The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Caird of McGill-Resurrection Restores “Whole Personality”

Canadian professor of New Testament, G. B. CAIRD, ²⁸ Of McGill University (Montreal, Quebec), deals with the Greek fallacy of a “fragmented man” in the “afterlife”—as it has been aptly phrased—as opposed to the “whole personality,” embraced in the Biblical teaching of a “unitary being” through the resurrection: CFF2 848.3

“There are many people who believe firmly in an afterlife who would rather not be troubled with so complicated a doctrine as the resurrection of the body, particularly if they have had enough trouble with the body itself through ill health. They would prefer to believe that at death the soul leaves the body behind like an old suit of clothes, and goes unencumbered to heaven. Now there is plenty of support for this belief in Greek philosophy, but none in the Bible. For some of the Greeks at least believed that the body is the root of all evil, that it is a prison in which the soul is incarcerated until its release at death. CFF2 848.4

“The Hebrews believed that the body is good, since God made it.... To the Hebrew, therefore, a belief in the immortality of the soul would mean that only part of the human personality survived death. In teaching the resurrection of the body the Bible is asserting that the whole personality survives.” ²⁹ CFF2 849.1

This is another Canadian stroke against the presumptions of Greek philosophy. CFF2 849.2