THE QUESTION:

Does Christianity believe in the “immortality of the soul”?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

No.

Not exactly. And before anyone has a heart attack reading that, The Guy hastens to explain that Christianity has always vigorously affirmed the Easter message that earthly death is followed by everlasting life. But the oft-used phrase about a mere “immortality of the soul,” which stems from ancient Greek philosophy, could suggest bodily life is problematic and mistakenly suppose that our soul exists through all eternity as only a disembodied spirit.

Instead, Christianity teaches that just as Jesus arose bodily from the grave, so the promise of everlasting life involves a person’s eventual resurrection that unites the soul with the body in a newly glorified state. As with the central belief that Jesus was God incarnate in full human and bodily reality, this Christian affirmation about the afterlife proclaims that, as in Judaism, our bodies are God’s good creation and fundamental to each person’s human identity.

This understanding of New Testament teaching was defined orthodoxy as early as A.D. 180 in Against Heresies by Bishop Irenaeus of Lyons, an authority and saint for Catholic and Orthodox Christians:

“… It is manifest that the souls of his disciples also, upon whose account the Lord underwent these things, shall go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection, awaiting that event; then receiving their bodies, and rising in their entirety, that is bodily, just as the Lord arose” (from book 5, chapter 31).

A precise Protestant formulation appears in the Westminster Confession of Faith, the Presbyterian credo from 1647 (here “men” refers to both genders):