of the physical body, but aren’t necessarily righteous. In fact they seem downright selfish. So if something is natural to us it seems bad, because it seems like it must be part of the natural man.

Thus this way of explaining the natural man is both easy to arrive at and plausible—but it’s also really troubling. It puts fundamental aspects of our lives not just in opposition to God, but at war with him. Oh, you’re feeling sexually aroused? Looking to binge on that ice cream, or feeling proud of your physical appearance? Well, much like the Venezuelan criminal justice system, Mosiah 3:19 has a message for you:

It’s really not a comfortable position for us to be in, and that’s probably understating the point. By stuffing into the natural man all the parts of our humanity which we deem bad, but which we can’t stop experiencing, we suddenly become God’s “enemies.” And that’s surprising and even disturbing, since the whole relationship between him and us is supposed to be based on love! Things like sexual desire and comparisons to others may end up seeming like the enemy-est parts of us, probably because of how fundamental they are to the experience of most adults. The more fundamental something is, the more natural it is—and the more of an enemy it makes you.

As far as I can tell, this is how almost everyone understands this verse. But we can get a well-motivated alternative when we look carefully at 1 Corinthians 2 and the original language behind the term “natural man.”

The “natural man” in 1 Corinthians 2

So let’s check out 1 Corinthians 2. We’ll focus our study on two things: the Greek words which get translated “natural man” in the King James version of 2:14, and the context in which the words arise in the first place. We’ll start with the words to see what we’re dealing with, and then the context will build on that. Both things will teach us lessons that we’ll bring back to Mosiah 3:19 later on.

Straight to 1 Corinthians 2:14 we go, then, since it’s the only place in all the King James version of the Bible that we find the phrase “natural man.” Here is the verse:

But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned.

The Greek words translated as “natural man” are ψυχικὸς ἄνθρωπος, psychikos anthropos. ἄνθρωπος, anthropos, just means “person, human, man(kind),” so that’s where the “man” part comes from.² Right now that word isn’t as important as the first one, ψυχικὸς, psychikos, which is what we really need to look at.

psychikos is an adjective related to a very important Greek noun: ψυχή, psyche. The basic meaning of psyche is something like “life” or “soul,” though the word has many other meanings and connotations.³ Fundamentally, the psychikos anthropos, or our “natural man” in 1 Corinthians 2:14, is the person whose life is centered around the psyche.

But just saying that doesn’t really illuminate the idea without a lot more help, and in fact, we need to look at a couple other Greek words in the same passage. In verse 14 we see the words “spirit” and “spiritually.” “Spirit” is the noun πνεῦμα, pneuma, whose basic meaning is “wind, breath,” but this is the New Testament’s word for the Spirit of God or Holy Ghost.⁴ “Spiritually” is then πνευματικῶς, pneumatikо̄s, an adverb derived from pneuma.

Now I know I’m throwing a bunch of Greek words at you, but the key to the idea of the natural man is in the contrast between these terms. You see, in the next verse of the passage, we get yet another spirit-related term: πνευματικός, pneumatikos,⁵ an adjective which means “spiritual” and which comes from the same noun pneuma. In that verse Paul says that, in contrast to the natural man, the person that is spiritual is able to “judge all things” (the word for “judge” there is the same as the word for “discerned” in verse 14).

So what we have in verses 14-15 is a distinction between two kinds of people: the psychikos person and the pneumatikos person. Paul intends these to be opposites, in a way—in this passage, we cannot understand them independently of each other; they’re working together to make the point. With its connection to pneuma, the Spirit, the pneumatikos person is someone who is under the influence of the Spirit, or who has received God’s gift of the Spirit to accompany them. Because of this gift, the pneumatikos person is able to “discern” or “judge” things, since we’re talking here of the Spirit in its capacity as a revelator and a means to knowledge.

If the pneumatikos person is the one who has the Spirit, then what is the psychikos person? Based on the contrast with pneumatikos, the psychikos person is someone who doesn’t have the Spirit.

That it’s. Yes, that’s it. The “natural” part of “natural man” refers only to someone who has not received the gift of the Spirit, or who doesn’t currently enjoy its presence in their experience of the world, because they’re just a regular ol’ human being. That’s all the meaning that psychikos carries here, and we don’t need to bake anything extra into it, because there’s nothing extra to include. The psychikos person or “natural man” is simply a human without the Spirit.

In a moment I’ll give you a couple of quotations about this, plus more in a footnote to establish the point beyond all doubt. But first let’s be clear about how different this interpretation of “natural man” is from the standard LDS interpretation coming out of Mosiah 3:19. Yes, the psychikos person is someone who doesn’t have the Spirit—but calling them that is not necessarily a judgment about their righteousness, it is merely a description of them as someone who does not currently have the Spirit. In addition, the idea of the psychikos person says nothing about why a person doesn’t currently have the Spirit, or how they came to be in a situation where they don’t have it. There are many reasons why you might not have it, of course, but the notion of a psychikos person tells you nothing about those reasons. It doesn’t include anything about sexual desire, for example, or anger or selfishness.

Compare this understanding of the psychikos person, the root behind the “natural man,” with the way we normally understand that idea. The way we normally talk about the natural man does make a clearly negative judgment about the righteousness of that individual, and even more, it also includes assumptions about why that person is unrighteous and therefore about how they came to not have the Spirit. But we don’t need to understand the natural man this way, and I think we actually shouldn’t.

To flesh out a few more details here, check out these two quotations from other sources which speak specifically about how to understand the difference between the psychikos person and the pneumatikos person. Here is the first:

In 1 Cor 2:14, therefore, the term psychikos stands in contrast to that which is animated and motivated by God’s spirit…One problem with this translation [psychikos as “unspiritual”], however, is that the term becomes negative rather than conveying the more value-neutral nuances of ordinary person or person who lives on an entirely human level.⁶

Notice how we should be looking for a “value-neutral” way of understanding the psychikos person. Let me humbly suggest that the way we normally understand the natural man is not at all value-neutral. It’s the opposite—we attach a very negative value to a whole bunch of things about ourselves, many of which we have little or no control over, at least at times.

Here’s the second quotation:

‘The one who is spiritual’ is such because indwelt, renewed, enlightened, directed by the Holy Spirit. Such persons, believers, are transformed by the Spirit so that they are enabled to do what psychikos anthropos cannot.⁷

I love that way of putting it. Are you a believer? Have you received the gift of the Holy Ghost? Are you making an effort to keep its company? Then congratulations! You are *NOT* the psychikos person! Bonus, you aren’t the natural man nor any enemy to God, either! And your desires don’t make you so! Yay!

Like I said, I know I’m including a big discussion of the Greek text here, but I think it’s necessary to understand what is really going on in 1 Corinthians 2. And that will give us some powerful material to take back to Mosiah 3:19. (If you’d like to see more quotations and alternate translations regarding psychikos anthropos, check out the footnote at the end of this sentence.⁸)

Before we go back to the Book of Mormon, though, I want to look real quick at the larger context in which the psychikos person shows up. This context explicitly has to do with knowledge and wisdom. By the time you get to 1 Corinthians 2:14, Paul has already mentioned the “wisdom of God” (1:21), which is the “cross” (1:18) and “Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God” (1:24). It was by “demonstration of the Spirit and of power” (2:4) that he was able to preach this wisdom to the Corinthians—normally, the wisdom is “in a mystery,” and you could even call it the “hidden wisdom” (2:7).

No regular human can access this mystery: “none of the princes of this world knew” (2:8), and indeed no “natural” or Spirit-absent manner of knowing can reach this knowledge at all, for it is something that “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man” (2:9). It is only by the Spirit that we can come to know it, for “the things of God knoweth no man, but the Spirit of God” (2:11) and “God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit” (2:10). When we get that Spirit, “we might know the things that are freely given to us of God” (2:12).

All of that is build-up for the great contrast Paul then draws between the psychikos person and the pneumatikos person. The whole context has to do with wisdom, knowledge, and ways of knowing, and that’s where all the emphasis goes when he actually makes the contrast. He’s trying to tell us that there’s a very special kind of wisdom or knowledge that you can only get when you have the Spirit. If you don’t have it, it’s not just less likely that you’ll find it, it’s actually impossible for you to find it: “the psychikos person receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him” (2:14). The psychikos person, or the natural man, is just not the kind of being who can receive this crucial revelation through the Holy Ghost. The designation refers to the ways of knowing available to that person. There might be a lot of reasons why someone is psychikos, but Paul calls attention to none of them here, because they’re beside the point. The only thing that matters is that the Spirit cannot communicate a divine message to that kind of being, shutting them off from the revelation until, however it happens, they’re no longer psychikos.

To summarize: this section has been about the natural man as it comes from 1 Corinthians 2. The Greek words translated as “natural man” just mean “person without the Spirit.” Those words imply nothing about why the person does not have the Spirit and, more importantly, say nothing about how a person’s “nature” affects their standing as God’s enemy or friend. In the context of 1 Corinthians 1 and 2, Paul’s discussion of the psychikos person contrasts with the pneumatikos person, who are in two very different situations with respect to revelation. The former cannot receive it, or can’t receive the important part of it; the latter can.

Knowledge and the natural man in restoration scripture

Next, let’s take the stuff we’ve learned from 1 Corinthians 2 back to restoration scripture.

A quick caveat first, though. I’m saying that the natural man, or psychikos anthropos, doesn’t have anything to do with selfishness or any of the other things we build into it. But that doesn’t mean that being selfish, constantly indulging our desires, or improperly managing them doesn’t drive away the Spirit. I’m sure it does. All I’m saying here is that the idea of the natural man, in itself, doesn’t have anything to do with that.

Anyway, I said let’s take the stuff back to restoration scripture, and not just to Mosiah 3:19, because the phrase “natural man” actually appears three other times outside of 1 Corinthians and Mosiah 3. Those three locations are Alma 26:21, DC 67:12, and Moses 1:14. Let’s look at those briefly before going to Mosiah. In them we’ll find a lot of support for our Corinthians-based approach to the natural man—so much support that I think we can just ditch the old approach entirely.

First, Alma 26:21. Ammon is monologuing in this chapter and eventually he recounts many of the wonderful things that the Lord has done for him and the people he’s met. After naming those things he suddenly asks, in verse 21, “What natural man is there that knoweth these things?” And immediately he answers his own question: “There is none that knoweth these things save it be the penitent.” So notice here that the natural man comes up in the context of knowledge and knowing, and Ammon affirms a difference in the ways of knowing available to two different groups: the “natural man,” or the psychikos person, and the “penitent,” or the rough equivalent of the pneumatikos person. Verse 22 then reinforces the difference and doubles down on the special knowledge available to those who, because of faith and prayer, become pneumatikos: “unto such it is given to know the mysteries of God. Yea, unto such it shall be given to reveal things which never have been revealed.”

The next appearance of the natural man is DC 67:12. Once again the context is knowledge and the experience of God, though we get even more emphasis here on the Spirit’s role. Verse 11 reads, “For no man has seen God at any time in the flesh, except quickened by the Spirit of God”—only the pneumatikos person, with a truly great bestowal of the Spirit, can see God—and verse 12, “Neither can any natural man abide the presence of God, neither after the carnal mind.” No psychikos person can receive this bestowal, and so this experience and the corresponding knowledge are cut off from them.⁹

Finally, the use of “natural man” in Moses 1:14 also clearly has to do with knowledge and knowing. “For behold, I could not look upon God, except his glory should come upon me, and I were transfigured before him. But I can look upon thee in the natural man. Is it not so, surely?” If you’re psychikos, utterly without the Spirit, there are just some things you’ll never get to see.¹⁰

We’ve now covered all four occurrences of the natural man outside of Mosiah 3:19. The biblical origin of that term comes in a passage about knowledge, and the three restoration occurrences are all directly about knowledge too. I think this is all the reason we need to abandon the traditional way of understanding the natural man, in favor of one focused on what we’ve been discussing: the psychikos/pneumatikos difference, the Spirit, revelation, and knowledge.

Let me suggest, then, that we understand the natural man as an epistemological designation, or as an epistemological category. “Epistemological” means “having to do with knowledge,” so to say it’s an epistemological designation or category means that the term focuses our attention on knowledge and ways of knowing. Normally we think of the natural man as a moral or behavioral designation, with focus on unrighteousness and the evils of certain desires. But that isn’t the right way to think about it. The natural man is natural because he lacks the Spirit and so doesn’t have access to certain crucial items of knowledge.

When we take this new approach back to Mosiah 3:19, we get some interesting new insights. The natural man is an “enemy” to God—and why would that be? Because he doesn’t have the Spirit and can therefore not know some very important things about Christ and the atonement that God would otherwise love to teach him. He therefore cannot change. And he’ll remain like that unless “he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord”—in other words, he’ll remain the psychikos person unless he lets the Spirit into his life so that he can learn and become the pneumatikos person through Christ. In this process he’s supposed to become “as a child,” and why would that be? Because one of the most striking things children do way, way better than adults is learn. They learn fast, learn widely, and retain what they know. All of those qualities Benjamin lists at the end of the verse make us better able to recognize what we don’t know, so we can ditch the forever-ignorant natural man to receive knowledge.

We could even plug into Mosiah 3:19 some alternate English renderings of psychikos anthropos, to see what comes out:

For the person without the Spirit/person who lives on an entirely human level is an enemy to God and has been from the fall of Adam and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit and putteth off the person without the Spirit/person who lives on an entirely human level and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord…

The point is, in talking about the natural man in this verse, we are not talking about the unrighteousness of the natural man, or some lack thereof; we are talking about him as someone who cannot receive the Spirit, cannot gain new knowledge or be transformed, and therefore cannot progress. It is in that respect that a person could be an “enemy to God.” It isn’t because God hates them or because he’s ready to just abandon them or whatever. It’s because they have set themselves in opposition to learning and change and growth—that is, in opposition to God’s nature, and to the plan of salvation.

The new birth, described in so many passages in the Bible and the scriptures of the restoration, is a transformation of our character and our desires. But it is also an epistemological transformation, in that we go from the psychikos person to the pneumatikos person and therefore acquire brand-new ways of knowing. New vistas of knowledge unfold to the one who is born of God, for the Spirit begins to act on them and their bodies such that they become able to know things that they could not otherwise know.

What’s more, it should be clear that you and I are not really the natural man. Sure, we do dumb stuff and move ourselves away from the Spirit at times. The caveat at the front of this section still applies and unrighteousness separates us from revelation. But if we’ve experienced a spiritual transformation through Christ’s atonement and have received the Holy Ghost, then we can’t be the natural man, because that isn’t what the natural man is. It’s something else, but it isn’t us.

That’s what I have for you today, though there’s so much more to say about 1 Corinthians 1-3 and Mosiah 3. I didn’t cover the larger context of Mosiah 3:19, and I didn’t say anything about Benjamin’s remarkable reversal of Paul’s metaphor in 1 Corinthians 3, where Paul encourages people to grow up but Benjamin urges them to become like children. Maybe we’ll get to those things a different day. For now we can be grateful for the wonderful interpretive opportunities that having the Bible and the Book of Mormon together gives us. If we pay close attention, they teach us sometimes astonishing things about revelation, and show us new roads we can walk to come closer to Christ.

Until next time

Next week Climbing the Rainbows returns in full force with a preview of what’s to come this fall, along with some new ways I’ll be trying to spice up the essays.

Thanks for reading.

1. This is the verse as it appears in the first edition of The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text.

2. anthropos is the root of words like “anthropology.”

3. They are myriad. The word psyche is the root for the English “psychology,” as the Greek “u” in psyche usually turns into a “y” in its English derivatives.

4. More meanings of pneuma. The word is the root for English words like “pneumatic.”

5. The adverb pneumatikо̄s and the adjective pneumatikos look pretty much identical in an English transliteration, but they are not the same in Greek. The adverb has a long “o” at the end, which is the letter ω (omega), while the adjective has a short “o,” the letter ο, “omicron.”

6. New International Greek Testament Commentary: 1 Corinthians [Thiselton, 2000], 267-268, emphasis in original.

7. Richard Gaffin, “Some epistemological reflections on 1 Cor 2:6-16,” Westminster Theological Journal, 1995, 114-115.

8. Here are some other translations and quotations regarding the psychikos person and the pneumatikos person:

• The Anchor Bible volume translates psychikos anthropos as “the animated human being.”

• The New International Commentary on the New Testament volume translates psychikos anthropos as “the person without the Spirit.”

• The New International Greek Testament Commentary volume translates psychikos anthropos as “the person who lives on an entirely human level.”

• “When applied to people, as here, the adj. psychikoi [plural of psychikos] means that they are living only with psychē or anima and do not have the ability to be open to revelation or wisdom that comes from God’s Spirit, whereas the pneumatikoi [plural of pneumatikos] are those who do have the ability…In any case, the distinction between the adjs. pneumatikos, “spiritual,” and psychikos, “animated, natural, worldly, unspiritual,” as descriptive of two different types of Christians is clear. The former describes the human being who is open to God’s Spirit and enlightened by it, whereas the latter is not…To receive something from God’s Spirit would make no sense for the merely animated human being, who is incapable of grasping what can only be discerned in a spiritual way, i.e., guided by God’s Spirit” (Anchor Bible: 1 Corinthians [2008, Fitzmeyer], 183, 184).

• “Here again psychikos means neutrally the natural man who lives without the eschatological gift of the pneuma and who thus belongs to the world (verse 12) and not to God (verse 10)” (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament 9:663).

• “The term pneumatikos has to do not with the human spirit but with God’s Spirit…thus psychikos does not refer to a different anthropological category, but to a different mode of existence, and in 2:14 the phrase psychikos anthropos (literally, ‘soulish man’) is properly rendered ‘natural man’ (KJV) or ‘those who are unspiritual’ (NRSV) or, better yet, ‘the person without the Spirit’ (NIV)” (New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology and Exegesis 4:731-732).

• The psychikos person is “any human being without the Divine Spirit” (New International Commentary on the New Testament: 1 Corinthians [2014, Fee]).

• “In 1 Cor 2:14, therefore, the term psychikos stands in contrast to that which is animated and motivated by God’s spirit…Hence in place of NJB natural, many versions translate the Greek unspiritual (NRSV, REB), One problem with this translation, however, is that the term becomes negative rather than conveying the more value-neutral nuances of ordinary person or person who lives on an entirely human level (cf. the man without the Spirit, NIV); whoever does not have the Spirit (TEV)…The arguments in favor of our understanding of psychikos as the person who lives on an entirely human level are conclusive” (New International Greek Testament Commentary: 1 Corinthians [Thiselton, 2000], 267-268, 269, emphasis in original).

9. The “carnal mind” coming up in DC 67:12 gives another connection to 1 Corinthians that we don’t have time to explore here. At the beginning of 1 Corinthians 3, Paul talks about people who are “carnal” in discussing growth in Christ.

10. We could go on with other verses in restoration scripture that discuss these ideas. Check out Moses 6:36, for example, or especially DC 76:114-118, which does not use the term “natural man” but is still one of the clearest statements you could find of the psychikos/pneumatikos difference.