DHK said:
Death is separation. Throughout the Bible it is always used as separation.
1. There is physical death.
"For as the body without the spirit is dead so faith without works is dead."
James says the body without the spirit is dead. That is physical death, that we are all acquainted with--when the spirit leaves the body, and the body becomes a mere corpse. The body is separated from the spirit.
This only defence for the notion that death = separation in the Bible is the application of an invented cosmology where man has a consciousness-bearing soul / spirit that inhabits the body and survives bodily death. This, I assert, is taught nowhere in the Scriptures. This is hard for people to take since we are steeped in Greek dualistic concepts about the nature of the human person. I will claim that the Hebrew people had no such dualistic conception of the nature of the human person. When the writers of Scripture used the words "soul" or "spirit", they never intended to communicate the idea that man possesses a "ghost in the machine" that survives bodily death. We can argue this further if desired.
In any event, if one can, just for the sake of argument, wrench free from this dualistic conceptualization, one can avoid the awkwardness of the following:
1. Having to believe that death means the opposite of its nominal meaning. It seems like a dreadful kloodge to make death connote a never-ending state of eternal conscious torment. This sounds like
life in all its fullness of experiential content, albeit a very unpleasant state of affairs.
2. Having to believe that numerous scriptures that say that the dead "sleep" really mean something diametrically opposed to the normal connotation of "sleep", which suggests the complete
absence of conscious experience.
I find it very curious as to how references to death are re-worked to be references to
life. Same thing with sleep. Sleep should conjure images of the
absence of conscious experiences - that is basically what sleep is. And yet we are asked to rework the many scriptures (from both Testaments) to accomodate the view that an immortal consciousness bearing soul lives inside the body and is released at death. I have no idea how such a view is reconciled with the implications of the metaphor of sleep.
As to the "eternality of death". Yes, death is eternal. But this is entirely consistent with a view that the real truth is that it is
a state of death (in the "lights out" sense) will last forever - it will never be reversed. To assert that it is a state of conscious eternal torment that lasts forever is to turn the nominal sense of the word "death" completely on its head.
And now with respect to the idea of eternal torment in flames:
The fate of the wicked is described many times in the Scriptures through an appeal to the imagery of fire. And if the fate of something that gets tossed into fire were not already obvious, certain Scriptures make it clear that the fate of something that is thrown into fire is
consumption, not eternal steady-state existence. What fire have you witnessed that does not consume its fuel?