The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest

by Joseph Agar Beet D.D.
“WHO ALONE HATH IMMORTALITY”
BY THE SAME AUTHOR Commentaries on St. Paul’s Epistles. 1. ROMANS. 2. CORINTHIANS. 3. GALATIANS. 4. EPHESIANS, PHILIPPIANS, COLOSSIANS.

Summary: This is a brief 4 chapter work by Beet (Methodist) to examine immortality. He looks at the concept from before Christ, what Christ Taught, in the early church, and in modern theology.

CONTENTS of Beet, J.A. – The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest

Chapter 1. Immortality Before Christ’
Chapter 2. the Teaching of Christ
Chapter 3. Immortality in the Early Church
Chapter 4. Immortality in Modern Theology
Chapter 5. Practical Consequences: the Doom of the Lost

In Dr. Agar Beet the Wesleyans have now a theologian who takes his place among the best of living expositors…. It is no small achievement to have carried into its ninth edition a book on so well worked a theme as the Epistle to the Romans. This success is the reward of solid and sober work. The writer has the great merit of knowing his own mind and of expressing his meaning with lucidity; and his literary skill enables him to give his readers most of the results attained by scholarship without distracting the unlearned by a parade of Greek. But he is more than a commentator; he applies the lessons of the Epistle with impressive earnestness and unfailing good taste.” – THE SATURDAY REVIEW.

” This is one of the greatest extant commentaries on Romans; and it is more, for it is also a compendium of theology, as must needs be the case with a work on the Epistle that deals at all adequately with its subject. Again and again as we turn over the pages we are delighted with some happy rendering, the skilful unravelling of some knotty phrase, the keen cut of thought into the heart of some tough sentence.” – THE CHRISTIANWORLD.

LONDON: HODDER AND STOUGHTON.

P R E F A C E

THE following pages are a reprint of articles published in THE EXPOSITOR during the last six months. They are a protest against a doctrine which, during long centuries, has been almost universally accepted as divine truth taught in the Bible, but which seems to me altogether alien to it in both phrase and thought, and derived only from Greek Philosophy. Until recent times, this, the alien doctrine has been comparatively harmless. But, as I have here shown, it is now producing the most serious results. My protest against it is appeal, which no Protestant can disallow, from the traditional teaching of the Church to authority of Holy Scripture. Of justice of this appeal, my readers must judge. It will, of course, be said, of this as of some other doctrines, that, if not explicitly taught, in the Bible, it is implied and assumed there. But they who ask us to accept all-important doctrine on this ground must prove clearly that it is so implied and assumed. For we cannot accept their mere dictum as evidence. They who claim for their reaching the authority of God must prove that it comes from Him. Such proof in this case, I have never seen.

RICHMOND

August 25th, 1901

More Works by Beet

• Beet, J.A. – The Immortality of the Soul: A Protest
• Beet, J.A. – Holiness: Symbolic and Real

More Works on the Immortality (of the Soul)

• Boyce, J.P. – Abstract of Systematic Theology