- Introduction
- The church and its history
- The essence and identity of Christianity
- The history of Christianity
- The primitive church
- The internal development of the early Christian Church
- Relations between Christianity and the Roman government and the Hellenistic culture
- The early liturgy, the calendar, and the arts
- The alliance between church and empire
- Theological controversies of the 4th and 5th centuries
- Liturgy and the arts after Constantine
- Political relations between East and West
- Literature and art of the “Dark Ages”
- Missions and monasticism
- The Photian schism and the great East–West schism
- From the schism to the Reformation
- Christianity from the 16th to the 20th century
- Contemporary Christianity
- Christian doctrine
- The nature and functions of doctrine
- Scripture and tradition: the apostolic witness
- Evangelism: the first teaching about the God of Jesus Christ
- Catechesis: instructing candidates for baptism
- Liturgy: the school and feast of faith
- Ethics: obeying the truth
- Aversion of heresy: the establishment of orthodoxy
- Apologetics: defending the faith
- Restatement: respecting language and knowledge
- Inculturation: respecting places and peoples
- Dogma: the most authoritative teaching
- Consensus: patterns of agreement
- Theology: loving God with the mind
- Symbolics: creeds and confessions
- Development: the maturation of understanding
- Schism: division over substantial matters
- Controversy: fighting over the faith
- Ecumenism: speaking the truth in love
- God the Father
- God the Son
- God the Holy Spirit
- The Holy Trinity
- Anthropology
- What it is to be human
- The human as a creature
- The human as the image of God
- Human redemption
- The problem of suffering
- The resurrection of the body
- Progressive human perfection
- The “new man”: The human being in the light of Christ
- The “reborn human”
- Human liberation
- Joy in human existence
- The charismatic believer
- Christian perfection
- Fellow humans as the present Christ
- The church
- Church tradition
- Eschatology
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in early Christianity
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in the medieval and Reformation periods
- Expectations of the Kingdom of God in the post-Reformation period
- The role of imminent expectation in missions and emigrations
- Eschatological expectations and secularization
- Concepts of life after death
- Aspects of the Christian religion
- Christian philosophy
- Christian mysticism
- Christian myth and legend
- The Christian community and the world
- The relationships of Christianity
- Christian missions
- Ecumenism
- Christianity and world religions
The immortality of the soul
Human beings seem always to have had some notion of a shadowy double that survives the death of the body. But the idea of the soul as a mental entity, with intellectual and moral qualities, interacting with a physical organism but capable of continuing after its dissolution, derives in Western thought from Plato and entered into Judaism during approximately the last century before the Common Era and thence into Christianity. In Jewish and Christian thinking it has existed in tension with the idea of the resurrection of the person conceived as an indissoluble psychophysical unity. Christian thought gradually settled into a pattern that required both of these apparently divergent ideas. At death the soul is separated from the body and exists in a conscious or unconscious disembodied state. But on the future Day of Judgment souls will be re-embodied (whether in their former but now transfigured earthly bodies or in new resurrection bodies) and will live eternally in the heavenly kingdom.
Within this framework, philosophical discussion has centred mainly on the idea of the immaterial soul and its capacity to survive the death of the body. Plato, in the Phaedo, argued that the soul is inherently indestructible. To destroy something, including the body, is to disintegrate it into its constituent elements; but the soul, as a mental entity, is not composed of parts and is thus an indissoluble unity. Although Aquinas’s concept of the soul, as the “form” of the body, was derived from Aristotle rather than Plato, Aquinas too argued for its indestructibility (Summa theologiae, I, Q. 76, art. 6). The French philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882–1973), a modern Thomist, summarized the conclusion as follows: “A spiritual soul cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no matter; it cannot be disintegrated, since it has no substantial parts; it cannot lose its individual unity, since it is self-subsisting, nor its internal energy since it contains within itself all the sources of its energies” (The Range of Reason, 1952). But though it is possible to define the soul in such a way that it is incorruptible, indissoluble, and self-subsisting, critics have asked whether there is any good reason to think that souls as thus defined exist. If, on the other hand, the soul means the conscious mind or personality—something whose immortality would be of great interest to human beings—this does not seem to be an indissoluble unity. On the contrary, it seems to have a kind of organic unity that can vary in degree but that is also capable of fragmentation and dissolution.
Much modern philosophical analysis of the concept of mind is inhospitable to the idea of immortality, for it equates mental life with the functioning of the physical brain (see mind, philosophy of). Impressed by evidence of the dependence of mind on brain, some Christian thinkers have been willing to accept the view—corresponding to the ancient Hebrew understanding—of the human being as an indissoluble psychophysical unity, but these thinkers have still maintained a belief in immortality, not as the mind surviving the body, but as a divine resurrection or re-creation of the living body-mind totality. Such resurrection persons would presumably be located in a space different from that which they now inhabit and would presumably undergo a development from the condition of a dying person to that of a viable inhabitant of the resurrection world. But all theories in this area have their own difficulties, and alternative theories emerged.
Kant offered a different kind of argument for immortality—as a postulate of the moral life. The claim of the moral law demands that human beings become perfect. This is something that can never be finally achieved but only asymptotically approached, and such an unending approach requires the unending existence of the soul. This argument also is open to criticism. Are humans indeed subject to a strict obligation to attain moral perfection? Might not their obligation, as finite creatures, be to do the best they can? But this does not seem to entail immortality.
It should be noted that the debate concerning arguments about the immortality of the soul and the existence of God has been as much among Christian philosophers as between them and non-Christian thinkers. It is by no means the case that Christian thinkers have all regarded the project of natural theology as viable. There have indeed been, and are, many who hold that divine existence can be definitively proved or shown to be objectively probable. But many others not only hold that the attempted proofs all require premises that a disbeliever is under no rational obligation to accept but also question the evidentialist assumption that the only route to rational theistic belief is by inference from previously accepted evidence-stating premises.
20th-century discussions
Discussion among Christian philosophers during the 20th century was predominantly epistemological. Among Roman Catholic thinkers it included the work of Bernard Lonergan in Insight (1957), which has stimulated considerable discussion. Lonergan argued that the act of understanding, or insight, is pivotal for the apprehension of reality, and that it implies in the long run that the universe is itself due to the fiat of an “unrestricted act of understanding,” which is God. Other Roman Catholic thinkers refined and extended the Thomistic approach, particularly the idea of analogical predication in statements about God. Others, in common with non-Catholic philosophers, have discussed the traditional divine attributes—omniscience, omnipotence, eternity, immutability, personality, goodness. The concept of a finite deity developing through time was also proposed (e.g., by Charles Hartshorne) to meet objections to some of these concepts: If God is immutable, how can God be aware of successive events in time? If God has absolute self-existence, how can God respond with sympathy to the pains of creaturely life? Others defended the traditional attributes as logically coherent, both individually and in their relationship to one another, and as allowing for divine awareness of the created universe, God’s activity in history, and divine sympathy with human suffering.
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