For many Christians, the belief that souls go to Heaven or Hell after death is a cultural legacy rather than a conclusion reached through personal analysis of the biblical text.
The logical argument for the above statement is as follows: the idea that the soul goes to Heaven or Hell immediately after death implies that it is judged and rewarded or punished immediately afterwards; in this case, the idea of a future resurrection of the dead for judgement would make no sense. However, the Bible frequently references the resurrection of the dead to receive their eternal reward.
A noble intention, but a culpable invention
According to Professor Oscar Cullmann’s thesis, supported by representatives of the neo-orthodox theological movement, the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul is based on Platonic philosophy. “Neo-orthodoxy took a quite different view of the matter. In the judgment of these theologians, the idea of the immortality of the soul was a Greek, not a biblical, concept.”[1]
While Greek philosophers saw illness as evidence of the intrinsic evil of matter and the body, biblical writings argue the opposite. The idea that the body could come back to life was, at the very least, laughable to the Greeks, as evidenced by the Athenians’ reaction to the Apostle Paul’s sermon on resurrection. “When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered” (Acts 17:32). In biblical thinking, however, the human body has value because it is God’s creation. After completing His creative work, God “saw all that He had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1:31), including humans as physical beings. Jesus healed the sick and raised the dead, and the Apostle Paul wrote to the Christians in Corinth to point out that the bodies are “the temples of the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 6:19).
Jesus’s disciples and the Christians of the first centuries communicated the message of the Gospel to pagan peoples—Greeks, Romans, and barbarians—who held various beliefs about what happens after death. The initial intention to use philosophical arguments to present the biblical teaching on the resurrection of the dead was the first step towards turning this teaching into a new doctrine—that of the immortality of the soul. The complex relationship between natural and revealed theology, or between Christianity and classical culture, is illustrated in Gregory of Nyssa’s book On the Soul and the Resurrection, which adapts Platonic elements to meticulously reflect Christian concepts.[2] Gregory of Nyssa’s theological discourse reflects his Greek background; he was one of the Church Fathers who endorsed the Platonic concept of natural immortality of the soul.
For them, recognising that the soul is an immortal entity made the idea of the body coming back to life more plausible. This concept became firmly established in Christian theology, as it was believed that “the soul is hence pre- and post-existent, because it transcends the birth and death of the body, and remains in its essence untouched by birth and death. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not a doctrine about a life after death; it teaches that the human being possesses a divine identity which is beyond birth and death.”[3] However, the laudable intention of theologians and philosophers to communicate the good news about eternal life effectively has resulted in an invented doctrine lacking biblical support.
“I dislike some of what is implied by the image of an immortal soul, or at least what many Christians assume it implies—that the spiritual and physical can easily be separated, that the physical part of our being is of much less value than the spiritual, that our earthly life is important largely insofar as we use it to prepare for our eternal spiritual life in heaven. In contrast, resurrection language is far more earthy. It affirms the value of our bodies and the physical world as a whole.”—Dan Epp-Tiessen
The Old New and the New Old
Both Jewish and Christian theology are based on the Genesis account of God creating mankind, which supports the idea of a living body rather than an incarnate soul. The concept of death as the liberation of the soul from the body, in the sense of immortality in Greek philosophy, seems to have been as foreign and incomprehensible to the authors of the New Testament as it was to those of the Old Testament[4], says J. T. Addison, Professor of History of Religion and Missions at the Episcopal Theological School (ETS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The concept of the soul detaching itself from the body at the moment of death was foreign to the Jews of the Old Testament period. They made no distinction between the physical and spiritual dimensions, considering humans to be unified beings. Renowned theology professor George Eldon Ladd of Fuller Theological Seminary emphasises this point: “The Old Testament nowhere holds forth the hope of a bodiless, nonmaterial, purely ‘spiritual’ redemption as did Greek thought.”[5] Greek body-soul dualism was certainly excluded from the thinking and teaching of the early Church. Theories that the Old and New Testaments take opposing positions on mankind’s fate after death are speculative and are based on the premise that the Bible is strictly a cultural product and not a book written by divine inspiration.
Creation and destruction
Careful study of biblical anthropology is required to answer the question of the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body. The first book of the Old Testament describes the creation of humankind as follows: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7). The distinction between the breath of life and the living soul is clear. The breath of life is the driving force of life; the living soul is man as a physical being—the sum of its constituent elements.
The term “soul” is the translation of the Hebrew word nephesh, which is used hundreds of times in the books of the Old Testament. However, this word has no connection with what happens after death. It essentially refers to life as we know it, which ends with what people usually call death. A corpse—whether human, bird, or animal—is devoid of nephesh[6]. The Greek equivalent of this term in the Septuagint[7] is psyche, a term that appears in the writings of the poet Homer, as well as other Hellenic authors, with the meaning of earthly life, which ultimately ends. Therefore, the soul is not a self-aware entity that subsists outside the human body; rather, it is the human being as a living being. The death of a person means the death of their soul.
“The biblical man is a single entity. But what is even more important to note is that, according to the Bible, there is no divine element in the human being that guarantees the survival of the human personality after death.” González Ruiz
If the creation of humans meant the union of the body with God’s breath of life, then death is the reverse process. “For dust you are and to dust you will return,” God said to Adam (Genesis 3:19). But what happens to the breath of life? It returns to the One who gave it: the Creator. This is not the self-aware soul about which Plato wrote, but simply the spark of life that animates the human body. The wise Solomon wrote of the dead that “they know nothing; they have no further reward” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). Death means unconsciousness. The reward that the immortal soul is supposed to receive—Heaven or Hell—is contradicted by this statement. In a prayer addressed to God, the psalmist David said that the dead no longer praise Him (Psalm 6:5).
Death—the enemy to be feared
Unlike Socrates, who awaited his death serenely while discussing the immortality of the soul, Jesus Christ expressed his desire to avoid the “cup” of his death (Matthew 26:36–46). On the evening He was betrayed, He prayed with His apostles in the Garden of Gethsemane. According to the accounts of the evangelists Mark, Matthew, and Luke, Jesus was distressed and “overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death,” asking his Father three times to take the “cup” of death away from Him. In his Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle Paul wrote that Jesus “offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death” (Hebrews 5:7). “Jesus is so thoroughly human that He shares the natural fear of death”[8], Cullmann observed. For Jesus, death was not a liberation and a return to God the Father, but an end, a separation, and an abnormal, painful reality. The sin of humanity that He had taken upon Himself could have resulted in eternal death and separation from His Father.
In the first half of the last century, the Italian author Giovanni Papini published a volume of short stories entitled Testimonies of Calvary, in which he presented psychological and spiritual portraits of the people around Jesus in the final days of His life. In the story “The Son of the Father”, Papini imagines the mental anguish experienced by Barabbas after he was released in Jesus’s place. Wanting to learn more about Jesus, Barabbas sought out Lazarus, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. Far from being a happy man, Lazarus was full of sadness and longing for Heaven, where he had found his parents.
“I was surrounded by everyone I loved. I had shaken off the dust of the earth. I was resting; I was happy. But suddenly, just to please the two women who thought they loved me, I was forced to return to trouble, suffering, fatigue, and exile.”[9] Papini correctly intuited that forcing Lazarus’ immortal soul back into his mortal body would have been an unkind thing for Jesus to do to His friend. If the soul were immortal, then all of the people whom the Bible says were brought back to life would have experienced terrible suffering upon their return from Paradise to a world of suffering. However, it is worth noting that none of those who were resurrected in the biblical text give any impression of what they saw beyond. Could their silence indicate that death means the complete end of human existence?
The attitude of the apostle Paul also suggests that death is a painful reality rather than liberation and a return to Heaven. Comparing the human body to a tent, Paul states that “while we are in this tent, we groan and are burdened, because we do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4). In other words, Paul expressed his hope that Christ would return quickly enough to prevent him from dying and allow him to pass directly into eternal life.
If Paul had believed for a moment that the soul is immortal, his statement would not have been justified. Although he wrote about the body and soul, or flesh and spirit, in his epistles, Paul did not interpret them in terms of Hellenistic thought. Pauline anthropology was founded on the Genesis story of the creation of human beings. Neither Jesus nor His apostles glorified death, nor did they claim that death liberates the soul, allowing it to ascend freely to the Father. Instead, Paul wrote that “to those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, He will give eternal life” (Romans 2:7). Why would someone who knows their immortal soul will live with God forever seek immortality? And why would God give eternal life to an immortal soul?
It is not a reincarnated soul, but a resurrected body
Redemption from sin means redemption of the whole human being; therefore, salvation and eternal life presuppose resurrection of the body. The patriarch Enoch and the prophet Elijah were taken up to heaven in the flesh (Genesis 5:24; 2 Kings 2:11), which is proof that salvation means the salvation of the physical body since it is God’s creation. The promise of the resurrection of the dead is frequently found in the Bible. Long before the resurrection of Lazarus and Jesus, the prophet Isaiah (8th century BC) wrote, “But your dead will live; their bodies will rise” (Isaiah 26:19). During the period when the Jews were slaves in Babylon (6th century BC), the prophet Daniel was told that “multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt” (Daniel 12:2). “Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them”—this divine declaration was communicated to the people of Israel through the prophet Ezekiel (37:13). Jesus foretold His own resurrection from the dead (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:33–34), and the apostle Paul based hope in the resurrection of believers on the Saviour’s resurrection. “for the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:53).
“The immortality of the soul is an opinion–the resurrection of the dead is a hope.”–Jürgen Moltmann
The resurrections described in the Bible cannot be proven. Other than the testimony of the biblical authors, there is no evidence. Therefore, hope in the return of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of the dead is closely linked to the biblical text—the word revealed by God. For early Christians, “the hope that the dead would rise from the grave thus rested not on an analysis of human nature but on the conviction that God would prove faithful to his promises.”[10] This hope of resurrection helps Christians to live principled lives, knowing in advance that death is the end, but not for eternity. Human eternal happiness in the promised paradise depends not on the nature of the soul, but on the Second Coming of Jesus, when the dead will be brought back to life. The voice that called Lazarus out of the tomb where he had been resting for four days will call all those who have died in hope of resurrection.
Belief in the immortality of the soul has been a constant element in the world’s great religions since ancient times and has won the sympathy of Christian theology, becoming a fundamental doctrine. The idea that the soul is immortal and carries something of the divine within it has tempted humans since the beginning, when the serpent said to Eve: “You will not certainly die. . . you will be like God” (Genesis 3:4-5). However, the Bible contains a different promise: “The righteous will live by faith” (Romans 1:17), because life comes from God and resurrection for eternal life depends on obedience.
