THE MORTALITY OF THE SOUL

In 1646, Edmund Calamy the Elder discerned two radical views among the sectarians of his time. ‘Some believe’, he wrote, ‘that the Soul dyeth with the Body, and that both shall rise again at the Last Day. Others begin to say, they believe that the Soul is mortal, as well as the Body, and that there is no resurrection neither of Soul nor Body.’

Such views were certainly radical, but they were not new. On the contrary, mortalist views — particularly of the sort which affirmed that the soul slept or died — were widespread in the Reformation period. George Williams has shown how prevalent mortalism was among the Reformation radicals. The early writings of Luther strongly supported it. He was firmly committed to a dualism between body and soul and therefore to the continued existence of the soul between death and the resurrection of the body. Nevertheless, for Luther, all the emphasis was on the final day of judgement when bodies would rise from the dead, as did Christ's on Easter morning, and be reunited with their souls.