7.01. Intermediate or Disembodied State
Intermediate or Disembodied State Summary of the Doctrine
Eschatology (eschatōn logos)1[Note: 1. ἐσχάτων λόγος = a word/discourse about the end-times] is that division in dogmatics which treats the intermediate or disembodied state, Christ’s second advent, the resurrection, the final judgment, heaven, and hell. Revelation does not give minute details upon these subjects, yet the principal features are strongly drawn and salient. The doctrine of the intermediate state has had considerable variety of construction, owing to the mixing of mythological elements with the biblical. The representations of Christ in the parable of Dives and Lazarus have furnished the basis of the doctrine. The most general statement is that the penitent, represented by Lazarus, is happy and that the impenitent, represented by Dives, is miserable. The doctrine taught in Scripture that the body is not raised until the day of judgment implies that the condition of all men between death and resurrection is a disembodied one. This doctrine has been greatly misconceived, and the misconception has introduced grave errors into eschatology. Inasmuch as the body, though not necessary to personal consciousness, is yet necessary in order to the entire completeness of the person, it came to be supposed in the patristic church that the intermediate state is a dubious and unfixed state, that the resurrection adds very considerably both to the holiness and happiness of the redeemed and to the sinfulness and misery of the lost. This made the intermediate or disembodied state to be imperfectly holy and happy for the saved and imperfectly sinful and miserable for the lost. According to Hagenbach (§142), the majority of the fathers between 250 and 730 “believed that men do not receive their full reward till after the resurrection.” Jeremy Taylor (Liberty of Prophesying §8) asserts that the Latin fathers held that “the saints, though happy, do not enjoy the beatific vision before the resurrection.” Even so respectable an authority as Ambrose, the spiritual father of Augustine, taught that the soul “while separated from the body is held in an ambiguous condition (ambiguo suspenditur).”2[Note: 2. WS: It is often difficult to say positively and without qualification what the opinion of a church father really was upon the subject of hades, owing to the unsettled state of opinion. One and the same writer, like Tertullian or Augustine, for example, makes different statements at different times. This accounts for the conflicting representations of dogmatic historians. One thing, however, is certain: the nearer we approach the days of the apostles, the less do we hear about an underworld and of Christ’s descent into it. Little is said concerning hades by the apostolic fathers. In the longer recension of Ignatius’s To the Smyrnaeans 9, they are exhorted to “repent while yet there is opportunity, for in hades no one can confess his sins.” Justin Martyr (Trypho 5) simply says that “the souls of the pious remain in a better place, while those of the wicked are in a worse, waiting for the time of judgment.” The extracts from the fathers in Huidekoper’s volume Christ’s Mission to the Underworld show the uncertainty that prevailed. The same is true of those in König’s Christi Höllenfahrt (Christ’s descent into hell), notwithstanding the bias of the author. For proof of the unsettled state of opinion among the fathers on many points of doctrine, see Jeremy Taylor’s Liberty of Prophesying, 8.]
The incompleteness arising from the absence of the body was more and more exaggerated in the patristic church, until it finally resulted in the doctrine of a purgatory for the redeemed, adopted formally by the papal church, according to which, the believer between death and resurrection goes through a painful process in hades which cleanses him from remaining corruption and fits him for paradise. The corresponding exaggeration in the other direction, in respect to the condition of the lost in the disembodied state, is found mostly in the modern church. The modern restorationist has converted the intermediate state into one of probation and redemption for that part of the human family who are not saved in this life. The Protestant reformers, following closely the scriptural delineations, which represent the redeemed at death as entirely holy and happy in paradise and the lost at death as totally sinful and miserable in hades, rejected altogether the patristic and medieval exaggeration of the corporeal incompleteness of the intermediate state. They affirmed perfect happiness at death for the saved and utter misery for the lost. The first publication of Calvin was a refutation of the doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and the resurrection. The limbus3[Note: 3. fringe, border] and purgatory were energetically combated by all classes of Protestants. “I know not,” says Calvin (2.16.9), “how it came to pass that any should imagine a subterraneous cavern, to which they have given the name of limbus.4[Note: 4. fringe, border] But this fable, although it is maintained by great authors and even in the present age is by many seriously defended as a truth is after all nothing but a fable.” The doctrine of the intermediate or disembodied state, as it was generally received in the Reformed (Calvinistic) churches, is contained in the following statements in the Westminster standards: The souls of believers are, at their death, made perfect in holiness, and do immediately pass into glory [Westminster Larger Catechism 86 and Westminster Confession 1 say: into the highest heavens]; and their bodies, being still united to Christ, do rest in their graves till the resurrection. At the resurrection, believers, being raised up in glory, shall be openly acknowledged and acquitted in the day of judgment and made perfectly blessed in full enjoying of God to all eternity. (Westminster Shorter Catechism QQ. 37-38)
According to this statement, there is no essential difference between paradise and heaven. Westminster Larger Catechism 86 asserts that “the souls of the wicked are, at death, cast into hell, and their bodies kept in their graves till the resurrection and judgment of the great day.” Westminster Larger Catechism 89 and Westminster Confession 1 say that “at the day of judgment, the wicked shall be cast into hell, to be punished forever.” According to this, there is no essential difference between hades and hell. The substance of the Reformed view, then, is that the intermediate state for the saved is heaven without the body and the final state for the saved is heaven with the body, that the intermediate state for the lost is hell without the body and the final state for the lost is hell with the body. In the Reformed or Calvinistic eschatology, there is no intermediate hades between heaven and hell, which the good and evil inhabit in common. When this earthly existence is ended, the only specific places and states are heaven and hell. Paradise is a part of heaven; hades is a part of hell. A pagan underworld containing both paradise and hades, both the happy and the miserable, like the pagan idol, is “nothing in the world.” There is no such place.
Pagan Influences on the Doctrine of Hades This view of hades did not continue to prevail universally in the Protestant churches. After the creeds of Protestantism had been constructed, in which the biblical doctrine of hades is generally adopted, the mythological view began again to be introduced. Influential writers like Lowth and Herder gave it currency in Great Britain and Germany. “A popular notion,” says Lowth (Hebrew Poetry, lect. 8), “prevailed among the Hebrews, as well as among other nations, that the life which succeeded the present was to be passed beneath the earth; and to this notion the sacred prophets were obliged to allude, occasionally, if they wished to be understood by the people, on this subject.” Says Herder (Hebrew Poetry 2.21 [trans. Marsh]), “no metaphorical separation of the body and soul was yet known among the Hebrews, as well as among other nations, and the dead were conceived as still living in the grave, but in a shadowy, obscure, and powerless condition.” The theory passed to the lexicographers, and many of the lexicons formally defined hades as the underworld. It then went rapidly into commentaries and popular expositions of Scripture. The pagan conception of hades is wide and comprehensive; the biblical is narrow and exclusive. The former includes all men; the latter only wicked men. The Greeks and Romans meant by hades neither the grave in which the dead body is laid nor the exclusive place of retribution, but a netherworld in which all departed souls reside. There was one hadēs5[Note: 5. ᾅδης = hades] for all, consisting of two subterranean divisions: Elysium and Tartarus.6[Note: 6. WS: The pagan nomenclature is self-consistent, but the pagan-Christian is not. In the pagan scheme, hades is a general term having two special terms under it: Elysium and Tartarus. But in the paganized Christian scheme, hades does double duty, being both a general and a special term. When the pagan is asked, “Of what does hades consist?” he answers, “Of Elysium and Tartarus.” But when the mythological Christian is asked, “Of what does hades consist?” he must answer, “Of paradise and hades.” He cannot answer, “Of paradise and Tartarus,” because the latter is gehenna, which he denies to be in hades. Hence he converts the whole into a part of itself. To say that hades is made up of paradise and hades is like saying that New York City is made up of Central Park and New York City.] In proportion as the later Jews came to be influenced by the Greek and Roman mythology, the Septuagint hades, which is narrow and definite because confined to the evil, became wide and indefinite because it was made to include both the good and evil. In Scripture, hades is descriptive of moral character. Whoever goes to hades is ipso facto a wicked man and like Dives goes to punishment and misery. In mythology, hades is nondescriptive of moral character. He who goes to hades is not ipso facto a wicked person. He may be either good or evil, may go either to happiness or misery. This mythological indefiniteness, when injected into the definiteness of the inspired representation of hades, takes off the solemn and terrible aspect which it has for the sinner in Scripture and paves the way for the assertion that when the sinner goes to hades he does not go to punishment and misery. This mythological influence upon the eschatology of the later Jews is seen in Josephus. He describes Samuel as being called up from hades (Antiquities 6.14.2). Yet in another place (Jewish War 3.8.5), he says that “the souls of the good at death obtain a most holy place in heaven, while the souls of the wicked are received by the darkest place in hades.” Here is the same vacillation between the biblical and the mythological view which appears in many of the Christian fathers. The mythological influence increased, until the doctrine of purgatory itself came into the Jewish apocryphal literature. Purgatory is taught in 2Ma 12:45 : Manasses in his prayer asks God not “to condemn him into the lower parts of the earth.” The synagogue according to Charnock (Discourse 2) believed in a purgatory.7[Note: 7. WS: On the influence of Hellenism on later Judaism, see Edersheim, Messianic Prophecy and History, lect. 9.]
That class of commentators, lexicographers, and theologians who contend that hades denotes an underworld and deny that it means either hell or the grave appeals to pagan and rabbinic authorities in proof. This assumes that there is no essential difference between the hades of Scripture and that of the nations; that the inspired mind took the same general view with the uninspired of the state of souls after death; that Moses, Samuel, David, and Isaiah together with Christ and his apostles agreed in their eschatology with Homer, Plato, Virgil, the Egyptian “Ritual of the Dead,” and the Babylonian tablets. A close adherence to the text and context of Scripture shows, we think, that this assumption is unfounded. Upon such an unknown subject as the future state, the appeal must be made to revelation alone. Because the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans believed that all human spirits at death go to one and the same underworld, it does not follow that it is a fact or that the circle of inspired men who wrote the Scriptures believed and taught it. And because the Jewish rabbis came to adopt the mythological eschatology, it does not follow that the biblical eschatology is to be interpreted by their opinions.8[Note: 8. WS: The strong tendency of the later Jews to adopt both the customs and opinions of the heathen nations is noticed by Chemnitz in his learned and thorough examination of the Tridentine doctrine of purgatory (Examination concerning Purgatory, 2): “Ex philosophorum ratiocinationibus, et ex superstitiosis gentium sacrificiis, quae ubique usitata erant, cum, quidem, sicut de caris absentibus ita etiam de mortuis naturalis quaedem cura et sollicitudo animis nostris insita est, ad Judaeos etiam hujus opinionis contagium quoddam, inclinato jam Judaismo, serpere coepit. Quanquam enim incisio carnis, et evulsio capillorum, in luctu mortuorum, expresse prohibita erant (Leviticus 19:1-37,Deuteronomy 14:1-29), ex conversatione tamen inter gentes, Israelitis etiam prophetarum tempore illa usurpari coepta fuisse, ex Jeremiae, cap. 16, non obscure colligitur. Sicut a gentibus etiam tibicines in funerum curatione mutauti sunt (Matthew 9:1-38), juxta versum poetae: ‘cantabat moestis tibia funeribus.’ Eadem ratione tandem post prophetarum tempora, etiam orationes et sacrificia pro mortuis, Judaei imitari coeperunt circa annum 170 ante natum Christum, cujus exemplum extat 2 Maccabaeorum 12. Id quod tum fieri coepit, cum collapsa doctrina, et rebus omnibus, cum in imperio tum in templo, perturbatissimis, Judaei una cum foederibus, etiam lingua, appellationibus, moribus, et ritibus, conformitatem cum gentibus quaererent et affectarent: sicut tota historia Maccabaeorum ostendit.” [AG: With Judaism already in a state of decline, a certain infection of this opinion began to creep in among the Jews from the reasonings of the philosophers and from the superstitious sacrifices of the heathen, which were everywhere customary. Indeed, just as a certain natural care and solicitude is implanted in our souls concerning beloved ones who are absent, so likewise (this carried over into a concern for) the dead. For although the cutting of the flesh and the pulling out of the hair in the mourning of the dead was expressly prohibited (Leviticus 19:1-37;Deuteronomy 14:1-29), nevertheless, it is clearly inferred fromJeremiah 16:1-21that, due to regular contact with the heathen, those things had begun to be practiced by the Israelites even in the time of the prophets. Thus, they even borrowed from the heathen the use of flute players in conducting their funerals (Matthew 9:1-38), according to the verse of the poet, “The flute was playing at the sad funerals.” In the same way, at length after the time of the prophets, the Jews began to imitate (around 170 b.c.) also the prayers and sacrifices for the dead-an example of which is found in2Ma 12:1-45. With the collapse of teaching and with everything in disarray-both in government and in the temple-it happened at that time that the Jews together with their covenants (note: Kramer renders una cum foederibus as “together with their confederates”-though lexically foedus means “covenant” or “agreement”) sought and aspired to conformity with the heathen also in speech, names, customs, and rites. This is shown by the entire history of the Maccabeans.]]
Revealed religion may be properly illustrated by ethnical religion when the latter agrees with the former, not when it conflicts with it. When mythology is an echo, even broken and imperfect, of Scripture, it may be used to explain inspired doctrine, but not when it is a contradiction. The meaning of hades must therefore be explained by the connection of thought in the Scriptures themselves and not by the imagination of uninspired man peering into the darkness beyond the grave and endeavoring to picture the abode of departed spirits. The mythological eschatology is a picturesque and fanciful conjecture respecting the unseen world. The biblical eschatology is the description of it by an eyewitness, namely, God speaking through prophets, apostles, and Jesus Christ. The pagan conception passed also into the Christian church. It is found in the writings of many of the fathers, but not in any of the primitive creeds: The idea of a hades (šĕ˒ôl),9[Note: 9. ùÑÀàåÉì = sheol] known to both [the later] Hebrews and Greeks, was transferred to Christianity, and the assumption that the real happiness or the final misery of the departed does not begin till after the general judgment and the resurrection of the body appeared to necessitate the belief in an intermediate state, in which the soul was supposed to remain, from the moment of its separation from the body to the last catastrophe. Tertullian, however, held that the martyrs went at once to paradise, the abode of the blessed, and thought that in this they enjoyed an advantage over other Christians, while Cyprian does not seem to know about any intermediate state whatever. (Hagenbach, History of Doctrine §77)10[Note: 0 10. WS: As an example of the degree to which the mythological view of the condition of the dead had worked itself into the Christian church in the first part of the third century, see the fanciful description of hades by Hippolytus in a fragment of his Discourse against the Greeks.]
According to this hellenized conception of the intermediate state, at death all souls go down to hades: in inferna loca11[Note: 1 11. into the infernal/lower parts] or ad inferos homines.12[Note: 2 12. to the men below] This is utterly unbiblical. It is connected with the heathen doctrine of the infernal divinities and the infernal tribunal of Minos and Rhadamanthus. The God of revelation does not have either his abode or his judgment seat in hades. From Christ’s account of the last judgment, no one would infer that it takes place in an underworld. In both the Old and New Testaments, the good dwell with God, and God’s dwelling place is never represented as “below,” but “on high.” Paradise is the third heaven (2 Corinthians 12:1; 2 Corinthians 12:4), and none of the heavens are in the underworld. Elijah “went up by a whirlwind into heaven” (2 Kings 2:11). The saints remaining on earth at the advent go up “to meet the Lord [and the saints that have been with him] in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17; cf. 2 Thessalonians 4:14; Ephesians 4:8; John 17:24; Acts 7:25; Luke 23:42-43; Luke 23:46; Proverbs 15:24). David expects to be “received to glory.” Christ describes the soul of a believer at death as ascending to paradise: “The beggar died and was carried by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died and was buried. And in hades he lifted up his eyes, being in torments, and sees Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom” (Luke 16:22-23). According to this description, Abraham’s bosom and hades are as opposite and disconnected as the zenith and the nadir. To say that Abraham’s bosom is a part of hades is to say that the heavens are a compartment of the earth. St. Matthew (8:11) teaches that Abraham’s bosom is in heaven: “Many shall recline (anaklithēsontai)13[Note: 3 13. ἀνακλιθήσονται] with Abraham in the kingdom of heaven.” Paradise is separated from hades by a “great chasm” (Luke 16:26). The word chasma14[Note: 4 14. χάσμα] denotes space either lateral or vertical, but more commonly the latter. Schleusner says: “It is especially used concerning space which is extended from a higher to a lower place.”15[Note: 5 15. Maxime dicitur de spatio quod e loco superiore ad inferiorem extenditur (Schleusner, entry “chasma”).] Hades is in infernis;16[Note: 6 16. in the lower parts/regions] Abraham’s bosom or paradise is in superis;17[Note: 7 17. in the upper parts/regions] and heaven proper is in excelsis or summis.18[Note: 8 18. in the highest]
If paradise is a section of hades, then Christ descended to paradise, and saints at death go down to paradise and at the last day are brought up from paradise. This difficulty is not met by resorting to the later Jewish distinction between a supernal and an infernal paradise. The paradise spoken of by Christ in Luke 24:33 is evidently the same that St. Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 12:3-4, which he calls “the third heaven.”
It is sometimes said that there is no “above” or “below” in the spiritual world, and therefore the special representation in the parable of Dives and Lazarus must not be insisted upon. This, certainly, should not be urged by those who contend for an underworld. Paradise and hades, like heaven and hell, are both in the universe of God. But wherever in this universe they may be, it is the biblical representation (unlike the mythological) that they do not constitute one system or one sphere of being any more than heaven and hell do. They are so contrary and opposite as to exclude each other and to constitute two separate places or worlds; so that he who goes to the one does not go to the other.19[Note: 9 19. WS: Respecting the entire separation between the good and the evil, see1 Samuel 25:29;Psalms 26:9; Psalms 28:3.] This contrariety and exclusiveness is metaphorically expressed by space vertical, not by space lateral. Things on the same plane are alike. Those on different planes are not. If paradise is above and hades is beneath, hades will be regarded as hell and be dreaded. But if paradise and hades are both alike beneath and paradise is a part of hades, then hades will not be regarded as hell (as some affirm it is not) and will not be dreaded. Hades will be merely a temporary residence of the human soul where the punishment of sin is imperfect and its removal possible and probable. (See supplement 7.1.1.) A portion of the fathers, notwithstanding the increasing prevalence of the mythological view, deny that paradise is a compartment of hades. In some instances, it must be acknowledged, they are not wholly consistent with themselves, in so doing. According to Archbishop Ussher (Works 3.281), “the first who assigned a resting place in hell [hades] to the fathers of the Old Testament was Marcion the gnostic.” This was combated, he says, by Origen, in his second Dialogue against Marcion. In his comment on Psalms 9:18, Origen remarks that “as paradise is the residence of the just, so hades is the place of punishment (kolastērion)20[Note: 0 20. κολαστήριον] for sinners.” The locating of paradise in hades is opposed by Tertullian (Against Marcion 4.34) in the following terms: “Hades (inferi) is one thing, in my opinion, and Abraham’s bosom is another. Christ, in the parable of Dives, teaches that a great deep is interposed between the two regions. Neither could the rich man have ‘lifted up’ his eyes, and that too ‘afar off,’ unless it had been to places above him and very far above him, by reason of the immense distance between that height and that depth.” Similarly, Chrysostom in his Homilies on Dives and Lazarus, as quoted by Ussher, asks and answers: “Why did not Lazarus see the rich man, as well as the rich man is said to see Lazarus? Because he that is in the light does not see him who stands in the dark; but he that is in the dark sees him that is in the light.” Augustine in his exposition of Psalms 6:1-10 calls attention to the fact that “Dives looked up, to see Lazarus.” Again, he says, in his letter to Euodius, “It is not to be believed that the bosom of Abraham is a part of hades (aliqua pars inferorum).21[Note: 1 21. some part of the lower regions] How Abraham, into whose bosom the beggar was received, could have been in the torments of hades, I do not understand. Let them explain who can.” Again, he remarks (On the Literal Meaning ofGenesis 12:33-34): “I confess, I have not yet found that the place where the souls of just men rest is hades (inferos). If a good conscience may figuratively be called paradise, how much more may that bosom of Abraham, where there is no temptation and great rest after the griefs of this life, be called paradise.” To the same effect says Gregory of Nyssa (In pascha): “This should be investigated by the studious, namely, how, at one and the same time, Christ could be in these three places: in the heart of the earth, in paradise with the thief, and in the ‘hand’ of the Father. For no one will say that paradise is in the places under the earth (en hypochthoniois),22[Note: 2 22. ἐν ὑποχθόνιοις] or the places under the earth in paradise; or that those infernal places (ta hypochthonia)23[Note: 3 23. τὰ ὑποχθόνια] are called the ‘hand’ of the Father.” Cyril of Alexandria in his On the Departure of the Soul remarks: “The innocent are above, the guilty below. The innocent are in heaven, the guilty in the abyss. The innocent are in God’s hand, the guilty in the devil’s.”24[Note: 4 24. Insontes supra, sontes infra. Insontes in coelo, sontes in profundo. Insontes in manu dei, sontes in manu diaboli.] Ussher asserts that the following fathers agree with Augustine in the opinion that paradise is not in hades: Chrysostom, Basil, Cyril Alexandrinus, Gregory Nazianzus, Bede, Titus of Bostra, and others.25[Note: 5 25. WS: The Council of Ferrara-Florence (1438-39), composed of Greek and Latin bishops, which attempted to unite the Latin and Greek churches, decided “that the souls of the saints are received immediately into heaven and behold God himself as he is, three in one” (Taylor, Liberty of Prophesying, 8).] (See supplement 7.1.2.)
These patristic statements respecting the supernal locality of paradise agree with Scripture: “The way of life is above to the wise, that he may depart from sheol beneath” (Proverbs 15:24). When Samuel is represented as “coming up from the earth” (1 Samuel 28:7-20), it is because the body reanimated rises from the grave.26[Note: 6 26. WS: In the narrative concerning the witch of Endor, the term sheol is not once used.] This does not prove that the soul had been in an underworld any more than the statement of St. John (12:17) that Christ “called Lazarus out of his grave” proves it. Paradise is unquestionably the abode of the saved; and the saved are with Christ. The common residence of both is described as on high: “When he ascended up on high, he led captivity captive” (Ephesians 4:8); “Father, I will that they also whom you have given me be with me where I am, that they may see my glory” (John 17:24); “those which sleep in Jesus, God will bring with him [down from paradise, not up from hades]” (2 Thessalonians 4:14). At the second advent, “we which are alive and remain shall be caught up in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air” (1 Thessalonians 4:17). Stephen “looked up into heaven and saw Jesus standing on the right hand of God” (Acts 7:55). Christ said to the Pharisees, “You are from beneath, I am from above” (John 8:23). Satan and his angels are “cast down to Tartarus” (2 Peter 2:4). The penitent thief says to Christ: “Lord, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Christ replies: “This day shall you be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42-43). This implies that paradise is the same as Christ’s kingdom; and Christ’s kingdom is not an infernal one. Christ “cried with a loud voice, Father into your hands I commend my spirit, and having said this, he gave up the ghost” (23:46). The “hands” of the Father, here meant, are in heaven above, not in “sheol beneath.” These teachings of Scripture and their interpretation by a portion of the fathers evince that paradise is a section of heaven, not of hades, and are irreconcilable with the doctrine of an underworld containing both the good and the evil.
Christ’s Alleged Descent into Hell
Another stimulant, besides that of mythology, to the growth of the doctrine that the intermediate state for all souls in the underworld of hades was the introduction into the Apostles’ Creed of the spurious clause he descended into hades. Biblical exegesis is inevitably influenced by the great ecumenical creeds. When the doctrine of the descent to hades was interpolated into the oldest of the Christian creeds, it became necessary to find support for it in Scripture. The texts that can, with any success, be used for this purpose, are few, compared with the large number that prove the undisputed events in the life of Christ. This compelled a strained interpretation of such passages as Matthew 12:40; Acts 2:27; Romans 10:7; 1 Peter 3:18-20; 1 Peter 4:6 and largely affected the whole subject of eschatology as presented in the Scriptures. The Apostles’ Creed in its original form read as follows: “Suffered under Pontius Pilate; was crucified, dead, and buried; the third day he rose again from the dead.” This is also the form in the two creeds of Nice (325) and Constantinople (381): a certain proof that these great ecumenical councils did not regard the descensus as one of the articles of the catholic faith. The first appearance of the clause he descended into hades is in the latter half of the fourth century in the creed of the church of Aquileia. Pearson, by citations, shows that the creeds, both ecclesiastical and individual, prior to this time do not contain it. Burnet (Thirty-nine Articles, art. 3) asserts the same. Refinus, the presbyter of Aquileia, says that the intention of the Aquileian alteration of the creed was not to add a new doctrine, but to explain an old one; and therefore the Aquileian creed omitted the clause was crucified, dead, and buried and substituted for it the new clause descendit in inferna.27[Note: 7 27. he descended into hell] Refinus also adds that “although the preceding Roman and oriental editions of the creed had not the words he descended into hades, yet they had the sense of them in the words he was crucified, dead, and buried” (Pearson, On the Creed, art. 5). The early history of the clause, therefore, clearly shows that the hades to which Christ was said to have descended was simply the grave in which he was buried.28[Note: 8 28. WS: Coleridge (Works 5.278) remarks: “This clause was not inserted into the Apostles’ Creed till the sixth century after Christ. I believe the original intention of the clause was no more than vere mortuus est (he truly died), in contradiction to the hypothesis of a trance or suspended animation.”]
Subsequently, the clause went into other creeds. The Athanasian Creed (600) follows that of Aquileia in inserting the “descent” and omitting the “burial.” It reads: “Who suffered for our salvation descended into hades, rose again the third day from the dead.” Those of Toledo, in 633 and 693, likewise contain it. It is almost invariably found in the medieval and modern forms of the Apostles’ Creed, but without the omission, as at first, of the clause was crucified, dead, and buried: two doctrines thus being constructed in place of a single one as at first. If, then, the text of the Apostles’ Creed shall be subjected, like that of the New Testament, to a revision in accordance with the text of the first four centuries, the descensus ad inferos29[Note: 9 29. descent into hell] must be rejected as an interpolation. (See supplement 7.1.3.)
While the tenet of Christ’s local descent into hades has no support from Scripture or any of the first ecumenical creeds, it has support, as has already been observed, from patristic authority.30[Note: 0 30. WS: See Hagenbach, History of Doctrine §§77-78, 141-42 (ed. Smith).] Says Pearson (On the Creed, art. 5): The ancient fathers differed much respecting the condition of the dead and the nature of the place into which the souls, before our Savior’s death, were gathered; some looking on that name which we now translate hell, hades, or infernus as the common receptacle of the souls of all men, both the just and unjust, while others thought that hades or infernus was never taken in the Scriptures for any place of happiness; and therefore they did not conceive the souls of the patriarchs or the prophets did pass into any such infernal place. This difference of opinion appears in Augustine, who wavered in his views upon the subject of hades, as Bellarmine concedes. Pearson (On the Creed, art. 5) remarks of him that “he began to doubt concerning the reason ordinarily given for Christ’s descent into hell, namely, to bring up the patriarchs and prophets thence, upon this ground, that he thought the word infernus (hadēs)31[Note: 1 31. ᾅδης = hades] was never taken in Scripture in a good sense to denote the abode of the righteous.”32[Note: 2 32. WS: Notwithstanding the currency which the view of hades as the abode of the good and evil between death and the resurrection has obtained, it would shock the feelings, should a clergyman say to mourning friends: “Dry your tears, the departed saint has gone down to hades.”] Pearson cites, in proof, the passages already quoted from Augustine’s epistle and Commentary on Genesis. On the other hand, in City of God 20.15, Augustine hesitatingly accepts the doctrine that the Old Testament saints were in limbo and were delivered by Christ’s descent into their abode: “It does not seem absurd to believe that the ancient saints who believed in Christ and his future coming were kept in places far removed, indeed, from the torments of the wicked, but yet in hades (apud inferos), until Christ’s blood and his descent into these places delivered them.” Yet in his exposition of the Apostles’ Creed (On Faith and the Creed), Augustine makes no allusion to the clause he descended into hades. And the same silence appears in the On the Creed, attributed to him. After expounding the clauses respecting Christ’s passion, crucifixion, and burial, he then explains those concerning his resurrection and ascent into heaven. This proves that when he wrote this exposition, the dogma was not an acknowledged part of the catholic faith.33[Note: 3 33. WS: The Episcopal church does not regard the descent into hell as a necessary part of the Christian faith. In the order for evening prayer, it is said that “any churches may omit the words he descended into hell.” The Forty-two Articles of Edward VI explain the clause to mean a descent into hades and preaching to the Old Testament saints in prison there. The Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles give no explanation, but contain both clauses. Hence Pearson concludes that the Episcopalian has some liberty in the interpretation of this article. His own method is, first, to explain the Scripture and then to explain the creed as it now reads in its modern form. His explanation of Scripture is that in the clause you will not leave my soul in hell soul is metonymically put for body and hell means the grave because (a) soul is frequently put for body in the Hebrew, (b) sheol means grave in many places, and (c) the Aquileian Creed so intended. Still, he says, “Though this may be a probable interpretation if the words of David, yet it cannot pretend to be an exposition of the creed as it now stands” in the Thirty-nine Articles, that is, as containing both clauses. When both clauses are retained, as in the Thirty-nine Articles, the second must be more than a mere repetition and explanation of the first. For if one merely explains the other, one would be omitted, as Rufinus says was the case in the Aquileian Creed and as is the case in the Athanasian Creed. Hence Pearson decides that the form of this article as it is adopted in the Thirty-nine Articles requires to be explained as the descensus ad inferos (descent into hell) in order to avoid tautology. But the form itself he shows to be a late addition to the Apostles’ Creed. If both clauses are retained, the explanation proposed by Whitby (onActs 2:26-27) is consistent with Scripture: “The Scripture does assure us that the soul of the holy Jesus, being separated from his body, went to paradise (Luke 23:43), and from thence it must descend into the grave or sepulcher to be united to his body that this might be revived. And thus it may be truly said: was dead and buried; his soul descended afterward into hades (the grave) to be united to his body; and his body being thus revived, he rose again the third day.’ ”] Still later, Peter Chrysologus, archbishop of Ravenna, and Maximus of Turin, explain the Apostles’ Creed and make no exposition of the descent to hades. The difference of opinion among the fathers of the first four centuries, together with the absence of scriptural support for it, is the reason why descensus ad inferos was not earlier inserted into the Apostles’ Creed. It required the development of the doctrine of purgatory and of the medieval eschatology generally in order to get it formally into the doctrinal system of both the Eastern and Western churches.34[Note: 4 34. WS: Baumgarten-Crusius (History of Doctrine 2.109) finds three stadia in the development of the dogma of the descent to hades: (1) the descent was the burial itself put into an imaginative form; (2) the descent was a particular condition or status of Christ resulting from his burial; and (3) the descent was entirely separate from the burial, being another and wholly distinct thing. Van Oosterzee’s history of the clause he descended into hell is as follows: “As concerns the history of this article, the conviction was expressed even by some of the earliest of the fathers-Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Clemens Alexandrinus, and others-that Jesus, after his burial, actually tarried in the world of spirits and by some of them, also, that he there preached the gospel, while the romantic manner in which this mysterious subject is presented in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus is well known. Gnosticism, especially, warmly espoused this idea; according to Marcion, this activity of the Lord was directed to delivering the victims of the demiurge and leading them upward with himself. From the creeds of the Semiarians, this much-debated article appears to have passed over to those of the orthodox church, according to some, with a view to controvert Apollinarianism. In the Exposition of the Aquileian Symbol of Rufinus, this formula is found, and especially through his influence it appears also to have passed over into other confessions of faith; although it is remarkable that in the Nicene Creed mention is made only of ‘was buried’; in the Athanasian Creed, on the other hand, only of ‘descended into hell.’ It is manifest from this, that both expressions were first employed by many interchangeably, though very soon greater stress was laid upon the latter, and its contents regarded as the indication of a special remedial activity of the Lord. As the doctrine of purgatory became more developed, the conception found wider acceptance that the Lord had descended into the lower world in order to deliver the souls of the Old Testament believers from their subterranean abode, the limbus patrum. Especially under the influence of Thomas Aquinas was developed the doctrine of the Romish church that the whole Christ, both as to his divine and human nature, voluntarily repaired thither to assure to the above-mentioned saints the fruits of his death on the cross and to raise them out of this prisonhouse to the full enjoyment of heavenly blessedness. According to Luther, on the other hand, who regards the descensus as the first step in the path of the exaltation, the Lord, after his being made alive according to the spirit and immediately upon his return from the grave, descended, body and soul, into hell, there to celebrate his triumph over the devil and his powers (Colossians 2:15) and to proclaim to them condemnation and judgment. Reformed theologians either understood the expression in the sense of ‘buried’ or explained it of the final anguish and dismay of the suffering Christ. This latter is the view of Calvin 2.16 and of Heidelberg Catechism A. 44. Some divines, for example, the Lutheran Aepinus, even maintained that the reference is to the sufferings of hell, which Christ endured in his soul, while his body was lying in the grave. No wonder that the Formula of Concord declared this article to be one “qui neque sensibus, neque ratione nostra comprehendi queat, solo autem fide acceptandus sit” [AG: which neither can be understood with the senses nor with our reason, but only is to be accepted on faith alone], which, however, did not prevent its being possible to say, on the other side, that “there are almost as many dissertations concerning the descensus as there are flies in the height of summer” (Witsius). Left by the supranaturalism of the past century entirely in a misty obscurity, it was wholly rejected by the Rationalists as the fruit of an exploded popular notion, to which, according to Schleiermacher, nothing but a fact wholly unnoticed by the apostles (unbezeugte Thatsache) served as a basis. Only in our day has the tide turned and theologians of different schools have begun to return with increased interest, yea, with manifest preference to this dogma and to bring it into direct connection not only with soteriology, but also with eschatology.” In the face of this historical account, Van Oosterzee proceeds to defend the doctrine of a local descent to hades, founding onPsalms 16:10;Acts 2:25-31; Acts 13:33-37;Ephesians 4:8-10;1 Peter 3:19-21; 1 Peter 4:6; Dogmatics 2.558-59.] (See supplement 7.1.4.) The personal and local descent of Christ into hades-whether to deliver the Old Testament saints from limbo or to preach judicially, announcing condemnation to the sinners there, or evangelically, offering salvation to them-if a fact, would have been one of the great cardinal facts connected with the incarnation. It would fall into the same class with the nativity, the baptism, the passion, the crucifixion, the resurrection, and the ascension. Much less important facts than these are recorded. St. Matthew speaks of the descent of Christ into Egypt, but not of his descent into hades. Such an act of the Redeemer as going down into an infernal world of spirits would certainly have been mentioned by one of the inspired biographers of Christ. The total silence of the four gospels is fatal to the tenet. St. Paul, in his recapitulation of the principal events of our Lord’s life, evidently knows nothing of the descent into hades: “I delivered unto you that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins and that he was buried and that he rose again the third day” (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). The remark of Bishop Burnet (Thirty-nine Articles, art. 3) is sound:
Many of the fathers thought that Christ’s body went locally into hell and preached to some of the spirits there in prison; that there he triumphed over Satan and spoiled him and carried some souls with him into glory. But the account that the Scriptures give of the exaltation of Christ begins it always at his resurrection. Nor can it be imagined that so memorable a transaction as this would have been passed over by the first three evangelists and least of all by St. John, who, coming after the rest and designing to supply what was wanting in them and intending particularly to magnify the glory of Christ, could not have passed over so wonderful an instance of it. The passage in St. Peter seems to relate to the preaching to the Gentile world by virtue of that inspiration that was derived from Christ.35[Note: 5 35. WS: Augustine, Bede, Aquinas, Erasmus, Beza, Gerhard, Hottinger, Clericus, Leighton, Pearson, Secker, Hammond, Hoffmann, and most Reformed theologians explain1 Peter 3:18-20to mean that Christ preached by Noah to men who were “disobedient” in the days of Noah and who for this cause were “spirits in prison” at the time of Peter’s writing. The particle pote (πότε = when), qualifying apeithēsasi (ἀπειθήσασι = having been disobedient), shows that the disobedience (or disbelief) occurred “when the ark was preparing.” But the preaching must have been contemporaneous with the disobedience or disbelief. What else was thereto disobey or disbelieve? Says Pearson (On the Creed, art. 2): “Christ was really before the flood, for he preached to them that lived before it. This is evident from the words of St. Peter (1 Peter 3:18-20). From which words it appears, first, that Christ preached by the same Spirit by the virtue of which he was raised from the dead: but that Spirit was not his [human] soul, but something of a greater power; second, that those to whom he preached were such as were disobedient; third, that the time when they were disobedient was the time before the flood, when the ark was preparing. The plain interpretation is to be acknowledged for the true, that Christ did preach unto those men which lived before the flood, even while they lived, and consequently that he was before it. For though this was not done by an immediate act of the Son of God, as if he personally had appeared on earth and actually preached to that world, but by the ministry of a prophet, by the sending of Noah ‘the eighth preacher of righteousness’: yet to do anything by another not able to perform it without him as much demonstrates the existence of the principal cause as if he did it himself without any intervening instrument.” Another proof of the correctness of this interpretation is the fact that Christ’s preaching to “the spirits in prison” was pneumati (πνεύματι = in the spirit) only. The total theanthrōpos (θεάνθρωπος = God-man) did not preach. The sarx (σάρξ) or human nature of Christ had no part in the act. But Christ’s personal and local preaching in hades would require his whole divine-human person, as much so as his preaching in Galilee or Jerusalem. Formula of Concord 9.2 so understands and teaches: “Credimus quod tota persona, deus et homo, post sepulturam, ad inferos descenderit, Satanam devicerit” [AG: We believe that the entire person, God and man, after he was buried, descended into hell, thoroughly conquered Satan]. Christ’s preaching through Noah-“a preacher of righteousness” (2 Peter 2:5) and therefore an “ambassador of Christ” (2 Corinthians 5:20)-might be done through his divinity alone. SeeEphesians 4:20-21;Acts 26:23;John 10:16for instances in which Christ’s preaching by others is called his preaching. It is objected that the phrase he went and preached (poreutheis ekēryxen,πορευθεὶς ἐκήρυξεν) in1 Peter 3:19would not apply to a preaching that was instrumental and spiritual. But the same use is found inEphesians 2:17: Christ “came and preached (elthōn euangelisato, ἐλθὼν εὐαγγελίσατο) to you which were afar off.” The reference is to Christ’spreaching to the Gentile world by his apostles. Christ, in his own person, did not preach to them which were “afar off”; and he forbade his disciples to do so until the time appointed by the Father (Matthew 10:5;Acts 1:4). The objection that actually living men upon earth would not be called “spirits” is met byRomans 13:1;1 John 4:1; 1 John 4:3and by the fact that at the time of Peter’s writing the persons meant are disembodied spirits.1 Peter 4:6, sometimes cited in proof of the descensus ad inferos, refers tothe preaching of the gospel to the spiritually “dead in trespasses and sins.” This is Augustine’s interpretation (Letter 6.21 to Euodius). InEphesians 4:9ta katōtera merē tēs gēs (τὰ κατώτερα μέρη τῆς γῆς = the lower parts of the earth) to which Christ “descended” from “on high” signifies this lower world of earth. St. Paul is speaking here of the incarnation. The incarnate Logos did not descend from heaven to hades or ascend from hades to heaven. Cf.Isaiah 44:23: “Shout, you lower parts of the earth.” This isthe opposite of the “heavens,” which are bidden to “sing.” InActs 2:19this world is called hē gē katō (ἡγῆ κάτω = the earth below). Hades would be ta katōtata merē tēs gēs (τὰ κατώτατα μέρη τῆς γῆς = the lower parts of the earth). InRomans 10:7Christ’s descent “into the deep (abysson, ἄβυσσον)” is shown by the context to be his descent into the grave. Whatever be the interpretation of1 Peter 3:18-20, such a remarkable doctrine as the descent to hades should have more foundation than a single disputed text. The doctrine itself is so obscure that it has had five different forms of statement: (1) Christ virtually descended into hades, because his death was efficacious upon the souls there; (2) Christ actually descended into hades; (3) Christ’s descent into hades was his suffering the torments of hell; (4) Christ’s descent into hades was his burial in the grave; and (5) Christ’s descent into hades was his remaining in the state of the dead for a season. Westminster Larger Catechism 50 combines the last two: “Christ’s humiliation after his death consisted in his being buried and continuing in the state of the dead and under the power of death, till the third day, which has been otherwise expressed in the words he descended into hell.”]
Scriptural View of the Intermediate State The early patristic and Reformed view of the intermediate state agrees with the Scriptures, as the following particulars prove.
Both the Old and New Testaments represent the intermediate state of the soul to be a disembodied state: “Jacob yielded up the ghost and was gathered unto his people” (Genesis 49:33); “oh that I had given up the ghost” (Job 10:18; Job 11:20; Job 14:20); “she has given up the ghost” (Jeremiah 15:9); “there is no man that has power over the spirit to retain the spirit; neither has he power in the day of death” (Ecclesiastes 8:8); “then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return to God who gave it” (12:7); “Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the spirit” (Matthew 27:50); “when Jesus had cried with a loud voice he said, Father, into your hands I commend my spirit; and having said this, he gave up the spirit” (Luke 23:46); called upon God, saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59); “we are willing rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); “I knew a man in Christ about four years ago, whether in the body or out of the body, I cannot tell” (12:2); “we groan, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon with our house which is from heaven: if so be that being clothed ‘we shall not be found naked’ ” (5:2-3); “knowing that shortly I must put off this my tabernacle, even as our Lord Jesus Christ has showed me” (2 Peter 1:14); “I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus” (Revelation 20:4); “I saw under the altar the souls of them that were slain for the word of God” (6:9). In accordance with this, the prayer for the burial of the dead in the Episcopal order begins as follows: “Forasmuch as it has pleased almighty God, in his wise providence, to take out of this world the soul of our deceased brother, we therefore commit his body to the ground.” And God is addressed as the one “with whom do live the spirits of those who depart hence in the Lord and with whom the souls of the faithful, after they are delivered from the burden of the flesh, are in joy and felicity.”
Belief in the immortality of the soul and its separate existence from the body after death was characteristic of the old economy, as well as the new. It was also a pagan belief. Plato elaborately argues for the difference, as to substance, between the body and the soul and asserts the independent existence of the latter. He knows nothing of the resurrection of the body and says that when men are judged in the next life, “they shall be entirely stripped before they are judged, for they shall be judged when they are dead; and the judge too shall be naked, that is to say, dead; he with his naked soul shall pierce into the other naked soul, as soon as each man dies” (Gorgias 523). That the independent and separate existence of the soul after death was a belief of the Hebrews is proved by the prohibition of necromancy in Deuteronomy 18:10-12. The “gathering” of the patriarchs “to their fathers” implies the belief. Death did not bring them into association with nonentities. Jehovah calls himself “the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,” and this supposes the immortality and continued existence of their spirits; for, as Christ (Luke 20:28) argues in reference to this very point, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living”-not of the unconscious, but the conscious. Our Lord affirms that the future existence of the soul is so clearly taught by “Moses and the prophets” that if a man is not convinced by them, neither would he be “though one should rise from the dead” (Luke 16:29).
Some, like Warburton, have denied that the immortality of the soul is taught in the Old Testament because there is no direct proposition to this effect and no proof of the doctrine offered. But this doctrine, like that of divine existence, is nowhere formally demonstrated because it is everywhere assumed. Most of the Old Testament is nonsense upon the supposition that the soul dies with the body and that the sacred writers knew nothing of a future life. For illustration, David says, “My soul pants after you.” He could not possibly have uttered these words if he had expected death to be the extinction of his consciousness. The human soul cannot long for a spiritual communion with God that is to last only seventy years and then cease forever. Every spiritual desire and aspiration has in it the element of infinity and endlessness. No human being can say to God, “You are my God, the strength of my heart, and my portion for threescore years and ten, and then my God and portion no more forever.” When God promised Abraham that in him should “all the families of the earth be blessed” (Genesis 12:3), and Abraham “believed in the Lord, and he counted it to him for righteousness” (15:6), this promise of a Redeemer and this faith in it both alike involve a future existence beyond this transitory one. God never would have made such a promise to a creature who was to die with the body, and such a creature could not have trusted in it. In like manner, Adam could not have believed the protevangelium,36[Note: 6 36. first gospel (a term used to refer to the first indications of a gospel of salvation)] knowing that death was to be the extinction of his being. All the messianic matter of the Old Testament is absurd on the supposition that the soul is mortal. To redeem from sin a being whose consciousness expires at death is superfluous. David prays to God, “Take not the word of truth out of my mouth; so shall I keep your law continually forever and ever” (Psalms 119:43-44). Every prayer to God in the Old Testament implies the immortality of the person praying: “My flesh fails, but God is the strength of my heart forever” (63:2); “trust in the Lord forever, for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength” (Isaiah 26:4). The nothingness of this life only leads the psalmist to confide all the more in God and to expect the next life: “Behold, you have made my days as a handbreadth; and my age is as nothing before you: verily, every man at his best state is altogether vanity. And now, Lord, what wait I for? my hope is in you” (Psalms 39:5; Psalms 39:7). As John Davies says of the soul in his poem on immortality:
Water in conduit pipes can rise no higher Than the well-head from whence it first doth spring:
Then since to eternal God she doth aspire, She cannot be but an eternal thing. That large class of texts which speak of a “covenant” which God has made with his people and of a “salvation” which he has provided for them have no consistency on the supposition that the Old Testament writers had no knowledge and expectation of a future blessed life. The following are examples: “I will establish my covenant between me and you and your seed after you, in their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be a God unto you and to your seed after you” (Genesis 17:7); “I have waited for your salvation, O Lord” (49:18); “I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God” (Exodus 6:7); “yea, he loved the people; all his saints are in your hand; happy are you, O Israel; who is like unto you, O people saved by the Lord?” (Deuteronomy 33:3; Deuteronomy 33:29); “though he slay me, yet will I trust in him” (Job 13:15); “for the Lord is our judge, the Lord is our lawgiver, the Lord is our king; he will save us” (Isaiah 33:22); “are you not from everlasting, O Lord, my God, my Holy One? we shall not die?” (Habakkuk 1:12); “into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O Lord God of truth” (Psalms 31:5).
It is impossible to confine this “covenant” of God, this “love” of God, this “salvation” of God, this “trust” in God, and this “redemption” of God to this short life of threescore years and ten. Such a limitation empties them of their meaning and makes them worthless. The words of St. Paul apply in this case: “If in only this life we have hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable” (1 Corinthians 15:19). Calvin (2.10.8) remarks that these expressions, according to the common explanation of the prophets, comprehend life and salvation and consummate felicity. For it is not without reason that David frequently pronounces how “blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord and the people whom he has chosen for his own inheritance”; and that, not on account of any earthly felicity, but because he delivers from death, perpetually preserves and attends with everlasting mercy those whom he has taken for his people. In the same reference, Augustine (Confessions 6.11.19) says: “Never would such and so great things be wrought for us by God, if with the death of the body the life of the soul came to an end.” When God said to Abraham, “You shall go to your fathers in peace” (Genesis 15:15), he meant spiritual and everlasting peace. It was infinitely more than a promise of an easy and quiet physical death. When Jacob on his deathbed says: “I have waited for your salvation, O Lord” (49:18), he was not thinking of deliverance from physical and temporal evil. What does a man care for this, in his dying hour? The religious experience delineated in the Old Testament cannot be constructed or made intelligible upon the theory that the doctrine of immortality was unknown or disbelieved. The absolute trust in God, the unquestioning confidence in his goodness and truth, the implicit submission to his will, the fearless obedience of his commands whatever they might be, whether to exterminate the Canaanites or slay the beloved child, and the hopeful serenity with which they met death and the untried future, would have been impossible had the belief of Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Samuel, and the prophets concerning a future existence been like that of Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire, and Mirabeau.
Another reason why the Old Testament contains no formal argument in proof of immortality and a spiritual world beyond this is because the intercourse with that world on the part of the Old Testament saints and inspired prophets was so immediate and constant. God was not only present to their believing minds and hearts, in his paternal and gracious character, but, in addition to this, he was frequently manifesting himself in theophanies and visions. We should not expect that a person who was continually communing with God would construct arguments to prove his existence or that one who was brought into contact with the unseen and spiritual world by supernatural phenomena and messages from it would take pains to demonstrate that there is such a world. The Old Testament saints “endured as seeing the invisible.”37[Note: 7 37. WS: Cf. Mozley, Essay on Job.]
The Scriptures teach that the intermediate state for the believer is one of blessedness. The disembodied spirit of the penitent thief goes with the disembodied Redeemer directly into paradise: “Today shall you be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43). Paradise has the following marks:
1. It is the third heaven: “I knew a man caught up to the third heaven. He was caught up into paradise and heard unspeakable words which it is not lawful for a man to utter” (2 Corinthians 12:2; 2 Corinthians 12:4); “to him that overcomes will I give to eat of the tree of life, which is in the center of the paradise of God” (Revelation 2:7).
2. It is “Abraham’s bosom”: “The beggar died and was carried by the angels into Abraham’s bosom” (Luke 16:22); “many shall come from the east and west and shall recline (anaklithēsontai)38[Note: 8 38. ἀνακλιθήσονται] with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 8:11).
3. It is a place of reward and happiness: “Remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted” (Luke 16:25); “to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); am in a strait between two, having a desire to depart and to be with Christ, which is far better” (Php 1:23); “for me, to die is gain” (1:21); “Christ died for us that whether we wake or sleep we should live together with him” (1 Thessalonians 5:9-10); “they stoned Stephen, calling upon God and saying, Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). According to Luke 9:30-31 Moses and Elijah coming directly from the intermediate state “appear in glory” at the transfiguration. The Old Testament, with less of local description yet with great positiveness and distinctness, teaches the happiness of believers after death: “Enoch walked with God; and he was not; for God took him” (Genesis 5:24); “let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his” (Numbers 23:10); the dying Jacob confidently says, “I have waited for your salvation, O Lord” (Genesis 49:18); “my flesh shall rest in hope; for you will not leave my soul in hell; neither will you suffer your Holy One to see corruption; you will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand there are pleasures forevermore” (Psalms 16:9-11); “as for me, I shall behold your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied, when I awake with your likeness” (17:15); “God will redeem my soul from the power of the grave; for he shall receive me” (49:15); “you shall guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me to glory; whom have I in heaven but you? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside you; my flesh and my heart fails; but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever” (73:24-26); “precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints” (116:15); “he will swallow up death in victory” (Isaiah 25:8, quoted by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:54 to prove the resurrection of the body); “I will ransom them from the power of the grave: I will redeem them from death; O death, I will be your plagues; O grave, I will be your destruction” (Hosea 13:14, cited by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:55); of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake to everlasting life; and they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars forever and ever” (Daniel 12:2-3); “I know that my Redeemer lives and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth; and though, after my skin, worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God; whom I shall see for myself and my eyes shall behold” (Job 19:25-27).39[Note: 9 39. WS: The common opinion of the church, ancient, medieval, and modern, is that this passage teaches both immortality and the resurrection. De Wette, Ewald, and even Renan find the doctrine of immortality in it (see Perowne, On Immortality, n. 3).] St. Paul teaches that the Old Testament saints, like those of the New, trusted in the divine promise of the resurrection: “I stand and am judged for the hope of the promise made of God unto our fathers: unto which promise [of the resurrection], our twelve tribes, instantly serving God day and night, hope to come. For which hope’s sake, King Agrippa, I am accused of the Jews. Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you that God should raise the dead?” (Acts 26:6-8; Acts 23:6). “These all died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them and embraced them and confessed that they were strangers and pilgrims on the earth. For they that say such things declare plainly that they seek a country. And, truly, if they had been mindful of that country from whence they came out, they might have had opportunity to have returned. But now they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly” (Hebrews 11:13-16). These bright and hopeful anticipations of the Old Testament saints have nothing in common with the pagan world of shades, the gloomy Orcus, where all departed souls are congregated. (See supplement 7.1.5.) The Scriptures teach that the intermediate state for the impenitent is one of misery. The disembodied spirit of Dives goes to hades, which has the following marks:
1. Hades is the place of retribution and woe: “In hades he lifted his eyes, being in torments. And Abraham said, Son, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and now you are tormented” (Luke 16:23; Luke 16:25). Christ describes Dives as suffering a righteous punishment for his hard-hearted, luxurious, and impenitent life. He had no pity for the suffering poor and squandered all the “good things” received from his maker in a life of sensual enjoyment. The Redeemer of mankind also represents hades to be inexorably retributive. Dives asks for a slight mitigation of penal suffering, “a drop of water.” He is reminded that he is suffering what he justly deserves and is told that there is a “fixed gulf” between hades and paradise. He then knows that his destiny is decided and his case hopeless and requests that his brethren may be warned by his example. After such a description of it as this, it is passing strange that hades should ever have been called an abode of the good.40[Note: 0 40. WS: Müller regards it as so unquestionable, from the description in the parable of Dives and Lazarus, that hades is not a place for repentance and salvation that he places future redemption after the day of judgment. He asserts that “those theories of apokatastasis (ἀποκατάστασις = restoration) which represent it as taking place in the interval between death and the general resurrection directly violate the New Testament eschatology. If, therefore, the idea of an apokatastasis pantōn (ἀποκατάστασις πάντων = restoration of all things) is to be maintained, it must be referred to a period lying beyond the general resurrection” (Sin 2.426).]
2. Hades is the contrary of heaven, and the contrary of heaven is hell: “You, Capernaum, which are exalted until heaven, shall be brought down to hades” (Matthew 11:23). This is explained by our Lord’s accompanying remark that it shall be more tolerable in the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for Capernaum, showing that to “be brought down to hades” is the same as to be sentenced to hell.
3. Hades is Satan’s kingdom, antagonistic to that of Christ: “The gates of hades shall not prevail against my church” (Matthew 16:18). An underworld containing both the good and the evil would not be the kingdom of Satan. Satan’s kingdom is not so comprehensive as this. Nor would an underworld be the contrary of the church, because it includes paradise and its inhabitants.
4. Hades is the prison of Satan and the wicked. Christ said to St. John, “I have the keys of hades and of death” (Revelation 1:18) and describes himself as “he that opens and no man shuts, and shuts and no man opens” (3:7). As the Supreme Judge, Jesus Christ opens and shuts the place of future punishment upon those whom he sentences: “I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand, and he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years and cast him into the bottomless pit and shut him up” (20:1-3). All modifications of the imprisonment and suffering in hades are determined by Christ: “I saw the dead, small and great, stand before God; and the books were opened, and the dead were judged out of those things which were written in those books; and death and hades gave up the dead which were in them, and they were judged every man according to their works; and death and hades were cast into the lake of fire” (20:12-14). This indicates the difference between the intermediate and the final state for the wicked. On the day of judgment, at the command of incarnate God, hades, the intermediate state for the wicked, surrenders its inhabitants that they may be reembodied and receive the final sentence, and it then becomes gehenna, the final state for them. Hell without the body becomes hell with the body.41[Note: 1 41. WS: If hades in this passage means an underworld, it would include paradise, and thus paradise would be cast into the lake of fire.]
5. Hades is inseparably connected with spiritual and eternal death: “I have the keys of hades and of death” (Revelation 1:18); “death and hades gave up the dead which were in them” (20:13); “I saw a pale horse; and his name that sat upon him was Death, and hades followed him” (6:6). Hades here stands for its inhabitants, who are under the power of (“follow”) the “second death” spoken of in 2:11; 20:6, 14; 21:8. This is spiritual and eternal death and must not be confounded with the first death, which is that of the body only. This latter, St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:26) says, was “destroyed” by the blessed resurrection of the body, in the case of the saints but not of the wicked (see p. 857). The “second death” is defined as the “being cast into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:14). This “death” is never “destroyed”; because those who are “cast into the lake of fire and brimstone with the devil that deceived him shall be tormented day and night forever and ever” (20:10).
6. Hades is not a state of probation. Dives asks for an alleviation of penal suffering and is solemnly refused by the eternal arbiter. And the reason assigned for the refusal is that his suffering is required by justice. But a state of existence in which there is not the slightest abatement of punishment cannot be a state of probation. Our Lord, in this parable, represents hades to be as immutably retributive as the modern hell. There is no relaxation of penalty in the former, any more than in the latter. Abraham informs Dives that it is absolutely impossible to get from hades to paradise: “Between us and you there is a great gulf fixed, so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us that would come from thence.” After this distinct statement of Abraham, Dives knows that the case of a man is hopeless when he reaches hades: “Then, said he, I pray you, therefore, father, that you would send Lazarus to my father’s house: for I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come to this place of torment” (Luke 16:27). The implication is that if they do come to it, there is no salvation possible for them. Abraham corroborates this by affirming that he who is not converted upon earth will not be converted in hades: “If they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead” (16:31). In the nine New Testament passages which have been cited in this discussion, the connection shows that hades denotes the place of retribution and misery. There are three other instances in the received text (two in the uncial) in which the word is employed and denotes the grave: Acts 2:27; Acts 2:31; 1 Corinthians 15:55. In 1 Corinthians 15:55, א, A, B, C, D, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Hort, and Revised Version read thanate.42[Note: 2 42. θάνατε = O death]
In Acts 2:27 it is said: “You will not leave my soul in hades, neither will you suffer your Holy One to see corruption.” The soul, here, is put for the body, as when we say, “The ship sank with a hundred souls.” The same metonymy is found frequently in the Old Testament: “There shall none be defiled for a dead body [Hebrew: for a soul]” (Leviticus 21:1); “you shall not make any cuttings in your flesh for the dead [Hebrew: for a soul]” (19:28); “he shall come at no dead body [Hebrew: dead soul]” (Numbers 6:6; cf. Leviticus 5:2; Leviticus 22:4; Numbers 18:11; Numbers 18:13; Haggai 2:13; see p. 857 n. 51 [Note: . 51 51. WS: In support of this interpretation of these words, we avail ourselves of the unquestioned learning and accuracy of Pearson. After remarking that the explanation which makes the clause he descended into hell to mean “that Christ in his body was laid in the grave” is “ordinarily rejected by denying that ‘soul’ is ever taken for ‘body’ or ‘hell’ for the ‘grave,’ ” he proceeds to say that “this denial is in vain: for it must be acknowledged that sometimes the Scriptures are rightly so, and cannot otherwise be, understood. First, the same word in the Hebrew, which the psalmist used, and in the Greek, which the apostle used and we translate ‘the soul,’ is elsewhere used for the body of a dead man and rendered so in the English version. Both nepeš (ðÆôÆùÑ = life, soul) and psychē (ψυχή = soul) are used for the body of a dead man in the Hebrew and Septuagint ofNumbers 6:6: ‘He shall come at no dead body (nepeš mēt,ðÆôÆùÑ îÅú = dead soul).’ The same usage is found inLeviticus 5:2; Leviticus 19:28; Leviticus 21:1; Leviticus 21:11; Leviticus 22:4;Numbers 18:11; Numbers 18:13;Haggai 2:13. Thus, several times, nepeš (ðÆôÆùÑ = life, soul) and psychē (ψυχή = soul) are taken for the body of a dead man, that body which polluted a man under the law by the touch thereof. And Maimonides has observed that there is no pollution from the body till the soulbe departed. Therefore nepeš (ðÆôÆùÑ = life, soul) and psychē (ψυχή = soul) did signify the body after the separation of the soul. And it was anciently observed by St. Augustine that the soul may be taken for the body only: “Animae nomine corpus solum posse significari, modo quodam locutionis ostenditur, quo significatur per id quod continetur illud quod continet” [AG: That the word soul can signify the body alone is shown in a certain manner of speaking, in which the thing contained signifies the container]; Letter 157 al. 190 to Optatus; Concerning the Origin of Souls 5.19. Second, Hebrew šĕ˒ôl (ùÑÀàåÉì = sheol), which the psalmist used, and the Greek word hadēs (ᾅδης), which the apostle employed and is translated ‘hell’ in the English version, does certainly in some other places signify no more than the ‘grave’ and is translated so. As when Ainsworth follows the word, ‘For I will go down unto my son, mourning, to hell’; our translation, arriving at the sense, renders it, ‘For I will go down into the grave, unto my son, mourning’ (Genesis 37:35). So again he renders, ‘You shall bring down my gray hairs with sorrow unto hell,’ that is, ‘to the grave’ (Genesis 42:38). And in this sense we say, ‘The Lord kills and makes alive: he brings down to the grave and brings up’ (1 Samuel 2:6). It is observed by Jewish commentators that those Christians are mistaken who interpret those words spoken by Jacob, ‘I will go down into sheol,’ of hell [in the sense of underworld], declaring that sheol there is nothing but the grave” (Pearson, On the Creed, art. 5). The position that nepeš (ðÆôÆùÑ = life, soul) is sometimes put for a dead body and that sheol in such a connection denotes the grave was also taken by Ussher (as it had been by Beza onActs 2:27, before him) and is supported with his remarkable philological and patristic learning; see his discussion of the limbus patrum and Christ’s descent into hell in his Answer to a Challenge of a Jesuit in Ireland in Works, vol. 3. This metonymy of “soul” for “body” is as natural an idiom in English as it is in Hebrew and Greek. It is easier for one to say that “the ship sank with a hundred souls” than to say that it “sank with a hundred bodies.” And yet the latter is the real fact in the case.] for Pearson’s proof of this metonymy). That soul is put metonymically for body and that hades means the grave in Psalms 16:10 is proved by the following considerations: (a) St. Peter says that “David being a prophet spoke of the resurrection of Christ, that his soul was not left in hades neither did his flesh see corruption” (Acts 2:31). But there is no resurrection of the soul in the ordinary literal use of the word. The use here, therefore, must be metonymical. Soul, as in the Old Testament passages cited above, must therefore stand for body. (b) Christ’s resurrection could not be a deliverance of both soul and body from hades, because both of them together could not be in hades. Whichever signification of hades be adopted, only one of the two could be in hades, and consequently only one of the two could be delivered from hades. If hades be the underworld, then only Christ’s soul was in hades, not his body. If hades be the grave, then only Christ’s body was in hades, not his soul. Accordingly, if hades be the underworld, then “not to leave Christ’s soul in hades” was to take his soul out of the underworld. But to call this a resurrection of his body, as St. Peter does in 2:31, is absurd. If hades be the grave, then “not to leave Christ’s soul in hades” was to take his body out of the grave. To call this a resurrection of his body is rational. The choice must be made between the two explanations, because to take both the soul and body of Christ out of hades is an impossibility. (c) The connection shows that “to leave Christ’s soul in hades” is the same thing as “to suffer the Holy One to see corruption.” David’s reasoning, as stated by St. Peter in Acts 2:25-27, implies this. David “foresaw the Lord,” that is, the Messiah. Respecting this Messiah, David argues that “his flesh shall rest in hope” because his “soul shall not be left in hades nor he be suffered to see corruption.” Now, unless “soul” is here put for “flesh” and hades means the grave, there is a non sequitur in David’s reasoning. That Christ’s soul was not left in an underworld would be no reason why his body should rest in hope and not see corruption.
Again, St. Peter’s own reasoning (Acts 2:22-27) proves the same thing. After saying that “God had raised up Jesus of Nazareth, having loosed the pangs of death,” he shows that this event of Christ’s resurrection was promised, by quoting the words of David, “You will not leave my soul in hades, neither will you suffer your Holy One to see corruption.” That is to say, the promise “not to leave Christ’s soul in hades” was fulfilled by “raising up Jesus of Nazareth and loosing the pains of death.” And yet again, St. Paul’s quotation in 13:35 of this passage from David shows that he understood soul to be put for body and hades to mean the grave, because he entirely omits the clause you will not leave my soul in hades, evidently regarding the clause you will not suffer your Holy One to see corruption as stating the whole fact in the case, namely, the resurrection of Christ’s body from the grave. In 2:31 the uncials, Lachmann, Tischendorf, Hort, and Revised Version omit hē psychē autou.43[Note: 3 43. ἡ ψυχή αὐτοῦ = his soul]
Meaning of the WordSheol The Old Testament term for the future abode of the wicked and the place of future punishment is sheol (šĕ˒ôl).44[Note: 4 44. ùÑÀàåÉì] This word, which is translated by hades (hadēs)45[Note: 5 45. ᾅδης] in the Septuagint, has two significations: (a) the place of future retribution and (b) the grave.
Before presenting the proof of this position, we call attention to the fact that it agrees with the explanation of sheol and hades common in the early patristic and Reformation churches and disagrees with that of the later patristic, the medieval, and a part of the modern Protestant church. It agrees also with the interpretation generally given to these words in the versions of the Scriptures made since the Reformation in the various languages of the world.46[Note: 6 46. WS: In committing themselves to the position that sheol and hades “signify the abode of departed spirits and correspond to the Greek hades or the underworld” (preface to the Old Testament) and that neither term denotes either the place of punishment or the grave, the Revised Version translators have placed themselves in doctrinal opposition, on a very important subject, to James’s translators, to Luther and the authors of the principal European versions, and to the missionary translators generally. In all these versions, sheol and hades are understood to mean either hell or the grave and never an underworld containing all spirits good and bad. The view of the Reformers on this point is stated in the following extract from “Hades” in the Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia: “The Protestant churches rejected, with purgatory and its abuses, the whole idea of a middle state and taught simply two states and places-heaven for believers and hell for unbelievers. Hades was identified with gehenna, and hence both terms were translated alike in the Protestant versions. The English (as also Luther’s German) version of the New Testament translates hades and gehenna by the same word hell and thus obliterates the important distinction between the realm of the dead (or netherworld, spirit world) and the place of torment or eternal punishment; but in the Revision of 1881 the distinction is restored and the term hades introduced.”]
That sheol in the Old Testament signifies the place of future punishment is proved by the following considerations.
First, it is denounced against sin and sinners and not against the righteous. It is a place to which the wicked are sent, in distinction from the good: “The wicked in a moment go down to sheol” (Job 21:13); “the wicked shall be turned into sheol, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalms 9:17); “her steps take hold on sheol” (Proverbs 5:5); “her house is the way to sheol, going down to the chambers of death” (7:27); “her guests are in the depths of sheol” (9:18); “you shall beat your child with a rod and shall deliver his soul from sheol” (23:14); “a fire is kindled in my anger, and it shall burn to the lowest sheol” (Deuteronomy 32:22); “if I ascend up into heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in sheol [the contrary of heaven], behold you are there” (Psalms 139:8); “the way of life is above to the wise, that he may depart from sheol beneath” (Proverbs 15:24); “sheol is naked before him, and destruction [Revised Version: Abaddon] has no covering” (Job 26:6); “sheol and destruction [Revised Version: Abaddon] are before the Lord” (Proverbs 15:11); “sheol and destruction [Revised Version: Abaddon] are never satisfied” (27:20). If in these last three passages the revised rendering be adopted, it is still more evident that sheol denotes hell; for Abaddon is the Hebrew for Apollyon, who is said to be “the angel and king of the bottomless pit” (Revelation 9:11).
There can be no rational doubt that in this class of Old Testament texts the wicked and sensual are warned of a future evil and danger. The danger is that they shall be sent to sheol. The connection of thought requires, therefore, that sheol in such passages have the same meaning as the modern hell, and like this have an exclusive reference to the wicked. Otherwise, it is not a warning. To give it a meaning that makes it the common residence of the good and evil is to destroy its force as a divine menace. If sheol be merely a promiscuous underworld for all souls, then to be “turned into sheol” is no more a menace for the sinner than for the saint and consequently a menace for neither. In order to be of the nature of an alarm for the wicked, sheol must be something that pertains to them alone. If it is shared with the good, its power to terrify is gone. If the good man goes to sheol, the wicked man will not be afraid to go with him. It is no answer to this to say that sheol contains two divisions, hades and paradise, and that the wicked go to the former. This is not in the biblical text or in its connection. The sensual and wicked who are threatened with sheol as the punishment of their wickedness are not threatened with a part of sheol, but with the whole of it. Sheol is one, undivided, and homogeneous in the inspired representation. The subdivision of it into heterogeneous compartments is a conception imported into the Bible from the Greek and Roman classics. The Old Testament knows nothing of a sheol that is partly an evil and partly a good. The biblical sheol is always an evil and nothing but an evil. When the human body goes down to sheol in the sense of the “grave,” this is an evil. And when the human soul goes down to sheol in the sense of “hell and retribution,” this is an evil. Both are threatened as the penalty of sin to the wicked, but never to the righteous.
Consequently, in the class of passages of which we are speaking, “going down to sheol” denotes something more dreadful than going down to the grave or than entering the so-called underworld of departed spirits. To say that “the wicked shall be turned into sheol” implies that the righteous shall not be; just as to say that “they who obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ shall be punished with everlasting destruction” (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9) implies that those who do obey it shall not be. To say that the “steps” of the prostitute “take hold on sheol” is the same as to say that “whoremongers shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8). To “deliver the soul of a child from sheol” by parental discipline is not to deliver him either from the grave or from a spirit world, but from the future misery that awaits the morally undisciplined and rebellious. In mentioning sheol in such a connection, the inspired writer is not mentioning a region that is common alike to the righteous and the wicked. This would defeat his purpose to warn the latter.47[Note: 7 47. WS: “The meaning of Hebrew šĕ˒ôl is doubtful, but I have not hesitated to translate it hell. I do not find fault with those who translate it grave, but it is certain that the prophet means something more than common death; otherwise he would say nothing else concerning the wicked than what would also happen to all the faithful in common with them” (Calvin onPsalms 9:17).] Sheol when denounced to the wicked must be as peculiar to them and as much confined to them as when “the lake of fire and brimstone” is denounced to them. All such Old Testament passages teach that those who go to sheol suffer from the wrath of God as the eternal judge who punishes iniquity. Thus, “the wicked is snared in the work of his own hands; the wicked shall be turned into sheol, and all the nations that forget God” (Psalms 9:16-17) is as much of the nature of a divine menace against sin as “in the day you eat thereof, you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:17). And the interpretation which eliminates the idea of endless punishment from the former, to be consistent, should eliminate it from the latter. (See supplement 7.1.6.)
Accordingly, these texts must be read in connection with and be explained by that large class of texts in the Old Testament which represent God as a judge and assert a future judgment and even a future resurrection for this purpose: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” (Genesis 18:25); “to me belongs vengeance and recompense; their feet shall slide in due time” (Deuteronomy 32:35); “Enoch the seventh from Adam prophesied of these, saying, Behold the Lord comes with ten thousand of his saints to execute judgment upon all and to convince all that are ungodly among them of all their ungodly deeds which they have ungodly committed” (Jude 1:14-15); “the wicked is reserved to the day of destruction; they shall be brought forth to the day of wrath” (Job 21:30); “the ungodly shall not stand in the judgment; the way of the ungodly shall perish” (Psalms 1:5-6); “verily, he is a God that judges in the earth” (58:11); “who knows the power of your anger? even according to your fear, so is your wrath” (90:11); “O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongs, show yourself; lift up yourself, you judge of the earth: render a reward to the proud” (94:1-2); “there is a way that seems right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death” (Proverbs 16:25); “God shall judge the righteous and the wicked: for there is a time for every purpose and every work” (Ecclesiastes 3:17); “walk in the ways of your heart and in the sight of your eyes; but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment” (11:9); “God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good or whether it be evil” (12:14); “the sinners in Zion are afraid; fearfulness has surprised the hypocrites; who among us shall dwell with devouring fire? who among us shall dwell with everlasting burnings?” (Isaiah 33:14); of “the men that have transgressed against God,” it is said that their “worm shall not die, neither shall their fire be quenched” (66:24); “I beheld till the thrones were cast down and the ancient of days did sit; his throne was like the fiery flame and his wheels like burning fire; thousand thousands ministered unto him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the judgment was set, and the books were opened” (Daniel 7:9-10); “many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (12:2); “the Lord has sworn by the excellency of Jacob, Surely I never will forget any of their works” (Amos 8:7); “they shall be mine, says the Lord of hosts, in the day when I make up my jewels” (Malachi 3:17). A final judgment, unquestionably, supposes a place where the sentence is executed. If there is a day of doom, there is a world of doom. Consequently, these Old Testament passages respecting the final judgment throw a strong light upon the meaning of sheol and make it certain in the highest degree that it denotes the world where the penalty resulting from the verdict of the Supreme Judge is to be experienced by the transgressor. The “wicked” when sentenced at the last judgment are “turned into sheol,” as “idolaters and all liars” when sentenced “have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone” (Revelation 21:8). A second proof that sheol signifies the place of future punishment in the Old Testament is the fact that there is no other proper name for it in the whole volume: for Tophet is metaphorical and rarely employed. If sheol is not the place where the wrath of God falls upon the transgressor, there is no place mentioned where it does. But it is utterly improbable that a final sentence would be announced so clearly as it is under the old dispensation and yet the place of its execution be undesignated. In modern theology, judgment and hell are correlates, each implying the other, each standing or falling with the other. In the Old Testament theology, judgment and sheol sustain the same relations. The proof that sheol does not signify hell would, virtually, be the proof that the doctrine of hell is not contained in the Old Testament; and this would imperil the doctrine of the final judgment. Universalism receives very strong support from all versions and commentaries which take the idea of retribution out of the term sheol, because no texts that contain the word can be cited to prove either a future sentence or a future suffering. They only prove that there is a world of disembodied spirits, whose moral character and condition cannot be inferred from anything in the signification of sheol, because the good are in sheol and the wicked are in sheol. When it is merely said of a deceased person that he is in the world of spirits, it is impossible to decide whether he is holy or sinful, happy or miserable. A third proof that sheol in these passages denotes the dark abode of the wicked and the state of future suffering is found in those Old Testament texts which speak of the contrary bright abode of the righteous and of their state of blessedness. According to the view we are combating, paradise is in sheol and constitutes a part of it. But there is too great a contrast between the two abodes of the good and evil to allow their being brought under one and the same gloomy and terrifying term sheol. When “the Lord put a word in Balaam’s mouth,” Balaam said, “Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his” (Numbers 23:5; Numbers 23:10). The psalmist describes this “last end of the righteous” in the following terms: “My flesh shall rest in hope; you will show me the path of life; in your presence is fullness of joy; at your right hand, there are pleasures forevermore” (Psalms 16:11); “as for me, I will behold your face in righteousness; I shall be satisfied when I awake with your likeness” (17:15); “God will redeem my soul from the power of sheol; for he shall receive me” (49:15); “you shall guide me with your counsel and afterward receive me to glory; whom have I in heaven but you?” (73:24). In like manner, Isaiah 25:8 says respecting the righteous that “the Lord God will swallow up death in victory and will wipe away tears from all faces.” and Solomon asserts that “the righteous has hope in his death” (Proverbs 14:32). These descriptions of the blessedness of the righteous when they die have nothing in common with the Old Testament conception of sheol and cannot possibly be made to agree with it. The “anger” of God “burns to the lowest sheol,” which implies that it burns through the whole of sheol, from top to bottom. The wicked are “turned”into sheol and “in a moment go down” to sheol; but the good are not “turned” into “glory,” nor do they “in a moment go down” to “the right hand of God.” The “presence” of God, the “right hand” of God, the “glory” to which the psalmist is to be received, and the “heaven” which he longs for are certainly not in the dreadful sheol. They do not constitute one of its compartments. If between death and the resurrection the disembodied spirit of the psalmist is in “heaven,” at the “right hand” of God, in his “presence,” and beholding his “glory,” it is not in a dismal underworld. There is not a passage in the Old Testament that asserts or in any way suggests that the light of the divine countenance and the blessedness of communion with God are enjoyed in sheol. Sheol in the Old Testament is gloom and only gloom-and gloomy continually. Will anyone seriously contend that in the passage “Enoch walked with God and he was not for God took him,” it would harmonize with the idea of “walking with God” and with the Old Testament conception of sheol to supply the ellipsis by saying that “God took him to sheol?” Was sheol that “better country, that is, a heavenly,” which the Old Testament saints “desired,” and to attain which they “were tortured, not accepting deliverance?” (Hebrews 11:16; Hebrews 11:35). A fourth proof that sheol is the place of future retribution is its inseparable connection with spiritual and eternal death. The Old Testament, like the New, designates the punishment of the wicked by the term death. And spiritual death is implied as well as physical. Such is the meaning in Genesis 2:17. The death there threatened is the very same thanatos48[Note: 8 48. θάνατος = death] to which St. Paul refers in Romans 5:12 and which “passed upon all men” by reason of the transgression in Eden. Spiritual death is clearly taught in the following: “I have set before you this day life and good and death and evil” (Deuteronomy 30:15); “I set before you the way of life and the way of death” (Jeremiah 21:8); “I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked; but that the wicked turn from his way and live” (Ezekiel 18:32; Ezekiel 33:11); “all they that hate me love death” (Proverbs 8:36). Spiritual death is also taught by implication in those Old Testament passages which speak of spiritual life as its contrary: “As righteousness tends to life, so he that pursues evil pursues it to his own death” (11:19); “whoso finds me finds life” (8:35); “he is in the way of life that keeps instruction” (10:17); “you will show me the path of life” (Psalms 16:11); “with you is the fountain of life” (36:9); “there the Lord commanded the blessing, even life forevermore” (133:3).
Sheol is as inseparably associated with spiritual death and perdition in the Old Testament as hades is in the New Testament and as hell is in the common phraseology of the Christian church: “Sheol is naked before him, and destruction has no covering” (Job 26:6); “sheol and destruction are before the Lord” (Proverbs 15:11); “sheol and destruction are never full” (27:20); “her house is the way to sheol, going down to the chambers of death” (7:27); “her house inclines unto death, and her paths unto the dead” (2:18); “her feet go down to death; her steps take hold on sheol” (5:5). The sense of these passages is not exhausted by saying that licentiousness leads to physical disease and death. The “death” here threatened is the same that St. Paul speaks of when he says that “they which commit such things are worthy of death” (Romans 1:32) and that “the end of those things is death” (6:21). Eternal death and sheol are as inseparably joined in Proverbs 5:5 as eternal death and hades are in Revelation 20:14. But if sheol be taken in the mythological sense of an underworld or spirit world, there is no inseparable connection between it and “death,” either physical or spiritual. Physical death has no power in the spirit world over a disembodied spirit. And spiritual death is separable from sheol in the case of the good. If the good go down to sheol, they do not go down to eternal death. That sheol in one class of Old Testament passages denotes the grave, to which all men, the good and evil alike, go down, is clear from the following citations. Before proceeding, however, to this citation, it is to be remarked that this double signification of hell and the grave is explained by the connection between physical death and eternal retribution. The death of the body is one of the consequences of sin and an integral part of the total penalty. To go down to the grave is to pay the first installment of the transgressor’s debt to justice. It is, therefore, the metonymy of a part for the whole when the grave is denominated sheol. As in English death may mean either physical or spiritual death so in Hebrew sheol may mean either the grave or hell. When sheol signifies the “grave,” it is only the body that goes down to sheol. But as the body is naturally put for the whole person, the man is said to go down to the grave when his body alone is laid in it. Christ “called Lazarus out of his grave” (John 12:17). This does not mean that the soul of Lazarus was in that grave. When a sick person says, “I am going down to the grave,” no one understands him to mean that his spirit is descending into a place under the earth. And when the aged Jacob says, “I will go down into sheol, unto my [dead] son mourning” (Genesis 37:35), no one should understand him to teach the descent of his disembodied spirit into a subterranean world: “The spirit of man goes upward, and the spirit of the beast goes downward” (Ecclesiastes 3:21). The soul of the animal dies with the body; that of the man does not. The statement that “the Son of Man shall be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth” (Matthew 12:40) refers to the burial of his body, not to the residence of his soul.49[Note: 9 49. WS: That “the heart of the earth” means the grave, Witsius (Apostles’ Creed, diss. 17) argues in the following manner: “Jonah says that, while he was in the bowels of the fish, he was ‘in the belly of hell’ or of the grave and ‘in the middle [Hebrew: heart] of the sea’: and in this respect he was a figure of Christ placed in the heart of the earth. This does not mean the hell of the damned, which, as Jerome says, is commonly said to be ‘in the middle of the earth’; but an earthen receptacle which has earth above, below, and on every side; or more briefly, which is within the earth. As the Scripture places Tyre ‘in the heart of the sea,’ that is, surrounded by the sea, as ‘the way of a ship is in the heart of the sea’ when it is surrounded on all sides by the sea, as Absalom was ‘alive in the heart of the oak,’ that is, in the oak, within its branches-so the grave is ‘the heart of the earth.’ Chrysostom remarks that ‘the sacred writer does not say in the earth, but in the heart of the earth, that the expression might clearly denote the grave, and that no one might suspect a mere appearance [of death].’ ”] When Christ said to the penitent thief, “Today shall you be with me in paradise,” he did not mean that his human soul and that of the penitent should be in “the heart of the earth,” but in the heavenly paradise. Christ is represented as dwelling in heaven between his ascension and his second advent: “Him must the heavens receive, till the time of the restitution of all things” (Acts 3:21); “the Lord shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God” (1 Thessalonians 4:16); “our conversation is in heaven, from which we look for our Savior the Lord Jesus” (Php 3:20). But the souls of the redeemed during this same intermediate period are represented as being with Christ: “Father, I will that they whom you have given me be with me where I am, that they may behold my glory which you have given me” (John 17:24); “we desire rather to be absent from the body and to be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). When, therefore, the human body goes down to sheol, it goes down to the grave and is unaccompanied with the soul. The following are a few out of many examples of this signification of sheol: “The Lord kills and makes alive: he brings down to sheol and brings up” (1 Samuel 2:6); “your servants shall bring down the gray hairs of your servant our father with sorrow to sheol” (Genesis 44:31);50[Note: 0 50. WS: This text andGenesis 42:38are parallel to 37:35 and explain Jacob’s words: “I will go down mourning into sheol unto my son.” “Gray hairs” are matter and cannot go into a world of spirits. It is objected that sheol does not mean the “grave” because there is a word (qeber,