I initially wrote the following posts in 2021 as a paper for an Historical Theology overview course at Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary. I was assigned to treat the development of the doctrine of one of the chapters in the Baptist Confession of which I chose chapter thirty-one “Of the State of Man After Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead.” These posts are therefore not concerned directly with a defense of doctrine from Scripture but rather with tracing how the broad community of God’s people has historically understood man’s destiny after death in both the intermediate and eternal states. I have made light revisions here, mostly to correct typographical errors or to clarify wording.

Introduction

When discussing the questions of the intermediate state and of the resurrection of the dead, the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith covers these doctrines in three short paragraphs. It states that the souls of men continue on following bodily death and are immediately ushered into either the presence of God or into hell. The righteous wait until the resurrection to receive their glorified bodies while the unjust likewise wait for the final judgment when their bodies will “be raised to dishonour.”¹ With this statement, the 17^th century Baptists stood in complete agreement with the Presbyterians and Congregationalists.² They were also in line with the bulk of the Protestant churches of their day.³ But what was the source of this agreement and what happened to it following the writing of the confession? A survey of the history of these doctrines will show that, though there have often been disputes respecting certain aspects of it, the Church has always held to a commonly agreed upon core of doctrine regarding the intermediate state. And while the doctrine of the resurrection has vacillated between two basic options, here too there has been remarkable continuity of thought.

Early Church Era

In the early Church, the doctrine of the intermediate state of the believer took on one of two basic forms; either the believer’s soul would be given immediate entrance to heaven upon death, or it would be confined to a state that was less than heaven but better than condemnation in hell. The Apostolic Fathers largely held to the first view, teaching that “the pious at death immediately inherit the heavenly glory prepared for them. . .”⁴ This doctrine can be seen with varying clarity in most of the Apostolic Fathers; the words of Polycarp and Hermas will serve to illustrate. Polycarp, when discussing the reward of those who had died in faith, clearly stated that the believer’s soul appeared in the presence of God after death: “all these have not run in vain, but in faith and righteousness, and… are [now] in their due place in the presence of the Lord, with whom also they suffered.”⁵

Likewise, Hermas, speaking allegorically, also expected that death would give the faithful direct entrance to heaven. He pictured the world and heaven as two opposing dwellings, contrasting the present abode of those “who are the servants of God” with their city which “is far away from this one.”⁶ The city of God’s servants is further set against their present country in that the servants do not obey the laws of their present country and are not to give much attention to purchasing assets in their present place but are instead to prepare to buy “lands, and possessions, and houses, as you will find in your own city, when you come to reside in it.”⁷ This city to which these servants belong is clearly not a reference to some lesser place of waiting as it is the city to which they belong and to which they are to look; it can only refer either to heaven or to the new heavens and new earth after Christ’s return to earth. That Hermas refers to the former is clear from his expectation that these Christians will go to their city immediately upon being expelled from the foreign country in which they are living–“be ready, when the master of this city shall come to cast thee out for disobeying his law, to leave his city, and to depart to thine own….”⁸ Hermas taught that to depart this world was to take up residence in the heavenly city.

The opposing view, that the Christian must wait in some lesser place before entering heaven, we only know to have been taught among the Apostolic Fathers by Papias while two of the Fathers are silent on the matter.⁹ Finally, some have tried to find a third view among the early fathers, that of some form of conditional immortality in which the souls of unbelievers simply cease to exist sometime after the death of their bodies, but these attempts have all failed.¹⁰

Following the Apostolic Fathers, Papias’ doctrine of the intermediate state gained wider acceptance in the ante-Nicene fathers, possibly becoming common but never universal.¹¹ Justin Martyr, although apparently inconsistent in his beliefs regarding the intermediate state, at some points in his writings adopted the view of Papias.¹² Further, “Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hillary, Ambrose, [and] Cyril… [all held] that the dead descended into hades” remained there in either some form of mild pleasure or torment “until the day of judgment.”¹³ Irenaeus held that all Christ’s disciples must await the resurrection of their bodies before they can enter God’s presence; until that time they “go away into the invisible place allotted to them by God, and there remain until the resurrection.”¹⁴

This belief was soon tempered by an allowance for the martyrs who died as a direct result of persecution to bypass this mysterious holding place and to ascend directly to heaven. Tertullian, once adamantly against allowing that any of the dead enter heaven before the resurrection, appears to have adjusted his view to allow these martyrs immediate entrance.¹⁵ First, he strongly attacked the idea that heaven and the presence of God was the expectation of the believer upon death, arguing instead that heaven was barred until the return of Christ.

How, indeed, shall the soul mount up to heaven, where Christ is already sitting at the Father’s right hand, when as yet the archangel’s trumpet has not been heard by the command of God…. To no one is heaven opened; the earth is still safe for him, I would not say it is shut against him. When the world, indeed, shall pass away, then the kingdom of heaven shall be opened.¹⁶

But later, despite this bold claim that “to no one is heaven opened,” Tertullian felt constrained to make an exception for the martyrs and bases this exception on John’s vision of martyrs under the altar in Revelation 6, questioning how “the region of Paradise… [has] no other souls as in it besides the souls of the martyrs” if others than the martyrs are permitted immediate access to heaven.¹⁷

But the view of Papias, Justin, Tertullian, and others as well as the opposing view were displaced by what appears to be a modification of the hades view in which only the unsaved dead were kept in hades while the saved dead were kept for a time in a separate place of temporary punishment intended to purify–purgatory–until they had become sufficiently holy to enter heaven.¹⁸ This idea entered the stream of Christian thought slowly; Augustine seemed to toy with an understanding that, for some men, there was a form of temporary suffering to be endured following death. When writing against those who hold that all punishment is intended to cleanse rather than to punish, he admits not only the purging nature of some punishment but also the temporary nature of some purgatorial punishment following death, stating,

We concede that, even in this mortal life, some punishments are indeed purgatorial…. [T]hey are certainly purgatorial to those who are corrected by their coercive force…. As for temporal punishments, some suffer then in this life only, others after death… yet all this precedes that most severe and final judgment. However, not all men who endure temporal punishments after death come into those everlasting punishments which are to follow after that judgment.¹⁹

Possibly contradicting this, he elsewhere states that the idea of purgatory is an open question: “It is a matter that may be inquired into, and either ascertained or left doubtful, whether some believers shall pass through a kind of purgatorial fire, and in proportion as they have loved with more or less devotion the goods that perish, be less or more quickly delivered from it.”²⁰ Whatever Augustine’s final thought on the matter, he did not develop this idea into a full-bodied doctrine. That distinction fell to Gregory the Great who was the first to refer to purgatory as a certainty.²¹ Though every person would stand before God in the last judgment “exactly as he was when he departed this life,” Gregory held that “there must be a cleansing fire before judgment, because of some minor faults that may remain to be purged away.”²² Following Gregory’s full acceptance of the idea of purgatory, the view developed into the predominant position of the western Church during the Middle Ages.²³

In conjunction with the developments of the doctrine of the intermediate state, the doctrine of the resurrection also appears in the early Church. Though there was disagreement over certain aspects of the resurrection, all the orthodox agreed there would occur a future resurrection. Polycarp wrote that whoever “says that there is neither a resurrection…, he is the first-born of Satan.”²⁴ Justin Martyr, while arguing for an earthly millennium, admitted there were “many who belong to the pure and pious faith, and are true Christians” but who did not hold to this same earthly reign; in contrast, he proclaimed that any “who do not admit this [teaching of the resurrection]… [but] who say there is no resurrection of the dead” should not even be regarded as Christians.²⁵ Rather, he says, “I and others, who are right-minded Christians on all points, are assured that there will be a resurrection of the dead….”²⁶ For Justin, while there was room for disagreement over the millennium, there was no place whatsoever within Christianity to debate the reality of the resurrection.

Unlike the belief in a bodily resurrection, the number of resurrections was not a settled matter. In Irenaeus we encounter the idea that there is a division in the resurrection, or two separate resurrections. He speaks specifically of a “resurrection of the just” which takes place before the thousand-year kingdom.²⁷ This is in contrast with the “general resurrection” which has to do with the judgment “after the times of the kingdom….”²⁸ So Irenaeus sees a resurrection exclusively for the righteous and a later second resurrection in which the rest of the dead are raised for judgment.

The opposing view, that there will be only one bodily resurrection, is more difficult to discern, usually taking the form simply of discussing the future resurrection without making any distinction between the resurrection of the wicked and that of the righteous. Polycarp merely mentions “a resurrection [and] a judgment” where he ought to speak of resurrections in the plural if he held the view of Irenaeus.²⁹ The distinction Polycarp does make is not one of timing but rather of quality; the resurrection of the saints is a “resurrection of eternal life, both of soul and body, through the incorruption [imparted] by the Holy Ghost.”³⁰ This implies that the wicked can expect a resurrection that is not of both body and soul, indeed, one that is corrupted; but there is no trace that this other kind of resurrection occurs at a later time than the first. Similarly, the so-called Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed both speak conspicuously only of one resurrection. This may be an indication that their focus is exclusively on the resurrection of the righteous or it may indicate that the Church had returned to Polycarp’s earlier view of a single resurrection. Augustine does appear to make a distinction in time between two resurrections, but his distinction is of quite a different sort from that of Irenaeus. He equates the first resurrection with the present kingdom of Christ–“this kingdom militant. . ., is the first resurrection, which ‘now is’.”³¹ For Augustine, the first resurrection “is a spiritual one and applies both to the faithful who are alive and to the dead who enjoy their rest in heaven.”³² But the second resurrection is a “resurrection of the body itself,” a resurrection “which is of the flesh” and any who partake of the second resurrection without first enjoying the first “will surely pass, at the second resurrection… into the second death with his flesh.”³³ This then is a development of Polycarp’s view and a rejection of that of Irenaeus.

Another question raised in the early Church was that of the resurrection body. It was generally believed that the same body which was laid in the grave at death would be raised, though this was not without some opposition. Tertullian argued for a renewed body rather than a completely new body, stating “both [the dead in Christ and the Christians still alive] shall be raised incorruptible, because they shall regain their body—and that a renewed one, from which shall come their incorruptibility….”³⁴ Even more explicitly, he used the language of the dead “recovering” their bodies which would then be clothed with heavenly vestments.³⁵ Against this, Origen argued that the resurrection body is not the same body in which the believer lived on this present earth but is instead “a refined and spiritualized body.”³⁶ While some Church Fathers agreed with Origen, most were of the opinion that the “resurrection body would be in every respect identical with the body formed in the present life” and this debate was still unsettled as the Church entered the Middle Ages.³⁷

Medieval Era

The doctrine of the resurrection suffered “speculations [which were] rather fanciful and had little permanent value” at the hands of the Scholastics in the Middle Ages.³⁸ Nevertheless, the doctrines from the early Church remained visible; Peter Lombard understood there to be a “common resurrection when all corruption will be cut away from the elect of Christ.”³⁹ Thomas Aquinas also held to a common resurrection, though he added to this the belief that all Christians would participate in the resurrection proper. Therefore, he taught the death and then immediate resurrection of those Christians who “are alive at the coming of Christ….”⁴⁰

It was also during the time of the Scholastics in the Middle Ages that the doctrine of purgatory took on its full form. Purgatory was conceived of as purifying the dead saints by means of fire, and was located somewhere in the vicinity of hell.⁴¹ Two more temporary compartments were added to purgatory in which unbaptized infants and Old Testament believers were kept and thus the Scholastics held to five separate destinations for men prior to the return of Christ: heaven, hell, purgatory, limbus, and limbus patrum.⁴² The latter two, along with purgatory, were believed to be subdivisions of hades and distinct from hell.⁴³

Before the close of the Middle Ages, the idea of an intermediary purgatory came under serious attack. Both John Wyclif and Jon Hus after him contended against many doctrinal and practical excesses of the Roman church, advocating a return to the teachings of Scripture above those of the Church and also appealing to Augustine for support.⁴⁴ Both men objected to the entire concept of purgatory and laid the foundation for its rejection in the Reformer’s doctrine.⁴⁵ But it remained for the Reformation to fully demolish the elaborate conceptions built concerning the intermediate state.

Continued in part 2.

Footnotes

1. 2LBCF (1677/89) XXXI.3. ↩︎
2. Samuel E. Waldron, A Modern Exposition of the 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith, 5th ed. (Welwyn Garden City, UK: EP Books, 2016), 441. ↩︎
3. Louis Berkhof, The History of Christian Doctrine (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1975), 261. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 259. ↩︎
5. Polycarp of Smyrna, “The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians,” in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), IX. Brackets in original. ↩︎
6. Hermas, “Similitudes,” in Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire), ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. F. Crombie, vol. 2, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), III.i. ↩︎
7. Ibid. ↩︎
8. Ibid. ↩︎
9. Charles E. Hill, Regnum Caelorum: Patterns of Millennial Thought in Early Christianity, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2001), 77. Hill states that the Epistle of Psuedo-Barnabas and the Didache contain no teaching on the intermediate state. He admits the Epistle to Diognetus is unclear, but believes it too holds a belief in a heavenly intermediate state (see p102-3). ↩︎
10. James Orr, The Progress of Dogma (1901; repr., London: Forgotten Books, 2012), 346. ↩︎
11. Hill, Regnum Caelorum, 43–44. ↩︎
12. Ibid. 25–27 ↩︎
13. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 259. ↩︎
14. Irenaeus of Lyons, “Irenaeus Against Heresies,” in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), V.xxxi.2. ↩︎
15. Hill, Regnum Caelorum, 30. Hill argues that this change was the result of interaction with opponents to the Hades view as well as Tertullian’s own past writings from before he held the view that the saints waited for the resurrection to enter heaven. ↩︎
16. Tertullian, “A Treatise on the Soul,” in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Peter Holmes, vol. 3, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), LV. ↩︎
17. Ibid., 231. ↩︎
18. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 259–60. ↩︎
19. Augustine of Hippo, The City of God Against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R. W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), XXI.xiii. ↩︎
20. Augustine of Hippo, “The Enchiridion,” in St. Augustin: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. J. F. Shaw, vol. 3, A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1887), LXIX. As The City of God and The Enchiridion were written in the last decade of Augustine’s life (likely with The Enchiridion being written while Augustine was still laboring on the former work) it is uncertain which represents his final judgment on the matter. ↩︎
21. Orr, Progress of Dogma, 347. See also Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 260–61. ↩︎
22. Gregory the Great, Dialogues of Saint Gregory the Great, trans. Odo John Zimmerman, vol. 39, The Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (1959; repr., Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2002), IX.xli. Emphasis added. ↩︎
23. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 260–61. ↩︎
24. Polycarp of Smyrna, “Epistle to the Philippians,” VII. ↩︎
25. Justin Martyr, “Dialogue of Justin with Trypho, a Jew,” in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), LXXX. ↩︎
26. Ibid. ↩︎
27. Irenaeus of Lyons, “Against Heresies,” V.xxxii.1. ↩︎
28. Ibid., V.xxxv.2. ↩︎
29. Polycarp of Smyrna, “Epistle to the Philippians,” VII. ↩︎
30. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, eds., “The Encyclical Epistle of the Church at Smyrna,” in The Apostolic Fathers with Justin Martyr and Irenaeus, vol. 1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), XIV. Brackets in original. ↩︎
31. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, XX.ix.3. ↩︎
32. Allison, Historical Theology, 688. ↩︎
33. Augustine of Hippo, City of God, XX.ix.6. ↩︎
34. Tertullian, “The Five Books against Marcion,” in Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Peter Holmes, vol. 3, The Ante-Nicene Fathers (Buffalo: Christian Literature Company, 1885), V.xii. ↩︎
35. Ibid. “[T]he dead also shall for their part recover their body, over which they too have a supervesture to put on, even the incorruption of heaven….” ↩︎
36. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 265. ↩︎
37. Ibid. ↩︎
38. Ibid. ↩︎
39. Geoffrey William Bromiley, Historical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1978), 191. ↩︎
40. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 266. ↩︎
41. Ibid., 260–61. ↩︎
42. George Park Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine, ed. Charles A. Briggs and Stewart D. F. Salmond (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), 259–60. ↩︎
43. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 268. ↩︎
44. Fisher, History of Christian Doctrine, 265–66. ↩︎
45. Berkhof, History of Christian Doctrine, 261. ↩︎