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

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

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?

Transcript

Welcome, friends. You're listening to the hashtag SDR-esque podcast, and mostly answering the questions is greycocle. And then stepping in after him is Amy Hall.

Put in 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've 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 saw 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 hide 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 can't give away a piece of your soul. Literally. We can speak poetically about that, but not literally.

It's just 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's 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, 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 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. Well, you could take your heart out of one part.

You could take a kidney 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. 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.

Science fiction. Yeah. But you've got to remember, too, there are spiritual forces out there who wanted to see 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.

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. Yeah, refer to 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 freakout when he found out, you know, that's all part of the driver, but it is a sweet movie. It is, but it doesn't really trade so much on the psychic qualities that might be inherited in the heart. It was, it's purely human, but it is sweet movie.

Or then let's go to a question from Jennifer. Does 1 Corinthians 1544 confirm babies in the womb have a soul? If there is a natural body, there is a spiritual body. 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 1544. 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 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 1544? 1544, 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 these 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. A resurrection is a resuscitation of that which died, just for clarification's 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. 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 insold with the immortal resurrection body which also is insold.

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

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.

So yeah, this is a different body in the likeness of Jesus' resurrection body rather than 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.

Oh, no, of course not. No, please keep. 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 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 in the 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 the 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, 40, he says, it is sown in dishonor.

Now, it seems to be dishonor can only be referring to sinfulness and fall in this. 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 your body is 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's 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, give a 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 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 in a fallen state and, you know, 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. 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 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, 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 the 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 Addon had all things being considered.

Then if Addon had not Adam and Eve, we always put it on Adam and the gal started it, right? Adam and Eve had sin to begin with. But the motif, what was the model of perfection, the archetype, is a human being dualistic body and soul. 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 could 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 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 or 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 not spiritual beings.

We have these magical powers. Hold, dig itself. You know, we tell it, but 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, 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 to souls. So here's a question from the questioner or the questioner.

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. Well, I actually included an anecdote in the article, The Invisible Man, which is available on the website, The Invisible Man being a reference to the soul. And when, what, a five or six or seven year old called me in the air and asked me what is a soul, I pause 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 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 animate your body, but it's not in your body the way. Well, here's the way I described, 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 kind of the way a body of the soul work. Your soul is in the body and it allows the body to do things that would be 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, that the soul is not in the body like a strictly speaking, like a hand is in a glove or a P is in the pod. There are marbles in the jar kind of thing.

But, 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 the glove, I think is really accessible.

All right. This next question comes from Ron. And I actually get a lot of questions about this 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 there are occasions, like he was 412 where soul and spirit are used separately in a text.

And I think in maybe Jude or something, I pray that your soul spas, 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 a material self.

The material 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. Okay, as opposed to a separate capability or capacity. Now the question becomes, where am I? 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. That's your unplugged being dead and sin.

And it's not until the rebirth that we get plugged in and we are regenerated then whoever is in crisis is a new creature. And so I think that's probably the best way to look at it, not tri part, three parts, but by part, dualistic. And the Greeks are all confused about this.

It's hard. They acknowledge both sides, dualism, but they thought the body was bad, the material world was bad. Of course, this isn't true in Christianity, which is why God and the word became flesh and dwelt among us.

And Peter of 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. 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. Alright, 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 STRS or you can go to our website at str.org. We look forward to hearing from you.

This is Amy Hall and Greg Cocle for Stand to Reason.