Chapter 4

Body and Soul — The Biblical Case for Substance Dualism

I want to start this chapter with a confession. For a long time, I did not think the question of what human beings are made of had anything to do with the question of what God will ultimately do with them. Body and soul—that seemed like a philosophy class topic. What happens to the unsaved—that seemed like a theology topic. Two different shelves in the library. Two different conversations at the coffee shop.

I was wrong.

It turns out that what you believe about the makeup of a human being has everything to do with what you believe about that person’s destiny. If a person is nothing more than their body—if there is no soul, no immaterial part that survives death—then when the body stops working, the person simply ceases to exist. Death is the end of the road, full stop. And if that is the case, then annihilation at death is just what happens naturally. God does not even have to do anything special. He just lets nature take its course.

But if a person has a soul—a real, immaterial part of them that is distinct from the body and that can exist after the body dies—then the picture changes dramatically. Suddenly, death is not the end of the story. Suddenly, the person is still there, still conscious, still standing before God, still in relationship with their Creator. And that raises a question that I think cuts right to the heart of the CI and UR debate: If the soul is still alive and God is still present to it, on what basis do we claim that God will eventually destroy it rather than continue pursuing it?

That is where we are headed in this chapter. But first, we need to lay the groundwork. We need to understand what the Bible actually teaches about the nature of the human person. And to do that, we need to deal honestly with a view that has become increasingly popular in some corners of the conditional immortality movement—a view called physicalism.

The CI Position: Dualists and Physicalists Under One Roof

Before I go any further, I want to be clear about something. Most CI advocates are substance dualists. That is, most people who hold the conditional immortality view believe that human beings have both a body and a soul, and that the soul can exist apart from the body after death. Edward Fudge, the most influential CI scholar of the last fifty years, explicitly acknowledged this.¹ John Stott, who famously questioned the traditional view of hell in his conversation with David Edwards, held to a traditional understanding of the soul.² Clark Pinnock, another heavyweight in the annihilationist camp, affirmed substance dualism as well.³

So the CI position, in its mainstream form, has no quarrel with substance dualism. Most CI advocates agree with us that human beings have an immaterial soul that survives the death of the body. They simply believe that God will eventually destroy that soul—along with the resurrected body—in the final judgment. Jesus warned us to “fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28), and CI takes that warning at face value. The soul is real, but it is not inherently immortal. God made it, and God can unmake it.

That is a perfectly coherent position, and I want to treat it with respect. The CI dualist is not denying the soul’s existence. They are denying the soul’s inherent immortality—the old Platonic idea that the soul is by nature indestructible, a spark of the divine that cannot be extinguished. And they are absolutely right to deny that. The Bible never teaches that the soul is inherently immortal. Only God has immortality in himself (1 Tim. 6:16). Everything else—including the human soul—exists only because God wills it to exist.⁴

So far, so good. But here is where things get interesting. Over the past few decades, a growing number of scholars who lean toward conditional immortality have adopted a very different view of human nature—one that goes far beyond denying the soul’s inherent immortality. They deny the soul’s existence altogether.

This view is called physicalism, and in some circles it is also called Christian materialism or non-reductive physicalism. Its most prominent advocates include Joel Green, a respected New Testament scholar who argues that the Bible teaches a thoroughly holistic view of the person with no separable soul.⁵ Nancey Murphy, a philosopher at Fuller Seminary, makes a similar case, arguing that the concept of the soul is a philosophical import from Greek thought that has been mistakenly read back into Scripture.⁶ Kevin Corcoran has argued for a “constitution view” of persons that denies any immaterial soul while still trying to preserve personal identity through the resurrection.⁷

The physicalist argument goes something like this. The Hebrew word nephesh, usually translated “soul” in English Bibles, does not actually refer to an immaterial substance. It refers to the whole person, the living being, the self. When Genesis 2:7 says that God formed man from the dust and breathed into him the breath of life and he became a “living soul” (nephesh chayyah), it does not mean that God inserted a soul into a body. It means the whole person came alive. The same phrase is used of animals in Genesis 1:20 and 1:24. Fudge himself acknowledged this, noting that the Old Testament uses nephesh in such a wide range of meanings that English translators have rendered it forty-five different ways.⁸

The physicalist CI advocate then extends this argument to the New Testament. The Greek word psychē, they say, carries forward the Hebrew meaning of nephesh—it refers to the whole life or person, not to a separable ghost-like substance inside the body. When Paul speaks of the resurrection, they note, he does not talk about souls being reunited with bodies. He talks about a new kind of body—a “spiritual body” (1 Cor. 15:44)—as if the body itself is what gets transformed, not something that gets reattached to a wandering soul.⁹

On this view, when a person dies, they simply cease to exist. There is no conscious intermediate state—no soul floating off to heaven or Hades. There is only death, and then God’s powerful act of re-creation at the resurrection. As one scholar put it, “One does not need Easter if the spirit or soul is immortal. But it is precisely because ‘when you’re dead, you’re dead’ that the resurrection is such incredibly good news.”¹⁰

I should say that I understand the appeal of this view. It feels clean. It feels simple. And there is a real kernel of truth buried inside it—the Old Testament really does present a more holistic picture of the human person than the later Greek philosophical tradition. The Hebrews did not sit around debating the metaphysics of immaterial substances the way Plato did. They thought of human beings as embodied wholes, created by God, dependent on God, and defined by their relationship to God.¹¹

But here is the problem: the fact that the Hebrews had a holistic view of the person does not mean they denied the existence of an immaterial aspect of the person. Those are two very different claims. You can affirm that a human being is an integrated whole—body and soul working together, designed to function as a unity—while also affirming that the soul can exist apart from the body when God wills it. And that, I want to argue, is exactly what the Bible teaches.

Fudge was actually quite honest about this tension. In The Fire That Consumes, he devoted significant attention to the question of monism versus dualism, but he ultimately concluded that “the nature of the human creature does not determine the outcome in our debate.”¹² Dualists acknowledge that God can destroy both soul and body in hell if he chooses. Monists acknowledge that God can resurrect the wicked to face judgment if he chooses. Either way, the question of final destiny remains open. I appreciate Fudge’s honesty here. But I think he understated the significance of the anthropological question. As we will see, what you believe about the soul has enormous implications for what you believe about God’s ongoing relationship with every person—and that relationship is at the heart of the CI/UR debate.

The UR Response: Why Scripture Teaches Substance Dualism

Now we come to the heart of the matter. I want to build a careful, passage-by-passage case that the Bible teaches substance dualism—that human beings have a real, immaterial soul that is distinct from the body and that can exist consciously apart from the body after death. This is not Platonic dualism. I am not arguing that the soul is a divine spark trapped in a prison of flesh. I am arguing for what philosophers call substance dualism—the view that a human being is composed of two real substances, body and soul, both created by God, both good, both designed to function together, but genuinely distinct.¹³

Let me be clear about one more thing. I am also not arguing that the soul is inherently immortal. The soul exists because God sustains it in existence, and if God chose to withdraw that sustaining power, the soul would cease to be. Jesus said to fear the one who “can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). The soul’s continued existence depends entirely on God’s will. On this point, I stand with my CI friends. But I want to ask a follow-up question that the CI position does not always take seriously enough: If the soul’s existence depends on God’s will, what does God’s character tell us about what he will actually choose to do?

We will get to that question. But first, the biblical evidence.

Old Testament Evidence

The physicalist argument leans heavily on the Old Testament, claiming that the Hebrew Scriptures present a purely holistic view of the person with no room for a separable soul. And it is true that the Old Testament generally thinks of human beings as integrated wholes rather than as bodies with souls rattling around inside them. Hans Walter Wolff’s classic study of Old Testament anthropology showed that Hebrew terms like nephesh (soul), basar (flesh), ruach (spirit), and lev (heart) each describe the whole person from a different angle rather than labeling separate parts.¹⁴

But the physicalist stops reading too soon. Because the Old Testament, even with its holistic emphasis, contains passages that are very difficult to explain without some kind of body-soul distinction.

Consider Genesis 35:18. Rachel is dying in childbirth, and the text says, “As her soul (nephesh) was departing—for she was dying—she called his name Ben-oni.” Now, if nephesh simply means “life” or “the whole person,” then this verse is just a poetic way of saying she was dying. But the Hebrew is more specific than that. It says her nephesh was “going out” (yatsa) from her—departing, leaving, exiting. That is separable language. Something is leaving the body. Something that is not the body.¹⁵

Even more striking is 1 Kings 17:21–22, the story of Elijah raising the widow’s son. Elijah prays, “O Lord my God, let this child’s nephesh come back into him.” And the text says, “The Lord heard the voice of Elijah, and the nephesh of the child came into him again, and he revived.” Think about what this passage is saying. The child’s nephesh had left his body. Elijah asked God to return it. God did, and the child came back to life. This is not metaphorical language. It is a narrative description of the soul leaving and re-entering the body. If nephesh means nothing more than “the whole living person,” then this passage makes no sense at all. You cannot put a “whole living person” back into a body. But you can put a soul back into a body.¹⁶

Then there is Ecclesiastes 12:7, one of the most important anthropological texts in the entire Old Testament: “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit (ruach) returns to God who gave it.” This is a direct allusion to Genesis 2:7, where God formed man from dust and breathed into him the breath of life. Ecclesiastes says that at death, the process reverses. The body goes back to dust. The spirit goes back to God. Two things going two different directions. That is not physicalism. That is dualism.¹⁷

John Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, examined these and many other Old Testament passages and concluded that while the Old Testament does not develop a full-blown metaphysical theory of the soul, it consistently assumes what he calls a “functional holism with a structural dualism.” In other words, the Hebrews thought of human beings as functioning wholes—but wholes composed of distinguishable parts that can be separated at death.¹⁸

We should also consider the remarkable story of the medium at Endor in 1 Samuel 28:11–19. Whatever we make of the ethics of the situation, the text describes the prophet Samuel appearing after his death as a conscious, communicating person. Saul recognizes him. Samuel speaks. He delivers a prophecy that comes true. The text does not present this as a demonic impersonation—it straightforwardly calls the figure “Samuel.”¹⁹ If physicalism is correct and there is no soul that survives death, this passage becomes almost impossible to explain. Was it really Samuel? On the physicalist view, Samuel had ceased to exist entirely. There was nothing left of him to summon. But the text presents him as genuinely present, genuinely conscious, and genuinely himself.

New Testament Evidence

If the Old Testament gives us hints of substance dualism, the New Testament turns those hints into a chorus. The evidence here is so strong that the physicalist position has to work extremely hard to explain it away—and in my view, it does not succeed.

Let us start with the text that both sides claim as their own: Matthew 10:28. Jesus says, “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” The CI advocate reads this as evidence that the soul can be destroyed—and on that point, the UR advocate agrees. The soul is not inherently immortal. God can destroy it if he chooses. But notice what else this verse teaches. Jesus makes a clear distinction between the body and the soul. Human beings who kill you can destroy the body, but they cannot kill the soul. That is a remarkable statement. It means the soul is something different from the body—something that survives even when the body is destroyed. This is substance dualism, stated plainly by Jesus himself.²⁰

J. P. Moreland, one of the leading philosophical defenders of substance dualism, has pointed out that Jesus’ language here assumes that his audience understood the soul as a distinct entity. He was not introducing a new concept. He was drawing on what his Jewish listeners already believed—that the soul is a real part of the person that outlasts the death of the body.²¹

Next, consider Luke 23:43. On the cross, Jesus says to the repentant thief, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” Today. Not at the final resurrection. Not at the end of the age. Today. The thief’s body was going to hang on a cross until it was taken down and disposed of. His body was not going to paradise that day. So what was? His soul. His conscious, personal self, departing the body and entering the presence of Christ in paradise.²²

The physicalist has a very hard time with this verse. Some try to move the comma—“Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise”—as if “today” modifies “I say to you” rather than “you will be with me.” But this is grammatically strained and has almost no support among Greek scholars. The word “today” (sēmeron) naturally modifies what follows it, not what precedes it.²³

Then there is Luke 23:46, where Jesus himself says, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (pneuma).” Jesus entrusts his spirit—his immaterial self—to the Father at the moment of death. His body went into the tomb. His spirit went to the Father. Two things. Two destinations. Stephen uses nearly identical language in Acts 7:59: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Both Jesus and Stephen, at the moment of death, commit something immaterial to God’s care. That something is not the body—the body is about to be buried. It is the soul or spirit, the conscious personal self that survives the body’s death.²⁴

Calvin, for all his theological commitments, was right on this point. In his early work Psychopannychia, he argued at length that the soul is a substance that survives the body’s death, remaining conscious and aware in the presence of God. He marshaled exactly these texts—Psalm 31:5, Matthew 10:28, Luke 23:46, Acts 7:59—and Fudge himself acknowledged the force of Calvin’s argument, even while noting that Calvin sometimes drifted into Platonic categories.²⁵

Now let us turn to what I think is the most powerful New Testament passage for substance dualism: 2 Corinthians 5:1–8. Paul writes:

“For we know that if the tent that is our earthly home is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens. For in this tent we groan, longing to put on our heavenly dwelling, so that by putting it on we may not be found naked. For while we are still in this tent, we groan, being burdened—not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life… We are always of good courage. We know that while we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord… and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”

Think about what Paul is saying here. He describes the body as a tent—a temporary dwelling. He says that when this tent is destroyed (that is, when the body dies), we have a building from God (the resurrection body). But notice the middle state he describes: being “naked” or “unclothed.” Paul does not want to be disembodied. He would prefer to go straight from the earthly body to the resurrection body. But he acknowledges that there is a state of being “away from the body”—and even in that state, he says, we can be “at home with the Lord.”²⁶

This is devastating for physicalism. Paul explicitly envisions a state in which the person exists apart from the body. He does not like it—he calls it being “naked”—but he affirms that it is real, and that even in that state the believer is conscious and with the Lord. Cooper calls this passage “the clearest Pauline affirmation of the intermediate state.”²⁷

Philippians 1:23 drives the point home. Paul says, “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Paul expects that when he dies, he will immediately be with Christ. Not at the resurrection—now. He is weighing two options: stay in the body and keep ministering, or depart and be with Christ. If physicalism is true, “departing” would mean ceasing to exist entirely. Paul would not be with Christ at all—he would be nothing, nowhere, unconscious, until the resurrection. But that is not what Paul says. He says departing is “far better”—a strange thing to say about non-existence.²⁸

Finally, consider Revelation 6:9–11. John sees “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God.” These souls are conscious. They cry out. They ask God how long he will wait before avenging their blood. They are given white robes and told to rest a little longer. Whatever we make of the symbolic elements of Revelation, this passage presents disembodied souls as conscious, communicating, and aware of the passage of time. They have not been resurrected yet—they are told to wait. But they are very much alive.²⁹

The physicalist tries to dismiss this as purely symbolic—after all, Revelation is full of symbolism. But the symbolism has to symbolize something. Even if the details are figurative, the underlying reality being depicted is the conscious existence of the dead in God’s presence before the resurrection. You do not create a symbol to depict something you believe does not exist.³⁰

There is one more New Testament passage we should consider, and it ties directly into the postmortem opportunity that both CI and UR affirm. In 1 Peter 3:18–20, Peter writes that Christ “was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.” And in 1 Peter 4:6, Peter adds that “this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead.”⁵⁵

Whatever your precise interpretation of these difficult verses, one thing is clear: Peter envisions Christ communicating with the dead. The “spirits in prison” are conscious beings who can receive a proclamation. The dead to whom the gospel was preached are persons capable of hearing and responding. None of this makes any sense on the physicalist view. If the dead have simply ceased to exist, there are no spirits in any prison and no dead persons to preach to. But on the substance dualist view, these passages make perfect sense. The dead are still there—their souls are conscious, awaiting the final judgment, and Christ himself goes to them.⁵⁶

This is a stunning picture. The God who pursues the living also pursues the dead. The gospel reaches beyond the grave. And the mechanism for that reaching is the continued conscious existence of the soul after death. Remove the soul, and you remove the very possibility of this postmortem ministry of Christ. Keep the soul, and a whole new horizon of God’s saving work opens up.

The Weight of the Evidence

When you lay all of this evidence side by side, the case for substance dualism is formidable. In the Old Testament, we see Rachel’s soul departing at death (Gen. 35:18), the child’s soul returning to his body at Elijah’s prayer (1 Kings 17:21–22), the spirit returning to God at death (Eccl. 12:7), and Samuel appearing as a conscious person after death (1 Sam. 28). In the New Testament, we see Jesus distinguishing body from soul (Matt. 10:28), promising the thief immediate fellowship in paradise (Luke 23:43), committing his spirit to the Father at death (Luke 23:46), Paul expecting to be with Christ immediately upon departing the body (Phil. 1:23), Paul describing a state of being “away from the body” yet “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and John seeing the conscious souls of the martyrs under the altar (Rev. 6:9–11).

J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, in their thorough study Body and Soul, argue that this cumulative evidence points decisively toward substance dualism—not the Platonic variety that denigrates the body, but a distinctly biblical dualism that affirms the goodness of both body and soul while recognizing their genuine distinction.³¹

Cooper reaches the same conclusion, arguing that the biblical evidence supports what he calls “holistic dualism”—a view that takes seriously both the Old Testament’s holistic emphasis and the clear dualistic implications of the intermediate state texts. Human beings are designed to function as body-soul unities. But death temporarily separates what God joined together, and the soul continues to exist consciously in God’s presence until the resurrection reunites it with a transformed body.³²

I want to stress something here, because I think the physicalists sometimes create a false choice. They say: either you believe the Hebrews had a holistic view of the person, or you believe in body-soul dualism. But that is not the choice at all. You can believe both. You can say—and the biblical evidence strongly supports saying—that the Hebrews viewed human beings as integrated wholes who are not meant to exist as disembodied spirits, and also that the Hebrews recognized a real distinction between the body and the soul that becomes evident at death when the two are separated.

Think of it like a marriage. A husband and wife are meant to function as “one flesh” (Gen. 2:24). They are a unity. They work together, live together, build a life together. But they are still two distinct persons. And if one of them dies, the other continues to exist. The unity has been broken—tragically, painfully—but the surviving partner is still real, still conscious, still a person. That is how biblical substance dualism works. Body and soul are meant to be together. They are designed for unity. But they are distinct, and death separates them, and the soul goes on existing until God reunites it with a glorified body at the resurrection.⁵⁷

The early church fathers overwhelmingly affirmed this view. From the very beginning, Christian thinkers recognized that the intermediate state required some form of conscious existence between death and resurrection. The Apostles’ Creed confesses that Christ “descended into hell” (descendit ad inferos)—a clause that presupposes the existence of conscious souls in Hades to whom Christ could go. You do not descend to a place of non-existence. The Creed assumes there are persons there, waiting, conscious, real—and that Christ went to them.⁵⁸

Tertullian, writing in the late second and early third century, argued that the soul is a distinct substance that survives the body’s death. He called belief in the soul’s reality one of the “common and primary conceptions of the mind.” Calvin later cited Tertullian on this very point, noting that the soul’s separate identity was well established in the earliest Christian centuries.⁵⁹ This was not a late philosophical import. It was there from the beginning.

Why Physicalism Fails

Let me be direct. I have a lot of respect for Joel Green, Nancey Murphy, and others who have argued for Christian physicalism. They are serious scholars who care about getting the Bible right. But I think their position simply cannot account for the full range of biblical data. And I think it creates serious theological problems—problems that are especially acute for anyone who holds the postmortem opportunity, as both CI and UR advocates do.

The Intermediate State Problem

The biggest problem for physicalism is the intermediate state. If there is no soul, then when a person dies, they cease to exist entirely. There is nothing left of them until God re-creates them at the resurrection. But the texts we just examined—Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:1–8, Revelation 6:9–11—all describe conscious existence between death and resurrection. The physicalist has to explain away every single one of these passages, and I do not think they can do it convincingly.³³

Some physicalists appeal to “soul sleep”—the idea that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection. But soul sleep is actually a different view from physicalism. Soul sleep assumes there is a soul that sleeps. Physicalism denies there is a soul at all. The physicalist cannot consistently appeal to soul sleep because there is nothing left to do the sleeping.³⁴

Other physicalists try a different approach. They argue that God immediately resurrects the person at the moment of death, so there is no gap between death and resurrection at all. On this view, the moment you die, God immediately gives you a new body in eternity. But this creates its own problems. If the dead are immediately resurrected, what is the point of the future, bodily resurrection that the New Testament so clearly teaches? Paul says that if Christ has not been raised, our faith is in vain (1 Cor. 15:14). The whole New Testament leans forward toward a future resurrection event—something that has not happened yet. If everyone is immediately resurrected at death, the future resurrection becomes redundant.³⁵

Beilby raises this exact issue in his study of the postmortem opportunity. He notes that views affirming an intermediate state face the question of how to reconcile the immediate experience of the dead with the future final judgment. But the physicalist view faces a far more radical problem: it has no intermediate state at all, and therefore no natural mechanism for the postmortem encounter with God that both CI and UR affirm.³⁶

The Postmortem Opportunity Problem

Here is where physicalism becomes especially problematic for CI advocates who also believe in a postmortem opportunity—and that is the specific audience of this book. Think about what the postmortem opportunity requires. It requires that after a person dies, they encounter God in some conscious, personal way. They hear the gospel. They understand it. They are given a genuine choice to accept or reject Christ.

But if physicalism is true, the dead person does not exist between death and resurrection. They are not conscious. They are not anywhere. They cannot hear anything, understand anything, or choose anything. They are simply gone, like a candle that has been blown out. Where, exactly, does the postmortem opportunity happen?³⁷

The physicalist might answer: at the resurrection. God raises the person, gives them a new body, and then offers them the gospel. But this pushes the postmortem opportunity all the way to the final judgment—and at that point, the entire intermediate state is emptied of any meaning. There is no Hades, no paradise, no conscious waiting. There is just death, then resurrection, then judgment. The rich man and Lazarus story in Luke 16 becomes impossible to explain. The martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6 become meaningless symbols for nothing. The thief on the cross was told a lie.

I do not think the physicalist position can sustain the weight of the postmortem opportunity. And since both CI and UR affirm the postmortem opportunity, both positions need substance dualism to make it work. The soul must survive death. The person must be conscious. God must be present to them. The relationship must continue.

The Personal Identity Problem

There is another serious problem with physicalism that deserves attention—the problem of personal identity. If a person is entirely physical, and their body is destroyed at death, and God later creates a new body at the resurrection, in what sense is the resurrected person the same person who died? It is not the same body—the original body has decomposed. The physicalist says God creates a new body. But is a perfect copy of me actually me? Or is it just someone who looks like me and has all my memories?³⁸

Moreland has pressed this point with great force. If there is no soul—no immaterial self that bridges the gap between death and resurrection—then the resurrected person is a replica, not a continuation. It is like making a perfect photocopy of a letter and then saying the photocopy is the original. It is not. It is a copy. The original was destroyed.³⁹

But if the soul exists and survives death, personal identity is preserved. The soul is the continuous thread that connects the pre-death person to the post-resurrection person. It is what makes you you, across the gap of death. Cooper argues that this is precisely why the biblical authors assumed an intermediate state: because they understood that personal identity requires continuity, and the soul provides that continuity.⁴⁰

Nancey Murphy and other physicalists have tried to solve this problem by appealing to God’s memory—God remembers who you are, and so the new body he creates is “you” because God says it is you. But this is a kind of magic trick. It does not actually solve the problem. God could “remember” you and create someone who has all your characteristics, but that does not mean the result is you any more than a perfect clone would be you. Identity requires more than resemblance. It requires continuity of the same substance. And that is exactly what the soul provides.⁴¹

What Substance Dualism Means for the CI/UR Debate

So substance dualism is true. The Bible teaches it. The early church affirmed it. The philosophical arguments support it. But why does it matter for our conversation about final destiny?

I think it matters enormously, for at least three reasons.

The Soul and God’s Ongoing Relationship

If the soul is real and survives death, then God’s relationship with every person continues beyond the grave. This is the theological heart of the matter. Death does not end the relationship between Creator and creature. The person is still there. The person is still conscious. God is still present to them.

This is actually common ground between CI and UR. Both positions affirm the conscious intermediate state. Both affirm that God is present to the dead. Both affirm the postmortem opportunity. Where they differ is on what happens next.

The CI advocate says that after the postmortem encounter, some people will still reject God—and God will respect that rejection by eventually destroying them. The UR advocate says that God’s love is powerful enough and patient enough to eventually win every heart—that no one who truly sees God face to face, with all the blinders of sin removed, will be able to resist his love forever.⁴²

Here is my question for the CI reader. If you believe the soul survives death, and you believe God is present to that soul, and you believe God offers that soul a genuine encounter with his love—on what basis do you believe God will eventually give up? What changes? What makes God say, “I have been pursuing this person through life and death and the intermediate state and the postmortem encounter, but now I am done”?

I once heard a pastor put it this way. Imagine you are standing outside a burning building, and your child is inside. You do not try the front door once, find it locked, and walk away. You try every door. You try the windows. You look for a ladder. You call for help. You keep going until you get your child out or until the building collapses with you inside it. That is what love does. It does not give up.

Now, the CI advocate would respond: “But this is not a case of someone trapped against their will. This is someone who chooses to stay in the burning building. They prefer the fire to the rescue. At some point, love has to respect that choice.” I understand that response. And I will address the question of free will in detail in Chapter 27. But for now, I simply want to note that the soul’s existence makes the question of God’s relentless pursuit inescapable. If the person were simply gone—if death ended their existence—there would be no one left for God to pursue. But because the soul is still there, still conscious, still a person whom God loves, the question remains: Will God ever stop reaching out?⁶⁰

Talbott presses this question with great force. He argues that if God genuinely loves every person—and both CI and UR agree that he does—then God’s love is not the kind of thing that has an expiration date. A loving father does not eventually stop caring about his lost child. A good shepherd does not eventually stop looking for the lost sheep. The whole point of Jesus’ parable in Luke 15 is that God’s pursuit is relentless and ends in rejoicing, not resignation.⁴³

The existence of the soul makes this question unavoidable. If physicalism were true, the question would not arise—the person would simply cease to exist at death, and there would be no ongoing relationship to speak of. But because the soul is real, the relationship continues. And because the relationship continues, the question presses: Will the God who leaves the ninety-nine to find the one ever stop looking?

The Soul and the Image of God

Substance dualism also has important implications for the image of God—the imago Dei—and what it means for the final destiny question.

Genesis 1:26–27 tells us that God created human beings in his own image. This image is not located solely in the body or solely in the soul—it characterizes the whole person. But if we affirm substance dualism, then the image of God extends to the immaterial aspect of the person as well. The soul bears God’s image. It reflects God’s rationality, moral awareness, relational capacity, and creative power. James 3:9 reminds us that even fallen human beings bear this image—“people who are made in the likeness of God.” Genesis 9:6 grounds the prohibition against murder in the image of God—to destroy a human being is to destroy a bearer of God’s image.⁴⁴

Now, here is the question. If the soul bears the image of God, and if that image, however defaced by sin, is never completely eradicated—then what does it mean for God to destroy a soul? It means God is permanently destroying a bearer of his own image. It means a reflection of God himself is extinguished forever. Something that God made to mirror his own character is gone, and it is gone because God chose to destroy it.

Can we really affirm that? Can we really say that the God who created persons in his own image will ultimately and permanently destroy some of those persons—not because he lacks the power to save them, and not because he lacks the love to pursue them, but because… why? Because they are too stubborn? Because their sin is too deep? Because God ran out of patience?

Manis, in Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, explores the connection between human nature, the soul-making process, and God’s purposes. He argues that the entire purpose of human existence is for the soul to be shaped and formed in relationship with God—what the Christian tradition calls theosis, or becoming like God. If that is true, then the destruction of a soul represents the ultimate failure of the soul-making process. It means God started something he could not or would not finish.⁴⁵

Let me put this more concretely. Imagine a sculptor working on a block of marble. The sculptor has a vision—a beautiful figure that he sees inside the stone. He begins to chip away, slowly revealing the form beneath. Some parts of the marble resist. Some pieces break off in unexpected ways. The work is painstaking, difficult, and takes far longer than anyone expected. But the sculptor does not give up. He does not look at a half-finished statue and say, “This is too much trouble. I will smash it to pieces and throw it away.” A sculptor who did that would not be a master—he would be a failure.

God is the sculptor. The soul is the marble. Sin is what resists the chisel. And the question is this: Is God the kind of sculptor who abandons his work? Or is he the kind who sees it through to completion? The CI advocate says God gives up on some blocks of marble. The universalist says God’s skill is infinite, his patience is endless, and no soul is too resistant for the Master’s hand.⁶¹

David Bentley Hart has pressed this point with particular force. He argues that every human being is created out of and for the purpose of reflecting God’s goodness. To permanently destroy a soul is to permanently erase one unique reflection of the divine. It is a loss not just for the person but for God himself—a part of his creation that will never fulfill its purpose, a note in the symphony that will never be heard. Hart insists that such a loss is incompatible with the God revealed in Scripture, the God who declares the end from the beginning and accomplishes all his purposes (Isa. 46:10).⁶²

The universalist says: God does not give up on his image-bearers. The fire of his presence does not destroy the gold—it refines it. However long it takes, however painful the process, God will see the work through to completion. Every soul that bears his image will eventually reflect that image as it was always meant to.

The Soul, the Postmortem Opportunity, and the Logic of Continuation

Here is one more reason substance dualism matters for this debate—and I think it is the one that will hit closest to home for the CI reader who believes in the postmortem opportunity.

Both CI and UR affirm the postmortem opportunity. Both believe that after death, God offers the unsaved a genuine encounter with his love. Both believe that this encounter happens while the soul is conscious and present before God. Both believe that some will respond to this encounter with faith.

The question is: what about those who do not respond with faith right away?

The CI advocate says: those who refuse the postmortem encounter have sealed their fate. They are eventually annihilated. The UR advocate says: God keeps pursuing. The encounter does not happen just once. God is patient. God is relentless. God is the shepherd who searches until he finds.

But notice the logic. The CI reader has already conceded the crucial premise. They have already agreed that the soul survives death. They have already agreed that God is present to the dead. They have already agreed that God offers the dead a genuine opportunity for salvation. They have already agreed that death is not the end of God’s saving work.

The universalist simply asks: If all of that is true, why would God stop? If the soul is still there, if God is still present, if the relationship is still ongoing—why would the God who is love itself ever say, “I give up”?⁴⁶

Think about it this way. The CI advocate believes God loves every person. The CI advocate believes God is powerful enough to reach across the barrier of death. The CI advocate believes God actually does reach across that barrier and offer salvation to the dead. The CI advocate believes some respond and are saved. The only question is whether God’s patience eventually runs out—whether there comes a point when God says, “I have offered you my love, and you have refused it, and now I will destroy you.”

But what kind of love is that? What kind of father eventually stops looking for his lost child and says, “Well, I tried”? Talbott argues that the very concept of a God who gives up on his creatures is incoherent—that a God whose love can be permanently thwarted by human stubbornness is not the omnipotent, all-loving God of the Bible. He asks us to imagine a mother who loves her child. If that child is in danger, the mother does not stop trying to save them after a certain number of attempts. She keeps going. And if a finite human mother has that kind of love, how much more the infinite God?⁴⁷

Parry makes a similar point in The Evangelical Universalist. He argues that the logic of the postmortem opportunity, once accepted, leads naturally to universalism. If God’s love reaches beyond the grave, and if God’s power is sufficient to reach every soul, then the only thing that could prevent universal salvation is a permanent, irrevocable, fully-informed refusal of God. And Talbott argues persuasively that such a refusal is impossible—that a fully informed, fully free rejection of infinite love and goodness is something no rational creature would or could make.⁴⁸

The existence of the soul is what makes all of this possible. Because the soul survives death, the person is still there for God to reach. Because the soul is conscious, the person can be encountered, addressed, loved, and healed. Because the soul bears the image of God, there is always something in the person that responds to God, however deeply buried under layers of sin and rebellion. And because God’s love never fails (1 Cor. 13:8), the pursuit never ends.

Not Plato, But the Bible

I want to close this chapter by addressing a concern that I know some readers will have. The physicalists are right about one thing: we must not import Plato into our Bibles. Platonic dualism—the idea that the body is a prison and the soul is a divine spark longing to escape—is not a Christian view. It denigrates the body, which God created and called good. It suggests the soul is naturally immortal, which the Bible never teaches. It makes the resurrection unnecessary, since the soul is already “free” without the body.

The substance dualism I am defending in this chapter is not Platonic dualism. It is biblical dualism. And it differs from Plato in at least four crucial ways.

First, the body is good. God created it (Gen. 2:7). Jesus took one on (John 1:14). The resurrection promises us a glorified body for eternity (1 Cor. 15:42–44). The goal is not escape from the body but the transformation and perfection of the body.⁴⁹

Second, the soul is not inherently immortal. Only God has immortality in himself (1 Tim. 6:16). The soul exists because God wills it to exist. It continues to exist because God sustains it. If God chose to end a soul’s existence, he could. The question is not whether God can destroy the soul, but whether God will—and what his character tells us about the answer.⁵⁰

Third, the intermediate state is not the final state. Being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8) is good, but it is not God’s ultimate plan. God’s plan is resurrection—the reunion of body and soul in a glorified, imperishable form. The intermediate state is a bridge, not a destination.⁵¹

Fourth, human beings are designed for embodied existence. The soul can exist without the body, but it is not meant to. Paul describes the disembodied state as being “naked” (2 Cor. 5:3)—not a state he longs for, but one he accepts as the cost of being with Christ before the resurrection. The full vision of human flourishing is body and soul together, transformed and glorified, in the presence of God forever.⁵²

This distinction is important because it shapes how we think about the intermediate state. For Plato, the separation of soul from body is liberation. For Paul, it is a kind of diminishment. The soul without the body is like a hand without an arm—real, alive, but incomplete. The intermediate state is real, and the person in it is genuinely conscious and genuinely with the Lord. But it is not the goal. The goal is resurrection—the full restoration of the whole person, body and soul reunited and glorified.

Gregory of Nyssa, one of the great Cappadocian fathers and a champion of universal restoration, held exactly this kind of biblical substance dualism. He affirmed that the soul is distinct from the body and survives death. But he also insisted that the soul is not complete without the body, and that God’s ultimate purpose is the resurrection and restoration of the whole person. For Gregory, the soul’s survival after death was not a Platonic escape but a divine gift—a gift that ensured God’s relationship with the person continued until the final restoration could be accomplished.⁶³

That is a deeply hopeful picture. The soul survives death not as an escape from matter but as a bridge to resurrection. And for the universalist, that bridge is wide enough for everyone. No soul that God sustains in existence is beyond his reach. No person held in God’s hand is truly lost. The intermediate state is not a waiting room for destruction. It is a place where the refining fire does its work, where the persistent love of God slowly melts the hardened heart, where the image of God is gradually uncovered and restored.

Fudge, to his credit, acknowledged that the nature of the human creature does not, by itself, determine the final destiny debate. As he put it, dualists and monists can both hold either the traditionalist or the conditionalist view.⁵³ That is technically true. But I think Fudge underestimated the implications. Because once you affirm that the soul is real, that it survives death, that it is conscious before God, and that God continues to relate to it after death—you have conceded everything the universalist needs to press the argument forward.

The soul is not just a metaphysical curiosity. It is the bridge between this life and the next. It is what makes the postmortem opportunity possible. It is what preserves personal identity across the gap of death. It is what ensures that God’s relationship with every person continues beyond the grave. And it is what makes the universalist’s question so pressing: If the soul is still there, and God is still there, and God’s love never fails—why would the story end in destruction?

The Reformer Helmut Thielicke once wrote that just as no creature has any inherent “death-proof substance” in the soul, neither does any person have inherent righteousness. Both life and righteousness are gifts from God, received only through fellowship with Christ. Thielicke said: “I move into my death with empty hands and without any death-proof substance in my soul, but only with my gaze focused on God’s hand.”⁵⁴

That is beautiful. And it is true. We do move into death with empty hands. But we move into it held by a God whose hands are not empty—a God who holds every soul he has made, a God whose grip does not loosen in the darkness, a God whose love follows us even into the deepest depths (Ps. 139:7–8).

The CI advocate and the UR advocate agree on almost all of this. We agree that the soul is real. We agree that it survives death. We agree that God is present to the dead. We agree that God offers every person a genuine encounter with his love beyond the grave. We agree that the soul is not inherently immortal but is sustained by God’s will.

Where we differ is on the final chapter of the story. The CI advocate says that some souls will be destroyed. The UR advocate says that the God who sustains every soul in existence does so for a reason—because he is not finished with them yet. Because the fire is still refining. Because the shepherd is still searching. Because the father is still watching the road, waiting for the prodigal to come home.

Let me leave you with one more thought. Augustine, the towering figure of Western theology, held that the souls of the wicked are immortal by creation—that God made them unable to be destroyed, and that they will therefore suffer forever. Fudge rightly pointed out that Scripture never actually says this. Immortality, in the Bible, is always spoken of in connection with the redeemed, never the wicked; always in connection with the embodied person, never a disembodied soul; and always as a gift bestowed in the resurrection, never as something inherent from creation.⁶⁴

On this, the CI advocate and the UR advocate stand together against Augustine. We agree that the soul is not inherently immortal. We agree that only God possesses immortality in himself. We agree that the soul’s continued existence is a matter of God’s will, not the soul’s nature.

But here is the question that divides us. If the soul’s existence is sustained by God’s will, and if God is love, and if God desires all to be saved—then why would God choose to stop sustaining a soul? Why would the God who holds every person in existence actively choose to end that existence? The CI advocate says: because the person has refused God’s love decisively and finally, and there is nothing more God can do. The UR advocate says: there is always more God can do, because his love is infinite, his patience is inexhaustible, and his purposes cannot be thwarted.

The existence of the soul is what makes this debate matter. Without the soul, there is no one left to love, no one left to pursue, no one left to save. With the soul, the story continues. God’s relationship with every person persists beyond the grave. The door remains open. And the universalist believes, with the confidence of Scripture and the character of God, that every prodigal eventually will come home.

In the next chapter, we will explore the nature of that fire—God’s purifying presence—and why it burns not to destroy but to heal.