Dear Editor,
I thought the article by Greg Sheldon in the November en on ‘Resurrecting Belief’ was very good but I did take exception to his statement that we ‘possess an immortal soul’.
Nowhere does the Bible give any hint of our possessing an ‘immortal soul’. That idea was imported into Christian theology by Augustine of Hippo who in turn got it from pagan Greek philosophy. The word ‘soul’ can be taken to refer to the non-material dimension of our lives. And the point made in Genesis 2:7 is that this was a direct creation by God, it is what distinguishes us from the rest of the animal creation. Then when Adam and Eve disobeyed God, they were cast out of the Garden of Eden and cut off from the Tree of Life. Our spiritual life is sustained by God, it has no inherent immortality as the Greeks believed.
