Mat. 10:28—“And be not afraid of them that kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell”; Acts 7:59—“And they stoned Stephen, calling upon the Lord, and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”: 2 Cor. 12:2—“I know a man in Christ, fourteen years ago (whether in the body, I know not; or whether out of the body, I know not; God knoweth), such a one caught up even to the third heaven”; 1 Cor. 15:45, 46—“The first man Adam became a living soul. The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. Howbeit that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; then that which is spiritual”—the first [pg 992]Adam was made a being whose body was psychical and mortal—a body of flesh and blood, that could not inherit the kingdom of God. So Paul says the spiritual is not first, but the psychical; but there is no intimation that the soul also was created mortal, and needed external appliances, like the tree of life, before it could enter upon immortality.
But it may be asked: Is not all this, in 1 Cor. 15, spoken of the regenerate—those to whom a new principle of life has been communicated? We answer, yes; but that does not prevent us from learning from the passage the natural immortality of the soul; for in regeneration the essence is not changed, no new substance is imparted, no new faculty or constitutive element is added, and no new principle of holiness is infused. The truth is simply that the spirit is morally readjusted. For substance of the above remarks, see Hovey, State of Impenitent Dead, 1-27.
Savage, Life after Death, 46, 53—“The word translated ‘soul’, in Gen. 2:7, is the same word which in other parts of the O. T. is used to denote the life-principle of animals. It does not follow that soul implies immortality, for then all animals would be immortal.... The firmament of the Hebrews was the cover of a dinner-platter, solid, but with little windows to let the rain through. Above this firmament was heaven where God and angels abode, but no people went there. All went below. But growing moral sense held that the good could not be imprisoned in Hades. So came the idea of resurrection.... If a force, a universe with God left out, can do all that has been done, I do not see why it cannot also continue my existence through what is called death.”
Dr. H. Heath Bawden: “It is only the creature that is born that will die. Monera and Amœbæ are immortal, as Weismann tells us. They do not die, because they never are born. The death of the individual as a somatic individual is for the sake of the larger future life of the individual in its germinal immortality. So we live ourselves spiritually into our children, as well as physically. An organism is nothing but a centre or focus through which the world surges. What matter if the irrelevant somatic portion is lost in what we call death! The only immortality possible is the immortality of function. My body has changed completely since I was a boy, but I have become a larger self thereby. Birth and death simply mark steps or stages in the growth of such an individual, which in its very nature does not exclude but rather includes within it the lives of all other individuals. The individual is more than a passive member, he is an active organ of a biological whole. The laws of his life are the social organism functioning in one of its organs. He lives and moves and has his being in the great spirit of the whole, which comes to a focus or flowers out in his conscious life.”
(b) The account of the curse in Genesis, and the subsequent allusions to it in Scripture, show that, while the death then incurred includes the dissolution of the body, it does not include cessation of being on the part of the soul, but only designates that state of the soul which is the opposite of true life, viz., a state of banishment from God, of unholiness, and of misery.
Gen. 2:17—“in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die”; cf. 3:8—“the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of Jehovah God”; 16-19—the curse of pain and toil: 22-24—banishment from the garden of Eden and from the tree of life. Mat. 8:22—“Follow me; and leave the dead to bury their own dead”; 25:41, 46—“Depart from me, ye cursed, into the eternal fire.... These shall go away into eternal punishment”; Luke 15:32—“this thy brother was dead, and is alive again; and was lost, and is found”; John 5:24—“He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgment, but hath passed out of death into life”; 6:47, 53, 63—“He that believeth hath eternal life.... Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves.... the words that I have spoken unto you are spirit, and are life”: 8:51—“If a man keep my word, he shall never see death.”
Rom. 5:21—“that, as sin reigned in death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life”; 8:13—“if ye live after the flesh, ye must die; but if by the Spirit ye put to death the deeds of the body, ye shall live”; Eph. 2:1—“dead through your trespasses and sins”; 5:14—“Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall shine upon thee”; James 5:20—“he who converteth a sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins”; 1 John 3:14—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren”; Rev. 3:1—“I know thy works, that thou hast a name that thou livest, and thou art dead.”
We are to interpret O. T. terms by the N. T. meaning put into them. We are to interpret the Hebrew by the Greek, not the Greek by the Hebrew. It never would do to [pg 993]interpret our missionaries' use of the Chinese words for “God”, “spirit”, “holiness”, by the use of those words among the Chinese before the missionaries came. By the later usage of the N. T., the Holy Spirit shows us what he meant by the usage of the O. T.
(c) The Scriptural expressions, held by annihilationists to imply cessation of being on the part of the wicked, are used not only in connections where they cannot bear this meaning (Esther 4:16), but in connections where they imply the opposite.
Esther 4:16—“if I perish, I perish”; Gen. 6:11—“And the earth was corrupt before God”—here, in the LXX, the word ἐφθάρη, translated “was corrupt,” is the same word which in other places is interpreted by annihilationists as meaning extinction of being. In Ps. 119:176, “I have gone astray like a lost sheep” cannot mean “I have gone astray like an annihilated sheep.” Is. 49:17—“thy destroyers [annihilators?] and they that made thee waste shall go forth from thee”; 57:1, 2—“The righteous perisheth [is annihilated?] and no man layeth it to heart; and merciful men are taken away, none considering that the righteous is taken away from the evil to come. He entereth into peace; they rest in their beds, each one that walketh in his uprightness”; Dan. 9:26—“And after the three score and two weeks shall the anointed one be cut off [annihilated?].”