Chapter 27

Does CI Require Physicalism?—Absolutely Not

Here is the question that has been building for twenty-six chapters: Does conditional immortality need physicalism? Does the belief that the wicked will finally be destroyed require the belief that human beings are entirely physical creatures with no immaterial soul?

The answer is no. It never has.

And yet, if you spend enough time in conditionalist circles—reading the books, listening to the podcasts, following the online discussions—you could be forgiven for thinking the answer is yes. A quiet but powerful assumption has taken root in the modern CI movement: that the case for final destruction depends on denying the existence of the soul, or at least on redefining the soul so thoroughly that it no longer means what Christians have meant by it for two thousand years. Edward Fudge did not invent this assumption, but his landmark work The Fire That Consumes did more than any other single book to embed it in the DNA of the movement.¹ And from Fudge, it passed into the broader conditionalist conversation—through Rethinking Hell, through Chris Date’s writing and debates, through the steady drip of articles and blog posts that treat physicalism as though it were part of the package deal.

This chapter is here to say, as clearly and as firmly as I can: that assumption is wrong. CI does not require physicalism. CI has never required physicalism. And CI is actually stronger—more biblically grounded, more theologically coherent, more philosophically defensible—when it is built on the foundation of substance dualism rather than the shifting sand of physicalist anthropology.

That is the central argument of this book, and this is the chapter where we bring it all together.

A. The Physicalist Assumption in the CI Movement

To understand why so many conditionalists assume that CI requires physicalism, we need to trace the logic. It runs something like this.

Conditional immortality holds that immortality is not a natural or inherent property of human beings. It is God’s gift, given only to those who are in Christ. The wicked do not possess immortality. Therefore, after the final judgment, they will be destroyed—they will cease to exist entirely. That is the “second death” spoken of in Revelation 20:14.²

So far, so good. I affirm every word of that.

But then comes the next move—and it is here that the logic goes sideways. The argument continues: if human beings had an immaterial soul that could survive the death of the body, then that soul would be naturally immortal. And if the soul were naturally immortal, it could not be destroyed. And if the soul could not be destroyed, then CI would be false—because the wicked could never truly cease to exist. Their souls would persist forever, and we would be right back to eternal conscious torment.

Therefore—so the reasoning goes—CI requires that there be no soul. Or at least, no soul that can exist apart from the body. The “soul” must be nothing more than a word for the whole living person, a synonym for “life” or “self.” When the body dies, the person ceases to exist entirely. There is nothing left over. The soul does not depart because there is no soul to depart.

Fudge makes this move in The Fire That Consumes. He does not use the word “physicalism,” but his treatment of human nature is consistently physicalist in its conclusions. He draws heavily on the holistic anthropology of Hans Walter Wolff and Aimo Nikolainen, presenting the biblical words for “soul” and “spirit” as referring to the whole person rather than to any separable immaterial component.³ He writes that the Hebrew word nephesh (often translated “soul”) “is the most comprehensive term for man in his wholeness,” and that its meanings range from “neck” and “life” to “person” and even “corpse.”⁴ He quotes Nikolainen’s summary approvingly: “Man is an indivisible whole. Seen from different points of view, he is by turns body, flesh and blood, soul, spirit, and heart. Each of these portrays a specific human characteristic, but they are not parts into which man may be divided.”⁵

Fudge then connects this anthropology directly to the question of final punishment. He notes that Jan Bremmer “traces the body/soul dualism of later Judaism, and eventually of the Christian church, directly to the influence of the Greeks.”⁶ The implication is clear: if body-soul dualism is Greek rather than biblical, and if the soul is merely a way of talking about the whole person, then there is nothing that survives death to be punished forever. CI follows naturally—and physicalism is the anthropological engine that makes it run.

The broader CI movement has absorbed this logic. Chris Date and the contributors at Rethinking Hell have done important work in making CI accessible and building a scholarly community around it—and I want to honor that work sincerely.⁷ But when it comes to anthropology, the physicalist assumption often operates in the background, unchallenged. The working assumption in much of the modern conditionalist literature is that CI and physicalism belong together, that one supports the other, and that to affirm an immaterial soul is to open the door to the very eternal conscious torment that CI was designed to replace.

That assumption is what I want to challenge. Not the eschatology. The anthropology.

And I want to be careful here, because I know this is a sensitive conversation. Many of my friends in the CI movement have absorbed the physicalist assumption without realizing it. They came to conditionalism through Fudge, or through Rethinking Hell, or through the work of Joel Green or Nancey Murphy, and along the way they picked up the idea that physicalism is part of the deal. They did not sit down one day and decide to reject the soul. It happened gradually, as they read books and listened to podcasts that treated physicalism as the obvious default position. They heard that “Hebrew holism” rules out body-soul dualism. They heard that the soul is a Greek import with no biblical basis. They heard that neuroscience has shown the mind is just the brain. And because they trusted the people telling them these things—people who are genuinely brilliant and genuinely committed to Scripture—they accepted the anthropology along with the eschatology.

I understand why that happened. And I am not here to question anyone’s motives or their commitment to the Bible. What I am here to do is show that the physicalist assumption is not true, that CI does not need it, and that CI is actually hurt by it. If you are a conditionalist and a physicalist, I am asking you to consider the possibility that you can keep the eschatology and change the anthropology. You can believe the wicked will be destroyed and believe that human beings have immaterial souls. These two beliefs are not in tension. They reinforce each other.

Let me show you how.

B. Where the Logic Breaks Down

The argument that CI requires physicalism contains a critical error. It confuses two very different claims: the claim that the soul can exist apart from the body and the claim that the soul cannot be destroyed. These are not the same thing. Not even close.

Think about it this way. A candle flame can exist without a candle—you can light a match and hold the flame in the air for a moment. But that does not mean the flame is indestructible. Blow on it and it goes out. The fact that something can exist in one state does not mean it must exist in every state, or that it cannot be extinguished by a sufficient power.⁸

The same principle applies to the soul. Substance dualism affirms that the soul can exist apart from the body—that when the body dies, the person does not simply wink out of existence but continues in a conscious state, sustained by God’s power, awaiting the resurrection. But substance dualism does not affirm that the soul is indestructible. It does not affirm that the soul has the power to keep itself in existence. It does not affirm that the soul possesses what theologians call aseity—the quality of self-existence that belongs to God alone.⁹

This is where the physicalist argument collapses. It assumes that affirming the soul’s existence automatically means affirming the soul’s indestructibility. But no serious Christian dualist has ever made that claim. Not Aquinas. Not Calvin. Not Cooper. Not Moreland. Not Swinburne.¹⁰

John W. Cooper addresses this directly in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. He distinguishes carefully between different senses of the word “immortality.” If immortality means simply that the soul continues to exist after the body dies, then yes, dualism affirms this. But that is not the same as saying the soul is self-sufficient or that God cannot terminate it. Cooper writes that no Christian theologian has ever attributed aseity—self-existence and utter independence from God—to the human soul.¹¹ The soul receives its existence from God, is sustained by God every moment, and could be extinguished by God at any time. Its continued existence is a gift, not an inherent right.

Richard Swinburne, one of the most important living philosophers of religion, makes the same point. He rejects the idea that the soul is naturally immortal and considers the philosophical arguments for that conclusion to be fallacious.¹² The soul’s simplicity—the fact that it is not made of parts the way the body is—does not prove that it will exist forever. A simple thing can still be destroyed by a power greater than itself. And there is no power greater than God.

Cooper reinforces this in his essay in Christian Physicalism. He notes that many current Christian dualists do not affirm intrinsic immortality at all. Instead, they hold that because God created humans as body-soul unities, soul and body are naturally interdependent. Disembodied existence during the intermediate state is sustained entirely by the supernatural power of God—not by any inherent property of the soul itself.¹³ The soul does not naturally survive death. It survives because God chooses to preserve it. And what God preserves, God can also end.

So the logic chain that moves from “there is a soul” to “the soul is immortal” to “CI is impossible” simply does not hold. Every link in the chain is broken. The soul exists by God’s power, not its own. God can sustain it or destroy it as He wills. And if God can destroy it, then CI is perfectly compatible with substance dualism.

There is a second weakness in the physicalist assumption, and it is just as serious. The argument assumes that CI is an anthropological claim—a claim about what a human being is. But it is not. CI is an eschatological claim—a claim about what happens to the wicked at the final judgment.¹⁴ CI says that the wicked will be destroyed. It does not say anything, one way or another, about whether human beings have immaterial souls. You can believe the wicked will be destroyed and believe they have souls. You just have to believe that God can destroy both.

This confusion between eschatology and anthropology is, I think, one of the most damaging errors in the modern CI movement. It has led conditionalists to fight on two fronts simultaneously—defending both their eschatology (final destruction) and an anthropology (physicalism) that is not only unnecessary but actively harmful to their case. Every hour spent defending physicalism is an hour not spent strengthening the exegetical case for CI. And worse, the physicalist anthropology creates theological problems (the intermediate state, personal identity) that CI then has to carry like dead weight. The conditionalist who drops the physicalist baggage will find that the case for final destruction is lighter, faster, and stronger than it has ever been.

The distinction between eschatological claims and anthropological claims is not a minor technicality. It is the key that unlocks the entire debate. Once you see that CI is about what happens to the wicked, not about what human beings are, the supposed tension between CI and substance dualism vanishes. There is no tension. There never was. The soul can be real and the wicked can be destroyed. All you need is a God who has power over both body and soul.

And as it happens, that is exactly what Jesus said.

C. The Dualist Response: Why Substance Dualism Strengthens CI

Now we come to the heart of the chapter—and, in many ways, the heart of this entire book. I want to show you not only that CI is compatible with substance dualism, but that dualism actually makes CI a stronger, more coherent, and more biblically grounded position than physicalism ever could. I want to take you through four specific areas where dualism strengthens CI, and I want to do it carefully, because I believe this is the most important argument in the book.

1. Matthew 10:28—CI’s Greatest Proof Text Actually Requires Dualism

If you had to pick one verse that captures the heart of conditional immortality, it would probably be Matthew 10:28. Jesus says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (NKJV).¹⁵

This is CI’s strongest verse. It teaches that God’s judgment involves the total destruction of the person—both soul and body—in Gehenna. It is precisely the verse conditionalists cite when they argue against eternal conscious torment. The word “destroy” here is apollymi in Greek, and conditionalists rightly insist that it means actual destruction, not merely “ruin” or “loss of well-being,” as traditionalists sometimes claim.¹⁶

But here is the irony that the physicalist conditionalist has never adequately addressed: this verse only makes sense if substance dualism is true.

Look at what Jesus says. He draws a contrast between two kinds of killing. Humans can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. God can destroy both soul and body in hell. For this contrast to work, “soul” and “body” have to refer to two different things. If “soul” just means “life” or “the whole person,” as Fudge and other physicalists claim, then the verse collapses into nonsense. Because humans most certainly can kill the whole person. That is what killing is.¹⁷

Cooper makes this point forcefully in Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. He notes that the monist strategy of treating psyche (soul) and soma (body) as cases of synecdoche—where each word refers to the whole person from a different angle—simply will not work in this text. Whatever “soul” means here, it can exist before God without the body. And whatever “body” means, it can be killed while the soul survives. These cannot both be referring to the same thing.¹⁸

Fudge tries to handle this verse by defining “soul” as “the life, the person.” He quotes Alexander Sand: Jesus “juxtaposes God, who can destroy both [soul] and [body], and humans, who can destroy the body, but not the [soul]: God can destroy the entire person.”¹⁹ Fudge then pivots quickly to the conditionalist conclusion: God destroys completely, soul and body, in Gehenna. The verse teaches annihilation.

And I agree with the conclusion! God can and will destroy the wicked completely. But notice what has happened in the argument. Fudge has drawn the conditionalist conclusion from the verse while quietly redefining the key term. If “soul” just means “person” or “life,” then the first half of Jesus’ statement—“do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”—makes no sense. Humans can kill a person. Humans can end a life. The only way Jesus’ words carry their intended force is if the soul is something distinct from the body, something that survives when the body is killed, something that only God has the power to destroy.²⁰

Cooper observes that the attempt to read this verse through Old Testament semantics also fails. In the Hebrew mind, if nephesh is merely the life-force or the bodily person, then killing the body is killing the nephesh. Unless the Israelites were dualists, nephesh could not survive bodily death. But Matthew assumes it can. Furthermore, Matthew places both soul and body in Gehenna—a concept from intertestamental eschatology where the inhabitants are often described as present in both body and soul.²¹

So here we have CI’s greatest proof text—the verse that most clearly teaches the final destruction of the wicked—and it turns out that it requires substance dualism. The verse distinguishes soul and body as two components of the person, affirms that the soul can survive physical death, and then declares that God has the power to destroy both. This is not dualism undermining CI. This is dualism making CI work.

I want to press this point a bit further, because I think the implications are enormous. Conditionalists have spent decades arguing with traditionalists about the meaning of the word “destroy” in Matthew 10:28. And they have been right to do so. The word apollymi means to destroy, to bring to ruin, to end something’s existence. It does not mean “to keep alive in torment.” Conditionalists have won that argument on linguistic grounds. But in their eagerness to win the argument about “destroy,” they have not always noticed what the rest of the verse is doing. The verse does not just say God can destroy. It says God can destroy both soul and body. Both. That word “both” presupposes two things. And those two things are identified: soul and body. If you take away the soul—if you collapse it into just another name for the body or the person—you have not strengthened the verse. You have weakened it. You have turned a powerful dualist statement about God’s comprehensive power over the whole person into a confusing tautology about God’s ability to destroy the physical body, which is something humans can already do.

Here is the bottom line: the conditionalist who is also a physicalist is sawing off the very branch he is sitting on. He is using Matthew 10:28 to argue for final destruction while simultaneously redefining the key terms in the verse in a way that drains it of its force. The conditionalist who is also a dualist has no such problem. The verse works perfectly. God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. That is the final destruction. That is CI. And it makes full, robust, glorious sense.

2. The Intermediate State—What Happens Between Death and Judgment

The second area where dualism strengthens CI is the intermediate state—the period between a person’s death and the final resurrection.

This is one of the most pastorally important questions in all of theology. When a believer dies, where are they? When an unbeliever dies, what happens to them? Are they simply gone, as if someone flipped a switch? Or are they conscious, aware, existing somewhere between this life and the next?

Scripture answers this question consistently: the dead are conscious. Believers who die are “with Christ,” which Paul says is “far better” than remaining in the body (Philippians 1:23).²² To be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8).²³ The thief on the cross was told, “Today you will be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43).²⁴ The souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are conscious, crying out to God, and told to wait a little longer.²⁵ Unbelievers, meanwhile, exist in Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not the lake of fire, not final punishment, but a holding state until the judgment (Luke 16:19–31).²⁶

We explored all of these passages in detail in earlier chapters (see Chapters 13 and 14). The point I want to make here is this: the conscious intermediate state is a massive advantage for CI when it is paired with substance dualism—and a crippling problem for CI when it is paired with physicalism.

On the physicalist view, when the body dies, the person ceases to exist. There is no soul to carry on. There is nothing conscious between death and resurrection. The physicalist must either deny the intermediate state entirely, propose that God immediately resurrects the person into a new body at the moment of death (“immediate resurrection”), or appeal to some kind of alternate temporality where the dead person is simply “not aware of the passage of time.”²⁷

Each of these options has devastating problems. Denying the intermediate state contradicts the clear testimony of the passages listed above. Immediate resurrection creates the problem of two bodies existing simultaneously—the corpse in the grave and the resurrection body in glory—which contradicts the biblical teaching that the resurrection is a future, general event associated with Christ’s return, not an individual event at each person’s death.²⁸ And the alternate temporality view, while creative, does not actually explain how the person continues to exist. It merely explains why they might not notice that they don’t exist.²⁹

Substance dualism has none of these problems. When the body dies, the soul—the immaterial core of the person—continues to exist by God’s sustaining power. Believers go to be with Christ in Paradise. Unbelievers exist in Hades, consciously awaiting judgment. This is exactly what the biblical texts describe. And it is exactly what the earliest Christians believed, as Cooper has documented extensively.³⁰

Now, here is where this connects to CI. On the dualist view, the wicked are conscious in Hades between death and the final judgment. They are not yet in the lake of fire. They have not yet been destroyed. They are waiting. And when the resurrection comes, they are raised bodily—soul and body reunited—to stand before God at the great white throne (Revelation 20:11–15).³¹ It is then, after the judgment, that the destruction occurs. The wicked are cast into the lake of fire—the second death—and both soul and body are destroyed.

This gives CI a complete and coherent eschatological timeline: life, death, conscious intermediate state, bodily resurrection, final judgment, and then either eternal life for the redeemed or total destruction for the unrepentant. Every piece fits. Every passage finds its place. There are no gaps, no awkward silences, no moments where the person simply doesn’t exist. The narrative is whole.

The physicalist version of CI, by contrast, has a gaping hole in the middle. Between death and resurrection, the person does not exist. There is no conscious Hades, no waiting, no awareness. The biblical descriptions of the rich man and Lazarus, the souls under the altar, Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ—all of these must be explained away, reinterpreted, or quietly ignored. And that is precisely what we see in Fudge and in other physicalist conditionalists. As we documented in Chapters 20–22, Fudge either ignored or gave only superficial treatment to the very passages that most clearly teach a conscious intermediate state.³²

Dualism does not create a problem for CI. It solves one. It gives CI a fully populated eschatological landscape where every act of the drama has real characters who are really there.

There is also a pastoral dimension here that we should not overlook. When a Christian dies, their family wants to know: Where is my loved one right now? On the dualist view, the answer is simple, beautiful, and biblical: they are with Christ. They are conscious. They are at peace. They are waiting for the resurrection, when body and soul will be reunited in glory. On the physicalist view, the honest answer is: they do not currently exist. They are simply gone. God will recreate them at some future date. That may be theologically defensible in some abstract sense, but try saying it at a funeral. Try saying it to a grieving mother. The pastoral inadequacy of physicalism at this point is not just a minor inconvenience—it is a sign that the theology has gone wrong somewhere.⁵⁹

And when it comes to the wicked dead, the dualist CI view also has an important advantage. We do not need to imagine that the unbeliever simply vanishes at death and then pops back into existence at the resurrection, with no awareness of anything in between. On the dualist view, the unbeliever enters Hades—a real, conscious, but temporary state—and there they wait for the judgment. This is not the lake of fire. It is not final punishment. It is the waiting room. And this makes theological sense of passages like Luke 16, where the rich man in Hades is conscious, aware of his condition, and capable of concern for his brothers still alive on earth. The physicalist must either explain this passage away as merely a cultural illustration with no theological content, or awkwardly concede that Jesus used imagery that directly contradicts the physicalist view of death.⁶⁰

3. Personal Identity at the Resurrection—The Same Person, Not a Copy

The third area where dualism strengthens CI is personal identity at the resurrection. This may sound like a philosopher’s problem, but it is actually a deeply practical and pastoral question: When God raises the dead on the last day, will the person who stands before the judgment throne be the same person who lived and died on earth? Or will it be a copy—a new person with the same memories and characteristics, but not actually the same individual?

This matters enormously for CI. If the person who is judged is not the same person who sinned, then the judgment is not just. You cannot justly punish a copy for the sins of the original. And you cannot justly reward a copy for the faith of the original. Personal identity is the thread that makes the whole story—creation, fall, redemption, judgment—hang together.

On the dualist view, personal identity is secure. The soul is the continuous thread that runs from life through death into the intermediate state and on to the resurrection. When the body dies, the soul continues. When the body is raised, the soul is reunited with it. The person who stands before God on judgment day is the very same person who lived on earth, because the soul has been there the whole time. There is no gap in existence, no interruption in identity.³³

Cooper makes this point with great force: “The person who survives death and undergoes future resurrection is a continuously existing reality. Whether philosophically conceived as consisting of spiritual stuff or as an organization of personal and mental states and capacities, the soul or person is a continuously existing entity. Although her properties and capacities may change due to disembodiment or divine sanctification, she remains the self-identical person from life, through death, and into the life to come.”³⁴ The possibility of non-identity simply cannot arise on the dualist view. Continuity of existence guarantees continuity of identity.

The physicalist, by contrast, faces what Cooper calls “the formidable problem of personal identity.”³⁵ If there is no soul, and if the person ceases to exist at death, then the person who is raised at the resurrection is a new creation—a new psychophysical entity that did not exist a moment before. What makes this new entity the same person as the one who died?

The physicalist’s usual answer is something like “God recreates them with the same information, the same memories, the same pattern.” Cooper compares this to a computer analogy sometimes used by monists: the same program can be loaded onto a new computer.³⁶ But as Cooper points out, multiple computers can run the same program simultaneously. If God recreated someone with the same “pattern,” there is nothing in principle to prevent Him from creating two or three or ten copies, each with an equal claim to being the original. The fact that God would not do this does not solve the philosophical problem. The nature of personal identity should not depend on God’s restraint.³⁷

Think of it this way. Imagine someone builds an exact replica of your childhood home—same floor plan, same materials, same furniture, same everything. Would it be your childhood home? Or would it be a very convincing copy? Most people’s intuition says copy—because the original had a continuous history, a story, a particular existence that no replica can duplicate. The same is true of persons. A recreation is not a resurrection unless something continuous connects the person before and after death. On dualism, that something is the soul.³⁸

James Turner makes a related argument in Christian Physicalism, noting that “resurrection” properly understood means that the body that died is the body that rises. Acquiring a numerically distinct body is reincarnation, not resurrection. Jesus’s own resurrection demonstrates this: the numerically same body that went into the tomb came out, which is the very explanation for the empty tomb in the Gospel accounts.³⁹ If Jesus’s resurrection is a model for ours, then our resurrection bodies must be numerically identical to our earthly bodies—transformed, yes, but the same bodies. And the soul is what secures the identity of the person across that transformation.

For CI, this means that the person who is destroyed in the second death is the same person who sinned on earth, who existed in the intermediate state, who was raised at the resurrection, and who stood before the judgment throne. The judgment is just because the person is genuinely the same individual. On physicalism, this continuity is uncertain at best and illusory at worst.

Let me put this in very concrete terms. Suppose a man lives a life of unrepentant wickedness and dies. On the physicalist view, he ceases to exist entirely. Decades or centuries pass. Then, at the resurrection, God creates a new psychophysical entity with the same memories, the same personality, the same characteristics as the original man. This new entity stands before the judgment throne and is condemned for the sins of the man who lived on earth.

Now ask yourself: Is that just? Can you punish this person for what that person did, when this person has only existed for moments and that person has been non-existent for centuries? The physicalist will say it is the same person, because God made them with the same “pattern.” But the dualist rightly asks: what makes it the same person? Sharing a pattern is not the same as sharing an identity. If I were to build an exact replica of the Mona Lisa, atom for atom, it would not be the Mona Lisa. It would be a replica. The original has a history, a provenance, a continuous existence that no copy can duplicate. Persons are the same way. What makes you you is not your pattern. It is your continuous existence as a particular individual—and on the dualist view, that continuity is grounded in the soul.⁶¹

CI needs the judgment to be just. If the person who is destroyed at the second death is not genuinely the same person who sinned, then the destruction is not a just punishment—it is an arbitrary act visited upon a newly created being. Substance dualism prevents this by providing the continuity of identity that justice requires. The soul is the thread that connects the person across every stage of the eschatological drama: life, death, intermediate state, resurrection, judgment, and either eternal life or final destruction.

4. The Postmortem Opportunity—Grace Beyond the Grave

The fourth area where dualism strengthens CI is the postmortem opportunity—the idea that God provides a genuine chance for salvation to those who did not have an adequate opportunity to respond to the gospel during their earthly lives.

I want to be clear: the postmortem opportunity is not a necessary part of CI. You can hold to CI without believing in it. But many thoughtful Christians—myself included—believe that Scripture supports the idea that God’s grace extends beyond the grave, at least for those who never truly heard.⁴⁰ First Peter 3:18–20 speaks of Christ preaching to “the spirits in prison.” First Peter 4:6 says that “the gospel was preached also to those who are dead.” The Descensus clause of the Apostles’ Creed affirms that Christ “descended to the dead.” And the logic of divine justice suggests that a God who is both perfectly just and perfectly loving would not condemn those who never had a genuine chance to respond.⁴¹

Now, I want to be fair: substance dualism is not strictly necessary for the postmortem opportunity. Even on a physicalist view, God could offer salvation to the newly resurrected at the final judgment. The person would encounter God for the first time in their resurrected body and be given the chance to respond.⁴²

But substance dualism provides a much richer and more natural framework for this. If the soul is conscious in the intermediate state, then the person who dies without hearing the gospel is not simply gone. They exist. They are aware. And they can encounter God’s purifying presence in the interim—long before the final resurrection. The conscious intermediate state provides the theological and metaphysical space in which a postmortem encounter with God can occur. The soul is the seat of the person’s will, desires, and moral agency. It is the soul that responds to or resists God’s offer of grace. Without the soul, there is no one there to respond.

On CI combined with dualism, the timeline looks like this: a person dies without adequate opportunity to hear the gospel. Their soul enters the intermediate state, where they encounter God’s presence. Some may respond in faith and receive Christ. Others may harden their hearts and continue to refuse. At the final judgment—the last opportunity—they stand before God in their resurrected bodies and are given a final chance. Those who respond receive immortality. Those who finally refuse are destroyed—body and soul—in the second death.

This is a complete picture. It is a picture that takes seriously both God’s justice and God’s mercy. And it is a picture that only substance dualism can fully support.

I should note that the postmortem opportunity is compatible with all three views of hell. On ECT, the postmortem opportunity gives those who never heard the gospel a genuine chance to respond before an eternity of torment. On universal restoration, the postmortem opportunity is one mechanism by which God eventually reaches everyone. And on CI, the postmortem opportunity means that those who respond in faith receive immortality, while those who finally refuse at the last judgment are destroyed. The point here is not that CI requires the postmortem opportunity. Many conditionalists do not hold it. The point is that if you do hold it—and I believe the biblical evidence supports it—then substance dualism gives you a much stronger framework for it than physicalism ever could. The conscious intermediate state is not just an abstract theological concept. It is the window of time during which God’s mercy can reach the dead who never heard.

5. Historical Precedent—CI Advocates Who Were Not Physicalists

Before we move to counter-objections, I want to make one more observation. The claim that CI requires physicalism is not only logically and biblically unsound—it is historically false. Some of the most respected advocates of conditional immortality in the evangelical tradition were not physicalists at all.

John Stott, widely regarded as one of the most influential evangelical leaders of the twentieth century, publicly embraced conditional immortality in 1988. His famous essay in Evangelical Essentials argued that the wicked would be destroyed after the final judgment—that “the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment.”⁴³ Stott was no physicalist. He affirmed the traditional Christian view of the soul. He simply believed that God could and would destroy the souls of the finally unrepentant.

Clark Pinnock, one of evangelicalism’s most creative and influential theologians, was a declared conditionalist who presented the case for CI in Four Views of Hell (1992).⁴⁴ Pinnock did not build his case on physicalist anthropology. He built it on the biblical language of destruction, perishing, and death.

Philip E. Hughes, the Gordon-Conwell professor, publicly rejected eternal conscious torment in 1989. John Wenham, a close colleague of J. I. Packer, argued for conditional immortality over a period of sixty years.⁴⁵ F. F. Bruce, one of the twentieth century’s most respected New Testament scholars, was a declared conditionalist.⁴⁶ None of these men were physicalists. They held to CI because they believed the Bible teaches that the wicked will be destroyed, and they held to the soul because they believed the Bible teaches that the soul is real.

Fudge himself notes that within the broader term “annihilationism,” there are different explanations. One sees humans as created mortal, with only the saved given immortality in the resurrection—this is conditional immortality in the strict sense. Another sees humans as having souls that can survive death but with the wicked finally destroyed, soul and body, by God. As Fudge acknowledges, Wenham held the first view, while Stott held the second.⁴⁷ Both are CI. Both involve final destruction. And the second explicitly affirms the soul while affirming that God can destroy it.

The CI movement did not begin with physicalism. It began with a careful reading of Scripture. And the most respected early advocates of CI in the evangelical world were dualists, not physicalists. The physicalist turn in the movement came later—largely through Fudge’s influence and through the rise of Christian physicalism in academic theology. It was an addition to CI, not a foundation of it. And it is an addition that CI does not need.

I find it deeply significant that the scholars who first made conditionalism respectable in evangelical circles did not feel the need to deny the soul in order to affirm final destruction. They saw no contradiction between the two. They understood instinctively what this chapter has argued at length: that CI is an eschatological claim about the fate of the wicked, not an anthropological claim about the nature of the human person. Stott, Pinnock, Wenham, Hughes, and Bruce all held to the soul. They all held to CI. And they never saw a problem. The “problem” was invented later, when a new generation of conditionalists absorbed the physicalist anthropology of academic theology and retroactively applied it to the CI position. But the problem was never real. It was always a phantom—a logical error dressed up as a theological necessity.

D. Counter-Objections

I have argued that CI does not require physicalism, that the soul’s separability does not entail its indestructibility, that Matthew 10:28 actually requires dualism, that dualism preserves the intermediate state and secures personal identity, and that the most respected CI advocates in evangelical history were dualists. Now I need to address the strongest objections that physicalist conditionalists might raise.

Objection 1: “If the Soul Can Exist Without the Body, Doesn’t That Mean It’s Immortal?”

This is the most common objection, and I have already addressed it at length in section B. But let me be even more direct.

No. The soul’s ability to exist without the body does not mean the soul is immortal in any problematic sense. Cooper distinguishes multiple senses of “immortality.” If “immortal” means “having the power of self-existence, independent of God,” then no Christian dualist affirms the immortality of the soul. Only God has that kind of immortality (1 Timothy 6:16). If “immortal” means “having a nature that does not naturally decompose because it is not composed of matter,” then some classical dualists have affirmed this—but they have always insisted that even this kind of immortality is a created gift from God, not an absolute property.⁴⁸ And if “immortal” simply means “continues to exist after death,” then yes, the soul is immortal in that minimal sense. But this does not mean the soul cannot be destroyed. It means the soul has not yet been destroyed.

Think of it this way. A tree is alive. It can survive for centuries. But that does not make it indestructible. A lumberjack can cut it down. A fire can burn it. Similarly, a soul can survive the death of the body. But that does not mean it is beyond God’s power to end. Jesus said God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. That is exactly what CI predicts.

Objection 2: “Doesn’t the Very Phrase ‘Conditional Immortality’ Mean the Soul Doesn’t Exist Naturally?”

Yes—and substance dualism affirms this. “Conditional immortality” means that immortality is not inherent in human nature but is a gift from God, given only to those who are in Christ (2 Timothy 1:10).⁴⁹ The wicked do not receive this gift. Therefore they will not live forever. They will be destroyed.

But the word “immortality” in the CI framework refers to everlasting life—the full, embodied, glorified, unending life of the resurrection. It does not refer to mere continued existence in the intermediate state. The soul’s existence between death and resurrection is not “immortality” in the CI sense. It is a temporary, diminished, disembodied state—what Cooper calls a “truncated” existence that is metaphysically destructive and often described in Scripture as something to be endured, not celebrated.⁵⁰

The soul in the intermediate state is not enjoying “immortality.” It is waiting for the resurrection, sustained by God. The wicked soul in Hades is not immortal in any meaningful theological sense. It is simply not yet dead. And it will be—at the final judgment, when God destroys both soul and body in the lake of fire.

So the phrase “conditional immortality” is perfectly compatible with substance dualism. Immortality—true, full, everlasting life—is conditional on being in Christ. The wicked do not have it. The soul’s temporary survival of physical death is not “immortality” in the relevant sense. It is merely the continuation of existence until God’s final act of judgment.

Objection 3: “Doesn’t Dualism Open the Door to Eternal Conscious Torment?”

This is perhaps the deepest worry in the CI camp. If the soul can exist apart from the body, and if it is conscious in the intermediate state, then what prevents God from keeping it conscious forever in punishment? Wouldn’t affirming the soul just give the ECT camp what they need?

The answer is no—for a simple reason. The question of whether the soul can exist apart from the body is different from the question of whether God will preserve it forever in punishment. The soul’s continued existence depends entirely on God’s will. If God chooses to sustain a soul forever in a state of conscious blessing, He can do that—and that is what He does for the redeemed. If God chooses to sustain a soul temporarily in the intermediate state and then destroy it at the judgment, He can do that too—and that is what CI teaches He does for the wicked.⁵¹

The question is not can God keep the wicked alive forever. Of course He can. The question is will He. And the biblical evidence—as we have argued throughout this book—says no. He will destroy them. Matthew 10:28 says so. Malachi 4:1–3 says they will be burned to ashes. Second Thessalonians 1:9 says they will suffer “everlasting destruction.” Revelation 20:14 calls it “the second death.”⁵²

ECT does not follow from substance dualism. It follows from a particular interpretation of certain biblical passages—an interpretation that CI challenges on exegetical grounds. The dispute between CI and ECT is about what God will do at the final judgment, not about what human beings are. And that is exactly the point: CI is an eschatological claim, not an anthropological one. You do not need to deny the soul in order to deny endless torment. You just need to read the destruction texts the way they were meant to be read.

Consider: the traditionalist who holds to ECT does not arrive at that view because of dualism. He arrives at it because he interprets “eternal fire” and “eternal punishment” to mean unending conscious experience, because he reads the story of the rich man and Lazarus as a literal picture of the afterlife, and because he believes the worm that does not die and the fire that is not quenched in Mark 9:48 describe a process that goes on forever. The conditionalist responds to each of these texts with better exegesis—showing that “eternal punishment” refers to punishment with eternal results, that the fire is eternal in its destructive effect, and that Isaiah 66:24 (which Mark 9 quotes) describes corpses being consumed, not people being tormented. None of these exegetical arguments have anything to do with whether the soul exists.⁶²

The conditionalist who fears that affirming the soul will lead to ECT is making a category mistake. It is like fearing that affirming God’s omnipotence will lead to Calvinism. God’s omnipotence is a metaphysical truth; Calvinism is a specific theological system that draws certain inferences from it. You can affirm the metaphysical truth without accepting all the inferences. Similarly, the soul’s existence is a metaphysical truth about human nature; ECT is a specific eschatological claim that some people draw from it. You can affirm the truth without accepting the inference—especially when the inference is exegetically wrong.

Objection 4: “The Tradition That Affirmed the Soul Also Affirmed ECT. Can You Really Have One Without the Other?”

It is true that the mainstream Christian tradition has affirmed both substance dualism and eternal conscious torment. And some will argue that these two beliefs are a package deal—that you cannot pry them apart.

But this argument proves too much. The mainstream tradition also affirmed the geocentric model of the solar system, the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of slavery. The fact that a belief was held alongside another belief does not mean the two are logically dependent on each other. Sometimes the tradition gets one thing right and another thing wrong. The question is always: What does Scripture teach?⁵³

In fact, there were voices in the early church who held something like conditional immortality alongside a robust belief in the soul. Justin Martyr, writing in the second century, explicitly rejected the Platonic view that the soul is inherently immortal while also affirming that the wicked would not endure forever. Conditionalists have long pointed to Justin as an early supporter of their view.⁵⁴ Fudge himself documents this, noting that the earliest Apologists, while bringing Greek philosophical categories into the church, did not claim that the soul was eternally pre-existent or inherently immortal. They modified the Greek view and placed the soul’s existence firmly under God’s sovereignty.⁵⁵

So the tradition is not as monolithic as it might appear. And even where the tradition did hold soul and ECT together, this was a contingent historical fact, not a logical necessity. CI can take the tradition’s best insight—that human beings have real, immaterial souls created by God—and correct its worst error—that the wicked must suffer forever. You do not have to throw out the baby of the soul with the bathwater of endless torment.

Objection 5: “Isn’t This Just Making CI More Complicated Than It Needs to Be?”

Some conditionalists may feel that adding substance dualism to the picture just complicates things unnecessarily. Why not keep it simple? Humans are physical. When they die, they cease to exist. God raises them at the resurrection, judges them, and destroys the wicked. Clean. Simple. Done.

I understand the appeal of simplicity. But simplicity is not the same as truth. And the “simple” physicalist picture is only simple because it has quietly removed several pieces of the biblical puzzle. It has removed the conscious intermediate state. It has removed the soul’s departure at death. It has removed the distinction between soul and body in Jesus’ own teaching. It has removed the vision of conscious souls in Revelation. It has removed Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ. And it has replaced all of this with an awkward gap—a period of nonexistence between death and resurrection that the Bible never describes and that creates real problems for personal identity, pastoral care, and the coherence of the eschatological narrative.⁵⁶

CI-plus-dualism is not more complicated. It is more complete. It accounts for more of the biblical data. It handles the intermediate state passages. It secures personal identity. It makes Matthew 10:28 work the way it was meant to work. And it does all of this without giving up a single thing that CI cares about. The wicked are still destroyed. Immortality is still conditional. The second death is still real. Everything CI affirms, CI-plus-dualism affirms. It just affirms more—because Scripture teaches more.

Summary and Conclusion

We have covered a lot of ground in this chapter, so let me bring the threads together.

The claim that conditional immortality requires physicalism is false. It rests on a confusion between the soul’s separability from the body and its supposed indestructibility. These are not the same thing. The soul exists by God’s sustaining power, not by its own nature. What God sustains, God can also destroy. No serious Christian dualist—not Aquinas, not Calvin, not Cooper, not Moreland, not Swinburne—has ever claimed that the soul is self-existent or beyond God’s power.⁵⁷

Moreover, substance dualism does not merely coexist with CI. It strengthens it in at least four crucial ways. First, CI’s greatest proof text—Matthew 10:28—actually presupposes substance dualism and makes no sense on a physicalist reading. Second, substance dualism preserves the conscious intermediate state, giving CI a complete eschatological timeline without gaps or awkward silences. Third, substance dualism secures personal identity at the resurrection, ensuring that the person who is judged is the same person who lived—not a copy, not a recreation, but the same individual. And fourth, substance dualism provides the metaphysical space for the postmortem opportunity, allowing God’s grace to reach those who never heard.⁵⁸

The most respected CI advocates in evangelical history were dualists: Stott, Pinnock, Hughes, Wenham, Bruce. The physicalist turn in the CI movement came later, driven largely by Fudge’s influence and by the rise of Christian physicalism in academic theology. It was an addition to CI, not its foundation. And it is an addition that weakens rather than strengthens the position.

CI does not need physicalism. CI is better without it. And it is time for the conditionalist movement to say so out loud.

We are more than dust. We always have been. And the God who made us body and soul—the God who sustains us, who loves us, who judges with perfect justice—is the same God who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. That is not a problem for conditional immortality. That is the foundation on which it stands.

I said at the beginning of this chapter that the physicalist assumption has taken root in the CI movement quietly, almost without notice. It came in through the back door, riding alongside the eschatological arguments that Fudge made so powerfully. And because those eschatological arguments were good—because Fudge was right about final destruction—many readers accepted the anthropology without examining it closely. They assumed that if the eschatology was right, the anthropology must be right too.

But it does not work that way. You can get the right answer to one question and the wrong answer to another. Fudge got the eschatology right: the wicked will be destroyed, not tortured forever. He got the anthropology wrong: human beings are not merely physical creatures but body-soul composites, created by God, sustained by God, and subject to God’s power over both soul and body. The CI movement does not need to throw out Fudge’s eschatological insights in order to correct his anthropological error. It just needs to build those insights on a better foundation.

That better foundation is substance dualism. And as we will see in the chapters that follow, when you build CI on that foundation, the whole structure becomes stronger—not just philosophically and theologically, but pastorally and practically. CI-plus-dualism gives the church a richer account of what it means to be human, a more complete picture of what happens at death, a more robust defense of the resurrection, and a deeper understanding of God’s justice and mercy. It is, I believe, the most faithful reading of what Scripture teaches about both the nature of the human person and the fate of the wicked.

And that is why this book exists.