Chapter 5
Before we look at a single near-death experience report, we need to settle a question that comes before all the others. When NDErs say they left their bodies, watched their own surgery from above, traveled through a tunnel, met deceased relatives, or stood face-to-face with Jesus — is any of that even possible? Or are we just dressing up dying-brain hallucinations in spiritual language?
The answer depends entirely on what kind of creature you think a human being is. If physicalism is true — if you and I are nothing but very complicated bodies with very complicated brains, and "soul" is just a poetic way of describing brain activity — then NDEs cannot involve any real separation of soul from body. There is no soul to separate.1 The whole NDE phenomenon would have to be filed under "weird brain stuff." But if the Bible teaches what most Christians have believed for two thousand years — that human beings are made of a body and an immaterial soul, and that the soul keeps existing after the body dies — then NDE reports of leaving the body and meeting the Lord are not strange exceptions to the biblical story. They are exactly what the biblical story would lead us to expect.
So this chapter has one job: to show that Scripture really does teach what Christians have historically called substance dualism. Not Plato's dualism, where the body is a prison and the soul is the real self trying to escape. Something gentler and more biblical — what John Cooper calls "holistic dualism."2 The body and soul belong together. They were made to be united. But they can be separated, and at death they are separated, until the resurrection puts them back together for good.
The word "dualism" scares some Christians. They picture a Greek philosopher saying the body is evil and the soul is divine. That is not what we are talking about.
Substance dualism is simply the view that a human person is made of two real, distinct kinds of things — a material body and an immaterial soul — and that the soul is what carries personal identity through death.3 The body is genuinely good. God made it, called it "very good," and will resurrect it. But the body is not all there is to you. There is something more — what the Hebrews called nephesh (נֶפֶשׁ) or ruach (רוּחַ), what the Greeks called psychē (ψυχή) or pneuma (πνεῦμα) — and that something can survive when the body cannot.
Cooper's term "holistic dualism" captures this. Holistic means body and soul are deeply integrated during earthly life — two parts of one whole, working as one. Dualistic means that even though they belong together, they are not the same thing, and they can come apart.4 Like a husband and wife in a strong marriage: deeply one, but still two persons, capable of being separated without ceasing to exist.
The story starts on page two of the Bible. "Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat chayyim, נִשְׁמַת חַיִּים), and the man became a living creature (nephesh chayyah, נֶפֶשׁ חַיָּה)" (Gen 2:7).
Look closely at how this happens. God does not just speak Adam into existence the way He spoke light into existence. He does it in two steps. First, He shapes a body from the dirt. At that point Adam has eyes, lungs, a heart — the whole body. But Adam is not yet alive. He is a perfectly formed corpse. Then God adds a second ingredient: the nishmat chayyim, the "breath of life." Only when this second thing meets the first thing does Adam become a nephesh chayyah — a living being.
Now, the Hebrew word nephesh is rich. It can mean "life," "self," "person," "appetite," even "throat" (the place breath passes through). Physicalists love to point this out, and they are right that we should not flatten nephesh into the English word "soul" without paying attention to context.5 But Cooper makes a careful and important point: when God puts the dust together with the breath of life, the picture is not materialism. Materialism would say the dust by itself, organized correctly, generates life — that ruach is hidden inside the dust waiting to come out. That is not what the text says. Existential power is not in the dust. Life comes only when God adds something from outside the dust.6
So even at the very beginning, the Bible gives us two ingredients God puts together to make a person. Whatever we call them, they are not the same kind of thing. Dust is one thing; the breath that comes from God is another. And as we will see, when those two ingredients come apart at death, the breath does not just disappear. It goes somewhere.
Jump ahead to the death of Rachel. The text says, "And as her soul (nephesh, נַפְשָׁהּ) was departing (for she was dying), she called his name Ben-oni" (Gen 35:18).
The verb here is yatsa' (יָצָא) — "to go out, to depart, to exit." Rachel's nephesh is going out of her. This is not poetic language tucked into a hymn. It is a narrative description of what is actually happening as she dies. Her body is staying right there on the road to Bethlehem. So whatever is "going out" cannot be her body. And it cannot just be her "life" in the sense of biological function, because biological function does not "go" anywhere — it just stops. Something is leaving the body and traveling to a destination.
The same kind of language shows up elsewhere. In 1 Kings 17:21–22, Elijah prays over the widow's dead son: "O LORD my God, let this child's life (nephesh, נֶפֶשׁ) come into him again. And the LORD listened to the voice of Elijah. And the life (nephesh) of the child came into him again, and he revived." The nephesh had gone out (the boy died); now the nephesh comes back in (he revives). Going out and coming back in is the language of an entity that exists somewhere between those two moments. Annihilation does not "come back in." A traveler does.
Notice the pattern. In death, something departs. In resurrection, something returns. The Bible describes this so consistently that it is hard to read these texts as anything other than a soul leaving and re-entering its body. NDErs describe the very same thing — leaving the body, traveling somewhere, and returning. The biblical writers and the cardiac arrest survivors are using the same vocabulary.
The episode at Endor is one of the strangest stories in the Old Testament, but it is enormously important for our question. King Saul, desperate and abandoned by God, sneaks out at night to consult a medium. He asks her to bring up Samuel — who has been dead and buried for some time. To everyone's apparent surprise (the medium herself is shocked), Samuel actually appears and speaks.7
I am not arguing that necromancy is permitted. The Old Testament forbids it absolutely (Deut 18:10–12), and we will look at that prohibition in a later chapter. The point here is what the text shows about Samuel. The deceased prophet is not gone. He is not unconscious. He is not reabsorbed into some impersonal life force. He is Samuel — recognizable, conscious, with full memory of his earthly ministry, capable of rebuking Saul for disobedience, and still functioning as a true prophet (his prediction of Saul's death is fulfilled the next day).
If physicalism were true, this story would be impossible to write. There would be no Samuel left to summon. The author of 1 Samuel takes for granted what physicalism denies — that the human person continues to exist between death and resurrection, retaining identity, memory, and moral agency.
The Preacher closes his book with a haunting picture of human death: "And the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit (ruach, רוּחַ) returns to God who gave it" (Eccl 12:7).
This is Genesis 2:7 played in reverse. At creation, God formed dust into a body and added ruach; the result was a living person. At death, the two ingredients separate. The dust returns to where it came from — the ground. The ruach returns to where it came from — God. Two ingredients, two destinations.
The verse simply does not work on physicalism. If the spirit is just the body's life-function, there is no "spirit" to "return" anywhere — there is only a body that stops working. But Ecclesiastes describes two distinct movements going in two distinct directions. That requires two distinct things.
If you want one verse that decisively settles whether the New Testament teaches body-soul dualism, here it is. Jesus says: "And do not fear those who kill the body (sōma, σῶμα) but cannot kill the soul (psychē, ψυχή). Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (Geenna, γέεννα)" (Matt 10:28).
Stop and let this sink in. Jesus is comforting His disciples about persecution. They might be killed for following Him. He tells them not to be afraid, and the reason He gives is that human killers can kill the body but cannot kill the soul. The whole comfort of the verse depends on body and soul being two different things. If sōma and psychē are just two ways of talking about one and the same physical organism, then the disciples should be terrified, because anyone who kills the body has, by definition, killed the soul too. Jesus' argument fails on physicalism. It only works if soul and body are distinct, and if the soul can survive when the body is destroyed.8
Cooper presses this point hard. Some scholars have tried to read sōma and psychē here as Hebrew-style synecdoche, where each word stands for the whole person. But that cannot work. As Cooper writes, both terms cannot stand for the whole bodily person in this text — because whatever the soul is, the verse says it can exist before God without the body.9 A human without a body cannot be the same as a human with a body, no matter how the words are defined. The body-soul distinction is built into the grammar.
One more thing worth noting, especially for anyone interested in conditional immortality. The verse says that God can "destroy" (apolesai, ἀπολέσαι) both soul and body. The soul, then, is not inherently indestructible. It can survive when the body dies, but it is not eternal by nature — only God can keep it in being or end its existence. Substance dualism does not require Plato's "immortal soul." It requires only a soul that can survive bodily death. Whether that soul will continue to exist forever is a separate question, settled by God's grace, not by the soul's own nature.10
Matthew 10:28 does not stand alone. The New Testament is full of texts that presuppose the same body-soul dualism, and we will look at them in detail in the chapters where they are at home. But because every NT writer's anthropology matters here, let me sketch the picture.
Jesus told the dying thief, "Today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43) — today, not at the future resurrection (full exegesis in Chapter 19). Paul told the Corinthians he would rather "be away from the body and at home with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8), and the Philippians that to "depart" was to be "with Christ" (Phil 1:23) — both passages assuming the apostle is not identical to his body (full exegesis in Chapter 20). John saw "the souls of those who had been slain" worshiping under God's altar, conscious, vocal, and clothed in white (Rev 6:9–11) — disembodied souls as the most natural reading (full exegesis in Chapter 20). Jesus' parable of the rich man and Lazarus assumes conscious post-death existence in two distinct realms (Luke 16:19–31, Chapter 19). Moses, dead for over a thousand years, appeared with Elijah on the Mount of Transfiguration — speaking, recognizable, fully himself (Matt 17:1–8, Chapter 20).11
The cumulative weight is overwhelming. From Genesis to Revelation, the biblical writers assume a creature with two parts that can come apart at death. The soul that survives is not a strange Platonic intruder. It is the most consistent thread in the Bible's teaching about what happens when we die.
Christian physicalists like Joel Green and Nancey Murphy are serious scholars and faithful believers, and they deserve a fair hearing. They argue that the Bible does not actually teach what I have just argued it teaches. Let me lay out their three main objections and respond to each.
Three physicalist objections: (1) The Hebrew Bible is "holistic" and never thinks of humans as body-plus-soul composites. (2) Words like nephesh and ruach never really mean an immaterial soul; they mean "life" or "person." (3) The New Testament continues this Hebrew holism without breaking from it.
The first claim is that the Hebrews thought of the human person as a unified whole, not a composite of two ingredients. They did not share Plato's sharp body-soul dichotomy. So when the Old Testament uses words like nephesh, it just means the whole living person, not an immaterial part.
This is partly true, and Cooper grants it. The Hebrews really were holistic in their thinking. They emphasized the unity and integration of the person. But — and this is the key move — holism and dualism are not opposites. You can affirm both. In fact, that is exactly what Cooper's "holistic dualism" does.12 During earthly life, body and soul are deeply unified, and the person functions as one integrated being. Hebrew anthropology stresses that unity, and rightly so. But the Hebrews also clearly believed that something survived death and went somewhere — to Sheol, to the fathers, to God. That belief is impossible without ontological dualism, no matter how holistic the person is in this life.
Saying "the Hebrews were holistic, therefore not dualistic" is like saying "this couple is happily married, therefore there is only one of them." Unity does not erase distinction.
The second objection focuses on vocabulary. Nephesh, the physicalists argue, has a wide range of meanings — life, self, person, throat, appetite — but never an immaterial substance.
I agree that nephesh has a range. But the range is the problem for physicalism, not for dualism. Cooper's exegetical analysis is decisive here.13 When nephesh appears in death-and-departure contexts — Rachel's nephesh "going out," Elijah's prayer for the boy's nephesh to "come back," the Psalmist's confidence that God will not abandon his nephesh to Sheol — it cannot mean "person as a whole" (the body is staying behind) and it cannot mean "biological life" (life does not travel to a location). In those contexts, nephesh refers to something that separates from the body. That is exactly what dualists mean by "soul."
The third claim is that the New Testament writers, being good Hebrews, simply carried over the OT's monistic anthropology and never broke from it. So we should not read NT references to "soul" as if they meant an immaterial substance.
The trouble is that the NT explicitly teaches body-soul distinction in passages like Matthew 10:28 and conscious survival after death in passages like Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, and Revelation 6:9–11. These texts cannot be read as physicalism without serious distortion. Cooper has demonstrated at length that Christian physicalists like Green play down the evidence for the intermediate state instead of refuting it, and tend to avoid the texts that most clearly assume disembodied existence.14 The cumulative testimony of the New Testament — even though it is not a primary doctrinal focus — is consistent and clear: believers enjoy fellowship with Christ between bodily death and the final resurrection.15
One more line of argument deserves a brief mention, because it functions as a powerful theological backstop. Michael Wilkinson's recent work on Chalcedonian anthropology argues that our doctrine of human nature must be governed by our doctrine of Christ. If the Chalcedonian Definition (AD 451) confesses that the eternal Son took to Himself a human nature consisting of "body and rational soul," then human nature consists of body and rational soul.16 Otherwise the Son did not assume what we are, and the great patristic principle holds — what is not assumed is not healed. Wilkinson presses this further: at death, the human person continues to subsist in the human soul, apart from the body, and at the resurrection the fullness of human nature is restored.17 The soul that survives is exactly what Chalcedon requires.
This is not a small detail. Christian physicalism has serious trouble with the triduum mortis — the three days between Christ's death and resurrection. If a human being just is a body, then when Jesus' body lay in the tomb, where was Jesus? The traditional answer — that His human soul, hypostatically united to the eternal Son, descended to the dead — is unavailable on physicalism. (I have argued this case more fully in my companion volume The Word Made Flesh, especially chapters 3 to 5.) The Christological evidence and the anthropological evidence converge: if Christ has a soul, we have a soul; if His soul survived His death, our souls survive ours.
So where does this leave us as we head into the rest of the book?
It leaves us in a wonderful place. If the Bible teaches that the soul can separate from the body at death and remain conscious, active, recognizable, and aware — and I believe we have just seen that it does — then NDE reports of precisely this experience are not extra-biblical anomalies that Christians should fear. They are exactly what the Bible has always said happens. When a cardiac arrest patient describes watching the resuscitation from the ceiling, hearing what the team said, and meeting the Lord — that is not a contradiction of Scripture. That is Scripture predicting something Scripture is then willing to receive.
The convergence point. The biblical case for substance dualism (this chapter) and the empirical case from veridical NDEs (Chapter 6) converge on the same conclusion from completely different angles. Scripture says the soul survives death. Cardiac arrest research suggests consciousness can function when the brain cannot. Two independent witnesses, one verdict.
Cooper himself, after fifteen years of further study following the first edition of his book, concluded that NDE evidence — when carefully evaluated — provides supportive (though not conclusive) confirmation of the dualism the Bible has already taught.18 He is right to be cautious; we will treat the evidential question with care in the chapters that follow. But the basic shape of the picture is now in place. We have a biblical anthropology that allows for, and indeed predicts, the kind of experiences the NDE literature describes.
The case I have made in this chapter is not flashy. It is the careful, cumulative testimony of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation. God formed man from two ingredients, dust and breath. At death those ingredients come apart — the dust returns to the earth, the spirit returns to God. Rachel's soul departed; the widow's son's soul came back. Samuel was conscious and identifiable after his death. Jesus told us our killers can take our bodies but not our souls. Paul wanted to be away from the body and home with the Lord. John saw souls under the altar, alive and singing.
This is not Plato. This is not New Age teaching. This is the steady drumbeat of biblical revelation about who we are and what happens to us when we die. With the soul biblically established and theologically confirmed by Christology, we are ready to look at what NDErs have to tell us about what they have seen.
1 John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), 7. Cooper helpfully frames the same point: if humans are purely physical, the very possibility of disembodied existence is foreclosed before any biblical or empirical evidence is examined. ↩
2 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, xviii–xxiv. Cooper introduces the term "holistic dualism" precisely to distinguish his position from Platonic and Cartesian forms of dualism that denigrate the body. ↩
3 Joshua R. Farris, An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020), 29. Farris defines substance dualism as "the view that persons are identical not to the material body but to the immaterial part (e.g., the soul, the spirit, the mind) or some compound configuration of both body and soul." ↩
4 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 33–46. ↩
5 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 41–44. Cooper offers an extended treatment of the semantic range of nephesh and ruach, refusing both the simplistic "soul = immaterial substance" reading and the equally simplistic "soul just means person" reading. ↩
6 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 48. "However it happens, human existence is created only when God puts the power to exist and function into the formed dust from the outside. Existential power is not inherent in the dust itself." ↩
7 The medium's reaction in 1 Samuel 28:12 ("she cried out with a loud voice") strongly suggests that what appeared was unexpected — not a routine summoning but a genuine appearance of Samuel granted by God for purposes of judgment. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 73–76. ↩
8 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 117. ↩
9 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 117–118. ↩
10 The conditional immortality of the soul — its capacity to be both preserved by God and destroyed by God — is consistent with the broader biblical pattern in which immortality is a gift, not a possession (cf. 1 Tim 6:16). For a fuller treatment of how substance dualism and conditional immortality fit together, see the conclusion of this volume (Chapter 36) and the author's companion volume Beyond the Grave: A Biblical and Theological Case for Postmortem Salvation, especially chaps. 5–7. ↩
11 J. Steve Miller, Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings (Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023), chap. 5, "Special Issues." Miller surveys the same body of NT texts and reaches the same conclusion: the most natural reading of these passages is body-soul separability and conscious post-death existence. ↩
12 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 35–46. ↩
13 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 41–44. ↩
14 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, xxii–xxiii. Cooper specifically engages Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), and finds Green's treatment of Luke 16, Luke 23:43, 2 Cor 5:6–9, 2 Cor 12:2–4, and Phil 1:20–24 to be exegetically inadequate. ↩
15 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 156–57. ↩
16 Michael A. Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology, Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024), xii–xiii. ↩
17 Wilkinson, Crowned with Glory and Honor, xiii, 333–34. ↩
18 Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, 212–15. Cooper's treatment is appropriately cautious; he does not claim NDEs prove dualism, but he argues they offer a kind of supportive empirical witness consistent with what Scripture already teaches. The full case from veridical NDEs is developed in Chapter 6 of this volume. ↩
Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000.
Farris, Joshua R. An Introduction to Theological Anthropology: Humans, Both Creaturely and Divine. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2020.
Green, Joel B. Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008.
Miller, J. Steve. Is Christianity Compatible with Deathbed and Near-Death Experiences? The Surprising Presence of Jesus, Scarcity of Anti-Christian Elements, and Compatibility with Historic Christian Teachings. Acworth, GA: Wisdom Creek Press, 2023.
Wilkinson, Michael A. Crowned with Glory and Honor: A Chalcedonian Anthropology. Studies in Historical and Systematic Theology. Bellingham, WA: Lexham Academic, 2024.