#STRask - Can a Deceased Person’s Soul Live On in the Recipient of His Heart?

Episode Date: May 12, 2025

Questions about whether a deceased person’s soul can live on in the recipient of his heart, whether 1 Corinthians 15:44 confirms that babies in the womb have a soul, why bodies are important, how to explain the soul to a child, and how the spirit relates to the soul.   Could the stories about recipients of donated hearts acting like the donors mean that if a person dies and his heart is donated to someone else, his soul lives on in the recipient? Does 1 Corinthians 15:44 confirm that babies in the womb have a soul when it says that if there is a natural body, there is also a spiritual body? In light of your article “The Invisible Man,” why are bodies important? How would you explain the existence of a soul to a child or someone who has never heard of this idea? How does a person’s spirit relate to his soul?

Welcome, friends. You're listening to the hashtag SDRask podcast and mostly answering the questions is Greg Kogel. And then stepping in after him is Amy Hall. Putting the icing on the cake. Greg, today we have questions about the soul, and this first one comes from Daniela. I've heard stories about people who received a donor heart acting like the person who gave them the heart. Could this possibly mean that if a person dies, but their heart is donated to someone else, their soul would live on in the donor recipient.

No. Now, I'm not sure about that anecdote. I don't know about that. I never heard that. But maybe it's quantified, maybe not. Maybe you've got these stray circumstances where some similarity and then people say, oh my goodness, that's like the guy who did, who sold you, whatever. But it's anecdotal.

So I don't know if there's any meaningful correlation. But if it was, it wasn't because the person's soul is in the heart that that person used to have, because a person's soul is a self, and a self is unified. It doesn't come in pieces and parts. You can't hive off a part of your soul because it's simple. Souls are simple. They're not, even though they have different capacities, ontological, that is the nature of their being, is that they're one whole thing.

You don't, you can't give away a piece of your soul literally. We can speak poetically about that, but not literally. It's like God. God can't be cut in half. When Jesus was on the cross, there wasn't this split between the Father and Jesus in the divine nature. Nature can't be split. They are simple, they're whole, they're unified. Whatever was going on, if the anecdotal evidence is meaningful, if there's a significant amount of that, and again, I'm not affirming that, that would be a question I'd ask, then it's fair to ask why is this happening? But it isn't happening because the soul is somehow,

a part of the soul is left behind in the heart. It doesn't make any sense. Our soul is not parts. It's just one whole thing and it cannot be, it's not like your body, where you could take your heart out of one person, you could take a kidney in, and the person could still be alive with one kidney and the kidney goes into somebody else.

So your kidneys, human bodies are parts and can be cut into pieces and used and the body still survives while the other piece is used in another body. But souls are not like that. I would say, and I would say, because I'm not familiar with these stories, I did read a book series once that kind of traded on this. Yeah, science fiction. Yeah. But you've got to remember, too, there are spiritual forces out there who want to deceive

people. So we can't discount the idea that they could be using this to deceive people. Maybe there's another explanation. Maybe it's just people, similar to when you read your horoscope and you notice the things that match, but you don't notice the things that don't match. It could be something like that. I don't know. I don't know what the stories are. Kind of a, what do they call that bias, a conformational bias? But I think it's much more likely that this is some kind of spiritual deception than it is that somehow your soul is divided.

Well, yeah, the soul's not divided. But there was a very sweet movie that was, I don't know if it really traded on this concept, but it was the guy lost- Return to me. Yeah, return to me. The guy lost his wife and then she gave up her heart and then he ended up meeting through

serendipitous circumstances and falling in love with the girl who actually received his wife's heart. And then it was a freak out when he found out, you know, that's all part of the drama, but it is a sweet movie. It is, yeah. But it doesn't really trade so much on the psychic qualities that might be inherent in the heart. It's purely human,

but it is a sweet movie. Host 2 Or then let's go to a question from Jennifer. Does 1 Corinthians 15, 44 confirm babies in the womb have a soul? If there is a natural body, there is a spiritual body. Dr. John B. Reilly Well, let me just turn to it and look at it. 1 Corinthians 15, of course the whole chapter there is on the resurrection of 1 Corinthians 15, 44. I think he's simply making, my suspicion is, he's making a contrast. By the way, if there's a spiritual body, that would also be on that line

of thinking. If there's a natural body, there's a spiritual body, and if there's a spiritual body, there's a natural body. But the natural body is after a person dies, decays and disappears, but the spiritual body remains. So I don't think the correlation there necessarily holds. 1 Corinthians 14, do you have a? 1 Corinthians 15, 44. 15, 44, next page. It is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.

If there is a natural body, there is a natural, that's also a spiritual body. The spiritual body in this passage is not referring to the soul. It's referring to this resurrected body that has different qualities. It's the same physical body. By the way, a resurrection is a resurrection of a body

or it's not a resurrection, it's a ghost. Okay, a resurrection is a resuscitation of that which died. Just for clarification sake. And so Paul is talking somewhat mysteriously here, I think in 1 Corinthians 15, about this odd thing called the resurrected body. And frankly, there's a lot I don't understand in here, but he is contrasting the mortal self

to the immortal self, the immortal self being the physical body raised to immortality. He talks about that, I think, a little bit later. Yeah, verse 53, for this perishable must put on the imperishable, and the mortal must put on immortality. This discussion in 1 Corinthians 15 is not talking about the soul at all. It is not contrasting the physical body with the immaterial self. It is contrasting the mortal physical self, which is in-souled, with the immortal resurrection body, which also is in-souled.

In both cases you have dualism. You have a body and a soul. But the nature of the resurrected self, body, soul, is very different than the physical. How different, in what ways different, and yet still the same? I don't know. And there's a mystery here,

even Paul seems to struggle with trying to make sense of it for the reader. But he's arguing for the resurrection and trying to give us some sense about it. And like I said, just to underscore, a resurrection is by nature the resuscitation of a physical body. That's why Jesus' body was no longer in the grave. And though it's different, and in fact appeared differently at different times, when Jesus was with the disciples in the post-resurrection appearances, he looked very different than

when he appeared to John in the book of Revelation. So there's a lot of possibilities that are there, but this is not a conversation about the body and the soul. Yeah, he's not saying we have a spiritual body and a natural body at the same time. He's talking about, he says like when we plant a seed, the seed dies and then we have the new. So yeah, this is a different body

in the likeness of Jesus' resurrection body rather than in the likeness of Adam. Explicitly here, verse 44, it is sown, there's your seed kind of metaphor, a natural body, it is raised, a spiritual body. And this just goes to show, a lot of times, if you come across something and you want to know what it means, all you have to do is just read the whole chapter because it'll become very clear what the context is. And that's the principle I really want to hit here, that you can do this yourself without even having to ask us if you go and you read the whole chapter

in context or the whole book even. And we don't mind being asked. That's what keeps us justifies our pay. But that's fine. But we're trying to convey to you that some of the techniques that we use that are actually accessible. It's not a mystery. We don't have, we don't necessarily have special knowledge. So you too can, if you learn how to read the Bible, you can solve a lot of these problems, even if you don't have a whole lot of background knowledge about what's happening. And incidentally, and I could read some of the other passages, but the point we're making is captured just in verse 44. It, what? The natural body, it is sown, a natural body, it's in the ground, it is raised, a spiritual body. So it's talking about the resurrection body here, not the soul. And secondly, it's talking about a resurrection of the body that was sown. The physical body resuscitated and taking on new characteristics. The larger context. So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown

a perishable body. It is raised an imperishable body. It is sown in dishonor. It is raised in glory." Which, I never thought about this before with this passage, but there's been discussion about whether you're able to sin in heaven. I think we both agree that we won't be able to sin, though some people think we are able to, but won't choose to. Okay, fair enough. But here 43 says, it is sown in dishonor. Now, it seems to me dishonor can only be referring to sinfulness and fallenness, and it is raised in glory. That means there's no sinfulness, it strikes me, that is capable of. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power, same concept. And then our verse, it is sown, a natural body raised, a spiritual body. Let's go to a question from Stuart.

Your article, The Invisible Man, makes me wonder, why are bodies important? The Son of God took on flesh, was resurrected with an eternal body. Scriptures say in eternity we will also have new bodies. The Greeks thought bodies were bad. Why does Christianity suggest this body-soul dualism is good? Well, I don't know if I can make a case in isolation from creation. Here is what I'll say. This is the way God made human beings, and he intended human beings to be and to flourish. And so I suspect that there is flourishing, human flourishing, that is more robust given dualism

than just having a soul or a spirit. And I mean, certainly there's lots more things that one can do with the body than with the soul. Soul is incorporeal. It's not physical. And I think you could, and there are all kinds of activities and fun things to do with your body. Now the body of course is,

as we just read in 1 Corinthians, it's dishonor and a fallen state and aches and pains and all of that. But that wasn't the way it was in the beginning. Paul, I'm sorry, God made Adam to be fruitful, multiply and subdue. And he made a human body with a soul to drive and guard and animate, guide rather, and animate that body. All right. Now, when we die, there is a tearing away. There is a wrenching away of the soul from the body.

Now the soul is the seat of our ego, our actual identity. That means where the soul goes, we go, but the body is still ours because of that deep union. So when we go, we are actually in an unnatural state, and Paul talks about this. Unclothed. Unclothed. Unclothed, for example. And we long to be clothed. I don't know why we would long to be clothed. God doesn't long to be clothed, and he's spirit. But nevertheless, what I have to go back to is,

this is the way God originally planned it for his reasons. I don't know all his reasons. We can speculate that. But what he's doing is restoring in some ways the original plan, but much better is the way I suspect. Now that is a theodicy. In other words, that is meant to give a rationale for why God would have allowed evil. The world that will obtain in the end will be in some respects a better world than if Adam had all things being considered, than if Adam had not sinned, Adam and Eve. We always put it on Adam, the gal started it, right? Adam and Eve hadn't sinned to begin with. But the motif, the model of perfection, the archetype, is a human being, dualistic body

and soul. And remember, it is the soul that animates the body. It's like you put your hand in a glove. This is an illustration I used in the article, The Invisible Man, that just came out not too long ago. The glove can do all kinds of things that a glove without a hand in it can do. You pull the hand out of the glove, it just lies there. In the same way, the soul animates the body and allows the body to do things that the body alone

without the soul couldn't do. And maybe, arguably, it does things that the soul without the body couldn't do. I think that's probably definitely true because God obviously is God. God doesn't need a physical body to create things, to do things, because He's God. He's not like us. He's omnipotent. Right. We are just limited individual beings, and we require a body to interact with a material world, unlike God. We don't speak things into existence.

That's not part of our nature. So our body allows us to do things God doesn't need a body for. And I think part of reflecting Him is being able to affect the world around us. But how, if we are just a spirit, I don't know how we would affect anything in the world. I had never thought about this before, so I'm glad the question is asked and we're talking about it. But if you're just a spirit over the earth, you can't dig a hole. Some people think, well, we're spiritual beings, we have these magical powers.

Hole, dig itself, you know, we tell it. But that doesn't seem to be cake. God can speak things into existence. God can do that, but we can't do that. So how do we dig a hole? You know, how do we harvest fruit? How do we water plants? How do we embrace each other, you know? Now I think on an interpersonal basis, there may be comfort one another with these words. First, that's for when we will be united. But even when we're united, even in that passage, that's the resurrected body he's talking about there. So anyway, yeah, I think this expands, body, soul, expands the capability of functioning in positive, meaningful, pleasurable ways that would not be available to simply souls. Simply two souls.

So, here's a question from the questioner, or sorry, the questionnaire. How would you explain the existence of a soul to a child or someone who has never heard of this idea? And I think you probably started to do that a minute ago. So I actually included an anecdote in the article, the invisible man, which is available on the website, the invisible man of being a reference to the soul. And when what, a five or six or seven year old called me on the air and asked me what is a soul, I paused for a moment to try to think of something that would be accessible.

And then I thought of something that's accessible to everybody. So if you can explain it to a six-year-old or whatever, it's probably a good explanation for a 60-year-old. And then I said, your soul is your invisible self. All right? It's in your body and animates your body, but it's not in your body the way,

well, here's the way I described it. I used the, I used the glove illustration. I said, so when you go up to the snow, does your mom put gloves on your, yes, we do. I said, notice when your gloves are on your hands, the gloves can do the same things your hands could do. But when you take the gloves off, you pull your hand out of the glove, then the glove just lies there.

Okay. And I said, that's, that's, that's kind of the way a body and a soul work. Your soul is in the body and it allows the body to do things it wouldn't be able able to do on a cell. You pull the soul out of the body and the body just lies there. That's what we mean when somebody dies, the soul is gone. But the clarification that I made was first of all, But the clarification that I made was first of all, that the soul is not in the body, like strictly speaking, like a hand is in a glove or a pea is in the pod, there are marbles in the jar kind of thing. But rather there's a deeper unity between the two because one's physical and the other one isn't. But we can still say that the body that our souls have

is ours because we're the ones who animate it. So that's the way I would explain it with that illustration hand in a glove I think is really accessible. All right, this next question comes from Ron and I actually get a lot of questions about this, a surprising number of questions. So here's his question, excellent solid ground treatment of the soul. Now how does a person's spirit relate to our soul? This question has been wrestled with by, from different people, but character, partly because because there are occasions like Hebrews 412 where soul and spirit are used separately in a text. And I think in maybe Jude or something, I pray that your soul prospers as your spirit, something like that. In any event, when you actually look at the inductive information,

the internal information, the way these words are used in the text, they are almost always used interchangeably. So the soul and the spirit are the same thing. They are the immaterial self, and it's probably the most, in a sense, parsimonious way of looking at it, the simplest way of looking at it. We have a physical self and an immaterial self. The immaterial self is unified with the physical self, and that's the living being. Okay? And virtually all the references that you see in Scripture allow that understanding.

If we want to make the spirit a separate substance, here I'm using philosophical language, but a separate thing, as opposed to a separate capability or capacity, now the question becomes, where am I? Where is the locus of myself, my ego? Where is that located? I would characterize the spirit, sometimes called the soul, I'm sorry, the soul, sometimes called the spirit as the locus, my invisible, immaterial self. That's me. That's why Paul could say, I went to the second heaven or the third heaven, whether in the body or not, I don't know. But he

was there, but he wasn't sure if his body was. So that means he wasn't his body. And so that's where I'm at. Now, if you say you have a physical body, that's one substance, one thing, and you have a soul, that is one thing, and then you have a spirit, that is one thing, the question is, where are you? And apparently, that spirit wasn't even active before you were born again. So that spirit can't be you because you were active before you were born again. The spirit, the soul must be the locus of the self and the spirit must be something other than the self. Not a substance, not a thing, but a capability. And I think this is probably the most accurate way of looking at it. The spiritual capacity is your ability to connect

with God and to understand spiritual things. And that robust capacity with regards to God is inoperative until the new birth. Now, I don't want to go so far as to say there's no spiritual dimension to unregenerate people's lives. I think there is, but not that aspect of their spiritual dimension that connects in a robust way with God. You're unplugged being dead in sin. And it's not until the rebirth that we get plugged in and we are regenerated then whoever is in Christ is a new creature. And so I think that's probably the best way to look at it. Not tripart, three parts, but by part, dualistic. And the Greeks, they were all confused about this. They acknowledged both sides, dualism, but they thought the body was bad, the material world was bad. And of course, this isn't true

in Christianity, which is why God, and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. Duh. And Peter, John says, this is the spirit of the Antichrist. Anybody who doesn't declare that Jesus the Messiah came in the flesh is not of Christ, is not of God, antichrist. But that was speaking directly to this Greek notion that God can't really take on human flesh. A lot of people have some really specific ideas about the difference between soul and spirit and it's just, it's not explained in Scripture, so I have a hard time answering that question because I don't know. Yeah, but also, when people distinguish them too aggressively, it ends up leading to lots of strange heterodox doctrine, things that are just not right,

and may lead them off the reservation too. Well, that's what I, in the circles I run, and usually I don't hear people talking about this, so that's why I suspected there's something, some theological thing going on out there, because I do get a lot of questions about this. So obviously there are a lot of people who have very strong views on this, and I'm just not familiar with why or where that leads. So hopefully your answer will be helpful to them as they're asking the question. All right.

Thank you so much. We got through five questions today. So that means we need five more questions. So send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or you can go to our website at str.org. We look forward to hearing from you. This is Amy Hall and Greg Kogel for Stand to Reason.