Conditional Immortality (2)
Those who believe in conditional immortality don’t believe "we’re nothing but animals" because they believe that God has created us with the capacity for conscious and voluntary fellowship with him and mere animals don’t have that. But they do believe that we’re made out of the same "stuff" as animals and that like animals, when we die we simply cease to be. They believe that humans, as far as what we’re "made of" is concerned, are simply one form of matter that can reason and choose in a self-conscious existence. With the decay of the matter the person decays and with the complete disintegration of the matter the person completely disintegrates. It’s obvious then that at death the person ceases to exist. One such thinker said it isn’t so much that man is made of dust, he is dust.
Many of us who don’t believe that the person ceases to exist at biological death tend to think there’s a second "substance" ("spirit" or "soul," whatever that is thought to consist of). That leaves the body and goes elsewhere. Hollywood movies show us "ghosts" that are sort of vapors that sometimes bear the resemblance of the bodies they left. It isn’t necessary to think that if we survive biological meltdown there must be some kind of second "substance". That might be true but it might well be some structured energy that isn’t tangible in the way our bodies are. Whatever it is, it is "us" and we will know it is us. (A little more on that later.)
If God has so made us that "we" express ourselves in this realm through our fleshly/animal aspect but continue on after death, it might not be important for us to know how "we" express ourselves without a fleshly body. That is, maybe it doesn’t matter if we can't come up with an answer to the question, "Is the soul/spirit a substance?" I’m sure it’s profitable for us to search the scriptures and reflect theologically and otherwise on the question but if the scriptures reveal our continued existence after death then at least we can rely on that and work forward with educated guesses.
A human can survive a bad accident, a human can survive the loss of a limb or eyes or arms, of course, but the scriptures teach that a human can survive the loss of his head. Conditional immortality says that a human can only be a human as long as he or she is organic life but Paul believed that he could continue in personal fellowship with Jesus Christ even after his organic life was destroyed (Philippians 1). It would appear that he took seriously the teaching of Jesus that people could kill your body but could not destroy your soul (Matthew 10:28).
But it’s a mistake to say, "it’s only the body that dies" when a person dies. (We hear that quite a bit from well-meaning people at funerals. "She isn’t dead only her body has died.") It’s not only that the scriptures wouldn’t speak that way—it gives the wrong impression about death. Death happens to the entire person. Death is the loss of embodied life. Something happens to the body but something also happens to "the soul". The soul is robbed of the present possibility of life expressed in an embodied mode. Does a person live on after biological death? Yes. But it isn’t embodied life because that has been shut down by death. We can say what we want about the joys of life in the disembodied state if we’re Christ’s but we mustn’t despise the glory of embodied life. The creation, the incarnation, resurrection and glorification of Christ forbids it!
We live biologically, we die and (the scriptures teach) we live again in the general resurrection (compare John 5:28-29 and Acts 24:15). Those embraced in Christ’s redeeming work are resurrected to embodied immortality. God never intended his children to ceaselessly exist as disembodied beings! That would mean that death reigns! The destruction of death is glorious resurrection. The body is for the Lord and what is perhaps even more startling the Lord is for the body (1 Corinthians 6:13 and 19-20). God has no intention of jettisoning the body; the whole person is to be completely redeemed from the curse. What God created when he created a human is a being that enjoys a bodied existence.
That is why the disembodied state is often called "the intermediate" state. It has nothing to do with "where" we exist but has everything to do with "how" we exist. At first we’re embodied and are subject to death and later, we are gloriously embodied and immortal and in between death and the glory we are disembodied. That is "intermediate". It would make no difference if we knew that when we died we went and sat in the Holy Father’s lap. We would not be in our "final" state, which is embodied and all glorious! That glorified and embodied state is the state that follows our glorious resurrection (Philippians 3 and 1 Corinthians 15).
©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.