The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

VII. Lutheran’s Heinecken-Man Has No Inherent Immortality

MARTIN J. HEINEKEN, ⁵⁴ professor of systematic theology at the Lutheran Theological Seminary, Philadelphia, takes a similarly stalwart stand on the issue of Innate Immortality. This he discusses repeatedly in his Basic Christian Teachings (1949), a text in the Lutheran Leadership Courses. ⁵⁵ Note his impressive statements. (Heinecken photo on page 826.) CFF2 836.4

1. DUALISTIC CONCEPT FALSE; MAN A “UNITY.”

First of all, man is not a “soul” temporarily inhabiting a “body.” Man is a “unity” CFF2 836.5

“In the biblical account of creation we are told that God formed man of the dust and of the earth, and that he then breathed into his nostrils and man became a living soul. This is usually interpreted to mean that God made a soul, which is the real person, and that he then gave this soul a temporary home in a body, made of the dust of the earth. But this is a false dualism.... Man must be considered a unity.” ⁵⁶ CFF2 836.6

“We are dealing with a unified being, a person, and not with something that is called a soul and which dwells in a house called the body, as though the body were just a tool for the soul to employ, but not really a part of the person.” ⁵⁷ CFF2 836.7

2. VITAL RELATIONSHIP OF CREATOR AND CREATURE

Furthermore, immortality comes from God through the resurrection. Man has “no life or immortality within himself.” Here is Heinecken’s wording: CFF2 837.1

“It is held by some people that there is within every man an unchanging and indestructible core, immortal in its own right. It is unaffected by time; it had no beginning, neither can it have an end. It has always been and always will be. It came into this world of changing things from the realm of eternity and will return to it.... CFF2 837.2

“The Christian view is by no means to be identified with the above belief in the immortality of the soul. The Christian belief is in the immortality of the God-relationship, and in the resurrection. The Christian dualism is not that of soul and body, eternal mind and passing things, but the dualism of Creator and creature. Man is a person, a unified being, a center of responsibility, standing over against his Creator and Judge. He has no life or immortality within himself. He came into being through God’s creative power. He spends as many years on this earth as in God’s providence are allotted to him. He faces death as the wages of sin. ⁵⁸ CFF2 837.3

3. MISCONCEPTIONS LEAD TO DEPRECIATING THE RESURRECTION

Platonic Dualism concerns itself only with redemption of the “soul”:
“Men have speculated like this: At death the soul is separated from the body. It appears then before God in a preliminary judgment (mentioned nowhere in Scripture) and enters into a preliminary state either of blessedness or condemnation. Then, when the last trumpet sounds, the body is resurrected and rejoined with the soul, and complete once more, the reunited body and soul appear for the final, public judgment scene, from there to enter either into final bliss or final condemnation. It is no wonder that, with this view, men have had little use for a resurrection, and have finally dropped the notion altogether and have been satisfied with the redemption of only the soul.” ⁵⁹ CFF2 837.4

4. UNCONSCIOUS OF PASSING TIME TILL RESURRECTION

To Heinecken the resurrection and the judgment come “at the end of time.” The dead are unaware of the passage of intervening time:
“To die then means to pass to the resurrection and the judgment at the end of time. Even if someone should say that all men sleep until the final trumpet sounds, what is the passage of time for those who are asleep? The transition from the moment of death to the resurrection would still be instantaneous for them. It would be no different from going to bed at night and being waked in the morning.” ⁶⁰ CFF2 837.5

5. “SEPARABLE SOUL” UNKNOWN TO BIBLE

A decade later, in God in the Space Age (1959), Dr. Heinecken consistently maintained the same view of the nonimmortality of the soul, with man as a “unity” and the “resurrection” as the door to eternal life: CFF2 838.1

“Strange as this sounds in some ears, the Bible knows nothing of the immortality of the soul separable from the body. It knows only of a resurrection of the total man from the dead. CFF2 838.2

“Man in the Bible is a psychosomatic unity, and as such he passes through death to the resurrection and the judgment to the fulfillment, from faith through death and resurrection to sight. This makes all speculations about a place of the departed spirits absolutely futile.” ⁶¹ CFF2 838.3

6. THE WAY To ETERNAL LIFE SET FORTH

Likewise in his The Moment Before God (1956) Heinecken says that without the “resurrection” “death must be viewed, as far as any human possibility is concerned, as the complete and final end.” ⁶² As to survival he says: CFF2 838.4

“If there is not one who is the Lord of life and an inexhaustible fountain of life, then a man must resign himself to the inevitable drop into the abyss of nothingness.... CFF2 838.5

“The only other alternative is the living God who can bring life out of death. The corollary to the absolute miracle of the creatio ex nihilo which stands at the beginning of existence is the absolute miracle of the resurrection from the dead which is a re-creation. Everlasting blessedness is not something which is everyone’s destiny as a matter of course and which he will eventually achieve.” ⁶³ CFF2 838.6

7. NO ONE HAS LIFE IN AND OF HIMSELF

One final statement must suffice. Eternal life is provided for man as a “mortal being” only in and through God: CFF2 838.7

“Though death is the constant reminder to man of the fact that he does not have life in and out of himself and is upheld over the abyss of nothingness only by the power of an other, though each man faces this most shocking of realizations that he could also not be, yet, at the same time, this mortal being, once he has been called into being by the other, can never escape this relationship. No man escapes God by dying. He, therefore, who was not eternal, who had a beginning, enters into a life that has no end. He who is not eternal is nevertheless eternal.” ⁶⁴ CFF2 839.1

Such is God’s provision. CFF2 839.2