Chapter 3

Substance Dualism and Christian Physicalism—Definitions and Stakes

Before we dig any deeper into this book, we need to settle something. We need to make sure we’re all speaking the same language.

That might sound like a small thing. It isn’t. In fact, many of the fiercest debates in theology and philosophy of mind are not really disagreements about evidence at all. They are disagreements about definitions. One scholar says “soul” and means one thing; another says the same word and means something entirely different. One writer uses “physicalism” as a technical label; another uses “holistic” and thinks she’s saying the same thing. The result is a conversation where people talk past each other for decades.

I don’t want that to happen in this book. So in this chapter, we are going to lay out, as clearly and accessibly as possible, the two main views of human nature that are driving this conversation. On one side is substance dualism—the view that has been held by the overwhelming majority of Christians throughout history. On the other side is Christian physicalism—a view that has gained enormous influence in the last half-century, particularly among biblical scholars and theologians who have been shaped by the neurosciences.

We will define each view carefully. We will name the major scholars who hold each position. And then—and this is the most important part of the chapter—we will explain what is at stake. Because this debate is not just an academic exercise. It touches things that matter deeply to every Christian: What happens to your loved ones when they die? Is the person who rises at the resurrection really you? Can God offer salvation to someone after death? What do you say to a grieving mother at a funeral?

The answers to those questions depend, more than most people realize, on what you believe a human being is.

A. The Physicalist Framework: How the Debate Is Usually Framed

If you have spent any time reading modern theology or biblical scholarship on the body-soul question, you have almost certainly encountered a particular narrative. It goes something like this:

The ancient Hebrews saw human beings as unified wholes. They did not divide people into “body” and “soul.” Words like nephesh (often translated “soul”) and ruach (often translated “spirit”) really just mean the whole person viewed from different angles. A nephesh is not a ghost living inside your body—it is you, the living, breathing, embodied creature that God made. Then along came the Greeks, especially Plato, who taught that the body is a prison and the soul is the real you, trapped inside flesh and longing to escape. Over time, this Greek idea infected Christian theology. The early church fathers absorbed it, and it hardened into the doctrine of the “immortal soul”—a teaching that, we are told, has more to do with Plato than with the Bible. The corrective, according to this narrative, is to return to the “Hebrew” view: human beings are unified, embodied creatures with no separable immaterial part. The soul is not a thing inside you. It is just a way of talking about the whole person.¹

This narrative has become extraordinarily influential. You find it in Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, where he treats nephesh and ruach as terms for the whole person and draws heavily on scholars like Hans Walter Wolff and Aimo Nikolainen to support a “holistic” reading of human nature.² You find it in Joel Green’s Body, Soul, and Human Life, which argues that neuroscience and careful biblical exegesis together lead us away from any notion of a separable soul.³ You find it in Nancey Murphy’s widely read Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?, which argues that Christians should embrace “nonreductive physicalism” as the view most compatible with both science and Scripture.⁴ And you find it, in less technical form, across the Rethinking Hell community and in popular-level conditionalist writing.

The narrative is powerful because it sounds humble. It sounds like we are stripping away centuries of pagan philosophy and getting back to what the Bible really says. Who wouldn’t want that?

But here is the question we need to ask: Is this narrative actually true? Does it hold up under careful scrutiny? And does the alternative—substance dualism—really deserve the bad reputation it has been given?

Before we answer those questions, though, we need to define our terms. Precisely. Carefully. Without slipping in assumptions under the cover of neutral-sounding language.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses: Where the Physicalist Framing Goes Wrong

The “Hebrew holism versus Greek dualism” narrative has a certain surface plausibility. It is true that the Old Testament emphasizes the unity of the human person. It is true that Hebrew anthropological terms do not map neatly onto Platonic categories. And it is true that some historical forms of dualism—particularly Gnostic and Orphic varieties—are deeply incompatible with biblical faith.

But the narrative has serious problems, and we need to name them before we go any further.

First, it confuses functional holism with ontological monism. This is perhaps the most important distinction in the entire debate, and it is the distinction that John W. Cooper has pressed most forcefully. Functional holism says that body and soul work together as a unified whole in normal human life. The physical and the spiritual are deeply integrated. You don’t have a body on one side and a soul on the other, operating independently like two machines bolted together. No—they function as one. Substance dualists affirm this wholeheartedly.⁵

Ontological monism, on the other hand, makes a much stronger claim: not just that body and soul function together, but that there is no soul. There is only one kind of stuff—physical stuff—and what we call “the soul” is simply a way of talking about certain complex functions of that physical stuff. Cooper has shown, rigorously and repeatedly, that the first claim (functional holism) does not entail the second (ontological monism).⁶ You can affirm that body and soul work together in deep unity and still hold that the soul is a real, immaterial substance that can, by God’s power, exist apart from the body. That is precisely what the Christian tradition has affirmed for two millennia.

The physicalist narrative slides from “the Bible teaches holism” to “the Bible teaches monism” as though these are the same claim. They are not. And the difference between them is enormous.

Second, the “Hebrew versus Greek” dichotomy is itself a false dichotomy. Cooper has addressed this with particular care. The suggestion that any belief in a separable soul must be a Greek import does not hold up historically or exegetically. Belief in the survival of personal identity after death is found across cultures worldwide—not just in Greece. It appears in ancient Near Eastern thought, in African and Asian traditions, and in the commonsense experience of virtually every human society ever studied.⁷ Even the Old Testament itself, as we will see in Chapters 5 through 9, contains narratives and teachings that presuppose the separability of the soul from the body—narratives like Rachel’s soul departing as she died (Gen. 35:18), the child’s soul returning to his body at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 17:21–22), and the spirit returning to God who gave it (Eccl. 12:7). These are not Greek ideas imposed on Hebrew texts. They are Hebrew ideas, embedded in Hebrew narratives, written long before Plato was born.

Third, the physicalist framing systematically ignores or minimizes biblical evidence for dualism. This is the problem that this entire book is designed to address, and it is nowhere more visible than in Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes. As we will document in Chapter 4, Fudge’s treatment of human nature draws almost exclusively on monist-leaning scholars and ignores the substantial body of dualist biblical scholarship entirely.⁸ He treats words like nephesh and ruach as though their only possible meaning is “the whole person” or “life-force,” when in fact these terms have a wide semantic range that includes reference to the immaterial self. The same pattern appears in Green, Murphy, and other physicalist writers: evidence that supports dualism is either explained away or simply not discussed.

This matters because definitions are not neutral. When a physicalist defines “soul” as “just a word for the whole person,” that definition has already decided the debate before any exegetical work begins. If “soul” cannot mean an immaterial substance by definition, then of course no passage of Scripture will teach that the soul is an immaterial substance. The conclusion has been hidden in the premise.

So let us do something different. Let us define these terms honestly and openly, with all their richness and complexity, and then go to the text of Scripture to see which definition best fits the evidence.

C. The Dualist Response: Definitions, Distinctions, and What Is at Stake

Defining Substance Dualism

Substance dualism is the view that a human being is composed of two distinct but deeply related substances: a material body and an immaterial soul (or spirit).⁹ The body is the physical organism—bones, blood, brain, sinews, skin. The soul is the immaterial core of the person—the seat of consciousness, thought, will, moral agency, and personal identity. In normal human life, body and soul function together in deep, seamless unity. You do not experience yourself as a soul riding around in a body-machine. You experience yourself as a single, integrated person. That is because God designed body and soul to work together. They are meant for each other.

But—and this is the critical point—the soul can exist apart from the body. Not because the soul is naturally immortal in the Platonic sense. Not because the soul is somehow better than the body or wants to escape from it. The soul can exist apart from the body because God sustains it. God created the soul, God maintains the soul in existence, and God can, if He chooses, keep the soul in existence even when the body dies and decays. The soul’s continued existence after death is not a property of the soul itself—it is an act of God’s sustaining power.¹⁰

This is an absolutely essential distinction, because one of the most common objections to substance dualism is that it smuggles in the Platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul. It does not. The Platonic view says the soul is inherently indestructible—it cannot not exist, because that is its nature. The Christian dualist view says something very different: the soul is created, contingent, and dependent on God for every moment of its existence. God can destroy the soul if He chooses. Jesus said exactly this: “Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28, NKJV).¹¹ If the soul were inherently immortal, Jesus’ warning would be empty. The fact that God can destroy the soul means the soul is not indestructible by nature. Its existence depends entirely on God’s will.

This is why substance dualism and conditional immortality fit together so naturally. CI says that immortality is a gift, not a birthright—a gift given only to those who are in Christ (1 Tim. 6:16; 2 Tim. 1:10). Substance dualism says the soul is real but not self-sustaining—it exists only as long as God wills it to exist. Put them together and you get a powerful, coherent picture: human beings are body and soul, created by God, sustained by God, and ultimately dependent on God for their continued existence. Those who receive eternal life in Christ will live forever, body and soul reunited in the resurrection. Those who finally and irrevocably reject God will be destroyed, body and soul, in the second death. That is the position of this book.

I should also say clearly what substance dualism is not. It is not Cartesian dualism in the popular sense—the idea that the body is a machine and the soul is a ghost riding inside it. René Descartes did hold a form of substance dualism, but his specific model of mind-body interaction has been widely criticized, and rightly so. The substance dualism defended in this book is not tied to Descartes’s particular philosophical framework.¹² It is not Platonic dualism either—it does not teach that the body is a prison or that matter is evil. The body is good. God created it. God pronounced it good. And God will raise it from the dead. The substance dualist treasures the body precisely because the body is half of what it means to be human.

Cooper coined a term for this view that I find very helpful: holistic dualism.¹³ Holistic, because body and soul function together as a deep, integrated unity. Dualistic, because that unity is composed of two genuinely distinct substances. Cooper argues that this is the view actually taught by the Bible: not monism, not Platonic dualism, but a holistic dualism in which the whole person is body-and-soul in life, and the soul can be sustained by God through death until the resurrection reunites body and soul once more. I think Cooper is right, and much of this book is an extended argument for that conclusion.

Defining Christian Physicalism

Christian physicalism is the view that a human being is entirely physical. There is no immaterial soul, no separate spiritual substance that exists alongside the body. What we call the “soul” or “spirit” or “mind” is either identical with certain functions of the brain, or it “emerges” from the complexity of the brain’s physical processes, but it is not a separate thing. When the body dies, the person ceases to exist entirely—unless and until God raises the body at the resurrection.¹⁴

Now, Christian physicalists are not atheists. They are not saying that the physical is all there is in the universe. They believe in God, in angels, in the Holy Spirit. But they believe that human beings, specifically, are entirely physical creatures. There is no immaterial component of human nature that can be separated from the body and continue to exist on its own. The person is the body.

Christian physicalism comes in several varieties, and it is important to distinguish them. Here are the most prominent.

Nonreductive physicalism is the view most associated with Nancey Murphy. Murphy argues that human beings are entirely physical organisms, but that the complex functions of the brain—consciousness, morality, spiritual experience—are “higher-level” properties that cannot simply be reduced to the chemistry of neurons. They emerge from the physical and depend on the physical, but they are not identical with the underlying physics in any straightforward way. Murphy calls this “nonreductive” because it refuses to reduce the mind to mere brain chemistry—but she insists that it is still physicalism, because these higher-level properties are properties of a wholly physical organism. There is no extra, nonphysical “ingredient.”¹⁵ Murphy has explicitly argued for what she calls “ontological reductionism”—the claim that as you move up the hierarchy of complexity, no new metaphysical ingredients need to be added.¹⁶

The constitution view is associated with Kevin Corcoran and, in a somewhat different form, with the late philosopher Lynne Rudder Baker. On this view, a human person is “constituted by” a body the way a statue is constituted by a lump of bronze. The statue is not identical to the bronze—you can melt the bronze and destroy the statue without destroying the bronze—but the statue has no existence apart from some physical material constituting it. Similarly, Corcoran argues, a human person is constituted by a human body but is not strictly identical to it. The person has properties (like the capacity for a first-person perspective) that the mere body does not have. Still, the person cannot exist without some body. There is no immaterial soul.¹⁷

Joel Green’s neuro-hermeneutic approach is somewhat different again. Green is a New Testament scholar, not a philosopher, and his approach is to argue that the exegetical task must be carried out “with the neurosciences fully in view.”¹⁸ He contends that neuroscience demonstrates such a tight link between brain activity and mental states that the notion of a separable soul is no longer tenable. He then reads the biblical evidence through this lens, arguing that Scripture, properly understood, does not teach a separable soul or a conscious intermediate state. Green is open to any anthropological model in which embodiment is essential for—but not simply reducible to—personal existence.

There are other varieties too: Warren Brown and Brad Strawn’s neuroscience-based physicalism, Philip Clayton’s emergent monism, John Polkinghorne’s psychophysical monism, and N. T. Wright’s somewhat enigmatic endorsement of ontological monism despite his affirmation of the intermediate state.¹⁹ These views differ from one another in important ways, but they share a common core claim: there is no immaterial soul that can exist apart from the body.

That shared claim is the one this book challenges.

It is worth pausing to appreciate just how remarkable this shared claim is. Despite the considerable disagreements among physicalist thinkers—over whether mental properties are reducible or irreducible, over whether the constitution relation is identity or something weaker, over whether neuroscience is determinative or merely suggestive—they all converge on this one point: when the body dies, there is nothing left. No immaterial self persists. No soul goes anywhere. The person, in their totality, ceases to exist. This is an astonishing claim, historically speaking. It contradicts the explicit teaching of virtually every Christian creed, confession, and catechism ever written. It contradicts the commonsense experience of nearly every human culture. And it contradicts, as we will argue, the plain teaching of Scripture. Yet it is presented by its advocates not as a radical innovation but as a return to biblical authenticity. That framing deserves careful scrutiny, and it will receive it throughout this book.

I should also note one more variety of physicalism that does not always go by that name but effectively functions the same way: soul sleep. Some Christians, particularly in the Adventist tradition and among some conditionalists, hold that the soul exists but is unconscious between death and resurrection. This is not strictly physicalism, since it affirms the existence of a soul. But functionally, it produces the same result as physicalism for the issues we are discussing. If the soul is utterly unconscious, it cannot be “with Christ” in any experiential sense. It cannot encounter God, hear the gospel, or respond in faith. For purposes of the intermediate state, pastoral care, and the postmortem opportunity, soul sleep and physicalism produce essentially the same outcome. We will not treat soul sleep as a separate view in this book, but the reader should be aware that the arguments we make against physicalism’s handling of the intermediate state apply to soul sleep as well.⁵⁷

The Key Scholars

Before we go further, it may help to know who the major voices are on each side of this debate. If you are new to this conversation, these are the names you will encounter most often in this book and in the broader literature.

On the substance dualist side, the most important voice for our purposes is John W. Cooper. Cooper is a Reformed philosopher and theologian whose book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate is, in my judgment, the single most important work of biblical anthropology written in the last fifty years.²⁰ Cooper makes the case that the Bible teaches both functional holism and the separability of the person from the body at death—what he calls “holistic dualism.” His work is exegetically rigorous, philosophically careful, and theologically rich. He also contributed a critical chapter to the volume Christian Physicalism?, arguing that the intermediate state is fatal to all forms of physicalism.²¹ We will draw on Cooper extensively throughout this book.

J. P. Moreland is a philosopher at Talbot School of Theology who has done more than perhaps anyone else to make the philosophical case for substance dualism accessible to a broad Christian audience. His book The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters is a masterful popular-level defense, and his more technical work with Scott Rae in Body & Soul and with Brandon Rickabaugh in The Substance of Consciousness provides the philosophical depth.²² Moreland has argued powerfully that people do not need to be taught to be dualists—even young children naturally distinguish between minds and bodies. It is physicalism, not dualism, that requires extensive philosophical coaching.

Richard Swinburne, the Oxford philosopher, has provided one of the most rigorous philosophical defenses of substance dualism in the analytic tradition. His The Evolution of the Soul and Are We Bodies or Souls? are landmark works, though they are more technical than the average reader will want to tackle.²³

Brandon Rickabaugh, along with Moreland, has provided a comprehensive defense in The Substance of Consciousness, which engages the latest neuroscience and philosophy of mind literature while arguing that consciousness cannot be explained in purely physical terms.²⁴

Joshua Farris has contributed a specifically theological defense of substance dualism in The Soul of Theological Anthropology: A Cartesian Exploration and in his edited volume The Creation of Self. Farris is among the few contemporary theologians to offer a constructive theological case for a Cartesian-style dualism grounded in both Scripture and Christian doctrine.²⁵

On the physicalist side, the names we will encounter most often are Nancey Murphy, Joel Green, Kevin Corcoran, and Lynne Rudder Baker—all of whom we have already introduced. In addition, Warren Brown and Brad Strawn have argued that the physical nature of human life should reshape how we think about spiritual formation and the life of the church.²⁶ And of course, Edward Fudge himself, whose The Fire That Consumes is the work this book is responding to, operates within a physicalist anthropological framework—though, as we will show in Chapter 4, he rarely uses the word “physicalism” directly.

Knowing these names matters because ideas do not float in thin air. They come from real people making real arguments. As we engage those arguments throughout this book, we will always try to engage the strongest version of each position, represented by its most capable defenders.

What Is at Stake: The Intermediate State

Now we come to the part of this chapter that matters most. Definitions are important, but definitions only matter because of what they mean—what they imply, what they require, what they rule out. So what exactly is at stake in the debate between substance dualism and Christian physicalism?

The answer is: quite a lot. More than most people realize.

Start with the intermediate state. This is the period between a person’s death and the final resurrection. What happens during that time? Where is the person? Are they conscious? Are they with God? Or do they simply cease to exist, suspended in nothingness until God re-creates them at the end of the age?

For the substance dualist, the answer is clear. When a believer dies, their body goes into the grave, but their soul goes to be with Christ. Paul says it plainly: “to be absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Jesus told the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). The souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are conscious, crying out to God, asking how long until justice comes. They are aware. They are present. They are in relationship with God. The intermediate state, on the dualist view, is a real state of conscious existence.²⁷

For the physicalist, this is an enormous problem. If there is no soul that can exist apart from the body, then what exists between death and resurrection? The person’s body is in the grave, decaying. If the person is the body, then the person simply does not exist during that interval. There is no “them” to be with Christ or anywhere else.

Physicalists have attempted several workarounds. Some, like John Polkinghorne, have proposed that God stores an “information-bearing pattern” of the person and then uses it to reconstruct the person at the resurrection.²⁸ Others have suggested that the person passes directly into a timeless eternity at death, so there is no intermediate state from the person’s perspective.²⁹ Still others, like Baker, have proposed that God provides a new intermediate body at death—essentially a second resurrection before the final resurrection.³⁰ And some physicalists have proposed the fissioning model, in which the body somehow “buds” or divides at death, with one part becoming the corpse and the other continuing the person’s existence.³¹

Cooper has examined each of these proposals carefully, and his conclusion is devastating: none of them can adequately account for the biblical data. The information-pattern view reduces the person to a set of data points. The timeless-eternity view contradicts the biblical narrative, which depicts the intermediate state as occurring within the flow of history, not outside of time. The double-resurrection view has no scriptural support and creates more problems than it solves. And the fissioning model relies on a biological miracle so exotic that it undermines the very scientific respectability that physicalism claims for itself.³²

The simplest and most natural reading of the biblical evidence is the dualist one: when a person dies, the body goes into the ground and the soul goes to be with God (or, for the unsaved, to a conscious state of waiting in Hades). The person is diminished—death is a real loss, a tearing apart of what God designed to be unified—but the person is not destroyed. They continue to exist, sustained by God’s power, awaiting the resurrection when body and soul will be reunited. This is what the church has believed, taught, confessed, and preached for two thousand years. Physicalism cannot reproduce it.

Let me put this as plainly as I can. The intermediate state is not an optional add-on to Christian theology. It is woven into the fabric of the New Testament’s teaching about what happens after death. Jesus teaches it. Paul teaches it. The author of Revelation depicts it. The Apostles’ Creed implies it when it says Christ “descended into hell.” The entire structure of Christian eschatology—death, then conscious existence with God, then final resurrection, then eternal life—depends on the reality of the intermediate state. Remove it, and you do not get a simplified eschatology. You get a different religion. You get a religion in which your grandmother is not with Jesus right now, in which the martyrs under the altar are not crying out for justice, and in which Paul’s desire to “depart and be with Christ” (Phil. 1:23) would be a desire for non-existence rather than for fellowship with his Lord. That is not the faith the apostles preached.

And the intermediate state, as Cooper has argued more forcefully than anyone in recent scholarship, logically requires dualism. If a person exists consciously between death and resurrection, and the body is in the grave, then some part of the person must exist without the body. Call it what you will—soul, spirit, the immaterial self—something non-bodily must persist. That is what dualism means, in its most basic form. Any anthropology that denies this possibility is simply incompatible with what Scripture teaches about the dead.⁵³

What Is at Stake: Personal Identity at the Resurrection

The second major thing at stake is personal identity. And this one cuts even deeper.

Here is the question: When God raises the dead on the last day, how do we know that the person who stands before God is really the same person who lived and died? What makes the resurrected you you, and not a very convincing copy?

For the substance dualist, the answer is straightforward. The soul is the locus of personal identity. It endures continuously as the self-same entity throughout life, through death, through the intermediate state, and into the resurrection. Even if your body changes radically—as it does over the course of a lifetime—you remain the same person because your soul remains the same. At the resurrection, God reunites your soul with a glorified body, and you—the very same you who lived and died—stand before God in fullness of being once again.³³

For the physicalist, personal identity is a serious and perhaps unsolvable problem. If the person is the body, and the body is destroyed at death, then the person no longer exists. At the resurrection, God must somehow recreate or reconstruct the person. But if the “resurrected person” is a new construction by God—however precise, however detailed—how can we be sure it is really the same person and not merely a replica?³⁴

Think about it this way. Imagine that a master sculptor creates a beautiful statue, and then the statue is destroyed. Another sculptor, using the original plans, creates an exact duplicate. Is it the same statue? Of course not. It is a copy. An excellent copy, but a copy nonetheless. If the second sculptor created two copies, which one would be the original? Neither. Both would be replicas.

This is the problem of multiple replication, and it haunts every physicalist account of the resurrection. Cooper has pressed this point with great force: if personal identity is grounded in the body’s characteristics rather than in an enduring soul, then there is nothing in principle preventing God (or an evil genius, to use the thought experiment) from creating multiple copies of the same person. Each copy would have an equally strong claim to being the original. But that is logically impossible—you cannot be two people at once. Something has gone wrong.³⁵

The dualist does not face this problem. The soul is not a pattern that can be copied. It is a unique, non-repeatable substance. There can only be one of you, because there is only one soul that is you. The soul is the thread of continuity that runs from your first moment of existence through death and resurrection and into eternity. Without it, personal identity at the resurrection is at best a hope, not a guarantee.

Consider what is at stake here in personal, existential terms. Paul wrote to the Corinthians about his own hope of resurrection. He wrote about his desire to be “further clothed” with a resurrection body (2 Cor. 5:4). He wrote about the confidence that “to be absent from the body” is “to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). Notice the pronouns. Paul expected to be absent from the body. Paul expected to be present with the Lord. Paul expected to be further clothed. There is a continuous “I” running through the whole sequence: the “I” who now lives in a mortal body, the “I” who will be absent from the body at death, and the “I” who will receive a resurrection body at the end. The same person, all the way through. That continuity of the “I” is exactly what substance dualism provides and exactly what physicalism struggles to account for.

Some physicalist writers, particularly those working in the four-dimensionalist tradition, have suggested that strict numerical personal identity is not what matters. What matters, they say, is psychological continuity—the connection of memories, personality traits, and dispositions between the earthly person and the resurrected person. But as the contributors to Christian Physicalism? have argued, this weakened account of identity is deeply troubling for the Christian hope. We do not want merely psychological continuity with a future person who resembles us. We want to be that person. We want the person who stands before God at the resurrection to be the very same person who trusted Christ on earth, who loved and grieved and prayed. Anything less is not resurrection. It is replacement.⁵⁴

What Is at Stake: Pastoral Care and the Grieving

I have been speaking in the language of philosophy and theology. Let me bring this down to earth for a moment.

Imagine you are a pastor. A young mother in your congregation has just lost her three-year-old daughter to leukemia. She comes to you, broken, barely able to speak, and she asks the question that every grieving parent asks: “Where is my baby? Is she okay?”

What do you say?

If you are a substance dualist, you can say what the church has always said: “Your daughter is with Jesus. Right now. She is safe. She is loved. She is in His arms. And one day, when He comes back, He will raise her body from the dead, and you will hold her again.” You can say this because you believe the soul is real, and that the moment that little girl died, her soul was carried into the presence of Christ. She is not gone. She is not in nothingness. She is with the Lord.

If you are a physicalist, you have a much harder task. Strictly speaking, on the physicalist view, the little girl no longer exists. She will not exist again until the resurrection. You can tell the mother that God will raise her daughter—and you believe that—but you cannot honestly tell her that her daughter is somewhere right now, safe in God’s care. On the physicalist view, there is no “her” to be anywhere. There is only the hope that God will one day reconstruct the girl from the information pattern He has preserved.³⁶

I am not saying physicalists do not care about grieving people. Of course they do. And I am not saying that the pastoral implications of a view are the final test of its truth—truth is truth whether it comforts us or not. But I am saying that the pastoral implications matter, and they deserve to be acknowledged honestly. The Christian church has, for twenty centuries, comforted the dying and the bereaved with the promise that the souls of the departed are with God. Physicalism takes that comfort away. It replaces the presence of the departed with an absence. And it owes the grieving a better explanation of why that absence is acceptable.

Cooper is characteristically forthright about this. He points out that the intermediate state is not some obscure, marginal theme in Christian history. It was a daily concern of ordinary believers for centuries. It shows up in the church’s creeds, liturgies, hymns, and funeral rites. It is depicted in Dante and in the medieval theologians and in the catechisms of nearly every branch of Christianity. The claim that it is an unbiblical import from Greek philosophy would have struck virtually every Christian before the twentieth century as incomprehensible.³⁷

What Is at Stake: The Postmortem Opportunity

There is one more stake in this debate that I want to name, even though we will treat it fully in Chapter 29. It concerns the postmortem opportunity—the possibility that God offers salvation to those who did not have an adequate chance to hear and respond to the gospel during their earthly lives.

I believe in the postmortem opportunity. I believe it is taught in Scripture (1 Pet. 3:18–20; 4:6), implied by the Descensus clause of the Apostles’ Creed, and demanded by the logic of a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly loving. I believe the last chance to respond to Christ comes at or during the final judgment.³⁸

I should be fair here: substance dualism is not strictly necessary for the postmortem opportunity. Even on a physicalist view, a person could encounter God at the final judgment, when their body is raised. So the physicalist can accommodate some version of a postmortem encounter with God. But substance dualism provides a much richer and more natural framework for it. If the soul is conscious between death and resurrection, then there is a sustained period in which the person can encounter God, hear the gospel, wrestle with the truth, and respond in faith. The intermediate state becomes the context in which the postmortem opportunity unfolds. Without the soul, without a conscious intermediate state, the postmortem opportunity shrinks to a single moment at the resurrection—a flash of encounter with no room for process, growth, or genuine deliberation.

I do not build the case for the postmortem opportunity on substance dualism alone. The biblical and theological arguments stand on their own. But substance dualism strengthens that case considerably by providing the metaphysical space in which the opportunity can naturally occur.³⁹

What Is at Stake: The Incarnation and Christology

There is one more area where the physicalism-dualism debate touches something central to the Christian faith, and it does not get nearly enough attention. It concerns Christ himself.

On Holy Saturday—the day between Good Friday and Easter—Jesus was dead. His body lay in the tomb. But was He, as a person, simply non-existent during that time? The Apostles’ Creed says He “descended into hell” (or “to the dead”). Peter says He went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison (1 Pet. 3:19). Something was happening between the cross and the empty tomb. Jesus was not just lying inert. He was active. He was going somewhere and doing something.

Jason McMartin, in a careful study in the volume Christian Physicalism?, has shown that physicalist models of resurrection have enormous difficulty accounting for Christ’s intermediate state.⁴⁰ If Jesus is entirely physical, and his body was in the tomb, then on the physicalist view, Jesus simply did not exist on Holy Saturday. But this creates serious christological problems. Was the Son of God temporarily non-existent? Did the second person of the Trinity cease to be incarnate? If the hypostatic union—the union of divine and human natures in one person—was broken by death, what are the implications for our salvation?

The dualist has no such difficulty. Jesus’ body was in the tomb. His human soul was active, descending to the dead, proclaiming victory. The hypostatic union was not broken, because the divine Son continued to sustain the human soul even when separated from the human body. On Easter morning, soul and body were reunited in the resurrection. This is the traditional reading, and it makes coherent sense of the biblical evidence.⁴¹

The physicalist must either deny that Jesus did anything on Holy Saturday (which conflicts with 1 Pet. 3:18–20 and the creedal tradition), or invent some alternative explanation (a temporary body, an entry into timelessness, a divine exception) that has no scriptural support. The christological difficulty of physicalism deserves far more attention than it has received.

What Is at Stake: The Tradition of the Church

Finally, we should be honest about what is at stake historically. The substance dualist position—or something very close to it—has been the dominant view of the Christian church from the earliest centuries to the present day. The creeds affirm the resurrection of the body, which presupposes that the person who rises is the same person who died. The church’s liturgies and funeral rites speak of the souls of the departed being with God. The medieval theologians, the Reformers, the Catholic catechism, and the great Protestant confessions all assume that the human person is composed of body and soul.⁴²

Cooper has noted this with particular force. Bodily monism did not gain traction in Christian theology until the twentieth century, when the influence of scientific naturalism and the so-called “Hebrew versus Greek” narrative made it seem plausible.⁴³ Before that, the claim that human beings have immaterial souls was simply what Christians believed. Not because they had read Plato, but because they had read Scripture. Because they took seriously the narratives of departing souls and conscious dead and spirits in God’s presence. Because they sang hymns about being with Christ when they died. Because the whole structure of Christian hope—from death through the intermediate state to the resurrection—only makes sense if you are more than your body.

This does not mean the tradition cannot be wrong. It can. Traditions should be tested against Scripture, and we should follow the evidence wherever it leads. But when a view has been held by virtually the entire church for virtually its entire history, the burden of proof lies heavily on those who would overturn it. Christian physicalism has not met that burden. It has offered philosophical models and neuroscientific observations, but it has not provided a compelling alternative reading of the biblical evidence. As we will see in Chapters 5 through 18, the exegetical case for substance dualism is far stronger than its critics have acknowledged.

D. Counter-Objections: Answering the Strongest Criticisms

Having laid out the definitions and the stakes, I want to anticipate and address the strongest objections that a Christian physicalist might raise against what I have said in this chapter.

“Substance Dualism Is Just Greek Philosophy Dressed Up as Christianity”

This is the most common objection, and we have already begun to address it. But it deserves a fuller response.

The claim is that the idea of an immaterial soul is a Greek—specifically Platonic—import into Christian theology, not something the Bible actually teaches. The early church fathers absorbed Platonic ideas about the soul, and these ideas became embedded in Christian doctrine through historical accident rather than biblical fidelity.

The problem with this claim is that it proves too much. As Cooper has shown, belief in the survival of personal identity after death is not unique to Greek thought. It is found across cultures worldwide, in peoples who never had any contact with Greek philosophy.⁴⁴ The Hebrew Scriptures contain their own indigenous narratives of departing and returning souls (Gen. 35:18; 1 Kings 17:21–22), of conscious dead (1 Sam. 28), and of the spirit returning to God at death (Eccl. 12:7). These are not Platonic ideas. They are biblical ideas. Furthermore, the dualism of the Bible is fundamentally different from Platonic dualism. Plato taught that the body is a prison and the soul longs to escape. The Bible teaches that the body is good, created by God, and destined for resurrection. Platonic dualism is anti-body. Biblical dualism is pro-body. Lumping them together is a failure of careful thinking.⁴⁵

Moreland has also pointed out that people do not need to be taught to be dualists. Even small children naturally distinguish between mental states and physical objects, between the mind and the body. The universality of dualist intuitions across ages and cultures suggests that dualism is not a philosophical invention but a recognition of something real about human experience.⁴⁶ Jaegwon Kim, himself not a dualist, has acknowledged that something like body-soul duality is “common lore shared across most cultures and religious traditions.”⁴⁷

“Neuroscience Has Shown That the Mind Is the Brain”

A physicalist might respond by pointing to neuroscience. We know that damage to the brain affects consciousness. We know that chemical changes in the brain affect mood, personality, and even religious experience. Does this not show that the mind just is the brain?

No. It shows that the mind and the brain are deeply connected, deeply integrated, deeply interdependent in normal human life. But correlation is not identity. The fact that brain states affect mental states does not prove that brain states are mental states. A television set mediates the signal from a broadcast station, and if you damage the television, the picture is distorted. But that does not mean the broadcast is the television.⁴⁸

Substance dualists have always affirmed that the soul and the body are deeply interconnected during earthly life. This is what functional holism means. When the brain is damaged, the soul’s ability to express itself through the body is impaired—just as a skilled pianist cannot play well on a broken piano. The problem is in the instrument, not in the musician. Neuroscience gives us remarkable information about how the brain mediates consciousness, but it has not come close to showing that consciousness is brain activity and nothing more. Rickabaugh and Moreland have argued this point at length, demonstrating that consciousness has features—intentionality, first-person perspective, qualia (the subjective “what-it-is-like” quality of experience)—that resist physical explanation.⁴⁹

The neuroscience argument, when pressed, actually points in the opposite direction from what physicalists claim. The more we learn about the brain, the more we realize how vast the “explanatory gap” is between physical brain processes and conscious experience. No one has even begun to explain how electrochemical signals in neurons produce the subjective experience of seeing red, tasting chocolate, or feeling grief. This is what philosophers call the “hard problem of consciousness,” and it remains completely unsolved.⁵⁰ The substance dualist has an answer: consciousness is a property of the soul, not of the brain. The physicalist has no answer at all—only the hope that one will eventually be found.

“The Bible Does Not Teach a Philosophical Anthropology”

A more sophisticated physicalist might object that the Bible is not a philosophy textbook. It does not give us definitions of “soul,” “body,” or “spirit” in the way that a philosopher would. Therefore, we should not read substance dualism into the text.

This objection is half right. The Bible is indeed not a philosophy textbook. It does not give us the kind of precise, technical definitions that we find in Plato or Descartes or contemporary philosophy of mind. Cooper has acknowledged this very clearly: the Bible gives us no philosophical definitions of “ego,” “person,” “body,” “soul,” or “spirit.” It tells us nothing about what sorts of experiences are possible without bodies. It provides no data for a theory of organisms or a theory of mind-brain interaction.⁵¹

But here is what the Bible does do. It tells us that in God’s providence, human beings can exist in fellowship with Christ without earthly bodies. It tells us that the soul departs at death and can return. It tells us that the dead are conscious, aware, and in communication with God. It tells us that Jesus warned about the destruction of both soul and body in hell—implying that they are distinguishable things. And any philosophical anthropology that is compatible with these biblical affirmations must be a form of dualism. That is what Cooper means by “generic dualism”—not a detailed philosophical system, but a basic picture of human nature that allows for the possibility of personal existence without the earthly body.⁵²

The Bible does not teach substance dualism as a philosophical system. But it teaches a view of human nature that is only compatible with substance dualism. And that, for a book that takes Scripture as its ultimate authority, is quite enough.

“You Are Letting Theology Drive Your Exegesis”

Someone might say: “You have decided in advance that substance dualism is true, and now you are reading the Bible through that lens. That is eisegesis, not exegesis.”

Fair enough. Let me turn the charge around. Every interpreter brings presuppositions to the text. The physicalist brings the assumption that neuroscience has settled the question and that any talk of a separable soul must be metaphorical or culturally conditioned. The dualist brings the assumption that the biblical narratives of departing souls and conscious dead should be taken at face value unless there is strong reason not to.

The question is not whether we have presuppositions. The question is: which presuppositions lead to a more faithful reading of the full biblical witness?

I submit that the answer will become clear in Chapters 5 through 18, where we will walk through over seventy passages of Scripture that bear on the body-soul question. We will look at creation narratives, departure narratives, psalms of the interior life, prophetic visions, the teachings of Jesus, the witness of Paul, and the apocalyptic imagery of Revelation. We will examine every passage fairly, note what it says and what it does not say, and ask which reading—dualist or physicalist—does the most justice to the text. I believe the cumulative evidence will speak for itself.

“Substance Dualism Leads to Neglect of the Body and the Material World”

A final objection deserves a word. Some physicalists argue that substance dualism, by distinguishing the soul from the body, inevitably leads to a devaluation of the physical world. If the “real you” is an immaterial soul, why care about the body? Why care about physical justice, hunger, sickness, the environment? Does dualism not foster the kind of world-denying, hyper-spiritual Christianity that retreats from creation rather than stewarding it?⁵⁵

The objection sounds serious. But it confuses substance dualism with Gnostic dualism. The Gnostic says the body is evil and the material world is a prison. The substance dualist says the body is good, created by God, and destined for resurrection glory. There is nothing in substance dualism that devalues the body. If anything, the dualist takes the body more seriously than the physicalist, because the dualist holds that the body is not just a lump of matter but a divinely designed partner for the soul—a partner so important that God will raise it from the dead and reunite it with the soul for all eternity. You do not go to the trouble of resurrecting something you consider unimportant.

Cooper has addressed this objection at length and found it wanting. He points out that anthropological dualism does not entail functional dualism—the compartmentalization of life into “spiritual” and “physical” categories. Many of history’s greatest advocates for the poor, for physical healing, and for the goodness of creation have been committed substance dualists. Meanwhile, monism offers no guarantee of a proper holistic ethic—Spinoza, Marx, Freud, and Skinner all held monistic anthropologies and ended up isolating and overemphasizing particular aspects of human existence while reducing others.⁵⁶ The connection between anthropological dualism and practical neglect of the body is asserted far more often than it is demonstrated. And the biblical record simply does not support it. The dualist prophets of Israel cared deeply about justice. The dualist apostles cared deeply about feeding the hungry and healing the sick. Jesus himself, who clearly taught the distinction between soul and body (Matt. 10:28), spent his ministry touching lepers, feeding crowds, and raising the dead.

The worry behind this objection is legitimate: Christians should never treat the body as unimportant or the material world as beneath their concern. But substance dualism does not lead there. What leads there is Gnosticism, and the two should not be confused.

But the larger work lies ahead. For now, what this chapter has established is the framework within which that work will take place. We have defined our terms. We have identified the major scholars. We have named the stakes: the intermediate state, personal identity at the resurrection, pastoral care for the grieving, the postmortem opportunity, the christological implications for Holy Saturday, and the weight of two thousand years of Christian tradition.

The stakes are not small. The questions are not trivial. And the answers matter—not just for our theology, but for the way we live, the way we grieve, the way we hope, and the way we die.

In the next chapter, we will turn to the man whose work made this book necessary—Edward Fudge. We will read his own words carefully and ask a simple but far-reaching question: Does Fudge teach physicalism? And if he does, what does that mean for the rest of his case?