Historical Theology: Where Do We Go When We Die? - Debates on Personal Eschatology

The story of Saul summoning the spirit of Samuel

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Lecture audio: Personal Eschatology

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Question: What happens to people immediately after they die?

Although the Bible doesn’t speak with indisputable clarity on this subject, the Christian faith has had a long-standing traditional position on this subject. When a Christian dies, their spirit/soul leaves their body and goes to be “with the Lord.” The Christian will remain in this intermediate state of spiritual bliss (often referred to as “being in heaven”) until the end of time, when Christ returns and they are resurrected into new, eternal bodies, as part of “the new heavens and the new earth.”

The Early Church Perspective

The early church believed in an “intermediate state” characterized by several levels. Before Christ came, the souls of the departed would go to Sheol, “the grave,” as referenced several times in the Old Testament (for instance, Job 7:9; 17:13-16; Psalm 6:5). Although the Old Testament doesn’t offer many details of what Sheol is like, the New Testament adds a few things. It seems to suggest that the souls of the wicked would go to a painful experience in a place called Hades (Rev. 20:13; Luke 16:23). The righteous, meanwhile, went to a place that Jesus refers to as “the bosom of Abraham” (Luke 16:22). After the crucifixion, however, some early traditions hold that Christ descended into "the grave" and preached the gospel to those held captive there (cf. 1 Pet. 3:18-20; Eph. 4:9). Since the time of Christ, the departed faithful go to be in “paradise” in the presence of the Lord (Luke 23:43), and the departed unrighteous continue to go to the waiting-grounds of Hades. Only at the end of time will all people receive their final judgment and go either to Hell (also referred to as Gehenna or “the lake of fire,” and sometimes as Hades once again) or Heaven (ultimately, referring to what John calls “the new heavens and the new earth”).

Though this early church perspective was fairly consistent, we should note that the Bible refers to the possible destinations of souls after death with a wide array of terms—Sheol, Hades, the Bosom of Abraham, Paradise, Hell, Gehenna, the Lake of Fire, Heaven, and the New Heavens and the New Earth—and it is not entirely clear from Scripture whether these different terms actually speak of several different regions of the afterlife (as the early church thought) or if they’re merely overlapping, poetic descriptions of merely one or two possibilities (many Christians throughout the ages, for instance, have used Hades/Hell interchangeably, and Paradise/Heaven interchangeably as well).

The Rise of the Soul-Sleep Interpretation

Lazarus and the Rich Man

Along with their new interpretations of Old Testament Law, the Seventh-Day Adventists and a few other similar groups from the 1800s began to question the traditional position on the intermediate state. In its place, they advocated a position called “soul sleep”—the idea that the souls of the dead did not go anywhere after the body died. They were either dormant or, in a certain sense, dead themselves. It was only at the resurrection that was to come at the end of time that the dead would be raised and re-created into a new bodily existence. Thus there was no intermediate state at all—the dead would simply experience what seemed (from their perspective) an “immediate” reawakening at the Judgment Day at the end of time.

The Biblical Case for Soul Sleep

Humans were created as unified, wholistic beings—body and spirit inseparably joined together. Throughout the Old Testament, the understanding seemed to be that when the body died, the spirit too experienced a sort of death in Sheol, “the grave.” This idea of humans being unified creatures carries over to the New Testament, where we are told that our ultimate destiny is not a disembodied state, but a new body at the resurrection of the dead (1 Cor. 15:42). The faithful dead in the New Testament are often described as those who have “fallen asleep” (John 11:11; 1 Cor. 15:6, 18; 1 Thess. 4:14), and the NT notes that the Last Day is the time when we “put on immortality” (1 Cor. 15:52-53; i.e., the human soul/spirit is not inherently immortal in and of itself). The one possible reference to a specifically disembodied state is not necessarily a favorable one—Paul describes it as “being found naked” (2 Cor. 5:1-4). Further, the one clear case of a disembodied human spirit appearing in a biblical story is in Saul’s attempt to contact the spirit of Samuel through a witch (1 Sam. 28:15); that story seems to imply that Samuel’s spirit has been in a state of rest until that moment.

The Biblical Case for a Spiritual Intermediate State

The strongest argument for the traditional position comes from a parable in which Jesus creates a hypothetical story about a rich man and a poor man dying and experiencing a negative and a positive version of an intermediate state (Luke 16:19-31). While it’s possible that Jesus was just using the possibility of an intermediate state as a rhetorical device to make his larger point, it seems unlikely that he would create a fanciful scenario whose premise he knew to be untrue. Further, Jesus famously tells the repentant thief on the Cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise” (though this phrase is open to several interpretations), and Paul says that “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6-8). In regards to the terminology of “falling asleep,” most Christians have simply taken this to be a euphemism of death rather than a theological statement about what happens after death, and 1 Thess. 4:14 might be read to imply that those who have “fallen asleep” have been with the Lord during the interim and will be returning with him at his Second Coming.

Conclusion

Most Baptists continue to hold the traditional position. In the long run, though, this is a distinction that has very little bearing on the Baptist practice of the Christian faith, other than the language we use to console those who grieve. Both positions agree that the big picture is the same—that the dead will experience what seems like an instantaneous transportation into the presence of Christ, and that our ultimate destiny is a new embodied existence in resurrection bodies at the end of time. In other traditions, however, in which the doctrine of "the communion of the saints" assumes that the dead remain spiritually alive in Christ, the matter carries greater weight.