A reader writes:
Being starved for Catholic radio out here in the Bay Area, I find myself turning to an Evangelical radio station during my commute. Today, I heard a commenter saying something like this: that it was clear that the old testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul. The bible teaches we will be raised from the dead to everlasting life, but it doesn’t mean that our souls are immortal, that is, that our souls are alive while our body is dead. This is an idea that is more common in Greek philosophy, he explains, but is not biblical.
Have you ever heard this theory bandied about? How would you respond to that?
There are a number of different groups that have variations on this idea. The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Protestant or even Christian), for example, hold a physicalistic understanding of the spirit that basically precludes its existence between death and resurrection (meaning that there are serious questions about wheter you are still you at the resurrection). That view is not common in Protestant circles, however.
More common in Protestant circles is the idea of "soul sleep," which is that you do have a soul that continues to exist between death and resurrection but that it does not have conscious experience in the interim and is thus "asleep." Luther seems to have held this view, as do Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other groups, but it has been quite uncommon.
MORE INFO ON THESE TWO VIEWS HERE.
I can’t tell from what you said whether the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying that the Old Testament writers didn’t believe in an immortal soul or whether he was saying that it is untrue that there is an immortal soul.
These two positions are not the same. One could hold that the Old Testament authors did not believe in the immortality of the soul because this doctrine had not yet been revealed but–since it has been revealed in the New Testament–we now know what they didn’t.
If he meant this latter position then I would say he at least has part of a leg to stand on. The idea of the afterlife is not sharply defined in the Old Testament, and it is not clear what most Jews believed about the afterlife at this time. Indeed, they may not all have believed the same thing. The Old Testament spends very little time discussing the afterlife; it is focused primarily on salvation from dangers in this life rather than salvation from hell after this life, so we don’t have enough data to draw firm conclusions about the particulars of how the afterlife was conceived in this period.
We do have enough data, however, to establish that at least some Jews (and almost certainly the great majority) did at least acknowledge the existence of the afterlife.
For example, the fact that, when various patriarchs die, they are regularly said to be "gathered to their people" suggests a reunion with those who have died. That phrase is a little ambiguous, though, but here is something that is not: If belief in an afterlife was not common among the Jewish people then God wouldn’t have had to warn them against using mediums and spiritists to call up the dead.
There also is at least one passage in which the fate of a particular figure is prophecied and it describes the descent of his soul and its encounter with other souls, who recognize who it, is described. That occurs in the prophets, so one could interpret it non-literally, but one passage that is not vulnerable to this objection is the situation in which Saul has the witch of Endor summon up the spirit of the departed Samuel.
I know that there have been some (more out of a desire to say you can’t call up the dead than anything else) who have speculated that it was a demon impersonating Samuel, but this is not the way the text depicts the situation. The text presents it straightforwardly, as if the witch really did call up Samuel’s spirit (presumably by a kind of divine dispensation, since Samuel immediately prophesies Saul’s doom, which then comes to pass).
Whether or not it really was Samuel’s spirit, the passage attests to Israelite belief in the afterlife–and not just any kind of afterlife, but on in which the soul continues to exist between death and resurrection. If that’s not what you believe then there’s not point in trying to contact a dead guy.
So if the gentleman you heard on the radio was saying denying the presence in the Old Testament of belief in this kind of afterlife then he was overstating matters. It would be more defensible to say that the concept of the afterlife was not clearly defined in this age and that there may have been some Jews who did not accept it (just as some Jews did not accept the exclusive worship of God), but to say that the idea is foreign to the Old Testament is simply inaccurate.
If the gentleman was going further and saying that we do not have souls that exist between death and resurrection then he will have insuperable problems when it comes to the New Testament, because Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man clearly envisions conscious human souls in the intermediate state. The fact that this is a parable also is not an issue, for even if there was not a specific Lazarus and a specific rich man who had this experience (something that is likely), Jesus’ parables nevertheless are populated by things from the real world. They are about kings and merchants and fields and farmers and servants and sums of money and other things–like conscious, departed human souls–that really exist.
Even if he wanted to be truculent on this one, he’d also have to face the book of Revelation, which unambiguously depicts departed human souls, before the resurrection, worshipping God and talking with him in the intermediate state.
The idea that we don’t exist or are not conscious between death and resurrection simply is not tenable.
By the way, since the gentleman was Protestant he wouldn’t accept this, but it’s worth pointing out that the second book of Maccabees also has a very explicit passage on the reality and consciousness of departed souls, for Judah Maccabee receives a vision in which he learns that the departed (and unresurrected) prophet Jeremiah prays for the people of Israel. Judah also sees the soul of a departed priest in this vision.
Solution to the writer’s “no Catholic radio” problem….Get an Ipod! Subscribe the the Catholic Answers podcast along with those from Catholic Exchange, Heart Mind and Strength and others.
Or get Sirius Radio. Sadly my husband opted for XM. Here’s to hoping XM picks up Catholic radio soon.
BTW, excellent post, Jimmy.
–Ann
My understanding was that revelation progressed to such a point over OT times that Jews did start to have an understanding of an afterlife. Because of this, it seems odd to me to lump everything together in OT times and try to determine whether they believed in the afterlife in those times. It’s like asking whether people who lived between 0 B.C. and 2006 B.C. believed that man could travel to the moon. Not in the beginning, but over time, towards the end, yes! And now Jews today typically acknowledge an afterlife going on no New Testament revelation.
See A Catholic Critique of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, an article online, particularly the sections, The Mystery of the Afterlife, and Punishment After Death.
http://www.catholic-forum.com/members/popestleo/cathjw.html
(You can’t be punished after death if you’re not even sentient enough to experience being punished) 😉
Or go on line and listen to EWTN Radio 24/7.
I never thought of the prohibitions against summoning the dead as evidence of belief in the afterlife, but dang, there it is.
This was a matter of dispute among two learned classes among the Jews, the Pharisees and the Saduccees. The former believed that there is resurrection, and the latter didn’t. This is something that modern day Jews also know.
We see an example of such difference of opinion in Acts 23:7. I hope the Proestant gentleman believes in every word written in the Bible; and by the way, New Testament was not written at that time, and the Pharisees didn’t read it, nor did they believe in it.
I’m surprised that the numerous references in the OT (especially in the Psalms) to Sheol, that shadowy place of the dead. I know the concept was kind of fuzzy, but it’s there.
Ge 37:35, 42:38, 44:29, 44:31
Nu 16:30, 16:33
De 32:22
1Sa 2:6
2Sa 22:6
1Ki 2:6, 2:9
Job 7:9, 11:8, 14:13, 17:13, 17:16, 21:13, 24:19, 26:6
Ps 6:5, 9:17, 16:10, 18:5, 30:3, 31:17, 49:14, 49:15, 55:15, 86:13, 88:3, 89:48…
And so on through Proverbs and the prophets, mentioned a total of 63 times. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it.
One might also toss into the mix Paul’s statement in Philippians 1 that to die and “be with Christ” would be better than continuing to live. It is difficult to imagine that dying to be unconscious would be better than living to consciously pray and praise.
“If belief in an afterlife was not common among the Jewish people then God wouldn’t have had to warn them against using mediums and spiritists to call up the dead.”
Wouldn’t this just appear, to a soul-sleep-believing-Protestant, that some (maybe the majority) Jews were just superstitious, and believed in the immortality of the soul, while such was not really true? Wouldn’t this be analogous to the Church in thrid-world countries where she forbids Catholics from worshipping false gods, although many of these Catholics practice things like santeria and vodoo?
I applaud your blog, former JW member speaks out.
The core dogma of the Watchtower organization is that Jesus had his second coming ‘invisibly’ in the year 1914.Their entire doctrinal superstructure is built on this falsehood.
Jehovah’s Witnesses door to door recruitment is by their own admission an ineffective tactic. They have lost membership in all countries with major internet access because their false doctrines and harmful practices are exposed on the modern information superhighway.
There is good and valid reasons why there is such an outrage against the Watchtower for misleading millions of followers.Many have invested everything in the ‘imminent’ apocalyptic promises of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and have died broken and beaten.
—
Respectfully, Danny Haszard http://www.dannyhaszard.com
EWTN has now jumped into the iPod bandwagon. So has Ave Maria University.
As a subscriber to XM radio, this has been the greatest gift… I can now pick and choose the shows I’d want to listen to, as opposed to being stuck with the same show every day in my morning/evening commutes.
Still waiting for the day when St. Joseph’s Communications, Keep the Faith, and every major Catholic conference tape series make it online…
Good post as always Jimmy. A couple thoughts:
1. Even though a Protestant wouldn’t accept Maccabees as scripture, they SHOULD accept it as a historical artifact. As such it remains convincing evidence that some Jews at that time (which was late in Jewish history) believed in an afterlife.
2. For the writer: The Sacramento Catholic radio station comes in from the East/North Bay Area. Contra-Costa country, Solano County, Marin county. As long as you have a radio with a good reciever. AM 1620.
Sometimes you run into the idea that if we can just discover what Jews of the time were thinking, then we’ll know what God’s revelation really was. This happens especially among the Sola Scriptura types, who have a real need to get EVERYTHING they could ever need to know out of Scripture; since Scripture does not actually address all of life’s issues, they end up broadening “Scriptural” to include whatever was generally thought or practiced in biblical times (at least, if compatible with Christian ideals).
This is often a good technique for reflecting on practical issues, just because pre-industrial lifestyles were different enough from our own to provide a helpful corrective comparison. But as a way of arguing about God’s revelation, it doesn’t work so well.
The fact is, at any point in Jewish or Christian history you can find a great mass of “God’s people” who are wrong about crucial issues. When Moses received the Torah, most Israelites believed in the gods of Egypt. The prophets all spoke because most of the nation had gone wrong. Determining what “most Jews” thought at any given point in time is not a good barometer for what God was revealing.
With regard to Scripture, this distinction between “what was thought” and “what was revealed” has a special application. The Biblical authors were correct about WHAT THEY WROTE. They were not always correct about WHAT THEY THOUGHT. For example, the author of the creation story in Genesis 1 undoubtedly thought that the sun moved around the earth (the most sensible theory, really); apart from the historical likelihood, you can tell that what he thought by the fact that he did not take special care to avoid being understood that way even though it was the prevalent view of the day. He didn’t assert this belief in his writing, but if you had asked him you could have gotten him to speak an error. To go back and broaden “Scriptural” to include whatever the author of Genesis thought about the structure of the universe would be a mistake.
To say that the OT authors did not believe in the afterlife is a similar mistake. Even if one could show that they did not believe in the afterlife, one would still have to ask what they meant to teach in their writings. Theoretically it would be possible to discern that an author probably held an erroneous view on something like this (as one can tell that the Genesis author was a geocentrist), but did not mean to teach or assert his view (as the Genesis author does not assert geocentrism). In this case, his error would not be “Scriptural”.
Luke 16 references the ‘Bosom of Abraham’ where the righteous dead, ie those who would go to Heaven once the Christ had redeemed them, dwelt, separate from the rest of the inhabitant of Sheol. As this was spoken about by Jesus in the story of The Rich Man & Lazarus, then surely his audience would be at least accepting that the concept existed in the wider sense, that it would not be new to them. Much more in http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01055a.htm
Also note that at the Transfiguration, Elijah and Moses appeared. Since he could talk, Moses was clearly not asleep, though he was dead.
True, though there is some indication that Moses may have been resurrected.
One should never listen to Evangelical radio stations. Period.
“More common in Protestant circles is the idea of “soul sleep,” which is that you do have a soul that continues to exist between death and resurrection but that it does not have conscious experience in the interim and is thus “asleep.” Luther seems to have held this view, as do Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other groups, but it has been quite uncommon.”
It seems to be a common mistake to say Seventh-Day Adventists believe in “soul sleep.” They (I’m not an SDA, but I share there belief in this matter) don’t believe people have immortal immaterial souls but rather are souls, just as the Old Testament refers to living creatures as living souls and calls dead people or creatures souls.
The mind can be seen as being much like a program running on a computer. However, unlike any program men can devise, the mind is not only running on top of all of its many deeper and deeper subroutines, but it does in fact seem capable of modifying the subroutines which undergird it.
Because of these things people can suffer memory loss, which wouldn’t be possible if the mind were immaterial and immortal and therefore incorruptible.
“The Jehovah’s Witnesses (who are not Protestant or even Christian), for example, hold a physicalistic understanding of the spirit that basically precludes its existence between death and resurrection (meaning that there are serious questions about wheter you are still you at the resurrection).”
One might also wonder if a program moved to another computer is the same program. It is. However, things are not quite this simple with people. Some have “normal” brains and others do not, so their “software” will run better and as God intended when they get their glorified bodies. They will be more themselves than they were on this side of eternity. All of us will be more ourselves than we are now because of minor brain abnormalities, but they more than the rest of us.
“Even if he wanted to be truculent on this one, he’d also have to face the book of Revelation, which unambiguously depicts departed human souls, before the resurrection, worshipping God and talking with him in the intermediate state.”
Revelation 6:9-11 may be in mind here which takes us back to the death of Abel whose blood cried out to God from the ground. Notice where these martyred souls are crying from in Revelation? From beneath the altar where the sacrifice’s blood dripped down into the ground.
Just some alternative thoughts on a very disputable topic. I know as Catholics you believe the Church is the pillar and foundation of truth. However, buildings are not foundations and foundations are not buildings. Pillars and foundations support and hold up buildings. What building does Paul refer to in the same passage in which he speaks of the pillar and foundation of truth?
“You can’t be punished after death if you’re not even sentient enough to experience being punished.”
Which means all will be resurrected. The wages of sin is death. Fear not him who can destroy the body, but fear Him who can destroy both body and soul in hell.
It’s the end of the world, an enormous message is emblazened across the sky:
THIS PROGRAM HAS PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION AND WILL BE SHUT DOWN.
I meant 0 A.D. and 2006 A.D. in my post here. (Where was my head!)
John: Right. I wrote that because punishment after death was eventually an Old Testament notion (Isaiah 66:22-24, Jeremiah 7:30-8:3), suggesting that they were gaining some understanding of an afterlife.
“One might also wonder if a program moved to another computer is the same program. It is.”
Actually,the computer program analogy can be pushed a little. The program is actually a complex interaction between the program code and the computer’s operating system. Try loading a program on an older computer, or on a different platform (like Mac instead of PC), and see what happens. In this sense, it is not the “same” program.
Our bodies are a big part of our personality, and play a great role in who we are. We each have a slightly different (maybe greatly different) “operating system”.
In support of an immortal, conscious soul that is rewarded or punished immediatly or soon after death is also Lk 23:43 where Jesus tells the “good theif” that “today you will be with me in paradise.” “Paradise” seems like a strange word to use for soul-sleep or temporary non-existence, or on the other side “today” is a strange way of refering to a future resurrection which would not happen for almost 2,000 years at the least (probably more).
The Last Supper Discourse also suggests that the soul goes to heaven after death, though not real clearly I admit.
Concerning the idea of the mind being like a computer program, in the sense that John meant it (I’m not sure what Tim J. meant) this is a rather logical idea, very common today. Any function of the soul can be credited to some known or unknown action of the brain. Just like total materialism can claim everything is matter and can be explained in a totally naturalistic way. ALso just like the person who thinks everything they see is an illusion, like in The Matrix. It all fits, nothing can really disprove any of those theories, but it is very sad if any of them is true. How much more beautiful is the human person if we are not just walking computers but have a truely spiritual side!
About buildings not being foundations and what building do we think Paul was referring to, it’s pretty obvious to me that Paul was not referring to a building at all. There were not church buildings until I think the 4th century. When Paul wrote about the Church, or when Catholics speak of the Church we do not mean any building, even in a metaphorical sense, but the total body of the baptized, which is the Body of Christ, Who is the Truth. That the body of the Truth should be the pillar and bulwark of truth makes perfect sense to me.
The Bay area isn’t without Catholic Radio – they have the Immaculate Heart Radio Network I’m certain he ought to be able to hear KSMH (Sacramento 1620 AM) or one of the other Immaculate Heart stations. They carry Jimmy at 3:00 PM often …
“In support of an immortal, conscious soul that is rewarded or punished immediatly or soon after death is also Lk 23:43 where Jesus tells the ‘good theif’ that ‘today you will be with me in paradise.'”
Or he could have said, “Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise.” In this way Jesus could have been emphasising the fact that while that day looked pretty grim for both of them, he was not the helpless victim he appeared to be at that moment, but was in fact the Savior, God.
“Any function of the soul can be credited to some known or unknown action of the brain.”
Not completely. Specific fuctions of the brain which are attributed to the soul can of course be credited back to the brain. Two functions of the soul which cannot be attributed to the brain are life and immortality, but neither of those are necessary if God is the source of our life and the resurrection of the dead is real. In fact, if the soul was the source of one’s life and the soul was immortal, then nobody would ever die. Death is the result of our seperation from the true source of life, God.
Memories on the other hand are cleary the domain of the brain. This is proven by the fact that people can forget things, and specific damage to the brain can result in the inability to form new long-term memories. If our souls contained our memories, then we would never forget anything with the possible exception of suppressed memories because of traumatic reasons or whatever, but then such memories aren’t really forgotten.
So in theory you may very well have an immortal soul which can survive the death of your body, but all your memories will die with your brain where they were stored. You will be like Short-term Memory Man when you get to heaven. You won’t know who you are or where you’ve been, and every few minutes you’ll come to the exhilerating realization that you are in heaven and you’ll wonder how did you die? How long have you been there? When you are resurrected you won’t know if you really are who you were before you died because you can’t remember who you were before you died, and you don’t know if your new bodie’s memories are truly your own.
“Just like total materialism can claim everything is matter and can be explained in a totally naturalistic way.”
This also is not true. Naturalism has no explanation for life. It can’t explain how evolution works in the face of entropy. Naturalism also requires belief in billions of effects without causes, and no man-made AI will ever be truly self-aware because intelligence didn’t evolve as materialists assume. It was hardwired from the beginning.
“nothing can really disprove any of those theories”
Well, Jesus proved to the Sadducees that there must be a resurrection of the dead because he said God cannot be the God of the living without it (Luke 20:27-40). Belief in an immortal soul implies God can be the God of the living without the resurrection. It is because there is a future resurrection that all who are in christ are alive to God. John also records Jesus’ belief that one cannot be alive without the resurrection (John 6:38-40).
“How much more beautiful is the human person if we are not just walking computers but have a truely spiritual side!”
God doesn’t make mere “walking computers.” Is it really so hard to believe that God is capable of making material sons and daughters in His image with the free will to truely love Him? You don’t need an immortal soul to have a spiritual side, but only humans can have the mind of Christ.
“There were not church buildings until I think the 4th century. When Paul wrote about the Church, or when Catholics speak of the Church we do not mean any building, even in a metaphorical sense, but the total body of the baptized, which is the Body of Christ, Who is the Truth.”
You are partially correct. Paul is speaking figuratively in this instance as both he and Peter do on other occasions where they liken the Body of Christ to a building, or house. He doesn’t mean a literal building when he speaks of the church, the house of the living God. Rather like you said, he’s talking about the entire body of Christ just as one would speak of the house of Israel. Then he completes the picture by speaking of the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth upon Whom and by Whom the Body of Christ is being built up. So it would be a mistake to confuse the house, the Body of Christ, with the living God, the pillar and foundation of truth.
“When you are resurrected you won’t know if you really are who you were before you died because you can’t remember who you were before you died, and you don’t know if your new body’s memories are truely your own.”
Of course, you won’t be concerned about this because you won’t remember not having memories.