Recovering Evangelicals #6 Soul and Afterlife: World and Biblical history
Very few of the believers sitting in the pews of our churches have a solid understanding of how we came to receive this collection of writings that we call “the Bible.” And most of them don’t realize how “Biblical thinking” evolved over the centuries during which those books were being written. Before we get into detail about JudeoChristian thinking about the soul and the afterlife, we should get a better idea of the evolution of that thinking.
In this episode, we trace the journey of the group of people who gave us the Biblical writings, and see how their thinking evolved as they came into contact with various other cultures around them … the Sumerians and Akkadians … the Egyptians … and then the Greeks and Persians. We also look at how Christian thinking evolved in response to Greek philosophy … and more recently, science.
It’s not that those Biblical authors blatantly plagiarized or “borrowed” from those other global superpowers; but they were certainly “influenced by” and always “responding to” the latter. In the same way that we Canadians (Boyd and I are proud Canadians) are always “influenced by” American culture, American media, American economics, American politics, American …
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