In two recent videos on my YouTube channel posted earlier today, I shared a preview of my forthcoming 7,000-word essay for the Miscellanies Companion Volume 3 project (2023) entitled “The Immortality of the Soul: Edwards, Warfield, and Plato.” In this piece, I consider one of the most pressing questions that we as human beings can imagine — what happens to us when we die?

As it turns out, both philosophy and theology have repeatedly tried to answer that question.

Beginning with a rubric suggested by B.B. Warfield in his chapter entitled “Annihilation” in the Collected Works, Volume 9, we look at four possible outcomes for the soul after death. According to B.B. Warfield, they are 1) Pure mortalism, 2) Conditional Mortality, 3) Conditional Mortality (or Annihilation Proper), and 4) Unconditional Immortality.

Both Edwards and Plato would fit into this fourth and last box, though they obviously disagree on a great many things. In these videos, as well as the forthcoming article in the Miscellanies Companion series, we will look at how both Plato and Jonathan Edwards answer the question of what happens to the soul after death. Here are the videos:

Video One: Warfield and Plato on Immortality

Video Two: Edwards on Immortality