Immortality or Resurrection, William West [best romance books of all time txt] 📗

God but his body is dead, this distinction is rubbish. I will attack it. One must say, 'The whole Abraham, the whole man shall live.' The other way you tear off a part of Abraham and say, 'It lives.' This is the way the philosophers speak: 'Afterward the soul departed from its domicile,' etc. That would be a silly soul if it were in heaven and desired its body" Luther's Works, Volume 54, Page 447. Luther called the theory of the immortality of the soul the "monstrous fables that forms part of the Roman dunghill of decretals." E. Petavel, The Problem of Immortality, Page 255.
[3] PAUL ALTHAUS, “The hope of the early church centered on the resurrection of the Last Day. It is this which first calls the dead into eternal life (1 Cor. 15; Phil. 3:21). This resurrection happens to the man and not only to the body. Paul speaks of the resurrection not ‘of the body’ but ‘of the dead.’ This understanding of the resurrection implicitly understands death as also affecting the whole man…Thus the original Biblical concepts have been replaced by ideas from Hellenistic Gnostic dualism. The New Testament idea of the resurrection, which affects the whole man, has had to give way to the immortality of the soul. The Last Day also loses its significance, for souls have received all that is decisively important long before this. Eschatological tension is no longer strongly directed to the day of Jesus’ Coming. The difference between this and the hope of the New Testament is very great” “The Theology Of Martin Luther” pages 413-414, 1966.
[4] JOHN WESLEY "It is indeed generally supposed that the souls of good men as soon as dislodged from the body, go directly to heaven, but this opinion has not the least foundation in the oracles of God" From Wesley's sermon on Luke 16:23.
[5] WILLIAM TYNDALE translated the first English New Testament, "In putting them (sleeping souls) in heaven, hell or purgatory, you destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul proves the resurrection...if the souls be in heaven, tell me why they be not in as good a case as the angels be? And then what cause is there of a resurrection...The true faith put forth the resurrection, which we be warned to look for every hour. The heathen philosophers, denying that, did put that the souls did ever live. And the pope join the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshy doctrine of philosophers together: things so contrary that they cannot agree...And because the fleshy-minded pope consented unto heathen doctrine, therefore, he corrupted the Scripture to establish it." bk. 4, chapter 4, pages 108-109, in 1530, and also in Burns, "Christian Moralism,” Page 99. Tyndale (like Luther) said it was heathen philosophers and the Pope, not the Bible that taught, "souls did ever live."
[6] JOHN DARBY: "We would express our conviction, then the idea of the immortality of the soul has no source in the gospel; that it comes, on the contrary, from the Platonists, and that it was just when the coming of Christ was denied in the church, or at least began to be lost sight of, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul came in to replace that of the resurrection. This was about the time of Origen." "The Hopes of the Church of God" Only in the early editions before what he said was changed by other persons.
Greek philosophy of an immortal soul was first bought into the church by the so-called church fathers that were believers in the Greek philosophy, and were only partly converted. They know more about the teaching of Plato than they did of Christ. It did not become commonly accepted unto after Tertullian in the third century. It was fought bitterly by Martin Luther, William Tyndale, and many others as being a part of the false Catholic doctrine. It was eventually accepted by most Protestant Churches, but only after a long fight. Most today know little or nothing of all this, and think the doctrine of an immortal soul was held by almost all, even back in the Old Testament.
NOTE: The teachings of many founders of the Protestant Reformation are an embarrassment to the Protestants Churches today, which bear their name and or claim them as their founders. The teaching of the churches they founded now makes them be heretics. Their own churches would now call anyone teaching the same as Luther and Wesley heretics.
Calvin might have been the leading influence in turning the Protestant Reformation back to Catholicism. Dr Joseph Priestley said, "Had it not been for the authority of Calvin, who wrote expressly against soul sleep, the doctrine of an intermediate conscious state would, in all probability, have been as effectually exploded as the doctrine of purgatory itself" Works, Volume 5, Page 229, 1818.
[7] JAMIESON, FAUSSET AND BROWN: "Nowhere is the immortality of the soul, distinct from the body, taught: A notion which many erroneously have derived from heathen philosophers. Scripture does not look for the anomalous state brought about by death, as the consummation to be earnestly looked for [2 Cor. 5:4], but the resurrection." Notes on 1 Corinthians 15:53.
[8] STRONG: "A breathing creature, i.e. animal..." word number 5315. "Strong's Exhaustive Concordance Of The Bible."
[9] W. E. VINE: "A Noun soul; self; life; person; heart...it occurs over 780 times in Old Testament...the noun refers to the essence of life, the act of breathing, taking breath...in its primary sense the noun appears in its first occurrence in Gen 1:20; 'the moving creature that has life,' and in its second occurrence in Gen 2:7; 'living soul... HOWEVER, IN OVER 400 LATER OCCURRENCES IT IS TRANSLATED 'SOUL.' WHILE THIS SERVES TO MAKE SENSE IN MOST PASSAGES, IT IS AN UNFORTUNATE MISTRANSLATION OF THE TERM. The real difficulty of the term is seen in the inability of almost all English translations to find a consistent equivalent or even a small group of high-frequency equivalents for the term. The KJV alone uses over 28 different English terms for this one Hebrew word...in narrative or historical passages of the Old Testament, NEPES CAN BE TRANSLATED AS 'LIFE' OR 'SELF' as in Leviticus 17:11; 'for the life of the flesh is in the blood... NEEDLESS TO SAY, THE READING 'SOUL' IS MEANINGLESS IN SUCH A TEXT...THE VERSIONS VERY WIDELY IN THE READING OF NEPES, WITH THE MORE CONTEMPORARY VERSIONS CASTING WIDELY FOR MEANING," Page 237 Old Testament, "Vine's Complete Expository Dictionary Of Old And New Testament Words." It did not change its meaning in the second part of the Old Testament, but the translators of the early English Bibles had to put in their beliefs, and later translators, those that are called "the major translations" have only partly gotten away from this mistakes, but a few of the latest translations have almost made it.
[10] THAYER: "1. Breath...a. the breath of life...b. life...2. The soul...a. the seat of the feelings, desires, affections, aversions (our soul, heart, etc.)." "A Greek-English Lexicon Of The New Testament."
[11] ROBERT YOUNG, author of Young's Literal Translation of the Bible said, "Animal soul...Nehphesh" Page 917 "It (nehphesh_ does not denote the immortal part of man, but his animal life." "Young's Analytical Concordance To The Bible."
[12] INTERNATIONAL STANDARD BIBLE ENCYCLOPEDIA: "Not, however, to dwell on the fact that many peoples have no clear conception of an immaterial 'soul' in the modern sense (the Egyptians, e. g. distinguished several parts, the Ka, the Ba, etc., which survived death; often the surviving self is simply a ghostly resemblance of the earthly self, nourished with food, offerings, etc.), there is the more serious consideration that the state into which the surviving part is supposed to enter as death is anything but a state which can be described as 'life,' or worthy to be dignified with the name 'immortality.' It is a state peculiar to 'death;' in most cases, shadowy, inert, feeble, dependent, joyless; a state to be dreaded and shrunk from, not one to be hoped for. If, on the other hand, as in the hope of immortality among the nobler heathen, it is conceived of, as for some, a state of happiness-the clog of the body being shaken off-this yields the idea, which has passed into so much of our modern thinking, of an 'immortality of the soul,' of an imperishableness of the spiritual part, sometimes supposed to extend backward as well as forward; an inherent indestructibility." From the article "Immortal; Immortality." Also from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, "We are influenced always more or less by the Greek, Platonic idea that the body dies, yet the soul is immortal. Such an idea is utterly contrary to the Israelite consciousness and is nowhere found in the Old Testament" From the article "Death," Page 812. Also from the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, "Soul, like spirit, has various shades of meaning in the O.T., which may be summarized as follows: 'Soul,' 'living being,' 'life,' 'self,' 'person,' 'desire,' 'appetite,' 'emotion' and 'passion'...NEHPHESH OR SOUL, CAN ONLY DENOTE THE INDIVIDUAL LIFE WITH A MATERIAL ORGANIZATION OR BODY." Page 2837. "For the Hebrews a person was a unity, not to be divided into body, soul, and spirit as the Greeks did," Page 592.
[13] INTERPRETER’S DICTIONARY OF THE BIBLE: “No biblical text authorizes the statement that the soul is separated from the body at the moment of death” Volume one, page 802.
[14] JEWISH ENCYCLOPEDIA: "The belief that the soul continues its existence after the dissolution of the body is a matter of philosophical or theological speculation rather than of simple faith, and is accordingly, nowhere taught in the Holy Scripture...The belief in the immortality of the soul came to the Jews from contact with Greek thought and chiefly through the philosophy of Plato, its principal exponent, who was led to it through Orphic and Dleusinian mysteries in which Babylonian and Egyptian views were strangely blended," "Immortality of the Soul," 1925. The concept of punishment after death is not in the Old Testament. The Law given through Moses deals only with punishment in this life and has no provisions for punishment after death. From their contact with pagan philosophy, the pagan immortal soul teaching had made some inroads with some Jews by the time of Christ. Paul warned about this Philosophy [Colossians 2:8].
[15] FUNK AND WAGNALL ENCYCLOPEDIA: “The Christian doctrine of the immortal soul has been strongly influenced by pagans such as Plato and Aristotle.”
[16] C. R. GRESHAM: "It is generally conceived that there is little about resurrection or after-life in what the Jews called the Torah...and the Former Prophets...Death is seen as the end, the destruction of human existence." Page 25. "Man's soul is primarily his vitality, his life, not some separate part of a person that has independent existence and an immortal nature, God's spirit (His breath, His power) creates and sustains all living things (Ps 33:6; 104:29-30), even the human spirit (Zech 12:1), but never is man's soul or spirit seen as an immortal part of man surviving death." Page 40. "The widespread misunderstanding that the New Testament teaches the immortality of the soul...If one recognizes that death and eternal life in the New Testament are always bound up the Christ-event, then it becomes clear that for the first Christians the soul is not intrinsically immortal, but rather became so only through the resurrection of Jesus Christ." Page 275. "What The Bible Says About Resurrection" The College Press, 1983,