CGI: Bill Watson’s Doctrine of ‘Changing Life Forms’

 

Bill Watson’s Doctrine of ‘Changing Life Forms’

 

By The COG Catholic

Expecting to be disappointed, I listened to CGI elder Bill Watson’s recent Armor of God episode entitled “Are We Immortal?” Unfortunately, my expectations were met.

Bill is a good and likeable guy, but he routinely misrepresents the beliefs of denominations other than his own. This is partly due to ignorance, and I'm afraid partly due to the comfort of sticking with standard-issue Armstrong narratives.

While there is much to criticize in this Armor of God episode, for now I want to highlight the irony of a particularly bizarre charge Bill makes against Christians who believe in man’s immortal soul.

Changing life forms

He claims we traditional Christians believe people “really don’t die, but instead you change life forms into some disembodied spirit and go on living consciously apart from your physical body.”

This is not the first time he has accused Christians of believing we “change life forms.” It’s part of his verbal repertoire when discussing the subject, like saying we believe our “souls waft off into heaven” when we die (I don’t know if I’ve ever heard the word waft outside of COG presentations).

But the truth is the opposite of what he claims: It is he who believes in changing life forms, and it is we in the historic Christian tradition who believe in the bodily resurrection.

What Christians actually believe

Christians from the beginning have always believed that our spirit, or soul, was created ex nihlo by God to be immortal. We are not “inherently immortal,” because only God has immortality inherently. God is, however, able to bestow the gift of everlasting existence to his creatures, just as he did for the angels.

We believe that at the conclusion of our earthly lives, our souls survive bodily death and await a bodily resurrection at the Second Coming. The eternal reward of the just will be enjoyed not in a perpetual ghostly state of “wafting,” but in the body – resurrected, reunited to our souls, glorified and immortalized.

Interestingly, Bill likes to say the concept of the immortal soul comes to us largely from pagan philosophers and gnosticism in the Early Church. But Irenaeus of Lyon (A.D. 130-202) most famously and effectively wrote against the gnostics; he did not adopt but opposed gnosticism.

As one who knew Polycarp (COGs’ favorite Early Church Father), Irenaeus wrote in his work Against Heresies(Book 5, Chapter 7) what we Christians believe regarding the body and the soul and the resurrection:

For this it [the body] is which dies and is decomposed, but not the soul or the spirit. For to die is to lose vital power, and to become henceforth breathless, inanimate, and devoid of motion, and to melt away into those [component parts] from which also it derived the commencement of [its] substance. But this event happens neither to the soul, for it is the breath of life; nor to the spirit, for the spirit is simple and not composite, so that it cannot be decomposed, and is itself the life of those who receive it. We must therefore conclude that it is in reference to the flesh that death is mentioned; which [flesh], after the soul's departure, becomes breathless and inanimate, and is decomposed gradually into the earth from which it was taken. This, then, is what is mortal. And it is this of which he also says, He shall also quicken your mortal bodies. And therefore in reference to it he says, in the first [Epistle] to the Corinthians: So also is the resurrection of the dead: it is sown in corruption, it rises in incorruption. [1 Corinthians 15:42] For he declares, That which you sow cannot be quickened, unless first it die. [1 Corinthians 15:36]

Irenaeus clearly believes in the immortal soul and the resurrection of the body. This is what practically all Christians believe.

But back to the idea of “changing life forms.”

What COGs actually believe

You, the readers of this blog, already know what COGs believe. While they scoff at the idea that death occurs when the soul separates from the body, they insist it involves the “spirit in man” separating from the body. That “spirit in man” – likened to a cassette tape or CD or USB thumb drive that contains a person’s memory and character – goes back to God and awaits a “resurrection” while resting comfortably in a deep soul sleep.

But wait – there's more!

Who really believes in changing life forms?

The irony I alluded to at the beginning of this post is that it’s not historic Christianity, but COGs who teach we will change life forms!

Think about it. COGs mean something very different by “resurrection” than what Christians do.

Christians believe explicitly in “the resurrection of the body,” which, for those who are saved, will be glorified and supernaturalized. It will “put on immortality.” And it will be reunited with the soul.

COGs, on the other hand, believe the body we have now will no longer be ours. They don’t believe “resurrection” means the coming back to life of that which was dead, but the absolute replacement of our old physical body. Our old body will be discarded, while the reawakened “spirit in man” will be inserted into an entirely different, entirely new “other” body that has no connection to our current body.

Back when God first created man, he saw everything he had made and called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31), yet COGs say we will no longer even be human beings. Instead, as creatures, we will become a completely different species: “spirit beings” (a nonbiblical term, incidentally). And our bodies will be “made out of spirit.”

Of course, bodies can’t be composed or made out of spirit, since by definition spirit is incorporeal.

So what we have in COG theology is a “spirit in man" that jumps from one life form (human being) to another life form (spirit being), while taking a snooze in between the two states. That sounds an awful lot like a form of reincarnation or a transmigration of souls – an idea as pagan as pagan gets. The only difference has to do with timing and whether the soul is conscious between life forms.

The historic Christian Church takes the Bible at its word. We are mortal because our bodies are subject to corruption. One day our mortal bodies will be made immortal. The saint’s body that goes into the grave is the same body that will come out, except it will be glorified and given everlasting life.

Biblical portrayals of the other side of death indicate consciousness: Lazarus and the Rich Man, the Transfiguration, King Saul and the Witch of Endor, the martyrs crying out for vengeance in heaven.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the soul needs the body for survival (instead of the other way around), and death includes “soul sleep.”

Either way, it is the COG position that most resembles paganism, presenting the “spirit in man” as something meant to escape the fleshly body, to be placed inside a “spirit body,” and to go on living apart from the physical body.

Which is to say, COGs believe the reward of the saved is to change life forms (with a nap in between).

 

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The COG Catholic currently blogs at https://write.as/thecogcatholic.