Rob Bell is everywhere. On Monday night he spoke with Lisa Miller of Newsweek at the New York Society for Ethical Culture (transcript at Patheos). Yesterday, he was on Good Morning America and MSNBC. He is promoting his controversial book Love Wins, which is available now.
I read it yesterday (it’s really short) and thought I would spend the next few days addressing some of the questions this book will raise (and there are quite a few). First of all, I think you should read it. Despite the fact that you may walk away with more questions than answers and that many of the answers Rob does give are ambiguous and unsatisfactory at best, I think it is worth your time.
But before you can have a conversation about Heaven, Hell and the fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, you have to talk about the nature of human beings themselves.
Most people assume, including Bell, that it is biblically faithful and theologically noncontrovesial to speak of human beings having an immortal soul.
Most Christians tend to regard the body as frail and finite and the soul as immortal (dualism). The body is the physical part of humans, the part that dies. It undergoes disintegration at death and returns to the ground. The soul, on the other hand, is the immaterial part of humans, the part that survives death.
Materialism, on the other hand, insists that humans are not to be thought of as in any sense composed of parts or separate entities, but rather as a radical unity. To be human is to be or have a body. The idea that a human can somehow exist apart from a body is unthinkable. Consequently, there is no possibility of post-death existence in a disembodied state.
The problem with dualism is that too often the soul is what is emphasized over the physical body, which can lead to Christian escapism. The problem with reductive materialism is that people are no more than the product of organic chemistry. Your joys and your sorrows, your memories and ambitions, your sense of identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and molecules.
But Scripture teaches that humans were created with a functional holism. The soul and the body are both aspects of the being of life, human being. Because of the incarnation and the resurrection we know that God cares about both our soul AND our body and has created a unity between them. God intends for us to worship him with all our heart, soul, and strength and operate as a whole person both now and after the final resurrection.
In other words, God created humans as thinking, feeling, moral persons made up of spirit and body tightly joined together. Death is not normal or natural, but an enemy, the consequence of sin. Death is the tearing apart of these two intertwined parts and the cessation of life on this earth. The body goes to the grave and the spirit goes into an afterlife.
But the Bible is clear that there will one day be a bodily resurrection for everyone to either eternal life with God or eternal condemnation apart from him in hell.
There is just one problem. The resurrection is a future event. Believers are not yet raised; we do not yet share in the resurrection.
So what happens in the interval between physical death and the resurrection? Paul says that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord (2 Cor. 5:8) and Jesus told the thief on the cross “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Although never explicit in its teaching, the Bible seems to suggest that our souls will survive in an intermediate state until they are rejoined with our physical bodies at the second coming of Christ.
The intermediate state refers to a temporary state of disembodied human existence which occurs after death and prior to the final resurrection of the body. The scriptures nowhere give a detailed description of the intermediate state, as it is primarily focused on the final consummation at the resurrection. Nevertheless it seems that human existence is so constituted that after biological death, self-conscious individuals (souls) can experience a state of joy in the fellowship with Christ and other saints or a state of misery, loneliness and regret from rejecting His love (see Jesus’ parable in Luke 16v23) until the final resurrection.
However, affirming continuous personal existence during the intermediate state does not necessarily commit one to the soul’s inherent or essential immortality. More on that tomorrow...
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