Chapter 30
We need to talk about something that might surprise you. Throughout this book, we have been working from a shared foundation: both the conditionalist and the universalist affirm that human beings have an immaterial soul that survives the death of the body. We’ve treated substance dualism—the view that a person is made up of both a physical body and an immaterial soul—as settled ground. And for good reason. The Bible teaches it. The early creeds assume it. The church has confessed it for two thousand years.
But there is a growing movement within evangelical Christianity, and specifically within the conditional immortality camp, that wants to abandon this view. A number of conditionalist thinkers have adopted what is called physicalism—the belief that human beings are entirely physical creatures with no separate, immaterial soul. On this view, when your body dies, you cease to exist entirely. There is nothing left. No conscious soul awaiting resurrection. No intermediate state. Just… nothing, until God recreates you at the resurrection.
I understand why some conditionalists find physicalism appealing. If immortality is conditional—if we don’t naturally live forever—then doesn’t it make sense that we’re purely physical beings who simply stop existing when our bodies fail? On the surface, it seems tidy. Clean. It pairs nicely with the conditionalist emphasis that only God possesses inherent immortality (1 Tim. 6:16).1
But I’m convinced this move is a serious mistake. And in this chapter, I want to show you why. The biblical evidence for substance dualism is strong—far stronger than the physicalist alternative. The Old Testament, the New Testament, the teaching of Jesus himself, and even the corroborating evidence from near-death experience research all point in the same direction: you are more than your body. You have a soul. And that soul is real, conscious, and capable of existing apart from your physical frame.
Now, here’s the twist in this chapter. Normally in this book, the universalist position is the main conversation partner. But in this chapter, the primary foil is physicalism, not universalism. Most universalist advocates actually agree with us here. So before we dive into the biblical case, let me briefly acknowledge where our universalist friends stand on this question.
This is one of those rare moments in our conversation where the universalist reader can sit back, nod along, and say, “I agree with everything you’re about to argue.” And I appreciate that. Most advocates of conservative biblical universalism affirm substance dualism without hesitation. Talbott, Parry, Hart—they all operate from the assumption that human beings possess an immaterial soul that survives the death of the body.2 This is not a point of contention between us.
In fact, from the universalist perspective, substance dualism strengthens the case for universal reconciliation. Here is the logic, and I want to state it fairly because it’s genuinely compelling. If the soul is real and conscious after death, then God’s relationship with every person continues beyond the grave. Death does not interrupt the divine-human encounter. The soul persists in God’s presence, and God’s purifying love continues its work. Time, as we experience it, may not apply in the same way. The soul, held in existence by God himself, remains available for the transforming encounter with divine love that universalists believe will eventually bring every creature to willing repentance.3
The universalist sees this as a powerful argument: if the soul is conscious and God is in relationship with it, what grounds does the conditionalist have for saying God will eventually destroy it? Think about that for a moment. The universalist is asking a pointed question: if God sustains a conscious soul in existence, if He is actively relating to that soul, if His love is surrounding it—how can we say He would then snuff it out? Wouldn’t a loving God continue to work on that soul until the work is finished?4
Robin Parry makes the case that the ongoing existence of the soul in God’s care is itself evidence of God’s unwillingness to let any creature go. If God wanted to destroy, He could do so at the moment of physical death. But He does not. He preserves the soul. And that preservation, Parry argues, is an act of continuing love that will not stop until reconciliation is achieved.5
Thomas Talbott pushes this further with his characteristic philosophical rigor. A conscious soul in God’s presence is a soul that is experiencing God—experiencing His love, His holiness, His goodness. Talbott argues that no soul, when fully confronted with God as He truly is, could permanently refuse such goodness. The soul’s ongoing conscious existence is precisely the means by which God’s love overcomes all resistance.6
I take this argument seriously. Very seriously. And I will address it directly before this chapter is done. But first, we need to establish the point on which we agree: that the soul is real, that it survives death, and that physicalism is not an adequate reading of the biblical evidence. On this point, the universalist and the conditionalist who affirms substance dualism stand together against the physicalist trend.
So let me turn now to that case. And let me address it to both my universalist reader and to any conditionalist who has been tempted by the physicalist option. The Bible has a great deal to say about the soul. And what it says does not fit within a physicalist framework.
Before we dig into the texts, I need to define what I mean by substance dualism, because the term carries baggage. When I say substance dualism, I do not mean Platonic dualism. I am not saying the soul is a divine spark trapped in an evil body. I am not saying the body is a prison that the soul needs to escape. I am not saying the soul is inherently immortal—that it cannot be destroyed under any circumstances. Plato taught all of those things, and they are all wrong.7
What I am saying is this: a human being is composed of two distinct but deeply united substances—a physical body and an immaterial soul. These two belong together. Full human flourishing requires their union, which is why the final hope of the Christian faith is not the escape of the soul from the body but the resurrection of the body and the reunion of body and soul in the new creation. The soul can exist apart from the body—and does so between death and resurrection—but that separated existence is not the ideal. It is a temporary, in-between state.8
John Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, calls this position “holistic dualism.” It takes seriously the Bible’s emphasis on the unity of the person (the holistic part) while also taking seriously the Bible’s clear teaching that the soul can and does separate from the body at death (the dualism part).9 This is not a compromise between Hebrew holism and Greek philosophy. It is what the text itself teaches when you let it speak on its own terms.
J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae make a similar case in Body and Soul. They argue that biblical substance dualism is not borrowed from the Greeks but arises organically from Scripture’s own testimony about human nature. The Greeks may have gotten some things right about the soul—even a broken clock is right twice a day—but the Bible’s teaching does not depend on them for its authority.10
With that clarification in place, let’s turn to the texts themselves. And we will start where the Bible starts: in the beginning.
The story of human nature begins in a garden. “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” (Gen. 2:7).11
Physicalists love this verse. And at first glance, you can see why. The verse does not say God created a body and then inserted a soul into it like a coin into a vending machine. It says God formed Adam from dust, breathed life into him, and he became a living being. The Hebrew word is nephesh—often translated “soul” but more broadly meaning “living creature” or “living being.” The same word is used of animals in Genesis 2:19.12 The physicalist looks at this and says: “See? The human is not a body plus a soul. The human is a living soul. There’s no separate immaterial part.”
But this reading misses the forest for the trees. Yes, Genesis 2:7 describes the human being as a unified whole. Substance dualists agree with that. We believe body and soul belong together. The verse tells us about the result—a living being—without giving us a detailed metaphysical account of the composition. It would be like saying, “The chef mixed flour, eggs, and sugar, and it became a cake.” That doesn’t mean the flour, eggs, and sugar ceased to exist. It means they came together to form something new.13
What is especially striking is that God performs two distinct actions. He forms the body from dust. Then He breathes life into it. This two-step process suggests that the body alone is not sufficient. Something else—the breath of God, the neshamah—must be added to the body for the result to be a living person. Edward Fudge, writing in The Fire That Consumes, acknowledges that the Old Testament presents a holistic view of persons, where body, soul, and spirit describe the same person from different angles. But he also notes that this holism does not settle the question of what happens at death, because other texts show that the “breath” or “spirit” of a person can depart the body and return to God.14
Genesis 2:7 does not, by itself, prove or disprove substance dualism. But it does establish something the physicalist would rather avoid: the human being is not reducible to dust alone. There is a divine contribution—the breath of God—that animates the clay and makes it a living person. Whether that breath constitutes a separable immaterial soul is a question Genesis 2:7 leaves open. But other passages close it decisively.
Here is a verse that the physicalist has never been able to handle comfortably. As Rachel is dying in childbirth, the text says, “And as her soul [nephesh] was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni” (Gen. 35:18, ESV).15
Read that again. Her soul was departing. The Hebrew verb is yatsa—to go out, to leave, to depart. It is a verb of motion. Rachel’s nephesh is described as leaving her body at the moment of death. This is not figurative language for “she stopped breathing.” The text could have simply said “she died.” Instead, it describes death as the departure of the soul from the body.
Cooper argues that this text, along with the parallel in 1 Kings 17, presents a “departure model” of death that is very difficult to reconcile with physicalism. If there is no soul, nothing “departs.” Death is simply the cessation of biological function. But the biblical author describes something leaving—and that something is identified as the nephesh.16
The physicalist might respond by saying this is just an idiom—a way of speaking that doesn’t carry metaphysical weight. People say “he gave up the ghost” without believing in ghosts, right? But the problem with that response is that the biblical writers don’t treat this language as empty idiom. They pair it with narratives that assume the soul continues to exist after it departs. Rachel’s soul goes somewhere. It is not simply annihilated at the moment of death.
If Genesis 35:18 shows the soul departing, 1 Kings 17:21–22 shows it coming back. When the widow’s son dies, Elijah prays: “Lord my God, let this boy’s life [nephesh] return to him!” And the text says: “The Lord heard Elijah’s cry, and the boy’s life [nephesh] returned to him, and he lived” (1 Kings 17:21–22).17
The soul departed when the boy died. The soul returned when the boy was raised. This is the natural, straightforward reading. The nephesh is treated as something that can separate from the body at death and return to the body when life is restored. On physicalism, nothing left the boy and nothing returned to him. God simply restarted biological processes. But that is not what the text says. The text says something went out and something came back. And it calls that something the nephesh.
John Cooper notes that these two texts together form a remarkably consistent picture: death is the departure of the soul from the body, and restoration of life is the return of the soul to the body. This is not Greek philosophy being imported into Hebrew thought. It is Hebrew narrative telling us what happens at death and what happens at resurrection.18
The Preacher, near the end of his long and sometimes bewildering meditation on life, says this about death: “And the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7).19
Here, at death, two things happen simultaneously. The body returns to the dust from which it was formed (echoing Genesis 2:7 and 3:19). And the spirit (ruach) returns to God who gave it. The body goes one direction; the spirit goes another. This is hard to square with physicalism. If there is no immaterial spirit that can separate from the body, then what is returning to God?
Fudge acknowledges this verse and observes that it presupposes a two-directional separation at death—the material component returning to the earth and something immaterial returning to God.20 Now, the physicalist might try to explain this as poetic language for the idea that God takes back the “life force” He once gave—that nothing personal or conscious survives, but rather the animating energy simply dissipates back to its source. But that reading flattens the personal language of the text. The “spirit” is not described as an impersonal force. It is the ruach that God gave to an individual person, and that individual’s ruach returns to its Giver.
Taken together with Genesis 35:18 and 1 Kings 17:21–22, Ecclesiastes 12:7 fills out the Old Testament picture: at death, the immaterial aspect of the person separates from the body. The body decays. The spirit or soul goes to God. This is the departure model of death, and it runs like a thread through the Old Testament.
This is one of the strangest stories in the Old Testament, and one of the most important for our question. King Saul, desperate for guidance, visits a medium at Endor and asks her to bring up the prophet Samuel, who has died. To everyone’s surprise—including, apparently, the medium’s—Samuel actually appears.21
What happens next is remarkable. Samuel speaks to Saul. He delivers a genuine prophecy—one that comes true the next day. He rebukes Saul for disobeying God. And he tells Saul that “tomorrow you and your sons will be with me” (1 Sam. 28:19). Samuel is described not as a hallucination, not as a demon impersonating Samuel, but as Samuel himself—conscious, personal, communicative—existing after his body has been buried.22
I realize this passage has been interpreted in multiple ways. Some argue the medium conjured a demonic impersonation. Others suggest God made a special exception and temporarily re-created Samuel for this encounter. But the simplest reading—and the one the text itself seems to present—is that Samuel’s soul continued to exist after death and was brought up from Sheol for this encounter with Saul. The text calls the figure “Samuel,” not “an apparition resembling Samuel.” And his prophecy comes true, which in the Old Testament is the test of a genuine prophetic word (Deut. 18:22).23
Cooper points to this passage as strong evidence that the Old Testament assumed the continued conscious existence of the person after death. The dead in Sheol are not simply non-existent. They are diminished, weakened, cut off from the worship of God—but they exist. Samuel exists. He can speak. He can prophesy. He can interact with the living.24
For the physicalist, this passage is deeply problematic. If there is no soul, if a person simply ceases to exist at death, then what appeared to Saul? The physicalist must either deny that Samuel actually appeared (requiring a reading the text does not support) or posit some kind of temporary re-creation by God (which raises its own problems about identity and continuity). The substance dualist, by contrast, has a straightforward explanation: Samuel’s soul survived death and was still capable of consciousness and communication.
If the Old Testament lays the foundation for substance dualism, the New Testament builds a skyscraper on it. The evidence here is even more direct and harder for the physicalist to explain away.
On the cross, Jesus turns to the repentant thief and says: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).25
This is one of the clearest statements of conscious existence between death and resurrection in all of Scripture. Jesus promises the thief that today—not at the future resurrection, not after centuries of non-existence, but today—he will be with Jesus in paradise. Both Jesus and the thief are about to die. Their bodies will be dead by evening. And yet Jesus says they will be together in paradise that very day.
On physicalism, this promise is extremely difficult to explain. If death means total cessation of existence, then neither Jesus nor the thief will be anywhere “today.” They will simply not exist until God raises them. Some physicalists have tried to reposition the comma in the Greek text—“Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise”—making “today” modify “I tell you” rather than “you will be with me.” But this reading is grammatically strained and has almost no support in the history of interpretation.26 Jesus is not emphasizing when He is speaking (that would be obvious). He is telling the thief when they will be together.
The substance dualist reads this naturally: the souls of Jesus and the thief, separated from their bodies by death, entered paradise together that very day. This is exactly what we would expect if the soul survives the death of the body and enters a conscious intermediate state.
Just before He dies, Jesus cries out: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).27 He is quoting Psalm 31:5. Stephen echoes these words in Acts 7:59 as he is being stoned to death: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
In both cases, the dying person entrusts their spirit—their immaterial self—into the care of God (or, in Stephen’s case, of Jesus). If there is no spirit that survives death, this is an empty gesture. Jesus would be committing nothing into God’s hands. But the language assumes that the spirit is something real, something that can be received by God at the moment the body dies.28
P. E. Hughes, one of the most distinguished evangelical conditionalists of the twentieth century, examined these passages in Calvin’s early work Psychopannychia and noted that while they clearly show the soul survives physical death, they do not prove the soul is inherently immortal. God can destroy the soul (Matt. 10:28). But the fact that He can destroy it does not mean it is not real. The soul is a genuine entity—it simply depends on God for its continued existence.29
This is perhaps the single most devastating passage for the physicalist position. Paul writes:
“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling… For 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… We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:1–4, 8).30
Let’s unpack this carefully. Paul uses three images for the state of the person in relation to the body. Being “in this tent” is the current earthly life. Being “clothed with our heavenly dwelling” is the resurrection—the final, glorious, embodied state. And being “unclothed”—that middle state that Paul doesn’t particularly want but is willing to accept—is the state of being “away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
This three-part structure makes no sense on physicalism. If there is no soul, there can be no state of being “away from the body.” Death would simply be non-existence until the resurrection. But Paul clearly envisions a state between death and resurrection in which the person is conscious, is “at home with the Lord,” and yet is not yet in the final resurrected body. The person is “unclothed”—without a body—but still exists and is with Christ.31
Cooper calls this passage “the linchpin of New Testament evidence for the intermediate state” and argues that Paul’s language is unintelligible if there is no immaterial part of the person that survives death.32 Paul does not prefer this disembodied state—he would rather go straight to the resurrection body (“we do not wish to be unclothed”). But he clearly accepts it as a real possibility and even as a state of being “at home with the Lord.” This is holistic dualism at its clearest: the ideal is embodiment, but the soul can exist without the body when necessary.
Paul faces the same question in his letter to the Philippians and comes to the same conclusion. He writes: “I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Phil. 1:23–24).33
Two things stand out. First, Paul says departing (dying) will mean being “with Christ.” Not ceasing to exist. Not entering a long sleep. Being with Christ—which is “better by far” than remaining alive in the body. Second, he contrasts departing with remaining “in the body.” This language implies that his true self—the “I” that desires, chooses, and relates to Christ—is something that currently resides in the body and can depart from it at death.
The physicalist has to explain how Paul can call death “better by far” if death means non-existence. How is non-existence better than conscious life serving the churches? Only if Paul expects to be conscious with Christ after death does “better by far” make sense.34
John sees a vision of the heavenly realm: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’” (Rev. 6:9–10).35
These are people who have died. Their bodies have been killed. And yet they are described as souls—conscious, speaking, crying out to God for justice. They have not yet been resurrected; the final judgment has not come. They are in an intermediate state, existing as disembodied souls, aware of what is happening, and capable of addressing God.
The physicalist must either dismiss this as purely symbolic (in which case, what is it a symbol of?) or admit that it presents a picture of conscious, disembodied human existence that directly contradicts the claim that there is no soul apart from the body. Even granting the highly symbolic nature of Revelation, the vision assumes a framework in which dead believers continue as conscious beings in God’s presence. John does not call them “the recreated bodies” or “the future persons”—he calls them “the souls.”36
Now we come to what I believe is the single most important verse in this entire debate. Jesus says: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28).37
Think about what this verse requires. It requires that the soul is something distinct from the body. It requires that the soul can survive the death of the body (otherwise, killing the body would kill the soul, and there would be nothing special to fear from God). And it requires that the soul is a real entity that God can destroy in the final judgment.38
On physicalism, Jesus’ words lose their force entirely. If a person is just their body, then killing the body is killing the soul. There is no distinction to be made. Jesus would be saying, “Don’t be afraid of those who kill you, but instead be afraid of the One who can… also kill you.” The warning collapses into nonsense.
But on substance dualism, the warning makes perfect sense. Persecution and martyrdom are real threats, but they can only touch the body. The soul survives. The real danger is not from those who can end your physical life, but from God, who has the power to end your entire existence—body and soul—in the final judgment. This is exactly what conditional immortality teaches: the ultimate fate of the finally impenitent is the destruction of the whole person, soul and body, in Gehenna.39
Hughes, writing in the context of Calvin’s use of this very text, makes an important observation. Calvin cited Matthew 10:28 as evidence that the soul is immortal. But Hughes points out that the verse actually implies the opposite—that the soul is destructible. If God can destroy the soul, then the soul is not inherently immortal. It exists only because God sustains it, and God can withdraw that sustaining power at the final judgment.40 This is the substance dualist version of conditional immortality: the soul is real, but its continued existence depends entirely on God’s will.
Peter tells us that Christ, after His death, “went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits” (1 Pet. 3:19). Whatever interpretation one takes of this difficult passage—and there are many—it presupposes the existence of conscious spirits who are somewhere, who can be addressed, and who existed in a disembodied state.41 This is exactly what substance dualism predicts: after death, the immaterial aspect of the person persists and can encounter God (or, in this case, be encountered by Christ during the period between His death and resurrection).
This passage also connects directly to the postmortem opportunity that we have affirmed throughout this book. If Christ went to proclaim the gospel to spirits after His death, it presupposes that those spirits exist and can hear. On physicalism, there are no spirits to address. The dead have ceased to exist. But Peter assumes they are there—waiting, conscious, and capable of receiving a message.42
Now that we have surveyed the biblical evidence for substance dualism, I want to address the main arguments that physicalists use to challenge it. These arguments have been influential, especially through the work of scholars like Joel Green (Body, Soul, and Human Life) and Nancey Murphy (Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?).43 They deserve a fair hearing. But I believe each of them, when examined carefully, falls short.
This is the physicalist’s favorite argument, and it has a grain of truth in it. The Old Testament does present a holistic view of human nature. The Hebrews did not think of the person as a soul trapped in a body the way the Greeks sometimes did. Terms like nephesh, ruach, basar (flesh), and leb (heart) describe the whole person from different angles, not separable parts that can be sliced apart like a pie.44
Edward Fudge presents this holistic understanding carefully, drawing on scholars like H. Wheeler Robinson and Hans Walter Wolff. He notes that nephesh speaks of “needy man,” basar of “man in his infirmity,” ruach of “man as he is empowered,” and leb of “reasonable man.” These are not component parts; they are perspectives on the unified whole.45
The substance dualist can and should agree with all of this. Holism is correct. Body and soul function as a unity. The biblical writers do not think in Cartesian categories of mind and body as two separate machines. But here is the critical point: holistic does not mean physicalist. Holism tells us that body and soul belong together and function as one. It does not tell us that the soul doesn’t exist. A married couple functions as a unit—that does not mean one of the spouses is imaginary.46
Cooper makes this distinction the centerpiece of his argument. The Old Testament is holistic, yes. But the same Old Testament that presents this holistic view also describes Rachel’s soul departing, the boy’s soul returning, the spirit going back to God, and Samuel appearing after death. The holism is real, but it is a holistic dualism—not a holistic physicalism.47
This is true. And the substance dualist agrees completely. Nephesh has a wide range of meanings in the Old Testament—Fudge notes that English translators have rendered it forty-five different ways.48 It can mean “living being,” “person,” “life,” “self,” and even “corpse” (Num. 19:13). It is not a technical philosophical term for an immortal, separable soul in the Platonic sense.
But the physicalist makes an error when they jump from “nephesh doesn’t mean ‘immortal soul’” to “therefore there is no soul.” That does not follow. The fact that the Hebrew word nephesh has a broader range of meanings than the Greek word psyche does not prove that the reality the word sometimes refers to—the immaterial aspect of the person—does not exist. It simply means the Hebrews used the word more flexibly than the Greeks used theirs.49
In Genesis 35:18, nephesh clearly refers to something that departs from the body at death. In 1 Kings 17:21–22, it clearly refers to something that returns to the body at restoration. The word may have many meanings, but in these contexts, it designates the immaterial, conscious aspect of the person. The substance dualist does not need nephesh to always mean “immortal soul.” We only need it to sometimes refer to the real, immaterial self that can separate from the body at death. And the texts we have examined clearly show that it does.
The physicalist argues that the emphasis of the New Testament is on bodily resurrection, not on the soul’s escape from the body. And they are absolutely right about this. The Christian hope is not to float around as disembodied spirits forever. It is the resurrection of the body—a glorious, physical, imperishable body raised by the power of God (1 Cor. 15:42–44). The final state is embodied, not disembodied.50
But the substance dualist agrees with all of this. We have never claimed otherwise. The point of substance dualism is not that the final state is disembodied. It is that there is a temporary disembodied state between death and resurrection—and this state is real, conscious, and meaningful. Paul himself distinguishes between the current earthly body, the state of being “unclothed” (disembodied), and the final resurrection body (2 Cor. 5:1–8). The bodily nature of the resurrection does not eliminate the intermediate state; it completes it.51
The bodily resurrection is the answer to the problem of disembodiment, not evidence against it. If there were no intermediate disembodied state, the resurrection would lose much of its theological significance. Why would God need to raise bodies if the soul never existed without one? The very need for resurrection implies a prior state of separation.52
Here is another way to think about it. Imagine someone tells you, “We are going to reunite you with your family at the airport.” That sentence only makes sense if you have been separated from your family. If you were never apart, there is nothing to reunite. The resurrection is a reunion of soul and body. That reunion presupposes a separation. And that separation is exactly what substance dualism describes: at death, the soul departs from the body, and at the resurrection, they are brought back together in a glorious, imperishable form.
This is the most rhetorically powerful of the physicalist arguments. It sounds devastating: “You’re not getting this from the Bible. You’re getting it from Plato!” The implication is that substance dualism is a pagan import that contaminated early Christian theology and that we need to recover a pure, original, Hebrew view of human nature—which, the physicalist claims, was purely physical.53
There are several problems with this charge.
First, the evidence we have just surveyed—Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21–22, Ecclesiastes 12:7, 1 Samuel 28, Matthew 10:28, Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, Philippians 1:23, Revelation 6:9–11—is not Greek philosophy. It is Scripture. The Old Testament texts predate any possible Greek philosophical influence on Hebrew thought. Rachel’s soul departing is not Plato. Elijah praying for the boy’s soul to return is not Socrates. These are Hebrew narratives, written in a Hebrew context, expressing Hebrew beliefs about what happens at death.54
Second, the charge assumes that if the Greeks believed something, the Bible cannot also teach it. But that is a genetic fallacy. The truth or falsehood of a claim does not depend on who else believed it. If Plato happened to be right that the soul is a real, immaterial substance (even though he was wrong about its inherent immortality and the inferiority of the body), that does not make the biblical teaching false. Truth is truth regardless of who stumbles onto it.55
Third, as Moreland and Rae argue, the relationship between Hebrew and Greek thought on the soul is far more complicated than the physicalist narrative suggests. The Jews of the Second Temple period did develop more detailed beliefs about the soul and the afterlife, and some of these developments were influenced by contact with Greek culture. But the seeds of those beliefs are already present in the Old Testament itself, long before Greek influence was possible.56
Fudge acknowledges the real tension here. He notes that Jan Bremmer traced the body/soul dualism of later Judaism to Greek influence and that many scholars have emphasized the difference between Hebrew and Greek thinking about the person.57 But Fudge also recognizes that the Old Testament itself contains passages that assume the soul can separate from the body at death. The Greek influence charge is overstated. The biblical evidence stands on its own.
I want to draw attention to what I think is the single biggest problem for physicalism: it cannot give a coherent account of the intermediate state.58
Consider: the Bible clearly teaches that there is a period between a person’s death and the final resurrection at Christ’s return. Believers who die before the Second Coming are described as being “with Christ” (Phil. 1:23), “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and in “paradise” (Luke 23:43). The souls of the martyrs are conscious and crying out to God (Rev. 6:9–11). Unbelievers are in Hades, a conscious waiting state (Luke 16:19–31).
If there is no soul, what is “with Christ” between death and resurrection? The body is in the grave. There is nothing else. The physicalist must resort to one of two unsatisfying options.
The first option is what philosophers call “gappy existence.” On this view, the person genuinely ceases to exist at death. There is a gap—a period of non-existence—and then God recreates the person at the resurrection. The problem here is both philosophical and theological. Philosophically, if a person ceases to exist and is then recreated, is the recreated person really the same person? Or is it a copy? If I build a sandcastle, destroy it, and build an identical one, the second is not the same sandcastle. It is a replica. The same worry applies to persons. If God recreates you from scratch, how is the recreated being you and not merely someone exactly like you?59
Theologically, gappy existence flatly contradicts what we have just seen in Scripture. Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. Jesus tells the thief they will be together in paradise today. Revelation shows the souls of the martyrs conscious and speaking. None of these texts are compatible with a gap in existence.
The second option is “immediate resurrection.” On this view, each person is raised from the dead at the moment of their individual death, so there is no intermediate state at all. But this contradicts the clear teaching of Scripture that the resurrection is a single, universal, future event at the return of Christ (1 Cor. 15:23; 1 Thess. 4:16–17). The dead in Christ “will rise first” when the Lord descends—not at the scattered individual moments of their deaths.60
The substance dualist faces no such difficulties. The soul survives death and is “with Christ” in a conscious intermediate state, awaiting the resurrection of the body at Christ’s return. The intermediate state is real but temporary. The resurrection completes what was begun when the soul was separated from the body at death. Everything fits.
I want to add one more line of evidence that is not biblical but is, I believe, genuinely relevant: the research on near-death experiences (NDEs).
Now, I know some readers may be skeptical of NDE research, and I understand that. We should be cautious. We should not base our theology on human experiences that are, by their nature, subjective and difficult to verify. Our foundation is Scripture, not the testimony of people who came close to death and came back. But with that caveat firmly in place, the evidence from NDE research is worth noting because it provides independent corroboration of what Scripture already teaches.61
J. P. Moreland, in The Soul, discusses the phenomenon of veridical near-death experiences—cases where the person reports seeing or knowing things during the period when their body was clinically dead that they could not have known through normal physical means. A patient describes the specific actions of medical staff in another room. A person blind from birth reports visual experiences during their NDE that are later confirmed. A child describes meeting a relative they never knew existed.62
Cooper also notes the significance of this research for the substance dualism debate. If consciousness is entirely dependent on the functioning brain, then there should be no conscious experience during the period when the brain has shut down. But the NDE literature consistently reports vivid, coherent, and sometimes verifiable conscious experiences occurring precisely during the period of brain inactivity. This is exactly what substance dualism would predict: if the soul is a real, immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body, then consciousness can continue even when the brain is not functioning.63
I want to be clear about what I am not claiming. I am not claiming that every NDE report is a genuine encounter with the afterlife. Some may be caused by oxygen deprivation, drugs, or other physical processes. I am not building my case for substance dualism on NDE research. I am saying that this research provides additional evidence that is consistent with the biblical teaching and that creates a serious problem for physicalism. If the mind is nothing more than the brain, veridical NDEs should not exist. But they do.64
The author of The Triumph of Mercy recounts his own experience during a near-fatal illness, describing multiple out-of-body episodes during a three-day hospitalization. He reports being given a specific number—361—while in a disembodied state during conversation with a figure dressed in white, and seeing that exact number appear on the hospital monitor upon returning to his body as his temperature reading of 36.1 degrees Centigrade.65 Even he, though cautious about letting such experiences influence doctrine, admits it is hard to dismiss such events as mere hallucination when they include verifiable details that the person could not have known otherwise.
This kind of experience does not prove the soul’s existence all by itself. But it adds weight to the already substantial biblical case. And it creates a real difficulty for the physicalist, who must explain how a person with a non-functioning brain can acquire new, verifiable information.
I want to address this next section directly to my fellow conditionalists who have adopted or are sympathetic to physicalism. I write this as a friend and as someone who deeply admires the work of CI scholars like Chris Date, who has done more than almost anyone to bring conditionalism into mainstream evangelical conversation. But I believe the embrace of physicalism within the CI movement is a strategic and theological error that actually weakens the conditionalist case rather than strengthening it.66
Richard Swinburne, in his chapter in Rethinking Hell, puts the point with characteristic clarity. He writes that a person consists of soul and body, and that the soul is the essential part that makes you you—the initiator of intentional action, the subject of conscious experience, and the vehicle of character, beliefs, and desires. The soul may not normally function without a body, Swinburne acknowledges, but God can give it a new body or keep it temporarily in existence without one.67 For Swinburne, the conditionalist view flows naturally from understanding that God has created human beings as rational souls capable of free will. The soul is real. God sustains it. And God can end it. Swinburne sees no tension between substance dualism and conditional immortality—they complement each other perfectly.
Similarly, the contributors to A Consuming Passion note that leading evangelical conditionalists like John Stott and P. E. Hughes were substance dualists.68 The association between conditionalism and physicalism is historically recent and theologically unnecessary. You can hold to conditional immortality without holding to physicalism. In fact, as I will argue in the next chapter, substance dualism makes the conditionalist case stronger, not weaker.
The physicalist wing of the CI movement has been influenced by the broader trend in biblical studies that emphasizes Hebrew holism and critiques Greek dualism. And as I have acknowledged, there is truth in the holism emphasis. But the pendulum has swung too far. In their eagerness to distance themselves from Platonic immortality (a goal I share), some CI physicalists have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. They have rejected not just the inherent immortality of the soul (which should be rejected) but the very existence of the soul (which should not).69
The contributors to A Consuming Passion helpfully observe that “it is not essential to adopt physicalism in order to challenge platonic assumptions about life and the universe.” A dualist framework “permits a healthy agnosticism” about some metaphysical questions while firmly insisting, on the basis of Scripture, that the soul is real and that it survives the death of the body.70 You can reject Plato’s inherent immortality without rejecting the soul itself. In fact, you must—because Scripture teaches both that the soul is real and that it is not inherently immortal.
Someone might ask: why does this matter? If conditionalism is true either way—whether on physicalism or on substance dualism—why fight about human constitution? The answer is that the version of conditionalism you hold shapes everything else. And substance dualism makes the conditionalist case more coherent, more biblical, and more powerful. I will develop this argument fully in the next chapter, but let me preview it briefly here.
Substance dualism grounds the postmortem opportunity. If there is no soul, then the person ceases to exist at death, and God must somehow recreate them in order to give them a chance to respond to the gospel after death. But on dualism, the soul is conscious in the intermediate state and can encounter God there. The postmortem opportunity becomes not a problem to be explained but a natural consequence of the soul’s continued existence in God’s presence.71
Substance dualism makes Matthew 10:28 the strongest possible conditionalist proof text. On physicalism, Jesus is simply warning about physical death. On dualism, He is warning about something far more terrifying: the destruction of the soul itself. The second death (Rev. 20:14) is not just the cessation of biological function—it is the permanent end of a conscious, immaterial being. That gives the warning its proper gravity.72
And substance dualism makes the intermediate state—which both CI and UR affirm throughout this book—intelligible. If there is no soul, we need ad hoc explanations for how believers can be “with Christ” between death and resurrection. On dualism, the explanation is simple: the soul is with Christ. The body waits in the grave. The resurrection will reunite them.
I promised at the beginning of this chapter to come back to the universalist’s question: if the soul is real and God is in relationship with it, why would God ever destroy it?
It is a fair question. And I want to give a fair answer.
The universalist reasons like this: God sustains the soul in existence after death. He does so because He is in relationship with it and because His love never fails. He pursues the soul with purifying love. Given enough time, that love will break down every barrier of resistance. Therefore, no soul will be permanently destroyed—because God will never stop loving, and love always wins in the end.
I understand the beauty of this vision. I really do. But I believe it contains a hidden assumption that does not hold up under scrutiny: the assumption that love, given enough time, inevitably overcomes all resistance. That is a claim about the nature of love and the nature of freedom, and I do not think it is true.
God honors the soul’s freedom. That is one of the most profound things we can say about God. He does not override creaturely choice. He does not compel love. He does not coerce worship. He woos, He pursues, He pleads, He sends the Son, He sends the Spirit, He provides the postmortem opportunity—the most overwhelming encounter with divine love imaginable. But at the end of all that pursuing, the creature’s “no” can still be final.73
The soul’s existence does not guarantee its preservation. This is the heart of conditional immortality. God sustains the soul because He loves it and because He wants to give it every possible chance. But if the soul permanently refuses the love that sustains it—if it definitively rejects the Source of its own existence—then God, in both justice and mercy, brings that soul to its end. The destruction of the soul is not the contradiction of God’s love. It is the consequence of the soul’s refusal of that love, honored by a God who respects the choices of the beings He has made.
Think about it this way. A doctor may keep a patient on life support for days, weeks, even months, because there is hope of recovery. The doctor sustains the patient’s life because the doctor cares and because recovery is still possible. But if recovery becomes impossible—if every treatment has been tried and every avenue exhausted—then discontinuing life support is not abandoning the patient. It is acknowledging reality. It is, in many cases, an act of mercy.
God sustains the soul through the intermediate state, through the overwhelming encounter of the postmortem opportunity, through whatever corrective process His purifying presence entails. But if, after all of that, the soul remains permanently resistant—permanently defined by its rejection of God—then destruction is the merciful end. Not vindictive. Not arbitrary. The natural, sorrowful conclusion of a love story that the creature refused to complete.74
In this chapter, we have walked through the biblical case for substance dualism and against the physicalist trend in the conditionalist movement. The evidence is substantial:
From the Old Testament, we see the soul departing at death (Gen. 35:18), returning at restoration (1 Kings 17:21–22), the spirit returning to God (Eccl. 12:7), and Samuel appearing consciously after death (1 Sam. 28:11–19). From the New Testament, we see Jesus promising paradise “today” (Luke 23:43), committing His spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46), Paul desiring to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:23), being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and the souls of the martyrs crying out in heaven (Rev. 6:9–11). The decisive text, Matthew 10:28, shows Jesus explicitly distinguishing between body and soul and warning that God can destroy both.
We have addressed the main physicalist arguments: the holistic view of persons (true, but holistic does not mean physicalist), the range of meanings of nephesh (broad, but including the immaterial self that departs at death), the bodily nature of resurrection (true, but this does not eliminate the intermediate state), and the charge of Greek influence (overstated and ultimately irrelevant to the biblical evidence). We have noted the corroborating evidence from NDE research. And we have answered the universalist’s question about why a loving God would destroy a conscious soul.
In the next chapter, we will take this a step further and show specifically how substance dualism strengthens the case for conditional immortality. The soul is real. It survives death. And its continued existence beyond the final judgment is conditional on God’s gift of eternal life through Jesus Christ. That is the heart of the conditionalist message—and it is strongest when it stands on the foundation of biblical substance dualism.
↑ 1. Paul affirms that God “alone possesses immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16, NASB). This is a cornerstone of the conditionalist position. But it is equally compatible with substance dualism: the soul is real but not inherently immortal. Its continued existence depends on God’s will, not on its own nature.
↑ 2. See Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 1, where Talbott operates from the assumption of a conscious intermediate state. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, Preface and chap. 1, similarly assumes substance dualism throughout.
↑ 3. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 7, “The Universalist’s Dilemma.” Talbott argues that the soul’s ongoing conscious existence in God’s presence provides the medium through which God’s purifying love eventually overcomes all resistance.
↑ 4. This is one of the UR position’s strongest arguments against CI. If God sustains the soul in existence after death, He is actively choosing to maintain a relationship with that soul. The UR advocate argues that such an active choice implies an intention to bring the relationship to its proper completion—not to terminate it. See Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 3.
↑ 5. Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, chap. 3, “Universalism and the Biblical Narrative.”
↑ 6. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 7. Talbott argues that fully informed, fully free rejection of God is impossible because it would be fundamentally irrational. I address this argument in Chapter 27.
↑ 7. Plato’s arguments for the soul’s inherent immortality in the Phaedo have been deeply influential but are not endorsed by Scripture. On the Platonic influence on later Christian theology, see Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 320–321, where Fudge notes that Calvin’s argument for the soul’s survival sometimes slipped into Platonic categories despite his intentions to remain biblical.
↑ 8. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989). Cooper’s entire project is devoted to showing that Scripture teaches a “holistic dualism” that affirms both the unity of body and soul and the soul’s ability to exist apart from the body between death and resurrection.
↑ 9. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper argues that the biblical position is neither Greek dualism (the soul trapped in the body) nor modern physicalism (no soul at all), but a holistic dualism in which body and soul belong together but can be temporarily separated.
↑ 10. J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000). See also J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014).
↑ 11. Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the NIV.
↑ 12. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–27. Fudge notes that the NIV correctly translates nephesh as “living being” in Genesis 2:7 but that the KJV’s “living soul” has unfortunately given many readers the impression that the verse teaches a separable, immortal soul. Norman Snaith called the KJV’s differing translations of the same Hebrew phrase in Gen. 2:7 (“living soul”) and Gen. 2:19 (“living creature”) “most reprehensible.”
↑ 13. This analogy is imperfect, of course, but it illustrates the point: describing the result of a process does not settle the question of whether the components remain distinguishable within the result.
↑ 14. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–28. Fudge surveys the Old Testament holistic anthropology while noting that this holism does not resolve the question of what survives death.
↑ 15. All ESV quotations are from the English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2001).
↑ 16. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper identifies Genesis 35:18 and 1 Kings 17:21–22 as presenting a “departure model” of death: the soul departs at death and returns at restoration.
↑ 17. The verb for “return” here is shuv, the common Hebrew word for turning back or coming back. The nephesh that departed has now returned.
↑ 18. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. These two passages together form one of the strongest Old Testament arguments for substance dualism.
↑ 19. Ecclesiastes 12:7 is widely recognized as an echo of Genesis 2:7 and 3:19, presenting death as the reversal of creation: dust returns to dust, spirit returns to God.
↑ 20. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 28. Fudge notes that every biblical expression of hope after death is grounded in God’s faithfulness, not in any death-proof substance the person discovers in themselves.
↑ 21. The medium’s startled reaction (1 Sam. 28:12) suggests that she did not expect the real Samuel to appear. Some commentators take this as evidence that God, not the medium’s necromantic art, caused Samuel to appear.
↑ 22. The accuracy of Samuel’s prophecy (that Saul and his sons would die the next day) is consistent with genuine prophetic authority. A demon impersonating Samuel would presumably not have access to such specific foreknowledge.
↑ 23. Deuteronomy 18:22 establishes that a true prophet’s words come to pass. Samuel’s words in 1 Samuel 28:19 come true in 1 Samuel 31, lending credibility to the narrative’s identification of the figure as genuinely Samuel.
↑ 24. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper argues that the Old Testament evidence, taken as a whole, supports the view that the dead continue to exist in Sheol in a diminished but conscious state.
↑ 25. Luke 23:43. The Greek word semeron (“today”) is unambiguous in its temporal reference.
↑ 26. The attempt to reposition the comma (“I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise”) is primarily associated with Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh-day Adventists. It lacks support in the mainstream of Greek scholarship. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, for a thorough treatment.
↑ 27. Luke 23:46, quoting Psalm 31:5.
↑ 28. Hughes, The True Image: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ, as excerpted in Date, Stump, and Anderson, eds., Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism, chap. 16. Hughes examines Calvin’s use of this text and notes that while it clearly shows the soul survives death, it does not prove the soul is inherently immortal.
↑ 29. Hughes, as excerpted in Rethinking Hell, chap. 16. Hughes points out that Calvin cited Matt. 10:28 as evidence for the soul’s immortality, but the verse actually implies the soul’s destructibility—a point that supports conditional immortality rather than inherent immortality.
↑ 30. 2 Corinthians 5:1–4, 8.
↑ 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper argues that Paul’s three-stage framework (in the body / unclothed / clothed with the heavenly dwelling) presupposes a real intermediate state in which the person is conscious but disembodied.
↑ 32. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper calls 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 “the linchpin” of the New Testament case for the intermediate state and for substance dualism.
↑ 33. Philippians 1:23–24.
↑ 34. The physicalist might argue that Paul is speaking from the perspective of the resurrected state, so that “departing” leads immediately to resurrection from Paul’s subjective experience (since he would not be conscious of any time lapse). But this requires reading a subjective time perspective into Paul’s words that the text does not suggest. Paul speaks of departing and being with Christ as a present alternative to remaining in the body, not as a subjective time-compression of the future resurrection.
↑ 35. Revelation 6:9–10.
↑ 36. While Revelation is highly symbolic, the symbolism assumes a framework in which the dead can exist as conscious souls. A symbol must refer to something; the question is what theological reality the symbol points to. Even on the most cautious reading, the passage assumes the continued conscious existence of the dead in God’s presence.
↑ 37. Matthew 10:28.
↑ 38. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul, argue that Matt. 10:28 is one of the clearest possible affirmations of substance dualism in the teaching of Jesus, because it requires a distinction between body and soul and asserts that the soul can survive what kills the body.
↑ 39. This is the full force of the conditionalist reading of Matt. 10:28: the second death is the destruction of the entire person—soul and body—in Gehenna. See the detailed treatment of this verse in Chapter 8.
↑ 40. Hughes, as excerpted in Rethinking Hell, chap. 16. Hughes makes the important observation that Matt. 10:28 undermines the doctrine of the soul’s inherent immortality while simultaneously affirming the soul’s real existence. God can destroy the soul, which means it is destructible; but humans cannot kill the soul, which means it survives physical death.
↑ 41. 1 Peter 3:18–20 is one of the most debated passages in the New Testament. For various interpretive options, see Wayne Grudem, 1 Peter, TNTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988); and Karen Jobes, 1 Peter, BECNT (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2005). On any interpretation, the passage assumes the existence of conscious spirits in a disembodied state.
↑ 42. The connection between 1 Peter 3:18–20 and the postmortem opportunity is explored in detail in Chapter 22 and Chapter 29. For an in-depth treatment, see Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 290–320.
↑ 43. Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Both Green and Murphy are physicalists who argue that the Bible does not teach substance dualism.
↑ 44. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–28, provides a careful summary of the Old Testament’s holistic anthropology, drawing on the work of H. Wheeler Robinson, Hans Walter Wolff, and others.
↑ 45. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27, summarizing Wolff’s categories from Anthropology of the Old Testament. Nikolainen’s summary, quoted by Fudge, is especially clear: the Hebrew view of the person is not that body, soul, spirit, and heart are separable parts but different perspectives on the whole person.
↑ 46. This analogy is my own. The point is simply that unity of function does not imply identity of substance. A husband and wife are one flesh (Gen. 2:24) but remain distinct persons.
↑ 47. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. This is the central thesis of Cooper’s book: the Old Testament is holistic, but its holism is a holistic dualism, not a holistic physicalism.
↑ 48. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27, citing Atkinson, Life and Immortality, 3.
↑ 49. This point is made effectively by Moreland, The Soul. The semantic range of a word does not determine the ontological status of what it sometimes refers to.
↑ 50. 1 Corinthians 15:42–44. Paul’s extended argument for the bodily resurrection is the most detailed treatment of the subject in the New Testament.
↑ 51. 2 Corinthians 5:1–8. Paul’s three-stage framework (current body / unclothed / heavenly dwelling) integrates the intermediate state and the resurrection without denying either.
↑ 52. This is an underappreciated argument. The very concept of bodily resurrection presupposes that the person has existed without a body and needs to be re-embodied. If there is no intermediate disembodied existence, the resurrection becomes the original creation of a new being rather than the restoration of an existing one.
↑ 53. This charge is common in the work of Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life, and Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? See also Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27, where Fudge cites Bremmer’s tracing of body/soul dualism in later Judaism to Greek influence.
↑ 54. The Genesis 35:18 and 1 Kings 17:21–22 passages date from the early monarchy period at the latest, centuries before Greek philosophical influence reached Israel. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, for a detailed chronological argument.
↑ 55. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul. They note that the genetic fallacy (dismissing a belief because of its origin) is one of the most common errors in the dualism debate.
↑ 56. Moreland and Rae, Body and Soul. See also N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), who argues that Jewish beliefs about the afterlife developed primarily from within their own tradition, with Greek influence being secondary.
↑ 57. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27. Fudge cites Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, 3: “Through the Septuagint… psychē entered the vocabulary of the Greek-speaking Jewish community and subsequently that of the early Christians. As the Old Testament did not yet know the Greek opposition of soul and body,… it would take a while before the early Christians started to use psychē in such a way.”
↑ 58. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper identifies the intermediate state as the single biggest problem for any form of Christian physicalism.
↑ 59. The “replica problem” or “gappy existence problem” is a major philosophical objection to physicalist accounts of personal identity across death and resurrection. See Dean Zimmerman, “The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The ‘Falling Elevator’ Model,” Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 194–212, for an attempt to address it from a physicalist perspective. Cooper argues that substance dualism avoids the problem entirely.
↑ 60. 1 Corinthians 15:23; 1 Thessalonians 4:16–17. The “immediate resurrection” hypothesis also faces the difficulty that Revelation 6:9–11 portrays the martyrs as not yet resurrected but conscious and waiting.
↑ 61. Moreland, The Soul. Moreland argues that NDE research is not the foundation of the case for substance dualism but provides independent empirical evidence that is consistent with the biblical teaching.
↑ 62. Moreland, The Soul. See also Michael Sabom, Recollections of Death: A Medical Investigation (New York: Harper & Row, 1982); and Pim van Lommel et al., “Near-Death Experience in Survivors of Cardiac Arrest: A Prospective Study in the Netherlands,” The Lancet 358 (2001): 2039–2045.
↑ 63. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper notes that the NDE phenomenon is consistent with the dualist model and difficult to account for on physicalist assumptions.
↑ 64. For a cautious but positive assessment of NDE research from a Christian perspective, see J. P. Moreland and Gary Habermas, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998).
↑ 65. The account is from the author of The Triumph of Mercy, who describes three out-of-body episodes during a near-fatal bout of staphylococcus aureus. The specific detail of being told the number “361” during the out-of-body experience, and then seeing it appear on the hospital monitor as a temperature reading (36.1°C), provides the kind of verifiable detail that is characteristic of veridical NDE reports. See The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ.
↑ 66. My critique here is offered in the spirit of collegial disagreement within the conditionalist family. I share the commitment of my physicalist CI colleagues to the authority of Scripture and to the doctrine of conditional immortality. I simply believe they have drawn the wrong conclusion on the question of human constitution.
↑ 67. Swinburne, “The Future of the Totally Corrupt,” in Date, Stump, and Anderson, eds., Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism, chap. 17. Swinburne writes: the soul “is the initiator of intentional action and is the subject of conscious experience, and is the vehicle of character.” The editorial introduction notes that Swinburne’s embrace of conditionalism from within a substance dualist framework “serves as a reminder to those evangelicals who associate conditional immortality with an exclusively physicalist view of persons.”
↑ 68. Date and Highfield, eds., A Consuming Passion: Essays on Hell and Immortality in Honor of Edward Fudge. The contributors note that “some leading evangelical conditionalists have been dualists, such as John Stott and P. E. Hughes,” making the association between conditionalism and physicalism a matter of individual choice rather than theological necessity. See chap. 12.
↑ 69. This “throwing the baby out with the bathwater” concern is expressed, in different terms, by several contributors to A Consuming Passion, who note that rejecting Platonic immortality does not require rejecting the soul’s existence. See the discussion in chap. 12, which argues that conditional immortality can be “derived in a manner which should not need to solicit questions of constitution and intermediate persistence.”
↑ 70. Date and Highfield, eds., A Consuming Passion, chap. 12. The framework presented “permits a healthy agnosticism in this area, or independent commitment to either dualism or physicalism with their entailments for an intermediate state.”
↑ 71. The postmortem opportunity is explored in detail in Chapter 29 and is grounded in 1 Peter 3:18–20; 4:6, and the Descensus clause of the Apostles’ Creed. Substance dualism makes this opportunity theologically coherent because the soul is conscious and capable of encountering God in the intermediate state.
↑ 72. This argument is developed fully in Chapter 31. The second death (Rev. 20:14) is far more significant on substance dualism than on physicalism, because on dualism it involves the destruction of a real, conscious, immaterial soul—not merely the cessation of biological function.
↑ 73. On the finality of creaturely freedom, see Chapter 27, where I engage Talbott’s argument that fully informed rejection is impossible. See also Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York: Macmillan, 1946), where Lewis presents the idea that the doors of hell are locked from the inside.
↑ 74. Baker, Razing Hell, pp. 111–149, provides the framework I find most compelling: in God’s fiery presence, the soul either submits and is purified or refuses and is consumed. The destruction is not vindictive. It is the natural consequence of a creature definitively rejecting the source of its own existence.