Chapter 5
What happened to the God-Man on the day between the cross and the empty tomb?
Jesus died on a Friday. He rose on a Sunday. But where was He on Saturday?
This is not a trick question. It is a real one. And it goes deeper than most of us ever think to ask. We talk about Good Friday. We sing about Easter Sunday. But between those two days there is a silence. The body of Jesus lay in a borrowed tomb, wrapped in linen, sealed behind a stone. His friends were in hiding. His enemies were satisfied. The world moved on for one quiet day.
Picture that tomb. A stone slab. A body wrapped in strips of cloth. No heartbeat. No breath. By every medical measure, Jesus of Nazareth was dead. His brain had stopped. His blood had pooled. The Roman soldiers were satisfied enough to skip the leg-breaking and move on to their next task.
But was Jesus only a body in a tomb? Was the God-Man finished? Or was something else going on?
If you have followed this book so far, you know where the question leads. In Chapter 2 we looked at the two main views of what a human being is. The dualist says a person is a body joined to a soul. The physicalist says a person is just a body. In Chapter 3 we looked at what Scripture says. In Chapter 4 we saw five strong passages that teach a conscious life between death and the resurrection.
Now we turn to a question that may surprise you. What does human nature have to do with Jesus Christ? The answer: everything. Our view of human nature does not float by itself. It touches one of the most important truths in all of Christian faith: who Jesus is. And what we believe about the soul and the body will either protect that truth or put it in danger.
Stay with me here, because this chapter may be the single strongest reason from theology to believe you have a soul.1
Christianity makes a staggering claim about Jesus of Nazareth. It says He is fully God and fully man in one Person. Not half and half. Not God wearing a costume. Fully, completely, truly God. And fully, completely, truly human. Both at once. Both forever.
This is called the hypostatic union (Greek hypostasis, "person" or "individual existence"). The word sounds technical, but the idea is plain. The eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, took on a real human nature at the incarnation. He did not stop being God. He did not pretend to be human. He became what He had not been before, a man, without ceasing to be what He had always been, God.2
Plain Words
Hypostatic union: the teaching that Jesus Christ is one Person with two natures, one divine and one human. The divine nature and the human nature are united in the single Person of the Son, without being mixed together and without being pulled apart. Chalcedon: the church council held in AD 451 that defined the hypostatic union and set the boundaries that all faithful Christian teaching about Christ must respect. Physicalism: the view that a human being is only a physical body and brain, with no separable soul. Substance dualism: the view that a human being is made of two things, a material body and an immaterial soul. The three days: the period between Jesus' death on Friday afternoon and His resurrection on Sunday morning.
The church hammered out this teaching over several centuries. It was stated most clearly at the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451. The leaders gathered there said Jesus Christ is "truly God and truly man, of a rational soul and body," and that His two natures exist "without confusion, without change, without division, without separation."3 That last phrase matters. The two natures are never confused into one. And they are never separated from each other. They hold together in the one Person of the Son.
Notice what Chalcedon says about His human nature. It is made of "a rational soul and body." The bishops were not guessing. They were drawing on Scripture and on centuries of careful thought. A human being, according to this ancient and settled teaching, is body and soul together. And the man Jesus Christ, the eternal Son made flesh, has a human body and a human soul.4
Why does this matter for our topic? Because what you believe about human nature shapes what you can say about Jesus. If you get the doctrine of the person wrong, you will get the doctrine of Christ wrong too. That is the lesson of the early church councils, and it is the lesson of this chapter.
The early Christians learned this the hard way. In the first few centuries of the church, teachers kept stumbling over the relationship between Christ's divinity and His humanity. Some said He was divine but not really human. Others said He was human but not fully divine. Still others said He was two separate persons sharing one body, or one nature blended from two. Each error started in the same place: a wrong view of what the human side of the equation actually involves. The church spent centuries sorting it out. And the answer they arrived at requires both a body and a soul.4
Paul puts it with breathtaking simplicity. He writes that in Christ "the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily" (Colossians 2:9, ESV).5 The Son came into the world with nothing left behind. He brought all that God is into a real human life. That union of God and humanity in one Person is the beating heart of the Christian faith. The incarnation, the atonement, the resurrection, and our salvation all depend on it.
On a dualist view of human nature, the story of Holy Saturday holds together. When Jesus died on the cross, His body and His human soul separated, just as body and soul separate at the death of any person. His body was taken down, wrapped, and laid in the tomb. His human soul continued to live.
We are not guessing about this. Jesus Himself told us. In His final moments on the cross, He cried out: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Luke 23:46, ESV).6 He was not committing His body to the Father. His body was about to be placed in a stone tomb. He was committing His human spirit, His immaterial self, into the Father's care. He did this freely. As He said elsewhere, "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:18, ESV).7
And where did that spirit go? We know that too. Earlier that same afternoon, Jesus had turned to the criminal dying beside Him and said, "Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise" (Luke 23:43, ESV).8 Today. Not someday. Not after the resurrection. That very day, the dying thief would be with Jesus in paradise.
This is only possible if Jesus had a soul that survived the death of His body. On the dualist view, Jesus' body lay in the tomb while His human soul was alive and active, in paradise, with the thief, in the Father's hands. The eternal Son continued to be united with His human nature throughout. His human soul did not cease. His body rested in death but was not abandoned.
Peter confirms this in his sermon at Pentecost. Quoting Psalm 16, he says of Jesus: "You will not abandon my soul to Hades, or let your Holy One see corruption" (Acts 2:27, ESV). Peter then adds, "He was not abandoned to Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption" (Acts 2:31, ESV).9 Two things are in view here. The soul of Jesus was not left in Hades (the realm of the dead). And His body did not decay. The soul and the body are both mentioned. Both are real. And both were kept safe by God.
Christology Needs Dualism
If Jesus Christ is fully God and fully man in one Person, and if His two natures can never be separated, then His human nature had to survive His death. A body-and-soul view of human nature lets that happen. His human soul lived on, united to the Son, while His body rested in the tomb. The hypostatic union held. But on a purely physical view, where the person is only a body, the death of that body would end the human nature entirely. And that is a problem.
On the dualist picture, the three days in the tomb are not a gap in the incarnation. They are a chapter of it. The Son remained what He had become at the manger: the God-Man. His body was dead, yes. But His human soul was alive. The union of deity and humanity was unbroken. On Sunday morning He took His body back, raised and glorified. The whole story holds together.10
Now set the dualist picture aside and ask: what happens to this story if physicalism is true? If a human being is only a body, only a brain and a nervous system and a set of physical processes, with no separable soul at all?
The answer is troubling. If the person is only the body, then when the body dies, the person ceases to exist. There is nothing left over. No soul. No spirit. No conscious self that survives. Death is the end of the person until God creates something new at the resurrection.
Apply that to Jesus. On Good Friday, His body died. If His human nature was only His body, then His human nature ceased to exist. For three days there was no human nature of Christ. No human soul in paradise. No spirit commended to the Father. Just a corpse in a tomb and a divine Son who had lost His humanity.11
Do you see the problem? The hypostatic union says the two natures of Christ are "without separation." But on the physicalist view, they were separated at the cross. The divine nature continued, because God cannot die. But the human nature ended. For three days, the God-Man was no longer the God-Man. He was only God.
Think of it this way. If I promise you I will never let go of your hand, and then I let go of your hand for three days, I have broken my promise. It does not matter that I grabbed it again on the fourth day. The promise was broken. In the same way, if the union of God and humanity in Christ can never be divided, but the human side disappeared for three days, then the union was divided. The boundary Chalcedon set was crossed.
In my doctoral research, I spent considerable time examining what physicalism does to the doctrine of Christ. I was not able to find an in-depth treatment from Christian physicalists that dealt with this problem in a convincing way. Several writers touch on the subject. But when you push the question hard, the answers grow thin.12
There are really only two places the physicalist can land, and both are bad.
The first option is the milder one. The human nature of Jesus ceased to exist at death, but the divine Son continued. On this view, the incarnation was interrupted. For three days the eternal Son existed without any human nature at all. Then on Easter morning God created a new human nature for the Son, and the incarnation started up again.13
The second option is more extreme. Some physicalists have hinted that if the person simply is the body, and if the Son truly became that person, then when the body died, the Son Himself in some sense ceased to exist. This is the darker edge of the view. If taken seriously, it means a member of the Trinity stopped being for three days.14
Neither option would have escaped the condemnation of Chalcedon.15
The Thomistic Reply: The Soul as the Body's "Form"
Some thinkers in the tradition of Thomas Aquinas argue that the soul is not a separate thing that lives inside the body. Instead, the soul is the "form" of the body, the organizing principle that makes matter into a living person. On this view, you do not need a separable soul for Jesus' human nature to persist through death. The divine Word Himself could have held the human nature together across the three days. This is a serious proposal, and it has been held by brilliant theologians. But it faces two difficulties. First, if the soul is just the body's form, and the body is dead and no longer organized, then what exactly remains? The form without its matter is an empty category. Second, this view still needs something immaterial to survive bodily death, since even Aquinas taught that the soul subsists on its own after the body dies, in an incomplete but real state. At that point the difference from substance dualism grows thin. And the deeper question remains: can a purely physical view of the person keep Jesus human through the grave? I do not think it can.16
You might be thinking: this is interesting theology, but does it really matter? Yes. It matters for three reasons. Each one touches something we cannot afford to lose.
First, it matters for the cross. The Christian faith teaches that Jesus bore our sins in His death. He stood in our place. He took what we deserved. But this work of salvation required a Savior who was both God and man. Only God could bear the infinite weight of sin. Only a man could stand in for other men and women. The atonement depends on the God-Man.17
If Jesus' human nature blinked out at the cross, then for three days there was no God-Man. The representative of the human race had ceased to be human. Who, then, bore our sins on Saturday? Who was our High Priest? The answer on a physicalist view is: no one. The human Jesus did not exist.
Gregory of Nazianzus, one of the great teachers of the fourth century, gave the church a principle that became a rule: what has not been taken up by Christ has not been healed. If the Son took on a human body but no human soul, then the soul has no Savior. And if the Son took on both body and soul but His humanity vanished at the cross, then the saving work had a gap in it right at the moment it mattered most.17
Paul writes to Timothy that "there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus" (1 Timothy 2:5, ESV). Notice the present tense. Christ Jesus is the man. Not was. Is. His humanity did not expire. His work as mediator does not have a gap in it.18
Second, it matters for who God is. Scripture teaches that God does not change. "I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6, ESV). The theological term is immutability. God is faithful and constant. He does not go back on His commitments.
At the incarnation, the Son committed Himself to a human nature. He became what He had not been. This was a great and free act, but it was not a temporary experiment. The Son did not try on humanity the way a person tries on a coat, planning to take it off when the weather changes. He became a man forever. The incarnation is permanent. Even now, after the resurrection and the ascension, Christ is still the God-Man. He sits at the right hand of the Father as a real human being with a glorified body. He will return as a man. He will judge as a man. Humanity is not something He left behind.19
If physicalism is true, then for three days the incarnation was undone. The Son put on humanity at Christmas and lost it at Calvary. Then He put it back on at Easter. That is two incarnations, not one. And it means God's great act of entering our world was reversible after all.20
John Cooper, the careful Reformed philosopher, puts the problem bluntly in his book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting:
If the extinction-re-creation account of Jesus' resurrection is true, then the teaching of Chalcedon is false. The two natures of Christ are separable and were in fact separated between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The human being Jesus completely ceased to exist. … What occurred on Easter is essentially the same as the miracle of Christmas. Once again the Word became flesh, this time resurrection flesh. We do not have an incarnation and something essentially different — a resurrection — in the life of Christ, but two incarnations.
— John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting
Cooper is right. If physicalism means the person ends at death, then the death of Christ was the end of the incarnation. And the resurrection was a second incarnation. That is not what the Bible teaches.21
Third, it matters for the incarnation itself. Chalcedon says the two natures are "without separation." That phrase is not a suggestion. It is a boundary. It means the union of God and man in Christ cannot be undone. Not by suffering. Not by death. Not by anything.
Think about what that means. The Son entered our world and took on a human life, knowing that life would lead to a cross. He did not flinch. He did not hold back. And even when His body died, the union held. His deity and His humanity were never pulled apart, not even for a moment.22
On a physicalist view, death does exactly what Chalcedon forbids. It separates the natures. The divine nature goes on. The human nature does not. For three days the boundary is crossed, the union is broken, and the God-Man is gone.
I do not say this to be harsh toward Christians who hold a physicalist view. Many of them are good and godly people who love the Lord and believe in the authority of Scripture. But I am convinced that their view of human nature, carried to its logical end, creates a serious problem at the very heart of the faith. And I think we owe it to each other to say so plainly.23
This is where the work of theologian Michael Wilkinson becomes so helpful. In his book Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology, Wilkinson argues that the way we define human nature should be shaped by what we already know about the human nature of Christ. He calls this a "Chalcedonian anthropology," and the idea is powerful in its simplicity.24
Here is the core of his argument. In Christ, the person of the Son is not the same thing as His human nature. He is a divine Person who lives in and acts through a human nature made of body and soul. Person and nature are related but distinct. The Person is the "who." The nature is the "what." The Son is the who. The body and soul together are the what.25
Wilkinson then asks a very good question. If this person-nature pattern defines what it means to be fully human in Christ, why would we use a completely different pattern when we define what it means to be human for the rest of us? His answer: we should not.
Wilkinson in His Own Words
The incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ gives us the man par excellence which must govern how we define the creation of man par ordinaire.
— Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor
In plain English: what Jesus is as the perfect man should guide how we understand every other human being. Jesus is a Person who lives in a body-and-soul nature. We, too, are persons who live in a body-and-soul nature.26
Wilkinson puts it in the language of Chalcedon. In Christ, the divine Person of the Son "subsists in" a human nature (a body and a rational soul). The Son is the acting subject. He does not replace the human soul or crowd it out. He takes it up into His own existence. In ordinary human beings, the pattern is the same at its basic level. A human person subsists in a human nature made of body and soul.27
This approach has a powerful result. It keeps Christology and anthropology in step with each other. Most views of human nature work only at the nature level. They ask: is a person a body, or a body and soul? That is a fine question. But Wilkinson shows that we also need to ask about the person who lives in that nature. In Christ, the person and the nature are distinct. Chalcedon insists on it. And Wilkinson argues that the same distinction should carry over, with the right adjustments, into our understanding of ordinary human beings.28
Why does this help with the three-days problem? Because it makes clear that the human Christ is body and soul. The Chalcedonian definition says so in plain language: He is made of "a rational soul and body." When Jesus died, His body went to the grave. His human soul continued, still united to the Person of the Son. The person-nature structure held. The union was not broken. And if this is what being human means for Christ, then it tells us something important about what being human means for us too.29
Wilkinson goes further. He argues that at death, the human person continues to exist in the soul, apart from the body. At the resurrection, the fullness of the human nature is restored. The body and soul come back together. This is true for Christ, and it is true, by extension, for every human being. Death separates what God joined. The resurrection puts it back. In between, the soul carries on. This is not a Platonic escape from the body. It is a temporary and unnatural separation that will one day be healed.
In the foreword to Wilkinson's book, theologian Stephen Wellum explains the problem that Wilkinson is solving. Most discussions of human nature treat "person" and "nature" as the same thing. A person just is a body and a soul, or just is a body. But in Christology, we know better. In Christ, the person is not the nature. The Son is a divine Person with a human nature. If we flatten person and nature together in our view of ordinary human beings, we cannot consistently extend that view to Christ without creating trouble.30
Wilkinson presses this point. If anthropology treats the person as nothing more than a physical body, and if we then read that understanding back onto Christ, one of two ancient errors appears. Either the human nature of Christ had its own separate person (a view called Nestorianism, which gives Christ two persons). Or the divine Son replaced a part of the human nature and Christ was not fully human (a view called Apollinarianism). Both were rejected by the early councils. Both are avoided when we keep person and nature distinct and when we affirm that human nature includes a real, separable soul.31
Wilkinson sums up his proposal in six theses, but the core idea is one sentence: because the man Jesus Christ is the revelation of true human being, His constitution should define ours. Christ is a person in a body-and-soul nature. So are we.32
From Christ to Us
Wilkinson's argument runs in one direction: from Christology to anthropology, from what we know about the man Jesus Christ to what we can say about all human beings. Most approaches run the other direction. They start with a theory about human nature and then apply it to Christ. That is where the trouble starts. If we begin with the biblical and creedal picture of Christ and let it guide our view of human nature, the result is clear. A human being is not just a body. A human being is a person who lives in a nature made of body and soul.33
Fair-minded readers will want to hear the other side. What do thoughtful physicalists say in response to this argument? Let me present the strongest replies and then offer my answers.
Some Christian physicalists argue that the divine Son did not need a human soul to keep the incarnation going during the three days. The Word of God has the power to sustain a human nature even through death. On this view, the Son held the human nature in existence by His own divine power, without any immaterial soul.34
This reply has a certain appeal. God is all-powerful. He can do what He chooses. But the question is not what God can do. The question is what He did, and what the Bible says about it. Jesus said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." That language assumes a spirit to commit. Peter said the soul of Christ was not abandoned to Hades. That assumes a soul that went to Hades. The New Testament uses the language of body and soul, not the language of a body held together by divine power alone.
There is a deeper concern too. If the divine Word alone could sustain a human nature apart from any human soul, then why did Chalcedon insist on "a rational soul and body"? The council was not adding extra parts for decoration. It was defining what human nature is. Take away the soul and you do not have a human nature anymore, at least not the kind Chalcedon was talking about.35
Another reply is simpler. Some say that what happened to Jesus between Friday and Sunday is a mystery, and we should not press it too hard. The Bible tells us He died and rose again. The details of what happened in between are best left with God.
I respect this caution. Mysteries deserve humility. But the early church did not treat this as a question we cannot answer. The councils, the creeds, and the New Testament all speak to it. Jesus told the thief He would be with him in paradise that day. Peter said His soul was not left in Hades. Paul implied that Christ's work as mediator continued without interruption. These are not speculations. They are biblical data. And they point clearly to a soul that survived the body's death.36
There is also a principle at stake. We do not get to claim "mystery" only when the evidence goes against our view. If the texts point one direction, we should follow them, even if the conclusion is hard for our preferred system. Mystery is real. But mystery is not a reason to ignore what the Bible says plainly.
We do not need to explain every detail of what happened in the tomb. But we do need to respect what Scripture reveals. And Scripture reveals enough to rule out the idea that Jesus simply stopped being human at the cross.
A third reply targets a specific text. First Peter 3:18–19 says that Christ "was put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison" (ESV). Some interpreters take this to mean that Jesus, in His human spirit, was active during the three days. But the passage is famously difficult, and physicalists point out that scholars disagree about what it means.37
This is a fair point. First Peter 3:18–19 is one of the most debated passages in the New Testament, and I would not want to build the whole argument on it. But the argument does not rest on this passage alone. It rests on Luke 23:43 ("today you will be with me in paradise"), Luke 23:46 ("into your hands I commit my spirit"), Acts 2:27 and 31 (the soul of Christ not abandoned to Hades), and the consistent witness of the creeds and councils. The descent passage is added support, not the foundation.38
A final reply suggests that I am asking the Chalcedonian definition to do more work than it was designed to do. Chalcedon was a fifth-century council solving fifth-century problems. It was not directly addressing the question of what happens to human nature at death.39
True enough, as far as it goes. The bishops at Chalcedon were mainly concerned with keeping the Person and natures of Christ together in the right way. They were not writing a treatise on the intermediate state. But their definition has logical consequences that reach further than any one debate. If human nature is "a rational soul and body," and if the natures of Christ cannot be separated, then the soul must survive the death of the body to keep the union intact. That is not reading too much into Chalcedon. It is reading Chalcedon straight.40
Joshua Farris, a theologian who has written carefully on this question, points out the result for physicalism in its most direct form. If a person is only a body, then when Christ's body died, He stopped being human. That leaves His work as our representative hanging in the air during the time between the cross and the empty tomb.41
The obvious challenge for a two-part materialist Christology comes from the doctrine of Christ's persistence upon somatic death. Upon Christ's human body dying, Christ would cease to be human. The concern that he persists raises significant worries about his representational work on behalf of humans during the intermediate state of disembodied existence.
— Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology
Farris adds that this step in the plan of redemption "is sustained on a dualist account of human nature," and he is right.42
Let me bring this together. Christology does not merely allow dualism. It needs it.
If Jesus Christ is one Person with two natures, and if those natures can never be separated, then His human nature must have survived His death on the cross. The only way for a human nature to survive the death of the body is for there to be something more than the body. There must be a soul. A real, immaterial, conscious soul that goes on living when the body stops.
That is what Scripture teaches. "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." "Today you will be with me in paradise." "You will not abandon my soul to Hades." The language is consistent. The picture is clear. Jesus had a human soul. That soul survived. And because it survived, the God-Man was never interrupted. The incarnation held. The atonement held. The union held.43
And if Jesus, the perfect man, has a soul that survives death, then so do we. Wilkinson's insight runs from Christology to anthropology. What is true of the man "par excellence" is true of mankind in general. We are not just bodies. We are body-and-soul creatures, made in the image of a God who Himself became a body-and-soul man.
This is one of the strongest theological reasons I know to believe you have a soul. It does not come from philosophy alone. It does not come from NDE research alone, though the evidence from near-death experiences lines up with it beautifully. We will begin looking at that evidence in Chapter 6. But here the argument comes from the person of Christ Himself, from the ancient teaching of the church, and from the clear witness of Scripture.
The question we asked at the beginning was simple. Where was Jesus on Holy Saturday? The answer, I believe, is just as simple. His body was in the tomb. His soul was in paradise. And the God-Man was unbroken, just as Chalcedon said He must be.
Christology Guards the Conversation
As we turn in the next chapters to the evidence from near-death experiences, keep this Christological anchor in mind. NDE evidence can support the reality of the soul. But the doctrine of the soul does not depend on NDE evidence. It is grounded in Scripture and in the person of Christ. Any experience that points to the soul's survival after death is consistent with what the Bible teaches. Any claim that reduces the person to a body alone runs into the same problem we have seen here. It puts the God-Man at risk. Test every claim by the standard the church has held for centuries: Christ is fully God and fully man, body and soul, and that union can never be undone.
I do not say any of this to win an argument. I say it because it matters for how we live and how we die. If you have a soul, then death is not the end of you. Your body will rest, but you will go on. And the same Christ who kept His own humanity through death will keep you too. He committed His spirit to the Father. You can do the same.
I think of the believers I have known who faced death with calm and even with joy. They were not pretending. They were not in denial. They knew something. They knew that they were more than a body. They knew that what makes them who they are would not be destroyed when their heart stopped beating. They knew they would be with Christ, just as Christ was with the Father on that Saturday between the cross and the empty tomb.
That kind of confidence does not come from a good attitude. It comes from a sound view of who you are. It comes from knowing that you are body and soul, and that the God who joined those two together at your creation will keep your soul safe when they come apart at your death. That is the comfort the doctrine of the soul gives. And it is a comfort grounded in the person of Christ.
The question of human nature is not an abstract debate for scholars. It touches the person of Jesus Christ. It touches the cross. It touches your own hope in death. And when we get it right, the comfort it gives is grounded not in wishful thinking but in the deepest truth the Christian faith confesses: that God became one of us, body and soul, and never let go.
In the chapters ahead, we turn from theology to evidence. We will ask what a near-death experience actually is, how to tell good evidence from bad, and what happens when the soul appears to step outside the body. The doctrine of the soul has been set on its foundation. Now we go looking for the data.44
↑ 1. The argument in this chapter draws on the author’s doctoral dissertation (Th.D., Trinity Theological Seminary), especially Appendix C, which examines the Christological consequences of physicalism. It also relies heavily on Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology, Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024). The term “Chalcedonian anthropology” is Wilkinson’s own coinage and represents the first sustained effort to extend the person-nature ontology of Chalcedonian Christology into a formal model of human nature.
↑ 2. The classic formulation is the Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451), which confesses that Christ is “truly God and truly man, of a rational soul (psychē logikē) and body.” The Greek term hypostasis refers to the individual, concrete existence of a person. In Trinitarian theology it distinguishes the three Persons (Father, Son, and Spirit) who share one divine nature (ousia). In Christology it identifies the single divine Person of the Son who now subsists in two natures, one divine and one human.
↑ 3. The four negative adverbs of the Chalcedonian Definition — “without confusion, without change, without division, without separation” (Greek: asynchytōs, atreptōs, adiairetōs, achōristōs) — set the boundaries within which all faithful Christology must operate. The first two guard against mixing the natures (against Eutychianism); the last two guard against splitting them (against Nestorianism). For the full text of the Definition, see Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, vol. 1 (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 86.
↑ 4. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 6, under “Constitution and Function.” Wilkinson demonstrates that the Chalcedonian tradition consistently defines Christ’s human nature as consisting of a body and a rational soul, and that this definition carries ontological weight. The soul is not an incidental label; it is a constituent part of what makes the human nature a human nature.
↑ 5. All Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.
↑ 6. Luke 23:46. The word translated “spirit” is Greek pneuma, which here refers to the immaterial dimension of the human person. Jesus is echoing Psalm 31:5. The act of “committing” His spirit to the Father presupposes that there is a spirit to commend — something distinct from the body that is about to die.
↑ 7. John 10:17–18. Jesus describes His death as a free, voluntary act: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.” The language of authority over both the laying down and the taking up implies a continuous agent who acts through both events.
↑ 8. Luke 23:43. Some interpreters try to move the comma (“Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in paradise”), placing “today” with the saying rather than the promise. But this is unnatural in Greek, and the reading “today you will be with me in paradise” has been the dominant understanding in Christian tradition. See John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), chap. 4.
↑ 9. Acts 2:27, 31. Peter quotes from Psalm 16:10 (LXX Psalm 15:10). The Greek word translated “soul” is psychē. Peter distinguishes two things that were preserved: the soul (not abandoned to Hades) and the body (not allowed to decay). This two-part language reflects a dualist understanding of Christ’s death.
↑ 10. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 6. See especially footnote 88 in Wilkinson: “It should be noted that the indivisibility of the person-nature constitution does not deny the separation of the body at Christ’s death. Even then, the human soul, which is part of the human nature, remained in the self-subsistence of the person of the Son as a human being.”
↑ 11. This is the logical consequence that physicalists must reckon with. If human nature is entirely constituted by the physical body, and if the body dies, then the human nature ceases. In the case of Christ, this means the God-Man is reduced to God alone for three days. The author’s dissertation (Trinity Theological Seminary), Appendix C, examines this consequence at length.
↑ 12. The author’s doctoral dissertation (Th.D., Trinity Theological Seminary), chap. 5. In my research I was not able to find an in-depth treatment of the incarnation and death of Jesus from a physicalist viewpoint that adequately dealt with the Christological implications. Several writers touch on the subject, but none address the hypostatic-union problem with the depth it requires.
↑ 13. This is what Cooper calls the “extinction-re-creation” view. On this account, Jesus’ human nature ceased to exist at death and was created afresh at the resurrection. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6.
↑ 14. This more extreme view has been hinted at by some physicalists who take the identity of person and body with full seriousness. If the Son truly is the man Jesus, and if the man Jesus is entirely constituted by his body, then the death of the body is the death of everything that the Son had become in the incarnation. The author’s dissertation examines this implication in Appendix C. Few physicalists state the view this baldly, but the logic points there.
↑ 15. Cooper makes this point directly: “If the extinction-re-creationists are consistent, they seem closer to the heresies which Chalcedon rejected than to orthodox Christology itself. For either the human nature of the Son is incidental even after his incarnation and was nonexistent for three Jewish days; or else we have two persons in Jesus Christ, a divine person who continued to exist and a human person who did not. Neither option would have escaped condemnation at Chalcedon.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6.
↑ 16. For a standard exposition of the Thomistic view that the soul is the “form” of the body, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, q. 75–76. Aquinas himself held that the soul can subsist apart from the body after death, in an incomplete but real state. This means Aquinas’s own position is closer to substance dualism than to the kind of physicalism under discussion here, since it requires an immaterial entity (the soul) that survives bodily death. The distinction between Thomistic hylomorphism and substance dualism, while real, is narrower than is often supposed when the question of survival is pressed. See Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), chap. 6, for a careful modern exposition.
↑ 17. On the necessity of both natures for the atoning work of Christ, see the Chalcedonian tradition’s consistent insistence that only the God-Man can mediate between God and humanity. Gregory of Nazianzus (Epistle 101) stated the principle that became axiomatic: “That which has not been assumed has not been healed.” If Christ’s human nature was interrupted at death, then the assumption was interrupted with it.
↑ 18. 1 Timothy 2:5. The present tense (“there is one mediator”) is significant. Paul writes this after the death and resurrection of Christ. The mediation is ongoing. The humanity of Christ has not been retired.
↑ 19. The permanence of the incarnation is a settled point in orthodox Christology. The Son did not temporarily borrow a human nature; He assumed it permanently. After the resurrection and ascension, Christ remains the God-Man. He appears in Revelation as both the Lion and the Lamb (Rev 5:5–6), still bearing the marks of His humanity. See Stephen J. Wellum, God the Son Incarnate: The Doctrine of Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 2016), 424.
↑ 20. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6. Cooper writes: “We do not have an incarnation and something essentially different — a resurrection — in the life of Christ, but two incarnations.”
↑ 21. Cooper’s analysis here is worth reading in full. He concludes: “The intermediate state account, entailing a dualistic anthropology, would generate no christological difficulty. In fact it would solve this problem. Since human nature is such that persons can exist temporarily without their bodies, Jesus Christ could have existed between Friday and Sunday without his body and yet have been one person with both a divine and a human nature.” Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chap. 6.
↑ 22. The fourth negative adverb of the Chalcedonian Definition, “without separation” (achōristōs), directly forbids any severing of the two natures. Even in death, the union between the divine and human natures of Christ was not dissolved.
↑ 23. The author’s dissertation (Th.D., Trinity Theological Seminary), chap. 5 and Appendix C, addresses this concern in the context of the conditional immortality (CI) debate. Many theologians within the CI movement hold physicalist views and are aware of the Christological difficulties, but have not resolved them satisfactorily.
↑ 24. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Introduction. Wilkinson states three presuppositions: (1) as the man par excellence, Jesus Christ reveals all that it means to be truly human, including human constitution; (2) Chalcedonian Christology provides the orthodox understanding of the Son’s incarnation; and (3) the Reformed orthodox tradition provides the most helpful articulation of orthodox ontology. These presuppositions frame his entire project.
↑ 25. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 7. The person-nature distinction is foundational. In the Chalcedonian tradition, the person (hypostasis) is the “who” — the acting subject. The nature (ousia or physis) is the “what” — the substance in which the person subsists. In Christ, the divine Person of the Son subsists in both a divine nature and a human nature (body and soul).
↑ 26. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Introduction. The Latin phrases par excellence (the supreme example) and par ordinaire (the ordinary instance) capture Wilkinson’s distinction. Christ is the supreme human being whose constitution defines what it means to be an ordinary human being.
↑ 27. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 7. Wilkinson is careful to note that the analogy involves adjustments. In Christ, the person is divine; in ordinary humans, the person is created. But the basic structure — person subsisting in a body-and-soul nature — is the same.
↑ 28. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Conclusion. He writes: “The predominant models lack a personal hypostasis in the constitution of merely human being to correspond with the personal hypostasis in the fully human being of Christ.” This gap is what his Chalcedonian anthropology is designed to fill.
↑ 29. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 6, fn. 88. At death, the human person continues to subsist in a human soul, absent the body. At the resurrection, there is a restoration of the fullness of the human nature. This is true for Christ and, by extension, for all human beings.
↑ 30. Stephen J. Wellum, Foreword to Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor. Wellum explains that most anthropological discussions conflate “person” and “nature,” using the term “person” to refer to a human nature alone. This conflation creates problems when applied to Christology, where person and nature are kept rigorously distinct.
↑ 31. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Introduction and chap. 7. Apollinarianism held that the divine Logos replaced the human rational soul in Christ, resulting in an incomplete human nature. Nestorianism was charged with dividing the one Christ into two persons. Both heresies arise when the person-nature distinction is mishandled. Wilkinson argues that physicalist anthropologies, when read back into Christology, risk generating one or both of these problems.
↑ 32. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, Conclusion. The six theses are: (1) Christ as the man is ontologically definitive for our human being; (2) Scripture presents a biblical analogy between the man and mere man; (3) the Chalcedonian Definition presents a person-nature distinction that invites extension into anthropology; (4) Chalcedonian Christology identifies the personal hypostasis as the person of Christ and the locus of union; (5) the man Jesus Christ is the divine person subsisting in a human nature of body and soul; (6) mere man is a human person subsisting in a human nature of body and soul.
↑ 33. The direction of the argument — from Christology to anthropology rather than from anthropology to Christology — is one of Wilkinson’s most important methodological contributions. Many forms of kenotic Christology begin with a modern theory of human nature and then try to fit Christ into it, often with problematic results. Wilkinson reverses the direction, letting the settled Christological conclusions guide the anthropological ones.
↑ 34. This reply appears in various forms among Christian physicalists within the conditional immortality movement and beyond. The basic claim is that God’s power is sufficient to preserve whatever is needed for the human nature of Christ to persist through death, even without an immaterial soul. The difficulty is that this requires redefining “human nature” away from what Chalcedon meant by the term.
↑ 35. The Chalcedonian Definition’s phrase “of a rational soul and body” (ek psychēs logikēs kai sōmatos) is a constituent description. It tells us what the human nature of Christ is made of. If either part is removed, the nature described is no longer the nature Chalcedon confessed.
↑ 36. The Apostles’ Creed affirms that Christ “descended into hell” (Latin: descendit ad inferos), historically understood as a reference to Christ’s activity between His death and resurrection. The precise meaning has been debated, but the clause assumes that Christ was somewhere and doing something during the three days — not simply nonexistent.
↑ 37. 1 Peter 3:18–19. The interpretive options include: (1) Christ in His human spirit preached to imprisoned spirits during the three days; (2) Christ through the Spirit preached through Noah before the Flood; (3) Christ at His ascension proclaimed victory to fallen angels. For a balanced survey, see Wayne Grudem, 1 Peter, Tyndale New Testament Commentaries (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1988), 203–39.
↑ 38. The cumulative case rests on multiple texts (Luke 23:43, 46; Acts 2:27, 31; John 10:17–18) and on the consistent teaching of the early church and the ecumenical creeds. No single text bears the full weight. Together they form a convergent witness that Christ was active as a human being between His death and resurrection.
↑ 39. This is a version of what is sometimes called the “limited scope” objection — the claim that conciliar definitions should not be pressed beyond the specific controversies they were designed to address. There is some truth in this caution, but it can be overstated. The logical entailments of a creedal definition are as binding as its explicit statements, provided the reasoning is sound. The claim that Christ has a human nature consisting of “a rational soul and body” entails that the human nature is not reducible to the body alone.
↑ 40. Wilkinson makes this point at length in Crowned with Glory and Honor, chap. 6. The Chalcedonian Definition is not just a historical document; it is a dogmatic norm that has ongoing authority for Christian theology. Its implications for anthropology are legitimate extensions of its Christological commitments.
↑ 41. Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), chap. 7. Farris notes that a materialist Christology faces the challenge of Christ’s persistence through death and that the dualist account sustains the continuity of Christ’s representational work.
↑ 42. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology, chap. 7. The full sentence reads: “Nonetheless, it is this crucial step in the redemptive process that is sustained on a dualist account of human nature.”
↑ 43. For a wider discussion of how the doctrine of human nature connects to other Christian doctrines — including the atonement, the Trinity, the resurrection of the body, and the image of God — see Appendix E.
↑ 44. Part III of this book (Chapters 6–8) introduces the near-death experience, explains how to evaluate evidence, and presents the out-of-body experience as the hinge of the NDE argument for the soul. Part IV (Chapters 9–12) presents the strongest evidence. The theological foundation laid in Part II (this chapter and the previous one) gives those evidence chapters their framework.