Chapter 31
“Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.”
—Jesus of Nazareth (Matthew 10:28)
Here is a question you may not have thought to ask: What does the nature of the human person have to do with whether God will eventually save everyone?
The answer, it turns out, is everything.
Throughout this book, we have built a cumulative case for universal restoration. We have shown that McClymond’s gnostic-origins thesis fails, that the patristic witness for universalism is far stronger than he admits, that the biblical texts form a massive witness for the eventual reconciliation of all things, and that the judgment passages are best read as describing age-long, purifying correction rather than endless torment. We have also explored the postmortem opportunity—the idea that those who die without a genuine encounter with Christ will receive one after death.
But there is a piece of the puzzle we have not yet examined. It is the anthropological piece—the question of what we are as human beings. Are we purely physical creatures, so that when the body dies, the person simply stops existing? Or are we composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul, so that the person continues to exist consciously even after the body gives out?
This question matters enormously. If we are purely physical, then death is the end of the person until the resurrection. There is no intermediate state. There is no conscious existence between death and the final day. And that creates a serious problem for the postmortem opportunity, because it means there is no person present to hear the gospel, respond to God’s love, or undergo the purifying work of the Holy Spirit during the intermediate period.
But if substance dualism is true—if we are body and soul, and the soul survives death in a conscious state—then God’s relationship with every person continues unbroken beyond the grave. The person is still there. God is still there. Love is still at work. And if God’s love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:8), and the person never ceases to exist, then the question becomes unavoidable: On what basis would we believe that God’s patient, relentless, purifying love ever stops working?
That is the argument of this chapter. I want to show that the Bible teaches substance dualism, that the soul is conscious between death and resurrection, and that this anthropological reality provides the essential mechanism through which God’s universal restoration works itself out. McClymond’s broader framework in The Devil’s Redemption never seriously grapples with this question, and that is a significant gap in his argument. A dualist anthropology, combined with the postmortem opportunity we explored in Chapter 21, creates exactly the conditions under which universal restoration makes sense.
McClymond’s two-volume work is a sweeping historical and theological critique of Christian universalism, but for all its impressive scope, it contains a remarkable gap. He never engages in any sustained way with the question of theological anthropology—the question of whether human beings are purely physical creatures or whether they have immaterial souls that survive bodily death. This is a significant oversight.
McClymond does touch on anthropological questions here and there. He documents that some historical universalists held to body-soul dualism, noting, for instance, the “strongly dualistic model of human nature” found in figures like Caspar Schwenkfeld and George de Benneville.1 He observes that in the nineteenth century, “mortalist and conditionalist views found more frequent and insistent expression in Britain during the 1870s, challenging the classical Platonic dualism of body and soul.”2 He also mentions that “questions regarding the state of the soul from the moment of its death until the time of Christ’s return—the so-called intermediate state—had never been resolved among the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers.”3
But none of this amounts to a sustained theological argument about what human beings are. McClymond never asks: If the soul survives death and remains conscious, what does that mean for the question of whether God’s saving work continues after death? He never considers the possibility that a dualist anthropology naturally supports the postmortem opportunity—and that the postmortem opportunity, in turn, naturally supports universal restoration.
This is a gap that matters. McClymond’s entire case against universalism depends on the assumption that death is a hard boundary for God’s saving work. His argument assumes that the destiny of each person is sealed either at death or at the final judgment, with no possibility of transformation in between. But that assumption rests on a particular view of human nature—one that McClymond never defends. If the soul is real, conscious, and still in relationship with God after death, then the entire framework shifts.
McClymond does engage with the conditionalist movement in some detail, documenting the rise of conditional immortality from the Socinians through the Christadelphians to modern advocates.4 He notes that conditionalists reject the classical teaching on the soul’s survival after death, with the more radical mortalists holding that “death brings extinction of consciousness to all human beings without exception, except insofar as God might choose to confer a continuation of consciousness.”5 What McClymond does not do is evaluate whether conditionalist anthropology is actually correct. He simply notes it as a historical phenomenon without asking the critical question: Does the Bible teach that the soul survives the death of the body?
That question is what this chapter is about.
There is also a broader issue at stake. McClymond repeatedly charges that universalism fails to take seriously the biblical warnings about judgment and the finality of divine decisions. But if we are going to talk about “finality,” we need to know what we are talking about. Is death the end of the person, or only the end of the body? Is the intermediate state a state of unconsciousness, or of conscious awareness? Does God’s relationship with the deceased person continue, or is it interrupted?
The answers to these questions determine whether McClymond’s assumption of a hard boundary at death can stand. And the answers, as we will see, are overwhelmingly on the side of substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state.
There are several specific weaknesses in McClymond’s handling of this issue.
McClymond’s framework treats the moment of death as a dividing line beyond which God’s saving work cannot operate. But he never defends this assumption. He simply takes it as a given and builds his critique of universalism on top of it.
This is the same assumption that Thomas Aquinas made in his Summa Contra Gentiles, and it deserves scrutiny. Aquinas argued that the soul, once separated from the body, becomes fixed in whatever orientation it held at the moment of death. As Jerry Walls has noted, Aquinas’s reasoning depends on a hylomorphic view of human nature—the idea that the soul requires the body in order to change.6 Walls rightly points out that this argument “will carry very little weight with dualists who believe that the soul is the essential self” and “retains its basic powers even without the body.”7
In other words, the claim that the soul cannot change after death is not a biblical teaching. It is a philosophical assumption rooted in Thomistic hylomorphism. And it is precisely the assumption that substance dualism challenges.
McClymond documents the rise of physicalist anthropology in certain strands of Christianity without ever taking a position on whether physicalism or dualism is correct. This leaves a critical hole in his argument. If physicalism is true, then the person ceases to exist at death and the postmortem opportunity becomes more difficult (though not impossible) to explain. But if dualism is true, then the person continues to exist after death, and God’s pursuit of that person continues with it.
The fact that McClymond never resolves this question means that his readers are left without a clear anthropological framework in which to evaluate his claims about the finality of death. This is not a minor oversight. It is a gap at the very foundation of his argument.
Perhaps the most significant weakness is that McClymond never engages with the substantial biblical evidence for the conscious intermediate state. The New Testament is full of texts that portray deceased persons as conscious and active between death and resurrection—the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11, Paul’s desire to “depart and be with Christ” in Philippians 1:23, Jesus’s promise to the thief on the cross in Luke 23:43, and many others. These texts form a strong foundation for substance dualism. McClymond does not address them in any systematic way.
This means that the strongest anthropological support for the postmortem opportunity goes completely unexamined in The Devil’s Redemption. And that is a problem, because the postmortem opportunity is one of the key mechanisms through which universal restoration operates. If McClymond wants to argue that universalism is untenable, he needs to deal with the anthropological framework that makes it possible.
Now we come to the heart of this chapter. I want to build the comprehensive biblical and theological case for substance dualism—the view that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul survives the death of the body in a conscious state. Then I want to show why this matters for the universalist case.
Let me be clear about what I am not arguing. I am not arguing for Platonic dualism—the idea that the soul is inherently immortal, that the body is a prison, or that physical existence is inferior to spiritual existence. The biblical view is different. In the biblical view, the soul is a creation of God. Its continued existence depends entirely on God’s sustaining will. God could destroy the soul if He chose to—Jesus Himself warned that we should “fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28). The soul is not immortal by nature. It is sustained by grace.
What I am arguing is that the Bible consistently portrays the soul as a real, immaterial substance that can exist apart from the body, that remains conscious after death, and that continues in relationship with God until the final resurrection, when body and soul are reunited. This is sometimes called substance dualism or, more specifically, holistic dualism—a dualism that affirms the reality of both body and soul while insisting that full human flourishing requires their union in the resurrection.8
The Old Testament contains several key texts that point toward substance dualism.
Genesis 35:18. When Rachel died in childbirth, the text says, “And as her soul was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni.” The Hebrew word here is nephesh, and the text portrays it as something that departs from the body at death. The soul is not identical to the body. It is something distinct that leaves the body when the person dies.9
This is not an isolated text. The same language of the soul “departing” or “going out” from the body appears throughout the Old Testament as a description of death. The consistent picture is one of separation—the soul goes somewhere, while the body remains behind. The verb used here is yatsa—to go out or depart—and it implies movement from one place to another. Rachel’s nephesh did not simply vanish. It went somewhere. The body stayed behind on the road to Bethlehem; the soul departed to another state of existence.
Some physicalists have tried to argue that nephesh simply means “life” or “breath” and does not refer to an immaterial soul. There is some truth to the observation that nephesh has a wide semantic range in Hebrew. It can refer to the whole person, to the appetite, to the throat, or to life in general. But the question is not whether nephesh sometimes means “life.” The question is whether, in contexts like Genesis 35:18, it refers to something that departs the body at death. And the answer is clearly yes. You cannot say that someone’s “life” departed from them and then also say that “life” is identical to the body. If the life departs, it must be something other than the body.57
1 Kings 17:21–22. When Elijah raised the widow’s son, he prayed, “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 back into him, and he revived.” This is a remarkable text. It portrays the soul as something that left the body at death and returned to it at resurrection. The body and the soul are distinct realities. Death is their separation. Resurrection is their reunion.10
Think about what this text implies. If the soul can leave the body and return to it, then the soul is not identical to the body. It has a reality of its own. And during the time the child was dead, his soul existed somewhere apart from his body. The text does not tell us where, but it tells us that the soul was real and separable.
Ecclesiastes 12:7. This text describes death with poetic clarity: “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” Here the Hebrew word is ruach (spirit), and the picture is unmistakable. At death, the body goes one direction (to the ground) and the spirit goes another (to God). The two are not the same thing. They have different destinies at the point of death, though both originated from God’s creative act.11
1 Samuel 28:11–19. The account of the medium at Endor, where Saul consults the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel, is one of the most striking texts in the Old Testament. Whatever we make of the mechanics of this event—and Christians have debated them for centuries—the text clearly presents Samuel as a conscious person who speaks, knows things, and renders judgment after his death. The text does not say Saul encountered a hallucination or a demon masquerading as Samuel. It says, “Saul knew that it was Samuel” (v. 14), and Samuel himself speaks, prophesying Saul’s death.12
John W. Cooper, in his important study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, argues that the Old Testament consistently presents a dualist anthropology, even if it does not develop the concept in the systematic way the New Testament does. The Old Testament portrays death as the separation of the soul from the body, with the soul continuing to exist in Sheol—the realm of the dead. Cooper concludes that “the Old Testament assumes a functional holistic dualism,” meaning that while the human person is meant to be a body-soul unity, the soul can and does exist apart from the body after death.13
If the Old Testament provides the groundwork, the New Testament builds the case into something overwhelming.
Matthew 10:28. This is perhaps the single most important text for substance dualism in the entire Bible. 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 implications are staggering. Jesus explicitly teaches that the body and the soul are distinct realities. The body can be killed while the soul remains alive. The soul can survive the destruction of the body. Only God has the power to destroy both.14
This text is owned by this chapter, and it deserves careful attention. Notice what Jesus does not say. He does not say that the soul automatically perishes when the body dies. He does not say that the soul is identical to the body. He draws a clear distinction between them, and He affirms that the soul survives the death of the body. This is substance dualism, plain and simple, from the lips of Jesus.
Notice also the language about destruction. Jesus says God can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna. He does not say God will. The universalist affirms that God has this ability but contends that God, in His love, will never exercise it in a final or permanent sense, because His purpose is always restoration, never annihilation. As we argued in Chapter 16, Jesus’s warnings about Gehenna are real and serious, but they function as warnings of what could happen if we persist in rebellion—not as descriptions of what must happen to anyone permanently.15
J. P. Moreland and Scott Rae, in their philosophical treatment Body & Soul, argue that Matthew 10:28 is decisive evidence for substance dualism. They write that Jesus’s teaching here “clearly implies that the soul is a different entity from the body, that it can exist without the body, and that it has a different fate from the body after death.”16
Luke 23:43. On the cross, Jesus told the repentant thief: “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.” The word “today” is crucial. Jesus did not say, “At the resurrection you will be with me.” He said today. This means that on the very day they both died, the thief would be consciously present with Jesus in paradise. The body of the thief hung dead on the cross. His soul was with Jesus.17
Some have tried to avoid this conclusion by repunctuating the verse: “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise”—making “today” modify “I say” rather than “you will be with me.” But this reading is linguistically awkward. In the Gospels, Jesus never uses the phrase “I say to you today” as if the word “today” needed to identify when He was speaking. The natural reading is that “today” modifies the promise: today, this very day, you will be with me in paradise.18
Luke 23:46. At His own death, Jesus cried out: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!” Jesus did not say, “Father, I am ceasing to exist.” He entrusted His spirit—His immaterial self—to the Father. The body died. The spirit went to the Father. This is the same pattern we saw in Ecclesiastes 12:7, but now it comes from Jesus Himself at the moment of His own death.19
2 Corinthians 5:1–8. This passage is one of Paul’s most detailed treatments of death and the afterlife. He writes: “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.” He continues: “We would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” Paul clearly envisions a state in which the person is “away from the body” and yet “at home with the Lord.” This is not soul sleep. This is not nonexistence. This is conscious personal existence in the presence of God, apart from the physical body.20
Paul’s language here is particularly telling. He uses the metaphor of a tent (the body) and a building (the resurrection body), and he describes an intermediate state in which we are “away from the body.” The person who is “away from the body” is still a person. Still conscious. Still with the Lord. The body is gone, but the self remains. This is substance dualism stated as plainly as Paul ever states anything.21
Philippians 1:23. Paul writes: “My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better.” Paul sees death not as the end of his existence but as the beginning of a closer relationship with Christ. “To depart” from the body is “to be with Christ.” The departure is from the physical body. The destination is Christ’s presence. Between these two points stands the soul—the conscious, personal self that leaves the body and enters the presence of the Lord.22
If Paul believed that death meant the cessation of all consciousness until the resurrection, it is very hard to see how he could call death “far better.” Unconscious nonexistence is not “better” than anything. It is nothing. Paul expected something after death—something conscious, personal, and joyful. That is why he could call it “far better.”
Revelation 6:9–11. John sees “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God.” These souls cry out to God: “O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?” They are told to wait “a little longer.” This is a portrait of conscious, personal existence after death. The martyrs are dead. Their bodies are gone. But their souls are present, aware, vocal, and waiting for the final judgment.23
This text is especially important because it comes from the apocalyptic literature, which is precisely the genre that describes the final judgment and the ultimate destiny of all people. The book of Revelation knows about the intermediate state. It knows that the dead are conscious. It knows that they are waiting for the resurrection. And it presents all of this as part of the unfolding of God’s plan.
Step back for a moment and look at what we have. Genesis 35:18 describes the soul departing at death. 1 Kings 17:21–22 describes the soul leaving the body and returning to it. Ecclesiastes 12:7 says the spirit returns to God at death. 1 Samuel 28 presents a dead prophet speaking consciously. Jesus teaches that the body and soul are distinct and that the soul survives death (Matthew 10:28). Jesus promises the thief conscious fellowship in paradise on the day of his death (Luke 23:43). Jesus commits His own spirit to the Father (Luke 23:46). Paul expects to be “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). Paul desires to “depart and be with Christ” (Philippians 1:23). John sees conscious, speaking souls under the altar (Revelation 6:9–11).
That is not a thin collection of proof-texts. That is a massive, consistent, cross-canonical witness to the reality of the immaterial soul and the conscious intermediate state. Cooper calls this evidence “impressive in its breadth and consistency” and concludes that “the New Testament clearly teaches that human persons survive death as conscious beings.”24
Moreland and Rae reach the same conclusion from a philosophical perspective, arguing that the best explanation of the biblical data is substance dualism—the view that the soul is a real, immaterial substance, distinct from the body, capable of existing apart from it, and sustained by God’s will.25
Now we come to the point that ties everything together. If substance dualism is true—and I believe the evidence overwhelmingly shows that it is—then several things follow that are directly relevant to the case for universal restoration.
First, the person continues to exist after death. Death is not the annihilation of the self. It is the separation of the soul from the body. The person—the conscious, thinking, feeling, choosing self—survives. This means that death does not end God’s relationship with the person. The person is still there, still real, still the object of God’s love.26
Second, the conscious intermediate state creates the space for the postmortem opportunity. If the soul is conscious between death and resurrection, then there is a period during which the person can encounter God, hear the gospel, and respond. This is exactly what the postmortem opportunity requires. The soul does not need a body to think, to respond, or to be transformed by God’s grace. As Beilby notes, “the theory of Postmortem Opportunity is compatible with any of these understandings of personal eschatology,” but it fits especially well with a dualist framework, where the soul retains its “basic powers even without the body.”27
Third, if the person never ceases to exist, and God’s love never fails, then the logic of universal restoration follows. This is the critical connection. Paul writes, “Love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8, NKJV). John writes, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). If the person continues to exist consciously after death, and God’s love continues to pursue them, then the question is: Will that love ever stop? Will God give up on anyone?
The universalist answer is no. God’s love is not a temporary offer that expires at death. It is the eternal, relentless, unbreakable pursuit of every person God has ever created. And because the soul survives death, that pursuit has all the time it needs. Not the few decades of an earthly life, but the vast ages of God’s patience—through the intermediate state, through the fires of judgment, through whatever process of purification is needed—until every last soul is home.28
Thomas Talbott makes this point with characteristic clarity. If God is love, and God has the power to bring every person to willing faith, and the person continues to exist as a conscious agent whom God can address and transform, then on what basis would we conclude that God will ultimately fail with anyone? Talbott argues that persistent rejection of God is a sign of bondage, not freedom—and that God’s purifying work aims precisely at breaking that bondage and restoring genuine freedom.29 The survival of the soul after death gives God the time and the access to complete this work.
David Bentley Hart arrives at a similar conclusion from a different angle. Hart argues that if God creates freely and out of love, then He must intend to bring that creation to a good end. A creation in which even one rational creature is permanently lost is a creation that has not reached its intended goal—and that represents the defeat of God’s purpose.30 The survival of the soul ensures that no creature is ever beyond God’s reach.
It is worth noting that the major patristic universalists all held to substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state. This is not a coincidence. Their universalism was built, in part, on their anthropology.
Origen, the great Alexandrian theologian, held that the soul is a real, immaterial substance created by God, distinct from the body, and surviving after death. His entire theology of apokatastasis—the restoration of all things—depended on the soul’s continued existence in the postmortem state, where it could undergo the purifying work of God’s love. Without the survival of the soul, Origen’s universalism makes no sense.31
Gregory of Nyssa likewise held to substance dualism and taught that the soul survives death. In his dialogue On the Soul and the Resurrection, Gregory (through the voice of his sister Macrina) argues that the soul’s continued existence after death is essential to God’s restorative plan. The soul is purified in the postmortem state by the fire of God’s love, and this purification eventually brings every soul to restoration. Gregory’s universalism was inseparable from his dualist anthropology.32
Maximus the Confessor, another major figure in the patristic universalist tradition (though the extent of his universalism is debated), likewise affirmed the survival of the soul after death and the continuation of God’s transformative work in the postmortem state.33
Even beyond the universalist fathers, the early church as a whole overwhelmingly affirmed substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state. The Apostles’ Creed’s affirmation that Christ “descended to the dead” presupposes that there are dead who are conscious and can be visited. The early Christian practice of praying for the dead—attested from the earliest centuries in both East and West—assumes that the dead are conscious, that their state can change, and that God’s grace continues to work in them.58 The universal consensus of the early church was that the soul survived bodily death in a conscious state. Physicalism—the idea that the person simply ceases to exist at death—was unknown in orthodox Christian theology until the Reformation era, and even then it appeared only among fringe groups.
This historical consensus matters because it shows that the anthropological foundation for the universalist case is not some novel invention. It is the shared inheritance of the entire Christian tradition. When we argue that the soul survives death and that God’s love continues to pursue it, we are not introducing a new idea. We are standing on the same ground that the church has stood on for two thousand years. The early church theologians who held to universal restoration also held to substance dualism. They saw the connection. If the soul survives death and God’s love never fails, then the eventual restoration of all is not just a hope—it is a logical consequence.
To appreciate why substance dualism matters for the universalist case, it helps to see what happens without it.
Physicalism—the view that human beings are entirely physical, with no separate soul—has been gaining ground in some evangelical and philosophical circles in recent decades. Thinkers like Nancey Murphy, Joel Green, and Kevin Corcoran have argued for various forms of nonreductive physicalism, contending that the Bible does not actually teach the existence of an immaterial soul.34
If physicalism is true, then at death the person simply ceases to exist. There is no intermediate state. There is no conscious soul in the presence of God. There is nothing until the resurrection, when God recreates the person from nothing (or from some kind of stored “information”).
This creates several problems for any theology that takes the postmortem opportunity seriously. First, if there is no person between death and resurrection, who receives the postmortem opportunity? Second, if the person ceases to exist at death, what guarantees that the resurrected person is the same person? This is the famous “gappy existence” problem—if the person goes out of existence and then comes back, is it really the same person or merely a copy?35
Now, Beilby rightly notes that the postmortem opportunity is compatible with both dualism and physicalism—one simply adjusts the details of how it works.36 On a physicalist view, the postmortem opportunity would have to occur either at the moment of death or at the resurrection, since there is no conscious person in between. But this significantly narrows the scope and the mechanism of God’s saving work. On a dualist view, by contrast, the entire intermediate period between death and the final judgment becomes available for God’s transforming grace to operate. The soul is there. God is there. Love is at work.
Moreover, physicalism faces serious exegetical challenges. How does a physicalist read 2 Corinthians 5:8, where Paul expects to be “away from the body and at home with the Lord”? How does a physicalist account for the conscious souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11? How does a physicalist explain Jesus’s promise to the thief that “today” he would be in paradise? These texts become very difficult to interpret without some form of substance dualism.37
It is also worth noting, as McClymond himself documents, that the mortalist view—the most radical form of physicalism—has historically been associated with heterodox groups: the Socinians, the Christadelphians, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses. McClymond observes that “all three groups share not only a belief in mortalism but also a rejection of the doctrine of the Trinity.”38 This does not prove that physicalism is wrong, of course—that would be the genetic fallacy we criticized McClymond for in Chapter 3. But it does suggest that the mainstream Christian tradition has consistently held to substance dualism, not physicalism, and that any departure from it needs very strong justification.
This point deserves a bit more attention, because it connects directly to the broader debate about the scope of salvation that runs through this entire book. The conditional immortality position requires one of two things: either the soul does not survive death (physicalism), in which case the person ceases to exist and there is nothing left to “annihilate” at the final judgment; or the soul does survive death but is eventually destroyed by God. The first option faces the exegetical problems we have already identified—it cannot account for the conscious intermediate state that the Bible clearly teaches. The second option grants the survival of the soul but then insists that God will eventually destroy what He has sustained, which raises a serious question about God’s character: Why would a God who lovingly sustains a soul through the intermediate period decide at the final judgment to annihilate that soul rather than restore it?61
The universalist position, by contrast, takes the biblical evidence for the soul’s survival at face value and draws the natural conclusion: God sustains the soul because God intends to restore the soul. The soul’s continued existence is not a prelude to annihilation. It is a testimony to God’s ongoing purpose. He keeps every soul in existence because He has not finished with anyone yet.
Let me draw the threads together with a picture.
Imagine a father whose son has run away from home. The father loves his son. He has never stopped loving him. He searches for him, calls out to him, sends messengers to find him. As long as the son is alive somewhere in the world, the father’s search continues. The father would never say, “Well, my son left the house, so my love for him has expired. He’s on his own now.”
Now imagine that someone tells the father: “Your son has died. He no longer exists.” If that were true, the father’s search would indeed be over—not because his love expired, but because there would be no one left to search for.
But what if the son has not ceased to exist? What if the son is still alive, still conscious, still out there somewhere—just beyond the veil of physical death? Then the father’s search continues. His love still has an object. His pursuit still has a goal.
That is the difference substance dualism makes for the universalist case. If the person ceases to exist at death, then God’s pursuit might reasonably be said to end (at least until the resurrection). But if the soul survives—if the person is still there, still conscious, still capable of hearing and responding—then God’s love keeps working. And God’s love does not fail.39
I want to say something personal here, because this is not just an abstract theological argument for me. When I think about the people I love who have died without a clear profession of faith in Christ—a grandfather, a friend, a neighbor—the question of whether they still exist matters more than I can say. If they have simply ceased to be, then there is nothing more to hope for on their behalf. Their story is over. But if their souls are alive and conscious, held in existence by the God who made them, then their story is not over. God is still with them. Love is still at work. And I can hope—not a vague, sentimental hope, but a hope grounded in the character of God and the nature of reality—that God’s pursuit of them has not ended.
This is why Jesus told the parable of the lost sheep the way He did. The shepherd does not say, “I’ve got ninety-nine. That’s a pretty good percentage. I’ll cut my losses.” The shepherd goes after the one that is lost and does not stop searching until he finds it (Luke 15:4–7). The shepherd’s search assumes that the sheep is still out there, still alive, still findable. Substance dualism ensures that every human soul is still out there, still alive, still findable—even after death.40
And here is the really striking thing. The New Testament does not present death as the end of God’s saving work. It presents death as something God has already conquered. “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54). “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). If death is an enemy that Christ has defeated, then death cannot serve as a boundary that limits God’s love. To say that God’s saving work stops at death is to give death more power than Christ’s resurrection has taken from it.41
Paul puts it with unforgettable force in Romans 8:38–39: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Paul says death cannot separate us from God’s love. Not just “our fear of death.” Not just “the idea of death.” Death itself. The actual event. The ceasing of the heart. The collapse of the body. None of it can separate us from God’s love. And if death cannot separate us from God’s love, and the soul survives death, then God’s love continues to work on the other side of the grave.42
The conscious intermediate state is not merely a waiting room. It is the arena in which God’s purifying love operates on those who died without knowing Christ.
As we discussed in Chapter 21, the New Testament provides direct evidence that the gospel is proclaimed to the dead. First Peter 3:18–20 tells us that Christ “went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, who formerly did not obey.” First Peter 4:6 says, “For this is the reason the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regard to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”43
These texts assume a conscious intermediate state. You cannot preach to people who do not exist. You cannot preach to unconscious bodies. The gospel was preached to the dead—to conscious souls in the realm of the dead—so that they might “live according to God in regard to the spirit.” This is the postmortem opportunity in action. And it depends entirely on the survival of the soul.
The Apostles’ Creed affirms that Christ “descended into hell” (or, more accurately, “descended to the dead”—descendit ad inferos). This ancient confession, rooted in the earliest Christian tradition, testifies to the belief that Christ entered the realm of the dead and did something there. What did He do? He preached. He proclaimed victory. He offered salvation. The very structure of the Creed assumes that the dead are conscious and capable of receiving what Christ brings to them.44
If we combine this with the biblical case for substance dualism, the picture is clear. The soul survives death. The dead are conscious. Christ has descended to them and proclaimed the gospel. God’s love pursues them beyond the grave. And if that love never fails—if it is truly inescapable, as Talbott argues—then it will eventually accomplish its purpose in every soul.45
Think about it this way. God has all the time in the world. He is eternal. His patience is infinite. And He has said that He desires all people to be saved (1 Timothy 2:4). If the soul continues to exist after death, and God’s love continues to work after death, and God’s patience has no limit, then the eventual restoration of all is not a wild hope. It is the logical consequence of who God is and what we are.
Consider also how this connects to the biblical teaching about Hades. As we explored in earlier chapters, the Bible distinguishes between Hades (the realm of the dead, a temporary holding state) and the lake of fire (the final judgment). Unbelievers who die go to Hades—not to the lake of fire. They are conscious there. They are aware. The rich man in Jesus’s parable of Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) is in Hades, and he is fully conscious: he sees, he speaks, he feels, he remembers his brothers, he desires comfort. Whatever we make of the details of this parable, it clearly portrays the dead as conscious persons in a state of awareness.59
Now, if the dead in Hades are conscious, and if Christ has descended to them and proclaimed the gospel (1 Peter 3:18–20; 4:6), and if God’s love pursues them even there, then Hades is not a final destination. It is a way-station. It is the place where the soul waits, where God’s grace works, and where the journey toward restoration continues. The soul is not locked in amber. It is a living, conscious person in the presence of a God who will not give up.
Isaac of Nineveh, the great seventh-century Syrian mystic, understood this profoundly. He wrote that the fires of judgment are not some external punishment imposed by an angry deity, but the burning experience of God’s own love when encountered by a soul that has resisted that love. The fire is painful, yes. Terribly so. But it is the pain of love breaking through the walls we have built against it. And because it is love, it does not destroy. It purifies. It burns away everything that is false, everything that resists God, until only the true self remains—the self that was made for communion with God.60
This only works if the soul is there. If the person has ceased to exist, there is nothing for the fire to purify. But if the soul survives, then the fire has its object, and God’s love has its patient, transforming work to do. Substance dualism provides the stage on which this drama of restoration plays out.
This is perhaps the most common objection. Critics argue that substance dualism is borrowed from Greek philosophy (specifically Plato) and smuggled into Christian theology. The Bible, they claim, teaches a holistic view of the person as an embodied being, not a soul trapped in a body.
There is a grain of truth here. The Bible does indeed emphasize the unity of the person and the goodness of the body. The Christian hope is not escape from the body but the resurrection of the body. We agree completely.
But the claim that substance dualism is “Platonic, not biblical” is an overstatement that ignores the evidence we have surveyed. Matthew 10:28 is not Plato. Luke 23:43 is not Plato. 2 Corinthians 5:8 is not Plato. Revelation 6:9–11 is not Plato. These are biblical texts, written by Jewish and Christian authors, in a Jewish and Christian context, and they clearly teach the distinction between body and soul and the survival of the soul after death.46
Moreover, the kind of dualism we are defending is not Platonic. We do not teach that the body is a prison. We do not teach that the soul is inherently immortal. We do not teach that physical existence is inferior to spiritual existence. What we teach is that God created both body and soul, that both are good, that full human flourishing requires their union in the resurrection, and that the soul survives the death of the body by God’s sustaining grace. This is biblical dualism—holistic dualism—not Platonic dualism.47
Cooper makes this point forcefully. He argues that the Old and New Testaments present a consistent picture of the human person as a body-soul unity that can be temporarily separated at death. The soul survives, but this is not Plato’s teaching about the soul’s inherent immortality. It is the biblical teaching about God’s sustaining power. Cooper calls this “functional holistic dualism”—a dualism that takes the body seriously while affirming the reality of the soul.48
This is a fair objection, and it deserves an honest answer. The survival of the soul after death does not, by itself, prove that everyone will be saved. One could affirm substance dualism and still hold to eternal conscious torment—in which case the soul survives death only to suffer forever. Or one could affirm substance dualism and still hold to conditional immortality—in which case the soul survives death for a time but is eventually destroyed.
I acknowledge this freely. Substance dualism is a necessary condition for the kind of universalism I am defending, not a sufficient one. The argument requires additional premises: that God genuinely loves all people, that God’s love is efficacious (not merely wishful), that God’s patience has no limit, that judgment is restorative rather than merely retributive, and that genuine freedom, when fully restored, always tends toward the Good.49
We have argued for each of these premises in earlier chapters. The point of this chapter is to add the anthropological piece: the survival of the soul ensures that there is always a person for God’s love to work on. Without the survival of the soul, universal restoration would require God to work on nothing—to save a person who does not exist. But with the survival of the soul, God’s love has an object, a recipient, a conscious person who can be encountered, addressed, purified, and restored.
Substance dualism does not prove universal salvation. But it makes universal salvation possible in a way that physicalism does not. It provides the mechanism—the continued existence of the person—through which God’s saving love can operate beyond the grave.50
As we noted earlier, Aquinas argued that the soul becomes fixed in its orientation at the moment of death. This has been an influential position in the Western church. But there are several problems with it.
First, Aquinas’s argument depends on hylomorphism—the view that the soul cannot change without the body. But as Walls points out, this carries little weight for substance dualists, who hold that the soul is a genuine substance with its own powers and capacities, capable of thought, choice, and change even without the body.51
Second, as Beilby notes, the claim that death fixes the soul’s orientation “is not as strong as it is commonly thought to be.” The biblical evidence for it is surprisingly thin. Scripture never explicitly says that repentance after death is impossible. In fact, texts like 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 point in the opposite direction.52
Third, the Eastern Orthodox tradition does not share the Western conviction that the soul is fixed at death. The Eastern tradition has long held to the possibility of postmortem transformation, as seen in the practice of praying for the dead and the theology of figures like Gregory of Nyssa and Isaac of Nineveh. Kevin Timpe himself acknowledges that “it is pretty clear that the Eastern Orthodox church demurs” on this point.53
Fourth, and most importantly, even if one is persuaded that the soul cannot change in the intermediate state, the Bible teaches that all will be raised. On the day of resurrection, every person will stand before God in a fully embodied state (John 5:28–29). At that point, even on Aquinas’s terms, the person would have a body and therefore the capacity for change. This means that even the most conservative reading of Aquinas leaves room for a postmortem opportunity at the final judgment, when all have been raised and embodied.54
Someone might object that we are asking the intermediate state to carry more theological weight than it was designed to bear. After all, the New Testament tells us relatively little about what happens between death and the resurrection. Isn’t it speculative to build a case for universal restoration on an intermediate state we know so little about?
This is a reasonable concern, and I want to be honest about the limits of our knowledge. We do not know every detail of what happens after death. The Bible gives us glimpses—paradise, Hades, the souls under the altar—but it does not give us a comprehensive roadmap.
What we do know, however, is this: the soul survives death. The person is conscious. God is present. And God’s love never fails. These are not speculations. They are biblical realities, attested by multiple texts across the Old and New Testaments. The universalist argument does not depend on knowing every detail of the intermediate state. It depends on knowing that the person is still there and God is still loving them. Those two facts are all we need.55
The question of what we are—body only, or body and soul—is not a side issue. It is foundational. If we are purely physical, then death is a hard wall. But if we are body and soul, then death is a doorway—a transition from one form of existence to another, with God’s love as the constant on both sides.
McClymond’s The Devil’s Redemption never seriously engages with this question, and that is one of its most significant weaknesses. A dualist anthropology, combined with the postmortem opportunity, combined with the relentless, purifying love of God, creates exactly the conditions under which universal restoration makes sense. The soul survives. God pursues. Love never fails.
In the end, the anthropological question comes down to this: Is there still a person for God to love after death? The Bible says yes. Jesus says yes. Paul says yes. John says yes. And if the answer is yes, then the God who created that person in love, who redeemed that person through Christ, who pursues that person by the Spirit—that God has both the motive and the means to bring that person home. Every last one.
As we have said throughout this book, God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). Not all in some. Not all in what’s left. All in all. And substance dualism ensures that the “all” includes every soul God has ever made.56
↑ 1. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 580. McClymond describes de Benneville’s theology as a continuation of Schwenkfeld’s “strongly dualistic model of human nature.”
↑ 2. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 98.
↑ 3. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 98.
↑ 4. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, pp. 113–14. McClymond traces the history of conditionalism from the Socinians and Christadelphians to modern advocates.
↑ 5. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 113.
↑ 6. Jerry Walls, Hell: The Logic of Damnation (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), chap. 4. Walls engages Aquinas’s argument from Summa Contra Gentiles that the soul becomes immovable once separated from the body. See also Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 235–36.
↑ 7. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 236. Beilby is here citing Walls’s argument that Aquinas’s hylomorphic anthropology does not bind those who hold to substance dualism.
↑ 8. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). Cooper uses the term “functional holistic dualism” to describe the biblical view that the human person is a body-soul unity that can be temporarily separated at death.
↑ 9. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4, “The Old Testament Picture.” Cooper argues that Genesis 35:18 presents the nephesh as departing the body at death, implying a distinction between the two.
↑ 10. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. The language of the nephesh returning to the body in 1 Kings 17:21–22 presupposes that it had departed and existed somewhere apart from the body during the period of death.
↑ 11. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Ecclesiastes 12:7 describes a two-directional movement at death: the body returns to the ground, and the spirit returns to God.
↑ 12. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Cooper discusses the Endor episode at length and argues that, regardless of the mechanism, the text presents Samuel as conscious and communicative after death. See also J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body & Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), chap. 2.
↑ 13. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Cooper’s conclusion is that the Old Testament portrays a “functional holistic dualism” in which the human person is meant to be a body-soul unity, but the soul can and does exist apart from the body after death.
↑ 14. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Matthew 10:28 is widely recognized as one of the strongest biblical texts for substance dualism. See also Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, chap. 2.
↑ 15. See Chapter 16 of this volume for a full treatment of Gehenna and Jesus’s warnings. The universalist reads Jesus’s warnings as real and urgent but as describing corrective judgment, not permanent destruction.
↑ 16. Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, chap. 2. Their philosophical analysis of Matthew 10:28 concludes that Jesus’s teaching clearly presupposes substance dualism.
↑ 17. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Luke 23:43 is a key text for the conscious intermediate state, as it implies that the thief would be with Jesus in paradise on the very day of his death.
↑ 18. For a defense of the traditional punctuation of Luke 23:43, see Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. The proposed repunctuation (“I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise”) is linguistically strained and lacks support in the broader Lukan usage of the “Amen I say to you” formula. See also I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 873.
↑ 19. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5. Jesus’s words echo Psalm 31:5 and present the spirit as something that can be commended to God at death, implying its continued existence.
↑ 20. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 5:1–8 clearly envisions a state of being “away from the body” while “at home with the Lord,” which is incompatible with soul sleep or physicalist monism.
↑ 21. Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, chap. 2. See also Murray J. Harris, Raised Immortal: Resurrection and Immortality in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1985), chap. 5, who argues that Paul’s language in 2 Corinthians 5 is best explained by an intermediate disembodied state.
↑ 22. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. Philippians 1:23 presents death as a transition to a closer relationship with Christ, not as the cessation of existence.
↑ 23. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 7. Revelation 6:9–11 presents the souls of martyrs as conscious, vocal, and waiting for the final judgment—a portrait fully consistent with substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state.
↑ 24. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8, “Conclusions.”
↑ 25. Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, chap. 7. Their conclusion is that substance dualism provides the best philosophical and biblical account of human nature.
↑ 26. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13, “Love’s Final Victory.” Talbott argues that if God’s love is truly inescapable, and the person continues to exist, then God’s love will eventually accomplish its purpose in every person.
↑ 27. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 52–53 (on compatibility with various views of personal eschatology) and p. 236 (citing Walls on the dualist critique of Aquinas).
↑ 28. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13. See also Hart, That All Shall Be Saved, chap. 4, where Hart argues that God’s love is not defeated by human resistance but ultimately overcomes it.
↑ 29. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 11, “God, Freedom, and Human Destiny.” Talbott argues that persistent rejection of God is a sign of bondage (cf. John 8:34), not genuine freedom, and that God’s purifying work restores the capacity for a truly free choice.
↑ 30. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), chap. 1. Hart’s argument from creatio ex nihilo is that a God who creates freely and out of love must intend to bring that creation to its intended fulfillment.
↑ 31. Ilaria L. E. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis: A Critical Assessment from the New Testament to Eriugena (Leiden: Brill, 2013), section on Origen. See also Ramelli, A Larger Hope?, vol. 1, chap. 3, “Origen and the Fullness of Apokatastasis.”
↑ 32. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection (De anima et resurrectione). See Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, section on Gregory of Nyssa. Gregory presents the soul’s postmortem purification as central to the restoration of all things.
↑ 33. Ramelli, The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, section on Maximus the Confessor. See also Ramelli, A Larger Hope?, vol. 1, for discussion of the extent of Maximus’s universalism.
↑ 34. See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); Kevin Corcoran, Rethinking Human Nature: A Christian Materialist Alternative to the Soul (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006). These represent the leading evangelical arguments for physicalism.
↑ 35. For the “gappy existence” problem, see Dean Zimmerman, “The Compatibility of Materialism and Survival: The ‘Falling Elevator’ Model,” Faith and Philosophy 16 (1999): 194–212. If the person goes out of existence and then is recreated, identity becomes problematic—the recreated person may be a replica rather than the original. Substance dualism avoids this problem because the soul provides continuity of identity across death.
↑ 36. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 52–53. Beilby affirms that “the theory of Postmortem Opportunity is compatible with any of these understandings of personal eschatology,” though he notes that the details of how the postmortem opportunity works will differ depending on one’s anthropology.
↑ 37. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. Cooper argues that the cumulative weight of the New Testament evidence is decisively against physicalism and in favor of substance dualism.
↑ 38. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption, V 1, p. 113. McClymond notes the correlation between mortalism and anti-Trinitarianism in the Socinians, Christadelphians, and Jehovah’s Witnesses.
↑ 39. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13, “Love’s Final Victory.” Talbott’s argument is that if God’s love is truly inescapable, and the person never ceases to exist, then God’s love will eventually overcome all resistance.
↑ 40. See Luke 15:4–7 for the parable of the lost sheep. The shepherd does not give up the search until the lost sheep is found. The universalist reads this as a portrait of God’s relentless pursuit of every lost person.
↑ 41. See 1 Corinthians 15:26, 54–57 for Paul’s teaching on the defeat of death. If death is the “last enemy” to be destroyed, then death cannot serve as a permanent boundary for God’s saving work.
↑ 42. Romans 8:38–39. Paul’s list of things that cannot separate us from God’s love explicitly includes death. The universalist argues that this means God’s love continues to pursue even those who have died without Christ.
↑ 43. See Chapter 21 of this volume for a full treatment of 1 Peter 3:18–20 and 4:6 and their implications for the postmortem opportunity. See also Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chap. 5, “Scriptural Evidence for Postmortem Opportunity.”
↑ 44. The Descensus clause of the Apostles’ Creed (“He descended to the dead”) has been understood since the earliest centuries as affirming that Christ entered the realm of the dead and did something salvifically significant there. See Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, chap. 5, for a detailed discussion of the Descensus tradition.
↑ 45. Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, chap. 13. The title of Talbott’s book captures the argument: God’s love is inescapable. No one can ultimately escape the reach of a God who never stops pursuing.
↑ 46. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 3, where Cooper addresses and refutes the claim that substance dualism is merely Platonic. He shows that the biblical writers had their own independent reasons for affirming the distinction between body and soul.
↑ 47. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8. Cooper uses the term “functional holistic dualism” to distinguish the biblical view from Platonic dualism. See also Moreland and Rae, Body & Soul, Introduction, where they distinguish their substance dualism from Cartesian and Platonic versions.
↑ 48. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 8.
↑ 49. For these premises, see the earlier chapters of this volume: Chapter 14 (Romans 5, 1 Corinthians 15, Colossians 1 on God’s universal intent), Chapter 24 (the character of God as love), Chapter 25 (free will and sin as bondage), and Chapter 23 (the restorative nature of judgment).
↑ 50. The argument here is that substance dualism is a necessary condition for universal restoration as we have defined it, not a sufficient one. It ensures the continued existence of the person, which is required if God’s saving work is to operate after death.
↑ 51. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 236. Beilby summarizes Walls’s critique: the Thomistic argument “will carry very little weight with dualists who believe that the soul is the essential self” and retains its capacities without the body.
↑ 52. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, pp. 234–35. Beilby argues that the biblical evidence against postmortem repentance “is surprisingly weak” when examined without the prior assumption that such repentance is impossible.
↑ 53. Beilby, Postmortem Opportunity, p. 237. Beilby cites Timpe’s acknowledgment that the Eastern Orthodox tradition does not share the Western conviction that death fixes the soul’s orientation.
↑ 54. See John 5:28–29; Revelation 20:11–15. The general resurrection brings all persons back into embodied existence. Even on hylomorphic terms, the re-embodied person would have the capacity for change, making a postmortem opportunity at the final judgment viable even for those who accept Aquinas’s argument about the disembodied soul.
↑ 55. The universalist argument does not require detailed knowledge of the intermediate state. It requires only that the person exists, that God is present, and that God’s love is at work. These are established biblical realities, not speculations.
↑ 56. 1 Corinthians 15:28: “When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.” The universalist reads “all in all” as meaning precisely what it says: God will be everything in everyone, with no exceptions.
↑ 57. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 4. Cooper addresses the semantic range of nephesh and argues that while the word has multiple meanings, its use in death contexts (like Genesis 35:18) clearly refers to an entity that separates from the body.
↑ 58. On the early Christian practice of praying for the dead as evidence for belief in the conscious intermediate state, see Everett Ferguson, Early Christians Speak, 3rd ed. (Abilene: ACU Press, 1999), chap. 21. The practice presupposes that the dead are conscious and that their state can be affected by prayer, which in turn presupposes some form of substance dualism.
↑ 59. Luke 16:19–31. Whether this is a parable or a historical account, the portrayal of the rich man as conscious, speaking, and experiencing sensation in Hades reflects the broader New Testament assumption of a conscious intermediate state. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 5.
↑ 60. Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies, Homily 84. Isaac teaches that the fire of judgment is the burning encounter with God’s love, which purifies rather than destroys. See also Hilarion Alfeyev, The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian (Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 2000), chap. 10, for a detailed discussion of Isaac’s eschatology.
↑ 61. The universalist argument here is not that God cannot destroy the soul (Jesus affirms in Matthew 10:28 that He can), but that God’s loving character makes it inconceivable that He would. If God sustains the soul through death and the intermediate state, the most natural inference is that He does so because He intends to restore it, not to annihilate it.