Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
The Soul (According to the Bible) - Wordsmatter
123 Plays10 months ago
The Bible doesn’t sound very Christian when it talks about the soul… Wait that didn’t sound right. Could it be that Christians don’t sound very Biblical when they talk about it? In this episode, Matt and Nick do a thorough lexical study of the most common Hebrew and Greek words translated into English Bible’s as soul. What they find is surprising, and it makes them think that maybe (just maybe), Christians are yet again more influenced by Greek and Enlightenment-era philosophers than they are by the Bible itself.
Resources Referenced: The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament by Ludwig Koehler et al., A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature by William Arndt et al., Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible by Joel B. Green, The Case for the Reality of the Traditional Christian Soul by Peter Gordziejko.
Interlude Music: Turning Over a New Leaf by Auxjack, In Foam by Lama House
Theme Song: Believe by Posthumorous
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to the Human Soul
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey and welcome to the Repairdyne Podcast. Today we ask the Bible what it thinks about the human soul, and the answer is a little bit surprising. Now this may be thought-provoking, but we wouldn't want it any other way. Enjoy the episode. Here it is.
00:00:27
Speaker
In modern English, the word soul usually is used to refer to the immaterial part of a human that survives after the body dies. So by definition, the soul is thought to be different from the body, and in fact, sometimes more important than the body, since the soul is eternal and the body is thought to be temporal.
00:00:44
Speaker
Notice here also that we're already working with an unquestionable theory of the constitution of human beings, namely that humans are souls lodged in bodies.
Impact of Cartesian Dualism on Theology
00:00:53
Speaker
This assumption about the human makeup goes back to Plato, of course, but in the West, this general theory of human personhood was more formalized by the French philosopher René Descartes, who's credited with a view called substance dualism or Cartesian dualism after his name.
00:01:08
Speaker
Most American evangelicals today are substance dualists in practice, thanks largely to this French fella. Of course, most people are probably unaware that this is in essence their view, but whenever we speak about the soul as a separate and distinct entity that inhabits a body, we're speaking in Cartesian terms. So how is it the connection between the soul and the body understood before Descartes?
00:01:30
Speaker
I have no idea how these things were put together throughout all time, throughout all cultures, but what we want to do today is look at how the Bible describes this soul-body relationship. I should say too that there are some Christians today, particularly some Catholic schools of thought, that would critique Cartesian dualism and would want to emphasize more like the unity of the human person by appealing to the thought of Thomas Aquinas usually.
00:01:54
Speaker
They would argue that though the soul certainly transcends the body and is different than the body, it works with the body kind of seamlessly when it has a body, of course. The soul is still thought to be like the essential you, but they would wish to emphasize that the full you is body and soul. So this type of thinking is sometimes called like Aristotelian anthropology or Augustinian or Thomistic type of ways of thinking. So the distinction there is that humans are still composed of a body and a soul, but that the body is not just some lesser, more insignificant part of a person.
00:02:24
Speaker
they'd want to emphasize that people are definitely a unity of both. okay So everything I just described has to do with the current popular Christian thinking in the West associated with the English word soul.
Linguistic Exploration of 'Soul' in Scripture
00:02:35
Speaker
It tells us nothing though about what the Bible teaches about the soul because the Bible obviously wasn't written in English. To figure out what is meant by the biblical words translated into English with the word soul, we obviously need to look at the biblical words.
00:02:49
Speaker
In the Hebrew Bible, the word most typically translated into English as soul is nefesh. In the Greek New Testament, the word most typically translated into English as soul is siki, or sukei or psyche, as some may say. No one can agree on how to pronounce streak, it seems.
00:03:04
Speaker
I will pause here and say that me and you have decided to just use modern Greek pronunciation. And so to a lot of our listeners who've been through seminary or just been around theological texts, they might be more used to like the Erasmian pronunciations. We've just decided to go with the modern Greek pronunciations because we think it's, well, better and probably closer to a Kine Greek or as they would say, Koine Greek.
00:03:26
Speaker
If we want to know if our modern assumptions about the soul are close to biblical, we'll need to take the Bible's lead on the matter. And to do that, we'll have to start with how the words nephesh and psikhi are used in the Bible and beyond at the time of the Bible's composition. And as good Bible-believing Christians, we'll then have to adjust to our concepts of soul accordingly. So we don't get to just start in 1611 with the KJV as God's inspired translation to English speakers? I'm uncomfortable doing that.
00:03:55
Speaker
Before we get into an analysis of Nephesh, I do have to say that English translations often obscure the fact that Nephesh is even being used because it's often used like euphemistically of other things. So in English, it's sometimes best to communicate that idiomatically or something like that.
00:04:11
Speaker
So I'm looking at the Strong's list for Nefesh, and it gets translated soul, self, life, creature, person, appetite, mind, living being, desire, emotion, passion, that which breathes, the breathing substance of being, soul, the inner being of man, a living being, a living being with life in the blood, the man himself, a self, a person or individual, the seat of the appetites, a seat of emotions and passions, activity of mind or activity of will.
00:04:37
Speaker
So it's translated a lot of ways in English. And so it's important that as we go through these texts that I'm referencing, if you look at these texts in English, you're probably not going to see like, soul every time that stands in for Nefesh. So my analysis here is from the texts as they're written in Hebrew. I'm going to try to use the English word soul as little as possible in this discussion of Nefesh and of Siki.
00:04:58
Speaker
This is basically a summary distillation of Halat, the standard Hebrew lexicon for biblical Hebrew. And I'm just going to summarize kind of their entries of what the word Nefesh means. So their first entry for Nefesh. Nefesh means throat. That's where the soul resides. It's like, what? I wasn't expecting that. But yeah, in Isaiah 5.14 and Psalm 63.5, it's parallel with mouth, peh.
00:05:22
Speaker
and it kind of functions the same way in those passages. In Habakkuk 2.5, the arrogant person opens his nephesh like Sheol, which is never satisfied as it consumes or like eats the living. It's like the organ you swallow with. Exactly.
00:05:36
Speaker
In Isaiah 29.8, the hungry person's nefesh longs for food and water. In Proverbs 27.7, the full nefesh doesn't desire honey, but to the nefesh that is hungry, even bitter things taste sweet. In Numbers 11.6, the Israelites complain about their nefesh being dried up. This is when they're, you know, getting stuck only with manna. The nefesh hates the food. In other words, their stomach is turned, or more colloquially, they've lost their appetite.
00:06:04
Speaker
In Jeremiah 31.25 and Isaiah 58.11, the nefesh is weary and is well watered or made drunk by God's blessing. In Psalm 105.18, Joseph's nefesh is chained in iron and his feet are fettered. and Not his soul. Not his soul, obviously. Right. The second entry Hallet has for nefesh is breath.
00:06:27
Speaker
This makes sense, right? Breath is from the upper chest-throat area. In Genesis 1.20, famously, the nefesh is what makes animals and humans different from the other elements of God's creation. They have the nefesh of life. The combination nefesh haya is usually just translated as living creature.
Defining 'Nefesh' Beyond English 'Soul'
00:06:45
Speaker
More literally, it's ah breathing life.
00:06:49
Speaker
It's the description of the creatures of the sea in Genesis 1.20 and the creatures of the land in Genesis 1.24. And it's also the description of humans when God dramatically fashions the body of a human, then breathes breath into the human, thus adding humans to this working category of nefeshhaya, breathing creature. So humans and the other animals have a nefesh and that they're breathing, they have this throat in a way that plants and other living beings do not.
00:07:16
Speaker
They have a nefesh or they are a nefesh. Both, maybe. In Genesis 9-4 and Deuteronomy 12-23, nefesh is used a little more generally to refer to that which animates animals and humans. Specifically, the nefesh is actually thought to be located in the blood.
00:07:34
Speaker
In Leviticus 27, 17, there are consequences for someone who takes the nefesh of an animal or human. In other words, takes their life, takes their breath, takes their blood. To act in such a way that that activating nefesh is no longer present in that body.
00:07:51
Speaker
It removes the nefesh from the body. That which animates the corpse is removed. And there's consequences for doing that to humans for sure, and then to animals sometimes. It can refer to people in general. Again, this isn't really surprising. If nefesh literally means something like throat, it can broaden to mean that which passes through the throat, like breath. And then it can easily be broadened to mean that which breathes animals and humans. And in some contexts, it can simply just refer to humans More specifically, since humans are obviously the most common topic of discussion in literature. So in Ezekiel 27.13 and Numbers 31 and other passages, people in general are just referred to as nefesh, or nefeshot would be the plural. The nefesh of Adam is a common way to refer to people generally.
00:08:36
Speaker
It can refer to one's personality. So this would be focused like on personal preference, the center of a person, the source of emotion and feeling. In Genesis 27.4 and Isaiah 1.14, the nephews of a person loves or hates a thing. It's even used with God, like God's nephews hating something. If my kids are being picky about what they eat for dinner or they're throwing tantrums, I can blame their nephews.
00:09:01
Speaker
In Judges 5, 21 and Leviticus 26, 11, a person or God refers to themself as mynephesh. Mynephesh wants or mynephesh hates or something like that. In several passages in the Song of Solomon, the nephesh loves someone. It's a repeated to refrain that says, the one mynephesh loves. In Hosea 4, 8, people direct their nepheshes toward sin.
00:09:25
Speaker
In Isaiah 53, 11, and Jeremiah 13, 17, nepheshot can be grieved and cry. So again, the focus there is that nephesh is kind of used as like the source of one's feeling, their innermost being. Does Hebrew have a more generic word for just a person? Adam. Adam. Would you use Adam for any human, the way like anthropos is in Greek? Yeah. Do you think there's a distinction between Adam and nephesh?
00:09:51
Speaker
Nefesh is way broader, so animals are Nefesh if they're alive. Animals are not Adam, though. Correct. ah Nefesh is like the animating force within life, but across all different types of life, so humans and animals. Seems like it's kind of the animating force as well as just kind of how that animated person or animated being exists and like interacts with the world around them. Yeah. It's almost hard to even put a definition on it, because like you said, it means so many different things. Trying to think like if you're going to sum it up,
00:10:20
Speaker
an animated life form in a live creature. A living being. A living being. You know. Nefesh can also be used as just one's life. So we already saw this a little bit. In Genesis 9-5, the Nefesh stands in for the life of a person. Instead of saying to take a life, you could say to take a Nefesh. In Genesis 19-17, it says, save your Nefesh, meaning save your life.
00:10:44
Speaker
This last entry in Hallet is really interesting though. Nevesh can also be used to refer to the dead, or the deceased person, a corpse. This is not the most common usage, but it does happen. That does seem really surprising. It does. Because it seems to almost go against the trend of every one of those other possible uses.
00:11:03
Speaker
Right, it does. I mean, in Leviticus 19-28, dead people are called nefeshot. It's ambiguous whether or not it's referring to their corpse or their continued existence, perhaps, and show. But in Numbers 6-6 and in Leviticus 21-1 and 11, very clearly corpses are called nefeshot. Like you said, this is counterintuitive because, as we've seen, the nefesh is usually the end product, the living creature, not the dead one.
00:11:30
Speaker
corpse plus breath equals nefesh so it's a bit odd that it's sometimes used to refer to the corpse that can actually defile a person in these passages that I listed though again I think it's not entirely surprising since the corpse was a nefesh at some point when it had breath I also find it interesting that this isn't at all how we would use the English word soul. We would never refer to an animal corpse or a human corpse as a soul. So this underscores again that the conceptual range for Nefesh is obviously a bit different and doesn't overlap perfectly with English soul. These words don't mean the same thing all the time. Yeah. I would never say my soul is dry when I'm really thirsty.
00:12:12
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. and So kind of to summarize some of this, aside from some ambiguous passages that speak about the dead as dead Nefesh out, we simply don't really have examples of Nefesh meaning the immortal soul or spirit of a person that has a conscious existence after death.
Understanding 'Psikis' in Greek Context
00:12:31
Speaker
This is one example of how Nefesh clearly has a very different conceptual range than does the English word soul. And this is important because soul is often the word that's chosen to translate Nefesh into our English Bibles. So we do need to bear that in mind. So Nefesh is always associated with some kind of a body and almost always it's a living body and occasionally with a corpse.
00:12:54
Speaker
I think it only is sometimes used to refer to a corpse because that corpse was one. There's just a remembered association there perhaps, but that is not by any means a very common usage. It's like how we refer to our dead loved ones sometimes. Sometimes we look at their casket and we're looking at this person that we loved, continue to love, and we're looking at their corpse, but we'll sometimes refer to them, almost like the living them, in the present tense.
00:13:21
Speaker
We feel uncomfortable right away, at least speaking of them in the past tense. Sure. Maybe something similar is going on. So associate that corpse with that living person that we knew and loved. Exactly. Yeah, sometimes we will look at our friend and say they are this, even though that doesn't really describe their current condition there. Sure. But they were very recently all that. And in a real way, like that memory of them doesn't go away. and So I think that's kind of why you have that usage. Sure. Yeah, that makes sense.
00:13:50
Speaker
Is a nefesh ever described clearly in the Hebrew Bible as existing separate from a body? I'm not sure if there's any passages that clearly refer to nefesh's not conjoined to bodies. There are some ambiguous passages that you could probably debate. okay But I'm unfamiliar with anything clear.
00:14:30
Speaker
So in the New Testament, like I said, the Greek word psikis is typically the one that we translate into English with soul. And so again, I'm going to use a standard Greek lexicon, BDAG, and kind of summarize the content of what they say about it. Quoting BDAG, they say this. The primary component is not metaphysical. Without a psikis, a being, whether human or animal, consists merely of flesh and bones and without functioning capability.
00:14:55
Speaker
So that's actually similar to Nefesh. In other words, just as in Hebrew thought, a corpse plus animating breath equals a living creature. So also in Greek, a corpse plus breath equals siki.
00:15:07
Speaker
So their first entry says, it's the life animating aspect of earthly creatures that makes bodily function possible. So they'll throw in some Old Testament passages, the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. So in Genesis 9.4, Revelation 8.9, it's the breath of life, the life or the life principle of animals in those passages. And then in Genesis 35.18 and in Acts 20.10, it's the breath of life, life or life principle of humans.
00:15:35
Speaker
So again, very similar to the usage with Nefesh. In Luke 12, 20, when it leaves the body, death occurs. It's the condition of being alive, earthly life, life itself. So in Revelation 12, 11, one can love their own siki, meaning they can love their own life.
00:15:55
Speaker
In Matthew 6, 25, and in Luke 12, 22, and a bunch of other passages, the Pseki is prolonged by nourishment. In other words, the life is prolonged by physically nourishing it. That's very similar to a lot of that Nefesh usage that you were describing earlier. Exactly.
00:16:11
Speaker
The second entry that BDAG has is the Pseki is the seat and and center of a human life. Think of like the Psalms, Psalm 107.9, the Pseki represents the full person that he satisfies the thirsty Pseki. Here's where it's a little bit different than Nefesh. It's sometimes thought to leave the realm of the earth upon death and have some sort of existence in Hades or in some other place outside the earth.
00:16:36
Speaker
ah they were getting into some more familiar thoughts. Yeah, exactly. Perhaps Acts 2, 27, which is quoting Psalm 1610, the Psikis could potentially be left in Hades in the realm of the dead. In Revelation 6, 9-11, the Psikis of people are under the altar of God, crying out for justice, and are instructed to keep resting for a while.
00:16:57
Speaker
And in Revelation 20 verse 4, the Psikis of people are around thrones in Ur-Nos, and they come to life in the end, implying that they were dead or resting. In the Apocalypse of Peter 25, the Psikis of people look upon the judgment of their murderers, and they commend God for being just when he judges them.
00:17:17
Speaker
Hemarius was a Greek poet. In one passage, he describes his son, how when he dies, he leaves his soma, body, to the death demon, and his siki goes into uranos, to live with the gods. So he goes into the heavens. Right, exactly, yeah.
00:17:33
Speaker
So kind of to summarize the lexical study of siki, the siki means the life of a creature. Frankly, most of the time, life is probably a lot better of a translation than soul. And I think in most modern translations, speaking anecdotally, that's usually what they'll do is they'll say life.
00:17:51
Speaker
Whether human or animal, the psiki is the life of that creature. In some Jewish thought at the time of Jesus, onward, perhaps influenced by Greek thought, I don't know, but the psiki of a human was sometimes thought to have some sort of vague existence perhaps after death. It's unclear whether this language is imaginative, kind of figurative maybe, or if it's, you know, really literalistic and we need to take it seriously.
00:18:14
Speaker
But I want to zoom out here and kind of look beyond just Neffesh and Siki. And I want to kind of just summarize what the Hebrew Bible and New Testament say more generally about the composition of human beings and about their relationship to death and what that means for their body or continued existence.
00:18:31
Speaker
What are we made up of and where do those parts go when we die? Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mortality and Resurrection in Biblical Texts
00:18:35
Speaker
So let's zoom out a little bit, right? I'm going to take some of these passages that you had listed in a previous episode here, because these are really powerful. In Genesis 3, 19, it says, by the sweat of your brow, you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you will return.
00:18:53
Speaker
In Psalm 115, 17, and 18, it's not the dead who praise the Lord, those who go down to the place of silence, but it's we who extol the Lord, both now and forever, meaning the living. In Ecclesiastes 3, 19 through 21, surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals. The same fate awaits them both. As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath. Humans have no advantage over animals. Everything is meaningless.
00:19:19
Speaker
all go to the same place, all come from dust, and to dust all return. Who knows if the human spirit rises upward and if the spirit of the animal goes down to the earth? The resurrection hope in the Hebrew Bible only comes late in the Hebrew Scriptures.
00:19:35
Speaker
There's some passages that are sometimes called like proto-resurrection passages, like Isaiah 26 where it says, your dead will live lord their bodies will rise let those who dwell in the dust wake up and shout for joy your dew is like the dew of the morning and the earth will give birth to her dead The most famous passage is in Daniel 12, verse 2 says, multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake some to everlasting life others to shame and everlasting contempt And there are some other passages as well that people will point to trying to show that resurrection doctrine is littered throughout the Hebrew Bible, but these are pretty cryptic if we're being honest.
00:20:14
Speaker
They can't really be pressed for a formal doctrine of individual bodily resurrection, I don't think. Resurrection from the dead back to earthly life, maybe. Remember the story of Elijah, or was it Elijah? Where a little boy is raised back to earthly life.
00:20:29
Speaker
resurrection of the children of ancient Israel as a nation. Yeah, you see that too. But individual bodily resurrection at the end of time, that's actually really rare in the Hebrew Bible. And there's no hint at all of dead people remaining conscious in heaven with God after death.
00:20:47
Speaker
Some people point to like 1 Samuel 28 where King Saul, after expelling all the necromancers and sorcerers and mediums from the land, he actually seeks one out himself because he's super stressed out. The story recounts how the medium ah seemingly like successfully calls up the prophet Samuel from the realm of the dead and speaks to him.
00:21:07
Speaker
Now it's a really strange story, and it maybe reflects some of the worldview of the ancient Near Eastern nations that surround them, I'm not sure. But whatever is going on there, whether it's a demon appearing like Samuel or whatever, actually the medium calls Samuel a god, an Elohim.
00:21:24
Speaker
So whatever's going on there, it certainly doesn't give us the idea of an immortal soul that goes to heaven when it dies. In the story, the Samuel Elohim is described repeatedly as coming up, indicating that he was thought to come from the realm of the dead, or sheol. And that's literally the job description of a medium, to call up those from that realm and speak with them.
00:21:47
Speaker
So the medium does not call Samuel's nefesh as like some kind of a floating soul back into their presence. Correct. He's not called a nefesh and he certainly doesn't come from heaven. And I'm assuming Samuel is one of the righteous. Also take notice of the Samuel Elohim character's attitude. and He says, why did you disturb me as if he'd been at rest?
00:22:07
Speaker
not consciously existing with God, enjoying Him forever. So whatever else this text teaches us, it doesn't give us the teaching that people, even righteous people in this case, have eternal souls that have a conscious existence with God in heaven when they die. We just can't get that doctrine from that passage.
00:22:25
Speaker
Now, some people also point to 2 Samuel 12, where David expresses that he's going to the same place as his deceased son. And sometimes it's thought that David is expressing hope that he's gonna go to heaven to see his son that's died, right? But in the passage, David says,
00:22:40
Speaker
now that he's dead why should i go on fasting can i bring him back again i'll go to him but he will not return to me Honestly, this has nothing to do with hope that he'll see his son again in the afterlife, or that there'll be a resurrection in which he'll see him again. He's simply reflecting upon the rather morbid fact that he'll join his son in the grave and she'll, but that his son will not return to the land of the living. This way of speaking about death is commonplace to the Hebrews. In fact, death was even sometimes thought to be a blessing for those who are really suffering.
00:23:15
Speaker
So in the book of Tobit, I think this is interesting. In chapter 3 verse 6 it says, command my spirit to be taken from me so that i may be released from the face of the earth and become dust for it is better for me to die than to live because i've had to listen to undeserved insults and great is the sorrow within me Command, O Lord, that I be released from this distress. Release me to go to the eternal home. And do not, O Lord, turn your face from me. For it is better for me to die than to see so much distress in my life and to listen to insults." So eternal home, death, becoming dust, those are all juxtaposed and compared as the same thing. And it's in response to his earthly suffering, not exactly hoping for something better on the other side of death.
00:24:00
Speaker
Right, the only reason why it's thought to be better is because his conscious existence is so miserable. It's almost like, put me out of my consciousness, let me join the dust, because all I know is consciousness is suffering for me. So later in the story, this guy tells this lady, go be with your dead husbands, because she had several that had died. In the story, she's super unhappy. She says, command that I be released from the earth and to not listen to such reproaches and more.
00:24:29
Speaker
Again, it's the same idea for her. Death was thought to be a comfort because her conscious existence was really tough. If they had kind of our idea of soul in heaven, you'd expect like, oh, God, come take my soul away after heaven. But that's not what they're expressing. Yeah, you'll notice it is described as going to an eternal place. So that like makes my Christian ears perk.
00:24:51
Speaker
But it's explained that this eternal place is the dust of the ground. It's regarded as a comfort at times when life is really miserable. In other words, it's a release from the miseries of a conscious existence when circumstances are super unbearable.
00:25:08
Speaker
And in that way, it's a type of rest. However, like you said, it's not described at all as being a comfort in that there's life beyond it. Not at all. Life is what the sufferer wants to escape.
00:25:22
Speaker
yeah There's no description of pearly gates there. Right. All this is to say again that in the Hebrew Bible and a lot of other Jewish writings, there's no thought of an afterlife that individual souls go to and remain conscious when they die. And even the doctrine of resurrection, which is quite a bit different from like a soul afterlife, even that's not hinted at until very late in the Hebrew Bible's compositional history.
00:25:45
Speaker
That kind of lack of a clear expression of belief in an afterlife existence was super strange within the ancient world, too. I mean, look at cultures like Egypt, where they have super elaborate systems of understanding about at least what the pharaohs would go through after death. Yeah, absolutely. I was just actually recently talking to someone about the Egyptian system and their religious beliefs about the afterlife, and it's super
00:26:37
Speaker
When we get to the New Testament, then we enter a world where this resurrection hope had actually become common to the Jews. This doctrine was developed significantly during this like Second Temple period between the writing of the Testaments. And in the New Testament, we see Jesus reflecting this Jewish hope in resurrection and commenting pretty extensively on the idea of a final judgment.
00:26:58
Speaker
where the the righteous are raised to an everlasting life and the wicked are cast out into outer darkness. This is obviously the theology of the apostles and of John's apocalypse as well. But what we do not find in the New Testament is extensive discourse talking about what happens to people's immaterial, immortal souls right after they die. The emphasis is upon what happens when Jesus returns, when he judges, when he resurrects, completing his redemption of his creation.
00:27:28
Speaker
Individual eschatology is wrapped up in that story, not in the Platonic one where souls want to escape the wicked world when they die. In the New Testament, we really only have a handful of passages that potentially hint of reflection about a continued existence for individuals after they die until the resurrection in the end. Yeah, scholars will kind of disagree on what happens, but they all agree that the New Testament doesn't have much information about it.
00:27:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. It's probably worthwhile to read some of these passages. One of the most prominent ones is where Jesus tells the thief on the cross, today you will be with me in paradise in Luke 23. But I think it's worthwhile to raise a couple questions. Christian tradition has Jesus going to Hades or perhaps hell after he dies to preach to the evil spirits in prison there. So does the thief go to Hades with him or to paradise?
00:28:16
Speaker
Also, is paradise even the same thing as heaven? Also, does Jesus say today your soul will consciously be with me in paradise? Also, would it not be today, for the thief at least, when he awakes in resurrection, even if he loses consciousness at death? These are some worthwhile questions that at least make the meaning of this text a little bit ambiguous.
00:28:39
Speaker
Essentially, dealing with those complexities, some Christians have developed traditions that say that paradise must be some sort of a subset of Hades in order to try to make sense of where Jesus and this thief on the cross go. That system does not line up nicely with any of the Jewish systems that we have from the Second Temple.
00:28:57
Speaker
It's a worldview imposed upon the text to try to make sense of my interpretation that I want to save. and Another passage that people go to as like a slam dunk case that humans have immortal souls that are conscious right after death is where Paul says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord in 2 Corinthians 5.
00:29:16
Speaker
But again, a couple of questions are in order here that maybe complexify this a little bit. Does Paul actually say, personal identity is tied to consciousness and therefore you will be consciously with the Lord immediately after you die? Also again, would it not be the experience of someone who has died in Christ that they are in fact consciously with the Lord in the resurrection immediately after they lose consciousness and death? Time's not discerned by the unconscious.
00:29:42
Speaker
Another passage people will go to is where Paul seems to indicate that the after-death state of an individual is a state of nakedness until resurrection in 2 Corinthians 6. But doesn't this describe, if nothing else, that even if there is some sort of continued existence of the self after death until resurrection, that's not the way it's supposed to be? Why think this type of state is a blissful, conscious state at all? Paul doesn't say it is.
00:30:08
Speaker
In 1 Thessalonians 4, Paul says that those who have died in Christ are asleep. Doesn't this describe something more like soul sleep, maybe, or unconscious existence, intel resurrection, at best, when those in Christ awaken to life? It is interesting. Within some Greek systems, sleep was used to describe a post-mortem consciousness. But it is interesting in 1 Thessalonians 4, when Paul describes it, it's with respect to a future waking up in the resurrection. So he's using it very differently than it was used by other Greek thinkers at the time.
00:30:38
Speaker
Right, the Old Testament passages that do hint of resurrection use that language of becoming awake or awakening in life.
Bodily Resurrection vs. Dualistic Theology
00:30:46
Speaker
And then there's that Revelation passage that I already read where the psyches of murdered saints are under the altar of God crying out for justice. That's a slam dunk case for like a conscious existence after death, right?
00:30:57
Speaker
Well, it's in Revelation. There's that, but like in Genesis 4.10, blood cries out for justice. So does that make it conscious and in heaven? Or is this a figure of speech? It's a way of saying that God does not forget the wrongs done against the innocent and oppressed people of God. God will visit them.
00:31:18
Speaker
I'm not comfortable being committed to the reality and the fact that blood is crying out to God right now, like literally. What I'm not trying to do is say exactly what these texts mean precisely. and I'm only pointing out that there are at least plenty of complexities in these passages that make it difficult to assume that they're describing a Platonist version of soul life after death.
00:31:42
Speaker
These types of passages are hardly something to create an entire doctrine of personal eschatology from. And they're certainly not trying to teach in anthropology or like ah an ontology of humans. They're not teaching explicitly that a human is composed of a body and a soul. Right, they're not trying to comment on that at all or like describe what humans are at all. It seems like if they were going to try to teach the body soul as we kind of understand it today, they would have developed some more clear language to do it.
00:32:10
Speaker
Yeah, I would think so. I think you pointed this out to me recently, too, but there is actually a description of what humans are in the Bible, where it does seem like it's attempting to be like an ontology of humans. And that's in Genesis, when it says that God forms humans from the dust of the ground, breathes into them life, and they become a living creature, a Nepesh Hayat, just like the animals. Yeah. Like that's your ontology of humans. Yeah, dust and wind. Right, exactly.
00:32:38
Speaker
But I think we want an ontology that makes us like a lot more cool than animals, and so we don't really like that ontology of humans. Yeah, that's that's way too simple. I want to be so much more than Dustin Wind. Right, exactly.
00:32:50
Speaker
I've said this a thousand times, but the biblical story is focused on resurrection as the culmination of God's restoration. It's not focused on an individual conscious, blissful existence after an individual dies. So with all that said, I do kind of find it odd that a lot of the time and effort spent by Christian theologians and apologists is spent defending the idea that humans are essentially an immortal soul with the body.
00:33:17
Speaker
they think that this dualistic idea is essential to the Christian faith. So they tend to have very like emotional and impassioned defenses of it. Frankly, I think this is kind of the result of having a deficient understanding of biblical eschatology, of the Jewish Christian resurrection hope that we've talked about you know the whole last series. When you have a more Jewish and biblical understanding of what resurrection accomplishes in God's story of redemption, then you quickly realize that you aren't compelled to defend some type of substance or Cartesian dualism.
00:33:52
Speaker
that people are, you know, immortal souls lodged in bodies or something like that. Because what you realize is that the hope for the future, what we call eschatology, is about the restoration of God's world, including human bodies. Not the escape from God's world and from human bodies. It's only when we get the wrong emphasis on what happens to our souls when we die until resurrection that we feel like we need to come up with defenses for Plato and Cartesian dualism.
00:34:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's got to be a response to kind of like a mechanistic naturalism too. And it may be for sure. I'll give you an example of where I think just like the focus is way off sometimes in Christian theology. One theologian I was reading, in the conclusion of like a really lengthy and detailed paper defending the idea of an immortal soul being like the most essential part of a human,
00:34:43
Speaker
he says this It is at least biblically clear that saints and angels exist in heaven as souls alone and with personality. So any need for embodiment as of resurrection is not easy to explain. Aristotle may have had secular reasons, but beyond God just having the requirement, the Christian view is unclear.
00:35:03
Speaker
In other words, he's confused why we need the doctrine of resurrection. I was like kind of shocked when I read this. I think I actually laughed out loud. I was like, fella, doesn't this scream to you that you might just have the strange unbiblical view here if you can't understand why the Bible is so insistent upon the resurrection of human bodies? Gone so platonistic that we're certain to be like, yeah, the Bible just seems weird now. I thought that was really striking. So maybe be some conclusions here.
00:35:31
Speaker
It can be debated whether or not substance dualism is the best way to describe human anthropology. I'm not trying to take sides in that debate, though you probably get a sense of where I lean on the matter. But it is not necessary that we believe in this idea that humans are composed of a distinct body and soul that are separate entities joined together. Traditional Jewish and Christian teaching about resurrection doesn't depend on this idea.
00:36:00
Speaker
In other words, faithful Jews and Christians do not need to affirm belief in the soul as an immaterial, immortal, self-conscious entity that's joined to a body at conception and leaves the body at death to go on living forever in the afterlife. You might want to believe that and you might have arguments for that, but it's not necessary for the Christian or Jewish faith for that matter.
00:36:25
Speaker
I'm thinking about kind of Christian apologetics in the world today, where there's a lot of modern ideas that humans are just another creature, you know, they're just mechanistic beings that will live and die like anything else. And Christians, I think in response to this, want to argue, oh, no, no, no, there's something more to the humans than just what science would see. The soul kind of feels like a convenient way to push back against these kind of modern ideas about humans as just another animal.
00:36:50
Speaker
Are you suggesting we'd be better as Christians to say, well, what separates us from that worldview is not the existence of a soul, but the restoration of those people, the restoration of humans in the future?
00:37:02
Speaker
Yeah, I would also question whether or not non-theistic materialism is the most popular secular view out there. ah Most of my friends that I talk to that are not theists, that are not Christians, they very much actually have kind of this Platonistic view that they are not their body, but they have one.
00:37:21
Speaker
I was actually talking to a friend of mine that is definitely not a professing Christian, and they kind of had this worldview, and they said, I view my body like a vessel. Like, I'm not my body, it's a vessel. And so then this person would entertain ideas of doing things to their body that I as a Christian would be very uncomfortable with doing. But I asked them, I was like, that's really interesting.
00:37:42
Speaker
That sounds a whole lot like evangelical Christians, although I don't think you're getting your philosophy from the evangelical Christians. But it was like one of those weird moments where I realized that a lot of voices in the secular culture, with their kind of platonic idea of the soul being the essential you and being indifferent toward the body or sometimes antagonistic toward the body, that actually basically just sounded the same as some of my Christian friends. It's like they basically had the same anthropological view.
00:38:10
Speaker
I think that's where like a biblical anthropology that focuses on the goodness of creation and its final restoration and resurrection. I think it actually critiques that platonic view pretty heavily, whether it's coming from the evangelical Christians or the secular culture.
Biblical Anthropology vs. Platonism
00:38:26
Speaker
It is interesting to think that actually a modernist who argues that humans are only their bodies might actually be a lot closer to especially older Hebrew thought than like a modern Christian Platonist.
00:38:38
Speaker
To be honest, I think it is closer. And I think the big difference there between us and like that modernistic mechanistic view would be that we think it's all good and going somewhere and will be restored to like a ah better condition. They obviously wouldn't have that future hope for it all. Yeah, it's definitely not how Christians have framed themselves within the conversations going on in our world today.
00:39:00
Speaker
As I've said before, maybe Cartesian dualism is true. But if it is true, it's not because the Bible taught it. It's because it just happens to be true. Or Plato was onto something, and he's right. I'm not interested in, like, arguing that it's untrue. I'm just saying it certainly doesn't need to be true for Christianity to be cohesive or something like that. Yeah, it's not central to Christian hope by any stretch of the imagination. Exactly. And that's my point.
00:39:23
Speaker
A second conclusion that I think is worth sitting on to here is even if we do want to believe in perhaps like some type of continued self existence after we die until resurrection, it's not necessary that we believe that this type of existence is conscious until resurrection.
00:39:43
Speaker
That's debated. Some people think we need to be conscious for whatever reason, but I think that actually might create some really big problems since consciousness, in my opinion, and in the opinion of neuroscientists, is clearly a function of the body, of the brain. I mean, I also think it's worthwhile considering what do we mean when we say, see Jesus after we die without eyes? What do we mean when we say, like, walk with him without legs?
00:40:11
Speaker
What does it feel like to feel his wounds without fingers? What does it mean to like sing his praises without lips, lungs, and tongues? I'm not saying these are like insurmountable obstacles, but I'm just saying they're worthwhile questions that make it somewhat uncomfortable to defend stridently this idea that your soul after you die remains conscious until resurrection.
00:40:35
Speaker
you don't need to go there. If you want to go there, that's fine, but you don't need that to be true for Christianity to be cohesive.
Soul Sleep and Christian Eschatology
00:40:43
Speaker
Yeah, I think you certainly argue for ways that consciousness can exist without the body, but within the Jewish story, it's clearly not God's ideal design for humanity. Yeah. It certainly cannot be what we're hoping for as our eternal state. It's at best a state of nakedness, you know, it's some kind of an inferior existence.
00:41:00
Speaker
Right, and it's fun for Christians to have different views about what they think possibly happens right after you die. No one knows. God hasn't told any of us. What about all those people who came back and wrote books about it?
00:41:14
Speaker
you can make a lot of money at doing that i was laughing i was looking through some of us and i was like nine minutes in heaven eleven minutes in heaven thirty minutes in heaven and then all the same like the equivalent ones but for hell like ohoh i'm going to write like ah three weeks in heaven but just blow em all out of the water <unk>nna do three weeks in a hell I think we can just simply affirm with Paul that after death, we wait for a resurrection in a state of nakedness. Like you said, and that this state of nakedness can be likened to being asleep. Like Paul says, it's his favorite description of those who are dead in Christ.
00:41:48
Speaker
and that whatever that state is like, those who are in Christ are kept by Him until resurrection, whatever that means. Their very self won't be forgotten, like their identity won't be left in the wind and just forgotten. They'll be reconstituted as truly themselves in the resurrection. It's not exactly enough to satisfy all my curiosities though, Nick.
00:42:12
Speaker
I think all of these things are worthwhile to be curious about and to debate. I can virtually guarantee you that several of my friends who are listening to this very much disagree with my approach to this, and that's fine. And I think it's interesting to think about these things, but to become an apologist for platonic, Descartian anthropology is just not the route we need to feel compelled to go down.
00:42:36
Speaker
yeah Don't confuse this thing that kind of got added into Christianity later as something that's central and necessary to Christianity. Right, that's a good way to put it. Some people will appeal to the intermediate conscious state of the self after death until resurrection as being necessary so that there's like a continued existence and identity of yourself in the resurrection.
00:42:59
Speaker
I think everyone sort of recognizes the problems of identifying your body with yourself and that that somehow carrying through to the resurrection is what constitutes your identity. Because like what of those who've decomposed completely and like what body is God even going to resurrect your 33 year old self? Like those atoms are already all over the planet. What about a martyr burned by fire?
00:43:24
Speaker
Well, exactly. So the question about like continued identity and how does God restore the true you in the resurrection is mysterious. But I think it's worthwhile thinking about and I don't think that it requires a continued conscious existence with God until resurrection.
00:43:41
Speaker
It's interesting because that theory assumes that the essential self, the you, is your conscious self. But that's a very rationalistic Western way of thinking. I don't think the Jews thought that way at all. Could it not be that identity of oneself is much more wrapped up in the relationships you had in your life with your community and in the role you play within that community?
00:44:07
Speaker
and in fact, in your relationship with the living God, your creator, who made and loves you. God, your creator, won't forget who you truly are. In Paul's language, if you're kept in Christ, your identity is wrapped up in and with Christ. He won't forget who you are in the resurrection.
00:44:27
Speaker
So I just don't think that God needs your continued conscious self with him in heaven, otherwise he'll forget about who you are and how to resurrect to you into an identity that has continuity with yourself on this side of resurrection. I don't have to be able to experience the time before the resurrection for God to be able to resurrect me. Right. God knows you better than you know you. You're in good hands. So the idea that during the intermediate state, people are not conscious is sometimes called soul sleep. But if you're not going to argue that the soul is necessary, what's your term for it, Nick? Yeah, I think the Bible would just say death. Yeah.
00:45:06
Speaker
You are dead and your identity is wrapped up with Christ. It is interesting, Yeah. If he's happy to just kind of skip over giving any details about that, I guess I'm