The Soul, Hell & the Supreme Ethic of Love
A Discipleship Class — with J. P. Moreland, Richard Swinburne, C. S. Lewis, and Ravi Zacharias
By Pleasant Springs Church · Discipleship School
Key Texts: Genesis 2:7 • Daniel 12:2 • Isaiah 66:24 • Matthew 10:28 • Matthew 25:31–46 • Mark 9:43–48 • Mark 12:29–31 • Luke 16:19–31 • 1 Peter 3:18–20 • 1 Peter 4:6 • Ephesians 4:8–10 • 1 John 4:7–19
Hell is the hardest doctrine the Church teaches. It is also one of the most misunderstood. This class works through what the soul is, what hell is, and how Christian philosophers from Augustine to Molina to Swinburne to Ravi Zacharias have shown that hell is not the failure of God’s love — it is the cost of His refusal to override love. We listen to Jesus from the standpoint of both the Author who spoke the warning and the Audience who first heard it, with Septuagint (LXX) and ESV scripture side-by-side at every key step.
Almost every culture in human history has assumed that a human being is more than a body. The Bible opens with that conviction in the very first description of a person:
καὶ ἔπλασεν ὁ Θεὸς τὸν ἄνθρωπον, χοῦν ἀπὸ τῆς γῆς, καὶ ἐνεφύσησεν εἰς τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ πνοὴν ζωῆς, καὶ ἐγένετο ὁ ἄνθρωπος εἰς ψυχὴν ζῶσαν. Then the Lord God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature (Hebrew: nephesh chayyah; Greek: psychēn zōsan — “a living soul”).
The Septuagint translators chose ψυχή (psychē) — the Greek word from which we get psyche and psychology. A human person is not made of a soul nor merely given one as an add-on. The text says we became a living soul the moment God’s breath met our dust. We are a functional unity of two distinct realities: body and soul.
Philosopher J. P. Moreland summarizes the historic Christian view this way: “A human being is a functional unity of two distinct entities — body and soul. The human soul, while not by nature immortal (its immortality is sustained by God), is nevertheless capable of entering an intermediate disembodied state upon death, however incomplete and unnatural this state may be, and, eventually, being reunited with a resurrected body.”
The soul is the bearer of everything that is you that is not your tissue:
This is why Jesus draws the most decisive contrast in all His teaching not between rich and poor, or strong and weak, but between body and soul:
καὶ μὴ φοβεῖσθε ἀπὸ τῶν ἀποκτεινόντων τὸ σῶμα, τὴν δὲ ψυχὴν μὴ δυναμένων ἀποκτεῖναι· φοβεῖσθε δὲ μᾶλλον τὸν δυνάμενον καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα ἀπολέσαι ἐν γεέννῃ. And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell (en geennē).
Blaise Pascal famously wrote, “The immortality of the soul is something of such vital importance to us that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.” The Bible agrees: God has “set eternity in the human heart” (Eccl. 3:11). The oldest cave drawings, the pyramids, the burial rites of every civilization are testimonies to a creature that knows, against all the evidence of decay, that it was not made for the dust alone.
If we are only bodies, then death is the end of us, hell is incoherent, and Jesus is a fanatic. If we are also souls, then death is a doorway, judgment is real, the warnings of Christ are tender mercy, and the Cross is the most important event in the history of the universe.
Every great moral conviction we hold — that murder is wrong, that babies deserve protection, that a slave is not property, that consent matters — rests on the prior conviction that there is something in a human being that money cannot buy, surgery cannot remove, and death cannot reach. That something is the soul. Lose the soul and you lose the foundation of every right and duty you cherish.
The doctrine of hell is taught with great frequency by Jesus Himself — more, in fact, than by any other figure in the Bible. He does not present it as speculation. He presents it as a finished and terrible reality from which He has come to rescue us.
καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν καθευδόντων ἐν γῆς χώματι ἐξεγερθήσονται, οὗτοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον καὶ οὗτοι εἰς ὀνειδισμὸν καὶ εἰς αἰσχύνην αἰώνιον. And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
41τότε ἐρεῖ καὶ τοῖς ἐξ εὐωνύμων· πορεύεσθε ἀπ’ ἐμοῦ οἱ κατηραμένοι εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ αἰώνιον τὸ ἡτοιμασμένον τῷ διαβόλῳ καὶ τοῖς ἀγγέλοις αὐτοῦ… 46καὶ ἀπελεύσονται οὗτοι εἰς κόλασιν αἰώνιον, οἱ δὲ δίκαιοι εἰς ζωὴν αἰώνιον. 41Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” 46And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
οἵτινες δίκην τίσουσιν ὄλεθρον αἰώνιον ἀπὸ προσώπου τοῦ Κυρίου καὶ ἀπὸ τῆς δόξης τῆς ἰσχύος αὐτοῦ. They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.
From these passages a clear, sober definition emerges. Moreland summarizes the essence of hell from these and other verses: “The essence of hell is the end of a road away from God, love, and anything of real value. It is banishment from the very presence of God and from the type of life we were made to live.”
Scripture describes hell with several images at once — flame and darkness, a bottomless pit and a refuse heap, a worm that does not die and a fire that does not go out. Pressed literally, these images contradict one another (how can the fire be literal in a literal darkness?). God Himself is called “a consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29) without being made of physical flame. The flames in hell are symbols of the reality of divine judgment. The loss they signify — the loss of God, of love, of every good thing the soul was made for — is altogether literal.
Hell is not a torture chamber operated by a cosmic sadist. God is not in hell punching the damned. Hell is the long, settled, irreversible state of a soul that has, with full awareness, said no to its own Maker for the last time. The pain is real, the shame is real, the regret is real, but the cause is the choice and the absence — not divine cruelty.
Richard Swinburne: Heaven Is Not a Reward, It Is a Home
Oxford philosopher of religion, on why hell is just and unavoidable
Swinburne asks the right question: why must a person have a properly oriented will and true beliefs to enjoy heaven? Why aren’t all simply admitted?
His answer has two parts. First, heaven is the kind of place where only a certain kind of person could be at home. Heaven is the eternal enjoyment of supremely worthwhile happiness — not pleasant sensations from drugs or flattery, but deep happiness rooted in three things: true beliefs, truly valuable activities (above all, friendship with God), and a will free of conflict — the will of a person who actually wants to be doing what heaven offers. A person who has spent a lifetime cultivating contempt for God, His worship, and His people would find heaven a torment, not a reward.
Second, heaven must be freely chosen. God will not drag anyone into eternal joy at gunpoint. To do so would not be love; it would be tyranny. As Moreland concludes in defense of Swinburne: “God can’t make people’s character for them, and people who do evil or cultivate false beliefs start a slide away from God that ultimately ends in hell…. When God allows people to say no to Him, He actually respects and dignifies them.”
God therefore has only one option for souls who, with eyes open, refuse Him: quarantine. To annihilate them would be to destroy creatures bearing His image — an offense against the very dignity He gave them. To force them is to violate the freedom that makes love possible. Hell is the cost God pays for taking us seriously.
In Bible study at Pleasant Springs we always work from two vantage points: the Author (what did the speaker mean to convey?) and the Audience (what did the first hearers actually hear?). Hell is one of those subjects where those two perspectives, properly held, dissolve a thousand modern misunderstandings.
Jesus — the Speaker of the Warning
Eleven times in the Gospels Jesus uses the word γέεννα (Gehenna)
More words about hell come from the lips of Jesus than from any prophet or apostle. He uses three distinct Greek terms, and they do not mean the same thing:
Jesus is not borrowing from Greek mythology. He is using vocabulary His own people had been speaking for centuries, drawn from their own Scriptures and history.
First-Century Jews — What They Heard When Jesus Said “Gehenna”
A real valley, a horrifying history, and a prophet’s oracle they all knew by heart
The Valley of Hinnom (Hebrew: גֵּיא־הִנֹּם, Gē-Hinnōm; LXX: φάραγξ Ἐννόμ or Γαι-εννόμ) ran along the southern wall of Jerusalem. In the days of wicked kings Ahaz and Manasseh, the valley became the site of the worst evil ever committed on Israelite soil — child sacrifice to the Canaanite god Molech (2 Kings 16:3; 23:10; Jer. 7:31–32; 19:1–6). Good king Josiah desecrated the place; later tradition records that the valley became Jerusalem’s burning rubbish dump — a place of perpetual fire, rot, and the worm that fed on what was thrown there.
Every first-century Jew listening to Jesus knew the valley personally. They could see the smoke from the city walls. They had inherited the prophet Isaiah’s closing oracle — an oracle every synagogue child memorized:
καὶ ἐξελεύσονται καὶ ὄψονται τὰ κῶλα τῶν ἀνθρώπων τῶν παραβεβηκότων ἐν ἐμοί· ὁ γὰρ σκώληξ αὐτῶν οὐ τελευτήσει, καὶ τὸ πῦρ αὐτῶν οὐ σβεσθήσεται, καὶ ἔσονται εἰς ὅρασιν πάσῃ σαρκί. And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.
When Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:24 directly — “where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” — three times in Mark 9:43–48, His audience does not have to ask what He means. They are hearing their own prophet, about their own valley, lifted into the eternal key.
43καὶ ἐὰν σκανδαλίσῃ σε ἡ χείρ σου, ἀπόκοψον αὐτήν· καλόν σοί ἐστι κυλλὸν εἰς τὴν ζωὴν εἰσελθεῖν, ἢ τὰς δύο χεῖρας ἔχοντα ἀπελθεῖν εἰς τὴν γέενναν, εἰς τὸ πῦρ τὸ ἄσβεστον… 48ὅπου ὁ σκώληξ αὐτῶν οὐ τελευτᾷ καὶ τὸ πῦρ οὐ σβέννυται. 43And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life crippled than with two hands to go to hell, to the unquenchable fire… 48where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.
A first-century Jew did not hear “Gehenna” the way a modern Westerner hears “hell.” He heard the name of an actual cursed valley a Sabbath day’s walk from the Temple, the name of the place where his own ancestors had murdered their own children to false gods. To go there forever was the deserved end of the road for those who would not turn. Jesus uses the image so His listeners cannot mistake His seriousness — and so they cannot blame God for inventing it. They had invented Gehenna. He came to close it.
A serious question presses every honest reader of the New Testament: what about all the people who lived before Christ? The patriarchs, the prophets, the faithful Israelite who died in 600 B.C.E., the righteous Gentile in Nineveh, the infant who never heard a sermon? Justice and love both demand that God’s rescue not be limited by an accident of birth date. The Bible does not leave us guessing.
From at least the time of Daniel, Jewish theology pictured the realm of the dead (Hebrew Sheol, Greek Hades) as having two compartments — the place of comfort for the faithful and the place of torment for the unrepentant. Jesus Himself confirms this picture in His most detailed parable of the afterlife:
22ἐγένετο δὲ ἀποθανεῖν τὸν πτωχὸν καὶ ἀπενεχθῆναι αὐτὸν ὑπὸ τῶν ἀγγέλων εἰς τὸν κόλπον Ἀβραάμ· ἀπέθανε δὲ καὶ ὁ πλούσιος καὶ ἐτάφη. 23καὶ ἐν τῷ ᾅδῃ ἐπάρας τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ, ὑπάρχων ἐν βασάνοις, ὁρᾷ τὸν Ἀβραὰμ ἀπὸ μακρόθεν καὶ Λάζαρον ἐν τοῖς κόλποις αὐτοῦ. 26καὶ ἐπὶ πᾶσι τούτοις μεταξὺ ἡμῶν καὶ ὑμῶν χάσμα μέγα ἐστήρικται. 22The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s side. The rich man also died and was buried, 23and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side… 26And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed.
Before the Cross, the souls of the righteous — Abraham, Moses, David, the faithful remnant — waited in “Abraham’s bosom” (kolpon Abraám), a holding place of comfort within Hades. The unrighteous waited in the place of torment. And then Jesus died.
18ὅτι καὶ Χριστὸς ἅπαξ περὶ ἁμαρτιῶν ἔπαθε, δίκαιος ὑπὲρ ἀδίκων, ἵνα ἡμᾶς προσαγάγῃ τῷ Θεῷ, θανατωθεὶς μὲν σαρκί, ζῳοποιηθεὶς δὲ πνεύματι· 19ἐν ᾧ καὶ τοῖς ἐν φυλακῇ πνεύμασι πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν, 20ἀπειθήσασί ποτε, ὅτε ἀπεξεδέχετο ἡ τοῦ Θεοῦ μακροθυμία ἐν ἡμέραις Νῶε. 18For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit, 19in which he went and proclaimed to the spirits in prison, 20because they formerly did not obey, when God’s patience waited in the days of Noah.
εἰς τοῦτο γὰρ καὶ νεκροῖς εὐηγγελίσθη, ἵνα κριθῶσι μὲν κατὰ ἀνθρώπους σαρκί, ζῶσι δὲ κατὰ Θεὸν πνεύματι. For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does.
8διὸ λέγει· ἀναβὰς εἰς ὕψος ᾐχμαλώτευσεν αἰχμαλωσίαν καὶ ἔδωκε δόματα τοῖς ἀνθρώποις. 9τὸ δὲ ἀνέβη τί ἐστιν εἰ μὴ ὅτι καὶ κατέβη πρῶτον εἰς τὰ κατώτερα μέρη τῆς γῆς; 10ὁ καταβὰς αὐτός ἐστι καὶ ὁ ἀναβὰς ὑπεράνω πάντων τῶν οὐρανῶν. 8Therefore it says, “When he ascended on high he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.” 9(In saying, “He ascended,” what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? 10He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens.)
This is the doctrine the ancient Church confessed in the Apostles’ Creed as the Descensus ad Inferos — “He descended into hell.” In the three days between Good Friday and Easter morning, the Lord Jesus went down to the realm of the dead, preached the finished gospel to the captives, led the waiting saints out of Abraham’s bosom, and on the morning of resurrection rose at the head of “a host of captives” (Eph. 4:8, citing Psalm 67:19 LXX). Matthew 27:52–53 records the first witnesses of that exodus: tombs around Jerusalem broke open and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and seen in the holy city.
Moreland gives the careful distinction: “Christ’s death and resurrection have always been the basis for our justification before God. However, the means of appropriating that basis has not always been a conscious knowledge of the content of the gospel.” Abraham was credited as righteous because he believed God (Gen. 15:6), and the credit account was paid in full at Calvary two thousand years later. The pre-Cross saints did not know the name of Jesus. They knew the God who would, in His own time, send Him.
So the great choir of Old Testament faithful — “Abel… Enoch… Noah… Abraham… Sarah… Isaac… Jacob… Joseph… Moses… Rahab… Gideon… David… Samuel and the prophets” (Heb. 11) — were not lost. They were waiting. And on Easter morning, the Door opened.
Here is the most common modern objection: “If God knows the future, then He knows who will be in hell. If He knows it and made them anyway, then He’s the one who put them there. Their ‘choice’ is an illusion.” The objection feels airtight. But it confuses two very different things — knowing a choice and causing it.
The classic Christian answer was developed in beautiful clarity by the Spanish Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina (1535–1600). It is called the doctrine of scientia media — God’s Middle Knowledge. It distinguishes three logical moments in God’s knowing (not three moments in time — God is outside time — but three layers in the structure of His omniscience):
God knows every necessary truth and every possibility — everything that could exist. He knows that 2+2=4, that triangles have three sides, that a billion possible universes might be made. This knowledge belongs to God by His very nature.
God knows, of every possible free creature, what that creature would freely choose in every possible circumstance. He knows what Peter would do if placed in a courtyard under a charcoal fire. He knows what Pilate would decide if a riot threatened on Passover. He knows what you would freely choose if confronted with the gospel in Tennessee in 2026. The choices are genuinely free — they belong to the creature — yet they are perfectly known.
After deciding which possible world to bring into being, God knows everything that will actually happen because He has freely decreed to create this world — with these creatures, in these circumstances, with their freely-chosen responses already eternally known.
Middle Knowledge is the great Christian protection of both divine sovereignty and human freedom. God truly knows every free act before time begins. And the act is truly free — not because God is in the dark, but because knowing what someone would freely choose is not the same as making him choose it. Your weather app may know it will rain tomorrow without causing the rain.
Once Middle Knowledge is on the table, the standard objection to hell collapses. God did not create a person in order to send him to hell. God created a person knowing that, if placed in any circumstances where genuine love was possible, that person would freely refuse Him. The alternative would be to create no free creatures at all — that is, to create no one capable of loving at all — or to create only puppets, programmed to mouth the syllables of love without ever choosing it. Neither alternative honors the very thing God values most about us.
Middle Knowledge also answers the question of those who never heard. Romans 1–2 teaches that every soul receives light from creation and conscience. Acts 10:35 and Hebrews 11:6 promise that God rewards those who seek Him. It is at least plausible — and many faithful theologians have held — that God in His middle knowledge sees what every soul would do with the gospel if it reached them, and judges accordingly. He commissions a messenger (Acts 10), or He honors the seeking heart even where the messenger never came. The Judge of all the earth will do right (Gen. 18:25).
Love, By Its Nature, Cannot Be Coerced
Why God will not save the unwilling
A “love” that is forced is not love. A husband who drugs his wife so she “loves” him is not loved, and he knows it. A father who threatens a child into saying “I love you, Daddy” receives only the sound of love, not love itself. Love is, by its very logic, a freely-given gift from one person to another. Omnipotence cannot make it otherwise. Moreland puts the point sharply:
This is why universalism, however lovely it sounds, cannot be true. If God could simply make all be saved without violating their freedom, He surely would. He desires all to be saved (1 Tim. 2:4; 2 Pet. 3:9). But love refused remains, against all His desire, refused. Hell is not the failure of God’s love. Hell is the proof that His love is not a manipulation.
First, God refuses to annihilate creatures bearing His image — even the lost. Their dignity is too high to be erased. Second, God refuses to override the choices of creatures bearing His image — even the wrong ones. Their freedom is too sacred to be confiscated. Hell is the long, terrible honor God pays to creatures who, having been made for love, have insisted to the end on something else.
The Indian-American apologist Ravi Zacharias (1946–2020) spent his life answering a single question on five continents: can a person live a coherent life apart from the God of the Bible? His framework was disarmingly simple. Any worldview — Christian or atheist, Hindu or Buddhist, modern or ancient — must answer four ultimate questions, and the answers must hold together as a single, livable whole:
Zacharias argued that only the Christian story gives an answer to all four that is true, coherent, and existentially livable. We come from a personal Creator. We are here for love — of God and of neighbor. We are obligated to a moral law because we bear the image of a moral Lawgiver. We are going either to communion with Him forever or banishment from Him forever — and Christ is the bridge from one to the other.
Christianity does not merely command love. It uniquely grounds love. Why? Because the God Christianity confesses is not a solitary monad but a Trinity — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — an eternal community of self-giving love that existed before there was anything to love but each other. Love is not an ethical add-on God noticed at creation. Love is what God is. Listen to John:
7Ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους, ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐστι, καὶ πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ γεγέννηται καὶ γινώσκει τὸν Θεόν. 8ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν Θεόν, ὅτι ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστί… 16ὁ Θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστί, καὶ ὁ μένων ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ ἐν τῷ Θεῷ μένει, καὶ ὁ Θεὸς ἐν αὐτῷ. 7Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love… 16God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
When Jesus is asked, of all the 613 commandments of Torah, which is greatest, He does not give a single commandment. He gives the Shema (Deut. 6:4–5) — love God — and Leviticus 19:18 — love neighbor — and binds them together as two facets of one supreme ethic:
29ἀπεκρίθη αὐτῷ ὁ Ἰησοῦς ὅτι πρώτη πάντων ἐντολή· ἄκουε, Ἰσραήλ, Κύριος ὁ Θεὸς ἡμῶν Κύριος εἷς ἐστι· 30καὶ ἀγαπήσεις Κύριον τὸν Θεόν σου ἐξ ὅλης τῆς καρδίας σου καὶ ἐξ ὅλης τῆς ψυχῆς σου καὶ ἐξ ὅλης τῆς διανοίας σου καὶ ἐξ ὅλης τῆς ἰσχύος σου. αὕτη πρώτη ἐντολή. 31καὶ δευτέρα ὁμοία, αὕτη· ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου ὡς σεαυτόν. μείζων τούτων ἄλλη ἐντολὴ οὐκ ἔστι. 29Jesus answered, “The most important is, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 30And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ 31The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”
Notice the vocabulary. Jesus calls for love of God with all your psychē — your soul. The very organ of love is the very thing hell threatens to lose. Hell is the eternal failure of the soul to do the one thing it was created to do.
If God is one solitary person (as in pure monotheism without Trinity), then before creation God had no one to love — love is a stranger to His eternal nature. If there are many gods (as in polytheism), there is no single moral source. If there is no God (as in materialism), then love is a chemical accident in the neurons of a primate species — not a binding obligation, not a transcendent good. Only the Christian doctrine of the Triune God says that the universe was made by love, for love, and that the supreme ethic is woven into the fabric of reality itself.
This is why hell, far from contradicting love, is its honor guard. Hell exists because love must be free; love must be free because God Himself is the eternal community of free love; and any creature made in His image must be free to refuse Him if its “yes” is to mean anything at all.
Step back. Lay the whole picture on one canvas:
2. The supreme purpose for which you were made is love — of God with all your soul, of neighbor as yourself — and love is impossible without freedom.
3. Hell is real — Jesus taught it more than anyone — because God will not annihilate creatures of such intrinsic value, and He will not coerce love from creatures of such intrinsic freedom.
4. God’s middle knowledge means He knows every choice you would freely make in every circumstance — yet His knowing is not His causing. The choice remains yours, and accountable.
5. Those who lived before the Cross were not abandoned. Christ Himself descended to the place of waiting souls, proclaimed the finished gospel, and led the faithful captives out on Easter morning.
6. The Cross is the only bridge from a soul that has earned banishment to a soul that has been forgiven and given a home. The supreme ethic of love is offered freely — but it must be received freely.
This is why we preach. Not to terrify, but to invite. Not to threaten, but to warn the way a loving parent warns a child running toward a highway. The gospel is not a religious sales pitch. It is the announcement that God Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, has come down into our dust, taken on a soul like ours, died the death our refusal earned, descended to the lower regions of the earth to gather His waiting saints, and risen with the keys of Death and Hades in His hand (Rev. 1:18).
- J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters. Chicago: Moody Publishers, 2014. (Especially ch. 1 on dualism and ch. 5 on heaven and hell.)
- Richard Swinburne, Faith and Reason. Oxford: Clarendon, 1981. Also Responsibility and Atonement. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.
- C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain. London: Macmillan, 1940. (Ch. 8 on hell.)
- Luis de Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge (Part IV of the Concordia), trans. Alfred J. Freddoso. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.
- William Lane Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2000.
- Ravi Zacharias, Can Man Live Without God. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 1994. Also Jesus Among Other Gods. Nashville: W Publishing Group, 2000.
- Gary Habermas and J. P. Moreland, Beyond Death: Exploring the Evidence for Immortality. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1998.
- Septuagint Greek text: Rahlfs-Hanhart, Septuaginta. Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft.
- English text: The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Crossway Bibles.
Pleasant Springs Church — Discipleship School