History of the Immortality of the Soul

I thought the first message today about Veterans Day that's also coming up and the hundredth year of that armistice after World War I brings up the point of us being Christian soldiers that, just like God expects in the Old Testament when He called Israel, He gave them an opportunity to have Him do the battles.

They didn't exactly have that type of faith, so He went ahead and set up for them more than anything to defend themselves. And of course in the New Testament, Jesus Christ added a spiritual dimension. People that have God's Spirit are expected to have a behavior different than the world. We have higher standards to live by, as Jesus Christ presented it. And standing in the gap is so important to stand up for what God believes, for what He is teaching us.

That is our calling. That is our bugle call. Our convictions depend on the strength of our faith. And without strong convictions, our faith is going to be weak. We are here to defend God's truths and the Bible, and if necessary, to die for them. This is not an easy calling. This is not some soft and cushy Christianity. This is a very serious and tough role that we are to play.

Well, what kind of truths are we supposed to defend? That's part of our teaching. That is why you come here. It isn't just for Christian living principles, which are very important. We're going through a grieving process, as one of our sisters in the faith just passed away. But also, our faith is one of hope. And what God tells us is the truth, what happens to a person after they die.

We have the world's explanation. We have traditional Christianity's explanation, but we also have God's explanation in Scripture. And a month ago, I gave two messages, two consecutive Sabbaths, on the falsehood of the immortality of the soul belief and how in the Bible it is not supported. We went through the Old Testament in one message and we went through the New Testament for the second message. But something was left out for lack of time. And what is left is what happened after that New Testament period finished. What happened as the church developed during those first centuries, all the way up to the present. Because if you look around, you find that 98% of the people that call themselves Christians believe that we have an immortal soul.

How did that come about? How did people believe this? When the Bible doesn't teach this, Christ said that we should fear Him who can both destroy the body and the soul in that Gehenna fire in Matthew 10. Jesus Christ talked about those who sleep in the grave. He never talked about an immortal soul and neither did the Apostles. So if you were to be asked, tell us how this idea is believed today. Could you explain it? Could you explain the history? Because part of our convictions is defending what we believe.

Like in 1 Peter chapter 3 and verse 15. Let's go there. 1 Peter chapter 3 verse 15. It says, but sanctify the Lord God in your hearts and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. So it tells us we should give a defense of what we believe. And I thought it was important as we covered what the Bible says about what truly is a human being and that we have a physical body.

We have the soul, which is what gives us life, and we have a spirit which God places in us. And it talks about a resurrection of the dead, not of those that are living in a disembodied manner. Disembodied means these souls that don't have bodies but they're wisps of some type of spirit running around. So it's important to give that defense, to be able to learn.

And to me it was a real eye-opener to see who were the ones that actually promoted this idea of the immortality of the soul during the different centuries all the way up to the present. It's got to be surprising. And I'd like to cover that because we never know how much time we have left. We never know when somebody asks you because that is one of the defining doctrines of whether you are in the truth or whether you have been deceived and you are with false teaching. This is one of the defining doctrines. It actually tells us what happens after death.

It also tells us about the kingdom of God and also of what our bodies are going to be like once we are resurrected. Spirit bodies. So we're never going to be some type of soul or spirit that's floating out there without any type of a body. No, when we're resurrected we have a new spiritual body. We're gonna have that spirit that God imparts to us and you're gonna have eternal life. So we are gonna be a complete being.

We're not gonna be this phantom or some phantasm, ghost-like person which is taught today that after a person dies their soul goes either to heaven or to hell. So I'd like to go over the history of this false doctrine and also about the true doctrine from the second century which is right at the end of the first century when the Apostle John was the last one. He wrote the book of Revelation and then around probably 95 AD he perished. So what happened afterwards? I'd like to start then in that what they called the second century which starts the year 101.

From the epistles that we have that exist of that time. There were some epistles like from Clement of Rome, Ignatius, Papias, Polycarp, and then later Justin Martin, Irenaeus. Some of these like Papias and Polycarp, they knew some of the Apostles before those Apostles died. That's why they're called the Apostolic Fathers. They did not teach the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the dead at Christ's coming. They unanimously thought that people would fall asleep and be woken up at the time of Christ.

There's a book called The Duration and Nature of Future Punishment by Henry Constable. He was an Anglican church historian and he made a study of the subject. This was back in 1875 when he published it and he came to believe that the immortality of the soul is not taught in the Bible and he challenged other historians to show him where that was taught in this first period of the Apostolic Fathers. He says, from beginning to end of the Apostolic Fathers, there is not a word said of that immortality of the soul which is so prominent in the writings of later fathers. So he did a study of over a hundred and wrote a hundred pages. And by the way, this book, Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, notice if you have Amazon, the Kindle edition costs one dollar and this is a good source because, again, it's not talking about somebody that is opposing traditional Christianity. He is part of traditional Christianity but he is opposing what the teaching is in his own church. It takes a lot of courage to do.

So let's say the first hundred years after the Apostle John died, we don't have the teaching of the immortality of the soul. And the first person that is well known who promoted this idea, his name is Tertullian. This is around 200 AD and he was a controversial figure, taught a lot of different and strange things. He eventually left the Catholic Church to join another group called the Montanists who were a type of Pentecostals of their day. You know, they spoke in tongues and did all of this and Tertullian finally joined them. But before that, while he was a Catholic, he was also a Greek philosopher, studied and he believed what Plato taught about the immortality of the soul.

The evangelical historian Edward Fudge in his book, The Fire That Consumes, another evangelical who was challenged on this subject and he was actually commissioned to study the subject and he thought, well, I'll show him immortality of the soul is taught in the Bible and he did this research and a year later he was shocked that it wasn't taught that immortality of the soul is a false teaching and he wrote this book and this is a very complete book on the subject.

He says, we see in the writings of Athanagoras, Tertullian, and other church fathers of the mid second century to the third century, mostly in that period of the two hundreds. The more closely we look, the clearer it becomes that patristic theology took shape largely in the framework of Platonic philosophy. So here the ones who rise up are well versed in Greek philosophy, Plato's ideas, and Tertullian was the first one that wedded along with the others mentioned here, they wedded together the idea of the soul in the Bible with Plato's idea of the immortality of the soul.

He goes on to say, Tertullian also accepted the platonic doctrine of the immortality of the soul with modifications made through the years by Aristotle, the Stoics, and especially by Christian philosophers such as Athanagoras, who lived before him, who defined the soul to allow for its creation by God, because Plato taught that the souls are eternal, and so they never had a beginning and will not have an end. Whereas here they adapted it to say, well God created the souls, but they are immortal, so they will continue on for an eternity.

So they adapted it a bit, and it's good. If you're going to teach others about the immortality of the soul and what Christianity teaches, it's not exactly what Plato said, because Plato said that the souls are eternal, and then they reincarnate, and they go from one body to another. So he believed in reincarnation, which here Tertullian did not accept that, but he did believe in the immortality of the soul.

And you can say he is kind of the father of this teaching, because after him people started believing this. It says, the most powerful element of Plato's doctrine continued unabated, and that was the idea that the soul is ultimately indestructible.

So here we have, basically from the time of Christ and the Apostles, you have over a hundred years that this is not taught, and now Tertullian in his writings starts promoting this idea of the immortality of the soul. Of course, you wonder where is the Jewish Christian Church at that time? They're not going along with this, but it is the ones that have to do with the Greek Gentile philosophies, and that they started taking this up.

Now the principal established of the doctrine of immortality of the soul came a little over a hundred years later with Augustine 354 to 430 AD, and he was the one that not only was it just writings, but he introduced it as a church teaching, and the Roman Church began teaching it and promoting it through Augustine's writings. Samuel Bakkioki, an Adventist historian in his book Popular Beliefs, says the following, Since the time of Augustine, Christians have been taught that between death and resurrection, a period known as the intermediate state, the souls of the dead either enjoy the beatitude of paradise in heaven or suffer the affliction of purgatory or hell.

The disembodied condition of the soul is supposed to continue until the resurrection of the body. Now this idea that was promoted by Augustine and basically what started with Tertullian really just started like a snowball, just multiplying until Augustine got it accepted as Catholic Church teaching.

This idea led to the belief in prayers to the dead, because after all, if your uncle or mother or grandparent is dead and you're part of the Catholic Church, you believe that these people are up in heaven and that they don't have a body yet because the resurrection won't take place, but they're there kind of in a disembodied spirit and that they can listen to you and that they can talk to God on your behalf. And this is where the worship of Mary comes in because she's also a disembodied spirit awaiting the resurrection but still alive, up in heaven, and she can intercede for a person.

Not only that, but also you have what are called indulgences, which the Catholic Church says that the pope has the right and the authority to sell you a certificate of merit so you can have people that are in purgatory lessen the time in hell, that you can actually pay to shorten their stay in purgatory, which is the temporary suffering and tormenting of the person. All of this was begun by Augustine, that historian Paul Johnson calls the dark genius of the medieval period because this is the fellow that got the ball rolling more than anything else.

So basically, from the fourth century on, you have the medieval period and you have Augustinian theology. This is what is taught, what Augustine said, and he promoted purgatory. He says some people, they can actually be purged of their sins through suffering in hell for a temporary period of time. That made the church very rich, especially in the middle ages, where people would pay to be able to have a loved one that sinned or did some things to be able to not stay as long in hell as necessary. That takes us to the 13th century, when you have another theologian called Thomas Aquinas, and he refined the Catholic doctrines and actually built this theological and legal system. He took what Augustine had written and now he made it into like a small encyclopedia, where he just categorized every point here.

As a follower of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher, this is what Edward Fudge writes in his book, Aquinas also viewed the soul as the, quote, form of the body and is incomplete without it.

For this reason, too, the resurrection was a philosophical necessity. So Aquinas said, well, even if you've got these disembodied spirits, you need to join them to a body in the resurrection.

And what did he say was the necessity is that then, when you have the resurrection of these people that are alive, either in heaven or hell or purgatory, once you join them, then there is an intensification of either pleasure or pain. So people suffering as souls in hell or in purgatory, they don't have a body yet. But when you have a body, then you're really going to suffer.

And of course, if you are in heaven, oh, you get a body, it's going to be so much more wonderful.

Now, where in the world do you find that in the Bible? You don't. But this is, again, based on Greek philosophy, which is the system that if you accept a premise, you accept the premise of the immortal soul. So where does it have to go? And well, you also accept that there is a resurrection.

So what are you going to do? Well, that means that you intensify. See, it's worse for a person in hell. You're still going to be in hell. You're never going to get out if you're only in purgatory.

But with a body, it's just like 100 times more painful than what it was before. I'm not kidding you. This is written up in this way. There's just book after book that explains this.

He concluded that a double retribution begins at the point of death for what man has done in life.

The righteous, after they die, their soul begins to see God. The wicked begin to suffer torment because even the righteous are tainted by sin's impurity. Their souls must first be purged.

He says, this is made by punishments, and this is the reason we hold that there is a purgatory. It's almost like saying, well, if you suffer but it's not eternal, then at least you're finally going to get out of jail sometime. He kind of gives this hope. But again, it's all built on wrong teachings, man's ideas. During this time, there have always been churches that did not accept the teaching. We have the Polysians in the eighth, ninth centuries.

We have the Waldensians or Waldenses in the 11th, 12th century, 13th century. While Thomas Aquinas was teaching this, there were groups that kept the Sabbath. They did not believe in the immortality of the soul. They did not teach it, and they were persecuted mercilessly through the centuries.

They suffered inquisitions. Back in that day, somebody accused you of not believing in the immortality of the soul. You went to the rack. You were going to be tortured. You were a heretic, and it was going to cost you your life, just because you don't want people to be spending their lives in a place like purgatory or hell. There was no religious freedom, as there is today.

So we can teach this, but it's not very popular. But it's the truth, and that's why we're here.

We gave up a lot to learn about God's truths, and you can corroborate this. There's so much literature in every point that I am making. And so now, from the 13th century with Thomas Aquinas, the next important moment takes place in the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation.

What were they going to do with this doctrine of the immortality of the soul?

And so you have two main leaders of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther and John Calvin.

One was in Germany, the other one was in Switzerland.

And it's a very sad historical account, because Martin Luther, who wrote and he translated the Bible into German, he knew the scriptures quite well, and he came to refute the doctrine of the immortality of the soul at the beginning of this Reformation.

Again from the book by Edward Fudge, it says, Martin Luther said little about man's supposed natural immortality, or about his soul as a separable part of his being. He wrote on many occasions of death as a sleep. Between death and resurrection, Luther pictured the deceased as having no consciousness of anything, although this sleep was sweet and peaceful for the righteous. He saw that that's what the Bible taught. In keeping with this view of man, Luther rejected the doctrine of the soul's innate immortality. In one, the hement outbursts against Roman traditions, following a public burning of his books, and he could have quite a temper. Luther classed or put in a category, the immortality of the soul among the quote monstrous fables that form part of the Roman dung hill of decreetals. This is from page 308 and 9 in Fudge's book.

But what eventually happened? Why did Martin Luther change his mind? Again, from the same author, it says, and even though Luther and Tyndale, another Protestant leader who was in England, had both expressed the same mortalist views, which means that the soul can die, as the Anabaptists, these were the groups, including the Waldensians and others, who did not believe this. The intense opposition of John Calvin and Bullinger to the doctrine led the other leaders to drop the subject, rather than to chance dividing the whole reformation over what seemed to be a minor point. So when Luther and Tyndale and others, they saw the biblical truths, but when Calvin went against it, they said, well, we better not teach it, because this can split the reformation up. Fudge goes on to say, although Calvin and Luther differed on the soul state after death, Calvin's intense zeal outweighed Luther's depth of commitment. Norman Burns details the way Luther's opinion was conceded. Luther compromised in the interests of reformed unity against the hated Anabaptists. So Calvin did not want anything to do with these Waldensians and other Anabaptists, means those who rebaptized as adults, children who had been baptized as infants, and who held a lot of the truth. But Calvin thought these were dissenters. They were going to divide this reformation movement, and he was vehement against the idea that the soul can die.

Fudge goes on to say, as a result, Calvin's view took the match by default to become the first the first the dominant and then the orthodox doctrine of most established Protestant churches everywhere. So you have Augustine, you'd have like Tertullian at the beginning who brings it up, then Augustine is the one that promotes it and gains acceptance of it. Thomas Aquinas kind of makes a systematic system or systematic doctrine out of it, and then you have John Calvin, who is responsible that the Presbyterians, that the Anglicans, that the Methodists, and others believe in the immortality of the soul. Luther would have gone a different way, but he just didn't stand his ground, and he yielded to it.

So what was the result? What caused all of this? Power. John Calvin did not want to separate the groups. He wanted to have a unity of teaching for all the Protestant groups. Luther went along with that. You have politics involved because he wanted to build a state church, as he did in Switzerland, and as Luther did in Germany. And so they needed to have the backing of the people. The immortality of the soul was something that was believed by the majority of the people at that time. They didn't want to rock the boat. The hatred for those who opposed this doctrine, primarily the Anabaptists, and because of Calvin's teachings as he went to the seminar or seminaries in his youth, where he was steeped in Augustinian philosophy. So that was what was taught before he broke as a Catholic. And he never came to the point that he would break with his old beliefs.

Now, there was never a complete consensus in the 18th century, especially in England.

Many authors questioned this doctrine. And we have the Church of God, Seventh-day Baptists, that did not believe it. Stephen Mumford, in 1671, established the first Sabbatarian Church of God in Rhode Island. He did not teach immortality of the soul. We have their beliefs still on record. And then from these Seventh-day Baptists, we go to the 1850s and 60s to the Church of God's Seventh-day, where we descend from this same group. They did not teach the immortality of the soul. The Seventh-day Adventists do not teach the immortality of the soul. Neither do the Jehovah's Witnesses. And we continue as a Church of God holding to the belief that man is mortal. Only God can give him immortality through a resurrection.

Now, another of these actors playing roles in the history of the immortality of the soul, you have to include Charles Darwin back in the 1850s as well. He contributed to this topic.

As Samuel Bakkioki mentions in his book Popular Beliefs, page 126, he says, the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of the Species in 1859 inflicted another blow to supernaturalism, which means those that believe in God and creationism, and especially on the immortality of the soul. If human life is the product of spontaneous generation, the human beings have no divine spirit or immortal soul in them. This led to atheism. As a matter of fact, Karl Marx asked Charles Darwin if he could dedicate his book Das Kapital, which is the standard book for communist thought. He asked Charles Darwin if he could dedicate this book to him. And Charles Darwin declined. But Marx knew how helpful Charles Darwin had been in the promotion of communism and atheistic system that believes that human beings have no souls, they have nothing after death occurs. And so those two came together about the same time in history. That takes us to the final point, which is that up to the present time, in the last 50 years, scholars with more knowledge, Bible scholars, a minority of them are coming out against the immortality of the soul.

This is from the book by Fudge. He says, among those in Great Britain who have publicly rejected the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, of unending conscious torment, are F.F. Bruce, famous Bible commentator, John Wenham, Stephen Travis, Michael Green, Richard Bachman, N.T. Wright, I. Howard Marshall, and John W. Stott. I have several books by some of these authors, and they all are top-tier Bible scholars, and they have all rejected the idea of the immortality of the soul.

Bachi Oki's comment is very important as we conclude here. He says, this challenge of modern scholarship to the traditional view of death as the separation of the soul from the body has been long overdue. He says this upwelling of people, scholars who are saying, no, this is a false, this came from Plato, this didn't come from the Bible. It is hard to believe that for most of its history, Christianity, by and large, has held to a view of human death and destiny, which has been largely influenced by Greek rather than by the teachings of Scripture. What is even more surprising is that no amount of biblical scholarship will change the traditional belief held by most churches on the intermediate state and the immortal soul. The reason is simple.

While individual scholars can and will change their doctrinal views without suffering devastating consequences, the same is not true for well-established churches. A church that introduces radical changes in its historical doctrinal beliefs undermines the faith of its members and thus the stability of the institution. In this regard, evangelicals are conditioned by their teachings just as much as the Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox. In theory, talk about the Protestants or evangelicals, they appeal to sola scriptura, which means, that's from Latin, scripture only. We're only going to get our teachings from the Bible. It says, in theory, but in practice, evangelicals often interpret scripture in accordance with their traditional denominational teachings. That's what happened with Calvin, what happened eventually with Luther. If new biblical research challenges traditional doctrines, in most cases evangelical churches will choose to stand for tradition rather than for sola scriptura, only scripture.

The real difference between evangelical and Roman Catholics is that Roman Catholics are at least honest about their normative authority of their tradition. Catholics say, well, we accepted this.

We know it comes from Augustine. We know the popes were the ones who do it. Evangelicals don't want to reveal and admit where they got their teaching, and so they try to keep it under wraps. They're not as open and honest. So brethren, are you glad you are not deceived? We know Satan has deceived the whole world. And by the way, mortality of the soul is believed by the Hindus, by the ancestors, worshippers. I mean, it is the most common belief around the world.

Satan has done a masterful job of deceiving people. Brethren, don't be fooled by such a teaching.

I'd like to end in 1 John chapter 2 verse 21.

1 John says that the truth would set us free, free from false hoods, from wrong teachings.

John says it here in 1 John chapter 2 in verse 21. He says, I have not written to you because you do not know the truth, but because you know it and that no lie is of the truth. No lie is of the truth. It's not biblical. It doesn't matter how many people believe it. It still doesn't make it right. So brethren, I wanted to go over this history with you so you will be able to defend the faith and be a good Christian warrior.