Death and the Intermediate State

Start where scripture starts rather than where consolation starts. Death in the Bible is not a natural rounding-off of a life. Genesis 3:19 makes it a sentence: 'For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.' Paul calls it an enemy, and not merely one among others: 'The last enemy to be destroyed is death' (1 Corinthians 15:26). Hebrews 2:14-15 describes people held in lifelong slavery through fear of it. And at the tomb of a friend who had been dead four days, the Son of God, who knew what he was about to do, wept. The Greek verb in John 11:33 and 11:38 is embrimaomai, which carries anger or indignation rather than sorrow alone, and several translations note it. Whatever death is in this book, it is not treated as a friend.

Say that plainly to yourself before you go further, because a great deal of Christian speech at funerals quietly denies it. The line that death is just a doorway, or a going home, or a next stage, is not what the New Testament says about death as such. What the New Testament says is that death has been beaten, which is a different claim and a better one, because it does not require anybody at a graveside to pretend that what has happened is fine.

The other half is equally emphatic. 2 Timothy 1:10 says of Christ that he 'has abolished death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the gospel'. The Greek verb is photizo, to bring to light, which is why the King James reads 'hath brought life and immortality to light'; the BSB's 'illuminated the way to' is a looser rendering, and the argument here does not depend on it. 1 Corinthians 15:54-57 has death swallowed up in victory and asks where its sting is. Revelation 1:18 has the risen Christ saying he has the keys of Death and Hades. Hebrews 2:14 says that, since the children have flesh and blood, he shared their humanity so that by his death he might destroy him who holds the power of death. So the same writers who call death an enemy say the enemy has been defeated, and they hold the two without embarrassment because the defeat is not yet visible and the resurrection of Jesus is the evidence that it has happened.

One more sentence belongs here because it governs everything that follows. Hebrews 9:27: 'Just as man is appointed to die once, and after that to face judgment.' Death in scripture is not merely a biological event with a theological gloss; it is the boundary of the probationary life and it is followed by an accounting. Every position in this lesson accepts that verse. They differ about what happens in between, and about whether there is an in-between at all.

A last piece of ground clearing. This lesson is not the module on humanity. Module 4 handled the anthropology, monism and dualism and the range in between, and you should carry that work into this lesson rather than redo it, because whichever account of the human person you found most persuasive there will constrain what you can say here. If you concluded that a human being simply is an animated body, you have a harder problem with Philippians 1:23 than a dualist does. If you concluded that a person is a soul joined to a body, you have a harder problem with the New Testament's insistence that the hope is resurrection and not release. Notice which problem is yours.

The Hebrew word is sheol, it occurs somewhere around sixty-five times in the Old Testament, and the single most useful thing a student can know about it is that older English versions translate it three different ways in three different places: the grave, hell, and the pit. That is not a translator's carelessness. It is a translator making a doctrinal decision in each verse and hiding it inside a word choice, and a reader who does not know it happened will think the Old Testament teaches whatever his version's pattern of choices implies.

Take what the texts actually say. Jacob, in Genesis 37:35, refuses comfort and says he will go down to Sheol to his son mourning, which is a righteous man expecting to go there. Korah and his household go down there alive in Numbers 16:30-33. Psalm 139:8 says that if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. So Sheol is spoken of as down, as a destination shared by everybody, and as not outside God's reach. What these texts do not give is a sorted afterlife with the righteous in one compartment and the wicked in another. That sorting is real in later Jewish and Christian thought and it is not yet in the word.

Then the hard column, which must be read at full strength and not softened. Ecclesiastes 9:5-6: 'the dead know nothing. They have no further reward, because the memory of them is forgotten. Their love, their hate, and their envy have already vanished, and they will never again have a share in all that is done under the sun.' Psalm 6:5: 'For there is no mention of You in death; who can praise You from Sheol?' Psalm 88, which is the one psalm of lament that does not turn the corner at the end, asks in verses 10 to 12 whether God works wonders for the dead, whether departed spirits rise up to praise him, whether his loving devotion can be proclaimed in the grave. Two observations are commonly made and both are worth having. These are liturgical complaints as much as metaphysical reports: the dead cannot join the assembly and sing, which is what the psalmist misses. And Ecclesiastes is speaking, by its own repeated formula, of what is seen under the sun. Both observations are fair. Neither turns the verses into affirmations of conscious bliss, and a teacher who uses them that way is doing to Qoheleth what Qoheleth exists to prevent.

Now the development, which is the point of this section. The Old Testament does not say one thing about death from beginning to end, and the honest way to handle that is to let the line be a line. Psalm 49:15: 'But God will redeem my life from Sheol, for He will surely take me to Himself.' Psalm 73:24: 'You guide me with Your counsel, and later receive me in glory.' The last phrase is disputed, and some translations read 'to glory' where the BSB has 'in glory', so treat the verse as a pointer rather than a proof. Isaiah 26:19: 'Your dead will live; their bodies will rise.' And then Daniel 12:2, which is as explicit as the Old Testament gets: 'And many who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake, some to everlasting life, but others to shame and everlasting contempt.' Job 19:25-27 belongs in the list with a caution attached, because it is one of the most textually difficult passages in the Hebrew Bible and the famous clause, which the BSB prints as 'yet in my flesh I will see God', carries the BSB's own footnote 'Or without my flesh', so the Hebrew can be read as seeing God apart from the flesh. Commentators divide. Use it, and tell your hearers that the Hebrew is contested rather than letting them think the verse is simple.

Between the Testaments the development continues, and the New Testament walks into a live argument rather than a settled consensus. Second Temple literature has judgement after death, compartments in Sheol, and resurrection in various forms; 2 Maccabees 7 has a mother and seven sons who die confessing that the King of the universe will raise them up. Acts 23:8 records the state of play in a single sentence: the Sadducees say there is no resurrection, nor angel, nor spirit, and the Pharisees acknowledge them all. Jesus takes a side in that argument, in Mark 12:18-27, and the argument he uses is worth noticing because it is an argument from the Torah, which is the only part of the canon his Sadducean opponents would grant him. So the method rule for this whole section is: read the canon forwards. Do not make David say what Daniel says, and do not make Daniel a late intrusion on a religion that had no room for him. The growth is real and it is the growth of one thing.

Luke 23:43. 'And Jesus said to him, Truly I tell you, today you will be with Me in Paradise.' Two things are argued about here and you should know both. The first is punctuation, which the Greek manuscripts do not supply, and the BSB has taken a side in it: its comma after 'you' puts the word today inside the promise, and its capital P treats Paradise as a place name. A small number of readers, including the New World Translation used by Jehovah's Witnesses, put the comma after today instead (the same English words, Truly I tell you today, you will be with Me in Paradise), which moves today from the promise to the speaking. The strongest case for that punctuation is that Jesus' solemn formula often introduces a statement with no time word attached, so 'today' reads naturally as the weight of the moment (I say this to you today, on this cross), and that it removes any clash with Jesus lying in the tomb until the third day, or with his words to Mary Magdalene in John 20:17 that he had not yet ascended. The best case for the BSB's punctuation is the grammar discussed next, together with the plain sense that a dying man is promised something for that day. The objection to that has to be stated carefully, because the version of it most often repeated is false. It is commonly said that an adverb of time is never attached to the formula, and the counter-example is in the Gospels and is the first thing a Jehovah's Witness will produce: Mark 14:30 reads, 'Truly I tell you,' Jesus replied, 'this very night, before the rooster crows twice, you will deny Me three times.' The better argument is grammatical. In Mark 14:30 the Greek puts hoti straight after the formula, and hoti marks the opening of the content clause, so 'this very night' is unambiguously inside what is being said rather than attached to the saying of it. Luke 23:43 has no hoti, so nothing in the sentence marks off the content in that way, and the case has to be made instead from the fact that the formula elsewhere runs straight into what is promised and from how Luke uses the word today. That is a real argument and it is not the knock-down one people think they have. The second question is what paradeisos means. The word occurs three times in the New Testament: here, at 2 Corinthians 12:4 where Paul is caught up into it, and at Revelation 2:7 where the tree of life is in it. It is a loanword from Persian by way of Greek, used in the Septuagint for the garden in Genesis, and in Second Temple Jewish writing it names the blessed part of the world of the dead. It is not a synonym for the new creation.

2 Corinthians 5:1-10, which is the densest passage on the subject in the New Testament and the least tidy. Verse 1: 'For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is dismantled, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands.' Verses 2 to 4 have Paul groaning, longing to be clothed with his heavenly dwelling, anxious not to be found naked, wishing to be clothed rather than unclothed. Then verse 8: 'We are confident, then, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.' The exegetical problem is that the state he prefers in verse 8 looks like the state he dreads in verse 3, and there is a genuine scholarly dispute about the way out. Some hold that Paul dreads only the interval and prefers it to the present anyway, because of who he would be with. Some hold that the building from God in verse 1 is received at death, so that there is no naked interval at all. Some hold that Paul's expectation changed between his letters. Murray Harris's commentary on the Greek text sets the options out at length and does not pretend the matter is closed.

Philippians 1:21-24, this lesson's anchor. The verb in verse 23 is analuo, to loose, of striking a tent or of a ship casting off, and Paul's phrase is a double comparative: literally, much rather better. Two features of the sentence are load-bearing. He treats his own death as a live option he could choose between, which tells you what he thought was on the other side of it. And the thing that makes it better is not rest, or release, or reunion; it is a person. 'I desire to depart and be with Christ.' Everything positive Paul says about the state between is a prepositional phrase about company.

Revelation 6:9-11. 'I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the testimony they had upheld. And they cried out in a loud voice, How long, O Lord, holy and true, until You judge those who dwell upon the earth and avenge our blood? Then each of them was given a white robe and told to rest a little while longer until the full number of their fellow servants, their brothers, were killed, just as they had been killed.' The martyrs are described as souls, they speak, they are answered, they are clothed, and they are told to wait. It is the most detailed picture in the New Testament of what lies between, and it is inside a vision in the most symbolic book in the canon, which is precisely why it is argued about. You already know from the New Testament Survey module on Revelation how much work the genre does in that book. Hold both facts: it is a picture, and a picture of conscious waiting is still a picture of conscious waiting.

What the four establish together, and what they do not. Together they make it very hard to say that the New Testament writers expected nothing at all between death and resurrection, because three of them speak of being somewhere with someone and the fourth has people talking. What they do not supply is a geography, a mechanism, a mode of existence, or any answer to the question of what a person without a body is. On that the New Testament is close to silent, and the four positions below are four ways of being honest about a silence.

Conscious presence with Christ. This is the majority position across Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant traditions and it says that the believer who dies is immediately and consciously with the Lord, in a real but incomplete blessedness, awaiting the resurrection of the body. Its texts are the four of the last section taken at face value, together with Luke 16:19-31, where the rich man and Lazarus are both conscious after death, and Hebrews 12:23, which speaks of the spirits of the righteous made perfect. Its classic Protestant statement is Westminster Confession 32.1, which says that the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies, and then adds a sentence worth quoting because of what it excludes: beside these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the scripture acknowledges none. Heidelberg Catechism 57 puts the same conviction pastorally, that the believer's soul is immediately taken up to Christ its head and the body will be raised and reunited with it. Calvin's first theological work, Psychopannychia, written in 1534 and published in 1542, was an attack on the alternative. The Catholic and Orthodox forms of the same conviction are older than the Protestant one and one episode in the Western history is worth knowing, because it shows the question was live inside Catholicism too. Pope John XXII, in sermons preached in 1331 and 1332, argued that the souls of the blessed do not see God face to face until the resurrection; the opinion was contested at once, he was pressed by theologians and by the cardinals, and he retracted it on 3 December 1334, the day before he died. His successor Benedict XII then settled it, in the constitution Benedictus Deus of 1336, defining that the purified souls of the blessed see the divine essence immediately after death, with an intuitive vision and face to face. Other texts regularly brought forward are Revelation 14:13, where the dead who die in the Lord are blessed and rest from their labours, and Revelation 7:9-17, where a great multitude stands before the throne. Its named weaknesses are of two kinds and the exegetical one should be given first, because it is the one about whether the position is true. It has to supply an account of Ecclesiastes 9:5, Psalm 6:5 and Psalm 88:10-12 which does not amount to calling them figurative because they are inconvenient. It has to say what a person without a body actually is, at the point where 2 Corinthians 5:3-4 has Paul calling the unclothed condition the thing he does not want. And the confessional form of it goes further than any single text does: Westminster 32.1's closing claim that scripture acknowledges no place for separated souls besides the two is an inference from the whole, not a sentence that can be quoted. Its defenders answer the first of those by saying that the Old Testament texts speak from inside a horizon the resurrection of Jesus had not yet opened, so that they are true of what was then known rather than false, and that this is what reading the canon forwards means when it costs something. The second weakness is gravitational: in popular use the position swallows the resurrection whole, so that Christian hope collapses into going to heaven when you die. Its own best defenders say that loudly.

Soul sleep, or Christian mortalism, stated as its defenders argue it rather than as its opponents report it. The claim is not that the person is annihilated at death. It is that the dead are genuinely dead, without consciousness and without the passage of time, and that they are raised at the resurrection by the power of God, who holds their identity rather than their needing to hold it themselves. The texts are the ones the last section put in the hard column, plus the New Testament's own vocabulary: koimao, to fall asleep, is what the writers say of Stephen at Acts 7:60, of the believers at 1 Corinthians 15:6, and of the Christian dead at 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, and John 11:11-14 has Jesus using the same image of Lazarus and then explaining it. Acts 2:29 and 2:34 say of David that he both died and was buried and did not ascend into heaven. The theological argument is that immortality is a gift and not a possession: 'He alone is immortal' at 1 Timothy 6:16 (the King James has 'Who only hath immortality'), Christ 'has abolished death and illuminated the way to life and immortality' at 2 Timothy 1:10, and at 1 Corinthians 15:53 the perishable 'must be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality', which is a thing done to it. The pastoral argument is that 1 Thessalonians 4, the New Testament's one sustained comfort for the bereaved, comforts them with the resurrection and the trumpet and never once with an intermediate state, which is a strange omission if the intermediate state is the comfort. On Philippians 1:23 the answer is that a person without consciousness experiences no interval at all, so that departing and being with Christ is, for the one who departs, immediate. It has been held by sixteenth-century Anabaptists, by John Milton in De Doctrina Christiana, by a line of English mortalists, by the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, and it is at least adjacent to Oscar Cullmann's Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead?, which pressed that the Greek immortal soul and the biblical resurrection are different hopes. Its named weakness is Revelation 6:9-11, where souls speak; the reply, that this is apocalyptic imagery, is true and is also convenient, and its own defenders concede the text is the hardest they have. The second weakness is 2 Corinthians 5:8, since preferring to be away from the body is a strange preference if the alternative is unconsciousness. On Revelation 6:9-11 the position answers that the souls under the altar are under an altar, in a vision full of horses and scrolls and a slaughtered lamb with seven horns, and that a reader who does not press the altar should not press the speaking; on Luke 16:19-31 it answers that the passage is a parable using a stock Jewish picture of the afterlife and is not teaching about it. Its historical position in the formularies is worth knowing: the Forty-Two Articles of 1553 included an article stating that the souls of those who depart this life do neither die with their bodies nor sleep idly, and that article was among those dropped when the Thirty-Nine Articles were drawn up in 1563. Luther's own remarks about the dead sleeping are disputed and are read both ways by Luther scholars, and Lutheran orthodoxy after him rejected the doctrine, so the position should not be hung on his name in either direction.

Purgatory, stated as Catholic theology states it. Begin with what it is not, because the Protestant caricature is almost universal and it makes the real doctrine impossible to hear. Purgatory is not a second chance, not a place where the fate of the soul is still undecided, and not a middle destination between heaven and hell. Everyone in it is saved and knows it. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says at 1030 that all who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation, but after death they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven, and at 1031 it gives that final purification of the elect the name Purgatory and says it is entirely different from the punishment of the damned. The doctrine rests on two convictions the tradition holds to be scriptural: that nothing unclean enters the presence of God, from Revelation 21:27 and Hebrews 12:14, and that a person who dies genuinely forgiven may still be genuinely unfit. Its texts are 1 Corinthians 3:13-15, where a man's work is tested by fire and he himself is saved, but only as if through the flames; Matthew 12:32, where sin against the Spirit is not forgiven 'either in this age or in the one to come', which Gregory the Great read as implying that some sins are forgiven in the age to come and which the Catechism cites at 1031; and the prayer for the dead in 2 Maccabees, at 12:46 in the numbering the Catechism uses and 12:45 in most modern critical editions, which the Catechism cites at 1032 and which is canonical for Catholics and Orthodox and not for Protestants. Its conciliar statements are the Second Council of Lyons in 1274, the Council of Florence in 1439, and the decree of the twenty-fifth session of Trent in 1563. Behind the councils the tradition appeals to a practice it holds to be older than any of them: the church prayed for its dead from the beginning, and Augustine records his mother Monica asking in her last illness to be remembered at the altar, and then prays for her himself, in the ninth book of the Confessions. The Catholic argument is that the practice is the datum and the doctrine explains it, which is why the Catechism grounds the teaching at 1032 on the practice of prayer for the dead rather than the other way round. Its named weakness is one Catholic theologians themselves have pressed: the scriptural warrant is indirect, resting on an inference from 1 Corinthians 3 and on a book half the church does not receive, so the doctrine leans harder on the practice of praying for the dead and on the authority of the councils than on any text that states it. And Trent's own decree, in the same breath as it affirms the doctrine, instructs bishops to keep difficult and subtle questions out of popular preaching and to forbid whatever tends to curiosity or superstition. Catholic theologians read that instruction as the council doing what it says it is doing, addressing abuses in popular preaching and practice rather than qualifying the doctrine; Protestant readers have taken it as a concession that the popular form of the doctrine had gone wrong. How far abuses in the practice bear on the doctrine itself is one of the things the sixteenth century was arguing about, and it is not settled by the decree that everybody quotes from.

The Orthodox account, which is neither of the last two and is routinely mistaken for one of them. The East holds that the dead enter immediately into a foretaste, a real anticipation of the judgement that is not yet passed: the righteous into a partial blessedness and the unrepentant into a partial affliction, neither of them final, both awaiting the general resurrection when the whole person is judged. Prayer for the dead is universal in Orthodox practice, in the memorial services and in every liturgy, and the tradition regards that practice as older than any theory about it. What the East rejects is the Latin framework rather than the mercy: no created purgatorial fire, no reckoning of temporal punishment still owed after guilt is forgiven, no satisfaction to be worked off, and therefore no indulgences. The refusal was formal. At the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438 and 1439, purgatory was one of the disputed articles, and Mark of Ephesus, who argued against the Latin position there, was the one Greek bishop who refused to sign the union and is venerated in the East for it. The substance of the Greek case there is worth having, because it is not simply obstinacy: the fathers and the liturgies speak of prayer, mercy and the relief of the departed, and they do not speak of a debt of temporal punishment to be discharged or of a created fire that discharges it, so the East holds that the Latins had added a mechanism to a practice rather than explained one. The practice itself is everywhere in Orthodox life, in the memorial services for the dead, in the Saturdays of the Souls set aside in the calendar for them, and in the prayers offered at every liturgy for those who have fallen asleep. The nearest thing to an Orthodox confessional statement is the eighteenth decree of the Confession of Dositheus, from the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672, which says that the souls of those who have fallen asleep are either at rest or in torment according to what each has done, that those who died in repentance without having brought forth fruits of repentance depart into Hades and there endure the punishment due to the sins they have committed, and that they are aware of their future release from there and are delivered by the Supreme Goodness through the prayers of the priests and the good works which the relatives of each do for their departed. Read that carefully and you will see how close the effect is to purgatory and how different the account of it is: there is deliverance, and there is no satisfaction. Its named weakness is that the tradition declines to specify, which Orthodox theologians defend as proper reticence about what has not been revealed, while the criticism from both West and Protestantism is that a practice as universal as praying for the dead ends up resting on a doctrine the tradition will not state. The point is sharpened by the tollhouses, the telonia, a vivid account of the soul's passage after death which is defended by some Orthodox writers and rejected by others as a later accretion; that it can be disputed at all inside the tradition shows how much the East has left undefined.

What the four agree on is worth setting out, because it is more than a student expects. All four hold that the dead are in God's hands and not beyond his reach. All four hold that the believer's final hope is the resurrection of the body and not the survival of a soul. All four hold that the state between, whatever it is, is not the goal and is not the end of the story. None of the four holds that a human being is immortal in his own right. The disagreements are real and they are about the interval, not about the destination.

Settled, across every tradition represented above: death is an enemy; it has been defeated in the resurrection of Jesus; the dead in Christ are safe; and the hope the New Testament actually preaches to the bereaved is the resurrection of the body at the return of Christ, not the survival of the soul in the meantime. 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 is the test case and it is striking how little it says about the interval and how much about the trumpet. If your own funeral sermon inverts those proportions, the New Testament is not where you got the proportions.

Not settled: whether the dead are conscious; whether there is purification after death and on what account; what a person is between the death of the body and its raising; and how the Old Testament's hard sayings about Sheol relate to the New Testament's confidence. The church has been divided on the first and second of these since the Reformation at least, and on the third since long before it. You will form a view, and you should. Hold it knowing the cost.

Now carry back what module 4 gave you, because this is where that work pays. If you concluded there that a human being is a unity and not a soul wearing a body, then the intermediate state is a real problem for you and you will be drawn to either soul sleep or to some account of an immediate resurrection body, and you will need to say what you do with Philippians 1:23. If you concluded there for some form of dualism, the interval is easy and your problem is the opposite one: you will have to work to keep the resurrection at the centre of your preaching, because your anthropology makes it optional and the New Testament does not. Neither of those is an objection to the anthropology. Both are a warning about the direction your account will drift if you stop paying attention.

Two practical cautions before the last paragraph. First, on confidence: the New Testament writers say less about the state of the dead than almost any modern Christian tradition does, and the gap between their reticence and our detail is filled, in practice, by hymns and by inherited pictures. A teacher's first job on this subject is to know which of his own sentences are from the text. Second, on the unbeliever's grave, where the traditions differ most and where careless words do real damage: what you may say honestly is that God is just and that his judgements are not yours to announce, and there is a long pastoral tradition in every communion of declining to pronounce on a particular soul, which is not cowardice but the recognition that you do not have the information.

And then the woman from the inquiry, whose husband was buried on Tuesday. What you can tell her, and defend from the text in front of her, is this: he is not lost, he is not beyond God's reach, and what is coming for him is not a permanent disembodied existence but the raising of the body she nursed. What you cannot tell her, if you are honest, is the mechanism of the interval, and she did not ask for one. She asked whether he is safe. The answer to that question does not depend on which of the four positions in section 4 turns out to be right, and that is the most important thing in this lesson.