Questions on Chapter 38.

Allowing personal identity to consist in the consciousness of the soul, that it is the same person — the same conscious, self-active, and responsible agent it was in childhood — and allowing the soul still to continue to exist, preserving this same consciousness of personal identity and responsibility — allowing this, we can then recognize the import and consistency of the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and of the future conscious existence of the soul.

By the identity of the body, we do not mean that the particles of matter from childhood to old age are precisely the same. These may all have been changed, including even the substance of the brain, some five or six times. Though decay and renewal, dilapidation and repairs, may have still been going on, yet we are not conscious of having changed our body for that of another person. On the contrary, we are conscious all the while that each day we possess the same body we had the day before. On the supposition that the soul still lives on through life, and from death till the resurrection, preserving a consciousness of its personal identity as the same responsible being — while this is the case, the identity of the body is still preserved. The moment we admit that during the interim from death to the resurrection there is no conscious being living on to connect the conscious being before death with the conscious being after the resurrection, there can, in the nature of things, be no resurrection. For if we admit that God should raise up the same material that once composed a body, how can a soul that has just sprung into being, on the organization of that new body, be conscious of that having once been its body, when it had not? And without this consciousness of receiving the identical body it had before inhabited, how can it realize a resurrection? If unconscious of ever having had a body, how can it be conscious of taking up the body it once laid down? And without this, how can it realize a resurrection? QUESTIONS ON CHAPTER 38.

QUESTION 1. Upon what is the principal objection to the doctrine of the soul’s immortality founded?

2. What Jewish sect were materialists?

3. When did this heresy originate in the Christian Church?

4. What is the theory of materialism?

5. How do we gain a knowledge of the existence of the soul?

6. How are matter and spirit proved to be essentially different by their respective properties?

7. How is it proved that matter is not intelligent?

8. How is it proved that the material substance of the brain is not possessed of memory?

9. To what form of skepticism does materialism lead?

10. What does materialism teach as to the state of the soul when the body dies?

11. Upon what is man’s proper personal identity grounded?

12. Why is the conscious existence of the soul, during the interim between death and the resurrection, necessary to man’s immortality?