Theopedia

Intermediate state

“Yes, we are of good courage, and we would rather be away from the body and at home with the Lord.”

— 2 Corinthians 5:8 (ESV)

Definition

The intermediate state is the condition of the soul between death and the resurrection of the body: the redeemed are made perfect in holiness and received at once into Christ’s presence, while the wicked are cast into conscious torment, both awaiting the resurrection and the final judgment (Heb. 9:27).1 It is called intermediate because it is not the soul’s final condition; the believer’s full inheritance, the resurrection body itself, still lies ahead.2 Historic Protestant theology holds this state to be one of continued conscious existence, not sleep or extinction of being.3

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession states:

“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

The Westminster Confession states the same teaching in nearly identical wording, closing its own chapter with the same exclusion of any third place for the dead.4 This is Reformed teaching generally, not a Baptist distinctive: both confessions agree that the soul’s condition at death is settled immediately and finally, not provisional.

Two claims stand out in this paragraph. First, the change is immediate: the righteous are “then made perfect in holiness,” not admitted to a lesser blessedness that some later process must complete, which is the confession’s own ground for excluding the purgatory Rome teaches as an intervening state of purification. Second, the change is conscious on both sides: the righteous “behold the face of God in light and glory” and the wicked “remain in torment,” language that describes active experience, not a suspended or sleeping existence. The confession does not treat the intermediate state as a doctrine complete in itself; it still awaits “the full redemption of their bodies,” the resurrection this same chapter goes on to state.

Biblical Basis

Paul writes to the Corinthians that to be “away from the body” is to be “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8), and tells the Philippians that his own “desire to depart” is a desire “to be with Christ,” which is “far better” than remaining in the flesh (Phil. 1:21-23). Hodge draws two conclusions from these texts: that Paul regarded the soul’s state after death as more exalted than its condition in the flesh, and that he expected this change to take place immediately, not at some later point.5 Jesus makes the same promise of immediacy to the thief on the cross: “today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). At death, Scripture says, “the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl. 12:7).

Revelation pictures the souls of martyrs already with Christ before the resurrection: they are seen “beneath the altar” that stands before God’s throne, crying out and receiving white robes while they wait for the number of their fellow servants to be complete (Rev. 6:9-11).2 This is a conscious, active existence, not a dormant one. The parable of the rich man and Lazarus describes the same immediacy for both destinies: Lazarus is carried to Abraham’s side while the rich man, in torment, still remembers, speaks, and pleads (Luke 16:22-31).

Historical Development

Patristic reticence and gradual differentiation

Bavinck traces a scriptural reserve in the earliest Christian writers: the Apostolic Fathers had no developed doctrine of the intermediate state and generally assumed that at death the devout entered heaven’s blessedness at once and the wicked hell’s punishment.2 Only once the parousia receded further into the future, and once Gnostic and Ebionite errors forced the question, did the church’s thinkers reflect on it directly. Justin held that the souls of the devout occupy a better place than the unrighteous while both await judgment; Irenaeus held that even the souls of the devout do not enter heaven immediately but an intermediate abode where they await the resurrection, with an early exception made for martyrs, admitted to heaven at once.2 As the developing doctrine of the merit of good works took hold, more and more of the departed were judged worthy of immediate blessedness, and the idea of a purifying fire for those not yet ready, first voiced by Origen in the third century, gradually developed into the position later formalized as purgatory.2

The soul sleep controversy

A distinct error held that the soul itself lapses into unconsciousness at death rather than merely losing its body. A. A. Hodge traces this teaching, called psychopannychism or Thnetopsychitism, to certain heretics in Arabia in the time of Origen; it resurfaced among some scholastic theologians in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and was condemned by the University of Paris in 1240 and, he records, by Pope Benedict XII afterward.6 The teaching found new adherents among some Anabaptists at the Reformation, prompting John Calvin to write a treatise against it, and Hodge notes it “has never been held by any church or permanent school of theologians.”6 Boettner, citing Louis Berkhof, records the same pattern continuing after the Reformation: some Irvingites held the view in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth it became, alongside a related doctrine of eventual annihilation, one of the distinguishing teachings of the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists.7

Opposing Views

Soul sleep (psychopannychism). On this view the soul, like the body, lapses into an unconscious or inactive state at death and remains so until the resurrection, when it is reawakened together with the body it is reunited to.7 Its modern proponents, chiefly the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh-day Adventists, appeal to texts that describe the dead as “asleep” (1 Thess. 4:13) and to passages that speak of the grave as a place without praise or remembrance (Ps. 6:5).6

Conditional immortality. Bavinck distinguishes this view from soul sleep proper: rather than holding the soul dormant until the resurrection, it holds that the soul is not naturally immortal at all, so that the unrepentant wicked are, at the final judgment, annihilated outright rather than raised to endless conscious punishment.2 Boettner records the same two groups that teach soul sleep also holding this further step, and notes its usual form: that immortality is not inherent to the soul but a gift God confers on the righteous alone.7

Purgatory. Rome holds that most believers, having died forgiven but still owing a debt of temporal punishment, undergo a period of purifying suffering before entering heaven, a position addressed at length in its own article.2

Objections and Responses

Psalm 6:5, “in death there is no remembrance of you,” shows the soul is unconscious after death. Such texts describe death as it appears from the standpoint of the living, not as a report on the soul’s actual condition in the world to come: no verse cited for soul sleep attempts to describe the activity or experience of the departed itself, and the same Scriptures elsewhere describe the dead as fully conscious and active.7

Scripture repeatedly calls death “sleep,” and if the body sleeps until the resurrection, so does the soul. Boettner answers that “the sleep spoken of is that of the body, not of the soul,” and that proponents of soul sleep “have simply confused the sleep of the body with that of the soul.”7 A. A. Hodge makes the same distinction from Paul’s own words: the apostle calls death itself, for the believer, “a living together with Christ,” not an unconscious interval (1 Thess. 5:10).6

The rich man and Lazarus is only a parable, and a parable cannot establish a literal doctrine about the intermediate state. Charles Hodge answers that the parable’s details are only intelligible, and only persuasive to its hearers, if they assume the very doctrine soul sleep denies: “there is no passing after death from one state to another; there is a great gulf between the righteous and the wicked from that time for evermore.”8 A parable can still teach real theological content its hearers were already assumed to grant.

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 31, “Of the State of Man after Death and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩ ↩2

  2. Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 23, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6 ↩7

  3. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, Volume III (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), 721: “the souls of believers are at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection.” ↩

  4. The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 32, “Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead,” para. 1. ↩

  5. Hodge, 3:726. ↩

  6. Archibald Alexander Hodge, Outlines of Theology (New York: Robert Carter and Brothers, 1879), 554-555. ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  7. Loraine Boettner, Immortality (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1956), chap. 3, “The Intermediate State.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5

  8. Hodge, 3:722. ↩