Chapter 26

Chris Date and Rethinking Hell — Physicalism in the Modern CI Movement

A. The Rethinking Hell Movement and Its Physicalist Leanings

If you are reading this book, there is a good chance you already know about Rethinking Hell. If you do not, you should. The Rethinking Hell ministry—founded in 2012 and associated most closely with Chris Date—has done more than any other single organization to make conditional immortality accessible, respectable, and visible in the contemporary evangelical world.¹ Through its website, podcast, conferences, and published volumes, Rethinking Hell has given a platform to scholars, pastors, and laypeople who believe that the Bible teaches the final destruction of the wicked rather than their eternal conscious torment. That is a genuinely important contribution. And I want to say clearly, before I say anything else: these are allies. I share their conviction about the final fate of the unrepentant. I am grateful for the work they have done.

So why dedicate an entire chapter to them?

Because along the way, much of the modern CI movement—Rethinking Hell included—has absorbed a set of assumptions about human nature that I believe are both unnecessary and harmful to the very position they are trying to defend. I am talking about physicalism. The idea that human beings are entirely physical creatures—that there is no immaterial soul that can exist apart from the body. And while the Rethinking Hell community has never issued a formal doctrinal statement requiring physicalism, the fingerprints of physicalist anthropology are all over its public discourse.²

This did not happen in a vacuum. Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes, the foundational text of the modern CI movement, builds its case on what I have argued throughout this book is an implicitly physicalist anthropology. As we saw in Chapter 4, Fudge consistently treats the biblical words for “soul” and “spirit”—nephesh (the Hebrew term meaning “soul,” “life,” or “self”), ruach (meaning “spirit,” “breath,” or “wind”), psyche (the Greek word for “soul”), and pneuma (the Greek word for “spirit”)—as though they never refer to an immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body.³ He relies on the “Hebrew holism” narrative championed by scholars like Hans Walter Wolff, while ignoring dualist scholarship almost entirely.⁴ And when he gets to critical passages like Matthew 10:28—where Jesus warns us to fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell—Fudge redefines “soul” as “life” or “the whole person” rather than acknowledging it as a reference to the immaterial self.⁵

The next generation of CI advocates grew up reading Fudge. Many of them learned their anthropology from him, or from scholars who share his framework. And so the physicalist assumptions passed from one generation to the next—not always explicitly argued for, but quietly absorbed as the default way of thinking about human nature within the CI world.

Chris Date has been the most prominent voice in this next generation. A thoughtful and articulate defender of CI, Date has debated traditionalists on multiple occasions, written extensively on the biblical case for final destruction, and co-edited the important volume Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism.⁶ His contributions to the theological conversation are real and substantial. I say this with complete sincerity.

But Date’s public statements reveal a pattern. In his podcast discussions, debates, and written arguments, he has repeatedly framed the body-soul question in ways that lean toward physicalism. He has questioned the traditional doctrine of the intermediate state. He has expressed skepticism about the idea that the soul exists consciously between death and resurrection. He has argued that the biblical language of “death” and “destruction” is best understood as referring to the whole person ceasing to exist, not to the separation of soul from body.⁷ And he has drawn on the same “Hebrew holism” framework that Fudge used—the idea that the ancient Hebrews did not think of humans as having separable souls, but always as integrated wholes whose “parts” are merely different ways of talking about the same thing.⁸

Other voices within the Rethinking Hell community have followed a similar trajectory. Glenn Peoples, a philosopher who has written and spoken for Rethinking Hell, has argued explicitly for a physicalist anthropology, contending that the biblical authors did not believe in an immaterial soul and that dualism is a later Greek imposition on the text.⁹ Several Rethinking Hell podcast episodes have featured discussions that treat physicalism as the natural, perhaps even the required, anthropological companion to conditional immortality.¹⁰ The cumulative impression for someone following the movement is unmistakable: if you hold to CI, you probably should be a physicalist too.

The broader Rethinking Hell community has also tended to align with scholars whose anthropological views are explicitly physicalist. Joel Green, whose Body, Soul, and Human Life is perhaps the most influential recent statement of physicalist biblical anthropology, is frequently cited with approval in CI circles.¹¹ Nancey Murphy’s nonreductive physicalism has been warmly received.¹² And the general tone of the movement suggests that anyone who believes in an immaterial soul is at best clinging to an outdated framework and at worst smuggling Platonic philosophy into the Bible.

The core claim, distilled to its simplest form, goes something like this: Conditional immortality makes the most sense on a physicalist view of human nature. If there is no immaterial soul, then when God destroys the wicked, He destroys the whole person—and that is the end. Substance dualism, by contrast, creates a problem for CI: if the soul is a separate, immaterial thing, then how can God truly destroy it? Doesn’t the existence of a soul imply that something survives death—and if something survives, doesn’t that point toward eternal conscious torment rather than final destruction?

That is the reasoning. And I understand why it is attractive. It is clean. It is simple. It avoids the messy question of what happens to the soul between death and resurrection. But I believe it is wrong—both exegetically and logically. And I believe it has cost the CI movement more than it has gained.

B. Where the Rethinking Hell Movement Gets It Wrong

Before I lay out the problems, I want to restate something. I am not questioning the sincerity, intelligence, or faithfulness of anyone in the Rethinking Hell community. These are serious Christians doing serious work. My disagreement is with one particular assumption that has become embedded in the movement’s framework—the assumption that CI and physicalism naturally belong together. That assumption needs to be examined, and examined carefully.

The first problem is a confusion of categories. Conditional immortality is an eschatological claim. It says something about the final fate of the wicked: they will be destroyed. Physicalism is an anthropological claim. It says something about what a human being is: entirely physical, with no immaterial soul. These are two different questions. You can answer the first one without answering the second one at all.¹³

Think of it this way. Imagine I told you that a certain building will eventually be demolished. That tells you something about the building’s future. It does not tell you what the building is made of. It could be made of wood. It could be made of steel and concrete. It could be made of a combination of materials. The fact that it will be demolished does not determine its composition. In the same way, the fact that the wicked will be destroyed does not determine what a human being is made of. God can destroy a being that consists of body and soul just as surely as He can destroy a being that is entirely physical. The claim that God will destroy the wicked says nothing, logically, about whether humans have souls.

Yet the Rethinking Hell movement has frequently treated these two questions as though they are the same question—or at least as though the answer to one determines the answer to the other. This is a mistake. And it is a mistake that has consequences.

The second problem is the uncritical adoption of the “Hebrew holism versus Greek dualism” narrative. This is the idea that the ancient Hebrews saw human beings as indivisible wholes, while the Greeks (especially Plato) saw them as souls trapped in bodies—and that the Bible is firmly on the Hebrew side. It is a tidy story. It also happens to be significantly oversimplified, as John Cooper has shown in devastating detail.¹⁴

Cooper demonstrates that the “Hebrew holism” narrative rests on a crucial confusion. Yes, the Old Testament presents human beings as integrated wholes. Nobody disputes that. But functional holism—the idea that body and soul work together as a unity in this life—does not entail ontological monism—the idea that there is only one kind of “stuff” making up a human being.¹⁵ You can believe that body and soul are deeply integrated in normal human life and also believe that the soul is a distinct, immaterial reality that can exist apart from the body by God’s power. Substance dualists have always affirmed this. We are holistic dualists, not Platonic dualists. The integration of body and soul in this life is exactly what we expect. It does not prove physicalism.

Cooper puts the point sharply: the Old Testament presents human nature as constituted from two irreducible sources. Adam is formed from the dust of the ground—that is one source. Then God breathes into him the neshama (the “breath of life”)—that is a second, different source. These are not the same kind of thing. The dust is earthy matter. The breath is divine life-giving power. Whatever labels we use, the Bible presents a duality of ingredients right from the start.¹⁶ That is not Plato. That is Genesis 2:7.

The Rethinking Hell movement, following Fudge and Green, has largely swallowed the “Hebrew holism” narrative without reckoning with Cooper’s critique. And this matters, because the narrative does heavy lifting in their arguments. If you start by assuming that the Bible never teaches the existence of an immaterial soul, then of course you will read every passage about death and destruction through a physicalist lens. The assumption shapes the exegesis. And if the assumption is wrong—or at least far more debatable than it has been treated—then the exegesis built on it needs to be revisited.

The third problem is the dismissal of the intermediate state. If physicalism is true, then when a person dies, there is nothing left. No soul. No conscious existence. Nothing until the resurrection, when God somehow reconstitutes the person from scratch. This is why many CI physicalists either deny the intermediate state altogether or redefine it as a state of unconsciousness—what older theologians called “soul sleep.”¹⁷

But as we have argued throughout this book (especially in Chapters 6, 7, 12, 13, and 14), the biblical evidence for a conscious intermediate state is overwhelming. Rachel’s nephesh departed as she died (Gen. 35:18). The widow’s son’s nephesh returned to him when Elijah prayed (1 Kings 17:21–22). Samuel appeared conscious after death (1 Sam. 28). Jesus promised the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paul said to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8). The souls under the altar in Revelation cry out to God (Rev. 6:9–11). The spirits of just men are described as “made perfect” in the heavenly assembly (Heb. 12:23).¹⁸

Physicalism cannot account for these texts without significant exegetical gymnastics. And the Rethinking Hell community, to the extent that it has adopted physicalist assumptions, has either downplayed these passages or offered readings that strain the plain sense of the text. That is a high cost to pay for an anthropological assumption that CI does not even require.

The fourth problem is the personal identity crisis. If a person is entirely physical, and that physical body decomposes after death, then what is resurrected? Is the resurrected person the same person, or a brand-new copy? Physicalists have struggled mightily with this question, and the solutions they have offered—constitution views, pattern-identity theories, temporal-parts theories—are neither simple nor obviously successful.¹⁹ Substance dualism, by contrast, answers the question straightforwardly: the same soul that animated the original body is reunited with a resurrected body. The soul is the thread of personal identity that runs from earthly life, through the intermediate state, to the resurrection. The person who rises is the same person who died, because the same soul is present in both. As Cooper argues in his contribution to Christian Physicalism, the physicalist alternatives face serious problems that dualism simply avoids.²⁰

The Rethinking Hell movement has, by and large, not grappled seriously with the personal identity problem. This is understandable—their focus is on eschatology, not metaphysics. But when you adopt an anthropology, you inherit its problems. And physicalism’s personal identity problem is a serious one that deserves more attention than it has received in CI circles.

A fifth problem, related but distinct, is the implicit reliance on a neuroscience argument that does not actually do what it is claimed to do. In broader physicalist circles—and sometimes within the CI movement—the advances of modern neuroscience are cited as evidence that the mind is nothing more than the brain. Damage the brain, and you damage the mind. Stimulate the brain electrically, and you produce mental experiences. Therefore (the argument goes), there is no separate mind or soul; consciousness is just what the brain does.⁵⁸

This argument sounds compelling at first, but it proves far less than it appears to. Yes, brain damage affects mental function. But that is exactly what substance dualism predicts. If the soul uses the brain as its instrument in this life, then damaging the instrument will affect the soul’s ability to express itself through the body—just as damaging a piano affects the pianist’s ability to make music, without proving that the pianist is the piano.⁵⁹ The correlation between brain states and mental states is perfectly consistent with dualism. What would actually disprove dualism is evidence that consciousness cannot exist apart from the brain. And that is precisely what the neuroscience evidence does not show. In fact, as we will explore in Chapter 30, the veridical near-death experience research provides significant evidence in the opposite direction—evidence that conscious experience can occur when the brain is not functioning at all.

The Rethinking Hell community has occasionally leaned on the neuroscience argument without engaging the dualist responses to it. J. P. Moreland and Brandon Rickabaugh have addressed these arguments in detail in The Substance of Consciousness, showing that the neuroscience evidence is fully compatible with substance dualism and that physicalism actually has more trouble accounting for the existence of consciousness than dualism does.⁶⁰ The so-called “hard problem of consciousness”—the question of why physical processes in the brain should give rise to subjective, first-person experience at all—remains unsolved on physicalist assumptions. Dualism does not face this problem, because it does not need to explain how physical matter generates consciousness. Consciousness is a property of the immaterial soul, which interacts with the brain but is not identical to it.

C. The Dualist Response — Why CI Is Stronger Without Physicalism

Honoring What Rethinking Hell Has Done Right

I want to begin this section by doing something I hope runs throughout this book: giving credit where it is due. The Rethinking Hell movement has accomplished things that needed to be accomplished. For decades, conditional immortality was treated as a fringe position in evangelical theology. It was associated with cults. It was dismissed without serious engagement. Respected scholars like John Stott could express sympathy for it and face immediate backlash.²¹ The theological establishment was hostile, and most pastors were afraid even to raise the question.

Rethinking Hell changed that. Chris Date and his colleagues created a space where CI could be discussed openly, defended rigorously, and debated fairly. They organized conferences. They published scholarship. They hosted public debates between conditionalists and traditionalists that demonstrated, for anyone paying attention, that CI was not a fringe position at all but a serious, exegetically grounded interpretation of Scripture held by thoughtful believers throughout church history.²²

Fudge laid the foundation. Rethinking Hell built the house. And for that, every CI advocate owes them a debt of gratitude.

But you can build a good house on a flawed foundation and still have structural problems. The physicalist anthropology that the Rethinking Hell movement has absorbed from Fudge and from broader academic trends is, I believe, a crack in the foundation. It does not threaten the house immediately. CI can survive with or without physicalism. But over time, the crack weakens the structure. And fixing it now is better than waiting until the walls start to bow.

I want to be specific about what I mean when I say the movement has been “helpful.” Before Rethinking Hell, a pastor who came to believe in conditional immortality often felt isolated. Where could he go? Who could he talk to? The traditionalist establishment viewed conditionalists with suspicion—sometimes outright hostility. The Rethinking Hell website, podcast, and annual conferences gave these pastors and scholars a community. That is no small thing. Theology is not done in isolation. We need fellow travelers. The Rethinking Hell community provided that fellowship, and it did so with integrity, scholarly seriousness, and genuine warmth.

The movement also demonstrated something that desperately needed demonstrating: that CI could hold its own in fair public debate. Chris Date’s willingness to engage traditionalist scholars in open, recorded discussions showed the evangelical world that conditionalism was not a position held only by people who did not know their Bibles. Quite the opposite. Date and his colleagues showed that they knew the biblical texts inside and out, that they had done their homework, and that they could give a thorough accounting of their position under pressure. That mattered. It changed the perception of CI in the broader church.

The published resources have been valuable as well. The volume Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism gathered important scholarly essays into a single, accessible collection. The website’s articles and the podcast’s archive represent a vast library of free material for anyone exploring the CI position. Many people who now hold to conditional immortality first encountered it through these resources. Edward Fudge planted the seed. Rethinking Hell watered it and helped it grow into a mature, visible, and intellectually serious movement within evangelicalism.

All of that is genuine. All of it matters. And none of it changes the fact that the movement’s default anthropology needs to be reconsidered.

The Logical Independence of CI and Physicalism

The most important thing to understand—and the thing I most want Rethinking Hell readers to take away from this chapter—is that CI and physicalism are logically independent. You do not need physicalism for CI to work. Period.

Here is why. CI claims that the wicked will ultimately be destroyed—that they will cease to exist after the final judgment. For this to happen, God must be able to destroy the whole person. On physicalism, the whole person is the body, so God destroys the body and the person ceases to exist. Simple enough. But on substance dualism, the whole person is body and soul—and God can destroy both. Jesus said so explicitly: “Fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28, NKJV). The soul is not inherently immortal. It exists because God sustains it. And God can withdraw that sustaining power whenever He chooses.²³

This is the point that I believe has been missed, or at least underappreciated, in the Rethinking Hell community. The assumption seems to be that if you believe in an immaterial soul, you are committed to the soul’s natural immortality—and if the soul is naturally immortal, then it cannot be destroyed, and CI falls apart. But this assumption confuses two very different claims. Substance dualism says the soul is real and immaterial. It does not say the soul is indestructible. Those are two completely different things.²⁴

Think about it this way. A flame is real. It is not material in the same way a rock is material—you cannot pick it up and put it in your pocket. But nobody would say a flame is indestructible. You can extinguish a flame. It depends on fuel, oxygen, and heat. Remove any of those, and the flame goes out. In a similar (though obviously imperfect) way, the soul is real and immaterial, but it depends on God for its continued existence. God gives life, and God can take it away. The soul’s immateriality does not make it unkillable. Only God is inherently immortal. Paul makes this clear: God “alone has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16). Everything else—including the human soul—exists at His pleasure.

This means that CI actually gains clarity on a dualist framework. When Jesus says God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna, the dualist takes Him at face value. There are two things—soul and body. God can destroy both. The result is the total, irreversible destruction of the person. That is conditional immortality. The physicalist, by contrast, has to redefine “soul” in this verse as “life” or “the whole person,” which creates the problem we explored in Chapter 10: if “soul” just means “life” or “person,” then Jesus is saying, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the person.” But of course humans can kill persons. They do it every day. The verse only makes sense if “soul” refers to something that survives the death of the body—something that humans cannot touch but God can destroy.²⁵

Here is the irony. CI’s single strongest proof text—the verse that conditionalists love to quote against traditionalists—actually requires substance dualism to make sense. The Rethinking Hell movement cites Matthew 10:28 constantly. And rightly so. It is devastating against eternal conscious torment. But the very logic of the verse depends on the distinction between body and soul that physicalism denies. This is not a minor tension. It is a contradiction at the heart of the physicalist-CI synthesis.

The Intermediate State: What the Movement Cannot Afford to Lose

A second reason CI is stronger on dualism has to do with the intermediate state—what happens between a person’s death and the final resurrection. On a dualist view, the answer is straightforward. Believers go to be with Christ consciously (Phil. 1:23; 2 Cor. 5:8; Luke 23:43). Unbelievers go to Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not the final lake of fire (Luke 16:19–31). Both groups await the resurrection and the final judgment. At that judgment, the redeemed receive immortality, and the unrepentant are destroyed—body and soul—in the second death.²⁶

This picture preserves the full biblical narrative. It accounts for the rich man and Lazarus. It explains Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ. It makes sense of the souls under the altar in Revelation 6. It provides the context for the postmortem opportunity (which we will explore in Chapter 29). And it does all of this without compromising CI in the slightest. The wicked are still destroyed. The destruction simply happens at the right time—after the final judgment, not at the moment of death.

Physicalism, by contrast, creates a gaping hole in this narrative. If there is no soul, then there is no conscious existence between death and resurrection. The dead are simply gone—nonexistent—until God recreates them at the final judgment. But this raises a cascade of problems. What does Jesus mean when He tells the thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise”? What does Paul mean when he says that to depart is to be with Christ, which is “far better”? How can the souls under the altar cry out if they do not exist?²⁷

CI physicalists have offered answers to these questions, but the answers tend to be strained. Some argue that “today” in Luke 23:43 should be connected to “I say to you” rather than “you will be with me”—a reading that is grammatically possible but exegetically unlikely and has been rejected by the vast majority of commentators.²⁸ Others suggest that Paul is talking about the resurrection body, not about a disembodied intermediate state—but this requires reading 2 Corinthians 5 in a way that ignores Paul’s explicit contrast between being “at home in the body” and being “away from the body.”²⁹ Still others simply accept “soul sleep”—the idea that the dead exist in some kind of unconscious state until the resurrection. But this has its own problems, not least the fact that Revelation 6:9–11 depicts the martyred dead as conscious, speaking, and waiting.³⁰

The CI movement does not need these problems. Substance dualism handles the intermediate state naturally and elegantly. It preserves the conscious existence of the dead, upholds the hope that believers are immediately in Christ’s presence at death, and still allows for the final destruction of the wicked at the last judgment. CI loses nothing by embracing dualism. It gains coherence.

Personal Identity and the Resurrection

There is a third area where dualism strengthens CI, and it is one that the Rethinking Hell community has not adequately addressed: the problem of personal identity at the resurrection.

Every Christian believes in the resurrection of the dead. But here is the puzzle: if a person dies, and their body decays, and centuries pass, and the atoms that once made up their body are scattered across the earth—possibly becoming part of other organisms, other people—then what exactly does God raise? If you are a physicalist, the answer cannot be “the same body,” because that body no longer exists. So God must create a new body. But if the resurrected person has a brand-new body and no soul carrying their identity forward, then what makes them the same person who died?³¹

This is not a trick question. It is one of the deepest problems in all of philosophical theology, and physicalists have labored over it for decades. Kevin Corcoran’s “constitution view” tries to solve it by saying the person is “constituted by” the body without being identical to it—but this threatens to collapse into dualism, since it requires something beyond the physical body to carry identity forward.³² Peter van Inwagen once proposed that God might secretly preserve the original body (or enough of it) to guarantee identity—a move that even van Inwagen himself admitted was speculative and unsatisfying.³³ Dean Zimmerman has offered an “immanent causal” account, but this too requires positing causal connections that seem to go beyond what physics alone can explain.³⁴

Substance dualism cuts through the tangle. The soul is the bearer of personal identity. The same soul that animated the original body is reunited with the resurrected body. The person who stands before God at the judgment is the same person who lived and died on earth—not a copy, not a replica, but the very same individual. This matters enormously for CI, because the final judgment must be a judgment of the same persons who lived, sinned, and (in some cases) refused God’s grace. If the resurrected person is not genuinely the same individual, then the judgment loses its moral force. You cannot justly condemn a copy for the sins of the original.³⁵

Again: the CI movement does not need this problem. Dualism solves it. Physicalism creates it.

Christology and the Death of Christ: A Test Case

There is another angle here that I think the Rethinking Hell community needs to take more seriously, and it comes not from philosophy but from Christology—the doctrine of who Jesus Christ is. What happened to Jesus between Good Friday and Easter Sunday? This is the question of “Holy Saturday,” and it turns out to be a powerful test case for the body-soul debate.

On the dualist view, the answer is relatively straightforward. When Jesus died on the cross, His body was placed in the tomb while His soul descended to the realm of the dead. The Apostles’ Creed captures this when it says He “descended into hell” (or “descended to the dead”).⁵² His human soul remained in conscious existence. His divine nature, of course, never ceased to exist. And on Easter Sunday, soul and body were reunited in resurrection glory. Throughout this entire process, Jesus remained one person—the same person—even though His body and soul were temporarily separated. The thread of personal identity was never broken.

Physicalism has a much harder time with Holy Saturday. If Jesus was entirely physical—if there was no immaterial soul—then when His body died, He ceased to exist. There was no conscious Jesus on Holy Saturday. There was only a corpse in a tomb. But wait—Jesus is also the eternal Son of God, the second person of the Trinity. The Son of God cannot cease to exist. He is eternal by nature. So if Jesus’ humanity was entirely physical and that physical body was dead, then either (a) the Son of God existed on Holy Saturday without any human nature at all, which threatens the Chalcedonian definition that the two natures are united “without separation,” or (b) we must come up with some creative metaphysical story about how a dead body can still somehow be a fully human person.⁵³

Neither option is attractive. The first risks what the early church called Nestorianism—the idea that Christ’s divine and human natures are so distinct they can be pulled apart. The second requires us to believe that a corpse is a person, which strains ordinary language and common sense to the breaking point. As several contributors to the volume Christian Physicalism? have pointed out, the physicalist has genuine difficulty accounting for the continuity of Christ’s incarnation across the three days of Holy Saturday.⁵⁴

The dualist faces no such difficulty. Christ’s human soul continued to exist between death and resurrection. His divine nature was never at risk. And the union of the two natures in one person was preserved throughout. Thomas Aquinas captured this beautifully when he wrote that Christ’s soul descended to the dead while His body lay in the tomb, and that both the soul and the body remained united to His divine person even though they were temporarily separated from each other.⁵⁵ This is the traditional Christian understanding. And it requires dualism.

Now, I realize that the Rethinking Hell community is focused on eschatology, not on Christology. But the two are connected. If your anthropology cannot account for the death and resurrection of Christ without creating Christological problems, that is a sign your anthropology needs work. And if the dualist account of Christ’s death is more coherent, more faithful to the creeds, and more theologically satisfying than the physicalist account, then that is one more reason to prefer dualism—and one more reason for the CI movement to disentangle itself from physicalist assumptions.

CI Dualists in the Historical Tradition

One of the assumptions that seems to operate quietly within the Rethinking Hell community is that CI and dualism have rarely been combined—that historically, if you believed in the soul, you believed in eternal torment, and if you believed in final destruction, you were some kind of physicalist or at least a soul-sleep advocate. This assumption is historically inaccurate.

John Stott—perhaps the most influential evangelical leader of the twentieth century—expressed his sympathy for conditional immortality in his well-known 1988 dialogue with David Edwards published in Evangelical Essentials. Stott was no physicalist. He affirmed the conscious intermediate state. He believed in the reality of the soul. But he argued, on exegetical grounds, that the language of destruction in the New Testament points to the eventual annihilation of the wicked rather than their eternal torment.³⁶ Stott held CI and substance dualism together without any apparent tension.

Clark Pinnock, another prominent CI advocate, likewise affirmed the destruction of the wicked while maintaining a generally dualist anthropology. Pinnock wrote that the traditional doctrine of hell as endless conscious torment was “morally and scripturally flawed” and that the Bible pointed toward the final destruction of the impenitent—but he did not argue that this required physicalism.³⁷

John Wenham, the British evangelical scholar who wrote the foreword to the second edition of Fudge’s book, was a conditionalist who affirmed the traditional Christian hope of being with Christ at death. Wenham did not need physicalism to defend CI. He simply argued that immortality is conditional upon God’s gift, not that the soul does not exist.³⁸

These examples matter because they show that the CI-physicalism link is not a historical constant. It is a recent development—one that owes more to the influence of academic philosophy of mind and to the “Hebrew holism” movement in biblical studies than to any inherent logical connection between the two positions. The Rethinking Hell community would benefit from recognizing this. CI has deep historical roots. Physicalism is a relatively recent addition to the package. And the addition is not an improvement.

The “Hebrew Holism” Narrative Revisited

I want to spend a few more paragraphs on the “Hebrew holism” narrative, because it plays such a central role in the Rethinking Hell community’s approach to anthropology. The idea, as I have mentioned, is that the ancient Hebrews thought of humans as indivisible wholes—body-soul unities in which “soul” and “spirit” are just different ways of talking about the whole person, not references to a separate immaterial substance. This is contrasted with the Greek (especially Platonic) view, in which the soul is an immortal entity imprisoned in a mortal body. On this telling, the Bible teaches holism, while dualism is a Greek import that distorted early Christian theology.

Cooper’s critique of this narrative is, in my view, one of the most important pieces of scholarship in the entire body-soul debate. He makes several points that are directly relevant to the Rethinking Hell community’s position.³⁹

First, Cooper acknowledges that the Old Testament is holistic in the functional sense. Body and soul are integrated. They work together. The Old Testament does not present human beings as souls that happen to be using bodies. No serious dualist claims otherwise. But Cooper insists—and this is critical—that functional holism does not entail ontological monism. Just because body and soul work together in this life does not mean they are the same kind of thing. A pilot and an airplane work together as a functional unity, but nobody would say they are made of the same stuff. Holism describes how the parts relate. It does not determine what the parts are.⁴⁰

Second, Cooper shows that the Old Testament actually points away from monism and toward a duality of ingredients. As we noted earlier, Genesis 2:7 describes God forming Adam from the dust and then breathing into him the breath of life. The dust and the breath are two different kinds of thing. Neither can be reduced to the other. Ezekiel 37 reinforces this: the dry bones come together, flesh covers them—but they are still lifeless until the ruach enters them from God. The body alone is not enough. A second, different ingredient is required. This is not Platonism. But it is not physicalism either. It is a picture of human nature as constituted from two irreducible sources.⁴¹

Third, Cooper demonstrates that the Old Testament narratives about death and the afterlife actually require some form of dualism. When Genesis 35:18 says Rachel’s nephesh departed as she died, the most natural reading is that something left her body. When 1 Kings 17:21–22 says the child’s nephesh returned and he lived, the most natural reading is that something came back. When 1 Samuel 28 depicts Samuel appearing after death and conversing with Saul, the most natural reading is that Samuel continued to exist consciously in some form.⁴² These narratives were written by the same Hebrew authors who supposedly did not believe in any distinction between body and soul. Either those authors were inconsistent, or the “Hebrew holism” narrative does not mean what its proponents think it means.

The Rethinking Hell community has, for the most part, relied on the “Hebrew holism” narrative without engaging Cooper’s critique. This is a significant gap. Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting is arguably the most important scholarly work on biblical anthropology written in the last half-century. Any serious discussion of what the Bible teaches about human nature needs to reckon with it. The fact that many in the CI movement seem to have bypassed it is itself a sign that the movement has absorbed its anthropological assumptions from a narrow range of sources.

I want to be fair here. Not everyone in the Rethinking Hell community has explicitly endorsed the “Hebrew holism” narrative. Some contributors are more careful. Some leave the body-soul question open. But the overall trajectory of the movement’s public discourse has been clear enough: dualism is treated as suspicious, physicalism is treated as natural, and the “Hebrew holism” narrative is invoked regularly as though it were settled scholarly consensus. It is not. It is a contested position that has been challenged by serious scholars and found wanting at critical points.

Russell Aldwinckle’s observation, quoted approvingly by Cooper, puts the matter bluntly: the claim that Hebrew thought was purely holistic and could not possibly accommodate any form of body-soul distinction has become “a dogma of much so-called biblical theology in our time.”⁵⁶ Like all dogmas, it has been repeated so often that people have stopped examining whether it is true. The Rethinking Hell community would benefit from stepping back and asking: have we examined this claim carefully, or have we simply inherited it from Fudge and from the broader stream of physicalist biblical scholarship?

Cooper also makes a point that deserves special attention in this context. Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that the Old Testament by itself does not clearly teach the separability of soul and body (which I do not grant, but let us suppose), the intertestamental period and the New Testament clearly do. By the time of Jesus, the expectation that the dead continue to exist in some form between death and resurrection was widespread in Judaism—and not because Jews had been corrupted by Plato. The Pharisees believed in the resurrection and in the conscious existence of the dead. The Sadducees denied both. Jesus sided with the Pharisees (Mark 12:18–27). The early Christians followed Jesus.⁵⁷ The idea that the conscious intermediate state is a Greek import reads the evidence backwards. It was the dominant Jewish expectation, rooted in Jewish scripture and tradition, which the New Testament confirmed and deepened.

What Fudge Missed—and What the Movement Inherited

This is where the genealogy of ideas matters. Fudge wrote The Fire That Consumes as a work on eschatology, not anthropology. His primary question was about the final fate of the wicked. But because that question touches on human nature, he had to address the body-soul issue—and he addressed it quickly, adopting the “Hebrew holism” narrative without engaging the strongest dualist scholarship.⁴³

As we documented in Chapters 19–22, Fudge discussed about 22 biblical passages bearing on the body-soul question, listed about 4 without exegesis, and completely ignored approximately 48. The passages he ignored tend to be the ones that most naturally support substance dualism: Genesis 35:18, 1 Kings 17:21–22, 1 Samuel 28, Luke 23:43, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, Hebrews 12:23, and dozens more.⁴⁴ The result was an anthropological framework that looked comprehensive but was actually quite selective.

The Rethinking Hell movement inherited this framework. Not because anyone was being dishonest, but because Fudge was the starting point for the entire modern CI conversation. When you read Fudge first—as almost everyone in the movement does—you absorb his anthropological assumptions before you ever encounter the counter-evidence. By the time you get to Cooper or Moreland or Swinburne, the physicalist lens is already in place. And once a lens is in place, it shapes everything you see through it.

I am not suggesting any bad faith. I am describing how intellectual movements work. We all start somewhere. We all have influences. The question is whether we are willing to reexamine our starting assumptions when the evidence warrants it. I believe the evidence warrants it here.

Disentangling CI from Physicalism: An Invitation

So here is my invitation to the Rethinking Hell community, and to everyone in the CI movement who has been operating with physicalist assumptions: consider the possibility that CI does not need physicalism. Consider the possibility that substance dualism—far from being a threat to CI—actually makes it stronger, more coherent, and more biblically grounded.

Consider what CI looks like on dualist foundations. God creates human beings as body-soul composites. The soul is real, immaterial, and utterly dependent on God for its existence. In this life, body and soul work together as an integrated unity. At death, the soul separates from the body. Believers go to be with Christ in a conscious intermediate state. Unbelievers go to Hades—conscious, aware, and waiting. At the final resurrection, body and soul are reunited. The redeemed receive immortality—the gift of life that never ends. The unrepentant stand before God and face the second death: the destruction of both soul and body (Matt. 10:28). They cease to exist. Permanently. Irreversibly. That is CI. And it works perfectly well on dualist assumptions.⁴⁵

In fact, it works better. You do not have to explain away the intermediate-state passages. You do not have to redefine “soul” in Matthew 10:28. You do not have to solve the personal identity problem with speculative metaphysics. You do not have to pretend that the “Hebrew holism” narrative is more settled than it actually is. You can take the biblical text at face value, in all its richness, and still hold to the final destruction of the wicked.

CI has always been an eschatological claim: the wicked will be destroyed. That claim does not change whether you are a dualist or a physicalist. What changes is how well you can account for everything else the Bible says about human nature, death, and the afterlife. And on that score, substance dualism has the clear advantage.

D. Counter-Objections

“If the soul can exist without the body, doesn’t that prove it is immortal?”

This is probably the most common objection I hear from CI advocates who lean toward physicalism. The reasoning goes like this: if the soul can survive the death of the body, then it must be naturally immortal. And if it is naturally immortal, then God cannot destroy it, and CI is in trouble.

But the objection rests on a confusion between existence and immortality. The soul can exist apart from the body—yes. That is what substance dualism claims. But the soul does not exist on its own power. It exists because God sustains it. And God can stop sustaining it whenever He chooses. A lamp can function in the dark. That does not mean it generates its own electricity. The soul’s ability to exist apart from the body is a gift of God’s sustaining power, not evidence of inherent indestructibility.⁴⁶

Scripture makes this clear. Paul says that God “alone has immortality” (1 Tim. 6:16). Immortality belongs to God by nature. Everyone else receives it as a gift—or does not receive it at all. The soul’s existence between death and resurrection is no more “natural immortality” than the flame’s existence while fuel lasts is “natural immortality.” God keeps the soul in existence until the resurrection because He has purposes for it—fellowship with Christ for the redeemed, waiting in Hades for the unredeemed. But that continued existence is entirely in God’s hands. He can end it. Jesus said He can. And on CI, He eventually does, for those who finally refuse His grace.⁴⁷

“But didn’t the early conditionalists reject the soul?”

Some in the CI movement point to early conditionalists who were indeed physicalists or near-physicalists—thinkers within the Advent Christian tradition, for instance, who held to “soul sleep” or outright denial of the intermediate state. As Fudge himself notes, the Advent Christian Church is distinguished from other evangelical bodies partly by its commitment to the “sleep” of the dead.⁴⁸

This is true as a matter of history. Some early conditionalists were physicalists. But so what? Some early conditionalists were also dispensationalists, or held to wooden literal readings of apocalyptic literature, or worked with exegetical methods that no one today would endorse without qualification. The fact that a historical position was combined with CI in the past does not mean it is required by CI. We do not determine the truth of an anthropological position by asking whether previous conditionalists held it. We determine it by asking what Scripture teaches. And as I have argued throughout this book, Scripture teaches substance dualism.

“You’re creating division in the CI movement over a secondary issue.”

I have heard this objection, and I take it seriously. The CI movement is still finding its feet in the broader evangelical world. Internal disagreements about anthropology might seem like an unwelcome distraction when the primary battle is still being fought over the doctrine of hell itself.

I understand the concern. But here is why I believe the anthropological question is not a distraction—it is essential. First, because the CI movement’s credibility depends on handling Scripture well. If we adopt an anthropology that requires us to explain away or downplay dozens of biblical texts about the soul, the intermediate state, and the body-soul distinction, we weaken our own exegetical credibility. Traditionalists will notice the strained readings. They already have. And when they point out that our anthropology cannot account for texts like 2 Corinthians 5:8, Philippians 1:23, or Revelation 6:9–11, they score legitimate points against us—not against CI itself, but against the particular version of CI that has been built on physicalist foundations. That is an unnecessary vulnerability. We should not be handing our critics ammunition that we do not need to give them.⁴⁹

Second, because the anthropological question affects pastoral ministry. When a bereaved parent asks, “Is my child with Jesus right now?” the answer matters. If our theology says, “Well, your child does not currently exist—they will be re-created at the resurrection,” that is a very different answer than, “Yes, your child’s soul is with Christ in paradise, and one day their body will be raised to join their soul in glory.” The second answer is both more comforting and more biblical. The CI movement should be able to give it without embarrassment.⁵⁰

Third, because getting the anthropology right actually strengthens the CI position. As I have argued throughout this chapter, CI is more coherent, more exegetically sound, and more theologically robust when built on dualist foundations. Disentangling CI from physicalism does not weaken the movement. It strengthens it. It frees CI from a set of philosophical and exegetical problems it does not need, and it allows the movement to focus its energy on its strongest arguments—the biblical case for final destruction.

“Dualism leads to eternal conscious torment, not CI.”

A final objection, and an important one. Some in the CI movement believe that substance dualism is historically and logically linked to eternal conscious torment. The reasoning is that if the soul is immortal, it must exist forever—and if it exists forever, the wicked must suffer forever. Therefore dualism leads to ECT, and CI should avoid it.

This objection confuses Platonic dualism with substance dualism. Platonic dualism holds that the soul is naturally immortal—that it cannot be destroyed by anything, including God. If that were true, then yes, the soul would have to exist forever, and the wicked would either suffer forever or be universally redeemed. But substance dualism, as defended in this book, makes no such claim. The soul is created by God. It depends on God for its existence. And God can terminate it. Jesus said so. Paul said so. The early church said so. Aquinas said so.⁵¹

The link between dualism and ECT exists only if you assume Platonic natural immortality. Drop that assumption—as every Christian should—and the link dissolves. Substance dualism is perfectly compatible with CI. It always has been. The Rethinking Hell movement would do well to stop treating dualism as the enemy and start recognizing it as a potential ally. The great irony of the CI movement’s suspicion of dualism is that the movement’s own hero text—Matthew 10:28—makes the strongest possible case for both CI and dualism at the same time. God can destroy both soul and body. That is conditional immortality. That also assumes the soul is a real, distinct entity. That is substance dualism. The two positions are not in tension. They are two sides of the same coin.

Conclusion

Chris Date and the Rethinking Hell community have done something genuinely important. They have made conditional immortality visible, respectable, and accessible in the evangelical world. For that, every conditionalist owes them thanks. But along the way, the movement has absorbed a physicalist anthropology that I believe is both unnecessary and counterproductive. CI does not need physicalism. CI is not strengthened by physicalism. In fact, CI is weakened by it—because physicalism forces the movement to explain away the intermediate state, redefine “soul” in key biblical texts, and carry a personal identity problem that has no clean solution.

Substance dualism offers a better foundation. It takes Scripture at face value. It preserves the conscious intermediate state. It solves the personal identity problem. It makes Matthew 10:28 mean exactly what it appears to mean. It handles the Christological questions of Holy Saturday without difficulty. And it does all of this without compromising CI in the slightest. God can destroy both soul and body. The soul is not naturally immortal. Conditional immortality stands.

My hope is that this chapter is received in the spirit in which it is offered—not as an attack on allies, but as an invitation to build our shared conviction on stronger ground. CI and substance dualism do not compete. They complement each other. And together, they offer the most coherent, most biblical, and most pastorally powerful account of human nature and final destiny available to the church today.

There is one more thing I want to say before I close this chapter, and I say it as someone who has sat in the same pews, read the same books, and wrestled with the same questions as the people I am addressing. The CI movement is young. It is still growing. It is still defining itself. That means there is still time to get the foundations right. We do not have to carry forward every assumption that was handed to us by our forerunners. We can honor Fudge’s work—as I have tried to do throughout this book—while also recognizing that his anthropology was the weakest part of his project. We can appreciate what Rethinking Hell has accomplished while also asking whether the movement’s default anthropological framework is serving it well.

I believe it is not. And I believe the alternative is not only available but compelling. CI built on dualist foundations is stronger exegetically, because it takes the full range of biblical anthropological language seriously. It is stronger philosophically, because it avoids the personal identity problem and the hard problem of consciousness. It is stronger pastorally, because it can affirm with confidence that the dead in Christ are with Him now, not merely awaiting re-creation. And it is stronger historically, because it aligns with the overwhelming majority of the Christian theological tradition on the nature of the human person.

The CI movement does not need to choose between believing in final destruction and believing in the soul. It can have both. In fact, it should have both. That is the argument of this book. That is the invitation of this chapter. And I extend it with genuine respect, genuine gratitude, and genuine hope that it will be considered on its merits.