Technically, no, though their belief has often been thought to be so.
In the exposition of their 28 Fundamental Beliefs, they write:
When God formed from the elements of earth a body, He “breathed” the “breath of life” into the nostrils of Adam’s lifeless body, and there resulted man the “living being” (Genesis 2:7). This “breath of life” is “the breath of the Almighty” that gives life (Job 33:4).…
When God formed the human being from the elements of the earth, all the organs were present: the heart, lungs, kidneys, liver, spleen, brain, etc.—all perfect, but lifeless. Then God breathed into this lifeless matter the breath of life, and man “became a living being.” The scriptural equation is straightforward: the dust of the ground (earth’s elements) + the breath of life = a living being, or living soul. The union of earth’s elements with the breath of life resulted in a living being, or soul. This “breath of life” is not limited to people. Every living creature possesses it. The Bible, for example, attributes the breath of life to both those animals that went into Noah’s ark and those that did not (Gen. 7:15, 22).
Seventh-day Adventists Believe, pg. 93
The SDA teaching is that the soul is a combination of “the breath of life” and your physical body. Once the “breath of life” departs from your body, the soul ceases to exist. This is to say they reject the belief in the soul of man being rational, alleging that such is Aristotelian in nature and not biblical. The SDA Church believes the Bible teaches that man is a monist creature rather than a dualist creature. Which is why soul death is a far more accurate phrase for the SDA view than soul sleep—since sleep is a conscious activity.
As we also see SDA psychology professors Karl G. D. Bailey and Duane C. McBride write:
Although mind-body dualism seems to be the default folk cultural belief for most people across the globe, it is not the position that is taught by the Seventh-day Adventist Church. Adventists teach that human beings are an “indivisible unity of the body, mind, and spirit.” Thus, for Adventists, no separate, nonmaterial part of the human person can feel, think, or act following the death of the body. As one of the Adventist fundamental beliefs asserts, “until [Christ returns] death is an unconscious state for all people.
The Curious Case of the Intuitive Soul (2020)
What is the soul?
Jesus Christ taught in Matthew 10:28 to not fear those that can kill the body, but not the soul (showing a dichotomy between body and soul). Instead, He said, fear Him who is able to cast both body and soul into Hell showing a duality to man’s nature. If the Adventist teaching on the soul were correct, then man could kill the soul by killing the body since the death of the body does kill the soul in their view.
In 2 Corinthians 5:8, Paul told the churches at Corinth that he’d rather depart his body and be with the Lord, but knows for their sake it was better that he remain “at home” in the body. He implies that one can be aware/conscious while away from their body. It’s clearly seen in Luke 16:19-31 that people who have physically died are still consciously aware in either the lower compartment of Abraham’s Bosom (Hades) or the upper compartment (Paradise) as they await the resurrection from the dead to be reunited with their glorified bodies. It’s also clear from scripture that the spiritual realm is real (Matthew 17:18) and spirits do not have physical bodies (Luke 24:39) yet they are consciously aware.
Furthermore, when Jesus Christ died physically, He did not cease to exist for 3 days to then have His character/personality infused back into a new body made of new particles (which is what the SDA Church teaches about resurrection). He was the fullness of the Godhead bodily (Colossians 2:9) and upholds the universe by the word of His power (Hebrews 1:3). Since Jesus is both fully God and fully man (hypostatic union), a belief the Seventh-day Adventist Church claims to uphold, then it would mean that there was a divide in the two natures of Christ in His death. The human soul of Jesus Christ’s human nature would have entirely ceased to be cognitive in any way, shape, or form, dividing the human and divine. This is antithetical to the biblical doctrine of the hypostatic union.
The late Dr. R.C. Sproul explains very succinctly what the Christian chuch means when the term “reasonable” or “rational” soul is used—particularly in the Athanasian Creed:
When we say that Jesus has a reasonable soul, we simply mean that touching His human nature, He is a duality. He is body and soul, as all human beings are, and that soul is rational. In that sense, the term “soul” is virtually interchangeable with the word “mind,” and God has created us in His image. God Himself is a rational being, and God has planted within the soul or mind of every creature that He has made in His image the capacity for reasonable discourse and thinking.
I know we live in a time that is one of the most anti-rational and anti-intellectual periods of the history of the church. People love academic pursuits, investigation, and scientific inquiry. But it’s the anti-mind and anti-rational people who think that Aristotle, for example, invented logic. Aristotle didn’t invent logic. God did. Aristotle no more invented logic than Columbus invented America. He discovered and found it.
Dr. R.C. Sproul, What Does It Mean When We Say Jesus Has A Reasonable Soul?
This is exactly the problem the SDA Church faces with their claim that believing the soul is rational is Aristotelian in nature and not biblical. Just like Aristotle didn’t invent logic, yet engaged in such and is credited with much discovery in that field, logic is ultimately something that comes from God. The same is true with the rational soul. While Aristotle did not possess a biblical worldview, he himself was still made in the image of God and utilized His God given faculties and arrived at much truth by studying the book of Nature, which is ultimately God’s fingerprints in our world. This doesn’t therefore mean that the soul being rational is unbiblical; no more than it makes logic unbiblical. What matters is what the entirety of the biblical witness puts forth.
What the Seventh-day Adventist Church misses in Genesis 2:7 is that God uniquely gave the breath of life to man in an intimate way that He did not do with the other creatures. While they are correct to observe that other creatures are said to possess the “breath of life,” only mankind received it by way of God breathing it into them. This interesting detail speaks into the fact that mankind is uniquely made in the image of God unlike anything else in creation (Genesis 1:27). And part of that uniqueness includes the ability to utilize higher critical faculties such as reason and engage in discourse—things we do not see amongst the other creatures.
Commentator John Gill actually points this out nicely where he highlights something important about the Hebrew grammar of Genesis 2:7:
And breathed into his nostrils the breath of life;
Which in that way entered into his body, and quickened it, which before was a lifeless lump of clay, though beautifully shapen: it is in the plural number, the “breath of lives” (l), including the vegetative, sensitive, and rational life of man. And this was produced not with his body, as the souls of brutes were, and was produced by the breath of God, as theirs were not; nor theirs out of the earth, as his body was: and these two different productions show the different nature of the soul and body of man, the one is material and mortal, the other immaterial and immortal: and man became a living soul; or a living man, not only capable of performing the functions of the animal life, of eating, drinking, walking, &c. but of thinking, reasoning, and discoursing as a rational creature.
John Gill, Commentary on the Book of Genesis, 2:7
When does a human obtain a soul?
Downstream from what the SDA Church teaches about the nature of the soul is what they teach about when a human being actually obtains one. Looking again at the exposition of their beliefs they write:
As we have already mentioned, in the Old Testament “soul” is a translation of the Hebrew nephesh. In Genesis 2:7 it denotes humans as a living being after the breath of life entered into a physical body formed from the elements of the earth. Similarly, a new soul comes into existence whenever a child is born, each “soul” being a new unit of life uniquely different and separate from other similar units. This quality of individuality in each living being, which constitutes it a unique entity, seems to be the idea emphasized by the Hebrew term nephesh. When used in this sense, nephesh is not a part of the person; it is the person and, in many instances, is translated “person”
Seventh-day Adventists Believe, pg. 94; “Soul”, SDA Bible Dictionary, rev. ed., pg. 1061
Because of their handling and application of Genesis 2:7, the Seventh-day Adventist Church doesn’t teach that what is in the womb of a mother is a living being (or soul). Like Adam prior to the breath of life entering into his nostrils, what is in the womb is merely a lifeless lump of clay. A human only becomes a living being/soul at the point of exiting the womb, taking in air as a separate unit from the mother.
This is why you find the practice of abortion taking place within Seventh-day Adventist affiliated hospitals and is the justification that many SDAs point to to justify the murder of the pre-born.
This understanding of when a human becomes living can be falsified using scripture by examining various sections of the Bible to see what it says about infancy and child birth. Luke chapter 1 is one such example where we see that, in Elizabeth’s womb, little John the Baptist was “filled with the spirit” (Luke 1:15). Not just that, but when Mary came to share the good news of the Messiah with Elizabeth, we are told that John the Baptist, in the womb, responded to the proclamation of the good news by leaping for joy (Luke 1:41, 44).
These are actions done by a living being, not a lifeless lump of clay. Which shows that prior to being a distinct a separate unit from Elizabeth, taking his first breath of air outside of the womb, John the Baptist was a conscious, responsive, reasonable being. What is in the womb is an image bearer of God that possess a rational soul, even if remedially. This erroneous belief also produces Christological heresy because it would mean that Jesus as a man was not a living, rational human within Mary; she simply carried around a lifeless lump of clay in her womb, but not God.
All of this proves that their handling and understanding of what’s being said in Genesis 2:7 cannot be correct.
