afterlife – Catholic Heart and Mind

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 43 of our weekly series on the soul. I may stop this series at part 50 so I can focus on another series. So let’s dig into the book, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. We talked about the Hebrew words and concepts of nephesh and ruach last time. They make an appearance this week, too, as Dr. Cooper reminds us that ancient Hebrew anthropology is not exactly the same as our modern anthropology, or exactly like the ancient Christian one, either. And we have to watch out so that we are not guilty of reading notions into the text that simply are not there. I’m going to backtrack a little before going to the next chapter, and let Dr. Cooper talk more about holism, monism and the Old Testament.

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+JMJ+ Welcome to part 42 of our weekly series on the soul just in time for All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days. I’ve been reading Dr. John W. Cooper’s book, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. The main reason I’m reading it is that so many non-Catholic Christians have rejected the Christian teachings on the afterlife, handed on from the beginning, with some rejecting the idea of the immortal soul. In fact, there’s a heated debate going on about what the soul is and whether or not it even exists. But as the author says in the preface to the second printing (page xv),

“The book makes the case that as Holy Scripture progressively discloses what happens to humans when they die, it teaches not only that each of us will undergo bodily resurrection, but that believers continue to exist ‘with the Lord’ until the resurrection.”

Since the battlecry of the Reformation was sola scriptura, it’s seems odd that the descendants of the Reformers would reject such an important teaching of Scripture. I guess “Scripture alone” doesn’t mean the same thing as “All of the Scriptures” or “Everything the Scriptures teach” but I digress. Notes and links will be at the end of this post.

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