Chapter 2

The Question Behind the Question

Are You Your Brain?

A Conversation in a Basement

Picture a small conference room in a divinity-school basement. There are about forty people in folding chairs. The speaker is a respected Christian philosopher, a senior figure in the contemporary conditional-immortality movement, and his lecture has been clear and careful. Humans, he says, are not Greek souls trapped in bodies. We are unified, embodied creatures. Hebrew anthropology, he argues, has no room for an immaterial soul that floats free of the body. The “soul” of Genesis 2:7 is just the living person — animated dust, breathing dirt, a body in operation. And when the body stops, the person stops. There is no I that survives outside the meat.¹

The audience nods along. Most of them are pastors and seminary students. Most of them have grown up with what they take to be the Greek-soul tradition — the soul-leaving-the-body picture they saw in Sunday-school art. The lecturer is offering them an alternative: a Hebrew-style holism, a fully embodied gospel, a unified human person who waits in the silence of the grave until the trumpet sounds and God resurrects them.

When the question time comes, a younger pastor in the back raises his hand.

He has just lost a parishioner. A widow named June. June was sixty-eight, a faithful Sunday-school teacher for thirty years, with stage-IV pancreatic cancer that had eaten through her. She had asked the pastor at her bedside what would happen to her when she closed her eyes. She wanted to know — not what he would say at her funeral, but what would actually happen to her. To the I behind her eyes.

The young pastor asks the lecturer: “I want to know what to tell my parishioners. June has been dead three weeks. According to your view — what is June, right now?”

There is a pause. The lecturer is honest. He does not duck the question. He says, “There is no June right now. Not in the sense you mean. There is a June God remembers. There is a pattern of the person God has preserved. There is a divinely held memory. At the resurrection, God will recreate June from that pattern, and June will live again. But between her death and her resurrection — the I you mean, the conscious ‘her’ — does not exist. There is no interval for her. She closed her eyes at her death and the next thing she will know is the trumpet.”

The young pastor sits down. He does not argue. But he doesn’t look comforted. He looks like he has just learned something he wishes he had not. Because he has spent years telling his parishioners — telling them in every funeral sermon he has ever preached — that the dying Christian goes immediately to be with Christ. That to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. That the thief on the cross was promised paradise today. That Paul preferred to depart and to be with Christ. He has told them, in the words of Heidelberg Catechism Question 1, that their only comfort in life and in death is that they are not their own but belong, body and soul, to their faithful Savior.²

Now he is being told — by a fellow Christian, a serious one, who has read more philosophy than the pastor will ever read — that the comfort he has been preaching is, on its strongest reading, false. That June is not with Christ. That nothing of June is anywhere. That there is only a divinely held pattern.

The lecturer is not being cruel. He is being honest about his position. And his position is rapidly gaining ground in the corner of the church the young pastor inhabits.

This is the moment behind the moment. Beneath every practical question about dying — what happens to the body, what happens to the soul, what does the dying person encounter, what comfort can the pastor honestly offer at the bedside — sits a more fundamental question.

The fundamental question is this: are you your brain?

That is the question behind the question, and this whole book is, in one sense, an attempt to answer it.

A Slow Walk Around the Question

We have to slow down here. The question “Are you your brain?” sounds like a philosophy seminar question. It is. But it is also the most pastorally urgent question I know of, and the rest of this chapter aims to show why.

Let me try a small experiment. Close your eyes for a moment and notice the I that is closing them. Notice the someone who is reading these words. Notice the awareness behind your eyes — the person who is paying attention right now, who has thoughts about what I have just said, who has a name and a history and people they love. That awareness — that someone — is what every culture in every century has called by some version of the word self. Most Christian traditions have called it your soul, or your spirit, or your inner person.

Here is the question. When your body finally fails — when your heart stops, when the EEG tracing goes flat, when the doctor calls the time of death — does that someone end? Does the I behind your eyes vanish? Or does the I keep going — separated from the body, but still aware, still a someone, still you?

That is the question.

It looks like a metaphysical question, and it is. But notice what is hanging on the answer.

If the I ends — if you are simply your brain, and the brain is gone — then the dying are not going anywhere. They are not going to be with Christ between death and resurrection. They are not encountering anything at the moment of death. The lights go out, and nothing is on the other side. The Christian on this view believes that God will resurrect them at the last day, and in that sense the dying Christian has hope — but it is the hope of a future event, not the hope of an immediate Person waiting on the other side of the curtain. The I will not meet anyone at death. The I will simply cease until the trumpet.

If the I does not end — if there is something we have traditionally called the soul, an immaterial center of the person that the brain serves but does not produce — then the dying are going somewhere. The I keeps going. Whatever happens next, whatever the soul encounters at the moment of death, there is a someone there to encounter it. The Christian on this view believes both that God will resurrect them at the last day and that, in the meantime, the Christian goes to be with Christ. There is no interval of nothing.

Stay with the difference for a moment. Two Christians can sit by the same hospital bed, holding the same dying friend’s hand, both of them creedally orthodox, both of them affirming the resurrection of the dead — and yet what they tell that friend will be different. One of them will say: “My friend, in just a moment, the next thing you will know, you will be looking into the face of Jesus.” The other will say: “My friend, in just a moment, you will close your eyes, and then the next thing you will know — though for you no time will pass — you will be looking into the face of Jesus at the end of the age.”

Are these the same comfort? At a logical level, you could argue they are. From inside June’s experience, there will be no waiting. She will close her eyes and the resurrection will follow — instantly, from her point of view, even if a thousand years pass on earth. So why does it matter?

It matters for at least three reasons, and I will spend the rest of this book making good on them.

It matters biblically, because the New Testament does not in fact talk about death the way the Christian-physicalist must talk about it. Paul does not say “I would prefer to depart and to be in dreamless suspension until the trumpet.” He says “I would prefer to depart and be with Christ.”³ Jesus does not say to the dying thief, “Today I tell you, you will be with me in paradise” (which is how the physicalist usually reads it). He says, “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise.”⁴ The natural reading of the New Testament is that something of the person continues, with Christ, between death and resurrection.

It matters theologically, because what the church has taught about the dying for two thousand years is not the physicalist’s no-interval account but the dualist’s interval account. Read the funeral liturgies. Read the catechisms. Read the consolation literature from Augustine to Spurgeon. The church has buried its dead believing the dead were with Christ, not held in storage as patterns awaiting reconstruction.

And it matters empirically, because we now have something we did not have a century ago. We have a body of careful, peer-reviewed, in-many-cases medically verified research that bears directly on the question of whether the I survives the brain. That research is what the rest of this book examines. But before we can examine the evidence, we have to understand the positions the evidence might bear on. We have to know what is actually being argued. So this chapter is a careful map of the positions. It is the slow work, before the empirical work, of making sure we know what we are talking about.

Six Answers to a Single Question

When you ask, “Are you your brain?” the answers people give fall into a small number of recognizable shapes. Six of them matter for our purposes. Three are forms of dualism (the I is something distinct from the body). Three are forms of physicalism (the I is somehow nothing more than a body or a brain doing what bodies and brains do). I want to walk through each one carefully — fairly, before we evaluate. I will name the position, define it in plain English, name its leading defenders, and say what it means for the dying.

1. Substance Dualism (Classical)

Substance dualism is the oldest and simplest answer. It says that a human being is composed of two kinds of stuff — a material body, and an immaterial soul (or spirit, or mind, depending on the writer). The body is the kind of stuff scientists study. The soul is the kind of stuff that has thoughts, intentions, awareness, and moral responsibility. The two are linked tightly during embodied life. They were meant to go together. But they are not the same thing, and at death they can come apart. The body returns to the dust. The soul does not.

This is the picture that most Christians, most of the time, have held. The catacomb art shows it. The medieval funeral hymns assume it. The hospital chaplain assumes it when he tells the family that their grandmother has gone to be with the Lord and they will see her again.

Philosophically, the great defender of substance dualism in the modern West was René Descartes (1596–1650). Descartes is sometimes blamed for everything that went wrong with Christian anthropology, and the criticism has some merit — Cartesian dualism over-separates the body and the soul, treats the body as a kind of machine the soul drives like a chauffeur, and ends up with the famous “ghost in the machine” picture that few Christians actually want.⁵ But Descartes did not invent dualism. He inherited it. The classical Christian tradition long before Descartes — Augustine, Aquinas, the East and West together — held some form of substance dualism, but a more carefully integrated form than Descartes’s.

In our own time, the most thorough defenders of substance dualism include Richard Swinburne (Oxford), J. P. Moreland (Talbot School of Theology), Charles Taliaferro (St. Olaf), Stewart Goetz (Ursinus), and Edward Feser (Pasadena City College). They all argue that the soul is not a Cartesian “ghost” but a genuine immaterial substance, distinct from the brain it informs.⁶

What does substance dualism mean for the dying? It means exactly what it sounds like. When the body fails, the soul does not fail with it. The soul is separable from the body. The two were meant to be together — that is the natural state of a human being — but death pulls them apart. The soul continues. The body does not.

I want to flag, already, what substance dualism does not commit you to. It does not commit you to thinking the soul is a kind of pure spirit-stuff that floats around the room. It does not commit you to denying that the brain matters for thinking — of course the brain matters; obviously brain damage affects thought during embodied life. It does not commit you to thinking the disembodied soul is the natural state of a human being. The natural state, the Christian tradition has always insisted, is the embodied state — body and soul together, in their proper unity, awaiting the resurrection that will heal what death has torn apart.

Substance dualism only commits you to the claim that the soul can exist without the body, even if it would prefer not to. The Christian who holds substance dualism is a holistic thinker about ordinary embodied life, but a dualist about the bare possibility of existence after the body fails.

2. Holistic Dualism

This brings us to a refined version of substance dualism that has become, in recent decades, the position of choice for many serious Christian dualist thinkers. It is sometimes called holistic dualism, and it is most clearly developed in John Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting (1989, revised 2000).

Holistic dualism agrees with substance dualism on the basic metaphysics. There is a body and there is a soul. They are distinct. The soul can survive the body’s death. So far, the same.

But holistic dualism leans harder on the unity of the embodied person during this life. The soul is not just sitting inside the body using it as a vehicle. The soul is the body’s animating center, deeply integrated with it, suffering when the body suffers, learning through the body’s senses, expressing itself through the body’s actions. The body is not a tomb the soul is trying to escape from (as Plato sometimes seemed to say in the Phaedo). The body is good. It is part of who you are. The future hope is not for the soul to be freed from the body forever; the future hope is resurrection — the body restored, glorified, and reunited with the soul that grieved its loss.

What happens at death, on the holistic dualist account, is more like an injury than a liberation. Paul speaks of being “unclothed” or “naked” in 2 Corinthians 5:1–4 — and notice that he does not see this as a good thing. He says, “Not that we wish to be unclothed, but that we wish to be further clothed.”⁷ The disembodied state is real, it is conscious, but it is incomplete. It is the soul without its proper clothing. The full restoration is the resurrection.

Holistic dualism is the position I find most compelling, and I will be working with it throughout this book. It preserves what is true in the historic Christian tradition (the soul survives the body’s death) while correcting what was overdrawn in some popular versions of the tradition (the soul is a higher self looking down on its lower bodily self). It treats the body as good. It treats the disembodied state as a real but unwhole stage. It treats the resurrection as the real goal.

The reader who comes from a more popular evangelical “leaving the body to go to heaven” tradition will find that holistic dualism is more biblical than the popular picture they grew up with. The body matters. Resurrection is the hope. But there is also an interval — and the interval is conscious, and the interval is with Christ.

3. Property Dualism

Now we move toward the line that separates dualism from physicalism. Property dualism is the first position on what I think of as the boundary.

Property dualism says: there is no immaterial substance. There is only the brain. But the brain has two kinds of properties. It has physical properties — neurons, electrical activity, chemistry. And it has mental properties — pain, color experience, the redness of red, the painfulness of pain. The mental properties cannot be reduced to the physical properties. There is something it is like to taste coffee that the chemistry of caffeine and the firing of neurons does not capture. Mental properties are real. But they are properties of the brain, not of a separate immaterial substance.⁸

The property dualist is trying to honor two things at once. First, they want to take seriously the strangeness of consciousness — the fact (defended at length by philosophers like Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers) that no purely physical description seems to capture what it is like to be you, to have your experiences from the inside.⁹ Second, they want to avoid what they take to be the metaphysical extravagance of believing in an immaterial substance that exists separately from anything we can scientifically study.

What does property dualism mean for the dying? It means almost the same thing as physicalism. If the mental properties are properties of the brain, and the brain ceases to function at death, then the mental properties cease too. The taste of coffee, the redness of red, the I behind the eyes — all gone, because the brain is gone. The mental was real, but it was real only as a feature of the physical thing.

So although property dualism sounds like a form of dualism, in terms of what happens at death it lines up with the physicalists. The I does not survive the brain.

I include property dualism in this list because it shows that not every position with the word dualism in it agrees that the soul survives the body. The reader needs to listen carefully to what people actually mean when they speak about minds and souls. Property dualism is closer to physicalism than to substance dualism, despite the name.

4. Emergentism

Closely related to property dualism is emergentism. The emergentist says: when matter is organized in sufficiently complex ways, new properties emerge that are not present in the simpler matter. Consciousness, for instance, emerges from the brain when the brain becomes complex enough — the way wetness emerges from H₂O molecules in the right configurations, or the way the behavior of a flock of birds emerges from the behavior of individual birds.¹⁰ The emergent properties are real. They do real work. They cannot be predicted from the simpler matter alone. But they exist only because the underlying material is there to support them.

Some emergentists are robust about the reality of the emergent properties; some treat them as merely descriptive labels. But all of them agree that emergent properties depend on the underlying physical substrate. Take the substrate away, and the emergent property goes with it.

What does emergentism mean for the dying? Again, basically the same as physicalism. Consciousness emerges from the brain. Take the brain away — and at death the brain is no longer functioning — and consciousness ceases to emerge. There is no separable I that floats free.

Some Christian philosophers have tried to develop an emergentism that allows for the survival of the I after death — what is sometimes called emergent dualism or non-reductive emergentism. William Hasker has done careful work in this direction, suggesting that the consciousness that emerges from the brain might, having emerged, gain a kind of independent reality that can survive the dissolution of the substrate.¹¹ This is an interesting move, and it is at least friendly to the conscious intermediate state. But it is a minority position, and most emergentists do not follow Hasker. Most emergentists land in the same place as the physicalists when it comes to dying.

5. Christian Physicalism

Now we come to the position that is the real dialogue partner of this book — the position that has been gaining ground in evangelical and conditional-immortality circles, and the position the lecturer in our opening vignette was defending.

Christian physicalism, sometimes called Christian materialism or Christian non-reductive physicalism, is the view that human beings are wholly physical. There is no immaterial soul. The “soul” of biblical language is just the whole living person — a Hebrew way of speaking about embodied life, not a Platonic way of speaking about an invisible second thing. The brain is who you are. There is no I behind the brain.

But — and this is the move that distinguishes Christian physicalism from atheist materialism — God can resurrect the wholly-physical person. The Christian physicalist is not denying the resurrection. They are denying the conscious intermediate state. The physical person dies, ceases to exist, and is recreated by God at the resurrection. The recreation is somehow the same person as the one who died, though how exactly the identity is preserved is debated. Some Christian physicalists speak of God’s “remembering” the person; some speak of God’s preserving a “pattern” or “blueprint”; some speak of a “fission” or “recreation” that God ensures is identity-preserving.¹²

The leading defenders of Christian physicalism include Joel Green of Fuller Theological Seminary, especially in Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Baker Academic, 2008); Nancey Murphy of Fuller, especially in Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge, 2006); and the New Zealand theologian Glenn Peoples in his work on the conditional-immortality movement. Increasingly, the Rethinking Hell network and a substantial faction within the conditional-immortality movement have moved toward Christian physicalism.¹³

I want to engage Christian physicalism at its strongest, because too often it is dismissed by Christian dualists as if it were obviously a Greek-vs.-Hebrew error. It is not obvious. The Christian physicalist makes serious arguments, and three of them are worth marking now.

First, the Christian physicalist appeals to biblical anthropology. They argue that the Hebrew and Greek words usually translated “soul” or “spirit” — nephesh, ruach, psychē, pneuma — do not in fact refer to a separate immaterial thing. Nephesh often just means a living, breathing creature, including animals. Ruach often just means breath, or wind, or the principle of life. The translation traditions that gave us “soul” as a noun referring to a separate thing are, on this reading, importing later philosophical assumptions onto biblical Hebrew and Greek.¹⁴

Second, the Christian physicalist appeals to Christian history. They argue that the dualism that came to dominate Western Christian thought was the product of Greek philosophical influence — Plato by way of the Alexandrian theologians, Aristotle by way of Aquinas — and that the original biblical and Hebraic anthropology was holistic. On this reading, the Christian dualist tradition is a corruption, not the genuine inheritance.¹⁵

Third, the Christian physicalist appeals to neuroscience. They argue that the contemporary scientific picture is increasingly clear: every aspect of mental life that we have so far been able to study is dependent on the brain. Damage the right part of the brain, and you damage the corresponding mental capacity. Memory, personality, language, moral judgment, the sense of self — all of them are vulnerable to brain damage. There is no part of the mind that has been shown to operate independently of the brain. The neuroscientific picture, on this reading, is hostile to dualism and friendly to physicalism.¹⁶

I will engage all three of these arguments seriously throughout the book. I think each of them has more weakness than the Christian physicalist supposes, and the third — the neuroscientific argument — is precisely what NDE research most directly addresses. But for the moment, I want the reader to feel the force of the position. The Christian physicalist is not a foolish person. They are arguing, in good faith, what they take to be the most biblically faithful and scientifically honest account of human nature.

What does Christian physicalism mean for the dying? Here is where the rubber meets the road. The Christian physicalist must say: at death, the dying person ceases to exist. There is no interval of conscious presence with Christ. The pastoral comfort that “she is now with the Lord” is, on this view, technically false. What the physicalist can offer instead is the comfort that God remembers her — that her pattern, her story, her self is held in the divine memory and will be recreated at the resurrection. This is not nothing. But it is not the same as saying she is with Christ right now.

I will return to this pastoral question at length below. For now, mark only the position itself. There is no I in the interval. There is divinely held memory.

6. Strict Materialism / Eliminative Physicalism

The last position is the secular endpoint of the physicalist trajectory. Strict materialism says: the mental is reducible to the physical. There is no special status for consciousness; consciousness is just what brains do. The “I” you think you experience behind your eyes is itself a product of the brain — a kind of model the brain constructs of itself, a useful illusion that has helped your ancestors survive but that has no metaphysical depth.

The most aggressive version is eliminative materialism, defended by philosophers like Paul and Patricia Churchland. The eliminativist argues that our ordinary mental vocabulary — beliefs, desires, intentions, the self — is a kind of folk psychology that science will eventually abandon as we abandoned phlogiston and the four humors. The mental categories don’t pick out anything real. There is just brain.¹⁷

I include strict materialism in this list for completeness, and to make a single point: no Christian holds this position. The Christian physicalists I have just described do not hold it; they think the mental is real, even though it is not separate from the physical. The strict materialists are the secular endpoint of the physicalist line, and they push the line to a place no Christian theology can follow.

What does strict materialism mean for the dying? It means dying is annihilation. There was never any I to survive. The brain stops, the lights go out, and there was nothing all along.

This is the atheist’s position, and it is consistent. I do not engage it polemically here. I mark it because the more inflated rhetoric of the contemporary “the brain is everything” school sometimes assumes strict materialism without saying so. When you read a popular neuroscientist saying that the soul is a “user illusion” and the I is just a story the brain tells itself, you are reading strict materialism in popular dress.¹⁸

What These Positions Mean for the Dying

I have been saying, throughout the position-descriptions, what each position implies for the dying person. Let me now pull those threads together and stretch the implications out a little.

On strict materialism and eliminative physicalism

The atheist materialist’s position is that dying is annihilation. The lights go out. There is no one there to notice. There was never anyone there in the first place — only a brain producing the illusion of a someone. The dying brain shuts down its illusion-producing machinery and the illusion ends with it.

The atheist materialist often presents this as a kind of liberation — no afterlife to fear, no judgment to face, no eternity to plan for. Some of them speak of dying as “going back to where you were before you were born” — the placid nothingness of nonexistence. Others, more honestly, acknowledge that the prospect is bleak and that there is no way to make it not bleak. Either way, the materialist’s funeral is short. There is nothing to say about the deceased except what was true of them when they were alive.

No Christian holds this position. I name it only to mark the secular endpoint of the line.

On Christian physicalism

The Christian physicalist’s position is more careful. The deceased is not gone forever. God remembers them. God will recreate them at the resurrection. Hope is real. But the interval — the time between the dying breath and the resurrection trumpet — is not a time during which the deceased is present anywhere. The deceased’s body is in the ground. The deceased’s soul, on this view, was never a separate thing. There is no “soul” to be anywhere. There is divinely preserved information.

Joel Green, in Body, Soul, and Human Life, is admirably honest about the implications. He acknowledges that the New Testament passages traditionally read as supporting the conscious intermediate state — Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:1–9, Luke 23:43, Revelation 6:9–11 — can be read in a way that supports it, but he argues they should not be. He proposes alternative readings on which Paul’s “departing to be with Christ” is shorthand for the resurrection (since from the dead person’s point of view, no time will pass), Jesus’s “today you will be with me in paradise” is a statement about the day of fulfillment rather than the calendar day, and so on.¹⁹

The Christian physicalist’s pastoral counsel at the bedside, accordingly, is more reserved than the dualist’s. The Christian physicalist can say: God will resurrect your loved one. God will not forget her. But the Christian physicalist cannot say, without cheating their position, that she is with Christ now. To say that, on the physicalist view, is to use a comforting fiction.

I want to be careful here. I am not accusing Joel Green of being a poor pastor. I am observing that his theological position pushes him in a direction that is harder to comfort the dying with. And many Christian physicalists, in pastoral practice, end up speaking as if they were dualists — telling the dying that they will see Jesus when they close their eyes, telling the bereaved that their loved one is with the Lord. The pastoral practice is dualist even when the published theology is physicalist. This is, I think, a sign that Christian physicalism is harder to live with than its proponents acknowledge.

On holistic dualism

The holistic dualist, by contrast, can say at the bedside what the church has always said. The dying Christian is going to be with Christ. There is no interval of nothing — the soul, having been the seat of the person’s identity throughout life, continues to be the seat of the person’s identity through the boundary of death and into the immediate presence of the Lord. The body lies in the grave awaiting the resurrection; the soul awaits its bodily clothing in the conscious presence of Christ.

This is what the Christian tradition has been saying for two thousand years. The art shows it. The hymns sing it. The funeral liturgies pray it. The catechisms teach it. When the Heidelberg Catechism asks, “What is your only comfort in life and in death?” the answer begins, “That I am not my own, but belong, with body and soul, both in life and in death, to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ.”²⁰ Body and soul. Both. Through death. To Christ.

The holistic dualist can preach this with full conviction. The holistic dualist can say it at the bedside. The holistic dualist can say it at the funeral. And the holistic dualist’s pastoral comfort is consistent with the metaphysics they confess.

I want to add a small word about how this shapes the experience of dying for the Christian. A Christian who really believes — who has internalized — that they are about to be unconscious for an indefinite stretch (from their own subjective point of view, no stretch at all, but ontologically nonexistent) approaches death differently from a Christian who really believes they are about to look up into Christ’s face. The second experience, the dualist experience, is what the Christian tradition has cultivated. The first, the physicalist experience, is what the contemporary Christian-physicalist movement is asking believers to cultivate instead.

I think this matters at a level deeper than philosophy. It shapes the imagination of the dying. It shapes the prayers we pray. It shapes the way we say goodbye.

The Bible’s Default Picture and the Physicalist Reinterpretation

Let me name the biblical texts the dualist tradition rests on — the texts the Christian physicalist must reread.

In the Old Testament: the death of Rachel in Genesis 35:18, where her nephesh “was departing”; the Shunammite boy in 1 Kings 17:21–22, whose nephesh “came into him again, and he revived”; Ecclesiastes 12:7, where “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it”; Daniel 12:2, where “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.” The Old Testament, more than the contemporary Christian physicalist allows, speaks of something in the human person that departs at death and goes somewhere — the dust to the ground, the spirit elsewhere.

In the New Testament: Jesus’s word from the cross to the dying thief, “Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43); Jesus’s commendation of his own spirit, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46); Stephen’s dying words, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59); Paul’s preference to “depart and be with Christ, for that is far better” (Philippians 1:23); Paul’s claim that “we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); Paul’s testimony of being “caught up to the third heaven” — “whether in the body or out of the body I do not know” (2 Corinthians 12:2–3) — which only makes sense if there is a meaningful possibility of being out of the body; Jesus’s teaching to “fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28), distinguishing soul from body in a way the physicalist must blunt; the souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11, who cry out “How long, O Lord?” — the souls of those who have been killed, conscious, awaiting vindication.²¹

This is not a small or marginal collection of texts. It is, on the natural reading, the dominant biblical voice on what happens to the human person at death. Something departs. Something is with Christ. Something cries out from under the altar. Something is “at home” with the Lord while the body waits in the grave.

The Christian physicalist has to do something with all of these texts. And the something, in published Christian-physicalist work, takes one of three shapes.

The first shape is the language is figurative. When Paul says he wants to depart and be with Christ, he does not mean he expects to be conscious in Christ’s presence between his death and the resurrection. He means he expects, from his point of view, to wake up at the resurrection — and “from his point of view” includes the lack of subjective time elapsing between death and resurrection. So in a kind of phenomenological sense, departing is being with Christ, but only because no time will be felt to pass. This reading turns Paul’s clear declarative into an unstated phenomenological claim about subjective time. It is possible. It is not the most natural reading.²²

The second shape is the language is anticipatory. The “today” of Luke 23:43 is the eschatological today — the day of God’s salvation that has dawned in Christ — rather than the calendar day on which the thief was crucified. So Jesus is not promising the thief that on Friday he will be with Jesus in paradise; Jesus is promising that the thief is now under God’s saving today, and at the resurrection he will be in paradise. This too is possible. But it requires re-punctuating the Greek (which has no original punctuation) in a way against the natural reading: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise.” The Greek manuscript tradition and almost all Christian translations preserve the natural reading.²³

The third shape is the language is symbolic. The souls under the altar in Revelation 6:9–11 are not literally souls; they are a symbolic representation of the cumulative martyr-witness of the church, which cries out for vindication. This is possible. But Revelation’s symbolism is generally identified by its own internal logic, and the souls under the altar are presented as identifiable persons — those who had been slain for the word of God and the testimony they had borne — speaking, asking questions, being given answers. The natural reading is that they are real souls, conscious between their martyrdom and the consummation.²⁴

I do not say the Christian physicalist’s rereadings are impossible. I say they are forced. They require us to read against the grain of what the texts most naturally say. They require us to import a theological commitment (no immaterial soul) and adjust the texts to fit. The dualist reading does not require importing anything. It simply takes the texts at face value.

In a similar way, the historic Christian creeds and the universal voice of the church through two millennia have read these texts the way the dualist reads them. The Apostles’ Creed says Jesus “descended into hell” — that is, Jesus’s spirit went somewhere between his death and his resurrection. The Christian physicalist must say either that the descent is symbolic of something else, or that Jesus alone among human beings had a soul that departed at death, while the rest of us do not. Neither move is comfortable. We will return to the Christological problem in Chapter 27, where the argument from the descent of Christ is developed at length.²⁵

The natural biblical and traditional reading is dualist. The empirical evidence we will examine in the rest of this book, I will argue, supports the natural reading.

The Conditional-Immortality Split

I want to spend some time on a particular story within the contemporary church, because it is the story this book most directly enters: the story of the conditional-immortality movement and its split over the soul.

Conditional immortality is the view that the wicked do not suffer eternal conscious torment but are ultimately destroyed — annihilated, ceased-to-exist, finally and forever — at the final judgment. Immortality is conditional on union with Christ. The unsaved do not have it. CI is an ancient view, taught by some early Christian writers (Ignatius of Antioch, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Arnobius), revived in the modern period in evangelical circles, and now held by a sizable minority within evangelicalism, including such figures as the late John R. W. Stott, Edward Fudge, Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd, and many others.²⁶

The classical conditional-immortality position was dualist. Edward Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes — the work that did more than any other to put CI back on the evangelical map in the late twentieth century — assumes throughout that human beings have souls that survive bodily death. The unsaved soul, on Fudge’s view, is conscious in Hades through the intermediate state, conscious through the final judgment, and only at the lake of fire is finally and irreversibly destroyed. Fudge’s anthropology is dualist. So is Edward White’s, the nineteenth-century Anglican who wrote the most thorough Victorian defense of conditionalism. So was Henry Constable’s, and Le Roy Edwin Froom’s. The historic CI position took the soul for granted.²⁷

In the past twenty years, the CI movement has split. Some of its most prominent contemporary voices — Glenn Peoples in particular, but also (with varying degrees of explicitness) Joel Green, Nancey Murphy, and other figures associated with the Rethinking Hell network — have moved toward Christian physicalism. They argue that CI fits more naturally with a physicalist anthropology: if the unsaved are eventually annihilated, why not say they are physical creatures whose annihilation is just the cessation of the body, with no separate soul to require destroying? On the physicalist version of CI, the unsaved cease to exist at death and the resurrection of judgment is the resurrection of some of the dead but not all — only those whose patterns God remembers in a way oriented toward judgment, perhaps, or only those whom God specifically resurrects to face the consequences of their lives. The details vary. The shared move is to make CI rest on physicalism rather than on the destruction of a separately existing soul.²⁸

Other CI voices have remained dualist. Pinnock historically was dualist; James Beilby’s Postmortem Opportunity is dualist; Stephen Jonathan’s Grace Beyond the Grave is dualist; the broader pastoral CI movement (including most pastors I have spoken with who hold CI) has remained dualist. The classical CI tradition continues unbroken in many quarters.²⁹

I want to be transparent about my own location in this conversation. I hold conditional immortality with postmortem opportunity, with genuine openness to conservative biblical universalism. I am, by self-description, a CI/PO theologian. But I am a dualist CI/PO theologian. I do not think CI requires physicalism. I think the reverse: the historic dualist CI tradition is the more biblical and evidentially grounded version of conditional immortality, and the physicalist turn within contemporary CI is a regrettable theological development that does not actually strengthen the case for CI.

The reason this matters for our book is that the Christian physicalists I will be engaging throughout — Green and Murphy especially — are not random outliers. They are voices within a movement I am theologically allied with. The book is not a polemic against CI. It is, in part, a fraternal correction within the broader CI tradition: a case to my fellow conditionalists that the most defensible version of our position is the dualist one our forebears held, and that the contemporary physicalist version is unnecessary, biblically strained, and (as the rest of the book will argue) at odds with the empirical evidence we now have.

Let me make one more observation about this conversation. The CI/UR question — whether the unsaved are finally annihilated (CI) or finally restored (UR) — is not what this book is mainly about. I have written on that question elsewhere, and I will keep doing so. But the anthropology question — the question whether human beings have souls that survive bodily death — is logically prior to it, and is what this book is about. Whether CI or UR is finally correct, the question of what happens to the I in the meantime — between death and the final eschatological resolution, whatever that is — turns on whether there is an immaterial center of the person that survives the failure of the brain.

If you are a CI person, you need a soul (or at least a divinely preserved “you”) to be in the conscious intermediate state.

If you are a UR person, you also need a soul (or at least a divinely preserved “you”) to be in the conscious intermediate state, and then to be progressively purified and ultimately restored.

If you are an ECT person, of course, you need a soul to be tormented eternally.

In all three eschatologies, the soul or the conscious intermediate state matters. The Christian physicalist who endorses CI and denies the conscious soul ends up with the strangest theology of dying among the available Christian options: the dying are gone, then the unsaved are recreated to be judged and annihilated again, and the saved are recreated for eternal life. The CI dualist tradition’s account is more economical and more biblical: the dying go to be with Christ, or to Hades; the saved are raised to glory; the unsaved face their final judgment from the conscious presence of God. We will develop this confirmation of the historic doctrine of the conscious intermediate state at length in Chapter 24, drawing the empirical and biblical threads together.

What This Chapter Has Done and Has Not Done

Let me name, before we close, what this chapter has tried to do and what it has not tried to do.

It has tried to frame the dualism-physicalism question and show that it sits behind the practical questions of dying. It has tried to disambiguate the major positions: substance dualism, holistic dualism, property dualism, emergentism, Christian physicalism, strict materialism. It has tried to show what each position implies for the dying and for the pastoral comfort the church can offer at the bedside. It has tried to show that the natural reading of Scripture and the consistent voice of Christian tradition support the dualist position. It has tried to show that the contemporary Christian-physicalist movement, especially within conditional-immortality circles, represents a recent departure from this consensus, not the recovery of an original biblical view.

It has not tried to settle the question philosophically. The substantive philosophical arguments for and against substance dualism — the philosophy-of-mind arguments, the conceivability arguments, the unity-of-consciousness arguments, the modal arguments, the argument from reason — are not what this book is mainly about, and others have made them better than I could.³⁰

It has not tried to present the empirical evidence for substance dualism. That work begins in Chapter 5, where we look carefully at what happens to the brain at death, and continues through the case files in Chapters 10–14, the cumulative case in Chapter 14, and the empirical-to-doctrinal synthesis in Chapter 23. The full empirical case is what the rest of the book is.

It has not tried to develop the pastoral implications at length. The pastoral chapters at the end (Chapters 32–34) are where the implications for ministering to the dying get worked out in detail. This chapter only points at the pastoral stakes.

It has not tried to engage every figure or every position in detail. I have named the most important defenders of each view. I have not engaged every nuance, every secondary literature debate, every internal dispute among the property dualists or the emergentists or the Christian physicalists. The book is long, but it is not infinitely long. I have cited the figures whose positions are the relevant dialogue partners.

A Preview of the Evidence

Let me close by previewing what the rest of the book is going to argue.

In the past fifty years, a body of careful, peer-reviewed, often medically corroborated research has emerged that bears directly on whether human consciousness can survive the failure of the brain. This research is near-death-experience research. The best NDE cases — the veridical ones, in which the dying or clinically dead person reports verifiable knowledge they could not have obtained through ordinary sensory means — are something genuinely new in the history of the question. Plato and Aristotle did not have them. Augustine and Aquinas did not have them. Descartes did not have them. The nineteenth-century materialists did not have them. We have them.

We have, for example, cases of people whose hearts stopped, whose EEG traces went flat, who were clinically dead by every contemporary medical standard, and who afterward reported, in detail, what was happening in the operating room or the emergency room while they were dead. They reported objects they could not have seen from their physical position. They reported conversations between staff who were elsewhere in the hospital. They reported, in dozens of well-documented cases, what was happening to their own bodies from a vantage point above and outside their bodies. We have over a thousand such cases of accurate distant observation in the dissertation database alone, with another large body of paradigmatic cases discussed in Chapter 10.³¹

We have cases of people who were blind from birth — who had never had visual experience of any kind — describing accurate visual perception during their NDEs. Thirty-three cases in the dissertation database alone. We have careful work by Kenneth Ring and Sharon Cooper documenting these cases at scholarly length, which we examine in Chapter 11.³²

We have cases of cardiac-arrest patients who reported conscious experience during medically documented periods of complete cessation of cortical activity. The AWARE study, the AWARE-II study, the Pim van Lommel Lancet study, and the Pam Reynolds case (which we examine in painstaking detail in Chapter 12) are the most famous, but they are part of a much larger pattern.³³

We have cases of people who, during their NDEs, encountered deceased relatives — including, in well-documented instances, relatives the patient did not know had died. These cases, we will see, are particularly hard for any physicalist explanation to absorb.

The case is cumulative. No single case settles the question. But the cases together, across thousands of patients and dozens of researchers and decades of careful work, present a picture that, I will argue, only substance dualism can satisfactorily account for.

That is what is coming. The case is going to take its time. The book is long because the evidence requires it. The reader who has been patient with this conceptual map will, I think, find that the empirical chapters reward the wait.

But before any of that, we need to understand the dying body and the dying brain as the medical sciences understand them. We need to know what cardiac arrest looks like at the cellular level. We need to know what an EEG flatline means, and what it does not mean. We need to know what the contemporary conventions of clinical death are, and where the boundaries are blurry. We need, in other words, to know what the body and the brain are actually doing during the cases the next chapters will examine. The next two chapters do that work.

For now, I will close with the question I opened with. Behind the practical questions of dying — what happens to the body, what happens to the soul, what does the dying person encounter, what comfort can the pastor honestly offer at the bedside — sits the question I have been calling the question behind the question.

Are you your brain?

The Christian tradition has answered no. The contemporary Christian-physicalist movement has answered yes. The empirical research the rest of the book examines has, I will argue, decisively answered no.

The dying need to know which answer is true. So do those who walk with them. The question deserves our most careful attention. Let us turn now to what Christianity has always taught about dying, and then to the body, and then to the brain, and then to the evidence itself.