Chapter 27

The Conscious Intermediate State—What Happens When We Die

A. Thesis and Context

Everyone asks this question eventually. Sooner or later, it catches up to all of us. A parent dies. A friend gets a devastating diagnosis. A child asks what happened to Grandma. And the question comes: What happens when we die? Not later—not at the resurrection, not at the final judgment. Right now. The moment after the last breath.

If you have been reading this book from the beginning, you have walked with me through some of the hardest terrain in Christian theology. We have explored what the Bible actually teaches about hell. We have seen that the divine presence model—the view that hell is not separation from God but the experience of God’s inescapable love by those who reject Him—fits the biblical evidence better than eternal conscious torment, better than simple annihilationism, and better than the choice model of C. S. Lewis. We have watched the fire passages, the judgment passages, and the parables of Jesus all point in the same direction: the same fire that warms the willing burns those who resist. The difference is not in the fire. The difference is in the heart.

But there is a question we have not yet addressed—a question that sits underneath everything else we have built. What happens between death and resurrection? Is there a “between” at all? When a believer dies, do they immediately experience the presence of Christ? When an unbeliever dies, do they enter Hades—a conscious state of waiting before the final judgment? Or does everyone simply cease to exist, waiting unconsciously until God reconstitutes them at the resurrection?

The answer to this question matters enormously for the divine presence model. If there is no conscious existence between death and resurrection, then there is no intermediate state. If there is no intermediate state, then there is no postmortem opportunity for those who never heard the gospel. And if there is no postmortem opportunity, then the scope of God’s saving love is dramatically narrowed—limited to those who happen to hear and respond during their brief earthly lives.

In this chapter, I want to make the case for what theologians call the conscious intermediate state: the belief that when a person dies, their soul continues to exist consciously while awaiting the resurrection of the body. Believers are with Christ in paradise. Unbelievers are in Hades—not the lake of fire, not Gehenna, not the final punishment, but a state of conscious waiting before the judgment.¹

This is not a minor theological detail. It is the foundation on which the next two chapters will build. The postmortem opportunity (Chapter 28) and the final judgment and final state (Chapter 29) both depend on the reality of a conscious intermediate state. And that conscious intermediate state, in turn, depends on a particular view of what a human being is—a view called substance dualism.

So here is my thesis: The Bible teaches that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul. At death, the soul separates from the body and continues in conscious existence. Believers enter the presence of Christ. Unbelievers enter Hades. Both await the final resurrection and judgment. This conscious intermediate state provides the metaphysical and theological space for the postmortem opportunity and connects directly to the divine presence model, because even in the intermediate state, God’s presence is real—though not yet fully unveiled as it will be at the final judgment.

B. The Case

What Is the Intermediate State?

The intermediate state is the period between a person’s physical death and the final resurrection of the body. It is, quite simply, the “in between.” You die. Your body goes into the ground (or is cremated, or is lost at sea). But the final resurrection has not yet happened. The great white throne judgment has not yet occurred. So where are you?²

The traditional Christian answer—and the answer I believe the Bible gives us—is that the soul survives the death of the body. The person continues to exist, consciously, in a disembodied state. This is not the final state. It is a temporary condition. The Christian hope is not merely that our souls go to heaven when we die. The Christian hope is the resurrection of the body—the day when God will raise all the dead, reunite souls with glorified bodies, and make all things new.³ But between now and then, the dead are not sleeping, not unconscious, and certainly not nonexistent. They are alive, aware, and waiting.

This distinction between the intermediate state and the final state is absolutely critical. As we saw in Chapter 21, confusing Hades with Gehenna—confusing the waiting room with the final destination—has caused enormous theological damage throughout the history of the church. The rich man in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31) is in Hades, the intermediate state, not in the lake of fire.⁴ Revelation 20:13–14 makes the distinction explicit: death and Hades give up the dead that are in them, and then death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire. Hades is one thing. The lake of fire is another. Hades comes first. The lake of fire comes after the judgment.

The unsaved do not enter the lake of fire when they die. That happens only after the final judgment. In the meantime, they are in Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not final punishment.⁵

The Biblical Evidence for a Conscious Intermediate State

The Bible does not give us a systematic theology of the intermediate state. It gives us something better—it gives us glimpses. Windows. Brief, vivid pictures of what happens the moment after death. And those glimpses, taken together, paint a remarkably consistent picture: the dead are conscious, they are aware, and their condition depends on their relationship to God.

Four texts deserve our special attention.

“Today You Will Be with Me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43)

As Jesus hung on the cross, one of the criminals crucified beside Him turned to Him and said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42–43).

The word today is the key. Not “at the resurrection.” Not “when the kingdom comes.” Today. That very day, before the sun set on that Friday afternoon, the dying thief would be consciously present with Jesus in paradise.⁶

Some have tried to move the comma in this verse to avoid the implication of immediate conscious existence: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise”—as if “today” modifies the telling, not the being-in-paradise. But this reading is strained. The phrase “Truly I tell you” (amēn soi legō) is a standard introduction to a solemn declaration in the Gospels. Jesus uses it dozens of times, and He never adds a redundant “today” to the introduction. The natural reading is that “today” modifies what follows: today you will be with me in paradise.⁷

Notice what this implies. The thief’s body would be taken down from the cross and buried (or discarded). His body was dead. But he—the person, the conscious self—would be with Jesus in paradise that very day. The body was in the grave. The person was with Christ. That requires something more than a body. That requires a soul.

“To Depart and Be with Christ” (Philippians 1:21–24)

Paul is writing from prison, and he is honest about his torn feelings. He writes: “For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain. If I am to go on living in the body, this will mean fruitful labor for me. Yet what shall I choose? I do not know! I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body” (Phil. 1:21–24).

Look at the logic carefully. Paul says that dying would be “gain” and “better by far.” Why? Because to depart from this life is to be with Christ. Not eventually. Not after an unconscious gap. Departing is being with Christ. The two are connected directly—death leads immediately to the presence of Christ.⁸

If death meant nonexistence until the resurrection, Paul’s reasoning collapses. How could nonexistence be “gain”? How could unconsciousness be “better by far” than fruitful ministry? From the perspective of someone who ceases to exist, there is no experience at all—no gain, no loss, nothing. Paul’s entire argument only makes sense if he believes that death immediately brings him into the conscious presence of Christ.⁹

“Away from the Body, at Home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:1–9)

This is the most detailed passage on the intermediate state in all of Paul’s letters. He writes: “For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:1–2).

And then, a few verses later: “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. For we live by faith, not by sight. We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:6–8).

The contrast is as clear as Paul can make it. Being “at home in the body” means being “away from the Lord”—not absolutely, of course, but in terms of the full, unveiled experience of His presence. And being “away from the body”—that is, being in the disembodied state after death—means being “at home with the Lord.”¹⁰

As Robert Peterson observed in his critique of annihilationism, Paul here teaches that there is a disembodied existence in an intermediate state. He contrasts life in the body with being away from the body, and he says that being away from the body means being at home in the immediate presence of Christ in glory.¹¹ The entire passage assumes that the person—the real, conscious self—can exist apart from the physical body. And when it does, it is not adrift in the void. It is with the Lord.

“The Souls Under the Altar” (Revelation 6:9–11)

In John’s vision of the heavenly throne room, we read: “When he opened the fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God and the testimony they had maintained. They called out in a loud voice, ‘How long, Sovereign Lord, holy and true, until you judge the inhabitants of the earth and avenge our blood?’ Then each of them was given a white robe, and they were told to wait a little longer” (Rev. 6:9–11).

These are dead people. They have been killed for their faith. Their bodies are gone. And yet they are described as “souls” who speak, who cry out, who ask questions, who receive answers, and who are given robes and told to wait. They are plainly conscious. They are plainly aware of what is happening on earth. And their status is plainly intermediate—they are waiting for the final day when God will set all things right.¹²

Peterson rightly points out that these departed human beings continue to exist and that their status is intermediate—they long for the end when God will set wrongs right. They are called souls in this passage, indicating the continued existence of the immaterial part of the person after the death of the body.¹³

The same point is reinforced by Hebrews 12:23, which speaks of believers approaching “the spirits of the righteous made perfect.” These are believers who have died and gone to be with the Lord. They have not ceased to exist. They exist as disembodied spirits who have experienced complete sanctification upon entering the presence of God.¹⁴

The Rich Man and Lazarus: A Window into Hades

We treated the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in detail in Chapter 24, so I will not repeat that full discussion here. But we should note what it contributes to our picture of the intermediate state. In Jesus’s story, both the rich man and Lazarus die. Lazarus is carried by angels to “Abraham’s side.” The rich man finds himself in Hades, where he is in conscious torment.¹⁵

Whether you read this as a literal description of the afterlife or as a parable that uses existing Jewish imagery, the point is the same: Jesus depicts the dead as conscious. The rich man can see, speak, feel, and remember. He remembers his brothers. He begs Abraham to send Lazarus to warn them. He is not asleep. He is not nonexistent. He is painfully, achingly aware.¹⁶

And the location matters. The rich man is in Hades—not Gehenna, not the lake of fire. He is in the intermediate state, the waiting place before the final judgment. Jesus is affirming the existence of an intermediate state for both the righteous and the wicked, and He is telling us that it is a conscious one.¹⁷

Why Substance Dualism Matters

Here is where we need to slow down and think carefully. If the soul can survive the death of the body—if the conscious self continues to exist when the physical brain stops functioning—then something very important follows. Human beings cannot be just their bodies. There must be something more—something immaterial, something that can exist apart from flesh and bone and neural activity.

This is the view that philosophers call substance dualism: the belief that a human being is composed of two distinct substances—a material body and an immaterial soul. The soul is real. It is not a metaphor. It is not a poetic way of talking about brain functions. It is a genuine, immaterial substance that is intimately united with the body during earthly life but can exist apart from it by God’s sustaining power.¹⁸

As Jerry Walls explains, in traditional theology and philosophy, the dominant view is that a human being is an immaterial soul intimately united with a material body. This view is called dualism because of the claim that a living human being has a dual nature, both material and immaterial, both body and soul. What is particularly interesting about this view for the question of the afterlife is the claim that the soul can exist apart from the body. This has been the position of dualists from Plato to Descartes to many contemporary thinkers.¹⁹

Now, I want to be very clear about something. When I say the soul can exist apart from the body, I am not saying the soul is naturally immortal. This is a crucial distinction that many people miss—including many people on both sides of the hell debate.

The Greek philosopher Plato taught that the soul is inherently indestructible. Once it exists, it can never cease to exist. It is immortal by its very nature. This idea seeped into Christian theology early on, and it has caused no end of confusion. If the soul is naturally immortal, then every person who has ever lived must exist forever—somewhere. And if there is a hell, then the wicked must suffer there forever, because their souls cannot be destroyed. This is one of the key philosophical pillars holding up the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.²⁰

But the Bible does not teach the natural immortality of the soul. As Clark Pinnock observed, the Bible teaches conditionalism: God created human beings mortal, with a capacity for life everlasting, but immortality is not their inherent possession. It is a gift God offers in the gospel, not an inalienable property of human nature.²¹ Paul says plainly that God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) and that He grants it to those who are saved through the resurrection (1 Cor. 15:53–54; 2 Tim. 1:10). The soul is real. The soul can exist apart from the body. But the soul is sustained in existence by the power of God, not by its own nature. And God can destroy it. Jesus Himself said so: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna” (Matt. 10:28).²²

This is the biblical balance. The soul is real and survives death—but it is not indestructible. It exists by God’s will and can be ended by God’s will. This is substance dualism without Platonic immortality. And it is exactly what we need for the divine presence model to work.

The Physicalist Challenge

Not everyone agrees with substance dualism, of course. In recent decades, a growing number of Christian thinkers have argued that human beings are entirely physical—that there is no literal soul or mind that exists as a separate substance from the body. This view is sometimes called physicalism or monism, because it says a human being is made up of just one thing: a body.²³

Somewhat surprisingly, physicalism has become popular in certain Christian circles. A number of scholars have argued that substance dualism is not the biblical view of human nature at all, but was imported into Christian theology from Greek philosophy. They say that the Hebrew view of the person is holistic—the human being is a unity, not a duality of body and soul. On this view, nephesh (the Hebrew word often translated “soul”) does not refer to a separable immaterial substance but to the whole living person.²⁴

There is a grain of truth in this. The Old Testament does emphasize the unity of the human person, and nephesh can indeed refer to the whole person rather than an immaterial part. When Genesis 2:7 says that God breathed the breath of life into Adam and he “became a living soul” (nephesh chayyah), it means Adam became a living being—a whole, animated creature—not that God implanted a ghostly substance inside a clay statue.²⁵

But the conclusion that physicalists draw from this—that there is no immaterial soul at all—goes far beyond what the evidence warrants. The fact that nephesh sometimes means “whole person” does not mean it never means “immaterial soul.” Context determines meaning, and in several biblical contexts, the meaning is clearly that of a separable, conscious self that survives death. We have already seen the evidence: the dying thief with Jesus in paradise, Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ, the souls under the altar crying out to God. These passages do not fit a physicalist reading.²⁶

The deeper problem with physicalism, however, is what it does to the intermediate state. If you simply are your body, then when your body dies and no longer functions or has conscious experience, then you no longer live or function and have conscious experience. And if that is the case, it seems you no longer exist and therefore have no continuing identity.²⁷

Think about what this means. If physicalism is true, then when a believer dies, they do not go to be with Christ. They cease to exist. When an unbeliever dies, they do not enter Hades. They cease to exist. There is no conscious waiting, no awareness, nothing at all until God re-creates them at the resurrection.

This has staggering pastoral implications. Think of the widow standing at her husband’s graveside. On the dualist view, she can take comfort in knowing that he is with Christ—right now, at this very moment, conscious and at peace. On the physicalist view, the most she can say is that one day God will re-create him. Right now, he is simply gone. Not resting. Not at peace. Not anywhere. Just… nothing. I am not saying that the comforting view must be the true one. Theology is not built on what makes us feel good. But when the comforting view also happens to be the one that best fits the biblical evidence, that counts for something.

But can we really call that “resurrection”? If a person ceases to exist entirely at death, and God later creates a new person with the same memories and personality, is that truly the same person being raised, or is it a copy? A replica? This is the problem of personal identity, and it haunts every physicalist account of the afterlife.²⁸

How Physicalists Try to Solve the Problem

Christian physicalists are not unaware of this difficulty, and they have proposed several creative solutions. Let me describe three of them briefly.

First, some physicalists suggest that God gives us a temporary body in the intermediate state—a placeholder body that keeps us alive and conscious between death and the final resurrection. Randy Alcorn, though not a physicalist himself, has noted that some New Testament texts could be taken this way. Paul speaks of longing to be “clothed with our heavenly dwelling” (2 Cor. 5:2–4), and the martyrs in Revelation 6 are depicted wearing robes, which could imply some form of embodiment.²⁹

But as Walls points out, even if such intermediate bodies existed, they would have no real continuity with our earthly bodies or our resurrection bodies. They would be mere placeholders. And the notion that we receive new bodies immediately after death seems to lessen the force of death itself and, accordingly, the significance of the future resurrection. The dualist view—that we exist without our bodies during the intermediate period—is arguably more faithful to the biblical reality that death is the last enemy yet to be conquered (1 Cor. 15:26).³⁰

Second, some physicalists appeal to what philosophers call the “gappy existence” view. On this account, a person simply ceases to exist at death and then comes back into existence at the resurrection. The gap in existence is no more a threat to identity than the gap between games in the World Series. The same series resumes after the gap. In the same way, the same person resumes after the gap of death.³¹

Defenders of this view appeal to God’s knowledge and power. God can preserve all the memories, character traits, and personality of each person, and He can restore them when He resurrects the body. The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne suggested that we think of the soul as the “information-bearing pattern” that organizes the physical matter in our bodies. God can preserve that pattern in His infinite memory and use it to reconstitute us at the resurrection.³²

I appreciate the creativity of these proposals, but I think they all face a decisive problem. They cannot account for the clear biblical teaching that the dead are conscious between death and resurrection. The souls under the altar in Revelation 6 are not in a gap. They are crying out. The dying thief is not waiting unconsciously for a future reconstitution. He is with Jesus in paradise today. Paul does not describe death as a gap in existence that he would not even notice. He describes it as a positive experience—“better by far”—because it involves being consciously present with Christ.³³

The gappy existence view also creates serious problems for the doctrine of purgatory and, more relevantly for our discussion, for the possibility of a postmortem opportunity. If there is no conscious existence between death and resurrection, then there is no space in which the dead could hear the gospel, encounter God’s unveiled love, or respond to His offer of salvation. The postmortem opportunity requires a conscious person who can respond—not a set of data stored in the mind of God.³⁴

Cooper’s Case for Dualism

The philosopher John Cooper, in his landmark study Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, provides what many regard as the most thorough biblical and philosophical defense of substance dualism in recent decades. Cooper does not approach the question as a Platonist smuggling Greek philosophy into the Bible. He approaches it as a careful exegete who asks what the biblical writers themselves believed about human nature and the afterlife.³⁵

Cooper identifies three basic views held by evangelicals regarding what happens after death. The first is the intermediate state/resurrection view: there is a conscious intermediate state in which the immaterial parts of human beings continue after death, only to be reunited with their resurrected bodies at the last day. This is the historic view of the Christian church, grounded in the biblical texts we have already examined. The second is the extinction/re-creation view: at death, human beings cease to exist entirely, and the resurrection involves their re-creation from scratch.³⁶

Cooper argues persuasively that the first view—conscious survival of the soul followed by bodily resurrection—is the view most compatible with the teaching of Scripture. The biblical evidence we have examined already supports this conclusion. But Cooper also draws attention to a point that is sometimes overlooked: the intermediate state is not the final goal. It is a temporary, less-than-ideal condition. We were not made to be disembodied souls floating around in paradise. We were made to be embodied persons—body and soul together. The intermediate state is real, but it is not complete. Completion comes only at the resurrection, when body and soul are reunited.³⁷

This is an important corrective. Some Christians talk as if “going to heaven when you die” is the whole story. It is not. The intermediate state is a way station, not the destination. The destination is the new creation—resurrected bodies, a renewed earth, the full presence of God. The intermediate state is real and conscious, but it points forward to something even better.

Moreland and the Reality of the Soul

The philosopher J. P. Moreland has made perhaps the most vigorous contemporary defense of the reality of the soul. In his work The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters, Moreland argues that we have good philosophical reasons—independent of Scripture, though fully consistent with it—to believe in the existence of an immaterial soul.³⁸

Moreland points to the nature of consciousness itself. Think about your own experience right now. You are reading these words. You are having thoughts about them. You are aware of yourself as a person having these thoughts. This experience of consciousness—this “what it is like to be you”—is not something that can be reduced to brain chemistry. You can describe every neuron firing in your brain, every chemical reaction, every electrical impulse, and you will still not have described what it feels like to read a sentence, to wonder about God, or to love your child.³⁹

Moreland also points to the unity of consciousness. At any given moment, you have a single, unified field of experience. You see the page, feel the chair, hear the clock ticking, and think about what you are reading—all at once, as a single conscious subject. But the brain is not a single thing. It is composed of billions of neurons, each a separate cell. How do billions of separate physical things produce one unified experience? The best explanation, Moreland argues, is that the experience belongs not to the brain but to the soul—an immaterial, unified subject that is distinct from the physical organ it uses.⁴⁰

Moreland’s arguments are not the focus of this chapter, but they are worth mentioning because they reinforce the biblical case from an entirely different angle. The Bible teaches that the soul is real. Philosophy gives us independent reasons to agree. And both point in the same direction: human beings are more than their bodies, and the conscious self can survive the death of the brain.

The Intermediate State for Believers

What, then, is the intermediate state actually like for believers? The Bible does not give us a detailed map. But it gives us enough to know the essential truth: believers are with Christ, and that is good. Very good.

Paul says being absent from the body is being “at home with the Lord” (2 Cor. 5:8). He says being with Christ is “better by far” than remaining in this life (Phil. 1:23). Jesus told the dying thief he would be in “paradise” (Luke 23:43). The souls under the altar in Revelation 6 are in the presence of God, aware and at rest, wearing white robes of purity.⁴¹

I want to linger here for a moment, because this truth is precious. When a believer dies—your mother, your husband, your best friend—they do not slip into a cold, dark void. They do not drift in unconscious oblivion. They step out of the body and into the arms of Jesus. That very day. That very moment. The transition is not a long journey through emptiness. It is a doorway—one side is this world, the other side is His presence. Paul ached for it. The dying thief received it as a gift. And every believer who has ever closed their eyes in death has opened them in paradise.

We do not know all the details, of course. What do disembodied souls experience? How do they communicate? Do they perceive the passage of time the way we do? These are questions the Bible does not fully answer, and I am content to leave them with God. What the Bible does tell us is enough: we will be with Christ, we will be conscious, and it will be good beyond our present ability to imagine.

At the same time, the intermediate state is not the final state. The souls under the altar are told to “wait a little longer.” There is an incompleteness, a longing for the full resolution that will come only at the resurrection and the final judgment. The believer’s soul is with Christ, but the believer does not yet have a glorified body. The creation has not yet been renewed. The final victory has not yet been made visible to all. The intermediate state is paradise, but it is paradise-in-waiting.⁴²

This is why the Christian hope is not just “going to heaven when you die.” That is part of the hope—a real and glorious part. But it is not the whole hope. The whole hope is the resurrection of the body, the renewal of the entire creation, and the full, unveiled presence of God filling everything. The intermediate state is the first movement of a symphony. The resurrection is the finale.

The Intermediate State for Unbelievers: Hades

What about the unsaved dead? The biblical picture is less detailed, but the rich man and Lazarus gives us important information. The rich man is in Hades—a conscious state of suffering. He is aware. He remembers his life. He can see Lazarus at Abraham’s side. He asks for help. He is told that there is a “great chasm” separating them that no one can cross.⁴³

Hades, in the New Testament, is not the final destination of the wicked. It is the waiting room. It corresponds roughly to Sheol in the Old Testament—the realm of the dead, the place where the departed await final judgment. The key point is that the unsaved dead are conscious in Hades, and their condition is one of suffering—but it is not the final judgment. That comes later, at the great white throne (Rev. 20:11–15), when death and Hades give up their dead and everyone is judged.⁴⁴

This distinction has profound implications for our discussion. If the unsaved dead are conscious in Hades and the final judgment has not yet occurred, then the question of their ultimate destiny is still open. The door to the postmortem opportunity—which we will discuss in the next chapter—stands ajar.

I want to make sure this sinks in, because it is one of the most important points in this entire section of the book. If a person dies without Christ but the final judgment has not yet occurred, then they are in Hades—not in Gehenna, not in the lake of fire, not in their final state. They are waiting. They are conscious. And on the divine presence model, God’s presence is beginning to press in on them in ways it did not during their earthly lives. The veil is getting thinner. The encounter with God that will reach its full intensity at the final judgment has already begun. This is what makes the intermediate state so theologically significant: it is the space in which God’s love can reach those who did not encounter it in this life.

Connecting to the Divine Presence Model: Manis and the Unveilings

Here is where all of this connects to the larger argument of this book. R. Zachary Manis, in Thinking Through the Problem of Hell and Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, develops a framework that I find enormously helpful for understanding how the intermediate state fits into the divine presence model. He calls it the framework of the “unveilings”—the progressive revelation of God’s presence across the stages of human existence.⁴⁵

Manis begins with a key observation: God’s presence “comes in degrees,” so to speak. God is always and eternally omnipresent—His power and knowledge extend to everything in creation at every time. But God is also capable of manifesting His presence to varying degrees. He can be more or less present to created beings at particular times and places. This is a puzzling idea, Manis admits, and yet it is one that is deeply embedded in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures and tradition.⁴⁶

Think about the Old Testament. God manifests His presence as a burning bush to Moses on Mount Horeb. He appears as a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night as He leads the Israelites through the wilderness. His glory fills the temple of Solomon in a way that is so overpowering that the priests cannot even stand to minister. The rabbinic tradition uses the term Shekinah (meaning “dwelling” or “settling”) to refer to this special manifestation of God’s presence at particular times and places.⁴⁷

And yet God also “hides His face” at certain times. He withdraws. He becomes silent. This does not mean He is absent in an absolute sense—He is still sustaining everything in existence by His power. But His experiential presence, His manifest nearness, fluctuates.

Manis suggests that we think about this in terms of a spectrum. At one extreme, there is complete divine absence—which would be complete nonexistence, since nothing can exist apart from God’s sustaining power. At the other extreme, there is the full, unveiled presence of God—God fully “all in all,” as Paul puts it (1 Cor. 15:28). In between lies our current earthly experience: a state of partial divine hiddenness in which God is present enough to sustain us and to make Himself knowable, but hidden enough to preserve our freedom of response.⁴⁸

Now here is where it gets fascinating. Manis suggests that as we move from earthly life to the intermediate state to the final judgment, the degree of divine disclosure increases. In this life, God is partially hidden—we walk by faith, not by sight (2 Cor. 5:7). In the intermediate state, God’s presence is more fully experienced—believers are “at home with the Lord,” and even for the unsaved, the veil is thinner. And at the final judgment—the parousia, the appearing of Christ in glory—the veil is removed entirely. Every eye will see Him. Every heart will be laid bare. The full, blazing, unveiled presence of God will be experienced by every person who has ever lived.⁴⁹

This is what Manis calls the pattern of “two unveilings.” The first unveiling is what happens in this life, when a person opens their heart to God through faith. It is voluntary, gradual, and gentle. As Paul writes, “Whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away” (2 Cor. 3:16). The second unveiling is what happens at the return of Christ. It is universal, sudden, and overwhelming. It is not a matter of human choice. It is an act of the divine will: Christ is revealed in all His glory, and the truth about every person is laid bare.⁵⁰

Manis raises an intriguing possibility regarding the intermediate state. Perhaps, he suggests, the intermediate state represents something in between these two unveilings—a degree of divine disclosure that is greater than what we experience in earthly life but less than the full revelation at the final judgment. For the damned in the intermediate state, this increased disclosure might serve as an ever-intensifying opportunity to repent, leading up to the Day of Judgment at which point God is fully revealed.⁵¹

This is profoundly important for the argument of this book. If the intermediate state is real, conscious, and characterized by an increasing experience of God’s presence, then it is not merely a theological footnote. It is the space in which the postmortem opportunity can occur. It is the space in which those who never heard the gospel in this life may encounter the God who is love for the very first time. And it is the space in which the divine presence model’s logic plays out most powerfully: the same love that draws the willing to repentance begins to trouble the conscience of those who resist.

Why the Soul Matters for the Presence Model

I want to draw out one more connection before we move to the objections. The divine presence model, as we have developed it throughout this book, depends on the reality of the human soul as a genuine, immaterial substance. Here is why.

The divine presence model says that hell is the experience of God’s inescapable love by those whose hearts are oriented away from Him. The same fire that purifies the willing torments the resistant. Paradise and hell are not two different places but two different experiences of the same overwhelming reality—the presence of God.⁵²

But for this to work, there must be a subject who experiences the presence of God—a conscious self who encounters divine love and responds to it. If human beings are purely physical, and if the dead are not conscious between death and resurrection, then there is no one there to experience God’s presence in the intermediate state. The encounter with God’s unveiled love can only happen at the resurrection, when God re-creates the person from scratch.

This is not necessarily fatal to the divine presence model—the model could still apply to the final state, after the resurrection. But it dramatically narrows its scope and eliminates the intermediate space in which the postmortem opportunity could occur. The whole framework of progressive disclosure—veiled in this life, more unveiled in Hades, fully unveiled at the judgment—requires a conscious subject at every stage. And that requires a soul.

Manis himself notes that while it is not the central task of his project to develop a theory of the intermediate state, the divine presence model naturally points in this direction. The framework of increasing divine disclosure makes best sense if the person who encounters God at each stage is the same continuous, conscious self—not a person who ceases to exist at death and is reconstituted later.⁵³

This is why the debate about the soul is not just an abstract philosophical exercise. It has direct, practical consequences for how we understand death, judgment, and the love of God. If the soul is real, the dead are alive, and God’s love pursues them even after death. If the soul is not real, the dead are simply gone until God calls them back. The first picture is richer, more biblical, and more consistent with a God whose love never lets go.

C. Objections and Responses

Objection 1: “Dualism is Greek philosophy, not biblical faith.”

This is perhaps the most common objection to substance dualism in contemporary theology. The argument goes like this: the ancient Hebrews had a holistic view of the person. They did not divide humans into body and soul. The idea of a separable soul comes from Plato, not from Moses. When Christians adopted dualism, they were importing Greek philosophy into the Bible, not reading the Bible on its own terms.⁵⁴

There is a kernel of truth here, as I mentioned earlier. The Old Testament does emphasize the unity of the person, and we should be wary of reading a full-blown Platonic metaphysics into biblical texts. But the conclusion that the Bible therefore teaches physicalism is a non sequitur. The fact that the Hebrews emphasized the unity of the person does not mean they denied the existence of a separable soul. It means they emphasized that body and soul belong together—that the ideal state is the embodied state, not the disembodied one.

And the New Testament clearly teaches conscious survival after death. Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:8, Revelation 6:9–11, Hebrews 12:23—all of these passages describe the dead as conscious and aware. You cannot get that from physicalism without extraordinary gymnastics. As Cooper has argued, the biblical case for some form of dualism, properly understood, is strong.⁵⁵

The real issue is not whether the Bible teaches dualism. The issue is what kind of dualism it teaches. The biblical view is not Plato’s view. The Bible does not devalue the body. It does not see the soul as trapped in a prison of flesh. It does not teach that the soul is naturally immortal. What the Bible teaches is that the human person is a unity of body and soul, that death temporarily separates them, and that the final hope is their reunion at the resurrection. That is a far cry from Plato. But it is still dualism.⁵⁶

Objection 2: “Soul sleep is a legitimate alternative.”

Some Christians hold to a view called “soul sleep”—the idea that the soul exists after death but is unconscious, in a state of dreamless sleep, until the resurrection. On this view, there is a soul, so the identity problem of physicalism is avoided, but the dead are not conscious. They are resting.⁵⁷

The main support for soul sleep comes from biblical passages that describe death as “sleep.” Jesus says of Lazarus, “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep; but I am going there to wake him up” (John 11:11). Paul speaks of those who have “fallen asleep” in Christ (1 Thess. 4:13–15). The Old Testament frequently describes death in similar terms.

But these passages describe death as sleep from the perspective of the living—the dead appear to be sleeping, because their bodies are motionless and still. The metaphor of sleep describes what death looks like from the outside, not what it feels like from the inside. When we compare these passages with the ones we have already examined—the thief in paradise, Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ, the conscious souls under the altar—it becomes clear that the “sleep” metaphor is about the appearance of the body, not the experience of the soul.⁵⁸

Moreover, soul sleep creates the same problem as physicalism when it comes to the postmortem opportunity. If the dead are unconscious, there is no space for them to hear the gospel, encounter God’s love, or respond to His invitation. The intermediate state becomes meaningless.

Objection 3: “Edward Fudge and others deny the intermediate state and affirm conditional immortality. Can’t you have CI without dualism?”

This is a fair question. Edward Fudge, one of the most influential defenders of conditional immortality, does indeed reject the traditional intermediate state. He holds that humans are entirely mortal, that there is no immaterial part that survives death, and that the wicked are simply annihilated—they cease to exist.⁵⁹

You can certainly hold CI without substance dualism. Many do. But I think this version of CI is weaker than the version I am defending in this book, for two reasons.

First, as we have seen, the biblical evidence for a conscious intermediate state is strong. Fudge’s view requires him to explain away passages like Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:8, and Revelation 6:9–11. Peterson has argued that Fudge’s rejection of the intermediate state is itself a theological error—one that he then uses to support another theological error (annihilationism as Fudge conceives it).⁶⁰

Second, without a conscious intermediate state, there is no postmortem opportunity. If the unevangelized simply cease to exist when they die and are re-created at the resurrection only to face immediate judgment, then they never had a genuine chance to respond to God’s love. For those of us who believe that a loving God would not eternally condemn those who never had a fair opportunity to hear the gospel, the conscious intermediate state provides the necessary theological space for that opportunity.

The version of conditional immortality I am defending in this book combines three elements: (1) substance dualism with conditional immortality of the soul (the soul is real but not naturally immortal; God can destroy it), (2) a conscious intermediate state in which the dead are aware and the unsaved are in Hades, and (3) a postmortem opportunity in which God’s unveiled love encounters every person and gives them a genuine chance to respond. This combination, I believe, is the strongest and most biblically faithful version of CI available—and it fits the divine presence model like a hand in a glove.⁶¹

Objection 4: “How can a disembodied soul have experiences? Doesn’t experience require a brain?”

This is the most philosophically pressing objection. If consciousness is produced by the brain, then without a brain, there can be no consciousness. No thoughts, no feelings, no awareness. A disembodied soul would be a blank—a nothing.

But the assumption behind this objection is exactly what substance dualism denies. The dualist says that consciousness is not produced by the brain but is a property of the soul that uses the brain during embodied existence. The brain is the instrument, not the source. Just as a musician can still hum a melody even if her violin is destroyed, the soul can still have conscious experience even when the body it used in this life is gone.⁶²

The analogy is imperfect, of course. We do not fully understand how a disembodied soul experiences things. Walls, drawing on Dante, notes that disembodied souls in Dante’s Purgatorio can recognize one another, communicate, remember, and feel emotion—but they cannot embrace, because they have no bodies. Dante’s character tries to hug his friend Casella’s soul and his arms pass right through, coming back empty against his own chest. There is not much satisfaction in hugging a soul without a body.⁶³

The point is that disembodied existence is real but limited. The soul retains consciousness, memory, feeling, and identity. But it does not have the full richness of embodied human experience. This is precisely why the intermediate state is not the final state. We need bodies. We were made for bodies. The resurrection will restore what death temporarily took away.

And in the meantime, the soul is not empty. It is with Christ. Or it is in Hades. Either way, it is aware. And either way, it is in the presence of God.

D. Conclusion and Connection

Let me draw the threads together.

We have seen that the Bible teaches a conscious intermediate state. Luke 23:43 tells us the dying thief would be with Jesus in paradise that very day. Philippians 1:23 tells us Paul expected death to bring him immediately into the presence of Christ. Second Corinthians 5:8 says being away from the body means being at home with the Lord. Revelation 6:9–11 shows us the martyred dead as conscious souls who speak, ask questions, and wait for God’s justice. And the parable of the rich man and Lazarus depicts both the righteous and the wicked as fully conscious in the intermediate state.

We have seen that this conscious intermediate state requires substance dualism—the belief that human beings are composed of a material body and an immaterial soul. The soul is real, and it can exist apart from the body after death. But the soul is not naturally immortal. God sustains it by His power, and God can destroy it if He chooses (Matt. 10:28). This is substance dualism without Platonic immortality—a position that avoids the philosophical foundation of eternal conscious torment while preserving the biblical teaching of conscious survival after death.⁶⁴

We have seen that physicalism—the view that human beings are entirely physical—struggles to account for the biblical evidence and creates serious problems for personal identity between death and resurrection. Physicalist solutions (temporary bodies, gappy existence, information-pattern theories) are creative but ultimately fail to do justice to what the Bible says about the conscious dead.

And we have seen how all of this connects to the divine presence model. Manis’s framework of progressive unveiling gives us a powerful way to understand the intermediate state. In this life, God’s presence is partially veiled—we walk by faith. In the intermediate state, the veil is thinner—believers are with Christ, and even the unsaved begin to experience God’s presence more directly. At the final judgment, the veil is removed entirely—Christ is revealed in all His glory, and the truth about every heart is laid bare.⁶⁵

This is the picture that emerges from the biblical evidence, from the philosophical arguments, and from the theological logic of the divine presence model: death is not the end of the story. It is not even the beginning of the end. It is the end of the beginning—the beginning of a stage of existence in which the human soul, stripped of its body but not of its consciousness, encounters the presence of God in a way that is both more direct and more consequential than anything experienced in earthly life.

This is not an abstract philosophical point. It is a deeply personal one. When your loved one dies in Christ, they are with Him. Right now. Conscious. At rest. Waiting for the day when they will receive a glorified body and you will be reunited in the new creation. That is the hope of the intermediate state.

And when someone dies who never heard the gospel—a child in a remote village, a person born into a religion that never gave them a fair chance to encounter Jesus—the conscious intermediate state means that their story is not over. God’s love pursues them even in death. The door is not yet shut. The judgment has not yet come. There is still time. There is still hope.

That hope is what we will explore in the next chapter. Having established that the dead are conscious and that God’s presence is real even in the intermediate state, we are now ready to ask the question that changes everything: Can God’s love reach beyond the grave?⁶⁶

I believe it can. And I believe the Bible gives us good reasons to think so.