Searching Sabbath 26: Death and Resurrection

There just two more to go in this series on Adventist beliefs and while I’ve enjoyed doing it I’m glad in a way that they’re coming to an end, because I haven’t really had time to do any blogging except the Wednesday and Sabbath videos, and I’d like to get back to more actual writing here on the blog, much as I like doing the videos.

This week we’re on a topic about which I am a very traditional Adventist. I am heartily in agreement with the Biblical nature of our teaching about death and the afterlife — I don’t believe the idea of an immortal soul is Biblical, which does away with the (evil, in my opinion) doctrine of an eternally burning hell. I wrote a column for Adventist Today  a couple of years thing that talked about the odd gaps that occurrences that sometimes make me question this belief — the people who genuinely believe, for example, that they have received a sense that a dead loved one is present with them. Yet in the end I always come down firmly on the side of one of the first “proof texts” I ever learned — “The living know that they shall die, but the dead know now anything” (Ecclesiastes 9:5).

Everything else I have to say on this topic is in the video; everything you have to say can be put in the comments.