Chapter 2

What Is Conditional Immortality?—And Why It Stands Without Physicalism

Before we can talk about what a human being is, we need to talk about what happens to the wicked at the end of all things. That might sound backward. Why start with eschatology—the study of last things—when our real subject is anthropology, the study of human nature? Because that is exactly how the conversation has unfolded in the conditional immortality movement. The CI case for the final destruction of the wicked came first. The anthropological assumptions came along for the ride. And those assumptions, I believe, are a problem.

But first things first. Many readers may have picked up this book already convinced that CI is the best reading of what Scripture teaches about the fate of the lost. Others may be hearing the term for the first time. Still others may be sympathetic but cautious, not yet sure whether they can embrace CI without giving up beliefs they hold dear—beliefs about the soul, the intermediate state, and what happens the moment we die. This chapter is for all of you. We are going to define CI carefully, present the strongest biblical case for it, and then demonstrate something that may surprise you: conditional immortality does not need physicalism. Not even a little. In fact, CI is stronger when it is built on substance dualist foundations. And some of the most respected CI advocates in church history have been dualists.

A. Fudge’s Argument: The Case for Conditional Immortality

Edward Fudge did not invent conditional immortality. The idea has a long history stretching back through the early church fathers and resurfacing with force in the writings of men like Henry Constable, Edward White, and LeRoy Edwin Froom.¹ But Fudge did something no one before him had done quite so thoroughly. In The Fire That Consumes, first published in 1982, he gathered the full weight of the biblical evidence into a single, sustained argument. He walked through the Old Testament, the intertestamental literature, the words of Jesus, the epistles of Paul, the rest of the New Testament, and the witness of church history. When he was done, the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment lay battered and bruised under the accumulated force of Scripture after Scripture after Scripture.²

The reaction was immediate. Some evangelicals dismissed Fudge’s work without seriously engaging it. Others attacked him with the fury reserved for those who dare question a long-held tradition. But a growing number of careful, Bible-believing scholars found themselves persuaded. Stephen Travis declared himself a conditionalist the same year Fudge’s book appeared.⁷⁰ John Stott followed, cautiously, in 1988. Clark Pinnock came aboard in 1987. Philip Hughes in 1989. By the turn of the millennium, the Evangelical Alliance Commission on Unity and Truth Among Evangelicals (ACUTE) in the United Kingdom had officially declared annihilationism a legitimate evangelical option.⁷¹ Something was shifting. And Fudge was at the center of it.

Fudge’s central claim is simple and can be stated in a single sentence: the Bible teaches that the wicked will finally and truly die, perish, and be destroyed forever—not that they will be kept alive in unending torment.³ He puts it plainly in the final pages of his book: “One issue alone divides traditionalists and conditionalists: Does Scripture teach that God will make the wicked immortal, to suffer unending conscious torment in hell? Or does the Bible teach that the wicked will finally and truly die, perish, and become extinct forever, through a destructive process that encompasses whatever degree and duration of conscious torment God might sovereignly and justly impose in each individual case?”⁴

That is the question. And Fudge answers it with remarkable clarity.

Defining Conditional Immortality

So what exactly is conditional immortality? The name tells you most of what you need to know. Immortality—the gift of living forever—is not something human beings possess by nature. It is conditional. It depends on a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Only God is inherently immortal. Paul makes this explicit in his first letter to Timothy: God “alone has immortality, dwelling in unapproachable light” (1 Tim. 6:16, NKJV).⁵ If God alone possesses immortality as an inherent attribute, then everyone else—every angel, every human being, every created thing—has life only because God gives it and sustains it.

This is the foundation on which CI builds. Immortality is a gift, not a birthright. It is not hardwired into human nature. It is not something we carry with us from the womb. It is something God grants to those who are in Christ. Paul says it again in his second letter to Timothy: our Savior Jesus Christ “has abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10, NKJV).⁶ Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say that everyone already possesses immortality and that Jesus came to rescue them from torment. He says Jesus brought immortality to light. Immortality comes through the gospel. It is available in Christ. Those who reject Christ do not receive it.

The logic is straightforward. If immortality is God’s gift to the saved, then the unsaved do not receive it. And if the unsaved do not receive immortality, they do not live forever. They do not burn forever. They are destroyed. They cease to exist. The second death is a real death—a final, irreversible end to the person’s existence.⁷

This is what CI affirms. And this is where it parts company with the traditional view of eternal conscious torment, which holds that God gives the wicked a kind of immortality—an indestructible resurrection body fitted for everlasting suffering. On that view, the wicked live forever in agony. CI says the Bible teaches something very different.

Conditional Immortality and Annihilationism

Before we go further, a word about terminology. You will sometimes hear CI called “annihilationism.” The two terms overlap significantly, but they are not identical. Fudge himself explains the distinction. Annihilationism, in the broadest sense, is the view that the wicked will eventually be destroyed and cease to exist, as opposed to being tormented forever or being restored to God.⁸ Under that broad umbrella, there are different explanations for how the wicked come to be destroyed. Conditional immortality reasons that human beings were created mortal—without inherent immortality—and that only the redeemed receive immortality at the resurrection. The wicked, lacking immortality, simply do not survive. A narrower form of annihilationism holds that human beings were created with immortal souls, but that God actively destroys the wicked, soul and body, by an act of divine power.⁹

Fudge holds the first view—conditional immortality in the strict sense.¹⁰ John Stott, as Fudge himself notes, held something closer to the second.¹¹ Both arrive at the same destination: the wicked are destroyed and cease to exist. The difference is in the mechanism. For our purposes in this book, both positions are welcome under the CI tent. What matters is the shared conviction that the wicked will not suffer conscious torment forever. They will be judged. They will be punished. And then they will be destroyed completely.

I mention this distinction for an important reason. Notice that the second form of annihilationism—the view that God destroys even immortal souls—is explicitly and unavoidably dualist. It assumes souls exist as real entities that God must actively destroy. If that version of the doctrine can coexist comfortably with a belief in immaterial souls, then it should be obvious from the start that the destruction of the wicked does not require physicalism. We will return to this point. It is one of the central arguments of this chapter.

The Biblical Case for CI

Fudge’s biblical case is extensive—far too extensive to reproduce here. But a brief survey of the key passages will remind us why so many careful Bible students have found CI compelling. These are the texts that bear the most weight in the argument.

Matthew 10:28. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (NKJV). This is the single most important verse in the CI arsenal, and it is the verse that traditionalists have struggled with the most. Jesus warns that God can destroy the whole person—soul and body—in Gehenna. If destruction means what it normally means, this is a straightforward statement that the wicked will be annihilated, not kept alive forever.¹² Fudge makes the point forcefully: Jesus equates “kill” and “destroy,” making them interchangeable. Humans can kill the body. God can destroy both soul and body.¹³ Ulrich Luz, the German-Swiss New Testament scholar, agrees that what Jesus describes here is the complete destruction of the wicked, body and soul alike.¹⁴

John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (NKJV). The contrast could not be sharper. Two fates are set before us: everlasting life for those who believe, and perishing for those who do not. Everlasting life and perishing are opposites. If “everlasting life” means living forever in joy, then “perish” should mean ceasing to exist forever. The traditional view asks us to believe that “perish” actually means “live forever in misery.” That is a strange definition of perishing.¹⁵

2 Thessalonians 1:9. The wicked “shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord” (NKJV). Paul calls the punishment “everlasting destruction.” Traditionalists have labored to redefine “destruction” as “ruin” or “separation” rather than actual annihilation. But as Fudge notes, the ordinary meaning of the word is clear: destruction means being destroyed. The “everlasting” qualifier tells us the destruction is permanent and irreversible—not that the process continues forever, but that the result endures forever.¹⁶ Augustine himself, the great defender of eternal torment, conceded the point: we measure capital punishment by its permanency, not by the time required for its execution.¹⁷

Revelation 20:14. “Then Death and Hades were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (NKJV). John calls the lake of fire “the second death.” Not the second life. Not the second suffering. The second death. Death is the end of life, not the continuation of life in a different mode. The imagery is vivid: even Death itself and Hades are thrown into the fire and consumed. If Death can be destroyed in the lake of fire, so can the wicked.¹⁸

Malachi 4:1–3. “For behold, the day is coming, burning like an oven, and all the proud, yes, all who do wickedly, will be stubble. And the day which is coming shall burn them up … that will leave them neither root nor branch … You shall trample the wicked, for they shall be ashes under the soles of your feet” (NKJV). Ashes. Stubble. Neither root nor branch. The imagery is total destruction. Fudge rightly observes that these metaphors all point in one direction: the wicked will be consumed completely. Nothing will remain.¹⁹

These are just five passages, but there are many more. Romans 6:23 tells us that “the wages of sin is death”—not eternal life in torment, but death. James 4:12 reminds us that God is the one “who is able to save and to destroy.” Philippians 3:19 says the destiny of the enemies of the cross is “destruction,” a word Paul sets in direct contrast to the glorification of the saved.⁶⁷ Peter warns that false teachers bring “swift destruction” upon themselves (2 Pet. 2:1) and that the present heavens and earth are reserved for fire, “reserved for the day of judgment and perdition of ungodly men” (2 Pet. 3:7). The Old Testament prophets use imagery of chaff blown away in the wind (Ps. 1:4), smoke that vanishes (Ps. 37:20), and wax melting before a flame (Ps. 68:2). In every case, the image is of something that ceases to exist—not something that burns forever.

Fudge works through dozens more passages with the same result. The cumulative weight is overwhelming. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible uses the language of death, destruction, perishing, burning up, and ceasing to exist when it speaks of the final fate of the wicked. The traditionalist must explain away every single one of these texts. The conditionalist simply takes them at face value.

And this is important: the CI reading does not deny that God’s judgment involves conscious suffering. Fudge himself is careful on this point. He writes that the wicked will “finally and truly die, perish, and become extinct forever, through a destructive process that encompasses whatever degree and duration of conscious torment God might sovereignly and justly impose in each individual case.”⁶⁸ CI is not soft on sin. It affirms divine justice with full force. It simply denies that justice requires infinite suffering for finite creatures. The fire of hell is real. It is terrible. And it ends in complete destruction.

Fudge’s Anthropological Assumption

Here is where things get interesting—and where this book parts company with Fudge. Alongside his powerful case for CI, Fudge weaves in an anthropological assumption that runs through the entire book. He assumes—and at times explicitly argues—that human beings are entirely physical creatures. There is no immaterial soul that exists apart from the body. When the body dies, the whole person dies. The soul is not a separate substance; it is simply a word for the living person, the self, the life.²⁰

Fudge does not always use the technical vocabulary of physicalism. He prefers words like “holistic” and “whole person.” He leans heavily on Old Testament scholars like Hans Walter Wolff, who emphasize the unity of the human person in Hebrew thought.²¹ He argues that the Hebrew word nephesh (which can mean “soul,” “life,” “person,” “self,” or even “throat”) does not refer to an immaterial substance. He treats ruach (which can mean “spirit,” “breath,” or “wind”) as a life-force breathed in by God rather than as a separate entity that survives death.²² We will examine these claims in detail in Chapters 4 and 19. For now, the point is simply that Fudge pairs his eschatological argument (CI) with an anthropological assumption (physicalism). And many in the CI movement have followed his lead, absorbing the physicalist anthropology along with the conditionalist eschatology—often without realizing the two are separate claims.

This pairing was not inevitable. It was a choice. And I believe it was a mistake.

B. Identifying Weaknesses: The Unnecessary Fusion of CI and Physicalism

The most important thing I can say in this chapter is this: conditional immortality is an eschatological claim, not an anthropological one.

Read that sentence again. It matters.

CI makes a claim about the final fate of the wicked. It says they will be destroyed. They will cease to exist. They will not be tormented forever. That is a claim about what happens at the end—about eschatology, about the last things. It is not a claim about what a human being is made of. It is not a claim about whether we have immaterial souls. It is not a claim about whether the soul can exist apart from the body. Those are anthropological questions. And they are separate questions.

Fudge treats them as though they go together. Many in the CI movement treat them as though they go together. But they don’t. And confusing them has created real problems.

The Logical Gap

Here is the logical issue. The physicalist CI advocate reasons like this: human beings are entirely physical. There is no immaterial soul. So when the body is destroyed, the whole person is destroyed. CI follows naturally from physicalism because there is nothing left to keep alive after the body is gone.

The reasoning seems tidy. But it contains a hidden assumption—namely, that the destruction of the wicked requires there to be no immaterial soul. And that assumption is false.

Think about it carefully. What does CI actually require? It requires that God can destroy the whole person permanently. That is it. CI does not require that the person be made of only one kind of stuff. It requires that whatever the person is made of, God can destroy all of it. If a person is made of body and soul, then God must be able to destroy both body and soul. And that is exactly what Jesus says in Matthew 10:28: “Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”²³

Notice what Jesus does. He does not say, “Fear Him who is able to destroy the body, because that is all there is.” He says God can destroy both soul and body. The verse distinguishes two things—soul and body—and says God can destroy them both. On a physicalist reading, the word “soul” here is redundant. If the soul is just another word for the body or the whole person, then saying “God can destroy body and body” or “God can destroy the whole person and the whole person” adds nothing. But on a dualist reading, the verse makes perfect sense. Humans can kill the body but cannot touch the soul. God, however, can destroy both. He has authority over the material and the immaterial alike.²⁴

The Problem of Redundancy

Fudge recognizes the challenge Matthew 10:28 poses for his anthropology. He cites Alexander Sand, who defines “soul” in this passage as “the life, the person”—not an immaterial substance, but the real self, the entire actual life God originally gives to a person.²⁵ On this reading, Jesus is saying that humans can kill the body but cannot take away the deeper life that God has given. Only God has the power to end both physical existence and this deeper, God-given life.

That is a creative reading. But it does not work. Here is why.

If “soul” simply means “life” in the general sense—the vitality or animating principle of the person—then killing the body does kill the soul. When you kill someone, you take their life. That is what killing means. A sword through the heart does not leave the person’s “life” floating around somewhere, untouched. It ends the life by ending the body. You cannot kill the body and leave the life intact unless the life is something other than the body’s biological functioning—unless it is an immaterial reality that persists when the physical organism shuts down. John W. Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, makes this point with precision. If psyche (the Greek word translated “soul”) is simply the life-force or the bodily person in the Old Testament sense, then it makes no sense for Jesus to say that killing the body does not kill the soul. In the Hebrew mind, as Cooper notes, killing the body is killing the nephesh. Unless the Israelites were dualists, the nephesh could not survive bodily death.²⁶

But Matthew assumes it can. Jesus tells his disciples that their persecutors can destroy their bodies but cannot touch their souls. That only works if the soul is something that exists over and above the body—something that persists when the body is killed. In other words, it only works if substance dualism is true.

A Category Error

The fusion of CI and physicalism commits what philosophers call a category error. It confuses two different types of claims. One claim is about the composition of human nature—what are we made of? The other is about the destiny of the wicked—what happens to them at the end? These are separate questions, and answering one does not determine the answer to the other.

You can be a substance dualist and believe in CI. You simply affirm that human beings are composed of body and soul, and that God will destroy both at the final judgment. The soul is not inherently immortal. It exists because God sustains it. And God can withdraw that sustaining power any time He chooses. Matthew 10:28 says as much.

You can also be a physicalist and believe in CI, as Fudge does. But you cannot argue that CI requires physicalism. That is the category error. It is like saying that a building can only be demolished if it is made of one material. A building made of bricks and wood can be demolished just as thoroughly as one made only of bricks. What matters is the power of the one doing the demolishing—and no one doubts that God has the power to destroy anything He has made.²⁷

C. The Dualist Response: Why CI Is Stronger on Dualist Foundations

I want to do more than simply show that CI and dualism are compatible. I want to argue something bolder: CI is actually stronger when it is built on substance dualist foundations. Physicalism does not help CI. In several important ways, it actually weakens it. Dualism, by contrast, resolves problems that physicalism creates and opens doors that physicalism closes.

We will look at four areas where dualism strengthens the CI position: the interpretation of Matthew 10:28, the intermediate state, personal identity at the resurrection, and the witness of CI advocates who were not physicalists.

1. Matthew 10:28 Makes Better Sense on Dualism

We have already touched on this, but it deserves fuller treatment because it is so important.

Jesus says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.” The verse sets up three contrasts. First, a contrast between human power and divine power. Humans can kill the body; God can destroy both soul and body. Second, a contrast between body and soul. The body can be killed by human agents; the soul cannot be. Third, a contrast between partial destruction and total destruction. Humans can only do partial damage (killing the body). God can do total damage (destroying both soul and body).²⁸

Every one of these contrasts depends on the soul being something distinct from the body. If the soul is just the body under a different label, or just the “life” that the body has, then the first contrast collapses. Humans can kill the whole person. They do it every day. The whole point of Jesus’ reassurance is that even when a persecutor kills the body, the person is not fully destroyed. The soul remains. The persecutor’s power has limits. God’s does not.²⁹

Cooper’s analysis is devastating for the physicalist reading. He points out that the monist strategy is to treat Matthew’s use of “soul” and “body” as cases of synecdoche—a figure of speech in which a part stands for the whole. But synecdoche cannot be what is happening here, because the two terms in the verse cannot both stand for the same whole. Whatever soul is, it can exist before God without the body. A human without a body is not the same as a human with a body, no matter how we define these words.³⁰

Furthermore, Cooper observes that taking soma (body) and psyche (soul) as identical in meaning with basar (flesh) and nephesh in the Old Testament will not work here. If psyche is nothing more than the life-force or the bodily person, then killing the body is killing the psyche. But Matthew assumes the psyche survives the death of the body. Jesus says persecutors cannot kill it. That is a dualist assumption, whether we are comfortable with it or not.³¹

Here is the payoff for CI. The conditionalist reading of Matthew 10:28 is that God can and will destroy the wicked completely—body and soul, the whole person, with nothing remaining. That reading is powerful. It is straightforward. And it only works if “soul” and “body” name two real, distinguishable aspects of the person. On dualism, the verse says: God will destroy everything you are—your material body and your immaterial soul. Nothing will survive. On physicalism, the verse says … what, exactly? God will destroy your body, and also your body? God will kill the person who was already killed by the persecutor? The verse loses its force. Its logic depends on dualism.³²

Fudge himself quotes Robin Nixon approvingly: “The soul in biblical thought is not immortal, except when new life is conferred upon it through Christ.”³³ But notice what Nixon is doing here. He is treating the soul as a real thing—a thing that can either receive new life or fail to receive it. A thing that can be destroyed by God. That is not physicalism. That is dualism with conditional immortality. The soul exists. It is real. It is just not indestructible.

2. The Intermediate State Is Preserved

One of the most significant advantages of combining CI with dualism is that it preserves the conscious intermediate state—the belief that persons exist consciously between death and the final resurrection. This is the historic Christian teaching, affirmed by the vast majority of believers across the centuries.³⁴ And it is one of the first casualties of physicalism.

Think about what physicalism requires. If there is no immaterial soul—if you are nothing more than your body organized in a certain way—then when the body dies, you cease to exist. There is nothing left over. No consciousness. No awareness. No “you.” Between the moment of death and the moment of resurrection, you simply do not exist. This is sometimes called “soul sleep,” though even that label is misleading, because sleep implies a sleeper. On strict physicalism, there is no sleeper. There is nothing at all.³⁵

For the CI physicalist, this creates an awkward picture. The wicked die. They cease to exist. Then God reconstitutes them at the resurrection (somehow—we will come back to the “somehow”), judges them, and destroys them again. They go from non-existence to brief existence to non-existence. Meanwhile, the righteous also cease to exist at death and then are reconstituted at the resurrection to receive immortality.

But Scripture paints a very different picture. Jesus promises the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43, NKJV)—not “in the distant future, after a long period of non-existence, you will be reconstituted and then be with Me.”³⁶ Paul tells the Philippians that to depart and be with Christ is “far better” (Phil. 1:23)—language that makes no sense if departing means ceasing to exist.³⁷ Paul tells the Corinthians that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8)—a statement that is meaningless on physicalism, because if there is no soul, being absent from the body means being absent from everything.³⁸

The book of Revelation shows us souls under the altar, crying out to God, conscious and aware (Rev. 6:9–11). Jesus tells the story of the rich man and Lazarus, in which both are conscious after death (Luke 16:19–31). Stephen, as he is being stoned, cries out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59)—committing something to Jesus that will survive the death of his body.³⁹

We will examine all of these passages in detail in later chapters. The point for now is simply that the intermediate state creates a real problem for the CI physicalist but no problem at all for the CI dualist. On dualism, the picture is coherent. When a believer dies, the soul goes to be with Christ consciously. When an unbeliever dies, the soul goes to Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not final punishment. At the resurrection, body and soul are reunited. The righteous receive immortality. The wicked stand before God in judgment and are destroyed completely—body and soul—in the second death. The soul is real. It is conscious between death and resurrection. But it is not indestructible. God can end it. And for the finally impenitent, He will.⁴⁰

This is a clean, biblical picture. It honors the intermediate state passages. It honors the CI passages. And it requires substance dualism.

3. Personal Identity at the Resurrection Is Secured

Here is another problem that physicalism creates and dualism solves. If you are entirely physical, and your body is destroyed at death, then what is raised at the resurrection?

The traditionalist and the conditionalist both affirm the bodily resurrection. The New Testament is emphatic about it. But the resurrection requires that the person who is raised is the same person who died. Otherwise it is not a resurrection at all—it is the creation of a brand-new person. And you cannot judge a brand-new person for the sins of someone else.⁴¹

On substance dualism, personal identity through death is secured by the soul. The soul is the continuous thread. It survives the death of the body, exists in the intermediate state, and is reunited with a resurrected body at the last day. The person who stands before God in judgment is the same person who lived and sinned and died, because the soul that persisted through death is the same soul that was present during life.⁴²

On physicalism, the story is much more complicated. If the body is destroyed and there is no soul, what maintains identity through the gap? Physicalist theologians have proposed various answers. Nancey Murphy appeals to God’s memory of the person’s pattern.⁴³ Kevin Corcoran proposes a “constitution view” in which personal identity is tied to biological and psychological continuity.⁴⁴ Peter van Inwagen once suggested that God might secretly preserve the original body (or a crucial part of it) and replace it with a simulacrum at death.⁴⁵

These proposals are creative. But they are also, frankly, strained. Each one faces serious philosophical objections. If God creates a new body based on His memory of the old person, how do we know it is the same person and not a perfect copy? A perfect copy of a painting is not the original painting. A perfect copy of a person is not the original person. The “replica objection,” as it is called in the philosophical literature, haunts every physicalist attempt to solve the identity problem.⁴⁶

The dualist does not face this problem. The soul provides the continuity. The resurrected person is the same person because it is the same soul in a new body. Simple. Clean. And it works just as well for CI as it does for the traditional view. The wicked are raised in their bodies, their souls reunited with resurrected flesh. They stand before God as the very people they were in life. They are judged. And then they are destroyed—body and soul together, completely and forever.

Think about why this matters for CI specifically. The whole point of the final judgment is that the same person who sinned is the person who faces God. Justice demands it. You cannot punish one person for another’s crimes. If the person who stands at the last judgment is a brand-new creation—a replica assembled from God’s memory—then we have a serious moral problem. Is it just to destroy a replica? Can a replica be held accountable for the sins of the original? These questions do not arise on dualism, because the soul that sinned is the soul that stands before God. Continuity of identity is not a philosophical puzzle to be solved by clever theories about divine memory. It is a straightforward metaphysical fact grounded in the soul’s persistence through death.⁶⁹

Paul himself seems to presuppose this when he writes to the Corinthians about the resurrection body. He does not describe the resurrection as the creation of an entirely new person. He describes it as the transformation of the existing person: “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:53, NKJV). The word “this” is crucial. This mortal puts on immortality. This corruptible puts on incorruption. There is something that persists through the change—a “this” that is the same before and after. On dualism, that something is the soul. On physicalism, identifying that something becomes enormously difficult.

4. CI Advocates Who Were Not Physicalists

One of the most effective ways to show that CI does not require physicalism is to point to actual CI advocates who held dualist views. And there are more of them than most people realize.

John Stott is perhaps the most prominent. In his famous 1988 dialogue with David Edwards, published as Evangelical Essentials, Stott cautiously but unmistakably endorsed annihilationism. He did so, as Fudge himself notes, not from a physicalist position but from a view closer to the second form of annihilationism described above: God actively destroys the wicked, soul and body, by divine power.⁴⁷ Stott was no physicalist. He was one of the most orthodox, Bible-believing evangelicals of the twentieth century. He affirmed the reality of the soul. He simply also affirmed that God can destroy it. E. Earle Ellis, the respected New Testament scholar at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, pointed out that the conditional immortality of Ignatius or of John Stott is hardly the product of contemporary relativism or trendy academic theology.⁴⁸ It is the product of careful biblical exegesis.

Clark Pinnock declared himself a conditionalist in 1987. Like Stott, Pinnock was not coming from a physicalist anthropology. He was a theologian who held to the reality of the human soul and who came to CI through the force of the biblical evidence about final punishment.⁴⁹

Philip Hughes, in his 1989 work The True Image, also embraced the final destruction of the wicked while maintaining a traditional Christian anthropology that included an immaterial dimension of human nature.⁵⁰

John Wenham, the distinguished British evangelical scholar, held to conditional immortality for over sixty years. He wrote the foreword to the second edition of Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, expressing his conviction that God alone possesses inherent immortality and that the unsaved will not live forever. Wenham wrote that the terror of the fires of hell is that “they burn up all that is unfit for heaven.”⁵¹ His was a robust faith that saw the soul as real and immortality as God’s gift to the redeemed.

F. F. Bruce, the esteemed Manchester scholar who wrote the foreword to the first edition, did not commit fully to either position. But his sympathy for conditionalism was clear, and his anthropology was anything but physicalist. He affirmed that all immortality except God’s is derived—a statement perfectly consistent with both dualism and CI.⁵²

These names matter. Stott, Pinnock, Hughes, Wenham, Bruce—these were not fringe figures. They were some of the most respected evangelical scholars of the twentieth century. And none of them felt it necessary to adopt physicalism in order to hold CI. They affirmed the reality of the soul. They affirmed the destruction of the wicked. They saw no contradiction between the two. Because there is no contradiction.

The point is not just historical. It is logical. If giants of evangelical scholarship could hold CI and dualism together without any logical tension, then the claim that CI requires physicalism is simply false. It is a claim that has grown up within one particular strand of the CI movement—the strand influenced by Fudge’s anthropological assumptions. But it was never a necessary feature of the position.

5. The Soul’s Dependence on God

There is a deeper theological point here that deserves careful attention. Physicalists sometimes argue that if you believe in the soul, you are committed to the soul’s immortality. And if the soul is immortal, then the wicked cannot be destroyed—their souls will live forever, and you are stuck with eternal conscious torment.

This argument fails because it confuses two very different things: the existence of the soul and the inherent immortality of the soul. Substance dualism says the soul is a real, immaterial entity. It does not say the soul is indestructible. The soul exists because God created it and God sustains it. God is the source of all being. Every created thing—material or immaterial—depends on God for its continued existence at every moment. Remove God’s sustaining power, and the soul ceases to exist, just as surely as the body does when deprived of life.⁵³

This is not Platonic dualism. Plato taught that the soul was inherently immortal—that it could not die because immortality was woven into its very nature.⁵⁴ Christian substance dualism makes no such claim. It says the soul is real, yes. Created by God, yes. Able to exist apart from the body by God’s power, yes. But inherently indestructible? No. God can destroy it. Jesus says so explicitly. And God will destroy the souls of the finally impenitent—along with their bodies—in the second death.

Justin Martyr, one of the earliest church fathers, made this exact point. In his Dialogue with Trypho, Justin has an old man explain that the soul is not inherently immortal: “For those things which exist after God … have the nature of decay, and are such as may be blotted out and cease to exist; for God alone is unbegotten and incorruptible, and therefore he is God, but all other things after him are created and corruptible. For this reason souls both die and are punished.”⁵⁵ Justin believed the soul was mortal, that it would suffer only as long as God willed, and that finally it would pass out of existence. He was both a dualist and a conditionalist—in the second century.

Fudge himself cites Justin Martyr as an early supporter of CI.⁵⁶ But notice what Justin’s position entails. Justin believed the soul is real. He believed it can suffer after death. He believed God can and will destroy it. That is substance dualism combined with conditional immortality. Justin did not need physicalism to arrive at his conditionalist conclusions. He needed only the conviction that God alone is inherently immortal and that everything He creates can also be un-created.

6. The Rethinking Hell Movement and the Physicalist Assumption

It is worth pausing to note how the physicalist assumption has spread through the modern CI movement. Fudge’s book was the catalyst, but the assumption has been reinforced by the Rethinking Hell community—the website, podcast, and conference movement founded by Chris Date and others that has done enormous good in making CI accessible to a wider audience.⁵⁷

I want to be clear: I am deeply grateful for Rethinking Hell. The work that Chris Date and his colleagues have done to bring CI into mainstream evangelical conversation is genuinely admirable. They have created a space where thoughtful Christians can explore this question without being dismissed as heretics. That matters. And the CI movement is stronger because of their efforts.

But the Rethinking Hell community has, in my view, absorbed physicalist anthropological assumptions without examining them carefully enough. The assumption that human beings are entirely physical—that there is no immaterial soul that survives death—has become something close to a default position in many CI circles. It is rarely argued for at length. It is simply assumed. And when someone within the movement raises the question of the soul, the response is often a quick appeal to Hebrew holism, as though the mere observation that the Old Testament emphasizes the unity of the person settles the anthropological question. It does not. As we will see in later chapters, holism and dualism are not opposites. You can affirm both the functional unity of the person and the existence of an immaterial soul. Cooper calls this “holistic dualism,” and it is, I believe, the view that best fits the full range of biblical evidence.⁵⁸

The CI movement as a whole would benefit enormously from disentangling these two claims. CI is an eschatological conviction about the destiny of the wicked. Physicalism is an anthropological theory about the composition of human nature. They are separate claims. You can hold one without the other. And I believe the CI movement would be stronger, more unified, and more theologically robust if it recognized this.

Think about what the CI movement gains by making room for dualists. Right now, some Christians who are drawn to CI are put off by the physicalist anthropology that often accompanies it. They believe in the soul. They believe in the conscious intermediate state. They believe that their deceased loved ones are with Christ right now. And when they look at the CI movement and see physicalism treated as a package deal, they walk away—not because they disagree with CI, but because they cannot accept physicalism. That is a tragedy. Those Christians should be welcomed into the CI conversation, not pushed out of it. CI does not belong to physicalism. It belongs to anyone who takes the Bible’s language of destruction seriously. And the tent is big enough for both dualists and physicalists to stand together under the shared conviction that the wicked will not burn forever.

D. Counter-Objections

Having made the case that CI does not require physicalism and is actually strengthened by dualism, we need to address the strongest objections a physicalist CI advocate might raise.

Objection 1: “If the soul can exist without the body, doesn’t that make it immortal?”

This is the most common objection, and we have already laid the groundwork for answering it. The answer is no. The soul’s ability to exist apart from the body does not mean the soul is inherently immortal. A plant can exist for a time without water, but it is not immortal. It needs water to survive. Eventually, without it, the plant dies. The soul can exist apart from the body because God sustains it. But God can withdraw that sustaining power at any time.⁵⁹

Inherent immortality means you cannot die, no matter what. It means death is metaphysically impossible for you. Only God has that. Created beings—whether material or immaterial—exist at God’s pleasure. The soul is not self-sustaining. It depends entirely on God. And if God decides to destroy it, it is destroyed. This is precisely what Jesus warns of in Matthew 10:28, and it is precisely what the conditionalist reading of that verse affirms.

Objection 2: “Doesn’t the very term ‘conditional immortality’ imply that there is no naturally existing soul?”

Not at all. The term “conditional immortality” describes the conditions under which a person receives eternal life. It says that immortality—living forever—is given only to those who are in Christ. It is a statement about destiny, not about composition. It tells you that living forever is not automatic; it is conditional on faith. It does not tell you what you are made of.⁶⁰

A person can have an immaterial soul and still not be immortal. The soul’s existence between death and resurrection is temporary—sustained by God for the purpose of the intermediate state and the final judgment. After the judgment, the souls of the wicked are destroyed along with their resurrected bodies. The soul’s existence was real but not permanent. It was conditional—conditional on God’s sustaining will.

Consider an analogy. A candle flame is real. It gives light and heat. You can see it. You can feel it. But it is not self-sustaining. It depends on the wick and the wax. Remove the fuel, and the flame goes out. The flame was real while it burned, but it was not permanent. In the same way, the soul is real. It is a genuine immaterial substance created by God. But its continued existence depends on God’s sustaining will. When God withdraws that will—as He does at the second death—the soul ceases to exist. This is conditional immortality combined with substance dualism. The two fit together without any logical strain.

Objection 3: “The Old Testament doesn’t teach an immaterial soul.”

This objection is widespread, and we will address it at length in Chapters 5 through 9 of this book. For now, a brief response will suffice.

It is true that the Old Testament does not present a fully developed, systematic doctrine of the immaterial soul in the way that later Greek philosophy did. No one disputes this. Hebrew anthropology emphasizes the functional unity of the whole person—body, soul, and spirit working together as an integrated whole. That is what scholars mean when they say the Old Testament is “holistic.”⁶¹

But holism is not the same as physicalism. Cooper makes this point with great care. The Old Testament is undeniably holistic. But does holism entail monism? Does the observation that the Old Testament emphasizes the unity of the person mean that the person is made of only one kind of stuff? Cooper argues persuasively that it does not. Holism affirms the functional integration of all parts of the whole. It does not deny that the whole contains distinguishable parts. A watch is a functional unity—all its parts work together seamlessly. But no one concludes from this that a watch is made of only one kind of material.⁶²

Moreover, the Old Testament contains narratives that are very difficult to explain on physicalist terms. Rachel’s soul departs her body as she dies (Gen. 35:18). The child’s soul returns to his body when Elijah prays (1 Kings 17:21–22). Samuel appears consciously after death (1 Sam. 28:8–15). Ecclesiastes 12:7 says the spirit returns to God who gave it when the body returns to the dust. These passages will receive detailed treatment later. For now, the point is that the Old Testament is not the monolithically physicalist text that some scholars have portrayed it as. There are strong currents of dualist thought running through it, even if they are not expressed in the systematic categories of later philosophy.⁶³

Objection 4: “Substance dualism is Greek philosophy, not biblical theology.”

This is perhaps the most rhetorically effective objection physicalists make, and it is also one of the most misleading. The argument goes like this: the idea of an immaterial soul separate from the body comes from Plato, not from the Bible. Christians who believe in substance dualism have been infected by Greek philosophy. The Bible teaches Hebrew holism, not Platonic dualism. Therefore, substance dualism is unbiblical.

The argument sounds impressive until you examine it carefully. First, the fact that Plato believed something does not make it wrong. Plato also believed in the objectivity of truth, the reality of the good, and the importance of justice. We do not reject those ideas because Plato held them. The question is not whether Plato taught it, but whether the Bible teaches it.⁶⁴

Second, Christian substance dualism is not Platonic dualism. Plato taught that the soul was inherently immortal, that the body was a prison, and that the ideal existence was the soul free from all bodily entanglement. Christian dualism teaches that the body is good (God made it), the soul is created (not eternal), the union of body and soul is the intended state of human existence, and the resurrection of the body is the goal of redemption. These are fundamentally different visions.⁶⁵

Third, the “Greek philosophy” objection cuts both ways. If we reject substance dualism because it has parallels in Greek thought, we should also reject the idea that death is the cessation of all personal existence, because that idea was held by the Epicureans—another Greek philosophical school. The Sadducees denied the resurrection and the existence of spirits (Acts 23:8), and Jesus rebuked them for it. The charge of Greek philosophical influence is a rhetorical weapon, not an argument. What matters is what the Bible actually says.⁶⁶

And what the Bible says, as we will demonstrate in the chapters that follow, is that human beings are more than their bodies. The spirit returns to God at death. The soul departs and returns. Jesus tells us to fear the One who can destroy both soul and body. Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. These are not Greek imports. They are biblical teachings. And substance dualism is the anthropology that makes the best sense of all of them.

Conclusion

Here is what we have established in this chapter. Conditional immortality is a powerful, biblical, and compelling account of what happens to the wicked at the final judgment. Fudge’s case for it is one of the most important contributions to evangelical theology in the past century. CI says the wicked will be destroyed, not tormented forever. It takes the Bible’s language of death, destruction, and perishing at face value. And it honors God’s justice without making Him into a cosmic torturer.

But CI does not need physicalism. Not logically. Not biblically. Not historically. CI is an eschatological claim about the final destiny of the wicked. It is not an anthropological claim about what human beings are made of. You can believe the wicked will be destroyed and believe that human beings have immaterial souls. All that CI requires is that God can destroy the whole person—body and soul—and He can. Jesus said so.

In fact, CI is stronger on dualist foundations. Matthew 10:28, the most important CI proof text, only makes full sense if soul and body name two distinct realities. The intermediate state, taught clearly in multiple New Testament passages, requires the soul to exist consciously between death and resurrection. Personal identity at the resurrection is secured by the continuity of the soul through the gap of death. And the great CI advocates of the past century—Stott, Pinnock, Hughes, Wenham—held CI and dualism together without any logical tension.

Physicalism is not a friend to CI. It is unnecessary baggage. And it comes with real costs—costs to the intermediate state, to personal identity, to the coherence of Matthew 10:28, and to the richness of the Christian hope. In the chapters that follow, we will build the biblical case for substance dualism piece by piece, passage by passage. But first, in Chapter 3, we need to define our terms more carefully and understand what is at stake in this debate. The question of what a human being is—body only, or body and soul—touches everything. It touches how we read Scripture. It touches how we think about death. It touches what we tell the grieving about their loved ones. And it touches whether we can look into the face of death and say, with confidence, that the person we loved is still somewhere—conscious, aware, and held by God.

That is the question before us. And it matters more than most of us have realized.

In the next chapter, we will define substance dualism and Christian physicalism precisely, examine the key scholars on both sides, and lay out the full theological stakes. What do we lose if we get the anthropology wrong? What do we gain if we get it right? The answers may surprise you. Because what is at stake is not merely a philosophical debate about the composition of human nature. What is at stake is the coherence of the Christian hope—the hope that death is not the end, that the person you love is still alive in God’s care, and that one day body and soul will be reunited in the kind of glory only God could imagine.