Theopedia

Death

“For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

— Romans 6:23

Definition

Death is the separation that sin brings: of soul from body at physical death, of the soul from God in spiritual death, and, for those who die outside Christ, of the whole person from God forever in the “second death” (Rev. 20:14). Scripture does not treat death as a neutral biological fact. It is the penalty God attached to disobedience in the garden (Gen. 2:17) and “the wages of sin” for every sinner since (Rom. 6:23). The Fall explains how death entered the world; this article concerns what death itself is, and how Christ, by his own death and resurrection, breaks its power (1 Cor. 15:54-57).

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names death among the consequences of Adam’s first sin: our first parents “fell from their original righteousness and communion with God, and we in them whereby death came upon all: all becoming dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the faculties and parts of soul and body.”1 The mechanics of that inheritance belong to original sin and imputation of Adam’s sin; this article picks up where that chapter leaves off, with death itself.

The confession returns to the subject in its chapter on the last things: “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.”2 At the resurrection, “all the dead shall be raised up with the selfsame bodies, and none other; although with different qualities, which shall be united again to their souls forever.”3

Three things follow from this. First, death separates rather than annihilates: the confession denies both soul sleep and the extinction of the person, holding that souls “neither die nor sleep.” Second, the confession recognizes only two possible states for a separated soul, paradise or hell, and rules out any third destination such as purgatory. Third, physical death is not the whole penalty. Chapter 6 already located “death” in the “faculties and parts of soul and body” alike, and chapter 31 confirms it: what happens to the body at the grave and what happens to the soul at judgment are two aspects of one penalty, not two unrelated events.

Biblical Basis

Death as comprehensive penalty. God’s warning to Adam, “in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die” (Gen. 2:17), cannot mean bodily death alone: Adam did not fall dead on the spot. Charles Hodge argues from Scripture’s own usage that “death,” as the penalty of sin, “includes all penal evil” and therefore covers three things at once: “the miseries of this life,” “the dissolution of the body,” and “spiritual and eternal death,” the loss of God’s favor that is the soul’s true life.4 Paul’s summary in Romans 6:23 states the same penalty in a single verse: sin’s “wages,” what it has earned and pays out, is death.

Spiritual death. Paul describes the unregenerate as those who were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph. 2:1) even while physically alive. Herman Bavinck reads this as more than metaphor: “sin not only results in death but also coincides with it; sin is death, death in a spiritual sense. Those who sin, by that token and at the same moment, put themselves in an adversarial relationship toward God, are dead to God and the things of God.”5 Death, on this reading, is fundamentally relational rupture, “the breakup of all these relations in which humans stood originally,” with God first and, as a consequence, with neighbor, self, and the created world.5

Physical death. “The body of Christ” language aside, Paul is direct about the body: “it is appointed unto men once to die” (Heb. 9:27), and “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (Gen. 3:19). Bavinck warns against reducing physical death to a merely natural event: it is “not merely a natural consequence, but a positive, divinely threatened and executed, punishment of sin.”6

The intermediate state. Between physical death and the resurrection, Scripture presents the soul as consciously existing, not dissolved or asleep. Paul writes that to be “absent from the body” is to be “present with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and tells the Philippians that to “depart” is “to be with Christ; which is far better” (Phil. 1:23). Hodge devotes an extended treatment to this state, arguing on scriptural grounds against theories that make consciousness depend on having a body.7

The second death. Revelation names a death beyond physical death: “he that overcometh shall not be hurt of the second death” (Rev. 2:11), and at the last judgment, “death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death” (Rev. 20:14). Bavinck traces this language through Revelation’s own usage: the “second death” is “the reality of being thrown into the lake of fire,” a fate reserved for the devil, the beast, and “all the wicked” after the resurrection and final judgment, and distinct from Hades, the intermediate dwelling of the wicked dead before that day.8

Death defeated in Christ. Paul’s climactic argument in 1 Corinthians 15 turns entirely on Christ’s own resurrection: “the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:26), and “death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Cor. 15:54-55). Bavinck reads Christ’s resurrection as the turning point for the doctrine as a whole: “Christ by his cross fundamentally achieved a victory over sin and death and brought life and immortality to light… so that everyone who believes in him has eternal life and will never die.”9 Christ’s own rising was itself “a birth from death and hence a victory over death and over him who had the power of death, the devil” (Heb. 2:14; 2 Tim. 1:10).10

Historical Development

The patristic and medieval church largely agreed that the soul survives physical death consciously, awaiting the resurrection, while disputing what becomes of it in the interim; Rome eventually settled on a purgatorial process of purification for the imperfectly sanctified dead, a position the Reformed rejected as having no scriptural warrant. Hodge surveys and answers the purgatorial doctrine at length in his chapter on the state of the soul after death, alongside the older patristic notion of “soul sleep,” the view that the soul is unconscious between death and resurrection.7

Within Protestant orthodoxy, the sharper historical dispute concerns not the intermediate state but the finality of the state that follows the last judgment: whether the punishment of the unrepentant wicked is everlasting or ends in either restoration or extinction. That discussion belongs to Alternative Views, below, since it remains a live question rather than a settled matter of church history.

Alternative Views

Reformed theology holds that both the righteous and the wicked exist forever after the resurrection, in either everlasting blessedness or everlasting conscious punishment. Two historic alternatives depart from this on the fate of the unrepentant.

Conditional immortality (annihilationism). On this view, human beings are not inherently immortal; unending life is a gift God grants only to the redeemed, and the finally impenitent simply cease to exist rather than suffer forever. Bavinck traces the position to the Socinians, notes it was later taken up by John Locke, and credits Edward White’s Life in Christ with popularizing it in the nineteenth century.11 Its supporting texts are the same ones that describe the wicked’s end as “destruction” (Matt. 7:13), “corruption” (Gal. 6:8), and “death” (Rev. 2:11), words conditionalists read as pointing to nonexistence rather than ongoing torment.

Universalism and hypothetical universalism. A rarer historical position holds either that repentance remains possible after death, up to and even beyond the final judgment (hypothetical universalism), or that every creature, including the devil, will eventually be reconciled to God (unconditional universalism, or apokatastasis). Bavinck traces the latter to Origen and notes it recurred among a handful of later figures, including Schleiermacher, but “has at all times been taught by only a handful of persons.”12

Objections and Responses

“Destruction,” “corruption,” and “death” mean the wicked simply cease to exist. Bavinck answers that this confuses ethical language with physical fact: “life, in Scripture, is never mere existence, and death is never the same as annihilation… sin is not a substance and does not destroy the existent but steers it in a wrong direction, a direction away from God.” The same vocabulary Scripture applies to the spiritually dead while they are still very much alive, the prodigal son called “dead” (Luke 15:24), the Ephesians “dead” in trespasses (Eph. 2:1), the church at Sardis called “dead” (Rev. 3:1), shows that “dead” does not mean nonexistent even in Scripture’s own usage. “Just as God does not annihilate human beings in the first death, so neither does he annihilate them in the second.”13

Eternal punishment is disproportionate, so “eternal” (aiōnios) must mean only “age-long.” Bavinck grants that aiōnios can describe a bounded age elsewhere, but argues the New Testament’s specific use of the word for final states, paired with “life” for the righteous and with “punishment,” “fire,” and “destruction” for the wicked, marks what belongs to “the age to come,” a state “in which a change of state is no longer possible.” Applying “age-long” consistently would just as easily undercut the eternity of the righteous’s reward, which no one proposes. “Unbiased exegesis will not find anything here other than eternal, never-ending punishment.”14

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 6, “Of the Fall of Man, of Sin, and of the Punishment thereof,” para. 2. Text confirmed against independent transcriptions of the confession. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 31, para. 2. ↩

  4. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 2 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1872), 118-119. ↩

  5. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩2

  6. Bavinck, chap. 25, “The Consummation.” ↩

  7. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 710-768. ↩ ↩2

  8. Bavinck, chap. 25. ↩

  9. Bavinck, chap. 23. ↩

  10. Bavinck, chap. 16, “The Exalted Lord Christ.” ↩

  11. Bavinck, chap. 25. ↩

  12. Bavinck, chap. 25. ↩

  13. Bavinck, chap. 25. ↩

  14. Bavinck, chap. 25. ↩