It Is Sinking In!

THE Kirchenbote (“Church Messenger”) for the canton of Zurich has published a very interesting article in its February, 1958, issue No. 2, entitled “Immortality or Resurrection?” An answer to a question seems to have triggered off a controversy among its readers on this subject, and so it now publishes an article from “Evangelische Welt” (“Evangelical World”) written by Prof. Dr. Koeberle of Tuebingen (Germany) to support its statements. This well-known German professor is mentioned as collaborator of the excellent work Neutestamentliches Wörterbuch (“New Testament Dictionary”). We have met with several clergymen of recent months who have stated they do not believe in the immortality of the human soul, but they do not come out and preach this publicly on account of ingrained public opinion; and so this article constitutes an admirable exception, a few paragraphs of which we now quote in translation:

“The question whether the soul also dies at death has for a long time been answered only with a convinced ‘Yes’ by adherents of materialistic opinion, while Platonism, Idealism and the Christian Church have stood just as adamantly for a continued living of the soul beyond death and the grave. According to the materialistic way of thinking, the spiritual, psychical and moral behavior of man is a strange and mysterious by-product issuing from the physiological activity of the brain. With the disintegration of the earthly substance in death the mental abilities of a person are automatically extinguished, just as a lamp loses its light when oil and wick are used up in the receptacle. As cheerless and hopeless as this opinion may seem to be, let us not deceive ourselves: it is precisely this dogma of a total extinction of the human individuality at death that is highly welcomed by countless persons, because one is then rid of all future responsibility. No one will ever be able to ask me: How have you been walking the board of the world stage?

“But now the extraordinary fact is that for about 30 years leading theologians, foremost of the Lutheran Church, have also owned up to the conviction that the soul dies at death, even though based on a completely different motivation and associated with entirely different hopes than those held by representatives of materialistic opinion. What induces evangelical theologians of rank to recognize this dogma of the total extinction of man at death, a view which, within the Christian Church, has been emphatically propagated only by the Bible Students [Jehovah’s witnesses]?

“Theological considerations tend in the following direction. Evil, the power of sin, is always rooted in the mind. Our body, our natural disposition, is not to blame for the severance from God. It is our pride of heart, our defiance of soul, that we do not want God to extend his love to us and that we prefer to go our own way of self-assertion. Hence, if death is the wages of sin as punishment for our rebellion against God, then the part actually to blame should also be included in the death sentence; but that is our mind, our soul, and not our body, which has only been drawn into this deplorable condition with the soul, active to be sure, but nevertheless bearing the least share of blame. So only does death take on its real character of judgment, while the judgment of death seems to be made light of if the immortal soul delivers itself more or less effortlessly out of the disintegration that only the body remains subjected to. But at the same time present-day theology is fully convinced that it is only this new view which allows the Christian resurrection hope to stand out in its full magnitude and grandeur, the fact that God at the end of all days will awaken or restore to new life out of absolute nothingness the dead who are recorded by name in his memory.

“It is not perchance that it is precisely Lutheran theologians who are taking such a determined stand for the conviction of the destruction of the soul in death. The Lutheran doctrine of justification says, man himself has nothing to offer by which he could claim God’s forgiveness and love . . . God, who alone has immortality, can give us life again by a resurrection as a consequence of an act of redemption.

“Our church people are deeply disturbed by this new understanding and teaching. The simple churchgoer gets the impression when hearing such a message at the graveside: Well, then the materialists are right when they maintain that all is out at death. The clergy say it themselves now too! That we go beyond this and point to the hope held out at the day of resurrection of the dead, this is not always so readily accepted. The congregation stand solely under the devastating impression that it is nothing with the survival of the soul after death . . . as far as man is concerned, the immortality of the soul can certainly not be maintained or proved.”

The above is confirmed by another well-known professor of theology, O. Cullmann, who teaches at the Basle and Paris universities. He says in a publication entitled “Immortality of the Soul or the Resurrection of the Dead?”: “The Jewish and Christian concept of creation excludes any Greek dualism between body and soul.”

It is interesting to note that after Jehovah’s witnesses have preached the grand Biblical truth of the resurrection for the past eighty years, some of the Protestant theologians now begin to see a little clearer on this subject. Yes, it is sinking in!