Where did the idea of an
Immortal soul originate?


Fortunately we are not left without an answer. The first sermon on the natural immortality of the soul was preached by Satan, the father of lies (john 8:44). Against the proclaimed word of God, Satan announced in the Garden of Eden: "Ye shall not surely die" (Genesis 3:4).

Ever since Adam and Eve gave heed to Satan's first great deception, the immortality of soul has become the cornerstone of apostasy and paganism. The Egyptians built an elaborate system of tombs and pyramids to protect the body as well as possible for the return of the soul. Oriental religions such as Hinduism proclaim the transmigration of the soul, teaching that death is but a door to a new form of life, higher or lower, depending on how good a life on leads now. But it was the Greeks, under the fertile genius of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato, who gave a systematic form to the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.

The foundation of the Greek teaching is a simple dualism. The Greeks divided the universe into matter and spirit. Matter is bad. Spirit is good. That which is bad is temporary, and that which is good is eternal. Once this was conceded, it was easy for the Greeks to divide man into body and soul. The body is physical and so evil and temporary. The soul is good and therefore eternal. Plato says in his Phaedo: "The soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable."

Plato viewed the body as simply an outer garment of the soul, a house in which the soul is imprisoned. So long as the soul is in the body, "the soul employs the body," making use of its sight, hearing, and other senses. Since the body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul. Indeed death simply frees the soul from the body, and initiates it into a true being. So Plato concluded that the soul "goes away to the pure, and eternal, and immortal, and unchangeable, to which she is kin."

This belief in the immortality of the soul was not simply a slogan with the Greeks. It was a way of life as revealed in the death of the man who embodied the Greek thought in its noblest form. Socrates approached his death with complete peace and composure. As he drank the hemlock, he looked to death as a friend that had come to liberate his soul from the prison house of the body. And so he said, "I am as sure as I can be in such matters that I am going to live with gods who are very good masters. And therefore I am not so much grieved at death; I am confident that the dead have some kind of existence, and as has been said of old, an existence that is far better for the good than for the wicked."

THE CONTRAST

What a contrast: the views of man; the revelation of God! The Greeks thought of death as a friend. But Inspiration looks upon death as an enemy (1 Corinthians 15;26), an intruder that has marred the beautiful creation of God. The Greeks considered the physical body to be evil. But the Bible teaches that the body of man is not evil. Indeed the Genesis account considers the whole creation, including the physical, as "very good" (Genesis 1:31). The Greeks thought of the body as a prison house with no particular value or importance. But the Apostle Paul values the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19). The Greeks taught the immortality of the soul. But the Word of God proclaims the resurrection of the dead (1 Thessalonians 4:16,17; 1 Corinthians 15:51-54).

PAGAN INTRUSION

Unfortunately the early church did not completely disregard the Greek thought. So long as the apostles lived, the church firmly held to the revealed truths of the Word of God, in spite of the onslaughts of the pagan and philosophical systems of the day. But soon after the time of the apostles Greek thought increasingly confronted the church. Some of the leading converts to the Christian faith were nurtured more in the writings of Plato than in the writings of Moses or Isaiah.

As one widely respected author states: "Many who professed conversion still clung to the tenets of their pagan philosophy, and not only continued its study themselves, but urged it upon others as a means of extending their influence among the heathen. Serious errors were thus introduced into the Christian faith. Prominent among these was the belief in man's natural immortality and his consciousness in death." E. G. White, The Great Controversy, p. 58.

Thus, little by little, pagan thought found its way into the Christian church, and through subtle ways became established as Christian precepts. As early as A.D. 150 Justin in his Dialogue wrote of people who said "that immediately at death their souls would ascend to heaven." By the beginning of the third century, Tertullian, Bishop of Carthage, boldly proclaimed the immortality of the soul as a Christian doctrine and even wrote A Treatise on the Soul in which he says, "The soul, then, we define to be sprung from the breath of God, immortal, possessing body, having form, simple in its substance, intelligent in its own nature, developing its power in various ways, free in its determinations, subject to . . . changes of accident, in its faculties mutable, rational, supreme, endued with an instinct of presentiment, evolved out of one (archetypal soul)." The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. III, p. 202.

On what did Tertullian base his conclusions? On the writings of the Old Testament? No. On the writings of the New Testament? No. Says he, "I use the opinion of a Plato, when he declares, 'Every soul is immortal.'"

Thus we find Tertullian at least intellectually more honest than many modern churchmen who teach the immortality of the soul as Scriptural doctrine. Plato's dogma became the premise for the teachings of many of the early church fathers. Popularized by men like Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augustine, it did not take long for the church to accept what nearly everyone wanted to believe; so during the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513, under the direction of Pope Leo X, the Roman Catholic Church officially proclaimed the immortality of the soul as an article of Christian belief.

THE VOICE OF TRUTH

However, even the power of the medieval Papacy did not fully stifle the voice of truth Small groups of Christians continued to believe and teach the Biblical truth of conditional immortality. For example, the Waldenses in Europe and the Malabar Christians on the Kerala coast in southwestern India refused to accept the papal dogma.

Individual Christian leaders too stood firm on the teachings of the Scriptures. William Tyndale, English reformer and Bible translator, openly opposed the papal doctrine: "And ye [papacy] in putting them [souls] in heaven, hell, and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection. . . . The true faith putteth the resurrection, which we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the soul did ever live. And the pope joineth the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers together; things so contrary that they cannot agree, no more than the Spirit and the flesh do in a Christian man. And because the fleshly minded pope consenteth unto heathen doctrine, therefore he corrupteth the scripture to stablish it. . . . And again, if the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of the resurrection?" An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue, Book 4, Chapter 2.

John Milton, the 17th century poet who wrote Paradise Lost, also opposed the doctrine of soul survival: "It may be inferred, unless we had rather take the heathen writers for our teachers respecting the nature of the soul, that man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual not compounded or separable, not according to the common opinion made up and formed of two distinct and separate natures as of soul and body; but that the whole man is soul, and the soul man." "The death of the body is the loss or extinction of life. The common definition, which supposes it to consist in the separation of soul and body, is inadmissible." The Prose Works of John Milton, Vol. 4

A noted Wesleyan scholar, J.A. Beeth, after a wide study on the subject, summarized the issue aptly: "The phrase, the soul immortal, so frequent and conspicuous in the writings of Plato, we have not found in pre-Christian literature outside the influence of Greek philosophy; nor have we found it in Christian literature until the latter part of the second century. We have noticed that all the earliest Christian writers who use this phrase were familiar with the teaching of Plat; that one of these, Tertullian, expressly refers both the phrase and doctrine to him; and that the early Christian writers never support this doctrine by appeals to the Bible, but only by arguments similar to those of Plato. . . . We have failed to find any trace of this doctrine in the Bible. . . . It is altogether alien, both in phrase and thought, to the teaching of Christ and His apostles." Immortality of the Soul, pp. 53,54.


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