Chapter 20
Give credit where credit is due. Edward Fudge did not ignore the question of human nature entirely. In The Fire That Consumes, he actually touched on roughly twenty-two passages that bear directly on the body-soul question. He quoted them. He discussed them. In some cases, he gave them sustained attention.
That matters. And I want to be fair about it.
But here is the problem—and it is a serious one. When you look carefully at how Fudge treated these passages, a pattern emerges. Again and again, his discussion was shaped by a set of assumptions that he brought to the text rather than drew from it. His handling of key anthropological terms was consistently one-sided. His engagement with competing interpretations was thin or absent. And in passage after passage, the strongest dualist readings were never considered at all.
In the previous chapter, we examined how Fudge redefined the core vocabulary of biblical anthropology—words like nephesh (soul), ruach (spirit), psyche (soul), and pneuma (spirit)—in ways that systematically flattened their meaning. In this chapter, we turn from the definitions to the passages themselves. We are going to walk through the major texts Fudge discussed and ask a simple question: Did he give these passages the careful, fair-minded treatment they deserved?
I believe the answer, again and again, is no. Not because Fudge was dishonest. Not because he was lazy. But because his physicalist assumptions acted like a filter, screening out evidence that pointed in a direction he had already decided not to go. And the result is that even the passages he did discuss received a treatment that was often superficial, sometimes misleading, and almost always incomplete.
The detailed exegesis of each of these passages has been provided in earlier chapters of this book. I will not repeat that work here. Instead, I want to do something different. I want to survey the landscape—to walk through each passage Fudge discussed, briefly note what he said, identify what he missed, and show how his physicalist lens shaped his reading. Think of this chapter as a field guide to Fudge’s treatment of the biblical data. The map, if you will, that shows where the gaps are.
We will work through them in roughly canonical order.
Before we begin, a word about method. I am going to present Fudge’s treatment of each passage fairly. I will note what he said and try to capture the substance of his argument. Then I will identify what he missed and explain how a dualist reads the same text. This is not a gotcha exercise. It is a serious examination of whether the most important modern defense of conditional immortality handled the body-soul evidence responsibly. The answer matters for everyone in the CI movement, because the anthropological foundation Fudge laid has been accepted by thousands of readers who assumed he had done the exegetical homework. As we will see, the homework was incomplete.
I should also note that the passages Fudge discussed fall into roughly three categories. Some he treated at length and with real care—Genesis 2:7 and Matthew 10:28 are the best examples. Others he discussed briefly, usually in the context of a larger eschatological argument, without giving sustained attention to their anthropological implications. And a few he merely acknowledged in passing, noting that they exist but moving on without real engagement. All three categories are covered in this chapter, because even the passages Fudge treated most carefully reveal the same pattern of physicalist filtering.
Fudge treated Genesis 2:7 as one of the foundational texts for his anthropology, and here I want to give him genuine credit. He was right to start where the Bible starts. God formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living nephesh—a living soul, or as many modern translations render it, a “living being.”1
Fudge argued that this text shows the unity of human nature. Man did not receive a soul; man became a living soul. The nephesh, Fudge insisted, is the whole person—not a separable component. He cited Wolff extensively on this point, noting that nephesh carries a wide range of meanings including “throat,” “life,” “person,” and even “corpse.”2 Fudge leaned heavily on the observation that animals are also called nephesh chayyah (living creatures) in Genesis—suggesting that the term carries no special ontological weight for humans.3
He also quoted Nikolainen’s summary that in Old Testament anthropology, “man is an indivisible whole,” and that body, soul, and spirit are not parts but different ways of viewing the same unified being.4
Fudge discussed Psalm 16:10 primarily in connection with the hope of resurrection. He acknowledged that the psalmist expresses confidence that God will not abandon his nephesh in Sheol. But Fudge read nephesh here as the whole person, not as an immaterial soul existing consciously in the underworld. His treatment focused on the forward-looking hope of restoration rather than on what the verse might imply about the state of the dead between death and resurrection.5
Fudge acknowledged this text in his discussion of Jesus’ dying words, since Luke 23:46 records Jesus quoting it from the cross. But his treatment of the Psalm itself was minimal. He interpreted the committing of one’s ruach (spirit) to God as an expression of trust, not as evidence that the spirit is a separable entity that can exist in God’s care apart from the body.6
Fudge discussed this passage as supporting his view that the Old Testament is agnostic about the fate of the spirit after death. If even the Preacher is uncertain whether the human spirit ascends while the animal spirit descends, Fudge argued, then we cannot build a doctrine of the soul’s survival on Old Testament grounds.7
Fudge acknowledged this verse but consistently interpreted the “spirit” returning to God as the life-force returning to its source—like breath returning to the air. He explicitly rejected the traditional reading that sees this as the individual soul returning to God’s conscious care. For Fudge, the spirit here is not a “thing” that survives; it is an impersonal energy that dissipates.8
Fudge treated this passage as a key proof text for conditional immortality. If the soul can die, he argued, then the soul is not inherently immortal. He read nephesh here as “person”—the person who sins will die—and took the passage as further evidence that nephesh does not refer to an indestructible immaterial entity.9
This is the passage Fudge discussed most extensively in connection with anthropology—and understandably so, since it is one of the most important proof texts for conditional immortality. Fudge focused primarily on the word “destroy” (apollymi), arguing that it means genuine destruction, not endless torment. He cited Alexander Sand, Ulrich Luz, R. T. France, and Robin Nixon, all of whom read the verse as teaching that God will permanently destroy the wicked rather than torment them forever.10
On the anthropological question, however, Fudge was far less thorough. He briefly acknowledged that Jesus distinguishes “soul” (psyche) from “body” (soma) in this verse, but he interpreted psyche as “life” or “the whole person” rather than as an immaterial entity that survives the death of the body.11
Fudge discussed Luke’s parallel to Matthew 10:28, noting that Luke omits the specific mention of the soul. He took this as evidence that the anthropological distinction in Matthew should not be pressed too hard. His focus, again, was on the eschatological implications—God’s power to cast into Gehenna—rather than on what the passage assumes about the composition of the human person.12
Fudge devoted an entire chapter to this parable. He argued that it was never intended to teach about the intermediate state or the nature of human beings after death. He emphasized the parable’s context—Jesus was teaching about covetousness and the failure to heed Moses and the Prophets. Fudge cited Jeremias on the parable’s “double-edged” structure, arguing that the theological point lies in the epilogue about the five brothers, not in the details about Hades.13
Fudge acknowledged that Jesus committed His spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46) and “gave up His spirit” (John 19:30). But he interpreted these as expressions of trust and submission—not as evidence that Jesus’ immaterial spirit departed His body and continued to exist in God’s care. The “spirit” here, for Fudge, is the breath of life returning to God, not a conscious entity going somewhere.14
Fudge treated Stephen’s dying prayer similarly to Jesus’ words on the cross—as an expression of trust and surrender rather than as evidence that Stephen expected his conscious spirit to be received by Jesus into a disembodied state.15
Fudge discussed this passage but minimized its anthropological implications. Paul says he is “hard pressed between the two,” desiring “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” Fudge acknowledged the difficulty of this text for his position but suggested that Paul may have been speaking phenomenologically—from the standpoint of subjective experience, in which death would seem to be followed immediately by resurrection, with no conscious intermediate state.16
Fudge discussed Paul’s prayer that the Thessalonians’ “whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless.” He argued that this is not a lesson in anthropology but a pastoral benediction. Paul was not listing the metaphysical components of the person; he was simply emphasizing completeness—the whole person in every dimension.17
Fudge acknowledged this passage but argued against reading it as evidence for a tripartite or even bipartite anthropology. He interpreted the “dividing of soul and spirit” as a metaphor for the penetrating power of God’s Word, not as a statement about the separability of two ontological components.18
Fudge discussed both Petrine texts, reading psyche in each case as “life” or “self.” The salvation of your souls becomes the salvation of your lives; committing your souls to God becomes committing your lives to God. The dualist overtones are quietly removed.19
Fudge acknowledged these texts and recognized that they use psyche to refer to the dead. But he argued that apocalyptic imagery should not be pressed for literal anthropological claims. The “souls” under the altar are a vivid way of saying that the martyrs’ lives cry out for justice—not that disembodied souls are literally conscious and speaking in heaven.20
Fudge gave this passage extensive treatment in his discussion of the resurrection. He rightly emphasized that Paul teaches a bodily resurrection—not the mere survival of a disembodied soul. He argued that the contrast between the “natural body” (soma psychikon) and the “spiritual body” (soma pneumatikon) refers to the source of the body’s animation, not to its material composition. The raised body is empowered by the Spirit, not made of spirit.21
That, in broad strokes, is what Fudge said about the passages he discussed. In many cases his observations contain genuine insight. His emphasis on the wholeness of the person, on the importance of bodily resurrection, and on the destruction of the wicked in Gehenna are all well taken. I agree with much of what he says about eschatology.
The question is what he missed.
When you step back and look at Fudge’s treatment of these passages as a whole, five recurring problems become visible. These are not minor quibbles. They represent a systematic pattern that undermines the reliability of his anthropological conclusions.
Every time Fudge encountered a Hebrew or Greek word that could mean either “soul/spirit as immaterial self” or “life/person as a whole,” he chose the physicalist-friendly option. Every single time. Nephesh always means “person” or “life.” Ruach always means “breath” or “life-force.” Psyche always means “life” or “self.” Pneuma always means “breath” or “wind.”22
Now, every serious lexicographer acknowledges that these words have a wide semantic range. They can mean “person” or “life.” Nobody disputes that. But they can also mean “immaterial self” or “the part of you that survives the death of the body.” Cooper demonstrated this at length.23 The question is which meaning fits best in each specific context. And Fudge never gave the dualist meaning a fair hearing. He simply assumed it was never the right choice.
Consider how strange this is. If you were studying a word that scholars agree can mean A or B, and you encountered it in twenty different contexts, you would expect it to mean A in some cases and B in others. The probability that a word with acknowledged polysemy would mean the same thing in every single occurrence is very low. Yet that is exactly what Fudge concluded. Nephesh never means “immaterial soul” in any of the passages he discussed. Psyche never means “the conscious self that survives death.” Pneuma never means “the personal spirit that can exist apart from the body.” The uniformity of his conclusions, across such a wide range of literary contexts, is itself evidence that something other than careful exegesis is driving the results.
That is not exegesis. That is eisegesis—reading a conclusion into the text instead of drawing it out.
Throughout his discussion of these passages, Fudge drew almost exclusively from scholars who shared his holistic or physicalist framework—Wolff, Nikolainen, Bremmer, and others. He virtually never interacted with the dualist counter-arguments. Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, the most important modern defense of biblical dualism, is not substantively engaged on any of the anthropological passages. Moreland’s philosophical arguments are absent. Swinburne does not appear. The dualist tradition—which includes Calvin, Aquinas, and the vast majority of the Christian theological tradition—is treated as though it has nothing useful to say.24
This is a glaring gap. You do not demonstrate that the physicalist reading is correct by citing only physicalist scholars. You demonstrate it by engaging the strongest arguments on the other side and showing why they fail. Fudge did not do this.
One of Fudge’s most consistent moves was to redirect every passage away from anthropology and toward eschatology. Matthew 10:28? That’s about destruction, not about the soul. Luke 16? That’s about stewardship, not about the intermediate state. Philippians 1:21–24? That’s about Paul’s preference, not about disembodied existence. Revelation 6:9–11? That’s apocalyptic imagery, not about conscious souls.25
Of course many of these passages have eschatological content. No one denies that. But the eschatological claims are built on anthropological assumptions. When Jesus says God can destroy both soul and body in hell, He is making an eschatological statement on the basis of an anthropological one. You cannot strip out the anthropology and pretend the eschatology still stands on its own. The two are interlocked.
When a passage was too difficult to flatten into the physicalist framework, Fudge’s fallback was to call it figurative, metaphorical, phenomenological, or apocalyptic imagery that should not be pressed for anthropological detail. The souls under the altar? Apocalyptic imagery. The rich man and Lazarus? A parable not intended to teach about the intermediate state. Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ? Perhaps a phenomenological expression from Paul’s subjective standpoint.26
Now, every good interpreter recognizes that genre matters. Apocalyptic literature is not a medical textbook. Parables are not doctrinal treatises. Fair enough. But there is a difference between respecting genre and using genre as an excuse to avoid the plain implications of a text. When every passage that supports dualism gets classified as figurative, and every passage that can be read physicalistically gets treated as literal and straightforward, the pattern reveals the interpreter’s assumptions, not the text’s meaning.
In several cases, Fudge’s interpretation required him to adopt readings that are less natural and less straightforward than the dualist alternative. Matthew 10:28 is the clearest example. Jesus says: do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. The most natural reading is obvious: there is something about you—your soul—that persists even when your body is killed. That is what any first-century Jewish hearer would have understood. Cooper showed that Jesus’ audience, steeped in the dualistic eschatology of Second Temple Judaism, would have heard psyche as referring to the immaterial self that survives bodily death.27
Fudge’s alternative—that psyche means something like “life” or “the whole person viewed from a certain angle”—actually creates a logical problem. If psyche just means “the whole person,” then the verse says: do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the whole person. But of course humans can kill the whole person—that is exactly what killing someone means. The verse only makes sense if the soul is something distinct from the body, something that persists when the body is destroyed.28
With those problems laid out, I want to walk back through the major passages and show what a careful, dualist-informed reading reveals. I am not going to repeat the full exegesis we provided in earlier chapters—that work has been done. What I want to do here is show, passage by passage, what Fudge missed.
Fudge was right that man became a living nephesh. He was right that the text emphasizes the unity of the created person. But he drew the wrong conclusion from this emphasis. The text does not say that man is merely dust organized in a certain way. It says that God performed two distinct creative acts: He formed the body from dust, and He breathed into it the breath of life. The result—a living nephesh—is the product of both ingredients, not of one alone.29
Cooper made this point powerfully. Whatever else Genesis 2:7 teaches, it presents human existence as constituted from two fundamentally different and “mutually irreducible” sources: the dust of the ground and the breath of God. The dust is material. The breath is not described in material terms at all. The resulting person is a unity, yes—but a unity composed of two radically different kinds of ingredient.30
Cooper went further. He argued that this picture “does not look as though it could be philosophically elaborated into monism—materialist, idealist, or neutral.” A materialist view would hold that life and consciousness are generated by the physical organization of matter itself. But that is precisely what Genesis 2:7 denies. The dust needed something from outside—the breath of God—before it could become alive. Life was not inherent in the dust. God gave it from beyond.31
Fudge never engaged this argument. He simply asserted the holistic reading and moved on.
There is something else worth noting here. Fudge leaned heavily on the fact that animals are also called nephesh chayyah (living creatures) in Genesis. He took this as evidence that nephesh carries no special ontological weight for humans. But this misses the point. The question is not whether animals and humans share the term nephesh. They do. The question is what kind of nephesh results from each creative act. When God breathed into Adam, He did something He is never described as doing with the animals. The breath of God imparted something unique to the human creature—the image of God, rational personhood, and the capacity for conscious relationship with the Creator. Even if the word nephesh is the same, the reality it points to is different. A horse is a living nephesh. A human being is a living nephesh that bears the image of the living God. That difference matters enormously, and it opens the door to a deeper kind of interiority than any animal possesses.
Moreland made a related point: the fact that Scripture uses the same vocabulary for both humans and animals does not prove that humans lack an immaterial dimension. It simply reflects the semantic breadth of Hebrew terminology. The question of what makes human nephesh unique must be settled by the broader biblical testimony—not by a single word study in Genesis 2.64
When the psalmist says, “You will not leave my nephesh in Sheol,” what does he mean? On Fudge’s reading, it means something like “You will not abandon me to the grave.” Fair enough as far as it goes. But there is more here than Fudge acknowledged.
The very concept of Sheol presupposes that the dead are somewhere. They are not simply nonexistent. The Old Testament consistently depicts the dead as existing in Sheol—diminished, shadowy, but real. The rephaim (shades) in Sheol have identity. They can be recognized. In Isaiah 14, the kings of the earth rise up to greet the king of Babylon when he descends. In 1 Samuel 28, Samuel appears from the dead and carries on a conversation. These are not descriptions of nonexistence.32
Peter’s use of Psalm 16 at Pentecost (Acts 2:27, 31) makes this even clearer. Peter argued that David was a prophet who foresaw that the Messiah’s psyche (soul) would not be left in Hades. The argument only works if the soul was in Hades to begin with—and needed to be rescued from it. If “soul” just means “life” in the abstract, Peter’s argument loses its force. What does it mean to say that someone’s “life” was not left in Hades? Life is not the kind of thing that gets left somewhere. But a soul—an immaterial self—can be in a place and can be delivered from it.33
Fudge used Ecclesiastes 3:21 to argue that the Old Testament is uncertain about the fate of the spirit after death. But he missed the rhetorical force of the Preacher’s question. “Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes downward?” (NKJV). The question implies a real possibility—that the human spirit does go upward while the animal spirit does not. The Preacher is not denying the distinction; he is questioning whether it can be known with certainty from human observation alone.34
Ecclesiastes 12:7 is even more striking. “The dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Fudge read the “spirit” here as an impersonal life-force that dissipates back to its source. But this interpretation struggles against the text’s own grammar. The spirit “returns to God.” The dust “returns to the ground.” Both return to their place of origin. Both are depicted as real things that go somewhere. If the dust does not cease to exist when it returns to the ground—it is still dust, still there—then by the same logic, the spirit does not cease to exist when it returns to God.35
Cooper observed that this text naturally fits within a framework where the two ingredients of human nature—the material body and the immaterial spirit—are separated at death, each returning to its source. That is exactly what substance dualism predicts. Fudge simply denied it without engaging the argument.36
I want to press this point a bit further. Fudge treated the “spirit” in Ecclesiastes 12:7 as an impersonal energy—like air being released from a balloon. But notice what the text actually says. It does not say the spirit “dissipates” or “ceases to exist” or “merges back into the atmosphere.” It says the spirit returns to God. The verb “returns” implies a journey. It implies a destination. It implies that the spirit arrives somewhere specific and is received by someone. The dust returns to the ground because the ground is where dust belongs. The spirit returns to God because God is where the spirit belongs. This language of personal return and divine reception is far more naturally read as the departure of a personal entity into God’s care than as the dissipation of an impersonal force into the cosmos.
And consider the implications for pastoral ministry. When a believer dies, what do we tell their family? If the spirit is merely an impersonal energy that evaporates at death, there is nothing to say except “they no longer exist; we await the resurrection.” But if the spirit is a real, personal entity that returns to God—that is in God’s care, in God’s presence, held by God until the day of resurrection—then we have something profound to say. We can say, “They are with God.” That is what Ecclesiastes 12:7 most naturally means. And it is what the Christian church has always believed.
Fudge was right that “the soul who sins shall die” teaches that the soul is not inherently immortal. Substance dualists agree completely. The soul exists by God’s sustaining power, and God can destroy it. That is exactly what Matthew 10:28 says. But Fudge took this a step further and argued that because the nephesh can die, it must be identical with the whole physical person rather than an immaterial component.37
This does not follow. On the dualist view, the soul is created and sustained by God. It is not inherently indestructible. It can die if God withdraws His sustaining power or actively destroys it. The fact that Ezekiel 18:4 teaches the mortality of the soul does not settle the question of whether the soul is material or immaterial. It settles the question of whether the soul is inherently immortal. And the answer is no—a point on which dualists and conditionalists agree.38
I devoted an entire chapter to this verse earlier in this book (Chapter 10), and I will not repeat the full argument here. But the point needs to be made again in this context, because Fudge’s treatment of Matthew 10:28 is the single most revealing example of how his physicalist lens distorted his exegesis.
Fudge cited Sand, Luz, France, and Nixon—all of whom read the verse as teaching destruction rather than eternal torment. Good. I agree with them. But none of these scholars support the claim that psyche here means merely “life” or “the whole person.” In fact, Luz explicitly noted that the Greek concept of the immortal soul is not taken over here—but that is a statement about immortality, not about the soul’s existence. Even Luz acknowledges that the verse distinguishes soul from body.39
Cooper’s analysis is devastating to the physicalist reading. He showed that in the context of Second Temple Judaism, psyche and soma in this verse would have been understood as referring to two ontologically distinct realities. The audience knew what Gehenna was—the place of final punishment where, according to Jewish belief, both soul and body would be present. The verse’s logic requires two distinct things: humans can kill the body but not the soul; God can destroy both. If soul and body refer to the same thing from different angles, the distinction collapses and the verse becomes nonsensical.40
Here is the irony I have pointed to before: CI’s strongest proof text for the destruction of the wicked actually requires substance dualism to make sense. God can destroy both soul and body in hell. If there is no soul, there is nothing for God to destroy apart from the body—and humans can already do that. Jesus’ warning assumes that something about you survives bodily death and can only be destroyed by God. That something is the soul.
Think about what Jesus is doing here. He is encouraging His disciples in the face of persecution. He is telling them not to fear the people who might kill them. Why not? Because the worst those people can do is destroy the body. They cannot touch the soul. The soul is beyond their reach. Only God has authority over the soul. This is a deeply comforting statement—but it only comforts if the soul is real. If psyche just means “life” in the sense of biological existence, then Jesus is saying: “Don’t fear those who can kill your body but cannot kill your life.” But killing someone’s body is killing their life. The distinction collapses. The comfort disappears. And the verse becomes incoherent.
Cooper drove this home by pointing out that Matthew’s use of psyche and soma fits squarely within the framework of Second Temple Judaism, where Gehenna was understood as the place of final punishment in which both the bodily and the nonbodily dimensions of the person would be dealt with. Most Jews who spoke of Gehenna were holistic dualists. They believed that souls exist temporarily without bodies but that both would be reunited for final judgment. Cooper concluded that the evidence “strongly favors reading Matthew as expressing Jewish dualism,” even though the verse’s primary purpose is not to teach anthropology.65
Fudge was correct that the primary point of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus is about stewardship and heeding God’s Word. He was correct that we should not press every detail of a parable for doctrinal specifics. I give him credit for these observations.
But Fudge went too far when he concluded that the parable teaches nothing about the intermediate state. Cooper pointed out that while the parable’s main lesson is about listening to Moses and the Prophets, the setting of the parable—conscious existence in Hades, awareness of one’s earthly life, conversation with Abraham—reflects the standard Jewish understanding of the intermediate state as found in intertestamental literature. The parable assumes this framework even if it does not intend to teach it as its primary point.41
This matters because a storyteller’s assumed background tells us something about what he believes. When Jesus tells a story set in a world where the dead are conscious in Hades, He is presupposing that such a state is real—or at least that His audience’s belief in it is not something He needs to correct. If the intermediate state were a false belief that Jesus wanted to overturn, it would be strange for Him to build an entire parable on it without ever signaling that the setting is misleading.42
Moreover, Cooper showed that when Luke 16 is read alongside Luke 23:43 (“Today you will be with Me in Paradise”) and Acts 2:27, 31 (the soul not left in Hades), a consistent Lukan theology of the intermediate state emerges. Fudge treated each of these texts in isolation, never allowing them to form a cumulative picture. That is a methodological failure.43
There is one more thing worth noting about this parable. Fudge emphasized that we should not build doctrine on the details of a parable. Fine. But he did not apply this principle consistently. When the parable of the wheat and the tares (Matt. 13:24–30, 36–43) describes the wicked being “thrown into the blazing furnace,” Fudge was happy to use the imagery as evidence for the destruction of the wicked. He did not say, “We should not press the details of a parable.” He pressed the details. And he was right to do so, because the imagery of fire and destruction in Jesus’ parables reflects genuine eschatological realities. But if the destruction imagery in the parables can be taken as reflecting real eschatological truths, then the intermediate-state imagery in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus can be taken as reflecting real anthropological truths. You cannot have it both ways.
Fudge treated Jesus’ words on the cross and Stephen’s dying prayer as expressions of trust rather than as evidence for the separability of the spirit. That reading is possible. But it fails to account for the broader New Testament pattern.
When Luke records that Jesus said “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit,” and then two chapters earlier records Jesus promising the thief, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise”—these two statements need to be read together. Jesus expected to be somewhere after His death. He expected to be in Paradise. And He committed His spirit to the Father as the means by which this would happen. The spirit is not breath evaporating into the atmosphere. The spirit is Jesus—the real, personal, conscious self—being entrusted to the Father’s care.44
Cooper made the critical observation that Luke uses pneuma (spirit) in Luke 24:37, 39 to refer explicitly to a discarnate person—a ghost. When the risen Jesus appeared to His disciples, they thought they were seeing a pneuma. Jesus corrected them: “A spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have.” This shows beyond any reasonable doubt that Luke uses pneuma to mean a deceased, nonfleshly, yet personally identifiable human being. When Jesus committed His pneuma to the Father, Luke’s readers would have understood this as the departure of His personal self—not the dissipation of an impersonal life-force.45
The same logic applies to Stephen’s prayer. “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” is a request for Jesus to receive Stephen’s conscious, personal self into His care. Fudge reduced this to a mere expression of trust. But trust in what? If the spirit is nothing more than breath returning to the atmosphere, then Stephen is asking Jesus to receive… air? The request only makes sense if the spirit is Stephen himself—the immaterial person who will continue to exist in the Lord’s presence after the body is destroyed by the stones of his executioners.46
Fudge’s treatment of Philippians 1:21–24 may be the weakest link in his entire discussion. Paul says he has a desire “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” The natural reading is straightforward: Paul expects that when he dies, he will immediately be with Christ. Death is not an interruption but a transition—from being with Christ in the body to being with Christ in an even closer way.47
Fudge suggested that Paul might be speaking “phenomenologically”—from his own experiential standpoint, in which there would be no awareness of time between death and resurrection. This is a common physicalist maneuver, but it has serious problems. First, it requires Paul to have been mistaken about his own anthropology—to have believed he was describing an immediate transition when in fact he was describing a gap in consciousness that he would not notice. Second, Paul does not say “to depart and eventually be with Christ after the resurrection.” He uses language that implies immediacy. Third, when this text is read alongside 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 (“absent from the body, present with the Lord”)—which Fudge did not discuss—the cumulative force is overwhelming. Paul expected to be consciously present with Christ immediately upon death.48
Cooper noted that Green’s attempt to avoid a disembodied intermediate state in these Pauline texts fails because it does not adequately deal with passages where Paul explicitly speaks of “I” as existing apart from his body (2 Cor. 5:6–9; 12:2–4). Paul uses personal pronouns to describe himself in a state separated from the body. That is precisely what substance dualism predicts.49
Fudge was partly right that 1 Thessalonians 5:23 is a pastoral benediction, not a treatise on anthropology. But the question is why Paul chose those specific terms—spirit, soul, and body—to express completeness. If Paul were a thoroughgoing physicalist, we would expect language like “may your whole self” or “may your entire person.” Instead, he used terms that his audience would have understood as referring to distinct dimensions of the human being. The tripartite language is not accidental. It reflects the anthropological framework Paul habitually worked within.50
Similarly, Hebrews 4:12 may not be primarily about anthropology, but its imagery is telling. The Word of God penetrates to the “division of soul and spirit, of joints and marrow.” The author draws a parallel between the material (joints and marrow) and the immaterial (soul and spirit). The imagery only works if both pairs represent real, distinguishable dimensions of the person.51
Fudge’s decision to dismiss the souls under the altar as “apocalyptic imagery” was too quick. Cooper acknowledged that Revelation uses highly symbolic language. But he argued persuasively that even apocalyptic imagery is intended to refer to actual states of affairs. The intertestamental literature from which Revelation draws its imagery assumed that the dead exist consciously in an intermediate state. The writers of apocalyptic believed this. John’s readers believed this. And the simplest reading of Revelation 6:9–11 is that John also believed it—even if the specific details (an altar, white robes) are symbolic.52
Cooper made a telling observation: “Whatever else may be concluded from this fact for theological anthropology, the semantic claim that the word ‘soul’ is never used dualistically in the New Testament is contradicted by this text.”53 That is a significant concession even from a cautious interpreter. Psyche in Revelation 6 refers to deceased persons in the intermediate state. The word is being used dualistically. And Fudge never adequately reckoned with this fact.
Fudge’s treatment of 1 Corinthians 15 was largely sound on the question of the resurrection body. Paul does teach a bodily resurrection, and dualists agree with this wholeheartedly. The soul is not the final state of the saved. The resurrection body is.
But Fudge drew an unwarranted conclusion from this emphasis on bodily resurrection. He seemed to imply that because Paul teaches bodily resurrection, Paul cannot also believe in a conscious intermediate state where the soul exists apart from the body. That does not follow. Dualists have always held both: the soul survives death, and the body will be raised. The resurrection is not the creation of a new person from scratch; it is the reuniting of the soul with a glorified body. These two beliefs are not in tension. They are complementary.54
Cooper demonstrated that both the intertestamental Jews and the earliest Christians held precisely this combination of beliefs: a conscious intermediate state followed by a future bodily resurrection. The dead are real now, and they will be embodied again later. One belief does not cancel out the other.55
There is also a subtle point about 1 Corinthians 15 that Fudge’s treatment obscured. Paul’s contrast between the soma psychikon (“natural body” or “soulish body”) and the soma pneumatikon (“spiritual body”) does not eliminate the soul from the picture. It assumes the soul. The soma psychikon is a body animated by the psyche—the natural life-principle. The soma pneumatikon is a body animated and empowered by the pneuma—the Holy Spirit. In both cases, the body is the visible, material dimension, and the animating principle is something other than the body itself. Paul’s resurrection anthropology does not reduce the person to the body. It describes a transformation in which the body is raised and glorified, while the immaterial dimension of the person—the soul or spirit—provides the thread of continuity between the earthly life, the intermediate state, and the resurrection. Without that thread, the resurrected person is not the same person at all. It is a copy. A replica. And that is a problem that physicalism has never been able to solve.
Fudge read psyche in these Petrine texts as “life” or “self.” But consider the oddity of this reading for 1 Peter 1:9: “receiving the end of your faith—the salvation of your lives.” If Peter means “the salvation of your lives” in a purely physical sense, the statement is hard to distinguish from ordinary self-preservation. Peter is obviously talking about something more—the salvation of the immaterial self, the real “you” that stands before God. Similarly, 1 Peter 4:19 says that those who suffer according to God’s will should “commit their souls to a faithful Creator.” This echoes Psalm 31:5 and Jesus’ words on the cross. The soul is entrusted to God precisely because it can exist in His care even when the body is destroyed by persecution.56
Notice the context of 1 Peter 4:19. Peter is writing to Christians who are suffering. Some of them may die for their faith. And his counsel is to commit their psyche—their souls—to a faithful Creator. This would be a strange thing to say if the soul were nothing more than the physical life that their persecutors were about to end. You do not commit something to God’s care if it is about to cease to exist. You commit it because you expect God to preserve it. Peter’s language assumes that the soul can be kept safe by God even when the body is destroyed. That is substance dualism in pastoral dress.
I can anticipate several objections to the argument I have made in this chapter. Let me address the most serious ones.
A physicalist might respond by saying: “Fudge’s book was about the final fate of the wicked, not about the nature of the soul. You can’t fault him for not writing the book you wanted him to write.”
This is a fair point up to a point. Fudge was primarily concerned with demonstrating that the wicked will be destroyed rather than tormented forever. His focus was eschatological. And he did an outstanding job of making that case.
But here is the problem: Fudge did not simply avoid anthropology. He engaged it. He devoted pages to defining nephesh, ruach, and related terms. He took positions on what these words mean and what they imply about human nature. He drew anthropological conclusions that shaped his reading of key eschatological texts. He taught his readers that the soul is not an immaterial entity that can exist apart from the body. That is an anthropological claim—and it demands an anthropological defense. If you are going to make the argument, you need to make it well. Fudge did not.57
Moreover, Fudge’s anthropological assumptions did not stay in the background. They directly shaped his exegesis of passages that matter enormously for the Christian faith. His reading of Matthew 10:28, his treatment of the intermediate-state passages, his handling of the soul-departure narratives, his dismissal of the Revelation texts—all of these were influenced by his prior commitment to physicalism. The anthropology was not incidental to his eschatology. It was the foundation. And that means the anthropology needs to be examined and, where necessary, corrected.
Someone might object: “But Wolff and other scholars have shown that nephesh and ruach do not typically refer to an immaterial soul. Fudge was just following the scholarly consensus.”
Two things need to be said here. First, the “consensus” is not as unanimous as it is sometimes portrayed. Cooper documented that scholars like Otto Kaiser argue that nephesh is at least occasionally used to refer to persons apart from living bodies. And Cooper himself argued that even if the word studies are conceded entirely—even if nephesh and ruach never strictly denote an immaterial substance in the Old Testament—the narratives about the dead require a dualist reading regardless. The dead in Sheol have identity. They can be recognized. They can speak. The word study does not settle the question because the narrative data points in a different direction.58
Second, even if nephesh and ruach are not used dualistically in the Old Testament, they clearly are used dualistically in the New Testament and in the intertestamental literature that bridges the two. By the time of Jesus, Jewish anthropology had developed a robust dualism in which psyche and pneuma regularly referred to deceased persons in the intermediate state. Fudge cannot treat the New Testament as though it were still operating with the older, more ambiguous Old Testament usage. The semantic development has to be acknowledged.59
This is actually a point I agree with. Substance dualism is not necessary for CI. You can believe the wicked will be destroyed whether or not you believe in an immaterial soul. The eschatological claim and the anthropological claim are logically independent.
But that is precisely my argument. CI does not require physicalism either. And yet Fudge, and many in the CI movement after him, have treated physicalism as though it were a natural or even necessary companion to CI. It is not. And as I have tried to show throughout this book, CI is actually stronger on a dualist foundation. Matthew 10:28 makes more sense. The intermediate state is preserved. Personal identity at the resurrection is secured. The postmortem opportunity becomes possible. You gain explanatory power across the board.61
Someone might argue that phrases like “into Your hands I commit my spirit” and “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” are just pious expressions of trust, not ontological statements about the separability of the spirit.
I understand the appeal of this objection. Not every statement in Scripture is intended as a philosophical proposition. People use language loosely, especially in moments of crisis.
But there are two problems with this dismissal. First, the same people who say “do not press these expressions for anthropological detail” are often quite willing to press other expressions for theological detail when it suits their argument. Fudge pressed “destroy” in Matthew 10:28 for all it was worth—and rightly so. But if “destroy” can be taken at face value, why can’t “receive my spirit”?62
Second, these expressions do not appear in isolation. They appear within a broader biblical pattern in which the spirit departs the body at death (Gen. 35:18; Eccl. 12:7; Luke 8:55; James 2:26), goes somewhere (to God, to Paradise, to Hades), and is depicted as conscious and personal. When you read “receive my spirit” within that pattern, the dualist interpretation is not reading too much into the text. It is reading the text within its own canonical context.
The cumulative weight matters here. One instance of “I commit my spirit” might be dismissed as a pious expression. But when you have Rachel’s soul departing at death in Genesis 35, the child’s soul returning to his body in 1 Kings 17, the Preacher describing the spirit’s return to God in Ecclesiastes 12, Jesus committing His spirit to the Father in Luke 23, Stephen asking Jesus to receive his spirit in Acts 7, Paul describing the body as a tent he will soon lay aside in 2 Corinthians 5, James defining death as the separation of spirit from body in James 2:26, and Peter describing the body as a tent that will soon be removed in 2 Peter 1:13–14—at some point, you have to ask whether the pattern means something. Individual expressions can be explained away one at a time. A pattern of this depth and consistency demands a better explanation. And the best explanation is the simplest one: these writers believed that the human person has an immaterial dimension that can exist apart from the body, and they expressed that belief naturally and repeatedly in the way they talked about death.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. I am not saying Fudge was dishonest. I am not saying he was careless. I am not saying he deliberately misled his readers. Fudge was a gifted scholar and a faithful Christian whose work on final punishment changed the conversation for an entire generation of evangelicals. I owe him an enormous debt.
What I am saying is that on the question of human nature, his work was incomplete. The passages he discussed were filtered through a physicalist lens that prevented him from seeing what was really there. The dualist readings were never seriously considered. The strongest dualist scholarship was never engaged. And the result is that thousands of readers came away from The Fire That Consumes believing that the Bible teaches physicalism—when in fact the Bible, even in the very passages Fudge discussed, consistently points in the opposite direction.63
The approximately twenty-two passages Fudge discussed were not his weakest selections. They include some of the most important anthropological texts in all of Scripture. And yet, passage after passage, the dualist evidence was dismissed, minimized, or simply overlooked. That pattern matters. It tells us something not about the texts themselves but about the framework through which Fudge was reading them.
Here is what I want the reader to take away from this survey. Fudge was a careful scholar. He did not make silly mistakes. He did not misquote Scripture. He did not fabricate evidence. What he did was something far more subtle and far more consequential: he read every passage through a grid that had already determined the outcome. The physicalist conclusion was decided before the exegesis began. And once that conclusion was in place, it shaped everything—which scholars got cited, which meanings got chosen, which readings got taken seriously, and which ones got quietly set aside.
This is not unique to Fudge. We all bring assumptions to the text. I bring assumptions too. The difference is that this book has tried to lay those assumptions on the table and defend them openly. I believe in substance dualism because I believe the biblical evidence supports it—and I have tried to show my work. Fudge, by contrast, embedded his physicalist assumptions so deeply into his reading that most of his readers never noticed they were there. They came away thinking the Bible teaches physicalism when in fact they had been shown the Bible through physicalism. Those are very different things.
And the cost of this is not merely academic. When you adopt a physicalist reading of these twenty-two passages, you lose something precious. You lose the conscious intermediate state. You lose the deep comfort of knowing that your departed loved ones are with the Lord right now. You lose the theological framework that makes sense of Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross. You lose the thread of personal identity that connects the person who dies with the person who rises. You lose the metaphysical space in which a postmortem encounter with God can occur.
Those are real losses. And they are unnecessary. Because the passages Fudge discussed, when read without the physicalist filter, point clearly and consistently toward substance dualism.
In the next chapter, we will turn to a smaller but equally revealing category: the handful of passages Fudge mentioned in passing without actually engaging them. And in Chapter 22, we will confront the most striking fact of all: the forty-eight passages bearing on the body-soul question that Fudge never mentioned at all.
The evidence is not on the physicalist’s side. It never was. And the more closely we look, the clearer that becomes.
↑ 1. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–27. Fudge notes that the NIV translates nephesh as “living being” in Genesis 2:7.
↑ 2. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27. Fudge drew on Wolff’s Anthropology of the Old Testament for this summary of nephesh’s semantic range.
↑ 3. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 27. He notes that the Old Testament applies the same terms (nephesh, ruach, neshamah) to both humans and animals.
↑ 4. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 27–28, quoting Nikolainen’s summary of Old Testament anthropology.
↑ 5. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 46–47. Fudge treats the Psalm in the context of the Old Testament hope of resurrection. See our treatment in Chapter 7.
↑ 6. Fudge’s treatment of Psalm 31:5 is largely in the context of Jesus’ dying words. See The Fire That Consumes, the section on Luke 23:46. See our treatment in Chapter 6.
↑ 7. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 46–48. See our treatment in Chapter 7.
↑ 8. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–27. Fudge reads the “spirit” in Ecclesiastes 12:7 as the life-force rather than as a personal entity. See our treatment in Chapter 6.
↑ 9. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–30. The passage is used in the broader discussion of the soul’s mortality. See our treatment in Chapter 9.
↑ 10. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 123–125. Fudge cites Sand, Luz, France, and Nixon in support of reading “destroy” as genuine destruction.
↑ 11. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123. Fudge quotes Alexander Sand: the soul is “the ‘life,’ the ‘person.’” See our detailed treatment in Chapter 10.
↑ 12. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 123–125. The Luke parallel is treated briefly alongside Matthew 10:28.
↑ 13. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 148–150. Fudge devotes an entire chapter to this parable, emphasizing its context and primary teaching about stewardship.
↑ 14. Fudge’s treatment of Jesus’ dying words appears in the context of his discussion of the crucifixion narratives. See The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on Luke 23 and John 19.
↑ 15. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on Acts 7:59. His treatment mirrors his approach to Jesus’ dying words. See our treatment in Chapter 12.
↑ 16. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on Philippians 1. See our treatment in Chapter 13.
↑ 17. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 26–28. The treatment of 1 Thessalonians 5:23 appears in his broader anthropological discussion. See our treatment in Chapter 15.
↑ 18. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections. The passage is treated briefly. See our treatment in Chapter 15.
↑ 19. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on 1 Peter. See our treatment in Chapter 17.
↑ 20. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on Revelation 6 and 20. See our treatment in Chapter 14.
↑ 21. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, relevant sections on 1 Corinthians 15. See our treatment in Chapter 18.
↑ 22. This pattern is documented throughout Fudge’s anthropological discussion, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–30 and passim. See also our detailed analysis in Chapter 19.
↑ 23. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 2–5. Cooper’s treatment of the semantic range of nephesh, ruach, psyche, and pneuma is the most thorough available from a dualist perspective.
↑ 24. Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting was first published in 1989, well before the third edition of The Fire That Consumes (2011). It was widely available and widely cited in the literature. The absence of engagement with it in Fudge’s anthropological sections is striking.
↑ 25. See the treatments of each passage in the relevant sections of Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, as discussed in Section A of this chapter.
↑ 26. On Luke 16 as parable, see Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 148–150. On Revelation 6 as apocalyptic imagery, see relevant sections. On Philippians 1 as phenomenological, see relevant sections.
↑ 27. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, “The New Testament Evidence.” Cooper argues that Matthew uses soma and psyche in the way his own Jewish contemporaries did—as referring to two ontologically distinct realities.
↑ 28. See our full treatment of this argument in Chapter 10. Cooper makes this point in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.
↑ 29. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2, “The Old Testament Evidence.” See our full treatment in Chapter 5.
↑ 30. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper argues that the two sources—dust and divine breath—constitute a “mutually irreducible duality.”
↑ 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper states that the Old Testament picture “does not look as though it could be philosophically elaborated into monism—materialist, idealist, or neutral.”
↑ 32. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 3, “The Dead in the Old Testament.” See Isaiah 14:9–10; 1 Samuel 28:11–19. See also our treatment in Chapters 6 and 7.
↑ 33. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Peter’s argument at Pentecost depends on the soul being a real entity that was in Hades and was delivered from it. See our treatment in Chapter 7.
↑ 34. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. The rhetorical force of the question in Ecclesiastes 3:21 implies a real distinction between human and animal spirits. See our treatment in Chapter 7.
↑ 35. See our full treatment in Chapter 6. The parallel structure of Ecclesiastes 12:7—dust returning to ground, spirit returning to God—strongly suggests two real entities going to two real destinations.
↑ 36. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 2. Cooper’s analysis of this text is a cornerstone of his Old Testament argument for dualism.
↑ 37. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–27. See our treatment in Chapter 9.
↑ 38. See Chapter 27 of this book for the full argument that CI does not require physicalism and is strengthened by substance dualism.
↑ 39. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, p. 123, citing Ulrich Luz. Luz notes that the Greek concept of the immortal soul is not present, but he does not deny the body-soul distinction itself.
↑ 40. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper states that the evidence strongly favors reading Matthew 10:28 as expressing “Jewish dualism.”
↑ 41. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, on the parable of Lazarus and the rich man. Cooper argues that the parable assumes the standard Jewish understanding of the intermediate state found in intertestamental literature.
↑ 42. Cooper notes the striking parallels between this parable and the depiction of the intermediate state in 1 Enoch 22, including the great chasm and the thirst of the damned. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.
↑ 43. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper argues that Luke 16, Luke 23:43, and Acts 2:27, 31 together form a consistent Lukan theology of the intermediate state. See also Cooper’s critique of Joel Green in the updated edition of Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting.
↑ 44. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. See our treatment in Chapter 12.
↑ 45. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper demonstrates that Luke uses pneuma in Luke 24:37, 39 to refer to a discarnate person, confirming the dualistic usage elsewhere in Luke-Acts.
↑ 46. See our treatment in Chapter 12. The logic of Stephen’s request only makes sense if the spirit is a personal, conscious entity capable of being received into the Lord’s presence.
↑ 47. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6, “The Pauline Evidence.” See our treatment in Chapter 13.
↑ 48. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. Cooper argues that the “phenomenological” interpretation is implausible because Paul’s language implies immediacy, and because 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 reinforces the same expectation.
↑ 49. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, updated edition. Cooper notes that Joel Green’s attempt to avoid a disembodied intermediate state in 2 Corinthians 5 fails to adequately handle Paul’s use of personal pronouns for existence apart from the body (2 Cor. 5:6–9; 12:2–4; Phil. 1:20–24).
↑ 50. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. See our treatment in Chapter 15.
↑ 51. See our treatment of Hebrews 4:12 in Chapter 15.
↑ 52. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper argues that a “median position” between strict literalism and pure symbolism is the most responsible approach to apocalyptic, and that this median position favors an affirmation of the intermediate state.
↑ 53. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5, on Revelation 6:9–11.
↑ 54. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7, “Anthropological Dualism and the Intermediate State.” Dualism has always affirmed both the soul’s survival and the body’s resurrection.
↑ 55. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4, on the intertestamental development of Jewish beliefs about the intermediate state and future resurrection.
↑ 56. See our treatment of 1 Peter 1:9 and 4:19 in Chapter 17.
↑ 57. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, pp. 25–30. Fudge’s anthropological discussion, though brief, is substantive enough to constitute an argument. It therefore invites a substantive response.
↑ 58. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 2–3. Cooper acknowledges the debate about whether nephesh is ever used to refer to persons apart from living bodies but argues that the narrative evidence for survival of death is decisive regardless. He cites Otto Kaiser as a scholar who defends the dualistic reading of nephesh.
↑ 59. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Cooper documents how nephesh and ruach (and their Greek counterparts psyche and pneuma) are “repeatedly and unambiguously employed to refer to the disembodied dead” in intertestamental literature.
↑ 60. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chaps. 1–2. Cooper directly challenges the “Hebrew holism vs. Greek dualism” dichotomy, arguing that it is a modern scholarly construction that does not do justice to the data. See also our treatment in Chapter 23.
↑ 61. See Chapter 27 of this book, “Does CI Require Physicalism? Absolutely Not.”
↑ 62. The methodological inconsistency is notable: Fudge presses the meaning of apollymi (“destroy”) in Matthew 10:28 but resists pressing the meaning of pneuma (“spirit”) in Luke 23:46 and Acts 7:59.
↑ 63. The influence of Fudge’s anthropological assumptions on the broader CI movement is treated in Chapter 26 of this book, “Chris Date, Rethinking Hell, and the CI Movement Today.”
↑ 64. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, chap. 3. Moreland argues that the shared vocabulary of nephesh across humans and animals does not entail a shared ontology. The unique divine act in Genesis 2:7 points to a unique kind of creaturely reality.
↑ 65. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Cooper concludes that “all things considered, the evidence strongly favors reading Matthew as expressing Jewish dualism.”