The immortality of the soul: Bringing this all together

In this post, I'm going to try and bring all of the previous arguments together and show them as a consistent, coherent, whole. I'll add some extra material that I've since thought about which helps to bring things into clearer focus.   My objective: To show that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is unscriptural and inconsistent with the doctrines and teachings of the Bible.  

A. Recap 

Part 1 of this series showed that death is nothing more than the complete cessation of life. Death was described by God as the punishment for sin and was so interpreted by the righteous throughout the Bible. Paul wrote in Romans 6 (v23) that the "wages of sin is death". Not hell, but death. You sin; Your death ensues because of that sin. 

I've not made it up nor have I retranslated or reinterpreted the words spoken by the apostle. It's very very clear. In death, you are about as conscious of your surroundings as when you are asleep.  

Part 2 of this series showed that the word we see as "soul" in most of our English bibles is actually a word (nephesh) that denotes nothing more than "life". It's used interchangeably between men and the animals as well as for various states of mind of man himself.   

Part 3 of this series completed the same job for the New Testament with the Greek word "psuche" being translated in English versions as either "soul" or "life".   Neither psuche, nepesh or any other word used in a similar context in the Bible record has ANY connotation of immortality. As a matter of fact, you'll find that the use of the word "nephesh" in the Old Testament is more often than not associated with death itself. The nephesh is said to be "subject to death", "in danger of death" or "delivered from death" on the majority of the occasions (80%+).   

Remember here that the soul according to Orthodox teaching is in no way influenced by our death. Rather, the death is the point at which the soul is released to its eventual home in heaven or hell. If you look at the Bible record honestly and without preconceptions, you will see exactly what I'm talking about. The soul cannot be subject to death if it is of the type that the Churches refer to. Nor does it have any dependent relationship with death at all.   

B. Put yourself in the shoes of Biblical characters 

Think for a minute if you were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, that your soul was immortal and that you knew it was so. Of what consequence then would God's sentence for your sin be? God says to you that "dying you will die", meaning you will be given a nature which is frail and temporary and will end up returning to the dust of the ground from which he said you were taken in the first place.  

Now you think to yourself, "Huh, well, that's not so bad is it. I got off relatively lightly. Sure I have to endure mortality but once my soul is released from my body at death, I'm good. So, dying isn't really so bad, then. It's more like a transition from one state to another. I'm a bit perplexed why such a big deal has been made about death though. Plus, why did I have to leave the Garden in Eden and why is the Tree of Life now guarded by an angel with a sword of fire?"  

Now, let's fast forward through time a bit. You're now sitting alongside Solomon as he's writing the book of Ecclesiastes. You read over his shoulder that he's written what we now know as Ecclesiastes 9 v 5 "The living know that they shall die but the dead know not anything..." You read on in v 6 "Also their love, and their hatred and their envy is now perished...". You read on a little further in v10 "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."  

Wait, what? I'm not going to heaven? I'm going to the grave? And if I'm dead I don't know anything? I have no emotions, no sentience? But I thought I was going somewhere at my death? Surely Solomon's a bit off here?   But then we fast forward a bit further to the record of the Kings and you hear Hezekiah singing the same thing after he'd recovered from his illness and perhaps your mind starts to shift. For the grave cannot praise thee, death cannot celebrate thee: they that go down into the pit cannot hope for thy truth. The living, the living, he shall praise thee, as I do this day: the father to the children shall make known thy truth. The LORD was ready to save me: therefore we will sing my songs to the stringed instruments all the days of our life in the house of the LORD. (Isaiah 38 v 18-20)  

Then, you're catapulted further forwards to watch Paul write his letters and you read the pages he's left on his table from Romans 5 and 6. (As a matter of fact, all you in the present day should read Romans 5 and 6 together right now. I might even try and do a verse by verse exposition of these two chapters to really drive home the relationship between mankind, sin and death).   

For now, you read the last verse of chapter 6. "The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord".  

Now you think to yourself - did he just say that my wages (earnings) for sin is death? Yes, yes he did. Paul clearly says here that death is the ultimate punishment for sin and that eternal life is a gift from God which can only be received through Jesus Christ.  Suddenly, things seem a lot clearer don't they. 

You are mortal. God has decreed mortality on Adam and Eve and all their descendants as a result of the sin in Eden. You inherit mortality and because you sin, you are worthy of death as were Adam and Eve. This punishment for your sin is only effective if your death has significance to you personally.   

If you have an immortal soul, your death really truly is not significant to you. Your death simply facilitates you walking down a road which forks to heaven or hell (or purgatory if you're Catholic). But you see, the truth is, you don't have an immortal soul. You have a fragile life which has been given to you for a finite period of time. At the end of this time period, your life is taken from you and that's that. 

There's only a postscript to this if, in God's mercy, you are granted His gift of eternal life through Jesus. (Romans 6 v 23).   

C. Logical problems with the teaching of the soul 

If you've made it this far, you should now be able to see the issues that come with the doctrine of the soul's immortality. Put simply, it doesn't square with the clear teaching of the Bible. Let's condense this down further. If you are inherently immortal, death as a punishment is meaningless. If you are inherently immortal, you make God a liar and characterise Solomon, Hezekiah, Job, Paul and many others as severely deluded. If you are inherently immortal, the concept of the resurrection of the dead is also meaningless. 

If you are inherently immortal, you personally don't need Christ to return to the earth. You don't need a returning saviour - you just need to wait it out until you can get to heaven. 

William Tyndale 

William Tyndale, the man whose translations of the Bible into English form the bulk of our Authorised Version, recognised the logical failures in the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. He wrote the following as an answer to Sir Thomas More, an Englishman under Henry VIII in 1530  “And you, in putting them [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 [a] case as the angels be? And then what cause [or reason] is there of the resurrection?” (An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, Book 4, chap. 4).  

The true faith puts [forth] the resurrection . . . The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put [forth] that the souls did ever live [as immortal]. And the pope joins 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 consents unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupts the Scripture to establish it.”  

There's some really rich points in here. Tyndale is right on the money. 

Firstly, he exposes the unreconcilable clash between the Biblical doctrine of resurrection and the immortality of the soul. 

Secondly, he bells the cat by saying that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not one from the Bible but rather from human teaching. 

Thirdly, he condemns the pope for trying to marry together human and Biblical teachings, passing them off as Gospel Truth. It's a devastating attack.   

D. Where to from here?  

I said at the start that we needed to do away with the immortality of the soul to make any progress here in understanding why the return of Christ to this earth is so important. This and earlier blog posts might have seemed a little wordy but in reality they only scratch the surface of this topic. Some of you have asked me to expand upon this topics a little more. I will try to do that but I'm also going to ask you to do some of this work yourself.