Life, Death and Destiny

There are two questions, in particular, to which even Christian tradition has repeatedly given answers totally inconsistent with the Bible, answers which rightly perplex or even scandalise many people today. First: What happens after death? The common traditional view is that at death the human soul or spirit, being immortal in nature, lives on, either in "heaven" or in "hell" or in some other "intermediate state", pending the final judgment of God. Second: What will happen to those excluded from God's final Kingdom? The standard Christian teaching has been that the "lost" are punished with everlasting suffering in "hell".

Obviously both of these questions are extremely important for every one of us. Unfortunately the answers traditionally given by the Church have sown confusion and served to turn a great many people away from faith in God altogether. These answers have been derived from non-biblical sources, not from the Bible, and it is surely significant that, in fact, neither of the great traditional Christian creeds, the "Apostles' Creed" and the "Nicene Creed", makes any reference, either to the immortality of the human soul, or to a hell of eternal torment.

Soul-immortalism entered Christianity, not from the Bible, but from ancient Greek philosophy, profoundly influenced by Plato. Alan Richardson, former Dean of York, acknowledges this:

...the ancient Church inherited from Greek thought the notion of a soul substance which was by nature immortal, and this conception was often entwined with biblical teaching about resurrection. In the biblical view, a man dies and literally ceases to exist: his resurrection... was the result of an act of new creation by God...

As far back as 1931, Archbishop William Temple... asserted, in his Drew Lecture on Immortality:

The core of the doctrine (of the future life) is this: Man is not immortal by nature or of right; but there is offered to him resurrection from the dead and life eternal, if he will receive it from God and on God's terms... It is a doctrine, not of Immortality, but of Resurrection... There is a very strong case for thinking out the whole subject again, in as complete independence as possible alike of medieval and of protestant traditions.

- Warren Prestidge, Life, Death and Destiny

Links: The Philosophy and Theology of Eternal Punishment (12 Mar 10), The Case for Annihilationism (31 Aug 10), Tetelestai (10 Sep 10)