Chapter 27

Resurrection vs. Soul-Escape — A False Dichotomy

Two thieves hung beside Jesus on Calvary. One mocked Him. The other believed.

To the believing thief, Jesus made a stunning promise: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).¹ Today. Not at the end of the age. Not at the resurrection of the dead. Today. Within hours, both men would die. Their bodies would hang lifeless on Roman crosses. And yet, somehow, the believing thief would be with Jesus in paradise that very day.

Now, here is the question that has shaped this chapter. If body and soul cannot be separated, how could the thief be with Jesus in paradise on Friday evening when his body was still nailed to a cross? And if the thief’s soul went to be with Jesus that day—before any resurrection—does that mean the future bodily resurrection no longer matters?

Of course not. The Christian tradition has always answered: Both are true. The thief went to be with Jesus that day in his soul. And one day, when Christ returns, the thief’s body will rise from the dust to be reunited with his soul in glorious bodily resurrection. Two stages. One story. No contradiction.

But Michael Marsh disagrees. In the preface to Out-of-Body and Near-Death Experiences, he argues that the very idea of a soul that “evades” death and lives on between death and resurrection is “inconsistent” with Christian resurrectional theology.² NDEs, he says, depend on this idea—and so they cannot be what they appear to be. To affirm a soul that survives death is, in his view, to undermine the resurrection.

This is one of Marsh’s most theologically charged arguments. It sounds serious. It sounds creedal. And it sounds wrong—not because Marsh is dishonest, but because he has constructed a false either/or. The historic Christian faith has always held both ends of this rope. And NDEs, properly understood, do not threaten the resurrection at all. They corroborate the part of the picture that comes before resurrection: the conscious intermediate state.

In this chapter, I want to walk through Marsh’s argument carefully, show why the dichotomy he sets up does not hold, and then build the positive biblical and creedal case that Christians have always confessed both a conscious intermediate state and a future bodily resurrection. The two are sequential, not contradictory.

A. The Critic’s Argument: Either Soul-Escape or Resurrection

Marsh lays out his core argument near the very start of his book. After describing the typical NDE narrative—leaving the body, traveling to another realm, encountering deceased loved ones, returning—he writes that running through these accounts is “the unquestioned assumption of an unbroken continuity of the person through death and into the afterlife.”³ The NDEr seems to slip out of the body and continue, fully conscious, in another mode of being. The body lies on the operating table; the “real” person carries on elsewhere.

For Marsh, this picture has a name. He calls it the idea of a “divinely implanted soul” that can “evade death and represent the whole person in eternity.”⁴ And in his judgment, that idea is “foreign to much current philosophical, psychological and neurophysiological thinking.”⁵ More importantly, he argues, it is foreign to the Christian theological tradition. He puts it bluntly: “A transference of the person through death and directly into another incorporeal modality in the afterlife, as evinced by accounts of [NDEs], [is inconsistent with] resurrectional theology.”⁶

Why is it inconsistent? Marsh’s answer runs through chapter 10 of his book, where he develops the argument at length. The Christian tradition, he insists, looks forward to “resurrection of the dead and the life everlasting,” not to “immortality vested in the receipt of [an] eternal, immortal soul.”⁷ The Nicene Creed of 381 promises “the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come”—a future, bodily event grounded in the resurrection of Jesus.⁸ What it does not promise, on Marsh’s reading, is that some inner self will go drifting off into another world while the body lies dead.

Marsh further argues that the human person is a tightly bound “psychophysical” unity of body, brain, and mind. Soul, on his view, is not a separate substance. It is an “emergent” property of that biological unity—the personality that arises out of the body-brain.⁹ When the brain dies, the personality goes with it. There is no “soul slipping through the gates of death.”¹⁰ Whatever new life God gives at the resurrection is just that—new, a fresh creative act of God, not the ongoing continuation of a soul that survived in between.

Marsh quotes Paul’s words in 1 Corinthians 15:52—“we will be changed”—to support his case, suggesting that what God carries over from this life into resurrection life is “very likely to be minimal.”¹¹ NDEs, by contrast, picture a smooth, unbroken passage of the personality from this world into the next. That smooth passage, in his view, simply does not square with the radical disjunction that real death is.

To his credit, Marsh sees that this is a theological question and not just a neurological one. He treats it seriously. He cites real biblical scholars—Wright, Gunton, Macquarrie, Murphy. He does not simply dismiss the soul-language of Scripture; he wrestles with it. I want to say plainly: this is honest engagement, and his concerns about a Platonic, escape-from-the-body spirituality are concerns I share. There is a kind of fluffy, soul-floats-up-to-heaven Christianity that has lost the resurrection altogether. Marsh is right to push back on that.

But his solution overcorrects. He does not just push back on bad Platonism. He pushes back on the historic Christian doctrine of the intermediate state. And he does so by treating soul-survival and bodily resurrection as if they were rival accounts of the afterlife, when in fact the church has always held them together.

B. Identifying the Weaknesses

Marsh’s argument has at least three serious weaknesses.

The first is the false dichotomy itself. Marsh writes as though Christians must choose: either we believe in a soul that survives death, or we believe in bodily resurrection. But the church has never made that choice. From the second century onward, Christian teachers have affirmed both. The believer who dies goes to be with Christ in a conscious intermediate state, and at the last day, that same person will receive a glorified, resurrected body.¹² The two doctrines do not compete. They unfold in sequence. Marsh has framed the question so that any soul-survival looks like an attack on resurrection, but that framing is artificial.

The second weakness is that Marsh misreads what NDE researchers actually claim. He treats NDEs as if they were claims about resurrection itself. They are not. No serious NDE researcher I know of—not van Lommel, not Greyson, not Long, not Sabom, not Parnia, not Holden—claims that NDEs reveal the final, glorified state of the resurrected body.¹³ What NDEs purport to reveal, at most, is what happens immediately after biological death and before recovery: the temporary, conscious, disembodied state that Christians have classically called the intermediate state. Hank Hanegraaff puts the framework well. There is life. There is life after life—the transitional, intermediate phase. And there is “life after life-after-life”—the bodily resurrection.¹⁴ NDEs only ever speak to the second phase. To attack them on the grounds that they don’t fit the third is to misunderstand what they are saying in the first place.

The third weakness is that Marsh conflates two very different kinds of dualism. There is Platonic dualism: the body is a prison, the soul is inherently immortal, salvation is escape from the flesh. And there is what philosopher John Cooper calls “holistic dualism” or the “biblical dualism” of historic Christianity: the body matters, body and soul are deeply integrated, but the soul can exist consciously apart from the body, and the goal is bodily resurrection, not endless disembodiment.¹⁵ When Marsh attacks “the immortality of the soul,” he is largely attacking Platonism. Christians can attack it too. But Platonism is not the only dualism on the table—and it is not the dualism that NDE evidence suggests.

C. The Pro-NDE Response: Both Intermediate State and Resurrection

Christian eschatology—the doctrine of last things—has long had room for two stages. There is what happens at death, and there is what happens at the resurrection. Marsh is right that the Nicene Creed centers on the latter. But the creed is not silent about the former, and Scripture is anything but silent. Let me build the case in three steps: from Scripture, from the creeds and tradition, and from a careful look at what NDEs actually claim.

1. Scripture Affirms Both

Begin with Jesus on the cross. He tells the believing thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).¹⁶ Whatever “paradise” means here, two things are clear. It happens that day. And it is not the resurrection—the thief’s body, like Jesus’s, will lie in the grave through Saturday and beyond. As J. Steve Miller bluntly puts it: if the spirit cannot separate from the body at death, how could the thief meet Jesus in paradise on the day of his crucifixion?¹⁷ The text demands an answer Marsh’s monism cannot give.

Then turn to Paul. In 2 Corinthians 5:8, he writes that he would “prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.” In Philippians 1:23, he longs “to depart and be with Christ, which is far better.” In 2 Corinthians 12:2–4, he describes a man caught up to the third heaven and adds—twice—that he does not know “whether in the body or out of the body.”¹⁸ Hanegraaff makes the obvious point. If Paul believed soul and body could not separate, why would he even raise “out of the body” as a live possibility? The very wording assumes the categories Marsh denies.¹⁹

And yet—here is the crucial part—the same Paul is the towering biblical witness to bodily resurrection. He devotes 1 Corinthians 15 entirely to it. He calls it the hinge of the Christian faith: “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith” (15:14). He writes of a body that “is sown perishable” and “raised imperishable” (15:42). He is not describing a soul that floats free forever. He is describing a body that dies and rises.²⁰

So in Paul we have both. The conscious presence with Christ at death. The bodily resurrection at the end. The same apostle teaches both, in the same letters, with no sense of contradiction at all. The apostle who longs to “depart and be with Christ” is the same apostle who writes that “the dead in Christ will rise first” (1 Thess. 4:16). If Paul did not see a problem with affirming both, neither should we.

Other passages reinforce the picture. Revelation 6:9–11 shows John seeing “under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God,” crying out, conscious, awaiting full vindication. Hebrews 12:23 speaks of “the spirits of the righteous made perfect” in the heavenly Jerusalem. Luke 16 describes Lazarus carried by angels to Abraham’s side, conscious and recognizable, while his body lay in the grave below.²¹ None of these passages cancel the resurrection. They simply describe what comes before the resurrection.

2. The Creeds and the Christian Tradition

What about the creeds? Marsh leans heavily on the Nicene Creed’s affirmation of “the resurrection of the dead.”²² Quite right—the creed says exactly that. But the Apostles’ Creed adds something the Nicene leaves implicit. It confesses that Christ “descended to the dead” (or “to hades,” descendit ad inferos)—a confession that assumes Christ’s human soul was somewhere between Friday afternoon and Sunday morning, while His body lay in the tomb.²³ If Christ Himself experienced an intermediate state in His human nature, on what grounds do we deny it for those united to Him?

Beyond the creeds, the church fathers, the medieval scholastics, the Reformers, and the post-Reformation Protestant tradition have all taught a conscious intermediate state alongside the bodily resurrection. Calvin wrote against soul-sleep precisely to defend the wakefulness of the saints with Christ. The Westminster Confession (32.1) and the Second London Confession both affirm that the souls of the righteous “immediately” pass into glory while their bodies await the resurrection.²⁴ Cooper traces this through in painstaking detail and shows that holistic dualism—not monism—is the mainstream of historic Christianity.²⁵

So when Marsh implies that affirming a conscious intermediate state is somehow at odds with the creedal tradition, he has the history backwards. The creeds insist on the resurrection, yes. But they do so within a framework that has always assumed a real human person who continues to exist between death and the last day. That is the historic faith.

3. NDEs Witness to the Intermediate State, Not the Final State

This is where the misunderstanding really matters. NDEs do not claim what Marsh treats them as claiming. NDErs do not return saying, “I have seen the New Creation.” They do not say they received a glorified resurrection body. They speak of being aware, sometimes of seeing themselves and others from above, sometimes of meeting deceased loved ones, sometimes of encountering a being of light. They report a temporary state. And then—crucially—they come back. They are told to return. They are pulled back. Their job is not finished. They wake in their bodies in an emergency room.²⁶

That round trip is theologically important. The resurrection is not a round trip. The resurrection, in Christian teaching, is permanent. Christ rose and does not die again (Rom. 6:9). When the saints are raised at the last day, they are not raised to come back into hospital beds. They are raised to live forever in the new creation. So whatever NDEs are showing, they are not showing the resurrection state. By their very structure—a trip out, a return—they fit the intermediate state and only the intermediate state.

Hanegraaff captures the logic well. NDEs, he writes, take place “at halftime, not the end of the fourth quarter.”²⁷ They are not eyewitness reports of final destinies. They are glimpses of what happens at the threshold of death. The Bible says the soul of the believer goes to be with the Lord at death. NDEs corroborate that the human person continues, conscious, when the body shuts down. The biblical picture is the larger frame; NDE evidence is one set of empirical pixels inside it.

Notice how this dissolves Marsh’s objection. He says NDEs picture an “unbroken continuity” that is foreign to the radical disjunction of death.²⁸ But Christian theology has always taught a real continuity of personhood through death. The Westminster divines did not invent this; they got it from Scripture. Death is real and dreadful, and yet the believer’s person is not annihilated—he or she is “with Christ.” The continuity is not the soul cleverly evading death; it is God preserving His own through death until He raises them on the last day. That is why Paul can speak of being “away from the body” without ever losing his hope of resurrection. The two are not in tension at all.

D. Counter-Objections

A careful reader will raise two further objections, and they deserve answers.

Objection 1: “If the soul is already with Christ at death, why do we need a resurrection at all?” This is an old worry, and it has a beautiful answer. We need the resurrection because we are not meant to be disembodied forever. Paul addresses this directly in 2 Corinthians 5:1–4. He looks forward to being “clothed” with our heavenly dwelling, not “found naked.” He admits that even the saints in heaven groan, longing “to be clothed,” that what is mortal might be “swallowed up by life.”²⁹ The intermediate state is wonderful—it is being with Christ—but it is also incomplete. The body matters. Creation matters. The whole human being, body and soul, is the object of God’s redemption. To be with Christ apart from the body is “far better” than this present life (Phil. 1:23). To be with Christ in a glorified body is better still. The intermediate state does not make resurrection unnecessary; it makes us long for it.

Objection 2: “Doesn’t affirming the soul’s survival smuggle in Platonism?” Not at all. The historic Christian view differs from Platonism at every key point. The soul is not inherently immortal—only God has immortality in Himself (1 Tim. 6:16); our soul’s continued existence is a gift, sustained moment by moment by God.³⁰ The body is not a prison; it is good, the work of God, and destined for resurrection glory. The goal of salvation is not escape from matter but the redemption of body and soul together in the new creation. As I explained in Chapter 24, the dualism this book defends is holistic, not Platonic. Marsh’s rejection of Platonism is something I share. But that rejection does not entail his monism—and conflating the two is precisely where his theological argument goes off the rails.

So where does this leave us? The dichotomy Marsh sets up—soul-escape or resurrection—collapses on inspection. Scripture affirms both. The creeds confess both. The Christian tradition has held both for two thousand years. NDEs witness only to the first, and they witness modestly: a temporary disembodied state in which the person remains aware. They make no pretense of revealing the final glory of the resurrection. Marsh is concerned that NDE-fueled Christianity will lose the doctrine of resurrection. That worry deserves to be taken seriously—and we will take it up directly in Chapter 28, where we ask whether the broader phenomenology of NDEs is compatible with orthodox Christian teaching. But the worry is not solved by collapsing the intermediate state into nothing. It is solved by holding the two together, exactly as the church always has.

The believing thief went to be with Jesus that day. His body still hung on the cross. One day, his body will rise. That is not a contradiction. It is the gospel.