How do you define "Spirit?"

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“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24). What is a “spirit?”
 
Good question!

I have to write 16 characters but I don’t have an answer!!

Still, this is a good question… 👍
 
Read Chapter 2 of Frank Sheed’s “Theology for Beginners.”

Briefly, spirit is a real substance which is not material. It is not matter or energy, it does not occupy space. Our human souls are spiritual beings, as are the angels, and God is the infinite spirit. Spiritual beings have intellect and will.
 
Everyone is partly immortal.
Spirit is the immortal.
How, I don’t know.
 
kjack2222 said:
How do you define “Spirit?”
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The animating principle of life.

“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24). What is a “spirit?”
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A being without a material body. A type of life which is not constrained by matter. Angels are one type of spirit. A ghost is another.

1 Corinthians 15:44 It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual one.

Matthew 22:30 At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage but are like the angels in heaven.

Whether angels possess spiritual bodies is open to question. Since Jesus also said:

Luke 24:39 [a]Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.”
 
kjack2222 said:
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn 4:24). What is a “spirit?”
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Christopher Stead of the Cambridge Divinity School explains how a statement that God is spirit would have been interpreted within ancient Judaism:

By saying that God is spiritual, we do not mean that he has no body … but rather that he is the source of a mysterious life-giving power and energy that animates the human body, and himself possesses this energy in the fullest measure. (Christopher Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 98)

Regarding John 4:24, Origen wrote:

I know that some will attempt to say that, even according to the declarations of our own Scriptures, God is a body, because . . . they find it said . . . in the Gospel according to John, that “God is a Spirit, and they who worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth.” . . . Spirit, according to them, [is] to be regarded as nothing else than a body. (Origen, De Principiis 1.1 (ANF 4:242)

Harvard Historian Harry Austryn Wolfson wrote:

in Scripture . . . there is no indication that by spirit and soul were meant any such principles as form or immateriality. (Wolfson, Philo, 2:95.)

The great Christian writer, Tertullian (ca. 200 A.D.) wrote,

For who will deny that God is a body, although ‘God is a Spirit?’ For Spirit has a bodily substance of its own kind, in its own form. Tertullian, “Against Praxeas,” in 7 Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886)3:602

I hope this helps…
 
It does - thank you! And thanks especially for including the specific resources.
 
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I got it mainly from reading Frank Sheed’s “Theology for Beginners” and “Theology and Sanity.” But the distinction between matter and spirit is also basic to some philosophy courses based on Thomist realism. Our current milieu is so thoroughly materialistic that this distinction is often lost.
 
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