Chapter 26

Biblical Anthropology and the Case for the Soul

If you have been following this book from the beginning, you know that our argument has been built, brick by brick, on evidence. Veridical NDE cases. Medical data. Scientific studies. Philosophical reasoning. We have let the evidence lead, and the evidence has pointed, again and again, toward the same conclusion: consciousness can and does function apart from the physical brain.

But now we need to turn a corner. Because the skeptics do not only challenge NDEs on scientific grounds. Some of them challenge NDEs on theological grounds. And one of the most important theological challenges comes from Michael Marsh himself, right in the heart of his Oxford monograph.

This may surprise some readers. We have spent chapter after chapter responding to neurological explanations—hypoxia, temporal lobe seizures, endorphins, REM intrusion, and the rest. We have engaged the philosophical objections from Fischer and Mitchell-Yellin. We have addressed the methodological critiques. But Marsh does not stop at neuroscience and philosophy. In chapter 10 of his book, he goes after the theological foundations of the NDE claim. He argues that the Bible itself does not support the existence of a separable soul. And if that is true, then the entire framework for understanding NDEs as genuine out-of-body experiences collapses—not on scientific grounds, but on biblical ones.

Marsh’s argument goes like this: the Bible does not teach that humans have a separable soul. Biblical anthropology, he says, is “holistic.” The ancient Hebrews viewed human beings as psychophysical wholes—not as souls trapped in bodies. Paul’s thinking was “Hebraic rather than Hellenistic.”¹ And if the Bible doesn’t teach a separable soul, then NDEs can’t be what they appear to be—because there is no soul to leave the body in the first place.

This is a serious argument. It deserves a serious response. And in this chapter, we are going to give it one.

I want to say upfront: I respect Marsh’s engagement with the biblical text. He is not a theologian by training—he is a medical doctor with a D.Phil. from Oxford—but he makes a genuine effort to grapple with the theological questions that NDEs raise. That takes intellectual courage. Many skeptics simply ignore the theological dimension altogether. They are content to explain away NDEs with neuroscience alone, never stopping to ask whether the Bible has anything relevant to say about the soul, the afterlife, or the nature of the human person. Marsh does not make that mistake. He recognizes that if NDEs are real, they have theological implications—and so he tries to block those implications at the theological level.

The problem is that Marsh’s theological argument is built on a foundation that has been crumbling for decades. The claim that “Hebrew thought is holistic and therefore doesn’t support a separable soul” is one of the most widely repeated—and most widely critiqued—claims in modern biblical scholarship. As we will see, the Old Testament, the New Testament, and the theological tradition of the church all point in a very different direction from where Marsh wants to take us.

A. The Critic’s Argument: Marsh on Biblical Anthropology

Marsh dedicates his entire chapter 10 to what he calls “Anthropological and Eschatological Considerations.” It is one of the longest chapters in his book, and it makes a sweeping theological argument against the kind of substance dualism that NDE evidence supports.

His argument unfolds in several stages. First, he turns to the Old Testament. He observes that in the earliest Hebrew traditions, human beings were created from the dust of the ground and animated by the breath of God (nephesh chayyah). In the older Yahwist tradition, “the breath of life vitalizes the earthen vessel destined for humanity” (Gen. 2:7).² When that breath departs, the person dies. There is no perception of immortality in the early texts, Marsh argues. The dead exist as weak “shades” (rephaim) in Sheol, a vague underworld concept “never elaborated further in the pre-exilic period.”³

From this, Marsh draws his first major conclusion. He quotes H. Wheeler Robinson approvingly: the human person in Hebrew thought is “conceived, not in some analytical fashion as a ‘soul’ and ‘body,’ but synthetically as a psychophysical whole.”⁴ In other words, there is no body-soul distinction in the Old Testament. The person is a body. The nephesh is not a separable soul—it is the whole living person.

Second, Marsh turns to the New Testament, focusing primarily on Paul. He follows James Dunn’s analysis of Pauline anthropology, noting that Paul uses Greek terms like sōma (body), sarx (flesh), psychē (soul), and pneuma (spirit) in ways that reflect his underlying Semitic thinking rather than Greek philosophical categories.⁵ Marsh spends considerable time unpacking each of these terms. He notes that sōma and sarx are both used to refer to the whole person. Sōma has no immediate Hebrew equivalent, while sarx does not necessarily equate to mere flesh. For Marsh, following Dunn, sōma refers to a person in the world, while sarx suggests a person who belongs to the world—oriented toward weakness, temptation, and mortality. On the question of psychē and pneuma, Marsh observes that Paul uses psychē only thirteen times compared to 146 uses of pneuma, and he argues that this shows Paul’s overwhelming concern was with the divine Spirit, not with some separable human soul.

Marsh’s conclusion, drawn from Dunn and from David Stacey before him, is that Paul’s anthropology is fundamentally unified: “the terms body, spirit and soul are not different, separable faculties of man, but different ways of viewing the whole man.”⁶ Paul’s sōma pneumatikon (spiritual body) is a God-imbued person, not a disembodied soul. His approach “seems to be Hebraic rather than Hellenistic.”⁷ For Marsh, this is decisive. If the greatest theologian of the early church did not believe in a separable soul, then the NDE claim that a soul can leave the body has no biblical warrant.

Third, Marsh addresses the non-Pauline New Testament. He acknowledges that Matthew 10:28 is “one suggestive reference to a dualistic concept”—Jesus says, “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” Marsh notes that John Cooper reads this as evidence for dualism, since “body” and “soul” cannot be referring to the same entity.⁸ But Marsh sides with N. T. Wright, who cautions against a “Platonistic reading” and suggests the point is simply that there is an afterlife beyond bodily death.⁹

Marsh also addresses Revelation 6:9, where John sees “beneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain.” He interprets this as referring to the martyrs’ lifeblood being poured out—a parallel to Temple sacrifice—rather than to disembodied souls awaiting resurrection.¹⁰ His conclusion: “few references to a Hellenistic dualism are offered in the NT.”¹¹

Fourth, Marsh builds his constructive position. The soul, he argues, is not a separable substance but “an emergent property of body and brain”—it is the “psychophysical ontology of ‘personality.’”¹² Because the soul is produced by the brain, it cannot survive the death of the brain. “The Platonic and Cartesian notions of soul as completely separable from corporeality are inconsistent with current neurophysiological opinion.”¹³ Death is a “radical rupturing” between earthly life and the hereafter. Whatever comes next, it is not the continuation of a disembodied soul—it is something radically new, created by God in the resurrection.¹⁴

He goes even further. “Man does not have a soul,” Marsh declares. “He is a soul, his total nature, internal and external, being characterized by it.”¹⁵ And the idea of “a divinely implanted soul that can evade death and represent the whole person in eternity is foreign to much current philosophical, psychological and neurophysiological thinking.”¹⁶

This is Marsh’s theological case in its strongest form. And if he is right—if the Bible really does teach that human beings are nothing more than psychophysical wholes, with no separable soul—then the entire NDE evidence base becomes much harder to interpret. There would be nothing to leave the body during an NDE.

But is he right?

B. Identifying the Weaknesses in Marsh’s Theological Argument

Marsh’s argument has a certain surface plausibility, especially for readers who have absorbed the popular scholarly narrative that “Hebrew thought is holistic” and “Greek thought is dualistic.” This narrative has been repeated so often in seminaries and academic theology that many people assume it is simply an established fact.

It is not. And the problems with Marsh’s argument run deep.

Problem 1: The “Hebrew Holism” Claim Is an Oversimplification. The idea that ancient Hebrew thought was purely holistic and had no concept of a separable soul was popularized by scholars like H. Wheeler Robinson and Oscar Cullmann in the mid-twentieth century.¹⁷ It became almost a dogma in certain circles: Hebrews thought holistically; Greeks thought dualistically; and the Bible is Hebrew, not Greek. Therefore, the Bible does not support dualism.

But this neat dichotomy has been dismantled by a generation of careful scholars. John W. Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, showed that the Hebrew-versus-Greek framework is a massive oversimplification.¹⁸ Cooper demonstrated that the Old Testament contains clear evidence that the Hebrews believed in a personal element that could exist apart from the body—not as an articulated philosophical position, but as a natural assumption embedded in the narratives themselves. We will look at this evidence in detail in Section C.

The point here is that Marsh builds his case on a scholarly consensus that is no longer a consensus. Cooper, Moreland, Swinburne, Goetz and Taliaferro, and many others have shown that the old Hebrew-holism narrative was driven more by mid-century theological agendas than by careful exegesis.¹⁹

Problem 2: Marsh Selectively Reads the Evidence. Notice what Marsh does with the Old Testament. He highlights Genesis 2:7 and the concept of nephesh as the animating life-force of the body. He notes the vagueness of Sheol and the weakness of the rephaim. And then he concludes that the Hebrews had no concept of a separable soul.

But he skips over texts that point in a very different direction. Genesis 35:18, which Marsh himself briefly mentions, describes Rachel’s soul (nephesh) “departing” as she died.²⁰ That language is not easily explained on a purely holistic reading. If the nephesh is simply the whole living person, what does it mean for the nephesh to “depart”? Something is leaving. Something is going somewhere.

Similarly, in 1 Kings 17:21–22, when Elijah raises the widow’s son from the dead, the text says that the child’s nephesh “returned to him.” Again: if nephesh simply means “living person,” this language makes no sense. You cannot say that a person “returned to” that same person. The text assumes that the nephesh is something that left the body at death and came back when the child was revived.²¹

Marsh doesn’t engage with these texts in any depth. He moves quickly past them on his way to the conclusion he has already reached.

Problem 3: Marsh Dismisses Cooper Too Quickly. This is perhaps the most glaring weakness in Marsh’s theological argument. He acknowledges Cooper’s reading of Matthew 10:28—that Jesus distinguishes body and soul as entities with different fates—but he simply sides with Wright’s alternative reading without giving Cooper’s argument a full hearing.²² Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is one of the most thorough treatments of biblical anthropology in print. It runs to hundreds of pages of careful, text-by-text exegesis. Marsh engages it in a few sentences.

This is not adequate. If you are going to dismiss the most important dualist reading of the biblical evidence, you need to engage it on its own terms. Marsh does not do this.

Problem 4: Marsh Conflates Substance Dualism with Platonic Dualism. Throughout his argument, Marsh treats “substance dualism” as if it were identical to Platonic or Cartesian dualism—the idea that the soul is an inherently immortal substance that is entirely independent of the body. He then argues (correctly) that this kind of dualism is not what the Bible teaches.²³

But substance dualism, as defended by Cooper, Moreland, and others, is not Platonic dualism. It does not claim that the soul is inherently immortal. It does not claim that the body is a prison or that the soul is better off without it. What it claims is much more modest: human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul, and the soul can exist apart from the body—not because it is self-sustaining, but because God sustains it.²⁴ The soul’s continued existence depends entirely on the will and power of God. This is a far cry from Plato.

Marsh attacks a position that most informed Christian dualists do not hold. That is a straw man.

Problem 5: Marsh’s “Emergent Soul” Is Philosophically Loaded. When Marsh defines the soul as “an emergent property of body and brain,” he is not drawing this from the biblical text. He is importing a modern philosophical position—emergentism—and then reading it back into Scripture.²⁵ The Bible never says the soul is an emergent property of the brain. The biblical writers had no concept of emergent properties. This is Marsh’s philosophy masquerading as exegesis.

And it is a philosophy with problems of its own. If the soul is merely an emergent property of brain activity, then when the brain stops, the soul stops. Period. There is no intermediate state, no conscious existence between death and resurrection, no way for a person to be “with Christ” after death. Marsh seems aware of this problem, and his solution—“memory traces held by God” that would somehow be reunited with a resurrection body—is, as he himself admits, vulnerable to the objection that he has “smuggled in a disembodied soul under the guise of computerized information technology.”²⁶ He denies this, but the charge sticks. If continuity between the pre-death person and the resurrected person requires something to persist through death, then you are very close to affirming a soul whether you call it that or not.

C. The Pro-NDE Response: The Biblical Case for the Soul

Now we come to the heart of this chapter. We have seen that Marsh’s argument has significant weaknesses. But weaknesses in a skeptical argument are not enough. We need to build a positive case. What does the Bible actually teach about the soul and the intermediate state?

I want to walk through the evidence carefully, from the Old Testament through the New Testament, and show that the biblical writers consistently assumed—and in many cases explicitly taught—that human beings have a personal, immaterial dimension that survives the death of the body. This is not a Platonic import. It is woven into the fabric of Scripture itself.

The Old Testament Evidence

Let me be clear about something from the start. Nobody claims that the Old Testament gives us a fully developed doctrine of the soul. The Hebrew writers were not doing systematic anthropology. They were telling stories, writing laws, singing psalms, and proclaiming prophecy. Their assumptions about human nature emerge from those writings, not as a separate doctrinal treatise.

But the assumptions are there. And they consistently point toward a view of human nature that includes a separable personal element.

Genesis 35:18 — Rachel’s Departing Soul. When Rachel dies in childbirth, the text says, “As her soul (nephesh) was departing—for she was dying—she called his name Ben-oni.” The language here is striking. The nephesh is not simply “life” in an abstract sense. It is something that departs—it goes somewhere. Cooper argues persuasively that this text assumes a separable personal element that leaves the body at death.²⁷ Marsh mentions this passage in passing but does not engage with its implications for his holistic thesis.

And notice how the text works. It does not say, “Rachel’s life ceased.” It says her nephesh was “departing”—using a verb of movement. Something was going out. Something was leaving. The Hebrew verb here (yatsa) is the ordinary word for going out or coming forth. It is the same word used for people exiting a house or leaving a city. The author of Genesis uses this spatial, directional language about the nephesh as naturally as breathing. He is not making a philosophical argument for dualism. He is simply describing what he believed happens at death: the personal self departs from the body. That is a dualistic assumption, even if it is not a dualistic theory.

1 Kings 17:21–22 — The Child’s Returning Soul. When Elijah prays over the widow’s dead son, he cries out, “O LORD my God, let this child’s soul (nephesh) come back to him.” And the LORD hears Elijah’s prayer: “the soul of the child came back to him, and he revived.” This is extremely difficult to explain on a monist reading. The nephesh left the body at death. It returned when the child was revived. It is personal—it is the child’s nephesh. And it exists apart from the body during the interval of death.²⁸

Think about that for a moment. This is not a philosophical treatise. It is a narrative. And the narrative assumes, without any self-consciousness or apologetic agenda, that a child’s personal identity—his nephesh—can leave the body and return to it. That is dualism in practice, even if it is not dualism in theory.

And here is the irony. If you had told the author of 1 Kings that the nephesh is nothing more than an emergent property of brain function—that it cannot exist apart from the body because it is produced by the body—he would have had no idea what you were talking about. That is a modern philosophical claim being imposed on an ancient text. The ancient writer assumed the opposite: the nephesh came and went. It left at death and returned at resurrection. This assumption runs quietly beneath the surface of the narrative, unargued and undefended, precisely because it was taken for granted.

Ecclesiastes 12:7 — The Spirit Returns to God. At the end of the book of Ecclesiastes, the Preacher describes what happens at death: “the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit (ruach) returns to God who gave it.” Here the separation is explicit. The body goes to the earth. The spirit goes to God. They go in different directions. Whatever “spirit” means here, it is clearly something distinct from the body, and it survives the dissolution of the body.²⁹

This verse is a mirror image of Genesis 2:7. In the beginning, God formed the body from dust and breathed the spirit of life into it. At death, the process reverses: the body returns to dust and the spirit returns to God. The parallelism assumes two components going in two different directions. It is very hard to read this as monism. A monist would have to say that the whole person returns to dust—but that is not what the text says. The text says the dust returns to the ground and the ruach returns to God. Two destinations. Two components. That is at minimum a functional dualism, and it is embedded in the text without any sense that the author is making a controversial claim. He is simply describing what he takes to be the normal sequence of death.

1 Samuel 28 — The Appearance of Samuel. In one of the most dramatic scenes in the Old Testament, King Saul consults the medium at Endor and the prophet Samuel appears. Whether or not we approve of what Saul did (the text clearly condemns it), the narrative assumes that Samuel’s personal identity persists after death. He is recognizable. He speaks. He delivers a prophecy that comes true the next day. The text treats Samuel as a conscious person who exists after death—not as a figment of Saul’s imagination.³⁰

The Psalms — Hope Beyond the Grave. While many psalms reflect a bleak view of death, others express a startling confidence that God will not abandon the psalmist to Sheol. Psalm 16:10: “You will not abandon my soul to Sheol.” Psalm 49:15: “But God will ransom my soul from the power of Sheol, for he will receive me.” Psalm 73:23–26: “I am continually with you; you hold my right hand. You guide me with your counsel, and afterward you will receive me to glory.” These texts express a personal hope—that the I, the person, will be received by God beyond death.³¹

Now, I am not claiming that these texts give us a fully worked-out doctrine of the intermediate state. They do not. But taken together, they show that the Old Testament is far more complex than the simple “holistic Hebrew thought” narrative allows. The biblical writers regularly assumed that a personal element—the nephesh, the ruach—could exist apart from the body, particularly at death.

Cooper sums it up well: the Old Testament does not teach Platonic dualism, but neither does it teach the monism that scholars like Robinson claimed. What it teaches is what Cooper calls “holistic dualism”—a view that takes the unity of the person seriously while also affirming that the person has an immaterial dimension that can, by God’s power, survive death.³²

The Intertestamental Development

Between the Old and New Testaments, Jewish thinking about the afterlife developed dramatically. By the time of Jesus, belief in a conscious intermediate state was widespread in Judaism. The Pharisees affirmed both the resurrection of the body and the continued existence of the soul after death. The Sadducees denied both. Jesus sided with the Pharisees on this question—explicitly and emphatically.³³

This matters because it tells us the theological world in which Jesus and the apostles operated. When Jesus talked about the soul, he was not importing alien Greek categories into a purely holistic Hebrew framework. He was speaking within a Jewish tradition that had already come to affirm the survival of the personal soul after death. The question was not whether the soul survived, but what the final state would look like—and that is where the doctrine of bodily resurrection came in.

Marsh acknowledges the intertestamental developments but does not give them the weight they deserve. He notes the rise of apocalyptic and resurrection belief in texts like Daniel 12:1–3, 1 Enoch, and 4 Ezra.³⁴ But he does not reckon with the fact that by the first century, dualism—in the sense of belief in a soul that survives death—was the majority Jewish position. This was not a Hellenistic import. It was a development within Judaism itself, driven by the logic of the Hebrew Scriptures and the hope of resurrection.³⁵

The New Testament Evidence

When we turn to the New Testament, the evidence for a separable soul and a conscious intermediate state becomes even stronger.

Matthew 10:28 — Jesus Distinguishes Body and Soul. This is, in my view, the single most important text in the debate. Jesus says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Let me be direct. This text is devastating for the physicalist position. Jesus distinguishes body and soul as entities with different fates. You can kill the body without killing the soul. That only makes sense if the soul is not simply another way of referring to the body. It is something else—something that persists when the body is destroyed.³⁶

Cooper’s analysis of this passage is careful and thorough. He argues that the body (sōma) and soul (psychē) in this verse cannot be referring to the same entity, because they have different fates: one can be killed by human beings, the other cannot. The only way to avoid a dualistic reading is to empty the words of their natural meaning.³⁷

What about Wright’s response, which Marsh prefers? Wright suggests that the point is simply that there is “an afterlife beyond bodily death.”³⁸ But this actually concedes the dualist point. If there is an afterlife beyond bodily death, then something survives the death of the body. What is that something? Call it what you like—soul, spirit, the personal self—but something continues to exist when the body is dead. That is exactly what substance dualism claims.

Luke 23:43 — “Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise.” On the cross, Jesus tells the repentant thief: “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The force of this promise depends on two things: (1) “today” means today—not at some distant future resurrection; and (2) “with me” means conscious personal presence, not unconscious storage.³⁹

Some have tried to defuse this text by relocating the comma: “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise”—as if “today” modifies “I say to you” rather than “you will be with me.” But this is linguistically awkward and contextually forced. The thief’s request was about the future: “Remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Jesus’s response is about timing: not “someday” or “at the resurrection” but today. The whole rhetorical force of the promise lies in the immediacy. Today. Not in the distant future. Not after a long unconscious sleep. Today, this very day, while your body hangs on that cross and mine hangs on this one, you and I will be together in paradise.

If physicalism is true, this promise is empty. Both Jesus and the thief would be dead—their bodies in the tomb or on the cross, their souls nonexistent. There would be no “today,” no “paradise,” no “with me.” But if dualism is true, the promise makes perfect sense: both Jesus and the thief would be consciously present together in the intermediate state that very day, even though their bodies were dead.⁴⁰

Philippians 1:21–23 — “To Depart and Be with Christ.” Paul writes from prison: “For me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far.”

Paul’s language here is unmistakable. He expects that when he dies—when he “departs” from the body—he will immediately be “with Christ.” He does not say he will cease to exist until the resurrection. He does not say he will be unconscious. He says being with Christ is “better by far”—language that assumes conscious, personal experience.⁴¹

Marsh interprets Paul’s anthropology through Dunn’s lens as thoroughly Hebraic and non-dualistic. But Dunn himself acknowledges the tension in Paul’s thought. Paul clearly expects to be consciously present with Christ between death and resurrection. That requires something to persist—something personal, something conscious, something that is not simply an emergent property of a now-dead brain.⁴²

2 Corinthians 5:1–8 — “Away from the Body, at Home with the Lord.” Paul makes the same point even more explicitly in his second letter to the Corinthians: “We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” Here Paul directly contrasts being “in the body” with being “with the Lord.” He envisions an existence that is disembodied yet conscious, personal, and—crucially—better than earthly life.⁴³

This is not easy to reconcile with Marsh’s emergentism. If the soul is simply a product of brain function, there is no “being away from the body.” There is only being in the body or not existing at all. Paul’s language demands a more robust anthropology than what Marsh offers.

What makes 2 Corinthians 5 especially powerful is that Paul is wrestling with the discomfort of disembodiment. He does not want to be “unclothed”—he uses that word in verse 4. He wants to be “further clothed” with his resurrection body so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life. Paul is no Platonist. He does not celebrate the escape of the soul from the body. He longs for the resurrection body. But between now and then, he recognizes a real, conscious, personal existence apart from the body—and he prefers it to earthly life because it means being “at home with the Lord.” This is precisely the kind of nuanced, both-and position that Cooper calls “holistic dualism.” Paul takes embodiment seriously. He takes the resurrection seriously. And he takes the intermediate state seriously. All three are part of his anthropology.

Revelation 6:9–11 — The Souls Under the Altar. Marsh tries to deflect this passage by reading it as a reference to the martyrs’ lifeblood poured out in sacrifice.⁴⁴ But this reading ignores what the text actually says. These “souls” (psychas) are not passive puddles of blood. They cry out. They ask God, “How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?” They are given white robes. They are told to wait “a little longer.”

This is a scene of conscious, personal existence after death. The souls are aware, vocal, emotional, and interactive. They have a sense of justice. They wear robes. They receive communication from God. Whatever genre of literature Revelation is, this passage clearly envisions the dead as conscious persons who exist in the presence of God between death and resurrection.⁴⁵

Marsh’s attempt to read this as merely a Temple sacrifice metaphor collapses under the weight of the passage’s own details. Blood does not cry out with articulate speech. Blood does not wear white robes. Blood does not receive instructions from God. The natural reading of the text—and the reading held by the vast majority of commentators throughout church history—is that the martyrs are conscious, personal beings existing in the presence of God after their bodily death. The imagery may be richly symbolic, as all apocalyptic imagery is, but the underlying anthropological assumption is clear: death does not end personal existence.

The Transfiguration — Moses and Elijah Appear. In Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9, Jesus takes Peter, James, and John up a mountain, and Moses and Elijah appear with him in glory. They are conscious. They are speaking. They are interacting with Jesus about his coming death. Moses had been dead for over a thousand years. Yet he appears as a recognizable, personal, conscious being.⁴⁶ This is not easily explained on a physicalist anthropology. It fits perfectly with substance dualism.

Some might object that Elijah never died—he was taken up in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). That is true. But Moses certainly died (Deut. 34:5–6). And yet here he is, on the mountain, talking with Jesus, fully conscious, fully personal, fully recognizable. If Moses was merely a “psychophysical whole” whose soul was an emergent property of his brain, then Moses ceased to exist at death. His brain decomposed. His emergent personality dissolved. There would be no Moses to appear on the mountaintop. Yet there he is. This is one of those passages where the narrative simply assumes what Marsh denies: that personal identity survives the death of the body.

The Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). In this parable, both Lazarus and the rich man are conscious after death. They are in different places (Abraham’s bosom and Hades). They see each other. They speak. They feel comfort and torment. They remember their earthly lives. Whether or not this is a literal account, the parable assumes an anthropology in which personal identity, consciousness, and memory persist after the death of the body.⁴⁷ Jesus would not construct a parable based on an anthropological assumption he believed to be fundamentally wrong.

And notice the specificity of the scene. The rich man remembers his five brothers. He remembers that they need to be warned. He has concern for their future. He has memory, emotion, desire, and moral awareness. All of these are functions that Marsh attributes to the brain. If they are merely emergent properties of neural activity, they cannot exist when the brain is dead. Yet in the parable, they do. Jesus is either teaching something true about the afterlife or he is deliberately misleading his audience. Given the weight that Jesus places on this story—using it as a serious moral lesson about the consequences of ignoring the poor and ignoring the testimony of Moses and the prophets—the second option is not credible.

Cooper’s “Holistic Dualism”

After surveying all of this evidence, Cooper offers a position he calls “holistic dualism.” It is worth pausing to explain what this means, because it answers the objection that dualism is somehow un-biblical or “Greek.”

Holistic dualism affirms that human beings are a unity of body and soul. We are not souls trapped in bodies. We are not ghosts driving machines. The body is good, created by God, and essential to full human flourishing. The Bible celebrates embodiment. The final hope of the Christian is not escape from the body but the resurrection of the body—a glorified, transformed body reunited with the soul for all eternity.⁴⁸

But holistic dualism also affirms that the soul is a real, immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body by the sustaining power of God. Between death and resurrection, persons exist consciously in an intermediate state—what Paul calls being “with Christ” and what Luke calls “paradise.” This is not the final state. It is a temporary, incomplete existence. The soul without the body is “naked,” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 5:3. But it is conscious. It is personal. It is real.⁴⁹

This view is not Platonic. The soul is not inherently immortal—God can destroy it (Matt. 10:28). The body is not evil or disposable—it will be raised and glorified. But the soul is genuinely distinct from the body, and it can, by God’s power and will, survive the death of the body.

Cooper demonstrates that this position is not only consistent with the biblical evidence but is, in fact, the best explanation of the full range of that evidence. The Old Testament hints at it. The intertestamental period develops it. Jesus and the apostles assume it and teach it. And the early creeds affirm it.⁵⁰

The NDE Evidence Corroborates What Scripture Teaches

Here is where our entire book comes full circle. If the biblical evidence supports a conscious intermediate state—a state in which the soul exists apart from the body, aware, personal, and in the presence of God—then NDE evidence is not a theological embarrassment. It is a theological confirmation.

What do NDEs show? They show consciousness functioning when the brain is severely impaired or clinically dead. They show patients accurately perceiving events they could not have perceived through normal means. They show encounters with deceased loved ones, experiences of light and love, life reviews, and a sense of crossing a threshold between this world and the next.⁵¹

In other words, NDEs show precisely what substance dualism predicts: that consciousness can function apart from the brain, because consciousness is not identical with brain function. And this is precisely what the biblical doctrine of the intermediate state teaches: that persons can exist consciously between death and resurrection, apart from the physical body.

J. Steve Miller, in his thorough study Is Christianity Compatible With Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences?, made this very point. Miller examined the NDE evidence alongside the biblical evidence and found a remarkable convergence. The NDE data does not contradict Christian teaching about the afterlife. Instead, it lines up with the core biblical themes: conscious existence after death, the reality of a spiritual realm, the presence of God or a being of overwhelming light and love, encounters with those who have died before, and a boundary or point of no return.⁵²

Miller was especially careful to address the objection, commonly raised in evangelical circles, that NDEs promote universalism or undermine the uniqueness of Christ. He examined the data methodically and found that the objection does not hold up. He went through the NDERF database and reviewed one hundred consecutive NDE accounts. Of those hundred, only seven mentioned anything even vaguely opposed to Christian beliefs, and only three of those actually contradicted Christian doctrine. The experiences themselves do not teach reincarnation, or that everyone goes to heaven, or any specific doctrine from Eastern religions that contradicts Christianity. The experiencers may sometimes interpret their experiences through non-Christian lenses, but the raw phenomenology of the experiences aligns far more closely with Christian expectations than with any other religious tradition.⁵³

Miller also documented a striking finding from the Near-Death Experience Research Foundation (NDERF) database, which contains over five thousand reported experiences from around the world. When he examined the data for religious content, he found that 18 percent of experiencers reported seeing Jesus—a number that dwarfed reports of figures from other religious traditions. Of the same total, only three reported seeing Krishna. Only two said they saw Buddha. None of the eighty self-identified Muslims in the database reported seeing Muhammad. Miller was careful to note that dozens of Hindu and Buddhist experiencers were represented in the data, making this not a case of Christians simply seeing what they expect to see.⁶⁶

This does not prove that Christianity is true and all other religions are false. That is not the point. The point is that the NDE evidence does not support the claim, made by some critics, that NDEs undermine Christian theology. The evidence actually aligns with Christian theological expectations far more closely than many skeptics realize.

Gary Habermas, who has studied NDEs extensively from a Christian philosophical perspective, has likewise argued that the empirical NDE evidence provides a powerful apologetic resource for Christians. In his foreword to Miller’s volume, Habermas noted that hundreds of highly evidenced NDE cases have produced confirmed reports of alert consciousness even in the absence of both heart and brain activity—directly challenging the naturalistic claim that consciousness is entirely a product of brain function. This is precisely the point at which the NDE evidence and the biblical evidence converge: both point to a form of personal existence that is not reducible to brain activity.⁶⁷

Conditional Immortality and Substance Dualism: A Coherent Position

Before we leave this section, I want to address one more point that often causes confusion. Some readers may know that I affirm conditional immortality—the view that immortality is a gift of God, not an inherent property of the soul. The wicked will ultimately be destroyed, not tortured forever. Only those who receive eternal life through Christ will live forever.

Some people assume that conditional immortality requires physicalism. After all, if the soul is inherently immortal, how can the wicked be destroyed? But this is a false inference. Conditional immortality actually fits perfectly with holistic dualism. The soul is real. It is immaterial. It can survive death. But it is not self-sustaining. God created it, God sustains it, and God can destroy it—which is exactly what Jesus says in Matthew 10:28: “Fear the one who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”⁵⁴

Notice how this text actually supports both substance dualism and conditional immortality at the same time. It distinguishes soul and body (dualism). And it says God can destroy the soul (conditional immortality). The soul is real and separable—but it is not indestructible. Its existence is contingent on the will of God. This is a position that many people have not even considered, because the debate is so often framed as a binary choice between physicalism and Platonic immortality. But it is a coherent, biblical, and powerful position.

The soul survives death because God wills it. The soul exists in the intermediate state because God sustains it. And the wicked soul will ultimately be destroyed because God, in his justice, withdraws the gift of existence from those who finally and irrevocably reject his grace. This is not Platonic immortality. It is conditional immortality grounded in substance dualism—and it is fully consistent with both the biblical evidence and the NDE evidence.⁵⁵

Marsh’s claim that dualism commits you to inherent immortality is simply false. And his claim that the soul as emergent property is more biblically faithful than the soul as immaterial substance has been shown to rest on exegetical foundations that are far shakier than he admits.

D. Counter-Objections and Responses

We have built a strong case. But a responsible argument does not stop there. We need to consider the strongest objections a skeptic might raise against what we have said—and respond to them honestly.

Objection 1: “You’re reading later theology back into earlier texts.”

A skeptic might argue: “Sure, the New Testament talks about being ‘with Christ’ after death. But the Old Testament doesn’t have a developed doctrine of the soul. You’re reading later ideas back into earlier texts like Genesis 35:18 and 1 Kings 17.”

This is a fair point, and it deserves a careful answer. I am not claiming that the Old Testament authors had a fully developed doctrine of the intermediate state. They did not. What I am claiming is that the Old Testament contains assumptions—embedded in the narratives, the psalms, and the wisdom literature—that presuppose a personal element that can exist apart from the body. These assumptions are not systematic. They are not philosophically articulated. But they are there.⁵⁶

And these assumptions are entirely consistent with the later, more explicit teaching of Jesus and the apostles. The doctrine of the soul did not appear out of nowhere in the New Testament. It grew organically from seeds that were planted in the Old Testament and watered during the intertestamental period. The Hebrew-holism narrative, which claims that there was no concept of a separable soul in ancient Israel, simply cannot account for the texts we have examined.⁵⁷

Objection 2: “Paul expected the resurrection, not an intermediate state.”

Some scholars argue that Paul’s primary hope was the resurrection at the return of Christ, and that he did not really envision a conscious intermediate state at all. The “departing and being with Christ” language in Philippians 1:23, they say, could refer to the resurrection itself, not to an intermediate state.

But this does not work. Paul is writing from prison, contemplating the real possibility that he might die before Christ returns. His dilemma is precisely between continuing to live in the body (and thus continue his ministry) and dying and being with Christ (which would be better for him personally). If Paul expected nothing between death and resurrection—if he expected to simply cease existing until the resurrection—the dilemma dissolves. Death would not be “better by far” if it meant nonexistence. It would be neutral at best.⁵⁸

Cooper demonstrates at length that Paul held both beliefs simultaneously: he expected a future bodily resurrection, and he expected to be consciously with Christ in the interval between death and resurrection. These are not contradictory. They are sequential.⁵⁹ You die. Your soul goes to be with Christ. Then, at the resurrection, your soul is reunited with a glorified body. This is the classical Christian position, and it is what both Scripture and the early creeds teach.

Objection 3: “Revelation 6:9 is apocalyptic imagery, not literal anthropology.”

A critic might respond: “You can’t build a doctrine of the soul on a passage from Revelation, which is full of symbolic imagery. The ‘souls under the altar’ might just be a vivid metaphor.”

This objection has some force. We should indeed be cautious about building doctrine on apocalyptic imagery. But several things need to be said. First, even if the imagery is symbolic, symbols need to be symbols of something. The vision assumes that the dead martyrs are conscious, personal, and in the presence of God. If this were fundamentally inconsistent with the author’s actual beliefs, using such imagery would be deeply misleading.⁶⁰

Second, Revelation 6:9 is not the only evidence. We have Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Matthew 10:28, the Transfiguration, the parable of Lazarus, and the Old Testament texts we surveyed. Revelation 6:9 is one thread in a tapestry. Remove it, and the rest of the tapestry still stands.

Objection 4: “NDE evidence and biblical evidence are separate issues.”

A more sophisticated critic might say: “Even if the Bible teaches a conscious intermediate state, that doesn’t mean NDEs are genuine glimpses of it. The NDE evidence stands or falls on its own merits.”

I actually agree with this, to a point. Throughout this book, we have argued that the NDE evidence stands on its own empirical merits—veridical perception, corroborated details, consciousness during clinical death. We have not needed the Bible to make the case for NDEs. And we should not use NDEs to “prove” the Bible, either.⁶¹

But what we can say is this: the NDE evidence and the biblical evidence converge. They point in the same direction. The Bible teaches that consciousness survives death. The NDE evidence suggests the same. The Bible envisions a personal intermediate state. The NDE evidence is consistent with exactly that. When two independent lines of evidence converge on the same conclusion, that convergence strengthens both. It does not prove either one absolutely. But it creates a cumulative case that is considerably stronger than either line of evidence alone.⁶²

Objection 5: “Substance dualism is just Greek philosophy smuggled into Christianity.”

This is one of the most common objections, and Marsh leans into it heavily. The idea is that the early church absorbed Platonic philosophy, contaminated the pure Hebrew gospel with Greek dualistic categories, and produced the false doctrine of an immortal soul.

But this gets the history backwards. As Cooper and Moreland have shown, the evidence for a separable soul and a conscious intermediate state is rooted in the Old and New Testaments themselves—not in Plato.⁶³ The church fathers certainly used philosophical language to articulate their beliefs, just as the modern theologians Marsh relies on use the language of neuroscience and emergentism. But the underlying belief—that persons continue to exist consciously after death—comes from Jesus, from Paul, and from the Hebrew Scriptures, not from Athens.

Moreover, the form of dualism defended in this chapter is not Platonic. Plato believed the soul was inherently immortal, eternally pre-existing, and that the body was a prison. None of this is what we are arguing. We are arguing that the soul is created by God, sustained by God, and can be destroyed by God. The body is good, created for a purpose, and will ultimately be resurrected. This is not Plato. It is biblical theology.⁶⁴

Indeed, the irony runs even deeper. The scholars who most loudly proclaim the “Greek contamination” theory are often themselves importing modern Western philosophical categories into the biblical text. Marsh, for instance, reads the Bible through the lens of modern emergentism and neuroscience. Brown and Murphy, contributors to Whatever Happened to the Soul?, read the Bible through the lens of nonreductive physicalism. These are no less philosophical impositions than Platonism. If it is wrong to read Plato into the Bible, it is equally wrong to read Daniel Dennett or Antonio Damasio into the Bible. The question is not which philosophy we bring to the text, but what the text itself teaches. And the text, as we have seen, teaches a form of body-soul duality that is neither Platonic nor emergentist but uniquely biblical—what Cooper rightly calls holistic dualism.

We should also note that the early church fathers, who were closest to the apostolic teaching both in time and in culture, overwhelmingly affirmed a conscious intermediate state and the reality of the soul as distinct from the body. The Apostles’ Creed, likely reaching its final form in the late second century, affirms the resurrection of the body without denying the survival of the soul. The Nicene Creed speaks of the life of the world to come. The theological tradition from Irenaeus through Tertullian, Augustine, Aquinas, and the Reformers consistently affirmed that the soul survives death and awaits the resurrection. This is not a medieval corruption. It is the church’s persistent reading of the biblical evidence across two millennia.⁶⁸

Conclusion: What This Chapter Establishes

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter. Let me summarize what we have established.

First, Marsh’s theological argument against the soul rests on a mid-twentieth-century scholarly consensus—“Hebrew thought is holistic”—that has been thoroughly critiqued and is no longer tenable as a blanket claim. The work of Cooper, Moreland, and others has shown that this narrative was driven as much by theological fashion as by careful exegesis. The Hebrew Bible is more complex than the holism thesis allows.

Second, the Old Testament contains clear evidence that the Hebrew writers assumed a personal element—the nephesh, the ruach—that could exist apart from the body at death. Rachel’s departing soul. The child’s returning soul. The spirit returning to God. Samuel appearing after death. The psalmists’ confidence that God would receive them beyond the grave. These texts do not add up to a systematic theology of the soul, but they are inconsistent with a strict monism that denies any form of body-soul distinction.

Third, the New Testament teaches explicitly that persons exist consciously after death in the presence of God. Jesus affirms it in Matthew 10:28, where he distinguishes body and soul as entities with different fates. He affirms it in Luke 23:43, where he promises the thief paradise “today.” Paul assumes it in Philippians 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:8, where he envisions being consciously “with Christ” after departing the body. Revelation depicts it in the souls under the altar, who cry out to God with full consciousness and personal agency. The Transfiguration assumes it in the appearance of Moses, who had been dead for over a millennium. And the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus presupposes it as the basic framework for understanding what happens after death.

Fourth, Matthew 10:28 distinguishes body and soul as entities with different fates—a text that Marsh acknowledges but does not adequately engage. Even Wright’s attempt to give a non-Platonic reading of this text concedes that there is personal existence beyond bodily death, which is the essential claim of substance dualism.

Fifth, the NDE evidence corroborates what the Bible teaches: consciousness can function apart from the brain, and persons can exist consciously after clinical death. Miller’s research shows that the NDE evidence does not contradict Christian theology but actually aligns with its core themes. The convergence of biblical evidence and empirical NDE evidence creates a cumulative case that is considerably stronger than either line of evidence on its own.

Sixth, substance dualism is not Platonic dualism. It is fully compatible with conditional immortality, with bodily resurrection, and with a high view of embodiment. The soul is not inherently immortal—God can destroy it. The body is not evil or disposable—it will be raised and glorified. What substance dualism affirms is simply this: human beings have an immaterial dimension that can, by God’s power, survive the death of the body. And this is precisely what the biblical text, the theological tradition, the early creeds, and now the NDE evidence all point toward.

Marsh told us that “the idea of a divinely implanted soul that can evade death and represent the whole person in eternity is foreign to much current philosophical, psychological and neurophysiological thinking.”⁶⁵ He may be right that it is foreign to much current secular thinking. But it is not foreign to the Bible. It is not foreign to the theology of Jesus, who told us not to fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. It is not foreign to Paul, who longed to depart and be with Christ. It is not foreign to John, who saw the souls of the martyrs crying out beneath the altar. And it is not foreign to the thousands of NDE experiencers who have reported consciousness continuing when their brains were clinically dead.

The soul is real. It survives death. And the evidence—both biblical and empirical—is stronger than the critics want you to believe.