This conversation seems like it should begin with a discussion on the soul. A disembodied soul is the description for what happens when a person dies and is simply without a physical human body. This state of existence will be the case until the event of the Resurrection of the saints.
In both Cartesian dualism and anthropological hylomorphism schools of thought, the disembodied state of the soul takes place. When we die, our souls leave our bodies. Dualism is the idea that the soul and the body are separate things, and the hylomorphic idea is that a soul and a body are not separate things, but a unity. As in, your soul could not fit into the body of another person. Your soul is essentially custom fit to your body.
What makes this interesting is that there are things that neither school of thought can answer very well, but there are questions that both answer very well. For one, there is a big question concerning dualism, which is about the Resurrection of the dead. For instance, Dualism historically has taught that the fleshly body is like a prison that when the body dies, it is freed from this prison, and this idea has not really been extinguished from Plato to Descartes. One might say that it is, but I still find that even Cartesian dualism still seems to hold to the idea that human existence essentially consists of a soul. Some dualistic arguments are the following:
Modal Argument for the Soul:
1. I am possibly disembodied (I could survive without my brain or body)
[I can logically conceive that I am disembodied. I cannot logically conceive that I am a square circle.]
2. My brain or body are not possibly disembodied (they could not survive without being physical)
3. So, I am not my brain or body.
4. I am either a soul, a brain or a body, so I am a soul.[1]
Sameness of the Self Over Time (What I like to think of as the Ship of Theseus argument):
1. If something is a physical object composed of parts, it does not survive over time as the same object if it comes to have different parts.
2. My body and my brain are physical objects composed of parts.
3. Therefore, my body and brain do not survive over time as the same objects if they come to have different parts.
4. My body and brain are constantly coming to have different parts.
5. Therefore, my body and brain do not survive over time as the same objects.
6. I do survive over time as the same object.
7. Therefore, I am not my body or my brain.
8. I am either a soul, a body or a brain.
9. Therefore, I am a soul.[2]
I personally love these arguments. I find them to be powerful, beneficial, and life-changing arguments, but they still do not answer one problem as alluded to above. This problem is that cartesian dualism does not answer the question of the Resurrection. For instance, if I am but a soul, then why is there a bodilyResurrection? Why does there need to be a Resurrection, such as discussed in 1 Corinthians 15, 1 Thessalonians 4, and Revelation 20?
On the other hand, the anthropological hylomorphic idea of the soul does not answer why there is a disembodied state. Anthropological hylomorphism emphasizes the relationship or the unity between the soul and the body. So, the fact that there is a disembodied state (an absence of the body) shows that there is something that seems to not be satisfactorily answered. In Cartesian dualism, a disembodied state of being makes sense, but not so much within the hylomorphic idea of the soul. In Cartesian dualism, the disembodied state is appropriate, but the bodily Resurrection of the saints itself seems to create a problem for Cartesian dualism. In either case, there seems to be an unsatisfying answer. But, taking both into consideration, it seems like we can use each of them to fill in the others’ gaps. Perhaps there are gaps to begin with because we do not have all the information that we need to make a completely satisfying argument concerning the soul and body.
Near Death Experiences
Systematic Theology is the type of theology that uses every source possible to discover truths about God. To give you something to compare it to, Biblical Theology only uses the Bible. But we have other things apart from the Bible that can tell us truths about God, such as natural theology. For instance, the Kalam Cosmological argument is not found anywhere in the Bible, but it definitely tells us something about God.
It seems possible, based on the same principle, to use things that agree with the Bible but are not necessarily part of the Bible in order to discover things about the soul, heaven, and hell. Similarly, with what happens to the soul and the nature of the soul. I say this because I must bring up NDE’s (Near Death Experiences). I was once very skeptical about them and dismissed them through what I refer to as, “Black Cat Theology” (from living in the mountains all my life and hearing some of the strange things that people believe). But after researching it from several sources, including interviewing people who have claimed to have had NDE’s, I have changed my mind about the truth of them. In fact, so much so, that I think they should be emphasized in systematic theologies as arguments for the soul and the afterlife.
The reason I was skeptical about them was because of how I understood the Resurrection of the saints. I did not believe that anyone could be resurrected before the Resurrection that will take place for the Day of Judgment, because the Resurrection has not happened yet. So therefore, in my mind, an NDE would go against what the Bible was teaching. I saw NDEs as a cult like belief and dismissed it as such and distanced myself from them. This all changed when I attended the ETS/EPS annual meeting in 2018, while I was sitting under Gary Habermas who further convinced me of the truth of NDE’s… Before Habermas started speaking, I sat down by a gentleman and whispered to him that NDE’s cannot be real, because the Resurrection hasn’t happened yet, and this would go against what the Bible says. He said that Lazarus died and rose from the dead. I was thinking… “well, now I’m ruined.” I listened intently to what Habermas was saying, and slowly, the gears started turning and I became more and more convinced.
Following this event a few days later, I attended the Reasonable Faith in an Uncertain World event, and one of my favorite Philosophers, J. P. Moreland, was speaking about NDE’s as well and mentioned some further truths about specific NDE’s. I was hooked. From there, I read numerous books on the subject from all kinds of people, some were agnostic and some were Christian. One of the things that J. P Moreland told us, I believe is crucial in studying NDE’s, which is that the person who is having the NDE does not always know how to interpret the NDE. So, some NDE’s, because they are wild and/or confusing, we should maybe not pay as much attention to. It seems that from NDE’s, the major things we should be concerned with are patterns that are recognizable, and also, the evidences beyond a reasonable doubt concerning the testimonies of NDE’s. What I mean by that is when someone claims to have an NDE, often they can give great details about something that it would be impossible for them to know. For instance, when the person’s body is not conscious, and they are being wheeled into the hospital room to be worked on, they give vivid details about what was said by the doctors and nurses because they were floating above their own body and listening to what was being said by the medical team. They also often give detail about how the doctors and nurses performed on their bodies in order to revive them.
These kinds of descriptions have been classified as OBE’s (Out of Body Experiences), and it seems to me that the main difference is that an OBE is when a person does not travel in the spiritual world to another place (NDE), but just hangs around outside his or her own physical body. With this in mind, I agree with Moreland when he explains that an NDE is basically a misnomer, and should be called a DE (for death experience).
An interesting NDE that I remember reading about was where a person has left his body and travels through space to go essentially go beyond space and time, and he said that people often describe this thing that one goes through as a tunnel, but he noticed that as he looked around while traveling very fast through space, that it was not a tunnel, but he was simply going so fast that it felt like a tunnel. He said that he looked to the side and saw the beautiful star constellations and wanted to go see them. When he arrived at the end of the tunnel, he described what most people seem to describe, which is a place that is indescribably beautiful, and that it was not yet his time to be there, or sometimes, people are often given a choice if they want to go back because they mention that someone still needs them on earth.
These are some of the things we can read about in NDE reports, in which we definitely find patterns. Jeffrey Long, a medical doctor, wrote about NDE’s in a book titled, Evidence of the Afterlife: The science of near-death experiences. His aim was to trace the patterns in NDE’s and he came up with several. One of them was a life review. This agrees with what the Bible teaches in Matthew 12:36-37.
There are several more patterns which Long observed in the thousands of responses that he received. Some things that people will commonly describe in NDE’s are heightened senses, passing in or through a tunnel, experiencing a life review as mentioned, encountering a brilliant light, encountering other being or relatives or friends, learning special knowledge, and several others.[3] Many of these patterns even seem to be common knowledge. We have all seen movies where someone enters a tunnel with bright light at the end of it. The interesting part of all this is that in NDE reports, there are patterns that are recognized. What is also noteworthy is that none of the people who participated in the studies were paid to give their testimonies. They had nothing to gain and nothing to lose, other than people thinking that they were silly or crazy. In any case, many NDE’s are quite fascinating, and they are becoming more well-known because they are happening more frequently. One reason this is happening more often is because of the advancement of medical technology. When someone’s heart stops, we have the tools to re-start a beating heart.
Heaven
I have studied NDE accounts where when the person arrived to what we could call paradise, which is an ancient Persian word meaning basically the same thing that we would describe in English as a park, it is often the case that brilliant colors are described, and people are greeted by friends and family they love and sometimes even Jesus. I have read NDE accounts where the person described seeing people working, almost in a gardening sense, and there was even mention of something like a wheelbarrow filled with flowers and such. This is intriguing because God created man and placed him in a garden to take care of it.[4]
There are several things I find interesting at this point in the discussion. Paradise, which is what Jesus calls the place where the thief on the cross would soon be with Him, seems to me to be what we think of when we say the word, “heaven.” But what is significant here is that when Jesus was Resurrected, what did He tell Mary when He saw her at the tomb where He was buried?
He asked her, ‘Woman, why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?’
Thinking he was the gardener, she said, ‘Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.’
Jesus said to her, ‘Mary.’
She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means ‘Teacher’).
Jesus said, ‘Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’[5]
He told her that He “has not yet ascended to the Father.” So, the question is, what or where exactly is paradise, and how is the Father is not there, but Jesus was? I think Jesus clues us into something in some of His parables and teaching. In speaking with His Disciples, He says,
Do not let your hearts be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.[6]
So, Jesus died, went to Paradise, was not yet with the Father, then ascended to the Father. He tells us that the Father has many rooms in His house. Perhaps Paradise is a separate place than is the Throneroom of God. Yet, Jesus can go from one to the next. Perhaps He was not able to go to the Father when He was in Paradise with the thief on the cross because He was held up by people worshiping Him and simply wanting to talk with Him after the most amazing, heavenly, church service in the history of all existence. But it still seems like there is an ability to travel from one “room” to the next in the heavenly realms.
John describes the gates of heaven in the New Jerusalem as never being shut.[7] I find that one of the seven I AM statements of Jesus may also provide some light on the subject:
Therefore Jesus said again, “Very truly I tell you, I AM the gate for the sheep. All who have come before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep have not listened to them. I AM the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.[8]
The idea that the New Jerusalem will have a gate that will never be shut and the way that Jesus talks about being the gate through whom people come in and go out and find pasture, seems to describe the way that “Heaven” will be. I put that in quotes because in our minds we often limit heaven to being the same thing and nothing more than paradise, but as we have seen, the Bible describes a much bigger place than what we have been thinking.
In any event, it seems that when a person dies, they have “a room” prepared for them by Jesus, and they live in Paradise, in a disembodied state, where it appears that there will be no sleep, and it will always be daytime:
And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gives it light, and its lamp is the Lamb. By its light will the nations walk, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it, and its gates will never be shut by day—and there will be no night there.[9]
There will be no need for sleep because there are no physical bodies, except perhaps Jesus when He is in Paradise, but even then, Paul describes our resurrected bodies as very different from our current physical bodies (See 2 Corinthians 5).
This is all definitely in line with what the Bible teaches in Genesis 2:7, “…then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” This makes good sense because God made the physical components of the earth come alive in the form of a man. Cartesian dualism and anthropological hylomorphism both agree with this. God took the physical components, namely carbon, and inserted His breath into what He created. Thus, we have the two components of a human being, flesh and soul.
Hell
Here, I will discuss the necessity of the existence of Hell, as opposed to the NDE accounts of those who claim they went to hell and the details of such. I think that perhaps in a later post, I could go into the details, but for now, I find the biggest problem with people and their understanding of hell is that if God is love, then Hell shouldn’t exist, but the opposite is true. Hell seems like it must exist for at least two reasons. One being that if God made free creatures so innately valuable that it would be wrong even for Him to annihilate, then it seems He must have a place where this is possible avoid. It seems to me that the intrinsic value comes from Genesis 1:26, where God says, “Let us create man in our image, in our likeness, that they may have dominion over the plants and animals…” (paraphrase). The idea here is that God created human beings to rule (have dominion) over everything in the world. I often find that people try to ascribe or read into the text more meaning to the phrase, “the image of God” than what is found in the text. What we do find in the text is the aspect of ruling. In what way are you made in the image of God? The text simply discusses having dominion, or rule. Now, It also seems that in order to rule, we must also have some necessary components as well, such as judgment. The ability to rule well requires good judgment. This is one component of human beings that I believe makes us intrinsically valuable; the fact that we are made in this very specific aspect of the image of God.
Second, God cannot be near sin, at least long term. For instance, The Bible teaches that Moses could not see the face of God because of sin, and also, that in the Revelation, the Throne of God is described as having a sea of glass around it that no one can cross (See Rev. 4:6). The reason many scholars see this sea of glass as a symbol of protection is because John was in prison in Patmos, which is an island, and the island itself was a prison, surrounded by the sea. It seems that this sea in the Revelation in front of the Throne of God is due to sin, for in Revelation 21:1, we find that “the sea is no more” in the view of the New Jerusalem.
In regard to the question of universalism, I think a good question on top of all this is, “Would it be loving if God were to force someone against their will to go to heaven?” and “If He did force people to go to heaven against their will, then did people ever actually have free will in the first place?” It seems that there are multiple levels of inconsistencies with such beliefs.
So, God has a place for those who reject Him where they are not annihilated. On top of all of this, God is a just Judge. The way we live our lives actually matters, because at the end of our lives we will be judged. Hebrews 9:27 says that “it is appointed unto man once to die, then comes the judgment.” God is Love, but that is not all He is. He is also a just Judge. Hell must exist because God will not annihilate an innately valuable soul, and because sin cannot exist in His presence for any significant amount of time.
Romans 5:8 says, “God demonstrates His own love for us in this: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” If Christianity is true, then those who put their hope and trust and lives in Jesus alone simply change location. We never actually die. From His work on the cross, we are saved from the wrath of God, but we are also blessed with eternal life. I pray that we strive to live by the influence of these truths.
“For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whosoever believes in Him shall not perish but will have everlasting life.” ~John 3:16
Written by Nace Howell through the grace of the Lord Jesus
© Nace Howell, 2022
[1] J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How we know it’s real and why it matters (Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014), 124.
[2] Ibid., 132.
[3] Jeffrey Long, Evidence of the Afterlife: The Science of Near-Death Experiences (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2010), 7.
[4] See Genesis 2:15.
[5] John 20:15-17.
[6] John 14:1-3.
[7] See Revelation 21:25.
[8] John 10:7-10.
[9] Revelation 21:23-25.
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