What Christadelphians believe about ...

Mortality

If I consult almost any traditional religious literature, I am assured that I have "A never-dying soul to save And fit it for the sky." Yet in the Bible there is no foundation for the idea of having an immortal soul.

1 I cannot find anything about "immortal soul" in the Bible. I find about "soul" often enough, and I read the word "immortal," but I do not find the two words joined; and what the Bible says about the two things separately, is out of keeping with the idea that a soul is an immaterial thing, or that immortality belongs to anybody now.

If every living thing has a soul, and a soul can eat, and be handled and can die, and if immortality is something that men have to seek for now, and to put on when Christ comes, it follows that the notion that the soul is an invisible thing that cannot die must be a mistake.

2 I read that man is mortal now; that death has entered the world by sin; that where sin is, death must be also, and that death will only be destroyed with Christ's final triumph upon earth.

How then can the doctrine of the immortality of the soul be true? Because if man is mortal, then he is not immortal; and if death has passed upon all men, then it must be wrong to say that he is never-dying and cannot die. And if death is not a fact, how can Christ take it away?

3 I read that the hope of immortality is to be effected by a change of the mortal body if alive when Christ comes, or by a resurrection of that body from the grave, for a similar change.

How could this be if I were already immortal, and if that immortality resided in an invisible spirit which goes away from my body when I die?

4 I read that the dead are to be judged at the coming of Christ; that the righteous are to be rewarded, and the wicked punished at that time.

How am I to understand this if I am to believe that when men die, they either enter heaven to be rewarded, or descend to hell to be punished? What is the meaning of a day of judgment if it is all settled before the day arrive?

5 Then I read that in the death state, men are without feeling, or memory, or consciousness, or any faculty; that in fact, they "know not anything."

I can understand this with the view that man is a poor mortal being, of a physical earth nature which dissolves in death, and who, when dead, is really dead. Then I can understand the need for resurrection, and the suitableness of its happening at Christ's re-appearing. But how am I to reconcile such teaching with the idea that when I die, I shall not be dead, but more alive, and know more than I now do? I cannot reconcile the two things; and as one must be right and the other wrong, I conclude that the Bible is right and that therefore I do not have an immortal soul.