Understanding Prayer for the Dead Quotes

“The scholarly consensus is that biblical anthropological terms seldom, if ever, refer to an immaterial soul that survives death apart from the body. They have functional rather than ontological meaning and refer to the whole embodied person or some aspect of the person—thoughts, feelings, intentions, desires—not to distinct entities within a person.367”
― James B. Gould, Understanding Prayer for the Dead: Its Foundation in History and Logic

“The Protestant assumption that Scripture existed first and that tradition was slowly . . . added to it,” David Currie says, is false. Instead, the church created Scripture and dogma through the decisions of bishops, ecumenical councils, and papal pronouncements. The Council of Trent declared in 1564 that truth is “contained in written books [of the Bible] and the unwritten traditions [of the church].”217”
― James B. Gould, Understanding Prayer for the Dead: Its Foundation in History and Logic

“The Eastern Orthodox churches—alone among Christians—pray for all the dead, including the unsaved, convinced that God’s grace can in some way alter their fates.”
― James B. Gould, Understanding Prayer for the Dead: Its Foundation in History and Logic