Just to give again some of the related
passages:
Daniel 12:2 says:
“And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to
everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Everlasting life starts not with death but with the
resurrection! Till then those who have died are presented as “sleeping in the
dust of the earth”. See that God did not tell Daniel “and many of them whose
souls are now in heaven”.
Same also with Paul: when speaking to the
Thessalonians about the dead and the hope we have in the resurrection he spoke
about those “sleeping”: In every verse of 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16 he mentions
the dead. See the terms that he uses:
1 Thessalonians 4:13-16
“But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not,
even as others which have no hope. For if we believe that Jesus died and rose
again, even so them also which sleep in Jesus will God bring with him. For this we
say unto you by the word of the Lord, that we which are alive and remain unto
the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself
shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and
with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first:”
Paul’s hope, the hope that God gave to us in his Word
has only one name: resurrection. Sometime between now and the resurrection some
of us, perhaps all (depending on when the Lord will come – this time nobody knows), will die. We will not then
enter into a blissful state in heaven or in paradise. Instead we will be
sleeping. Where? In the dust of the ground, or as it is usually called in the
Word “Sheol” or “Hades”, the gravedom ). This is the simple and easy to grasp
truth of the Word of God.
The truth that the dead are now sleeping and will be
made alive in the resurrection is unfortunately not what most Christians believe
and which can be summarized as follows:
“A
person is composed by body and soul. The body is the physical flesh-and-blood
"shell” that works as a house for the soul. The soul is the nonmaterial
part, the mind the feelings etc. At death the soul leaves the body, and
continues to live consciously forever in heaven or hell.”
In the article “body, soul and spirit” we have dealt with the soul and what exactly it is. Perhaps there is
no better summary to the meaning of the respective Hebrew word (“nephesh”),
translated as “soul” in the English Bible, than the one given by Vine in his
dictionary:
“Nephesh:
“the essence of life,
the act of breathing, taking breath ... The problem with the English term
'soul' is that no actual equivalent of the term or the idea behind it is
represented in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew system of thought
does not include the combination or opposition of the 'body' and 'soul' which
are really Greek and Latin in origin" (Vine’s
Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1985, p.
237-238, emphasis added).
“Nephesh” (or “Psuchi” in the Greek New Testament),
soul, is, according to the Word of God simply the breath, the life. Genesis 2:7
demonstrates this truth very clearly:
Genesis 2:7
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his
nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [“nephesh” in Hebrew]. ”
See that the Word does not speak about soul as
something separate from the body. “Man became a living soul”. Everyone of us that
breaths today is a living soul. When we will have breathed our last, we will no
longer be living souls. We would be sleeping, having no consciousness, exactly
as during deep sleep people have no consciousness.
If we adopt the definition the Word of God gives to
soul and not the one of the “Greek and Latin in origin”, as Vine calls it, we
will not then have a problem when we realize that the animals also have soul:
Genesis 1:20-21
"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature
[nephesh, soul] that has life [nephesh, soul] and fowl that may fly above the
earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature [“nephesh”, soul, so also in the MKJV
and others] that moves, which the waters
brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his
kind: and God saw that it was good"
and Genesis 1:29-30
"And God said "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which
is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yield seed; to
you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the
earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the
earth , wherein there is a living soul [nephesh in Hebrew] I have given every
green herb for meat:" and it was so."
There is obviously nothing metaphysic in soul.
Whatever breathes, man or animal, is a living soul. Where then does the belief
of the so called “immortal soul” come from? This is something we will deal with
next.
Concerning the origins of the idea of the immortality
of the soul, Vine already gave us some hinds above: this belief comes from
Greek philosophy, expounded especially by two of the chief Greek Philosophers:
Plato and Socrates. Plato, though not the first to assert the doctrine of the
immortal soul, he was definitely the most eloquent one. As Werner Jaeger of
Harvard University says:
“The
immortality of man was one of the foundational creeds of the philosophical
religion of Platonism that was in part adopted by
the Christian church” (Werner Jaeger, “The Greek ideas of
immortality”, Harvard Theological Review, Volume LII, July 1959, Number 3,
emphasis added ).
As The Catholic Encyclopedia (Topic: the platonic
school) also informs us:
“The
great majority of the Christian philosophers down to St. Augustine were
Platonists.”
What did then Plato believe about the soul? Plato was
a disciple of another great Greek philosopher, Socrates. Plato’s work “Phaedo”
is a dialogue which depicts the death of Socrates. The dialogue supposedly took
place on the last day of Socrates, before being executed by drinking hemlock.
As Wikipedia says: “one of the main themes in the Phaedo is the idea that the
soul is immortal”. We could consider “Phaedo” a work that gives the combined beliefs
of Plato and Socrates, the two greatest Greek philosophers on the matter. Here
are some passages from this work (Taken from the following website: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html ):
“The
soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intelligible, and
uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable …. It goes away to the pure, and
eternal, and immortal, and unchangeable, to which she is kin." (Phaedo)
And
again:
“The
soul whose inseparable attitude is life will never admit of life's opposite,
death. Thus the soul is shown to be immortal, and since immortal,
indestructible ... Do we believe there is such a thing as death? To be sure.
And is this anything but the separation of the soul and body? And being dead is the attainment of this separation,
when the soul exists in herself and separate from the body, and the body is
parted from the soul. That is death.... Death is merely the separation of the
soul and body." (emphasis added)
Furthermore:
“Be
of good cheer, and do not lament my passing … When you lay me down in my grave,
say that you are burying my body only, and not my soul”
Does what Plato and Socrates say sound very familiar?
Indeed it does. It could very well be a summary of what the average Christian
also believes!
As
the church historian Philip Schaff says:
“Plato
gives prominence also to the doctrine of a future state of rewards and
punishments. At death, by an inevitable law of its own being, as well as by the
appointment of God, every soul goes to its own place; the evil gravitating to
the evil, and the good rising to the supreme good.” (The New Schaff-Herzog
Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, article: Platonism and Christianity).
All the above, sound indeed like written by a
contemporary Christian preacher. In fact, compare what we read from Phaedo with
what the most celebrated preacher of contemporary Christianity says about our
topic:
“….you
are an immortal soul. Your soul is eternal and will live forever. In other
words, the real you -- the part of you that thinks, feels, dreams, aspires; the
ego, the personality -- will never die. … your soul will live forever in one of
two places -- heaven or hell …. whether we are saved or lost, there is
conscious and everlasting existence of the soul and personality.” (Billy
Graham, Peace With God, chapter 6, paragraphs 25 and 28).
Now compare this with what God and His archenemy, the
devil, said in Genesis 2 and 3:
Genesis 2:16-17, 3:4
“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You
may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of
good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die ….. “But the serpent said to the
woman, "You will NOT surely die.””
The first that taught that man is – though fallen -
supposedly immortal was the devil in the garden of Eden. Compare his “you shall
not surely die” with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. “Your soul is
immortal and will live forever”, Billy Graham said. As much as I respect him,
the same also Plato, Socrates and the devil said. According to them: there is
no real death. “You will not surely die”, “You soul just leaves the body and
lives eternally in heaven or in hell, depending on what it has done”. This is
not a Christian belief brothers; it is a heathen belief, taught first by the
father of lies in the Garden of Eden.
Let’s now see what 2 of the greatest reformers thought
about the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. Tyndale that great reformer
and revered Bible translator, who was burned in the stake, said about the
doctrine of the immortality of the soul, answering to Papal supporter Thomas
More :
“And
ye, in putting them [the departed souls] in heaven, hell, and purgatory,
destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection.... And again, if the souls be in heaven, tell me why
they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the
resurrection? … The true faith putteth [setteth forth] the resurrection, which
we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers,
denying that, did put [set forth] that the souls did ever live. And the pope joineth the spiritual
doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so
contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the Spirit and the flesh do in a
Christian man. And because the fleshly-minded pope consenteth unto heathen
doctrine, therefore he corrupteth the Scripture to establish it.” (An Answer to
Sir Thomas More's Dialogue (Parker's 1850 reprint), pp. 180, 181., emphasis
added)
He
also said:
“And
I marvel that Paul had not comforted the Thessalonians with that doctrine [he
means the doctrine of the immortality of the soul], if he had wist [known] it,
that the souls of their dead had been in joy; as he did with the resurrection,
that their dead should rise again. If the souls be in heaven, in
as great glory as the angels, after your doctrine, show me what cause should be
of the resurrection” (An Answer to Sir Thomas More's
Dialogue (Parker's 1850 reprint), pp. 118, emphasis added).
Furthermore, Martin Luther, the great German Reformer,
in response to the same doctrine and the same Bull of Leo X, classified the
immortality of the soul to “monstrous opinions”. Here is what he said:
“However,
I permit the Pope to establish articles of faith for himself and for his own
faithful—such are: That the bread and wine are transubstantiated in the
sacrament; that the essence of God neither generates nor is generated; that the
soul is the substantial form of the human body that he [the pope] is emperor of
the world and king of heaven, and earthly god; that the soul is immortal; and
all these endless monstrosities…”
(Assertion of all the articles of M. Luther condemned by the latest Bull of Leo
X), article 27, Weimar edition of Luther's Works, vol. 7, pp. 131, 132,
emphasis added)
The Lutheran scholar Dr. T. A. Kantonen (The Christian
Hope, 1594, p. 37), summarized Luther's position on the death in these words:
"Luther,
with a greater emphasis on the resurrection, preferred to concentrate on the
scriptural metaphor of sleep. “For just as one who falls asleep and reaches
morning unexpectedly when he awakes, without knowing what has happened to him
we shall suddenly rise on the last day without knowing how we have come into
death and through death. We shall sleep, until He comes and knocks on the
little grave and says, ‘Doctor Martin, get up! Then I shall rise in a moment,
and be with him forever.’ "
We couldn’t agree more with these two great Reformers.
Death is indeed sleep! There is no such thing as immortal soul. The comfort of
the Bible is NOT the comfort that most preachers give in funerals i.e. that the
soul of the deceased supposedly lives on. This was the comfort of Plato and
Socrates whose teaching their converted students (I remind again the quotation
from the Catholic Encyclopedia: “The great majority of the Christian
philosophers down to St. Augustine were Platonists.”) carried on! Will we
continue believing on this or we will turn our ear to what the Word of God
says?
That the immortality of the soul doctrine is something
foreign to the Scriptures is also stated by the Jewish Encyclopedia, which says
concerning it:
"The
belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body
is...nowhere expressly taught in Holy Scripture...The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the
Jews from contact with Greek thought and chiefly through the philosophy of
Plato its principle exponent, who was led to it through
Orphic and Eleusinian mysteries in which Babylonian and Egyptian views were
strangely blended" (The Jewish Encyclopedia, article, "Immortality of
the Soul", emphasis added).
Similarly
the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia says:
“We
are influenced always more or less by the Greek, Platonic idea that the body
dies, yet the soul is immortal. Such an idea is utterly
contrary to the Israelite consciousness and is nowhere found in the Old
Testament.” (1960, Vol. 2, p. 812, “Death”)
Brothers, the soul is NOT immortal. The soul is just what gives
life to the body. You breath.. you have soul. You are a living soul. Same also
for the animals: they are also living souls. You are dead.. there is no soul.
The hope of the Christian rests on one and only one doctrine: the doctrine of
the resurrection from the dead. When Paul went to Athens, the capital of Greek
philosophy, the home of Plato and Socrates, he preached “Jesus and the resurrection” (Acts 17:18). By
then the concept of the immortality of the soul was widespread in the Greek
world. But Paul did not adopt it to appeal to the Greek philosophical mind.
Instead he preached the only true doctrine on the matter: the doctrine of the
resurrection. Paul would not compromise the truth to appeal to the philosophers
and their opinion. In fact here is the warning he issued to all of us:
Colossians 2:8
“See to it that no one takes you captive by
philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition,
according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”
The word “philosophers” is the word used in the Acts
17:18 to describe the Epicureans and the Stoics that were deriding Paul,
because he was preaching the resurrection. It is the word Plato, Socrates and
all others used to describe themselves. They were philosophers and their
product was one thing: philosophy. While Paul warned: “see to it that no one
takes you captive by philosophy”, the church Fathers – most of them - were
taken captive by it. For example, the Evangelical Dictionary of Theology says
about Origen, a Church father described by Encyclopedia Britannica as “the most
important theologian and biblical scholar of the early Greek church”:
“Speculation
about the soul in the subapostolic church was heavily influenced by Greek
philosophy. This is seen in Origen’s acceptance of Plato’s doctrine of the
preexistence of the soul as pure mind (nous)...” (1992, p. 1037, “Soul”)
Here
is what Origen himself wrote:
“.
. . The soul, having a substance and life of its own, shall after its departure
from the world, be rewarded according to its deserts, being destined to obtain
either an inheritance of eternal life and blessedness . . . or to be delivered
up to eternal fire and punishments . . .” (Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 4, 1995,
p. 240)”
Many of the Church Fathers, instead of rejecting their
previous philosophical influences, they christianized them, getting captive by
them and mixing the truth of the Word with the error of pagan philosophy. Here
is what Ackermann says concerning one of the very early Greek Church Fathers,
Justin Martyr:
"Justin
was, as he himself relates, an enthusiastic admirer of Plato before he found in
the Gospel that full satisfaction which he had sought earnestly, but in vain,
in philosophy. And, though the Gospel stood infinitely higher in his
view than the Platonic philosophy, yet he regarded the latter as a preliminary
stage to the former. And
in the same way did other apologetic writers express themselves concerning
Plato and his philosophy.."” (Ackermann, Das Christliche im Plato, chap.
i., Hamburg, 1835; Eng. transl., The Christian Element in Plato, Edinburgh,
1861)
In fact Encyclopedia Britannica, describes Justin
Martyr as “the first Christian to use Greek philosophy in the service of the
Christian faith”.
And
as German Church historian Philip Schaff says in his Encyclopedia:
“many
of the early Christians, .. found peculiar attractions
in the doctrines of Plato, and employed them as weapons
for the defense and extension of Christianity, or cast the truths of Christianity in a Platonic mold.
The doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity received their shape from Greek Fathers, who, if not trained in the
schools, were much influenced, directly or indirectly, by the Platonic
philosophy, particularly in its Jewish-Alexandrian form. That errors and corruptions crept into the Church
from this source can not be denied. ……. Among the most
illustrious of the Fathers who were more or less Platonic, may be named Justin
Martyr, Athenagoras, Theophilus, Ireneus, Hippolytus, Clement of Alexandria,
Origen, Minutius Felix, Eusebius, Methodius, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa,
and St. Augustine.” (The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge,
article: Platonism and Christianity, emphasis added)
To conclude: the doctrine according to which the souls
of the dead separate from the body at death and carry on living in heaven or
hell, because the soul is supposedly immortal, is not a Christian innovation.
It is something that was articulated by Socrates and Plato, who in turn had a
profound influence on most of the Church Fathers, from Justin Martyr down to
Augustine. This pagan doctrine although unfounded in the Bible and foreign to
the Old Testament, to Jesus and the apostles was taken over together with other
Greek philosophical ideas and practices and was renamed as Christian. This
platonic pagan doctrine replaced the true Christian hope concerning the dead:
the resurrection at the last trumpet, “for the trumpet shall sound, and the
dead shall be raised incorruptible” (1 Corinthians 15:52). For though the
resurrection of the dead is kept as a doctrine of the church, what is its
meaning if the dead get immortality immediately upon death? Tyndale was very
right to ask: If the souls be in heaven, in as great glory as the
angels, after your doctrine, show me what cause should be of the resurrection”.
The
immortality of the soul doctrine is unbiblical, pagan and essentially
incompatible with the Biblical doctrine of the resurrection of the dead: there
is indeed no meaning to the resurrection if the dead are alive now, for the
resurrection aims to make them alive! As Paul says in I Corinthians 15:22-23:
“For as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive.
But every man in his own order: Christ the firstfruits; afterward they that are
Christ's at his coming.”
All SHALL be made alive. It is future. The Word
in saying that the dead SHALL be made alive at Christ’s coming, makes very
clear that they are NOT alive now. Everything else is a lie, regardless of
whether it is your pastor, your denomination, or your favorite Church saint
that teaches it.
You and I have a choice to make: will we believe God
and His Word, or we will believe Plato, Socrates and what they brought, through
their disciples, into the church doctrines? Do you want to be a disciple of
Plato or a disciple of Christ? Making the right choice may mean standing out
against popular opinion (and believing in the immortality of the soul is the
popular, established in church opinion) and bearing the respective costs. But
do we care for this or we care for the truth? Do we care about what men say
about us or about what God says about us? As Paul instructs us:
2 Timothy 2:15
“Do your best to present yourself to God as one approved,
a worker who has no need to be ashamed, rightly handling the word of
truth.”
Keeping both the Word and our traditions is in this
case no possible. One of the two will have to go and I pray you make the right
decision which one it will be.