What Happens the Moment We Die: Part 1

     Recently I got involved in an email discussion regarding the human soul. My word study on the Hebrew word nephesh and the Greek word psuche evoked questions and even some accusations that I did not share the prevailing view of my Christian friends, several of whom are trained Bible teachers. One wanted to know what I thought happened the moment I die. And as I thought about this, I realized how different is the Biblical answer from the Christian mythology that now parades as orthodoxy in many circles. Having been diagnosed with a terminal illness, I have done a lot of thinking about this subject and, more importantly, I have carefully examined the Word of God for what it may actually tell us; no, reveal to us, about our entrance into eternity.  Embarking on this study, I soon realized that my answer would involve not only re-examining the Biblical concept of “soul,” but would necessitate confronting medieval notions of cosmology as well as our view of time and space. In other words, it’s complicated, not because God made it complex, but because people have clung to the detritus of idolatry and sought to justify religious speculations with obscure proof-texts from the Bible taken out of their historical and literary context to serve a cultural religious myth.

     The myth goes something like this. When you die, your soul is released from the body and you find yourself either in heaven or in hell, depending on whether the good you did outweighed the bad and evil in your life. This is the general Western view. People who are more than nominally Christian say your final destination depends whether you believed the gospel of Jesus.  Believers go to heaven, a place of reunion with other dead souls, our family and friends; unbelievers are consigned to purgatory, a kind of time-out, or sent directly to hell, a place of eternal torture and ultimate destruction.  If during your life you believed the right things about Jesus, you go to heaven the moment after you die; if you rejected Jesus, you might get a second chance if you're friendly with the Roman Church, or otherwise, you suffer in hell forever, or maybe you simply cease to exist.  Some Christians, wishing to preserve a place for the Biblical doctrine of resurrection of the body, believe the believer's soul will be reunited with a resurrected body either at something called “the Rapture” or at the second coming of Jesus. In the meantime, we sleep in God’s loving care.

     Now, the odd thing is, there are texts in the Bible that can be used to justify all of these ideas. So, is the Bible contradicting itself? Can we even know what happens the moment we die? Did we become believers primarily because we wanted to go to heaven the moment we die? That was the reason I remember responding to my first altar call at a youth rally. The evangelist had painted this horrible picture of hell that awaited the unprepared soul. He told a story of a boy rejecting an altar call on Sunday and later that week was killed, his life snuffed out before accepting Christ, and now tortured forever by Satan and his demons in hell. Yikes!! As a 12 year old even I knew I needed my fire insurance. So up to the altar I went and joined a lot of other teens pleading for God to forgive their sins and not to kill them.

     After nearly 30 years of ministry and Bible study, learning Hebrew and Greek, schooled in the theology of the early church and the Reformation, my position was the myth of “soul sleep.”  As recently as a year or two ago, I would have answered that the moment I die my essential self (soul) is put into a kind of spiritual holding pattern until the Second Coming of Christ when I am somehow reconstituted as a new, eternal being in the New Heaven and New Earth. I pointed out the New Testament texts where Jesus said to Jairus that his daughter wasn’t dead, but only sleeping; or where Paul in his wonderful description of the resurrection in 1 Corinthians 12 talks about those who are asleep being awakened by the Lord at his coming.

     I call these ideas myths. A myth isn’t necessarily a lie; it is a story told with elements we do understand to help us explain stuff we don’t understand. Myths are stories in which values are personified, interact, and spell out moral duty. The problem is we mistake our myths for truth because we don’t know what we don’t know (better read that last sentence again).  We think we know what words mean. We think we understand the late Bronze Age of King David or the Israelite theocracy of 2000 years ago.  We think we know what time it is. We think we know where we are. We think we know what happens after death because someone we know saw a deathbed vision (My great grandfather said he could see the heavenly Jerusalem) or we read a book about coming back from the dead (floating above my corpse, tunnel of light, reuniting with loved ones, etc. etc.).

     For those of us who accept the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament as the Word of God, we at least have some touchstones of truth in understanding our life journey.  But the fact is: God’s Word on afterlife is a progressive revelation.  That means, for a reason known only to God, he allowed the cultural beliefs of ancient people to be recorded as holy writ. The picture of life after death for the vast majority of Biblical time was the notion of Sheol, a word meaning the pit. Originally the idea was that a person’s destiny was the hole in the ground.  Eternal life was your children taking the faith of their ancestors into the future. Probably during the Exile (587-520BC) Persian notions of afterlife began to seep into the Hebrew mind and writings. Sheol became a place of shadowy existence, a kind of eerie ghostly experience.  The point is: it's tricky business to proof-text these ideas without a context.

     In Jesus day, people who knew the Bible the best had lots of disagreements about what happened the moment you die. Sadducees, the ruling elite, held to the ancient idea of no afterlife. The Pharisees and Essenes believed in a life after death. We don't know the dating of Job, but at least according to the canonical order of things, Job first introduced the notion of resurrection. The prophets developed the idea that there would be a resurrection of the faithful when Israel’s Messiah would be declared King of the world.   

“I know that my Redeemer lives and he will stand upon the earth at Last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body** I will see God.”  (Job 19:25) (**The Hebrew is muddled here and could be translated "without my body.")

     And that brings me to the problem with Bible translations. Every translation is an interpretation. I don’t mean to sound like an elitist, but if you cannot read Hebrew or Greek and have no background in those cultures, you are at the mercy of what translators think a text means.  In our email exchange about the meaning of soul, one fellow copied and pasted a whole list of texts containing the word soul and then proceeded to correct my viewpoint. Of course, what he did not know (remember, we don’t know what we don’t know) was that there are different Hebrew words for soul and different ideas of it, depending on when the text was written. God doesn’t spell out resurrection in the Genesis. But Bibles have to be sold to people, and while some translators have enough integrity to provide notes on alternate readings and meanings, not all do. 

     Here's an example. One of the favorite Scriptures cited by those who believe the “go-to-heaven-immediately-after-we-die” myth is Jesus’ word to the thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). They lift the word paradise out of any historical context and just assume it means heaven. They also presume that, like our own language, ancient Greek manuscripts had punctuation and don’t realize that ancient texts were just a series of capital letters without even spaces between words. So, the verse could be just as easily translated: “Jesus said, “Today I assure you, you will be with me in the pleasure garden (that’s what the Persian word for paradise meant).”  Why did Jesus say “paradise” and not heaven?

     Translators, marketing to both students of Scripture and people who know nothing about the ancient world, try to make sense of texts in light of what most people already think they know.  So, instead of a clumsy concept like Sheol, the translator uses “hell.” Peter never said Jesus preached to the souls in hell. The place name is Tarturus. What in the heck is that? So, if you only read translations of the texts you’re bound to get confused.

     Let's muddy the waters even more. Combine that with the medieval Catholic Church that bought hook-line-and-sinker into the pagan cosmology of Greek philosophy. In his treatise De Anima (On the Soul) Aristotle taught the immortality of the soul as opposed to the mortality of the body. Thomas Aquinas (beatified by the Roman Church) plagiarized Aristotle and in Question 75 of his Summa Theologica made the pagan idea into Christian orthodoxy. The Roman Church re-defined or re-packaged the Biblical story in this Greek wrapper and firmly implanted the Aristotelian cosmology in the Western mind. Heaven was up and far away. Hell was down. Earth was in the middle. Our sojourn on Earth was to determine where we went the moment we died – up to heaven away from this awful, sinful world, or down to hell, where we were beyond hope, or maybe to something called the Pergatorium, the room off to the side of the Roman banquet hall where you would go and make yourself throw up (purge) so you could come back and eat some more.  Weird, huh?

     So, this is is the mishmash we have inherited: a view of the world and our place in it that is completely at odds with how Jesus and his Jewish ancestors thought and spoke. We use the ancient texts but disregard the Aristotelian spectacles through which we read them.  Remember when Galileo's telescope led him to state that the sun did not revolve around the earth. The Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy and threatened his immortal soul with damnation because the Bible said the sun went around the earth.  Galileo recanted, but his insights were true.  In our time we are undergoing a radical change in what we know about space and time.  The medieval cosmology not only crumbles but is shown to be a hoax of the first order.  Medieval notions of soul, hell, and heaven will not survive the onslaught of truth as God allows people a deeper look into the mystery of creation.