Drew said:
And I am not alone in my view. Here is a quote from NT Wright, the bishop of Durham:
Quote:
Unlike Platonists, who preferred a disembodied immortality, those who believed in resurrection agreed with the ancient Israelites that real life meant embodied life.
And don't forget Tyndale:
"And ye, in putting them (the departed souls) in heaven, hell, and purgatory, destroy the arguments wherewith Christ and Paul prove the resurrection ... 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?
Dr. Joseph Priestley, after observing that many of the early reformers held to `soul-sleep', stated:
"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."
John Milton, the great sacred poet wrote:
"Inasmuch as the whole man uniformly said to consist of body, and soul (whatever may be the distinct provinces of these divisions), I will show, that in death,
first, the whole man, and
secondly, each component part,
suffers privation of life. ... The grave is the common guardian of all till the day of judgment."
Archbishop John Tillotson of Canterbury stated:
"I do not find that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is anywhere expressly delivered in Scripture, but taken for granted."
Henry Layton was a member of the Anglican Faith. He said:
"... during life, we live and move in Christ; and when we die we rest and sleep in Him, in expectation of being raised at His second coming.
Bishop Edmund Law was the master of St. Peter's College, archdeacon of Staffordshire and bishop of Carlisle. He challenged the doctrine of a conscious intermediate state; held death to be a sleep, a negation of all life, thought, or action - a state of rest, silence and oblivion.
Dr. William Whiston was a Baptist theologian and professor of mathematics at Cambridge University and
"... denied the doctrine of eternal torment and held that the wicked would be totally destroyed."
Dr. John Tottie was the canon of Christ Church in Oxford and archdeacon of Worcester. He
"... opposed the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul."
Bishop Timothy Kendrick states in a sermon from 1805:
"The soul of man dies with the body, and is restored to life at the resurrection and second advent."
Dr. Amos Phelps, was a Methodist-Congregationalist clergyman and professor of Yale University, He wrote:
"This doctrine [of natural immortality] can be traced through the muddy channels of a corrupted Christianity, a perverted Judaism, and pagan philosophy, and a superstitious idolatry, to the great instigator of mischief in the garden of Eden. The Protestants borrow it from the Catholics, the Catholics from the Pharisees, the Pharisees from the pagans, and the pagans from the old serpent who first preached the doctrine amid the lowly bowels of Paradise to an audience all too willing to hear and heed the new and fascinating theology: 'Ye shall not surely die.'"
Dr. Edward White was a Congregationalist pastor at St. Paul's Chapel and chairman of the Congregational Union. In 1883 he made it known:
"I steadfastly maintain, after 40 years of study of the matter, that it is the notion of the infliction of a torment in body and soul that shall be absolutely endless, which alone gives a foot of standing ground to Ingersol in America, or Bradlaugh in England. I believe more firmly than ever that it is a doctrine as contrary to every line of the Bible as it is contrary to every moral instinct of humanity."
Archbishop Richard Whately was archbishop of Dublin, Ireland and a professor at Oxford and principal. He taught the final destruction of the wicked and believed
"The wicked are never spoken of as being kept alive, but as forfeiting life."
Frederick W. Farrar was the canon of Westminster Abbey and the dean of Canterbury. he denounced the
"... dogma of endless, conscious suffering and could not find a single text in all Scripture that, when fairly interpreted, teaches the common views about endless torment."
Herman Olshausen was professor of theology at Königsberg, Ostpreussen in Germany. He wrote:
"The doctrine of the immortality of the soul and the name are alike unknown in the entire Bible."
Bishop John J. S. Perowne was a scholar of Hebrew and an Anglican Bishop of Worcester, England. He wrote:
"The immortality of the soul is neither argued nor affirmed in the Old Testament."
"The immortality of the soul is a phantom which eludes your eager grasp."
Dr. J. Agar Beet was a Wesleyan professor. He stated:
"The following pages are ... a protest against a doctrine which, during long centuries, has been almost universally accepted as divine truth taught in the Bible, but which seems to me altogether alien to it in both phrase and thought, and derived only from Greek Philosophy. Until recent times, this alien doctrine has been comparatively harmless. But, as I have here shown, it is now producing more serious results ..."
"It will of course be said, of this as of some other doctrines, that, if not explicitly taught in the Bible, it is implied and assumed there ... They who claim for their teaching the authority of God must prove that it comes from Him. Such proof in this case, I have never seen."
Dr. R. F. Weymouth was the headmaster of Mill Hill School and translator of New Testament in Modern Speech and a renowned Greek scholar. He said:
"My mind fails to conceive a grosser misrepresentation of language than when five or six of the strongest words which the Greek tongue possesses, signifying to destroy or destruction, are explained to mean `maintaining an everlasting but wretched existence.' To translate black as white is nothing to this." [7700]
In his book in a note on 1.Corinthians 15:18 he says:
"By `perish' the Apostle here apparently means `pass out of existence'."
On Hebrews 9:28 we read:
"The use in the N.T. of such words as `death', `destruction', `fire', `perish', to describe Future Retribution, point to the likelihood of fearful anguish, followed by extinction of being, as the doom which awaits those who by persistent rejection of the Saviour prove themselves utterly, and therefore irremediably bad."
On Revelation 14:11:
"There is nothing in this verse that necessarily implies an eternity of suffering. In a similar way the word `punishment' or `correction' in Matthew 25:46 gives itself no indication of time."
On Revelation 20:10:
"The Lake of fire implying awful pain and complete, irremediable ruin and destruction."
And the list goes on and on and on...
Protestant and Catholic clergyman, theologians, scholars from Baptist, Wesleyan, Reformed, Anglican, Reformers...all of them recognized that the doctirne of inate immortality and eternal torment is false, false, false.
