The Immortal Soul: A Response to Soul Sleep

Scripture itself speaks of the soul existing outside the body after death if taken literally. We will divide this between the Old Testament and the New Testament. I will also address common objections to these verses. This is far from an exhaustive list, and I intend to add to it over time. Old Testament Support: The story of the Witch of Endor in 1 Samuel 28 portrays the spirit of the prophet Samuel coming up from the ground. The witch describes Samuel as an elohim. An elohim is any divine being in the spirt realm, including angels. The implication is Samuel is alive and conscious after death in the same spiritual realm as God and the angels. There are those who would dismiss this account as a deception either by the witch or a demon, which I have addressed here . Regardless, it demonstrates that the ancient Israelites had an understanding of the immortal soul at least three thousand years ago, minimum. Enoch walked or pleased God and was taken (Gen 5:24), meaning that he did not die....

Is there a way we can know if the soul persists beyond death? Perhaps the closest we can get to knowing without actually dying is Near-Death Experiences (NDEs). The term "near-death experience" was coined by author and physician Raymond Moody. In his book, Life After Life , Moody recounts the story of George G. Ritchie, who was a U.S. Army recruit in 1943 during World War II. George reportedly died of pneumonia and was declared clinically dead for about 9 minutes. During that time, he recounts leaving his body and encountering a being of light, among other things. He was told it wasn't his time to die and was later revived with an adrenaline injection. George G. Ritchie's story is considered one of the earliest "modern" NDEs, although NDEs are not new or novel but have been recorded in ancient texts for thousands of years. NDEs often have many commonalities among them, including: Having an out-of-body experience and seeing their own physical body apart from ...

There is a common accusation that Christians adopted the concept of the soul from the Greeks, most notably from Plato. There’s a variation of this argument that Christians adopted ideas about the soul and the afterlife from the Egyptians. By soul, I’m referring to the immaterial essence of humans that encompasses consciousness and continues on after physical death. But just how true is this accusation? How much did the Greeks influence Christian theology? And can it be established that the mainstream Christian concept of the soul is not purely the product of Greek philosophy? We will seek to answer these questions. It should first be established that Israelite/Jewish thought had already allowed for a postmortem existence prior to Greek influence. One very prominent example can be found in 1 Samuel involving the story of the Witch of Endor. King Saul had gone to visit the witch to summon Samuel from the grave. Much to the witch's surprise and dismay, she summoned what appeared to be...

Why did I write this blog? After the passing of my father, I began to reflect heavily on death and my own mortality. We live most of our lives trying to avoid the thought of death, but when we lose a loved one, we are forced to confront it. Death is something that is inescapable and touches each and every one of us at some point. It's part of the human experience. What happens when we die is one of life's big questions along with "Is there a God?" and "Why am I here?" My motivation in writing this blog was to try and answer that question to the best of my ability. There are a lot of ideas of what happens when we die. The materialist will say there is no life after death, that when your dead your dead. Buddhists and Hindus, among others, believe we have lived many lives and will be reincarnated. Mainstream Christians like myself believe in a life after death. Then there is the view that the soul "sleeps" until the resurrection of the dead. The latte...