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The philosophy-loving minority in the New Testament church was made up of those few we’ve already discussed (such as Justin, Clement, Origen, and Cyril). These Enlightened Christian heretics were ridiculed and sometimes executed for their subversive doctrines. Why did these heretics think everybody – including the unregenerate – go to heaven? Because they thought you do not have to be born again of the Spirit in order to leave this physical realm and enter the spirit realm of eternity. They thought you do not need Christ in order to get everlasting life. And, of course, they rejected the differences between born-once heathen and born-again saints. None of that stuff about heathens living beyond the grave, being equal to saints, and having innate Reason to receive and know the spiritual things of God was in the Bible, which means the early heretics, such as Justin and Origen, listened to the Greek philosophers – not to the privileged thousands of saints who were personally instructed by the Lord Jesus Christ Himself.

 

4. LATER NEW TESTAMENT: PHILOSOPHY CORRUPTS SAINTS (400 A.D. – 2nd Coming)

The nascent belief that pagans have immortal souls got its first big boost in the 5th century when Augustine published his book, The City of God, which included the world’s first (and only!) “Christian proof” that pagans have immortal souls. Augustine’s philosophy-based book effectively marks the reintroduction of Greek philosophy into Christianity. Because it was disguised in sheep’s clothing it was more effective than the heavy-handed program of Hellenization imposed upon God’s people by the Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. Those Old Testament attempts to infect God’s people with Reason had caused the well-intentioned Maccabees to rise up in rebellion, but this time there would be no military resistance because the leaven was coming from within the church.

 

Discerning Bible-based Christians were disappointed when Augustine addressed the immortality of the soul controversy because of what his “proof” ignored. He chose to ignore the fact that the Bible says the unregenerate flesh-only man cannot receive and know spiritual truths, cannot be subject to God’s laws, cannot please Him, and cannot be anything but enmity against Him. Knowledgeable Christians saw that Augustine’s proof only dealt with mankind in general by completely ignoring the Biblical distinctions between saints and the unregenerate. For reasons unknown to scholars he merely restated Plato’s childish “proof” – and then used that as the foundation upon which to conclude that all men are made in the image of God, which is a direct contradiction of what the Scriptures plainly say (covered in chapter D26, In The Image of God Made He Them), and that the souls of all men – including the unregenerate that have been born only of the flesh – are somehow spirit, which gives them everlasting life.

 

There were men who read Augustine’s book and immediately recognized him as an intellectual fraud, such as Vincent of Lérins. It cannot be determined with certainty whether Vincent and the other discerning Christians were that smart, or if the majority of Christians was that stupid – but it did take 850 years for the majority to realize Augustine was a fraud!

 

Discerning Christians were unable to stop Augustine’s “proof” from spreading because his book was quickly adopted by the Roman Catholic Church and accepted as doctrinal dogma. The immortality of pagan souls became the justification for the Catholic Church’s high-profile wars to convert pagan nations at sword point…they had to save the poor creatures from spending their “everlasting lives” in hell!

 

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN CHRISTIANITY AND ORGANIZED RELIGION

As the centuries went by, discerning Christians lived quiet lives away from the spotlight of history because, knowing we do not have dominion and understanding the heathen hoards weren’t pouring into hell, they were not interested in building empires by conquering kingdoms and building denominations by recruiting unregenerate dogs. But they were actively involved in helping each other remain strong in doctrine and weak in the flesh, and they never hesitated to share the gospel with strangers and exhort Catholics to study the Scriptures. Precisely who these groups of Christians were and what their exact doctrines were is unknown because history is written by the victors – and the Roman Catholic Church wiped these groups out and then wrote their “history.”

 

Geographically, these groups, whose origins go back to the first centuries of the New Testament era, settled the contiguous regions along the trade and migration routes from the Caspian Sea, around the Black Sea, and along the Danube River all the way to the Atlantic. The group names that pop up most frequently in history include: 1) The Paulicians. This eastern group of Christians originated in Armenia, which became the world’s first Christian nation (300 A.D.) and included the region of the old Assyrian Empire in the vicinity of the Caucasus Mountains. 2) The Bogomils. This central group was made up of Slavics and Saxons who spread east and west from the region south of the Balkan Mountains from the Adriatic Sea to the Caspian Sea – an area centered around the cities of Berea, Thessalonica, Philippi, and Neapolis (Ac 16:11,12; 17:10-13). 3) The Cathari. This large western group spread all the way across southern Europe from the Adriatic Sea to the Atlantic Ocean. 4) The Albigenses. This group of Christians appears to have been part of, or closely linked with, the Cathari of southern France and northern Italy. The Albigenses got their name from one of their main population centers, the city of Albi, in southern France. The different names may have been nothing more than conveniences of communication for historical and geographical identification – because the different names cannot be used to prove they were doctrinally divided into denominations. For ease of communication I usually refer to them collectively as the Cathari (pages H7-6 and D24-1).

 

Doctrinally, these groups had a number of things in common and, in fact, may have been homogenous. They completely rejected the spiritual efficacy of the physical sacraments of the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches (called “sanctifying grace” in the Roman Church). They rejected the New Testament validity of the priesthoods of those two denominations. They rejected the earthly political aspirations of those two churches. And they rejected the hierarchies of the two. The Cathari refused to call physical buildings churches, which caused some people to claim they were anti-church. They embraced Spartan lifestyles and devoted themselves to preaching the Bible, which they claimed to be more authoritative than the doctrinal teachings of the Greek and Roman churches. And they rejected the Roman Catholic doctrine of the immortality of pagan souls. Not surprisingly, the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches, which excommunicated each other as heretics and non-Christians, hated these Cathari groups because their preaching convinced many Christians to leave the two powerful denominations. Both churches labeled the Cathari heretics, non-Christians, and followers of cults such as the Manichean dualists. Because historians have never found any evidence linking the Cathari with Manichaeism, it is believed medieval Catholic historians linked the two merely because of some dualistic similarities in doctrine – which are not dissimilar to some things within Christianity and Catholicism. I’ll cover some of the elements of Cathari “dualism” shortly, but remember that history contains very few specifics about their doctrines – except for their rejection of the above-mentioned particulars of Roman Catholicism.

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The Cathari were fruitful, and over generations as their communities spread out, they came into more frequent contact with Scripturally-ignorant members of the Catholic Church. When a Scripturally-mature Christian speaks with a Christian who is religious but hasn’t mastered the Bible, the one walking in the light immediately recognizes that fact, but the one walking in darkness doesn’t realize his ignorance is so apparent. So it was no mystery among the growing communities of Bible-believing Cathari that Roman Catholics, who claimed to be doctrinally-correct Christians and who thought the whole world should join their church or go to hell, were merely stumbling along in the darkness of ignorance, carnality, and philosophy-based religious traditions. When the Cathari spoke with Catholics, they told them to learn the Bible because when the blind follow the blind they both go to hell. The Catholics responded by saying the ones going to hell were the non-Catholic Cathari and the unconverted heathen. The Cathari responded by saying dogs weren’t qualified for hell because they were merely flesh-born mortals. Not being able to handle the Scripture they were shown, the Catholics went and got their priests. But the priests could no more engage in Swordplay than their pewsters, so they simply defended the immortality of pagan souls by pointing out that Plato proved it, early “church fathers” like Justin and Origen accepted it, the great Augustine established Plato’s proof as consistent with Catholic doctrine, and therefore the Cathari needed to submit to the magisterium of the pope in Rome. The Cathari kept replying, “Yeah, I hear you, but where does the Bible say pagans have everlasting life of any kind?” Confused and embarrassed, these angry priests sent official reports to their superiors in Rome stating that increasing numbers of heretics were causing faithful Catholics to doubt established Roman Catholic doctrines, ask questions about the Bible, and in some cases to leave Catholicism and join the ye-must-be-born-again heretics.

 

By the early 11th century the Vatican felt so threatened by these large, growing groups of quiet-living, Bible-preaching heretics that it actually responded with the murderous violence of Cain – it launched several full-scale military crusades to wipe out Cathari population centers. Then it sent the Inquisition into every nook and cranny to find and execute the survivors. When members of the Inquisition questioned – under torture – captured Cathari families about why they rejected the immortality of all human souls, the questioners had no more understanding of the Bible-based answers they were given than today’s Catholics do. The Cathari were talking way over their Inquisitors’ heads when they replied, “In order to understand the immortality of the soul issue, you must first understand the new birth, carnality, serving the God of heaven by walking in the light of the Spirit, serving the god of this world by walking in the darkness of the flesh, and why carnality renders the natural man incapable of responding to the Bible because the unregenerate are not subject to the law of God and neither indeed can be because the spiritual things of God must be spiritually discerned. Verily, verily, I say unto thee, priest, ye must be born again.”

 

The Inquisitors, who were supposed to be the ones safeguarding correct doctrine, were embarrassed and angered by the obvious Bible knowledge of these humble people who remained pious even under severe, bloody, sexual torture. But all the Inquisitors agreed these heretics condemned themselves by believing Jesus Christ meant it literally when He referred to pagans as dogs. So the Inquisitors tied these families of heretics into huge living balls, consigned them to the fires of hell, and rolled them over the sides of mountains. (One conservative calculation indicates one thousand Cathari were butchered every month for two hundred years before the dwindling number of survivors made that kill rate unsustainable. For documentation of the atrocities committed see Fox’s Book of Christian Martyrs and van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror.) Then the Inquisitors sat down in the homes of their victims and snacked on their food while writing reports justifying these latest executions. Centuries later, Catholic historians would peruse those reports, not understand what the Cathari were talking about, and write that the Cathari were dualist heretics who rejected the One God of Creation and therefore weren’t even real Christians. There were so many of these dangerous families and communities of Bible believers spread out over 1,500,000 square miles that it took the Roman Catholic Church four centuries to completely wipe them from the face of the earth. After this genocide there was no one to stand up and explain that Cathari “heresy” was merely the product of Roman Catholic ignorance of the Bible and enmity against those who refused to bow to a wafer as if it were Jesus Christ in the flesh.

 

Why would historians think humble Bible-preaching people like the Cathari were “heretics”? I’ll use Nicodemus’ encounter with Jesus Christ in John 3 as an example.

 

Nicodemus did not understand fundamental Biblical truths about the new birth or about the important distinction between mortal flesh and immortal spirit. And from that we may infer he also lacked a proper understanding of carnality and the difference between the evil of walking in the darkness of the flesh as opposed to properly walking in the light of the Spirit. The conversation he had with Christ, in fact, shows he understood less about being born again than your average Roman Catholic does today – because even Catholics don’t ask questions half as stupid as Nicodemus did. So, let’s pretend Nicodemus rejected Christ and therefore didn’t have the foggiest idea what He was talking about. And let’s also say Nicodemus wrote a history book about life in Israel in his day in which he says Christ was a weirdo and a heretic. Here’s an excerpt from Nicodemus’ “historical proof that Christ was a heretic”:

I don’t know why some people liked this penniless carpenter from Galilee. He was an itinerant mooch who always invited himself into people’s homes in order to get a free meal. He didn’t even own a home and often slept in the public park over on the Mount of Olives with a scruffy group of unemployed wanderers. He suffered from megalomania and told people he was the son of God, claimed to have angels at his beck and call, and said he was the true king of the Jews even though he always shunned political involvement and refused to be made a king. He was finally executed as an insurrectionist, but not before he started a sect that believed in dualism.

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We Jews know from the Bible there is but one God, and He created the universe. God taught us it is good to have circumcised penises, wash the outside of our dishes, rest on Saturday, and keep a list of other Commandments. Keeping His Commandments is good; not keeping His Commandments is bad. But the carpenter who called himself the Christ rejected all of that and preached dualism.

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Jesus rejected our Biblical belief in one God and one creation: he said there is a good god in heaven who rules over a spirit realm of light, and there is another god – an evil one – on earth who rules over a physical realm of darkness. These two gods are fighting against each other. Some people on earth are children of light because they are spirits. But people who are flesh and blood are evil children of darkness because the physical world is evil. I actually heard Jesus tell some Pharisees their father was the devil and they were walking in darkness. This carpenter also rejected God’s rule-based system of right and wrong. For example, I heard him tell some people there is nothing wrong with eating with unwashen hands, there is nothing wrong with working on Saturday, and it is OK to enter the temple and take the showbread and eat it…as long as you are “a child” of “the kingdom of light.”

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When I asked him how people become children of light, he said they have to squeeze back into their mothers’ wombs and then be “born again”! I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life! I just stood there a minute looking at this deluded pauper while he continued spouting more of his claptrap about the flesh is part of this worldly kingdom of darkness, and people have to be “born again” and walk around with their heads in the clouds in order to be a good member of the heavenly kingdom of light.

 

If you understood as little Bible as this “Nicodemus” did, it would be easy to think Christ was a “heretic”, and even easier to convince later generations of ignorant Christians He was a heretic.

 

Now, because I referred to dualism, and because Catholic historians accused the Cathari of the heresy of dualism, I’ll describe dualism as if I were a secular historian:

As its name implies, dualism attempts to subvert the traditional Christian belief in one God and one creation by introducing a vague and contradictory belief that there are two opposing gods and two opposing worlds (often called kingdoms) under the command of these opposing gods. The teachings of dualism seem to boil down to the idea that there are two opposing systems of good and evil – the spirit world (good) is opposed by the physical world (evil). For example, the Bogomils, who were closely related to the Cathari, thought the devil is the god of this world who fathered and rules the physical human body. But the Bogomils only practiced a modified dualism because they thought the god of this world, the devil, is not co-equal with the god of heaven, but is a rebellious child of the god of heaven. At any rate, the devil and the god of heaven are fighting over the souls of men by using their two opposing kingdoms of good (spirit) and evil (physical matter). The belief that physical matter is bad and spirit is good caused some people to go to the extreme of saying Christ never had a true physical body on earth; he was a spirit who manifested himself in human form. Dualists believe the good spirit realm will eventually triumph and use fire to destroy this evil physical world.

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The destruction of this earth by fire contradicted the traditional belief of the established church, the Roman Catholic Church, which maintained that the earth God created is not evil, and therefore the Biblical destruction of this world should not be taken literally; it is an allegorical representation of the eventual triumph of the Church and the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth. The Roman Church believed it was blasphemy to think God would create anything evil, or to think God is not the one supreme ruler over all of creation.

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One of the modern offspring of dualism was the “Doctrine of Transcendence”, which said people could use Natural Law meditation to transcend this physical world and get in touch with the beauty and truth of the glorious realm above and beyond the earth. However, Transcendental Meditation fell from vogue in the mid 1800s when it was agreed Natural Law never existed.

 

The above descriptions of “heretical beliefs” show how easy it would have been for Biblically-ignorant historians to sincerely – but incorrectly – call the Cathari heretical dualists. Therefore, terms like “ye must be born again” in order to avoid “walking in the flesh” after “the god of this world” seemed very strange to those that lived by sight rather than by the literal living words of the living God.

 

The rotting corpses of millions of Cathari put Christians who rejected the immortality of unregenerate dogs in a distinct minority, and it made those who accepted the immortality of pagan souls a distinct majority that would remain until the Second Coming. However, during the destruction of the Cathari the Christian majority was embarrassed to find out Augustine’s proof of the immortality of souls was specious. That revelation launched many years of intense theological debate and religious and political maneuvering, which are of great doctrinal and historical interest to those studying this topic. Let’s examine that debate within the context of history.

 

THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL’S DOCTRINAL CRISIS

When the fourth crusade against the Cathari completed the task of razing their remaining towns and slaughtering the inhabitants, the Vatican commanded the Inquisition to sniff out, torture, and kill any survivors who had gone into hiding. Because dead people cannot discuss doctrine, it looked as if Rome had finally done away with those who questioned the validity of the Catholic tradition that pagan souls are immortal. But then the unexpected happened: A man named Averroes reached out from the grave, discredited the only “Christian proof” of heathen immortality, and put the Vatican into another panicked defense of not only its doctrinal competence, but also its continued status as a social and religious powerhouse.

 

Before we get to Averroes, we need to briefly set the stage. The Crusades (1095-1291) had energized commerce between Europe and the Middle East, and allowed Catholic scholars to have access to documents preserved by Muslim scholars, which included unadulterated copies of Greek philosophy. Many scholars were impressed with and won over by philosophy and the use of Reason. Philosophy in turn seemed to lend credibility to the teachings of early Christians like Justin and Origen, who in their day were heretics but were now increasingly viewed as intellectuals. The process of elevating those men from heretics to “intellectuals” and then to “church fathers” was a long and slow one that paralleled the increasing acceptance of Reason, resulting in theologians adopting the beliefs of these early heretics as “doctrinal precedents.”

 

When modern Bible scholars first began examining the teachings of early liberal Christian intellectuals (such as Justin and Origen who thought pagans could please God and go to heaven via Reason and morality – without the Scriptures and without the new birth), they realized the liberals weren’t really very intellectual…because they had based their doctrine on Greek philosophy rather than the Bible. Ordinarily that would have caused modern scholars to discredit the early intellectuals, but because the scholars had the hindsight of history, they already knew Augustine would come along and establish a “precedent” by “Christianizing” Plato’s Reason-based immortal soul “proof.” Therefore, scholars assumed that even though the early liberal non-intellectuals had based their doctrine solely on the wrong foundation of pagan philosophy, they’d accidentally reached the right conclusion. In other words, the early Enlightened non-intellectuals were excused for erroneously relying on pagan precedents…because those precedents would eventually – when Natural Law and Reason became “Christian” – be redefined as Christian precedents.

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The growing use of Reason caused more and more Christians to conclude that pagans like Plato were in touch with God, that all men, pagans and Christians, were going to heaven, and that even pagan religions taught certain religious and moral tenets that were of God. Because everything was now open to skepticism, some scholars even thought it had been wrong for God’s Old Testament people (like King David) to slaughter innocent pagans and then claim “God told us to do it!”

 

But Averroes tossed all of that traditional wisdom out the window.

 

Averroes (1126-1198) was a brilliant Spanish-Arab Muslim theologian and philosopher who was so well-respected and influential among Enlightened Christian and Jewish theologians and scholars that they graced him with an honorary nickname. Just as Aristotle was deemed so great that he was simply known as “The Philosopher”, scholars likewise called Averroes, “The Commentator.” Averroes was a devoted student of Greek philosophy who accepted its teachings about Reason, Equality, and Happiness, which made him unpopular among fundamentalist Muslims who took the Koran literally. Averroes believed people of all religions have access to God’s truth through philosophy (Reason). But he believed the masses lack the intellectual capacity to understand and appreciate the higher truths hidden within religious law, and that they would react with superstitious fear if they ever learned of them. Therefore only the intellectual elite should be given access to the higher truths revealed by philosophy. He believed Moses, the best prophet of his era, was superseded in greatness by the later prophet, Jesus Christ. But the latest and greatest prophet of all was Mohammed – simply because Reason allows mankind to grow ever closer to God’s truths through the study of the accumulated wisdom of Enlightened scholars of the past.

 

Averroes’ works integrated Greek philosophy and the religion of Islam, which showed how Reason can link all religions by revealing their common moral values. Averroes’ combining Reason and Islam made him the Muslim forerunner of Thomas Aquinas. He is also the father of modern liberal Islamics because his works were influential in splitting off from fundamentalist Muslims who take the Koran literally a new Enlightened group of Muslims who are liberal, sophisticated, and progressive. For example, Averroes believed the treatment of women as servants was in accordance with the literal Koran and therefore should be the belief of the masses, but at the same time it was OK for the elite to understand that women are equal. In other words, his teachings were very similar to the literal teachings in the Bible that Christian women are fundamentally equal to their husbands by virtue of the fact that all saints are in Christ, but at the same time wives are made servants of their husbands by virtue of the different jobs God gave to men and women.

 

Averroes showed that the philosophical arguments of Plato and Augustine were specious by demonstrating conclusively and undeniably that Augustine’s Plato-based “proof” of the immortality of human souls actually – if you took Reason seriously – made a good case for the opposite conclusion! In doing so, Averroes single-handedly pulled the rug out from under the validity of Plato, the “church fathers”, Augustine, magisterium, and papal infallibility. This was a huge crisis for the Vatican. If it allowed people to think Augustine was wrong about heathen immortality, and if it allowed people to think Christ had been literal when He called pagans dogs, they might question the Vatican’s doctrinal competence, its military conquest of pagan nations in order to save their souls, and its extermination of millions of Cathari “heretics.”

 

Even before Averroes’ works became public, many scholars privately knew Augustine’s “proof” was specious, but they had been too timid to speak up – so the issue was quietly ignored. But now that Augustine’s “proof” was openly criticized as specious, and because most Christians know their church’s doctrines are supposed to be based solely on the firm foundation of Biblical truth, and because of the reality that many of the naïvely-faithful had been shocked to learn that Augustine’s brain-dead “proof” had been the only doctrinal foundation supporting heathen immortality in over 1,300 years of New Testament Christianity, Catholicism realized it had a problem it could no longer ignore. Now that the Augustinian foundation of Roman Catholicism was discredited, scholars could no longer utilize other Catholic traditions – such as sending missionaries out to rescue pagans from hell – as backward “confirmations” of the theory that all souls are immortal. Scholars now had to face the fact that many church traditions over the centuries had been founded upon Augustine’s assumption – and subsequent “proof” – that early heretics like Philo, Justin, Clement, Origen, and Cyril had been correct to teach that God and His saints should not be taken literally in the Bible when they call pagans dogs. Scholars needed humility to admit their error, faith to believe what the Bible literally says, and time to study and grow into doctrinal maturity so they could dismantle centuries of errors built upon errors. It was all just too much for the Vatican to handle; too much had been built upon the foundation of heathen immortality to go back to sola Scriptura. But doctrine wasn’t Rome’s only problem: Long before the writings of Averroes showed up, spiritual matters like doctrine had been overshadowed by temporal political, geopolitical, military, and denominational problems directly related to the Church’s lust for worldly dominion.

 

The Vatican’s machinations had alienated the king of France, Philip the Fair, who rejected the Catholic doctrine of worldly dominion that said kings should be subordinate to the pope. I’ll skip the myriad concurrent historical details (such as King Philip’s Babylonian Captivity of the papacy) and focus on the four things the Vatican did in an effort to save face, preserve the discredited doctrine of pagan immortality, and retain its political and religious power.

 

First, the Vatican told the Inquisition to continue killing the Cathari – and anybody else who denied that pagans have everlasting life. Yes, everyone now knew the Cathari might have been correct for well over a thousand years…but it was too late for the Vatican to dismantle the Roman Catholic denomination that had taken 900 years to build.

 

Second, the Vatican began looking for someone with the intellectual ability to salvage the sagging credibility of the never-proven doctrine. It selected the well-known scholar, Dominican bishop, and teacher of philosophy, Albertus Magnus (1200-1280). Albertus was an excellent choice; he was the foremost scholar of his time, and is the only one to be given the title “the Great” (which is what magnus means). But Albertus quickly found out why the immortality of pagan souls had never been proven: there are no examples in the Bible of Egyptians, Philistines, Persians, Babylonians, or any other pagans living beyond the grave; all examples involve God’s people. If Albertus tried to take the examples of God’s people (apples) living beyond the grave and apply them to pagans (oranges), he would expose himself as an intellectual dunce, be stripped of his magnus title, and become Albertus Idiotus.

 

Knowing he could not prove his case with the Bible, and knowing Averroes had been correct in saying he couldn’t prove his case with Reason, either, Albertus stooped to using a last-ditch tactic very familiar to debaters: he wove the Bible into his rhetoric and used Reason to modify it, and then he’d say things like, “therefore thus-and-such”, and, “from that we must conclude yakkety-yak” – when he’d really proven nothing. He might have gotten away with it if Averroes hadn’t just shown everybody how to recognize such tactics. Albertus’ frustrating attempts to make it look like he’d proven the traditional Catholic doctrine were all embarrassing failures.

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But nobody blamed him and nobody tried to call him Albertus Idiotus; because every scholar who’d ever examined the issue knew it could not be proven by Reason, was not in the Bible, and in fact seemed to contradict a number of places in the Bible. When scholars and theologians saw Albert the Great fail, it merely convinced them that any Christian of lesser intellect who attempted to prove the doctrine was also going to fail – and was going to expose himself as Biblically and intellectually immature. That is why no serious Christian scholar since Albertus Magnus has ever tried to publish a comprehensive Biblical proof that pagans have immortal souls.

 

Albertus’ frustration and failure showed scholars and theologians that neither the Bible nor Reason could be used as convincing, irrefutable proofs of pagan immortality. But they noted that Albertus’ inventive usage of convoluted, hard-to-follow Reason-based arguments showed Reason to be more useful than the Bible: With the Bible you get boxed in quickly because the Bible is finite, definite, and written. Reason, on the other hand, is infinite and indefinite because it exists only in the mind of man. Therefore Reason showed much promise as a “proof” because its subtleties could be twisted and manipulated into labyrinthine paths that would be sure to confuse and tire all but the most tenacious scholars. Reason began to appeal more and more to Vatican authorities who somehow had to reestablish their doctrinal credibility.

 

Therefore when a combination of factors, including religious and political machinations in the late 13th century, put pressure on the Vatican, it decided to go ahead and take its third step to establish the credibility of pagan immortality: it assigned its brilliant liberal scholar, Dominican friar, and philosopher, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the task of formally recognizing the doctrinal validity and credibility of Reason as part of Christianity. He was not told to prove the immortality of pagan souls because Albert the Great had already proven it couldn’t be done. Aquinas merely said in passing that the reason man doesn’t want to die is because he can’t – his soul is immortal. And he assured Christians they could continue trusting the teaching magisterium of the Catholic Church.

 

Also note that Aquinas did not prove the Christian validity of Reason; indeed, that was not his assignment. His assignment was to weave Reason into Christianity and show how it could be used to benefit Christianity and mankind. And that is all he did: he wrote and wrote and wrote; he rambled and mused and postulated; he discussed and philosophized and advised; he analyzed and examined and compared. But he established nothing. He proved nothing. But the powerful Roman Catholic hierarchy acted as if he had.

 

Those who had depended on “great scholars” like Albertus to prove heathen immortality were again disappointed by Aquinas. And those who had been reluctant to accept as valid the very philosophy the Bible warns about continued to have reservations. But most within the Roman Catholic hierarchy recognized how important to the future of the Church Reason was, so they took the fourth step: In 1323 Thomas Aquinas was made an official Roman Catholic saint for his work of integrating Reason and Christianity, and he displaced Augustine as the Church’s foundation. All resistance and scholastic debate stopped, and the acceptance of the never-proven and no-longer-open-for-discussion doctrine of pagan immortality was assured among the ignorant and uncaring masses.

 

Another factor that influenced the spreading acceptance of the theory that pagans have immortal souls was the leaders of the Protestant Reformation all grew up Roman Catholics who trusted in the validity of the works of a Christian saint, their own Thomas Aquinas, and therefore never questioned the revolutionary changes wrought by the Age of Reason. Not one of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation knew enough Bible to question the never-proven (!) belief that pagan souls have immortality without the spiritual birth. Probably the closest any Reformer ever came to learning the truth was the brilliant John Calvin. He learned enough Bible to realize the new birth is a sovereign parental act of God and has nothing to do with the carnal “free will” of the unregenerate. Had he not been so preoccupied with establishing Christian political dominion on earth he might have had the study time to discern the centuries-old unsolved parable of the difference between the saved and the unsaved. At any rate, nobody has ever been able to Scripturally prove pagans have immortal souls. That is the reason the doctrine has become such an embarrassment to the modern church that nobody seriously preaches and teaches it. I say again, nobody has ever been able to Scripturally prove pagans have immortal souls. And if anyone ever does, he will be more famous among theologians than Plato, Augustine, and Aquinas.

 

The ex-Catholic priests who started the Protestant Reformation founded a new breed of Enlightened denominations that would believe (until the mid 19th century) Reason was God’s gift to mankind to reveal His Natural Law. These Protestant denominations simply and blindly accepted (until the mid 19th century) the Bible PLUS Reason as the foundation of doctrine, and by the time they found out Reason and Natural Law never existed, they had already revolutionized the social order of Western civilization, including church and civil government, economics, education, and the purpose of warfare (to fight for democracy rather than religion).

 

The incorporation of Reason into Christianity allowed the theory that pagans have immortal souls to survive without ever being proven. Reason also caused theology to wax…while faith, Biblical literacy, and Biblical literalism waned.

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THE DEBATE OVER THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL

We have dealt with the historical events that established – and later salvaged – the doctrine of heathen immortality. Now we’ll focus on the doctrinal arguments made by Christians over the centuries.

 

The Bible says pagans are unregenerate, mortal dogs: The doctrinal position of the Cathari and conservative scholars was Christians are given spirit life and immortality by Christ – but pagans are not. Some of the verses used to prove heathen are mere mortals, flesh-only, no different from beasts, and prevented by a lack of God-given spirit life from receiving and knowing the spiritual things of God, a condition that makes these Gentiles no more subject to the Bible than beasts, included Ec 3:18,19; 1 Co 2:10-16; Ro 5:12-17; 8:7,8; Mt 10:28, which are almost completely ignored today.

 

Tradition claimed the “breath of life” equals spirit and immortal: Liberal theologians attempting to salvage the doctrinal credibility of the Roman Catholic Church responded by turning to Ge 2:7, which says all men have a God-given “breath of life.” They said this “breath of life” is the soul, which they said is a spiritual entity that gives man immortality and the ability to receive and know God’s spiritual truths, making man different from beasts because beasts do not have everlasting life, cannot go to heaven or hell, and are not subject to the Bible like humans are. Therefore, they said, pagans are supposed to live by the Bible and will go to hell if they don’t – thus proving the Catholic and Protestant missionary programs of proselytizing pagans were not misdirected.

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The Bible says God gave animals the breath of life: The conservatives then humiliated the liberals by pointing out that Ge 6:17 and 7:15 show animals also have this God-given “breath of life”, and Ge 7:21,22 clearly shows that all flesh, both human and animal, in whose nostrils is the breath of life die. In fact, the reason mortal men and mortal beasts die is the simple fact that they all have the same type of God-given breath: “For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast” (Ec 3:19). Therefore Augustine’s theory that pagan humans have immortal hell-bound souls did not come from the Bible. That’s why today’s encyclopedias openly state that the Christian doctrine of the immortality of the soul is not supported by either Testament of the Bible, but came to Christianity from the Greek philosophers. (Go look it up in your encyclopedia. Britannica’s Micropædia has it under “soul”; and in the Macropædia under “Christianity” find the section “Christian thought and doctrine”, and in the subsection “Christian Philosophy” read the part called “History of Christian philosophy.”) The pagan origin of the doctrine is not a mystery. I say again, it is very well known. But it is an embarrassing unmentionable because it reveals that for many centuries our spiritual forefathers, both preachers and pewsters, were ignorant and/or shallow in their understanding of the Bible, or were hypocrites who knew better but were too weak and selfish to stand up and preach correct doctrine.

 

Tradition claimed animals do not have souls: The liberals had no choice but to admit that animals have the breath of life, but they rashly countered by saying animals certainly do not have souls. That was an unfounded and unscriptural assumption, and it was based on the traditional view of the soul as an immortal entity that either went to heaven or hell.

 

The Bible says animals have souls: The conservatives then appeared to finally win the argument by pointing out animals do have souls, and that those souls are mortal and don’t go to hell. For example, Re 8:9; 16:3; Jb 12:10 say the souls of animals die just like Ezek 18:4 says human souls are not immortal because they die – all of which reaffirmed the doctrinal validity and literal truth of Ec 3:18,19.

 

Even though the conservatives won the Bible-based argument about the mortality of dogs, that didn’t keep the liberals from continuing to resort to Reason. They pointed out that some ancient pagans – like Plato – used Reason to conclude that all humans have immortality. And Christians like Origen and Augustine used Reason to conclude the same. The conservatives shook their heads and said it didn’t matter what anybody used to believe; what mattered was what the Bible says because all doctrines must come from the Bible.

 

Even though Aquinas avoided the doctrine of heathen immortality, he actually salvaged it by making philosophy “Christian” and teaching that the Bible doesn’t answer all doctrinal questions or reveal everything we need to know: some things we have to get from the Natural Laws written on the tables of our hearts. That is why taking the Bible literally and believing the Bible to be the sole authority in all matters of Christian doctrine and all matters of our Christian daily lives never regained the ascendancy and will remain the minority position until the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

 

After Aquinas it became “Christian” for the liberals to use pagan Natural Law to “prove” humans really were different from beasts because when God breathed the “breath of life” into man and beast He was “obviously” giving man Reason while withholding it from beasts so humans alone could receive and know divine truths/moral values. The Catholic Church began promoting the immortality of human souls by referring to them as “Reasonable souls” and “Intellectual souls”, as distinguished from the mortal souls of beasts that merely had “instinct” – not intellect (as was commonly believed back then). The use of unscriptural terms like “Reasonable souls” helped the Vatican reestablish its doctrinal credibility and to “prove” all human souls have everlasting life – because now Reason was valid, it was Christian. And it was now OK for liberals to use the writings of church fathers, such as Augustine and Origen, as legitimate doctrinal precedents.

 

Having accepted man’s “Reasonable soul” as immortal, and Reason as a valid mystical substitute for the Bible, the Catholic Church built upon this mystical/mythical mental ability by decreeing, “At the bar of God’s justice a man will not be judged by anything but his own conscience.” (International missionary work, however, would later discredit the theory that conscience is a universal value system implanted by God: conscience is based upon, and changes with, learned belief systems.) Augustine’s old discredited doctrine was now accepted again, and the fact that neither he nor anybody else has ever proven pagans have immortality doesn’t mean it isn’t true! Therefore it is true!

 

The historical debate over heathen immortality illustrates Christianity’s division into two camps. One camp believed the Bible didn’t answer all doctrinal questions or reveal everything we need to know. Some things we had to get from the wisdom written on the tables of our hearts by God – the writing was Natural Law, and Reason was the mechanism by which all men have access to these eternal truths of God.

 

The other camp believed the word of God can make us doctrinally perfect and throughly furnished unto all good works – including using Scripture to instruct Christ’s sheep in the way of righteousness and to reprove and correct those who stray from the word of truth.

 

Today Christianity remains divided over what should be the source of our doctrine: Some think doctrine should come from the Bible PLUS nothing; others think doctrine should come from the Bible PLUS (add whatever your denomination approves of: Self, Reason, love, church hierarchy, “tongues revelations”, feelings, conscience, morality, family values, democracy, freedom, happiness, tradition…).

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THE MODERN PROTESTANT ORIGIN OF “ETERNAL SECURITY”