Monday, December 13, 2021

W.L. Crowe (Church of God Abrahamic Faith/Proponent of 'soul sleep') on Ecclesiastes 12:7

 

Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it. (Eccl 12:7)

 

For those who may wonder how someone who holds to soul sleep/death may respond to Eccl 12:7, consider the following from an anti-Mormon book from 1902 (the author was a member of the Church of God Abrahamic Faith):

 

That the spirit returns to God at death we admit. It was with God as a person of the energy or universal spirit of God, before our existence, from all eternity, and returns to the same condition after man’s death. It was not man’s spirit before his conception and quickening. It is not his after death. Man has no spirit of his body after death. It is not man’s spirit that raises the body at the resurrection, but God’s spirit. Rom. 11:8; 1 Cor. 15:26, 44; Psa. 71:20; 104:29, 30. (W.L. Crowe, The Mormon Waterloo: Being a Condensed and Classified Array of Testimony and Arguments Against the False Prophet, Joseph Smith, his Works, and his Church System and Doctrines: Based upon Standard History, Science, the Bible and Smith Against Himself [St. Paul, Nebr.: 1902], 122)

 

For a thorough refutation of the belief the dead are unconscious in the intermediate state, see:

 

Response to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology