lovely said:
I have some questions for those who do not believe in eternal Hell.
7. Do you believe that Matthew 10:28, where it says to fear Him who can kill the soul and destroy the body is accurate? And, if so, does this not correspond with the argument that satan, the deceiver, is responsible for killing souls for an eternity? Does this verse indicate that even though a person is being killed, that they continue to exist?
I will take a crack at number 7: Matthew 10:28 says "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell" The big problem with this verse is that people do not realize that they
come to the verse having already decided that human beings possess an immaterial soul. With such a presumption, they draw their conclusions and are mystified that others do not see that this verse clearly shows a distinction between body and soul.
T'aint necessarily so. Consider that one approaches the verse with a different presupposition (If you object that I am not "allowed" to do this, then you rather brazenly beg the central question - you unquestioningly accept a certain connotation for the term "soul"). Suppose I have reasons to believe in the following "theology of the human person"
1. People are unified entities - they cannot be "split" into body and soul.
2. The word soul refers to the
whole person - the physical structure that we all call the "body"
and the phenomenology that we all experience (the ensemble of sense experiences and emotions that differentiates us from robots who are "unaware of themselves"). On such a view, this phenomenology is the necessary by-product of physical activity in a brain. It is not a separate "thing" in essence.
3. When a person dies, the brain stops and the phenomenology ends (for now, anyway). However, God "stores" knowledge of our physical constitution for future use.
4. At the resurrection, God re-constitutes us physically, and the phenomenology come back into existence (as it must - it is the by-product of this newly re-constituted physical brain in the new resurrection body).
If such a view is brought to the reading of Matt 10:28, we interpret it as follows: Men can kill my body but since God "saves" knowledge of my physical state and can resurrect me, they cannot be said to have killed the "whole person" since I still exist as "information" in the mind of God. So I need not fear men - they can kill my physical structure but ultimately "I am safe in God" since the totality of my person has not been lost - God has saved "knowledge" of me in His mind.
God, on the other hand, has the power to destroy the whole person, since He can elect to not reconstitute me if I am not redeemed. Or he can reconstitute me and subject me to complete and total destruction. So I do need to fear God.
I know what some readers are saying to themselves - why can't this guy just accept that Jesus' plain words are saying that "the body is distinct from the soul" - after Jesus talks about how men can kill the body but not the soul.
Well, even today we often talk "phenomenologically / metaphorically". If I say "my heart died the day my Mother died", I do not mean that the pump in my chest has stopped working.
Not to mention the fact that a very strong (and unrefuted as far as I know) argument has been forward by guibox (and others) that the word "soul" as used by the Hebrews generally, and in the OT in particular, has always been used to denote the "whole person", not an immaterial entity that inhabits the body. That latter idea, by the way, we apparently got from the Greeks.
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