LORD OF THE DANCE

Agnes de Mille (niece of Cecille B. de Mille)

The art experience is a state of grace. It implies total submission, total service. You become transparent, perfectly used, reorganized. You become all self and selfless, a conductor. It demands health, not serenity or even happiness, but inner conviction, nerve and vigor. You realize at last, if only partially but with humility and joy, the meaning of the great promise in Revelation: “Behold, I make all things new.” — Agnes de Mille, To a Young Dancer

I decided to write this article a few hours after my niece Ashley was wed to Kenji at a very solemn, traditional marriage ceremony at a Catholic church in North Hollywood. I was totally awed by what the newlyweds did after they entered at the reception hall. Up front, on a centrally located dance floor, the two performed an evidently well-rehearsed choreography which amazed and delighted the gathered family and friends. Later, before the garter tossing ritual, her spouse and three of his groomsmen executed another impressive dance routine in front of the seated bride. Near the end of it, the rest of the groomsmen and bridesmaids joined them, having obviously invested much time and effort practicing for this performance.

The burden to write about dancing, however, came several weeks earlier when I met the woman who ran the dance academy where my daughter-in-law is a ballet instructor. This director told me that after becoming a Christian she gave up her dancing career, because her church considered dancing a worldly behavior. But after almost 30 years of missionary service, she discovered that such condemnation was not Scriptural. Realizing that she had been a victim of religious legalism rather than sound Bible teaching, she returned to dancing as an avenue for Christian ministry.

Compass Dance Academy, Tyrone, GA

Yet as I began to write, I recalled watching another sad episode of how this widespread legalistic censure against dancing played out at a Christian gathering. Several decades ago, I was at a men’s retreat sponsored by a strongly evangelical denomination. During an activity where talented people had an opportunity to show their skills, a man in his early thirties, dressed in gym shorts and a tee shirt, danced for us. After briefly introducing his theme, he used his body’s creative movements to emotively express that theme during nearly fifteen minutes of energetic dancing.

As he ended his dance, sweat soaked his outfit and was dripping from his face. But an uncomfortable silence reigned in the meeting hall. The sound of his heavy, rapid breathing should have been drowned in applause. But if there was any clapping, it was so brief, scattered and weak that it did not register in my memory. I felt sorry for the fellow but not enough to withstand the peer pressure of the unspoken consensus. Although I hesitated to applaud him, I now believe Jesus was clapping loudly. I could kick myself for not joining Him, but my rear-end is too far away in the past for my foot to reach it. Instead, I hope this article will somehow make amends for my cowardice.

Dancing on the Dance Floor

Long before that men’s retreat—and despite my own denominational background’s religious aversion to dancing—I named my talk on chaste relationships between guys and gals “The Dance of the Sexes.” The dance metaphor was too perfect to pass up. Every day, on many dance-floor environments (schools, jobs, churches, neighborhoods, various gatherings), we are routinely in a social dance with those of the opposite sex. To regulate behaviors and boundaries in those opposite-sex interactions, God has only one standard: marriage. The main thrust of my talk was to show that God’s holy and healthy rule for both marrieds and singles is an exclusive pre- and post-marital fidelity to spouses.

A Video Talk on YouTube

To dramatically illustrate how that spousal fidelity was possible, even on an extremely intimate dance floor, I used myself as an example. As a male L&D nurse, working mostly with female co-workers and helping many thousands of young moms deliver and breastfeed newborns, I had no problem remaining 100% faithful in thought, word and deed to my dear wife, to whom I had vowed marital loyalty. Whether my audience believed my testimony or not, I was telling the truth.

It was only later, after intense research, that I discovered solid reasons why women’s bare anatomy did not distract or stumble me sexually, when my religious training unanimously insisted that it would. But in that research, my biggest discovery was that the sexual objectification of the body creates a sex-focused society. The church’s prudish perspective on the body is actually a pornographic view that has unwittingly fueled the fires of our presently porn-addicted culture.

I immediately began writing about the evils of body shame and its antidote in a wholesome, godly, Creator-honoring body acceptance. But now I see from those same discoveries why the rhythmic bodily motions in dancing have been religiously banned in the past and are still shunned by some Bible-believers. Sadly but undeniably true, many Christians in Western culture are indoctrinated with an overshadowing sex-focus on human anatomy. With eyes mentally glazed over by this obsessive fixation on the sexual dimensions of the body, they see in the movements of dance a shameful display rather than a creative expression of God’s design.

Dancing: the Dirty and the Delightful

There is indeed dirty dancing. A Scriptural example of it is the dance by “the daughter of Herodias” which so allured Herod that he agreed to behead John the Baptist (Mat 14:6-11). And yet merely because it is exploited lewdly, dancing itself is not turned into a form of lewdness. Just as the body has been misused to promote pornography, so wayward choreographers have employed willing dancers to participate in burlesque obscenities or in manners suggestive of sexual gratification. But, whether the concern is the anatomical bare body or the expressively dancing body, guilt-by-association is unethical and fallacious, no matter how popular its practice.

Churches are right to ostracize the unwholesome exploitation of dance for sexually wayward ends. Yet they are deeply wrong to allow occasions of its abuse to jade their vision, blinding them from seeing its divine origin. Unfortunately, when the sex-focus of porno-prudery permeates religious thinking, such a mistaken perception may seem not only logical but supportive of maintaining that condemnatory focus.

That sex-focus is a shame-focus with philosophical roots in the exaltation of spirit over matter in ancient Gnosticism. Although resisted strongly by the early church, the Gnostic heresy unfortunately tainted later Christian thinking and still persists today with many socially destructive effects. Any Gnostic denigration of the material world and of the fleshly body is an attack on “the Maker of heaven and earth.” Praise God for the strong voice of the late Pope John Paul II in his landmark Theology of the Body. He not only dismantles Gnosticism but refreshes our forgetful memories that any true spirituality we manifest on earth may start in the heart but is only seen and practiced through the body.

Down through human history, people in almost every culture have developed customary expressions of delight and exuberance through rhythmically synchronized motions. These rich dancing patterns did not develop as bodily activities to advertise lewdness but as wholesome ways to celebrate aspects of life. Joyous social dancing surrounded birth, milestones of growth, weddings, harvest times, sacred days, anniversaries of special events. Whether celebrating some form of public success or merely bringing a happy gathering of families to a delightful culmination, the dance included all, from eager children imitating dance-steps to the elderly moving slowly in reminiscence of their youthful vibrancy. But as a cross-cultural phenomenon of the human race for thousands of years, dancing was blasted or belittled by church leaders who failed to take a theological look before making a non-biblical leap.

The Divine Dance

Dance, by definition, involves bodily motion. When several dancers produce a choreographed composition, the bodily movements are rhythmically coordinated. Astrophysicists, studying our incredibly humongous universe, molecular biologists, investigating the city-like complexities within living cells, and all other scientists working between those two extreme dimensions, often become poetic when describing the amazing phenomena of movement and rhythm in all of nature by using the word “dance.” The interactive relationships at play in creation, the fine-tuned performances of atoms and galaxies, reveal a choreography that is dynamically organized.

Skeptic materialists blindly deny that this dancing creation points to a Divine Choreographer. But Christians may also be blind, failing to recognize that God manifests Himself—especially His nature as a Triune Godhead—in His handiwork. There is such an eternal unity in the divine dancing of the Trinity that Father, Son and Holy Spirit have forever been working together as one Triune Dance Team. Many years ago, I was inspired to write a free verse poem about this:

THE DANCE

Three great pairs of loving hands
Firmly grasped in joyous dance,
Spreading brilliant, sparkling orbs
Around a universe of void,
Filling worlds with nature’s gems,
Moving newly-fashioned minds
With awe until they bow in praise!

Years go by. . . the brilliance lasts;
Yet creatures imaged from the Three
Forget the awe, count commonplace
The dazzling, artful universe
And dwell upon their meager meals
Of human wisdom’s pride and boast.

Break out, Three Dancers! Dear God dance!
Hit the pew, on pulpits dance!
Turn classrooms to a whirling reel,
Melt hardened hearts with prancing fire
To spread the flame throughout the world
And shine to all, this tale to tell:
The Three still live! The Three still dance!
Come join them for eternity!

— David L. Hatton, 7/30/1984
(from Poems Between Heaven and Hell ©1991, 2014)

Imaging the Dancing God

Christians who have believed for years that dancing is a sinful activity, may have difficulty accepting the idea that God is a Dancer and the Creator of dancing. But they can overcome that difficulty by remembering, as they watch an innocent toddler spontaneously trying to move to a musical rhythm, that humans are made in the image of God. Humans dance because they reflect their dancing Maker.

Even those claiming to take a moral stand against dancing will sometimes catch themselves tapping their toes unconsciously to the beat of a lively Christian song. That foot movement is the built-in urge of the body to be in sync with the melody. God purposefully put that elementary tendency to move with rhythm into His image-bearers, and when it is creatively and expressively expanded, it becomes what all cultures in the world know as dancing.

But the greatest cure for a Christian who legalistically condemns dancing is the “reproof” and “correction” of God’s Word (2 Tim 3:16). It is God Who turns our “mourning into dancing” (Psa 30:11). His Word tells us to “praise his name with dancing, making melody to him with tambourine and lyre!” (Psa 149:3). When He rebuilds His people, Israel, telling them that they will celebrate, He says, “you shall adorn yourself with tambourines and shall go forth in the dance of the merrymakers.” (Jer 31:4). While merrymaking is not to be our perpetual activity, God’s Word tells us that there is “a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;” (Eccl 3:4). King David evidently thought it the proper time for a physically vigorous celebration, when he “danced before the LORD with all his might… wearing a linen ephod” (2 Sam 6:14), as the ark of God was being brought into Jerusalem.

David’s wife Michal sarcastically chided him, “How glorious was the king of Israel today, uncovering himself today in the eyes of the maids of his servants, as one of the base fellows shamelessly uncovers himself!” (2 Sam 6:20). Michal’s criticism of her husband’s devotional dance may have stemmed from her ideal of propriety, which entailed maintaining royal prestige. But, in one respect, it parallels the reaction of the Pharisees in their legalistic disdain of John the Baptist and of Jesus. Yet their responses went beyond hers. They repudiated both the ascetical elements in John the Baptist and the mundane practices of Jesus (see Luke 7:33-34). Jesus quoted a popular childhood aphorism to expose their legalism’s vacillating attitude. In it, Jesus presents dancing as an appropriate response to music, and His approbation of it aptly reproves the inappropriate religiosity that berates dancing today: 

They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another,
“‘We played the flute for you,
   and you did not dance;
   we sang a dirge,
   and you did not weep.’” (Luke 7:32)

In regard to dancing, the modern Pharisee is quick to point out the tight apparel of the ballet dancer, which clearly reveals the shapely physique of the body, even as nudity itself would. The implication is that everyone should know that such a frank display of the body’s shape is lustful. That focus is perverted, coming not just implicitly from a cultural porno-prudery but explicitly from an objectifying sex-focus on the body’s physical anatomy. They view the anatomical features that give shape to the human form as lust-inspiring rather than God-glorifying. What God originally called “very good” (Gen 1:31) in assessing His unadorned creative handiwork, the porn-tinted mind calls “a lustful temptation.” Such a view of the human body is definitely not our Maker’s view, but His perspective should definitely be our perspective. 

Christians know from Scripture that the human body, in tights or in the buff, is “fearfully and wonderfully made” (Psa 139:14, KJV). Even if secular and religious majorities have a pornographic mindset, we should not emulate their worldly, Creator-maligning focus. Our reasoning should be obvious: 1) as Christians, “we have the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16), with eyes that should be surrendered to see the human body as He does, and 2) we are to obey God’s directives in Rom 12:2, “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Getting our minds renewed from conformity to a worldly sex- or shame-focus requires a willing submission to “the washing of water by the word” (Eph 5:26, KJV). Only by such a renewal of mind will the serious believer learn “the will of God” about dancing, His “good and acceptable and perfect” will.

A Concluding Finale

Investments in falsehood won’t get into Heaven. While I don’t believe in a place called Purgatory, I can envision a mind-cleansing obligation that Christian dance-deniers might face in the afterlife. Perhaps their naked souls will have to dance their way through the pearly gates, jumping and twirling forward after having wept tears at a devastating sight outside. Prior to entry, a consuming fire will incinerate all “wood, hay, [and] stubble” with flames that “will test each one’s work” (1 Cor 3:11-15, KJV). Will those who legalistically maligned dancing witness their efforts being consumed? If, after reading this, they adamantly reject what I’ve written here, I’m sure they will consider this article itself as part of the “stubble” destined for that fire.

But if I’ve truly offered my readers a valid glimpse of the counsel of God on dancing, then I envision an opposite experience. I foresee that all believers in Christ, including any who formerly taught against dancing, will be celebrating quite frequently in joyously exuberant dances throughout eternity.

THE FIRST ADVENT: THE INCARNATION

“The Incarnation Blows My Mind!”

The physical nature of the human body and its sexuality are major components in God’s plans. He created the race of Adam as an alloy of matter and spirit. This incarnate amalgamation prepared us to be special mediators between the cosmic and the celestial worlds. As body-spirit beings “created in the image of God,” we were to serve as the Triune Godhead’s unique representatives (Gen 1:26). Our job was to bring physical and spiritual creation under a single, universal, government. So crucial was this divine plan that, when it got off course, God became human to fulfill it.

For over 30 years the Incarnation has never ceased to blow my mind! The eternal Word, Creator of all things, actually “became flesh,” (John 1:1-2,14). The Second Member of the Trinity became the Second Adam (1 Cor 15:45), “firstborn” (Col 1:15) of a new human race. Jesus Christ is now the human King who will lead redeemed humanity in ruling over “a new heaven and a new earth” (Rev 21:1).

The Incarnation has magnificent implications for human destiny. But the bodily aspects of God’s strategy have often been ignored. Religious infatuation with Gnostic ideas has exalted the spiritual to the exclusion of the physical. God’s goal is to bring the two into unity, and His express manner of doing so is through the body-spirit nature of humanity.

The Sexual Physiology of the Incarnation

The Bible is biologically correct. Avoiding human sexuality and its anatomical realities as a religious taboo is neither biblical nor Christian. Yet the popular, even traditional, exclusion of sexuality from theological thought has caused many to overlook what actually occurred in the Incarnation.

Right after the Fall, God promised a Savior who would be a woman’s “seed” (Gen 3:15)—not a man’s offspring. The virgin Mary descended from Abraham, in whose “seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed.” (Gen 22: 18). But Mary’s DNA also carried the genetic code from Adam, which she contributed to the Incarnation in an ovulated egg. In this way, Jesus sexually inherited from Mary the nature of Adam’s fallen race as half of His unique human nature.

A biologically functional conception did in fact occur (Luke 1:31), but Mary’s egg was not fertilized by a sperm from Adam’s fallen race. Although authentically human, it wasn’t from an earthly man. Joseph was told, “that which is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit” (Mat 1:20, ESV). Genetically, the other half of Christ’s human nature, was formed by God. This newly created human “seed” was not of this world. But Scripture’s revelation that Mary had a true conception implies that this totally new, divinely created human sperm—or at least the exact complementary human DNA material necessary for a real conception—was the location where “the Word became flesh.” If this is where God entered cosmic creation, where He physically embodied His personal and divine Identity, then when that new human DNA joined with the ovum of Mary, the Son of God became one of us, a true human being.

Biology and theology dovetail here. God formed Adam “of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature,” (Gen 2:7, ESV). In the same way, God’s Spirit [“breath”] directly fashioned and vitalized this holy haploid of human DNA. I personally believe God had no qualms about becoming an authentically fleshly sperm and carrying out the DNA transfer in the normal way of conception. But regardless of how it happened, the genetic material in that transfer—although truly human, sexually functional, and equipped with the gene determining male gender—was not a part of our fallen world. It was an entirely new creation and the beginning of a new humanity.

Theological and Sacramental Implications

This was no mere supernatural manifestation. God really did become one of us, with a human body, a human soul, a human spirit. But in His Incarnation—this strategic union of the old human race with a new humanity—Jesus came to die. His nature as a sinless new Adam allowed Him to pay for fallen humanity’s sins (2 Cor 5:21). But His union with the fallen human race allowed Him to take Adam’s nature [“our old man”] to the Cross with Him (Rom 6:6). The sacrifice of His dual humanity provided exactly what sinners need: freedom from both sin’s penalty and its power.

Salvation isn’t automatic. It resides only “in Christ,” and we access it only by personal faith. (Gal 2:20; Phil 3:9). But Christ’s bodily Resurrection shows that it isn’t limited to the spiritual realm. Nor is faith in Christ limited to heart-belief, for “with the mouth confession is made unto salvation,” (Rom 10:9-10, NKJV). As bodily signs of our faith in Him, Jesus stipulated both Baptism (Mat 28:19) and Holy Communion (Luke 22:19-20). Yet both these body-focused sacraments go beyond illustrating His plan to resurrect and glorify our physical bodies (1 Cor 15:42-43). They exemplify God’s original intent for the spiritual and the physical to be brought into unity. Faith and works do not stand and cannot be understood separately (James 2:14-26). Trust and obey are as divinely wedded as the “one flesh” union of human marriage, and what “God has joined together, let not man separate,” (Mat 19:6, ESV)

As a Christian rite of initiation, water baptism uses the body to declare faith. But Paul goes deeper, expounding its metaphysical ability to unite us with Christ’s death, which is valid only if Jesus actually took our old Adamic nature with Him to the Cross:

Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:3-5, ESV)

Christ’s words about Holy Communion were so physically shocking that they turned away many early followers. Some otherwise faithful Bible teachers still balk at taking them at their face value. But if our personal, faith-filled baptisms put us into Christ, uniting us with His incarnational death of the old human nature, then our ongoing, faith-filled nourishment at the Lord’s Table puts into us His new resurrected life as the Second Adam:

So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. (John 6:53-56, ESV)

These words are no surprise. Early on, God said we do “not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD,” (Deut 8:3, ESV). If spiritually true of His written Word, how much more eagerly should we spiritually feed on the living Word Incarnate?

Anticipating the Second Advent

The Son is back in heaven sitting beside the Father. But now a Human Being fills the seat. Christ’s Incarnation and Resurrection introduced physical humanity into the Trinity. Jesus left Heaven to obtain a human Bride. As in the first Adam’s deep sleep, when God opened his side to create Eve (Gen 2:21-22), so in the Second Adam’s sleep of death on the Cross, His side was opened to create the Church.

Revelation 19:7-9

Our destiny, as redeemed humanity, is corporate marriage to the Son of God, whose genetic conception on earth wedded Adam’s flesh to a new humanity. His bodily Resurrection empowers those who receive Him to become God’s spiritual children by new birth (John 1:12-13). But we join all of creation in eagerly longing for redeemed humanity's full manifestation, when we receive “the redemption of our bodies” (Rom 8:19-23), bodies that match the resurrected body of our Bridegroom (Phil 3:20-21).

The first Advent brought us the Incarnation, and because of it, the second Advent will bring us a Wedding. When Jesus returns to reign, those united to Him by faith will be literally taken into the Trinitarian Family as in-laws. Forever married to our Husband-King, the incarnated God-Man, we will be the new humanity ruling with Him over all the realms He has ever created or will create.

In the meantime, to those who don’t have this faith and hope,

The Spirit and the Bride say, “Come.” And let the one who hears say, “Come.” And let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price. (Rev 22:17, ESV)

And I join the Apostle John in praying this last prayer in the Bible: “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20, ESV).

SOUL AWAKE—DNA SLEEPING

Death has different meanings in Scripture, depending on what part of a person dies. Paul’s prayer in Thessalonians 5:23 (WEB) lists these parts: “May your whole spirit, soul, and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” 

 These three components or our human nature are similarly described in the creation of Adam: “And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath [spirit] of life; and man became a living soul.” (Gen 2:7, KJV).

What is the Soul?

The soul seems to begin when that fleshly dust and spiritual breath come together. It connects them as a God-designed mediator. Our soul integrates our visible animal bodies and our invisible angelic spirits, making us body-spirit beings who can interact with both the material and spiritual realms. These three parts of our humanity form a lifelong amalgamation—a human trinity—that images the Creator in special ways, both separately and in union.

The soul has self-awareness and a personal identity that thinks, feels, chooses, and remembers. Other people can perceive an individual’s spiritual character when the soul reveals his or her unique personality via the body. A person’s soul, though not seen directly, is recognized through the bodily activity of thoughts communicated, emotions expressed, and actions taken.

A computer can illustrate this tri-unity of body, soul, and spirit. The body with its brain, nervous system, sense organs and musculature, is like the computer’s motherboard, RAM and ROM memory, hard drive, and input and output devices. The spirit is like the electrical power energizing the whole unit. But the different programs loaded and the personally stored data make up the functional soul of the computer.When the power is turned off or an essential physical component breaks down, the programs and data continue to exist on disk or backed up on a cyberspace memory cloud. When the physical computer (body) is turned on (spirit), it has a functional character (soul). The computer’s body is visible; its electrical spirit is not. While the programs and data are also invisible, they become uniquely recognizable through the running computer. While not perfect, this analogy might be helpful to some.

The “Soul Sleep” Misinterpretation

Because the Bible often speaks of death as “sleep,” some teach that the soul goes nowhere at death but either ceases to exist or unconsciously rests in “the grave” with its disintegrating corpse. The latter scenario becomes a strained interpretation when the grave is the ocean, or when an explosion literally makes a real grave impossible. The former idea fails to explain the martyred souls in heaven described in Revelation. Those “souls” weren’t asleep in their graves but had wide-awake wills actively choosing to express mental thoughts with strong emotional feeling, all in a definite, non-earthly location:

“And when he had opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God, and for the testimony which they held: And they cried with a loud voice, saying, How long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not judge and avenge our blood on them that dwell on the earth?” (Revelation 6:9-10, KJV)

If it’s important in our conception of death to know which part of us dies, it’s also important to know which part of humanity is sleeping, when Scripture metaphorically uses “sleep” to indicate death. People can mistake which part is asleep by confusing the metaphor. The appearance of literal sleep provides the metaphorical significance of “sleep” as a description of how a dead body appears. Observers no longer see choices of the will, perceive no more sad or happy feelings, hear no thoughts being communicated. Shake a dead person vigorously. Why is there no response? “The dead know nothing,” says Ecclesiastes 9:5. The corpse is profoundly asleep. The dead body has nothing more to do with the ongoing activities of this physical world, except to disintegrate and be reabsorbed by it.

What Sleeps in the Body’s Death?

Christians believe that bodies, sleeping in death, will awaken at the resurrection. How so? How can a buried corpse absorbed by a tree root, or a drowned body scattered throughout the ocean, or one vaporized by an fiery explosion, be reconstructed into its original state as a resurrected body? In Christ’s resurrection, all the matter in His body was still local. In ours, some molecules from those who died at sea might end up on our table in the next bite of fish. This thought may bring emotional discomfort, but it poses no scientific problem. What sleeps in death is not the body’s array of personal dust but each person’s specific arrangement of DNA.

The material composing the bodies of living creatures is in constant flux. Cellular structures are continuously being built up or repaired with new molecules taken in as food. Old cell material is likewise being broken down and discarded from the body as waste. This process of construction and destruction replaces all the atoms in a human body approximately every seven years. In other words, “we’re not what we used to be.” We’re not living in the material body we had seven years ago. Even the old atoms on each double-helix DNA molecule have been exchanged for new ones. However, the DNA stays the same, except perhaps for some minor mutations.

When reduced to its essence, our personal DNA is a numerical arrangement, much like the computer’s stored programs. If the physical computer is destroyed, the programs can be reloaded on an entirely new unit. But the difference with DNA is that it holds the specific formula for the physical unit’s unique design. This is why I personally believe that the intangible numerical formula of our personal DNA—expressed tangibly in this life through the medium of matter—is registered in the soul and taken with it, along with our entire personal memory, when the soul and spirit leave the body in death. As far as our bodies are concerned, “we’re just a number,” but a number “wonderfully and fearfully made” by creation’s Master Mathematician.

Michelangelo's "Resurrection of the Dead"

On Resurrection Day, what’s the point of having our bodies restored from the same material our DNA was borrowing for the last seven years of our lives? Any nearby dust will do. What about the undesirable results of a believer’s DNA defects, caused by sin in a fallen world? Surely each of our DNA programming will be restored to the perfection of the Creator’s original design. Jesus said He “came to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10), and not only the soul and spirit were lost in the Fall. Christ’s glorious physical resurrection is the prototype of our own. He will reconstruct our bodies to be “like His glorious body” (Philippians 3:21). Sadly, this hope for “the redemption of our bodies” is a part of the Gospel not emphasized in modern evangelism. Yet bodily resurrection is so important that Paul declares, “in this hope you were saved” (Romans 8:23b,24a, ESV).

Putting the Soul Sleep Doctrine to Sleep

But this resurrection hope doesn’t include the unconsciousness of the soul in death. Widespread belief in “soul sleep” or in the soul’s annihilation at death is relatively recent. Various versions of this concept have been held by Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses since the late 1800s. However, this doctrine is absent from the teachings of the primitive church, although one critic reports that “according to historian Philip Schaff, soul sleep fomented in the mind of a specious fourth century pantheist named Arnobius.”

In modern times, the growing number of those bold enough to share their personal testimonies of near-death experiences have confirmed the early church’s teaching. Even though these episodes are usually only “near-death,” some of those describing NDEs were professionally evaluated as clinically “dead.” In other words, God let them miraculously come back from death to tell their stories. While their descriptions may vary, these people unanimously report a continuing consciousness, sometimes seeing the bodies they left behind. They talk about still experiencing their soul’s ability to think, feel, choose and remember. It might take only one NDE to convince teachers of “soul sleep” that their doctrine was erroneous. If not, their final death certainly will.

In discussions with Jehovah’s Witnesses, I sometimes show them Genesis 49:33 in their New World Translation: “Thus Jacob finished giving these instructions to his sons. Then he drew his feet up onto the bed and breathed his last and was gathered to his people.” I explain how this verse mentions first body, then spirit, and finally soul. If they say, “Oh, but to be ‘gathered to his people’ means to go to the grave,” I show them the next verse, Genesis 50:1, “Joseph then threw himself on his father and wept over him and kissed him.” Then I point out, “You forgot something. Jacob wasn’t buried yet. His body was still there, but a special part of him had just been ‘gathered to his people.’ Don’t you find that theologically embarrassing?” No, they don't. A footnote in the Watchtower translation tells them to ignore the clear implications of this phrase by insisting it to be merely “a poetic expression for death” rather than a divine revelation of what actually happened. This is the kind of stubbornness that could benefit from an NDE.

I had a Seventh-day Adventist friend who was similarly adamant in her belief about the soul’s unconsciousness in death. When she died, I envisioned her immediately regretting her insistence on that doctrine. I even wrote a poem to be read at her graveside service, believing that someday in the afterlife she will thank me for doing so.

That poem is probably the best conclusion I can make for this article.

SOUL SLEEP

For eighteen hundred years was taught

That only corpses went to graves,

That souls went on, awake in thought,

While bodies slept ’neath dust or waves.

I choose to keep the older creed

That says our flesh must rest from toil,

Awaiting, like the planted seed,

That Day of Rising from the soil.

If later teachers’ words are right—

That souls must sleep before they rise—

Then when I hear that Trumpet bright,

I’ll wake up and apologize.

But if they’re wrong, then their mistake

Was known the moment that they died,

For even now they’re wide awake

Repenting for what they denied.

I’d rather be aroused from sleep

To find that I was duped by lies

Than be awake in death to weep

Till God decides to dry my eyes.

— David L. Hatton, 3/12/2013

(to be in Poems Between Here and Beyond)