Immortality of the soul: the common belief vs. the Bible
The truth that the dead are now sleeping and will be made alive in the resurrection is unfortunately not what most Christians believe and which can be summarized as follows:
“A person is composed by body and soul. The body is the physical flesh-and-blood "shell” that works as a house for the soul. The soul is the nonmaterial part, the mind the feelings etc. At death the soul leaves the body, and continues to live consciously forever in heaven or hell.”
In the article “
body, soul and spirit” we have dealt with the soul and what exactly it is. Perhaps there is no better summary to the meaning of the respective Hebrew word (“nephesh”), translated as “soul” in the English Bible, than the one given by Vine in his dictionary:
“Nephesh: “the essence of life, the act of breathing, taking breath ... The problem with the English term 'soul' is that no actual equivalent of the term or the idea behind it is represented in the Hebrew language. The Hebrew system of thought does not include the combination or opposition of the 'body' and 'soul' which are really Greek and Latin in origin" (Vine’s Complete Expository Dictionary of Old and New Testament Words, 1985, p. 237-238, emphasis added).
“Nephesh” (or “Psuchi” in the Greek New Testament), soul, is, according to the Word of God simply the breath, the life. Genesis 2:7 demonstrates this truth very clearly:
Genesis 2:7
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul [“nephesh” in Hebrew]. ”
See that the Word does not speak about soul as something separate from the body. “Man became a living soul”. Everyone of us that breaths today is a living soul. When we will have breathed our last, we will no longer be living souls. We would be sleeping, having no consciousness, exactly as during deep sleep people have no consciousness.
If we adopt the definition the Word of God gives to soul and not the one of the “Greek and Latin in origin”, as Vine calls it, we will not then have a problem when we realize that the animals also have soul:
Genesis 1:20-21
"And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature [nephesh, soul] that has life [nephesh, soul] and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature [“nephesh”, soul, so also in the MKJV and others] that moves, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good"
and Genesis 1:29-30
"And God said "Behold I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree whose fruit yield seed; to you it shall be for food. And to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and to everything that creeps upon the earth , wherein there is a living soul[nephesh in Hebrew] I have given every green herb for meat:" and it was so."
There is obviously nothing metaphysic in soul. Whatever breathes, man or animal, is a living soul. Where then does the belief of the so called “immortal soul” come from? This is something we will deal with next.
Immortality of the soul: a platonic belief
Concerning the origins of the idea of the immortality of the soul, Vine already gave us some hinds above: this belief comes from Greek philosophy, expounded especially by two of the chief Greek Philosophers: Plato and Socrates. Plato, though not the first to assert the doctrine of the immortal soul, he was definitely the most eloquent one. As Werner Jaeger of Harvard University says:
“The immortality of man was one of the foundational creeds of the philosophical religion of Platonism that was in part adopted by the Christian church” (Werner Jaeger, “The Greek ideas of immortality”, Harvard Theological Review, Volume LII, July 1959, Number 3, emphasis added ).
As The Catholic Encyclopedia (Topic: the platonic school) also informs us:
“The great majority of the Christian philosophers down to St. Augustine were Platonists.”
What did then Plato believe about the soul? Plato was a disciple of another great Greek philosopher, Socrates. Plato’s work “Phaedo” is a dialogue which depicts the death of Socrates. The dialogue supposedly took place on the last day of Socrates, before being executed by drinking hemlock. As Wikipedia says: “one of the main themes in the Phaedo is the idea that the soul is immortal”. We could consider “Phaedo” a work that gives the combined beliefs of Plato and Socrates, the two greatest Greek philosophers on the matter. Here are some passages from this work (Taken from the following website:
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html):
“The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable …. It goes away to the pure, and eternal, and immortal, and unchangeable, to which she is kin." (Phaedo)
And again:
“The soul whose inseparable attitude is life will never admit of life's opposite, death. Thus the soul is shown to be immortal, and since immortal, indestructible ... Do we believe there is such a thing as death? To be sure. And is this anything but the separation of the soul and body? And being dead is the attainment of this separation, when the soul exists in herself and separate from the body, and the body is parted from the soul. That is death.... Death is merely the separation of the soul and body." (emphasis added)
Furthermore:
“Be of good cheer, and do not lament my passing … When you lay me down in my grave, say that you are burying my body only, and not my soul”
Does what Plato and Socrates say sound very familiar? Indeed it does. It could very well be a summary of what the average Christian also believes!
As the church historian Philip Schaff says:
“Plato gives prominence also to the doctrine of a future state of rewards and punishments. At death, by an inevitable law of its own being, as well as by the appointment of God, every soul goes to its own place; the evil gravitating to the evil, and the good rising to the supreme good.” (The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, article: Platonism and Christianity).
All the above, sound indeed like written by a contemporary Christian preacher. In fact, compare what we read from Phaedo with what the most celebrated preacher of contemporary Christianity says about our topic:
“….you are an immortal soul. Your soul is eternal and will live forever. In other words, the real you -- the part of you that thinks, feels, dreams, aspires; the ego, the personality -- will never die. … your soul will live forever in one of two places -- heaven or hell …. whether we are saved or lost, there is conscious and everlasting existence of the soul and personality.” (Billy Graham, Peace With God, chapter 6, paragraphs 25 and 28).
Now compare this with what God and His archenemy, the devil, said in Genesis 2 and 3:
Genesis 2:16-17, 3:4
“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, "You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die ….. “But the serpent said to the woman, "You will NOT surely die.””
The first that taught that man is – though fallen - supposedly immortal was the devil in the garden of Eden. Compare his “you shall not surely die” with the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. “Your soul is immortal and will live forever”, Billy Graham said. As much as I respect him, the same also Plato, Socrates and the devil said. According to them: there is no real death. “You will not surely die”, “You soul just leaves the body and lives eternally in heaven or in hell, depending on what it has done”. This is not a Christian belief brothers; it is a heathen belief, taught first by the father of lies in the Garden of Eden.