THE QUESTION:
Does Christianity believe in the “immortality of the soul”?
THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:
No.
Not exactly. And before anyone has a heart attack reading that, The Guy hastens to explain that Christianity has always vigorously affirmed the Easter message that earthly death is followed by everlasting life. But the oft-used phrase about a mere “immortality of the soul,” which stems from ancient Greek philosophy, could suggest bodily life is problematic and mistakenly suppose that our soul exists through all eternity as only a disembodied spirit.
Instead, Christianity teaches that just as Jesus arose bodily from the grave, so the promise of everlasting life involves a person’s eventual resurrection that unites the soul with the body in a newly glorified state. As with the central belief that Jesus was God incarnate in full human and bodily reality, this Christian affirmation about the afterlife proclaims that, as in Judaism, our bodies are God’s good creation and fundamental to each person’s human identity.
This understanding of New Testament teaching was defined orthodoxy as early as A.D. 180 in Against Heresies by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, an authority and saint for Catholic and Orthodox Christians:
“… It is manifest that the souls of his disciples also, upon whose account the Lord underwent these things, shall go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection, awaiting that event; then receiving their bodies, and rising in their entirety, that is bodily, just as the Lord arose” (from book 5, chapter 31).
A precise Protestant formulation appears in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Presbyterian credo from 1647 (here “men” refers to both genders):
“The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls (which neither die nor sleep), having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God,” either “waiting for the full redemption of their bodies” or cast into hell. “At the last day, such as are found alive shall not die but be changed; and all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other, although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever” (from chapter 32).
The 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church has a more succinct version:
“In death, the separation of the soul from the body, the human body decays and the soul goes to meet God, while awaiting its reunion with its glorified body. God, in his almighty power, will definitively grant incorruptible life to our bodies by reuniting them with our souls through the power of Jesus’ Resurrection” (#997).
This raises the related mystery of the “intermediate state” and what Christianity says about the human soul’s existence between earthly death and its reunion with the body in the future resurrection.
The Catholic doctrine about souls’ preparation in Purgatory to meet God was formulated by the 15th Century Council of Florence and 16th Century Council of Trent. As the modern Catechism explains it, those who die in God’s grace are “assured of their eternal salvation but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven.” For Catholicism, certain offenses against God can be forgiven only in the eternal state.
(The Guy here bypasses exploration of Catholic belief in the church’s power to grant “indulgences” for the remission of punishments in the afterlife. The late medieval church linked such relief with donations of money, a corrupt practice that helped spark the Protestant Reformation and was later denounced as “evil” by Trent. For current teaching on indulgences, see Catechism #1471-1479.)
During Eastertide 2020, such matters were examined by Adam Wood of Wheaton College (Illinois) in the quarterly Christian Scholar’s Review. A medieval specialist, he finds good Protestant grounds to agree with the great Catholic theologian Thomas Aquinas, as follows.
There’s ongoing debate whether any disembodied souls exist in the life to come and that “Christian hope should be in the bodily resurrection alone.” If we are identical with our bodies, that rules out disembodied human persons and “souls” do not exist until the future resurrection.
Wood, however, insists that “human souls are capable of surviving death in a disembodied state” in which they remain capable of “conscious experiences.” There’s interesting discussion about whether and in what ways those experiences may be limited, but Wood considers it “wise to refrain from saying too much about ‘what it’s like’ to be a disembodied soul.”
But bodily resurrection is so central to the faith that he also asserts “human persons cease to exist between dying and rising again.”
CONTINUE READING: “Easter topic: Does Christianity believe in ‘the immortality of the soul’?”, by Richard Ostling.