Thoughts about "Spiritual Death"

I was reflecting on the term and concept of “spiritual death” today. The term is used among non-denominational Christians in particular and Protestant Evangelicals more broadly to describe the state of the fallen human being after the introduction of original sin. It is a very popular and widespread Protestant theological understanding. There’s just one problem with it. It’s an oxymoron.

“Spiritual Death” is a contradiction in terms where the worldview of ancient near eastern peoples are concerned.

In the ancient worldview, while matter could decay, suffer from corruption like rust, being eaten by moths, etc., and die, spirit as a substance is immortal. It can’t suffer corruption, it can’t decay, and it certainly can’t die. “Spiritual Death” as a concept and a term would have been nonsense to the ancient mind. Moreover, it never appears in the Holy Scriptures (I am not aware if some paraphrases use it, but the term doesn’t exist in the original languages).

So where did it come from?

In Genesis chapter 2, God tells Adam that on the day he eats of the tree of knowledge, “dying you will die.” In Genesis chapter 3, the man and the woman eat the fruit of the tree, and while there are severe consequences, it is readily apparent that they did not drop dead on the spot on the same day. Moreover, it is clear in Paul’s letter to the Romans from chapters 5-8 (5 in particular), that death entered the world through Adam’s disobedience, and the compensation for hamartia is death. In order to reconcile these passages, the theological concept of “spiritual death” was introduced as the result and cause of humankind’s innate sinfulness, thus having one’s cake and eating it too. When attempting to research the initial origin of the concept, I came up empty as to who first coined the term, but it can be said with a high degree of certainty it is a post-Reformation concept and likely originated within the nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.

Again, the problem with it is that it would be utter nonsense to the people to whom either Genesis or the letter to the Romans was written. “Spirit” as such is immortal. It cannot die. This is the very premise of the resurrected body discussed in 1 Corinthians 15. The only reason why this teaching has become so popular and continues to persist is that it provides a handy explanation for Protestant theologians to reconcile the discrepancy between Genesis 2 and 3, and those to whom they are teaching it have no knowledge of or understanding of either the ancient Greco-Roman worldview or the ancient Hebrew worldview.

A second observation is that while hamartia (sin) is associated with death, it is never described as spiritual or in spiritual terms in the Holy Scriptures. In fact, far from it. The Torah (the law) is described as spiritual in Romans 7, but hamartia (sin) is associated with the flesh and located in the flesh, or one’s own physiology or biology. It is never described as spiritual, much less a “spiritual death.” Furthermore, there is no mention of spirit or spiritual things at all in the language of Genesis 2 and 3 unless you take into account God breathing the breath of life into the man and him becoming a living being. The language in these chapters is concrete and concerns physical matters, not spiritual ones.

In conclusion, the concept of “spiritual death” is entirely unbiblical, and unsupported by either Holy Scripture or the worldview of the recipients of the Scriptures in question. It is a result of an attempt to explain away a discrepancy in Scripture without taking into account all the data in question by slapping the term “spiritual” onto it and trusting the ignorance of one’s congregation about it to do the rest (as is all too often the case in popular preaching and theology).