Chapter 19

Fudge’s Redefinition of Soul, Spirit, and Person

A. Fudge’s Argument: The Language of Wholeness

Words matter. They are the currency of thought. When a theologian takes a word that Christians have used for two thousand years and quietly gives it a different meaning, the result is not clarity—it is confusion. And when the word in question is soul, the stakes could not be higher.

That is exactly what happens in Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes. Across the key anthropological sections of his landmark work, Fudge takes the Bible’s most important words for the inner life of a human being—nephesh, ruach, psyche, and pneuma—and systematically redefines them. He does not do this maliciously. He does not announce that he is changing the definitions. He simply uses the words in ways that strip them of any reference to an immaterial reality. And in doing so, he builds his entire case for conditional immortality on a foundation that most Christians in history would not recognize.

I want to be careful here. Fudge deserves a fair hearing, and I am determined to give him one. He is not the first scholar to argue that Hebrew anthropological terms are more flexible and multivalent than traditional theology assumed. That observation is correct, and we will acknowledge it throughout this chapter. The Hebrew language is rich, complex, and often surprising in its range of meaning. What I want to show, however, is that Fudge does not merely note the flexibility of these terms. He flattens them. He takes words that carry a rich range of meanings—from “throat” to “life” to “self” to “immaterial person”—and insists that they never, in any context, refer to an immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body. That is not careful lexicography. That is a theological decision disguised as a linguistic observation.

So what exactly does Fudge say? His most concentrated discussion of human nature appears on pages 25 through 30 of The Fire That Consumes, in a section titled “Some Key Biblical Words.”¹ Here Fudge lays the anthropological groundwork for everything that follows. He begins by noting that man is described as a “soul” (Hebrew: nephesh; Greek: psyche) over 150 times in the Old Testament and about sixteen times in the New.² He then observes that English translators have rendered nephesh forty-five different ways—an impressive statistic meant to show that the word is far more flexible than the simple English word “soul” suggests.

So far, so good. No one disputes that nephesh has a wide semantic range. The question is what Fudge does with that observation. And what he does is tell the reader that “soul” is simply the most comprehensive term for “man in his wholeness.”³ Its meanings, he says, range from “neck,” “life,” “self,” and “person” to what seems the opposite of life: “corpse.”⁴ He quotes Hans Walter Wolff approvingly: the soul “is man himself viewed as a living creature.”⁵ He then turns to Wolff’s breakdown of Old Testament anthropological terms: soul speaks of “needy man,” flesh is “man in his infirmity,” spirit points to “man as he is empowered,” and heart signifies “reasonable man.”⁶

Notice the pattern. Every definition Fudge offers for these terms resolves into a description of the whole person seen from a particular angle. None of them point to an immaterial part of the person. The soul is “needy man”—not an immaterial self. The spirit is “man as he is empowered”—not a distinct immaterial substance. Every term is absorbed into the whole.

Fudge then brings in what might be his single most important anthropological source: A. T. Nikolainen. He quotes Nikolainen at length, and the quotation is worth pausing over. Nikolainen writes that “man is an indivisible whole,” and that each anthropological term—body, flesh and blood, soul, spirit, heart—“portrays a specific human characteristic, but they are not parts into which man may be divided.”⁷ Body is man as a concrete being. Soul is “the living human individual.” Spirit is “man as having his source in God.” Heart is “man as a whole in action.” The conclusion Nikolainen draws—and Fudge endorses—is that no part of the person can be separated from the whole. Man is not divisible into pieces. There is no “highest part” that can float away when the body dies.

The same flattening occurs when Fudge handles the Hebrew word ruach (which means “spirit,” “breath,” or “wind”). He notes that the Old Testament applies the same terms to both man and the animals—nephesh for soul-life, ruach for spirit-breath, and neshamah for spirit.⁸ The implication is clear: if animals have ruach and nephesh, these words cannot refer to an immaterial soul unique to human beings. Fudge also cites Jan Bremmer, who traces the body-soul dualism of later Judaism and the Christian church “directly to the influence of the Greeks.”⁹ In other words, if you think the Bible teaches that humans have an immaterial soul, you have been reading Plato into the text, not Moses.

For the New Testament, Fudge follows a similar path. He argues that the soul, for New Testament writers as well as Old Testament writers, generally stands for “the natural life of man … in his limitedness and humanity over against the divine possibilities and realities.”¹⁰ The Greek word psyche (soul) is treated as functionally equivalent to the Hebrew nephesh—not as an immaterial substance, but as the living person considered from the standpoint of vulnerability and need.

There you have it. Fudge’s anthropology, laid out in his own sources. The soul is the whole person. The spirit is the life-force. Neither is an immaterial substance. Neither survives the death of the body as a conscious entity. Human beings are indivisible wholes, and when the body dies, the whole person ceases to exist until the resurrection.

This is not a minor interpretive choice. This is the anthropological foundation on which Fudge’s entire eschatology rests. If there is no immaterial soul, there is no conscious intermediate state. If there is no conscious intermediate state, the dead simply do not exist between death and resurrection. And if the dead do not exist between death and resurrection, then every passage in Scripture that seems to teach a conscious intermediate state must be reinterpreted—or explained away.

B. Identifying Weaknesses: What Fudge Gets Wrong

I said at the outset that Fudge is not wrong to observe the wide semantic range of nephesh and ruach. He is absolutely right that these words do not always mean what the traditional English word “soul” suggests. Sometimes nephesh means “throat.” Sometimes it means “life.” Sometimes it means “person” or “self.” Sometimes it means “corpse.” All of that is well-established and not in dispute.

But there are several serious problems with what Fudge does with this data—problems that, when stacked together, amount to a fundamental distortion of the biblical picture.

Problem 1: Fudge treats semantic range as semantic restriction.

The fact that nephesh can mean “throat” or “life” or “person” does not mean it cannot mean “immaterial self.” A word with a wide semantic range can carry all of those meanings in different contexts. English provides an easy analogy. The word “heart” can mean the physical organ that pumps blood, or it can mean the center of a person’s emotional life (“she has a big heart”), or it can mean courage (“take heart”). No one would argue that because “heart” sometimes refers to a muscle, it can never refer to the emotional center of a person. That would be absurd. Yet this is precisely the kind of move Fudge makes with nephesh and ruach. He shows that the words have many meanings, and then concludes that they never mean “immaterial soul.”¹¹

This is a logical error. The wide range of meanings for a word does not eliminate any particular meaning. It simply means you have to pay attention to context. And when you pay attention to context—as we will see in Section C—there are passages where nephesh and ruach almost certainly refer to something more than the whole person or the breath of life.

Problem 2: Fudge selectively cites only holistic monist scholars.

This is one of the most telling weaknesses in Fudge’s treatment. In his anthropological sections, Fudge draws almost exclusively on scholars who share his holistic assumptions: Hans Walter Wolff, A. T. Nikolainen, and Jan Bremmer.¹² These are not obscure figures—they are respected scholars. But they represent one side of an active academic debate. The other side is virtually absent from Fudge’s discussion.

Where is Otto Kaiser, the Old Testament scholar who argued that nephesh is sometimes used to refer to deceased persons?¹³ Where is John W. Cooper, whose Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting provides the most thorough treatment of biblical anthropology from a dualist perspective?¹⁴ Where is Robert Gundry, whose study of Pauline anthropology concluded that soma (body) in Paul frequently implies a dualistic framework?¹⁵ Where are the dozens of scholars—evangelical and otherwise—who have argued that the biblical evidence points to some form of body-soul duality?

They are nowhere. Fudge does not engage them. He does not refute them. He does not even mention them. The reader is given the impression that the scholarly consensus is unanimous: the Bible teaches a holistic, indivisible view of human nature, and anyone who reads “soul” as “immaterial self” is importing Greek philosophy. That impression is simply false. The scholarly community is deeply divided on this question, and has been for decades.

Problem 3: Fudge conflates holism with monism.

This is a subtle but crucial error. Holism and monism are not the same thing. Holism says that human beings function as integrated wholes—body, soul, and spirit work together in a unified system. Substance dualists agree with this completely. The soul and body are not two independent machines strapped together. They are deeply, intimately integrated in life. A substance dualist can be a holist in the functional sense without being a monist in the ontological sense.¹⁶

Monism, on the other hand, says that a human being is only one kind of thing—physical matter organized in a certain way. There is no immaterial soul. There is no “part” that can exist apart from the body. When the body dies, the whole person ceases to exist.

Fudge slides from holism to monism without acknowledging the distinction. He argues that the Old Testament presents human beings as integrated wholes (true), and then concludes that there is no immaterial soul (a non sequitur). As Cooper puts it, the functional unity of a human being does not by itself tell you whether that unity is composed of one kind of stuff or two. Holism is about how the parts relate. Monism is about what the parts are. They are different questions, and they have different answers.¹⁷

Problem 4: Fudge ignores the biblical narratives about the dead.

This may be the most serious problem of all. Fudge spends considerable time analyzing individual Hebrew and Greek words, but he pays almost no attention to what the Bible actually describes happening when people die. And the biblical narratives paint a strikingly different picture from the one Fudge’s word studies suggest.

In the Old Testament, the dead exist in Sheol as conscious beings. Samuel is summoned from Sheol and speaks to Saul (1 Sam. 28:15–19). The kings of the nations rise up to greet the king of Babylon in Isaiah 14:9–10. Rachel’s nephesh departs from her body at death (Gen. 35:18). Elijah prays that the child’s nephesh would return to his body, and it does (1 Kings 17:21–22). These are not abstract theological statements. They are stories. They describe events. And they assume that something real—call it soul, spirit, self, person—continues to exist after the body dies.¹⁸

Fudge’s word-study approach cannot account for these narratives. If nephesh just means “the whole person” or “the life-force,” then what departs from Rachel’s body? What returns to the child at Elijah’s prayer? What rises up in Sheol to greet foreign kings? Fudge’s definitions leave these questions unanswered—or worse, unanswerable.

Problem 5: Fudge’s definitions create internal contradictions with his own proof texts.

Consider Matthew 10:28, which Fudge himself calls one of the most important texts for the case for conditional immortality: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”¹⁹ Fudge uses this verse to argue that God will destroy the wicked completely—soul and body, nothing left. And he is right that the verse teaches destruction.

But look at the logic of the verse. Jesus distinguishes two things: the body and the soul. He says that humans can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. On Fudge’s own definition, the soul is “the whole person” or “the life.” But humans can kill the whole person. That is what murder is. And humans can take a person’s life. That is what execution is. If “soul” means “whole person” or “life,” then Jesus’ statement that humans “cannot kill the soul” is simply false. The only way the verse makes sense is if “soul” refers to something that survives the death of the body—something humans cannot reach. An immaterial self. A substance dualist reads this verse easily. Fudge’s own definitions make it incoherent.²⁰

As we saw in Chapter 10, Fudge tries to resolve this tension by appealing to Alexander Sand, who reads psyche here as “the entire, actual life God originally gives to a person”—something deeper than mere physical existence.²¹ But that only pushes the problem back a step. If there is some deeper dimension of “life” that survives the body’s death, that is very close to what dualists have always meant by the soul. Fudge is caught between his definitions and his proof text.

C. The Dualist Response: What These Words Actually Mean—And Why It Matters

Now we come to the heart of the matter. If Fudge’s redefinitions are inadequate, what do these biblical terms actually mean? And does the evidence support the substance dualist reading?

I want to walk through each of the four key terms—nephesh, ruach, psyche, and pneuma—and show that while Fudge is right about their flexibility, he is wrong about their boundaries. Each of these words can, in the right context, refer to the immaterial self. And the contexts where they do so are precisely the contexts that matter most for the body-soul question.

1. Nephesh: More Than “Needy Man”

The Hebrew word nephesh (which can mean “soul,” “life,” “person,” “self,” “throat,” or even “corpse”) is the single most debated anthropological term in the Old Testament. Fudge is correct that it has a remarkably wide range. But he is wrong to insist that none of its uses refer to an immaterial self that can exist apart from the body.

Cooper provides the most balanced analysis available. He acknowledges up front that the majority of Old Testament scholars in the twentieth century have emphasized the holistic dimensions of nephesh. He grants that in many passages, nephesh functions as synecdoche—a part-for-whole expression where “my nephesh” simply means “I.”²² He agrees that nephesh can refer to the throat, to the breath, to the life-force, and to the person as a whole. None of this is in dispute.

But Cooper makes a point that Fudge never addresses. Even if we grant that nephesh and ruach do not typically function as technical terms for an “immaterial substance” in Old Testament usage, that observation is irrelevant to the question of whether the Israelites believed in the survival of the person after death. Why? Because the Israelites had another word for the dead who exist in Sheol: rephaim (“shades” or “departed ones”).²³

Think about that for a moment. Fudge argues that because nephesh and ruach do not clearly denote an immaterial soul, the Israelites did not believe in the survival of the person after death. But that conclusion does not follow. It would be like arguing that because English speakers do not typically use the word “heart” to refer to a disembodied ghost, English speakers do not believe in ghosts. The absence of a particular usage for a particular word tells you something about that word. It tells you nothing about what the people who used that word actually believed.

And what the Israelites actually believed is clear from the narratives. The rephaim in Sheol are not merely memories. They are not metaphors. They are persons. Samuel is recognized and speaks. The kings of the nations have personal identities and memories. The deceased are described with spatial location, consciousness, and personal continuity. Cooper drives the point home: the absolute continuity of personal identity beyond death is essential to the Old Testament picture.²⁴

Furthermore, there is at least one prominent Old Testament scholar who argues that nephesh is sometimes used to refer to the person who survives bodily death. Otto Kaiser, in his study of death and life in the Old Testament, concluded that nephesh can occasionally denote the disembodied person—the self that persists after the body has returned to dust.²⁵ Cooper notes that Kaiser cannot be accused of grinding a theological ax, since Kaiser himself denied belief in an intermediate state. He simply followed the textual evidence where it led.²⁶

The key passage here is Genesis 35:18, where Rachel is dying and the text says, “And so it was, as her nephesh was departing (for she died), that she called his name Ben-Oni.” The verb used here is yatsa—to go out, to depart. Rachel’s nephesh goes out from her body at the moment of death. On Fudge’s reading, this would mean “her life departed” or “she died”—a mere idiom. But the companion passage in 1 Kings 17:21–22 makes the idiomatic reading extremely difficult. There, Elijah prays over the dead child: “O Lord my God, I pray, let this child’s nephesh come back to him.” And the text says, “the nephesh of the child came back to him, and he revived.”²⁷

If nephesh is simply “life” in the abstract, it is strange to say it “came back” to the child. An abstract quality does not depart and return. But if nephesh here refers to the self—the immaterial person who left the body at death and returned to it at resuscitation—the passage reads naturally. The soul departed. The soul returned. The child revived.

Cooper observes that even those scholars who deny that nephesh refers to a subsistent soul in these passages must still account for the fact that something personal survives death and continues in Sheol. Whether you call it the nephesh, the ruach, or the rephaim, the result is the same: some sort of ontological duality. The person is separable from the earthly body. That conclusion, Cooper writes, is “inescapable.”²⁸

2. Ruach: More Than “Empowered Man”

The Hebrew word ruach (which means “spirit,” “wind,” or “breath”) receives similar treatment from Fudge. He emphasizes its connection to breath and wind. He notes that it refers to the Spirit of God more often than to the human spirit. And he concludes that ruach is essentially a vital force—the power of life that God gives to all living creatures and withdraws at death.²⁹

Cooper acknowledges most of these points. He agrees that ruach is often associated with the life-force or animating power. He agrees that it is used of animals as well as humans. He agrees that it is a gift from God, externally conferred, not generated by the body itself.³⁰

But Cooper insists—rightly—that the picture is more complex than Fudge admits. Ruach in humans, Cooper notes, “is not merely biological energy; it empowers humans to do whatever they were created to do.” The spirit can reason, deliberate, choose, will, rebel against God, hate one’s neighbor, be depressed or courageous, and err or lie. It is “the locus or source of all the higher subjective human capacities.”³¹

Here we run into an important question. If ruach is merely an impersonal life-force—a kind of divine electricity that flows through living creatures—why does it have personal qualities? Why can the spirit deliberate, rebel, choose, and lie? Impersonal forces do not deliberate. They do not rebel. They do not choose. The fact that Scripture attributes these intensely personal activities to the human ruach suggests that it is more than a generic animating principle. It is the person at the deepest level—the self that thinks, wills, and relates to God.

Consider Ecclesiastes 12:7, one of the most important verses for this discussion: “Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit (ruach) will return to God who gave it.” Fudge handles this verse by insisting that the ruach returning to God is simply the life-force being withdrawn—the same impersonal energy that animates all creatures.³² But as we saw in Chapter 6, this reading has serious problems. If the ruach that returns to God is impersonal, then it does not matter whose ruach it is. My spirit and your spirit would be indistinguishable once withdrawn from our bodies. But the whole point of the passage is that your dust returns to the earth and your spirit returns to God. The personal identity is maintained. The text assumes that the spirit that goes back to God is yours—not a generic energy packet, but something identifiably connected to you as a person.

Cooper makes the broader point with characteristic precision. Even if we cannot determine with certainty whether the Old Testament uses nephesh and ruach as technical terms for a surviving immaterial substance, that question is secondary. The primary question is what the Old Testament narratives actually describe. And what they describe is personal survival beyond bodily death. Whether the surviving entity is called nephesh, ruach, or simply rephaim, the result is the same: ontological duality.³³

3. Psyche: The New Testament Inheritance

When we move to the New Testament, the Greek word psyche (soul) picks up where nephesh left off—but with a significant development. By the time of the New Testament, Jewish literature had already been using psyche and pneuma (spirit) to refer to disembodied persons for centuries. The intertestamental literature—books like 1 Enoch, 2 Esdras, and the Wisdom of Solomon—repeatedly and unambiguously uses these terms to describe the dead who exist consciously in the intermediate state.³⁴

This is a development that Fudge almost entirely ignores. He wants to read New Testament psyche as functionally identical to Old Testament nephesh—just “the whole person” or “the life.” But by the first century, the word had acquired additional meanings. Cooper documents this carefully: in intertestamental Judaism, both nephesh/psyche and ruach/pneuma “are repeatedly and unambiguously employed to refer to the disembodied dead either in the intermediate or final state.”³⁵ The terms are used interchangeably in this context—they are synonyms for the surviving person.

This matters because the New Testament writers were not writing in a vacuum. They were writing in a Jewish context where these words had already come to carry a dualistic meaning. When Matthew records Jesus saying “fear Him who can destroy both psyche and soma in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28), he is writing in a world where psyche had already been used for centuries to refer to the disembodied dead. The idea that Matthew meant only “life” or “the whole person” requires us to assume that he ignored the way his contemporaries used the word—a word he himself uses in a context (destruction in Gehenna) that comes directly from intertestamental eschatology.³⁶

Cooper’s analysis of Matthew 10:28 is particularly devastating for the monist reading. He notes that the attempt to read psyche here as merely “the life-force” (as Fudge does, following Schweizer and others) simply does not work. For starters, synecdoche can be ruled out: each term cannot stand for the whole bodily person in this text, because whatever psyche is, it can exist before God without the body. Body and soul cannot both be referring to the same thing in different ways. Furthermore, if psyche is merely the life-force, then killing the body does kill the psyche—which contradicts what Jesus says. The Israelites did not believe that nephesh survived the death of the body (on the monist reading). But Matthew clearly assumes it can.³⁷

Revelation 6:9–11 provides another clear example. John sees “the souls (psychai) of those who had been slain for the word of God” under the altar in heaven. These souls are conscious. They cry out. They are given white robes and told to wait. They are not yet resurrected—Revelation 20:5–6 makes that clear. They are persons existing in the intermediate state, between death and resurrection, referred to explicitly as “souls.”³⁸ Cooper observes that whatever one makes of the symbolic details of Revelation’s apocalyptic imagery, the term “souls” here unambiguously refers to persons during the intermediate state—persons who are conscious, reactive, and awaiting bodily resurrection.

Fudge discusses Revelation 6:9–11 in his book, but he deflects the force of the passage by treating it as purely symbolic—apocalyptic imagery that should not be pressed for literal anthropological conclusions.³⁹ That is a fair hermeneutical caution in principle, but it proves too much. If we dismiss every intermediate-state passage as “merely symbolic,” we have immunized the monist position against any possible counter-evidence. At some point, the sheer weight of texts that depict conscious persons between death and resurrection becomes difficult to wave away as metaphor.

4. Pneuma: The Spirit as Person

The Greek word pneuma (spirit) receives the same flattening treatment from Fudge that ruach does: it is the breath, the life-force, the divine energy that animates the person but is not itself a personal entity. Once again, the New Testament evidence tells a different story.

Cooper walks through the key New Testament passages with care. In Hebrews 12:23, the author speaks of “the spirits (pneumata) of just men made perfect.” These spirits are distinguished from the “church of the firstborn who are registered in heaven”—the living believers. The “spirits of just men made perfect” are almost certainly the righteous dead who await the final resurrection.⁴⁰ If pneuma here means nothing more than “breath” or “life-force,” the verse is meaningless. Breaths do not get “made perfect.” But persons do.

The death narratives are equally telling. When Jesus dies, Matthew says “He yielded up His pneuma” (Matt. 27:50). Luke reports Jesus saying, “Father, into Your hands I commit My pneuma” (Luke 23:46). When Stephen is stoned, he cries out, “Lord Jesus, receive my pneuma” (Acts 7:59).⁴¹ Fudge treats these as simple idioms for “dying”—giving up the breath, expiring. But Cooper argues persuasively that this minimalist reading fails. Would it make any sense for Jesus to commit His exhaled air to His Father? At the very least, He is yielding His self to God. And given that Luke himself uses pneuma just one chapter later (Luke 24:37) to mean “a disembodied person”—when the disciples think the risen Jesus is a ghost (pneuma)—the idea that pneuma means only “breath” in Luke’s vocabulary is untenable.⁴²

Here is the point. Luke uses pneuma in Luke 23:46 when Jesus commits His spirit to the Father. One chapter later, in Luke 24:37, Luke uses the same word to refer to a disembodied person—a ghost with a visible form but no flesh and bones. Jesus Himself draws the distinction: “A pneuma does not have flesh and bones, as you see I have” (Luke 24:39). Luke obviously knows that pneuma can refer to a person who exists without a physical body. And he uses that same word to describe what Jesus yielded up at death. The most natural reading is that Jesus’ personal spirit—His immaterial self—departed His body and went to the Father.⁴³

5. The Synecdoche Problem: When Part-for-Whole Goes Too Far

One of the most popular arguments in the monist toolkit is the appeal to synecdoche—the figure of speech where a part of something stands for the whole. In English, we say “all hands on deck” when we mean all sailors, not just their hands. Monist scholars have argued that Hebrew anthropological terms work the same way: when the Old Testament says “my nephesh praises the Lord,” it simply means “I praise the Lord.” The nephesh is not a separate part speaking independently. The whole person is speaking, and nephesh is just a way of saying “I.”

Fudge relies heavily on this argument. So does Wolff. So does Nikolainen. And in many cases, they are right. There are absolutely passages where nephesh and ruach function as synecdoche—part-for-whole expressions that refer to the entire person. No serious dualist denies this.

But Cooper issues an important caution about this argument—a caution that Fudge never acknowledges. Some scholars, Cooper observes, seem to imply that all instances of Old Testament anthropological terms are cases of part-for-whole expressions. This is an overreach. The variety of linguistic usage in the Old Testament defies any simple generalization. Nephesh can mean “throat.” Ruach does not include bones and kidneys. These words do pick out specific parts, aspects, and particular features of persons in many contexts.⁶¹ Holism does not require the denial that wholes contain distinguishable parts. You can affirm that human beings are functionally unified wholes and recognize that the words for their components sometimes refer to those components rather than to the whole person.

The synecdoche argument also fails in precisely those passages that matter most for the body-soul debate. When Genesis 35:18 says that Rachel’s nephesh departed, synecdoche makes no sense. If nephesh just means “Rachel herself,” then the text is saying “Rachel departed”—but the whole point is that Rachel’s body remained while something else left. When 1 Kings 17:22 says the child’s nephesh returned to him, “he returned to himself” makes no grammatical or logical sense. The nephesh is clearly distinguished from the body it returns to. And when Jesus says in Matthew 10:28 that humans can kill the body but cannot kill the psyche, synecdoche is ruled out entirely—because if both terms referred to the whole person, the sentence would be saying that humans can kill the whole person but cannot kill the whole person. That is a contradiction, not a figure of speech.

Cooper puts it bluntly: whatever psyche is in Matthew 10:28, it can exist before God without the body. “Body” and “soul” cannot both be referring to the same thing in different ways in this verse. A human without a body is not the same as a human with a body, no matter how these words are defined.⁶² The synecdoche escape route is blocked.

6. The Critical Point: Narratives Trump Word Studies

I want to pull back and make a broader observation, because it is easy to get lost in the weeds of individual word meanings. The fundamental problem with Fudge’s approach is not that he gets the word studies wrong (though in some cases he does). The fundamental problem is that he relies almost exclusively on word studies and ignores the narratives.

Cooper makes this point with characteristic force. The polemics of anti-dualist writers, he observes, have made a great deal out of the fact that nephesh and ruach do not always denote personal immaterial entities that survive death. But even if true, that observation is irrelevant to the debate. It simply does not follow from the claim that nephesh and ruach never refer to the dead that the Israelites thought the dead did not exist. We learn something about the meanings of words. We learn nothing about Israelite eschatology. For the Israelites did affirm the existence of the departed—they simply had another term for them: rephaim. To conclude that the Hebrews were nondualists from the premise that they did not use nephesh and ruach to refer to existing dead persons is, as Cooper puts it, to commit the fallacy of non sequitur.⁴⁴

This is a devastating observation, and it cuts the ground out from under Fudge’s entire anthropological argument. Fudge’s case rests on showing that certain words do not mean “immaterial soul.” But even if he succeeded in proving that (and he has not fully succeeded), it would not prove what he needs it to prove. Because the Bible describes the dead as existing, conscious, and personal—regardless of which word is used to name them.

7. Cooper’s Crucial Concession—and Why It Strengthens the Case

One of the things I admire most about Cooper’s work is his intellectual honesty. He does not overstate the dualist case. He freely concedes that the Old Testament anthropological terms are “as different from as they are similar to the Platonic sense of ‘soul.’”⁴⁵ He acknowledges that ruach “is not an immaterial substantial soul, but a vital force” in many of its Old Testament uses.⁴⁶ He grants that the Old Testament does not set forth a philosophical anthropology in the technical sense.

But he then asks the right question: What follows from this? Does the weakness of a naively Platonic reading of the Old Testament mean that monism wins? Does holism entail monism?

His answer is a resounding no. Holism, as Cooper defines it, affirms the functional unity of the person—the integration and interrelation of all the parts in the existence and proper operation of the whole. But holism does not by itself tell you how many kinds of “stuff” the whole is made of. You can have a functionally unified whole that is composed of two irreducibly different kinds of ingredient. And that, Cooper argues, is exactly what the Old Testament creation narratives describe: dust from the ground and the breath of life from God. Two radically different ingredients. One unified person.⁴⁷

Cooper presses further. Whatever technical label you attach—substance, element, principle, constituent—dust and life-breath amount to a “mutually irreducible duality which God puts together to get one person.” And that picture, Cooper argues, simply “does not look as though it could be philosophically elaborated into monism.”⁴⁸ The Old Testament is certainly not Platonic. But it is not materialist either. The energy of biological life and of all the higher human capacities is not generated by the physical matter itself. God had to breathe life into the dust from the outside. Existential power is not inherent in the dust. God simply did not make the dust that way.

This is a crucial point for our conversation with Fudge. Fudge treats the Old Testament’s anti-Platonic emphasis as evidence for monism. Cooper shows that it is evidence only against one particular form of dualism—the Platonic form—and that a more biblical form of dualism (what we are calling substance dualism) is not only compatible with the Old Testament data but actually required by it.

8. The Intertestamental Development

One more piece of the puzzle needs to be put in place. Between the Old Testament and the New, the Jewish understanding of these terms underwent significant development. In the intertestamental literature, nephesh/psyche and ruach/pneuma “are repeatedly and unambiguously employed to refer to the disembodied dead.”⁴⁹ Cooper documents this at length. In 1 Enoch 22, the souls of the dead cry out to God. In 2 Esdras 7, they are conscious of God and His expectations. They are described in spatial and bodily terms—consistent with the Old Testament idea that the dead retain a quasi-bodily form even without flesh and bones. They are depicted as having location, emotion, and voice.⁵⁰

This development matters enormously for reading the New Testament. When Jesus, Paul, Luke, and John use the words psyche and pneuma, they are writing in a context where these words had already acquired a clearly dualistic meaning. To insist, as Fudge does, that the New Testament authors meant only “life” or “whole person” by these terms is to ignore centuries of linguistic development. It is like arguing that the English word “computer” in 2025 means only “a person who computes”—its original meaning—rather than the electronic device. Language evolves. And by the first century, psyche and pneuma had evolved to include the meaning “disembodied person.”

9. Fudge’s Redefinition of “Person”

There is one more redefinition that needs to be addressed, though Fudge does not make it as explicitly as the others. It is his implicit redefinition of person.

For Fudge, a person is the whole psychophysical unit—body, breath, consciousness, all integrated into one indivisible entity. When the body dies, the person ceases to exist. There is no “leftover” part. No soul lingers. No spirit departs for heaven or Hades. The person simply—stops.

But the Bible’s own language repeatedly assumes otherwise. When Stephen cries, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59), he is not asking Jesus to receive a breath of air. He is asking Jesus to receive him—Stephen himself. When Paul says that to depart is to “be with Christ, which is far better” (Phil. 1:23), he is not expecting to cease to exist. He is expecting to be somewhere—consciously, personally, with Christ.⁵¹

The pastoral consequences of this redefinition deserve attention. What do we tell the grieving widow at a funeral? If physicalism is true, the answer is sobering: her husband no longer exists. He is not in heaven. He is not with Christ. He is simply gone—and will remain gone until some future resurrection. The words of comfort that Christians have offered for centuries—“He is with the Lord now”—become, on Fudge’s anthropology, well-meaning falsehoods. The widow’s loved one is not with the Lord. He is nowhere.

I do not think Fudge intended this consequence. I think he was focused on the final fate of the wicked and did not fully consider how his anthropological commitments would affect the church’s pastoral theology. But the consequences follow inevitably from the premises. If there is no immaterial soul, there is no conscious intermediate state. And if there is no conscious intermediate state, the dead do not exist between death and resurrection. We cannot soften that conclusion with vague language about “resting in God’s memory” or “sleeping in Christ.” Either the person exists after death or the person does not. Substance dualism says they do. Fudge’s anthropology says they do not.

The Christian tradition has always understood personhood in a way that is bigger than the body. You are not merely your body. You are not merely your brain. You are not merely the sum of your biological processes. You are a person—an embodied soul, a breathing spirit, a creature of dust and glory. And because God sustains your soul, you do not cease to exist when your body fails. You go on. Diminished, perhaps. Longing for resurrection, certainly. But real. Conscious. Present with the Lord or awaiting judgment. That is the biblical picture, and Fudge’s redefinitions cannot make it disappear.⁵²

10. The Philosophical Dimension: Why Definitions Matter

Before we leave the dualist response, I want to briefly note why this matters philosophically, not just exegetically. Fudge’s redefinitions have philosophical consequences that he does not address.

If the soul is merely “the whole person,” then there is no immaterial substance to ground personal identity across time. What makes you the same person today that you were ten years ago? On a dualist view, the answer is straightforward: your soul—your immaterial self—persists through time, even as your body changes. On a physicalist view, the answer is far more difficult, because every atom in your body has been replaced multiple times. Fudge never addresses this problem.⁵³

If the spirit is merely “the life-force,” then there is no immaterial locus for consciousness, thought, moral agency, and relationship with God. These capacities become emergent properties of physical matter—which raises profound questions about whether they can survive the destruction of the matter that generates them. On substance dualism, consciousness is rooted in the soul, which is sustained by God and can exist apart from the body. On Fudge’s view, consciousness is rooted in the body, which means it dies when the body dies.⁵⁴

And if “person” means only the psychophysical whole, then the person at the resurrection is a different person from the one who died—unless there is some thread of continuity that bridges the gap between death and resurrection. On dualism, the soul provides that thread. On physicalism, the gap is absolute, and it is very difficult to explain how the resurrected individual is the same person who died, rather than a replica or a new creation. We will examine these philosophical problems in greater detail in Chapter 25. For now, the point is simply this: Fudge’s redefinitions are not just linguistic adjustments. They have far-reaching consequences for some of the most important questions in Christian theology.

D. Counter-Objections: What the Physicalist Might Say

No argument is complete without addressing the strongest objections the other side would raise. Let me anticipate four objections that a physicalist in the CI movement might bring against the argument of this chapter.

Objection 1: “You are reading substance dualism into the text, just as Fudge reads physicalism into it.”

This is a fair challenge, and it deserves a careful answer. I am not claiming that the biblical authors were writing philosophical treatises on substance dualism. They were not. The Bible does not use the technical vocabulary of Aristotle or Descartes. But here is the key difference between the dualist reading and the physicalist reading: the dualist reading is the one that makes better sense of the actual biblical data.

The dualist does not need to explain away the narratives of personal survival after death. The dualist does not need to reinterpret “souls under the altar” as purely symbolic. The dualist does not need to deny that Stephen’s spirit went to Christ. The dualist does not need to render Matthew 10:28 incoherent by insisting that “soul” means “whole person.” The dualist simply takes the texts at their most natural reading and finds a coherent anthropology at the other end.⁵⁵

The physicalist, by contrast, must explain away a great deal of biblical data. And the primary tool for doing so is precisely the kind of word-study redefinition we have been examining in this chapter. That is not reading out of the text. It is reading around it.

Objection 2: “The idea of an immaterial soul is a Greek import, not a biblical concept.”

This is probably the most commonly heard objection, and Fudge leans on it heavily through his citation of Bremmer, Wolff, and Nikolainen. The claim is that body-soul dualism entered Judaism through contact with Greek philosophy—particularly Plato—and that the original Hebrew worldview was holistic and unitary.

There are several problems with this claim. First, it commits the genetic fallacy. Even if the Jews developed a more explicit body-soul distinction through contact with Greek culture, that does not make the distinction false. Truth is truth regardless of where you first encounter it. Second, the claim overstates the evidence. As Cooper demonstrates, the Old Testament itself contains the raw materials for a dualistic anthropology—long before any Greek influence. The rephaim in Sheol are an Israelite concept, not a Greek one. The departure and return of the nephesh in Genesis 35:18 and 1 Kings 17:21–22 predates any possible Greek influence on Hebrew thought.⁵⁶

Third, the cultural anthropological evidence suggests that belief in the survival of the personal self after death is nearly universal among human cultures—including those with no contact with Greek philosophy whatsoever. As Cooper notes, the identification of ghostly persons with the soul-breath by Semitic and non-Semitic peoples alike is widely recognized by cultural anthropologists.⁵⁷ The Greeks did not invent belief in the soul. They attempted to give a philosophical account of something that humans everywhere have always believed.

Objection 3: “Cooper himself admits that the Old Testament terms do not clearly point to an immaterial soul. So the dualist case from the Old Testament is weak.”

This objection picks up on Cooper’s intellectual honesty and tries to use it against him. Yes, Cooper acknowledges that nephesh and ruach do not function as technical terms for an immaterial substance in most Old Testament contexts. But he then makes the crucial move that this objection ignores: the terms are not the whole story. The narratives are.

The fact that the Israelites did not have a precise technical word for “immaterial soul” does not mean they did not believe in the survival of the personal self after death. They clearly did. And their belief is not based on word definitions but on stories—stories about Samuel in Sheol, about Rachel’s departing nephesh, about Elijah’s prayer for the child’s nephesh to return, about the kings rising in Sheol to greet Babylon’s fallen ruler. Cooper’s concession about the terminology actually strengthens his case, because it shows that the evidence for dualism does not depend on reading particular words in a particular way. It depends on the cumulative witness of the biblical narratives—a witness that points consistently to the survival of the person after bodily death.⁵⁸

Objection 4: “Fudge was not trying to do a comprehensive anthropology. He was focused on the final fate of the wicked. You are criticizing him for something he was not trying to do.”

There is some truth to this. Fudge’s primary concern in The Fire That Consumes was the nature of final punishment, not the nature of human beings. His anthropological sections are relatively brief compared to his eschatological arguments. He was focused on demonstrating that the wicked will be destroyed, not on providing a full account of what a human being is.

But this objection actually underscores the problem rather than resolving it. If Fudge did not intend to build a comprehensive anthropology, he should not have made sweeping anthropological claims. He should not have told his readers that the soul is merely “the whole person” and the spirit is merely “the life-force.” He should not have cited monist scholars as though their conclusions were undisputed. He should not have laid an anthropological foundation that his readers would inevitably absorb as part of his larger argument.⁵⁹

The fact is that Fudge did make these claims, and his readers did absorb them. Across the CI movement today, it is common to hear that “the Bible teaches a holistic view of human nature”—meaning no immaterial soul—as though this were an established biblical truth. It is not. It is Fudge’s interpretation, and as we have seen, it is an interpretation that cannot withstand careful scrutiny.

Objection 5: “Even if Fudge’s word studies are incomplete, modern neuroscience supports the physicalist view. Consciousness depends on the brain.”

This objection comes not from biblical studies but from science, and it is worth addressing briefly because it looms in the background of many physicalist arguments. The claim is that neuroscience has shown consciousness to be entirely a product of brain activity. When the brain is damaged, consciousness is damaged. When the brain dies, consciousness presumably ceases. Therefore, there is no need to posit an immaterial soul.

There are several things to say here. First, the fact that consciousness is correlated with brain activity does not prove that consciousness is identical with brain activity. Correlation is not identity. A television set’s picture is correlated with its electronics, but the broadcast is not generated by the television. If you smash the TV, the picture disappears—but the broadcast signal continues. In the same way, the brain may be the instrument through which the soul interacts with the physical world, without being the source of consciousness itself.⁶³

Second, the neuroscientific evidence is far from unanimous in supporting physicalism. Rickabaugh and Moreland, in The Substance of Consciousness, argue at length that the subjective, first-person character of conscious experience—what philosophers call “qualia”—resists explanation in purely physical terms. The redness of red, the pain of pain, the taste of chocolate—these are irreducibly subjective experiences that cannot be captured by describing neural firings, chemical reactions, or information processing. Consciousness, they argue, is best explained as a property of an immaterial substance—the soul.⁶⁴

Third—and this is particularly relevant for our book’s larger argument—the evidence from veridical near-death experiences suggests that consciousness can function independently of normal brain activity. Clinically dead patients have reported accurate perceptions of events occurring while their brains showed no measurable activity. We will examine this evidence in detail in Chapter 30. For now, the point is simply that the appeal to neuroscience does not settle the question in the physicalist’s favor. The evidence is far more complex than the simple claim “brain produces consciousness” would suggest.

Conclusion

Let me bring this chapter to a close with a warning and an invitation.

The warning is this: when you read Fudge on the soul, he is not talking about what you probably think he is talking about. When he says “soul,” he means “the whole person.” When he says “spirit,” he means “the life-force.” When he says “person,” he means “the psychophysical whole that ceases to exist at death.” These are not the meanings that Christians have historically given to these words, and they are not the meanings the biblical evidence supports. Fudge’s redefinitions are quiet, scholarly, and embedded in an otherwise excellent book. But they are redefinitions nonetheless. And they carry enormous theological consequences—consequences that affect what you believe about the intermediate state, about personal identity at the resurrection, about pastoral care for the dying, and about the very nature of what it means to be human.⁶⁰

The invitation is this: look at the evidence for yourself. Read Cooper. Read Moreland. Compare their treatments of these same biblical terms with Fudge’s. Pay attention not just to the word studies but to the narratives—the stories about the dead, the departure and return of the soul, the conscious intermediate state. Follow the evidence. I believe that when you do, you will find what I found: that the Bible teaches substance dualism. Not Platonic dualism. Not Cartesian dualism. A biblical substance dualism in which the soul is real, immaterial, created by God, sustained by God, and separable from the body at death—but ultimately destined for reunion with a resurrected body at the last day.

And notice something important. Acknowledging that the soul is real does not weaken the case for conditional immortality. It strengthens it. If there is no soul, then Matthew 10:28 is a confused sentence—and we lose our single strongest proof text for the destruction of the wicked. But if the soul is real, Jesus’ words ring with perfect clarity: God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. The wicked are not merely killed in the way that any human murderer can kill. They are destroyed completely—every dimension of their being, material and immaterial alike, brought to an end by the God who made them. That is a far more devastating picture of final judgment than anything physicalism can offer. And it rests squarely on the reality of the soul.

We are more than Fudge’s definitions allow. We are more than the whole person viewed as a living creature. We are body and soul, dust and breath, earth and heaven. And when we die, we do not simply stop. Something real—something us—goes on. That is what Scripture teaches. That is what the church has always believed. And no amount of redefinition can make it disappear.

In the chapters that follow, we will examine how Fudge’s redefinitions shape his treatment of specific biblical passages—the texts he discussed, the texts he listed without exegesis, and the forty-eight texts he completely ignored. But this chapter has laid the essential groundwork. When you encounter Fudge’s language of “the whole person” and “the life-force,” you will know what is happening. You will know that a redefinition is at work—a quiet, scholarly, deeply consequential redefinition. And you will be prepared to ask the right question: Is this what the Bible actually says? Or is this what the Bible says when you have already decided that the soul does not exist?