Conditional immortality (1)
A reader asked: "After death what?" Does the "soul" die? Are we made of two different kinds of "stuff"? Let me offer several pieces in this area.
Some people say that God created matter (a form of energy) and took some of it and gave it the capacity to reason, choose, sin, worship—in short to be a self-conscious being called a human. Out of that same matter God formed the elements like rocks and rivers and growing things like grass and trees. And out of that same matter he made animals and other living things. But he did not give animal matter the capacity to be self-conscious or to reason or worship. Only the matter we call "humanity" is given that ability.
These people insist that a human is "made of" material and nothing but material, material that can think and reason, material arranged in a particular form—the form we call a human. They think that these capacities are imbedded in the (human) material so that when a person dies nothing survives the biological death. When a person dies it’s "all over". That’s part of what "conditional immortality" means.
But someone who believes in conditional immortality says more than that. God will resurrect the dead in Jesus Christ and they will be given life that death can’t touch, they will be made immortal. That immortality is only for those who are redeemed in Jesus Christ. That’s the condition and that’s what conditional immortality means.
Those who hold this view don’t normally believe in eternal conscious torment (I myself don’t believe in eternal conscious torment) though they believe in a resurrection to judgment and eternal punishment, which is an eternal second death, eternal non-existence. (I strongly tend toward that view myself but I’m working with some difficulties connected with it.)
But is it true that a human as made is wholly and totally mortal? That is, does everything about a human become extinct at biological death? It’s clear that if God chose to make us utterly cease to exist we would cease to exist. If he can create us then it’s nonsense to say that he can’t "uncreate" us. But that’s really not the question. The question is this: has God so made us that at biological death we simply cease to exist? Putting it another way: do humans exist in some disembodied state after biological death? I think they do. It seems to me that that’s what the scriptures teach us.
I think that there is something about us that survives biological death. Call it what we will (soul or spirit or "inner man") there is something that is identified with me, the self-conscious person, that continues on in a disembodied state. This seems to be the simplest and best understanding of Paul in Philippians 1 when he says he had two desires and one of them was to die and go to be with Christ. And while I think in 2 Corinthians 5 he has more in mind than simple separation from his fleshly body I think that that is included when he speaks of being "away from the body" rather than being "at home" in it. Whatever difficulties are generated by believing that the thief went that Friday to be with Jesus in paradise it appears to be simplest and best to believe that that’s precisely what he did. And if he did then the "me" and the "you" (see Luke 23:42-43) that was the dying thief continued to exist in a disembodied state while his corpse was there to behold. See also 2 Corinthians 12:2-3.
It’s vital that we understand that "life after death" is not the same as the full hope of resurrection to immortality that Jesus is the guarantor of.
©2004 Jim McGuiggan. All materials are free to be copied and used as long as money is not being made.
Many thanks to brother Ed Healy, for allowing me to post from his website, the abiding word.com