Abraham's Bosom

“And it came to pass, that the beggar died, and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom.”

— Luke 16:22

Abraham’s bosom is the biblical expression for the blessed rest of the righteous dead between death and the resurrection. It comes from Jesus’s account of Lazarus and the rich man (Luke 16:19-31), where poor Lazarus dies and is carried to Abraham’s side, while the rich man dies and is in torment, with “a great gulf fixed” between them (Luke 16:26). The phrase draws on the ancient custom of reclining at a table, where the place of honor lay next to the host, close enough to lean on him. To be in Abraham’s bosom is to occupy that place beside him.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter devoted to this specific expression, but its chapter on the state of man after death describes the same reality in its own words: “The bodies of men after death return to dust, and see corruption; but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous being then made perfect in holiness, are received into paradise, where they are with Christ, and behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies; and the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torment and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day; besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledgeth none.”¹ “Paradise” here and “Abraham’s bosom” in Luke 16 name the same destination: immediate, conscious blessedness for the believing dead, with no third place and no delay.

Biblical Basis

Immediate, not eschatological. The parable states both men’s condition as already true the moment they die, not as a distant future outcome. Lazarus is carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom; the rich man, in torment, is told by Abraham, “now he is comforted, and thou art tormented” (Luke 16:25), a present-tense verdict pronounced “even ‘now,’ immediately after the death of both.”² That the scene concerns the time before the resurrection, not after it, is clear from the rich man’s plea on behalf of his still-living brothers: he wants someone sent from the dead to warn them, a request that only makes sense if their fate, like his, is not yet finally sealed.²

“Paradise” as the same place. When Jesus tells the repentant thief, “today shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43), he is naming the same destination Luke 16 calls Abraham’s bosom. Paradise appears twice more in the New Testament, both times as heaven itself: Paul says he “was caught up into paradise,” which he explains as being “caught up into the third heaven” (2 Cor. 12:2-4), and the risen Christ promises the church at Ephesus fruit from “the tree of life, which is in the midst of the paradise of God” (Rev. 2:7). The word paradise, on this reading, is heaven, so that when Christ told the dying thief he would be in paradise that day, he told him he would be in heaven that day.³ Matthew 8:11 uses a related image for the same blessedness, promising that many “shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob, in the kingdom of heaven.”

A fixed separation. Abraham tells the rich man that “between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence” (Luke 16:26). The rich man’s suffering does not blur his memory, character, or concern for his brothers: “there was no break in memory, nor any change in personality. What a man is in this world he remains in the next.”⁴ The gulf between the two states, once fixed at death, does not close.

Historical Development

Gill traces the expression itself to Jewish custom rather than to a coinage of Jesus’s own: “a phrase used by the Jews, expressive of the heavenly happiness,” drawn from a table at which the guests reclined on couches, so that the one next to the host leaned, as it were, on his breast.² Used of Abraham, it pictured the intimate fellowship of the righteous dead with the father of the faithful and, through him, with God.

Roman Catholic theology later gave the phrase a more specific role. By the time of the medieval scholastics, “Abraham’s bosom” had come to name the limbus patrum, a holding place for the Old Testament saints, distinct from heaven itself, from which Christ’s descent into hell released them into glory only after his death.⁵ The Reformers rejected this reading. Calvin identified Abraham’s bosom with heaven itself, not a separate waiting-room: “the blessed gathering of saintly spirits is called ‘Abraham’s bosom’ [Luke 16:22]… the souls of the pious, having ended the toil of their warfare, enter into blessed rest, where in glad expectation they await the enjoyment of promised glory.”⁶ Writing against the “sleep of the soul,” Calvin held that Abraham’s bosom means the souls of the faithful already enjoy full peace after death, though something remains outstanding until the resurrection itself, “the full and perfect glory of God,” so that their blessedness “remains in progress until the day that concludes and terminates all progress.”⁵ Gill, addressing the same paradise promised the thief on the cross, denied the limbus patrum reading outright: at death Christ went “not into ‘limbus patrum,’ to deliver the Old Testament saints from thence… but into heaven itself.”²

Objections and Responses

Can doctrine rest on details from a parable? Even conservative Reformed exegesis does not insist that the account of the rich man and Lazarus is a literal historical report rather than an illustrative parable; whether its characters are historical or fictitious is treated as an open question.⁷ The state Luke 16 describes, however, does not depend on that question being settled, since it is confirmed by texts that are not parables: Paul expects that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and that to depart this life is “to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23); Jesus tells the dying thief directly, without any parabolic frame, that he will be in paradise that day (Luke 23:43).

Does Abraham’s bosom name a separate holding place for Old Testament saints, as later Catholic theology taught? The confession allows only two destinations for the separated soul, paradise or hell, and “acknowledgeth none” besides them.¹ Calvin’s reading treats Abraham’s bosom as heaven itself, entered by the pious dead directly, not a shadowed anteroom awaiting a later release;⁶ Gill likewise denies that Christ, or any believer, passes through such an intermediate compartment on the way to God.²

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. Text confirmed against independent transcriptions of the confession. ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VII, chap. 3. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 724-725. ↩
Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), 100. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩²
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, III.xxv.6, quoted in Bavinck, chap. 23. ↩ ↩²
Bavinck, chap. 5, “Holy Scripture.” ↩