Without Excuse: Apologetics Blog

  There is a common accusation that Christians adopted the concept of the soul from the Greeks, most notably from Plato. There’s a variation of this argument that Christians adopted ideas about the soul and the afterlife from the Egyptians. But just how true is this accusation? We will seek to answer that very question. It should first be established that Israelite/Jewish thought had already allowed for a postmortem existence prior to Greek influence. One very prominent example can be found in 1 Samuel involving the story of the Witch of Endor. King Saul had gone to visit the witch to summon Samuel from the grave. Much to the witch's surprise and dismay, she summoned what appeared to be the spirit or ghost of Samuel (1Sa 28).  The summoned spirit of Samuel is often dismissed as a trick, hallucination, or a demonic deception. Those are all separate objections that can be addressed another time. But it is far less relevant whether it was the actual spirit of Samuel or not for th...

Soul sleep proponents believe that Greek philosophy significantly influenced traditional Christian ideas about the soul and the afterlife rather than Scripture alone. For that reason, they reject the continued existence of the soul after death, also known as the intermediary state. Instead, they have a more Hebraic worldview that places far less emphasis on heaven and the afterlife than later Jewish and Christian theology. Soul sleep is founded on the belief that humans don’t have a soul; we are souls. This is interpreted from Genesis 2:7: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul ( nephesh ).” The Hebrew word for “soul” is “ nephesh ” and is broadly defined as the whole living being or person. The question is, are we only nephesh ? “ Nephesh ” is translated to “psyche” in the Septuagint. If nephesh were strictly biological, they could have used the Greek word “bios,” from which we get the Eng...

I have created yet another blog entitled " The Immortal Soul: A Response to Soul Sleep " (although it might change in the future). It is intended to both refute soul sleep and support the immortal soul. It has several blogs that I originally posted here but have since refined. I wanted to put them into a single blog to act as a digital book of sorts for free.