Gary Pollard
One of the commonly asked questions on my list is, “Does consciousness continue after death?” I was fairly confident in what I believed about this one until 3:00 PM today (11.19). Carl dropped the problem of the Transfiguration on me: How are Moses and Elijah present with Jesus before the resurrection? The purpose of this article is to sort out the Gnostic and the scriptural, but also to hopefully put more minds on this question. It’s been bothering me for several hours now.
The overwhelming weight of scripture seems to be in favor of death being (from our perspective) an instantaneous transition to Jesus’s return and the resurrection. There are some teachings that potentially complicate this view (like the Rich man and Lazarus, thief on the cross, saints under the altar), but the concept of a “place of waiting” made no sense to me in light of the rest of scripture. What’s the point of dividing the sheep and the goats if they’ve been tortured/resting for the last umpteen years? And why are the “goats” surprised at their fate if they’ve already been punished for however long? And how/why is poor Abraham dealing with the pained cries of the rich man in torment? There is, after all, a wide abyss separating the two places (maybe the acoustics are really good). It makes the most sense that Jesus was using an image they would’ve been familiar with (from I Enoch 22, 51) to illustrate the importance of viewing money appropriately. Paul clearly says that we’re given life only when Jesus returns (cf. I Thess 4.14ff), and that Jesus being brought back to life was a visible example of what will happen to all of us too (I Cor 15.20-24). Our hope for consciousness after this life is solely in God’s promise to bring us back when his son returns.
William Tyndale (1484-1536) said, “By putting the departed souls in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, you have destroyed the arguments that Christ and Paul used to prove the resurrection. … What’s the point of resurrection, then? And what’s the point of judgment? … The true faith affirms the resurrection, which is what we’re told to always watch for. Pagan philosophers deny this and claim that the soul is immortal. The Pope combined the spiritual doctrine of Christ and the fleshly doctrine of philosophers, things so dissonant that they’re totally incompatible. And because the fleshly-minded Pope is okay with pagan doctrine, he has no problem corrupting the scripture to establish the doctrine [of Heaven]. If the soul is in Heaven, tell me what the point of resurrection is?” The doctrine of “heaven” widely adopted by our culture is unsupported by scripture and has far more in common with Gnostic and Egyptian beliefs (i.e. Pleroma and Duat).
So is there an intermediate place where departed souls go to experience the beta version of eternity? I didn’t think so. I’m pretty confident that our culture’s concept of heaven is wrong — on linguistic (ουρανος means “sky” or the place above the sky, which we call “space” today), scriptural (our new life comes when Jesus returns), and historical-cultural grounds (the early, pre-Catholic Christians believed that we would get life in a new body on a new/renewed earth when Jesus returns).
But the original question was, “Is there consciousness after death?” From a biblical point of view, I believe (until the Transfiguration Conundrum is sorted anyways) the answer is yes and no. From the perspective of the dead, the transition between death and resurrection is instantaneous. I was comatose for about a week several years ago and couldn’t believe I’d been out for that long. Now, that’s not dead — but it at least proves a point. If you aren’t conscious you aren’t aware of time passing. So the “blink of an eye” statement in I Corinthians 15 makes perfect sense! But the bible does suggest that the dead are not conscious, though this is contested (cf. Ecc 9.5, Dan 12.2, Ps 115.17, 146.4 I Thess 4.14-17, and the 50+ times the bible describes death as “sleep”). Regardless of which answer is correct, what we can all agree on is this:
Brothers and sisters, we want you to know about those who have died. We don’t want you to be sad like other people — those who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died, but we also believe that he rose again. So we believe that God will raise to life through Jesus any who have died and bring them together with him when he comes (I Thess 4.13-14). 1
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