Chapter 27
What happens to you the moment after you die?
That question has haunted human beings for as long as we have walked this earth. Every culture, every religion, every generation has asked it. And the answer you give to that question shapes everything else you believe about judgment, about heaven, about hell, and about the character of God.
For most of this book, we have been building a case for the divine presence model of hell—the view that hell is not a place of separation from God but the experience of God’s overwhelming, all-consuming love by those who have set their hearts against Him. We have looked at the character of God. We have looked at the meaning of divine justice. We have worked through the major fire, judgment, and destruction passages. We have seen how the same fire that purifies the willing consumes the resistant. And we have argued that the divine presence model fits the biblical data better than its competitors.
But there is a question we have not yet addressed—a question that is absolutely essential to the model. What happens between death and the final resurrection? Is there a gap? And if so, what are we doing during that gap?
The answer, I believe, is that human beings exist consciously between the moment of death and the day of resurrection. We do not cease to exist. We do not fall into a dreamless sleep from which we have no awareness. We continue as real persons, with real thoughts, real feelings, real experiences—even though we no longer have our physical bodies. The saved are with the Lord. The unsaved are in a state the Bible calls Hades (the Greek word for the realm of the dead)—a state of conscious waiting, not yet the final judgment, not yet the lake of fire.1
This chapter makes the case for that belief. Along the way, we will explore what the Bible actually teaches about the soul, about death, and about what theologians call the intermediate state—the period between physical death and the bodily resurrection at the end of the age.2 We will see why substance dualism—the view that human beings are made up of both a material body and an immaterial soul—is the best reading of Scripture. We will see why physicalism—the view that you simply are your body and nothing more—creates serious problems for the intermediate state, for personal identity, and for the divine presence model itself. And we will connect all of this to what we have already learned about how God’s presence works in the lives of the dead and the living alike.
This matters more than you might think. The conscious intermediate state is not a side topic. It is not an optional add-on. It is the foundation on which the postmortem opportunity rests. If there is no conscious existence between death and resurrection, then there is no space for the dead to encounter God, no window for the gospel to reach those who never heard it in this life. And if that is the case, the divine presence model loses one of its most powerful and hopeful features.
So let us begin where all good theology begins—with what the Bible actually says.
The intermediate state is simply the time between a person’s death and the final resurrection. Think of it this way: When a believer dies, she goes to be with Christ. But her body remains in the grave. She has not yet received her resurrection body. The final judgment has not yet happened. The new heavens and new earth have not yet arrived. She is in an “in-between” stage—no longer living on the old earth, but not yet living in the fullness of the new creation.3
The same is true for unbelievers. When a person who has rejected God dies, she does not immediately go to the lake of fire. That comes later, after the resurrection and the great white throne judgment (Revelation 20:11–15). In the meantime, she exists in Hades—a conscious state of waiting.4
This distinction is critically important, and it is one that many Christians miss entirely. In popular thought, the moment a person dies, they go straight to either heaven or hell—final, forever, no in-between. But the Bible paints a more detailed picture. There is an intermediate period. There is a waiting. And what happens during that waiting has everything to do with the character of God and the nature of His judgment.
The New Testament gives us several clear windows into what happens to believers after they die. Each one points in the same direction: they are conscious, they are with the Lord, and they are aware.
Luke 23:43—“Today you will be with me in paradise.”
The scene is Calvary. Jesus hangs on the cross between two criminals. One of them—the one we often call “the thief on the cross”—turns to Jesus in his final moments and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus answers with one of the most astonishing promises in all of Scripture: “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).5
Notice that word: today. Not “someday.” Not “at the resurrection.” Not “when the new heavens and new earth arrive.” Today. That very day, the thief would be with Jesus in paradise. This means that something happens immediately at death. The thief did not cease to exist. He did not enter a long, unconscious sleep. He was going to be with Jesus—aware, conscious, in His presence—that very day.6
Some have tried to get around this by arguing that the comma in the Greek should be placed differently: “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise”—making “today” modify when Jesus is speaking, not when the thief would arrive in paradise. But this reading is forced. In every other use of the phrase “Truly I tell you” in the Gospels, Jesus follows it with the content of His promise, not with a reference to the time He is speaking.7 The natural reading is simple and clear: the thief would be with Jesus in paradise that very day. Before the sun set on the darkest day in history, the thief and the Savior would be together in conscious joy.
Philippians 1:21–23—“To depart and be with Christ.”
Paul is writing from prison, uncertain whether he will live or die. And he makes a remarkable confession: “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” (Philippians 1:21–23).8
Pay close attention to what Paul says. He says that dying would be gain. He says that departing would mean being with Christ. And he says that this would be better by far than remaining alive in the body.
Now think about that. If death meant ceasing to exist—if Paul’s consciousness simply blinked out at death—in what sense would that be “gain”? In what sense would it be “better by far”? A long, blank unconsciousness is not “being with Christ.” A gap in existence is not something you desire. Paul clearly expects that the moment he dies, he will immediately enjoy the conscious presence of Jesus—and that this experience will be so wonderful that it makes even the fruitful work of ministry seem small by comparison.9
2 Corinthians 5:6–9—“Away from the body and at home with the Lord.”
This is perhaps the clearest passage of all. Paul writes: “Therefore we are always confident and know that as long as we are at home in the body we are away from the Lord. 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 Corinthians 5:6–8).10
The contrast is simple and devastating to any view that denies conscious survival after death. Paul sets up two states: being “at home in the body” (alive on earth) and being “away from the body and at home with the Lord” (dead, but consciously with Christ). There is no third option. There is no gap. There is no sleep. The moment we leave the body, we are at home with the Lord.11
As Robert Peterson points out in Two Views of Hell, Paul’s language here assumes a real distinction between the body and the person who inhabits it. You can be “away from the body” and still exist as a person. You can be “at home with the Lord” even though your body is in the grave. This is substance dualism in action—the soul surviving the death of the body and entering immediately into the presence of Christ.12
Revelation 6:9–11—The Souls Under the Altar
In one of the most striking images in all of Revelation, John sees a vision of heaven: “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” (Revelation 6:9–11).13
These are people who have died. They are called “souls”—not bodies. They are disembodied, and yet they are very much alive. They speak. They cry out. They ask questions. They receive robes. They are told to wait. Every detail tells us the same thing: these dead believers are conscious, active, and aware in the intermediate state. They have not ceased to exist. They are waiting for the final judgment, when God will set all wrongs right.14
Peterson puts it plainly: “These people are dead, they continue to exist, and their status is intermediate—they long for the end when God will set wrongs right. Here departed human beings are called souls.”15
Hebrews 12:22–24—“The Spirits of the Righteous Made Perfect”
The author of Hebrews paints a stunning picture of the heavenly reality that believers have already joined through faith: “You have come to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem. You have come to thousands upon thousands of angels in joyful assembly, to the church of the firstborn, whose names are written in heaven. You have come to God, the Judge of all, to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant” (Hebrews 12:22–24).16
Notice that phrase: “the spirits of the righteous made perfect.” These are believers who have died. They are called “spirits”—a word that points to their immaterial, disembodied existence. And they have been “made perfect.” They are not sleeping. They are not unconscious. They are present in the heavenly assembly, standing alongside the angels and the risen Christ. As Peterson writes, they “exist as disembodied spirits who experienced entire sanctification when they died.”17
If believers go to be with the Lord at death, where do unbelievers go?
The answer is not “hell”—at least not in the way most people use the word. The answer is Hades. And Hades is not the same as the lake of fire. Getting this distinction right is one of the most important things you can do for your theology of the afterlife.
Hades is the Greek word for the realm of the dead. It is roughly equivalent to the Hebrew word Sheol (the “place of the dead” in the Old Testament). In the New Testament, Hades refers to the intermediate state—the place where the dead wait between death and resurrection.18
The lake of fire, by contrast, is the final state. It does not come into play until after the resurrection and the great white throne judgment. Revelation 20:13–14 makes this crystal clear: “The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire.”19
Do you see what is happening here? Hades gives up its dead. The people in Hades are released from it so that they can stand before God at the final judgment. Then—and only then—are the unrepentant cast into the lake of fire. Hades itself is thrown in too, because once the final judgment is complete, Hades is no longer needed. The waiting room is closed. The final destination has arrived.20
This means that when unbelievers die, they do not go straight to the lake of fire. They go to Hades—a state of conscious waiting. As John Walvoord notes in Four Views on Hell, the reference to Hades in Revelation “may in the context go beyond the grave to the intermediate state of suffering for the wicked.”21
The most vivid picture of this intermediate state for the unsaved comes from Jesus Himself, in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31). Whether this is a literal description of the afterlife or a parable that uses familiar imagery, it tells us something important: the rich man is conscious after death. He is in torment. He can speak, think, feel, and remember. He begs for relief. He worries about his brothers who are still alive. He has not ceased to exist. And he has not yet faced the final judgment.22
Peterson summarizes the parable’s teaching: the people of God will be carried into God’s presence after death, while the unrepentant will experience a state of conscious punishment. And through the writings of Moses and the prophets, God reveals Himself and His will so that no one who ignores that revelation can fairly protest what follows.23
For the divine presence model, the distinction between Hades and the lake of fire is essential. It gives us a theological framework for understanding what happens between death and the final judgment. And it opens the door for something that many Christians have longed to believe is possible: a genuine postmortem opportunity for those who never heard the gospel in this life. We will explore that possibility in detail in the next chapter.
Everything we have just seen depends on one foundational claim: that human beings are made up of more than just a physical body. If you are nothing more than your body—if there is no soul, no immaterial part of you that can exist apart from flesh and bone—then when the body dies, you die. Full stop. There is nothing left to be conscious. There is nothing left to be with Christ. There is nothing left to wait in Hades.
The view that human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul is called substance dualism. It is called “dualism” because it affirms that a living human being has a dual nature—both material and immaterial, both body and soul.24
This has been the dominant view in the history of Christian theology. As Jerry Walls points out in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, the claim that a human being is “an immaterial soul intimately united with a material body” is the traditional position of Christian thought, stretching from the earliest centuries of the church all the way through the Reformation and beyond.25 Dualists of one kind or another include Plato, Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Calvin, and a host of modern thinkers. Even Thomas Aquinas, whose version of the view is somewhat different from the others—he held that the soul is the “form” of the body—agreed on the essential point: the soul can exist without the body.26
Substance dualism is not just a philosophical idea. It is deeply rooted in the Bible.
In the Old Testament, the word nephesh (often translated “soul”) refers to the whole living being, but it can also point to the inner life that gives a person their identity. The word ruach (often translated “spirit”) refers to the breath or wind of God that animates us. Together, these terms paint a picture of human beings as creatures who are animated from the inside by something that comes from God—something that is not identical to the body itself.27
In the New Testament, Jesus draws a clear distinction between body and soul when He says, “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 hell” (Matthew 10:28).28 This verse is remarkable for several reasons. First, it assumes that the soul and the body are distinguishable—you can kill one without killing the other. Second, it assumes that the soul survives the death of the body. Those who kill you can destroy your body, but they cannot touch your soul. Only God has power over both.
Third—and this is critical for conditional immortality—it tells us that God can destroy the soul. The soul is not inherently immortal. It does not live forever by its own power. It continues to exist because God sustains it, and God is the only one who can end that existence. This is a vital corrective to the Greek philosophical idea of the soul’s natural immortality, which was imported into Christian theology through the influence of Plato and distorted the church’s understanding of hell for centuries.29
As Clark Pinnock writes in Four Views on Hell, “God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) but graciously grants embodied life to his people (1 Cor. 15:21, 50–54; 2 Tim. 1:10). God gives us life and God takes it away. There is nothing in the nature of the human soul that requires it to live forever.”30 The soul is real. The soul is immaterial. The soul survives the death of the body. But the soul is not indestructible. Immortality is a gift, not a birthright. It is conditional—given by God in Christ, not something we possess by nature.
The great philosopher and theologian John W. Cooper has made the definitive evangelical case for this position in his landmark book Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate. Cooper argues that both the Old and New Testaments presuppose a dualistic view of human nature, and that the intermediate state of conscious survival after death is a non-negotiable element of biblical teaching.31 Walls refers to Cooper’s work as providing the strongest case that substance dualism “is the view most compatible with the teaching of Scripture.”32
J. P. Moreland has reinforced this case from the perspective of philosophy and neuroscience in his book The Soul: How We Know It’s Real and Why It Matters. Moreland argues that the reality of consciousness, free will, and personal identity all point to the existence of an immaterial soul that is not reducible to brain processes.33 We are more than our bodies. We are embodied souls—and when the body dies, the soul lives on.
In recent years, the old consensus around substance dualism has been challenged by a surprising rival: Christian physicalism. This is the view that human beings are entirely physical—that you simply are your body, and there is no separate, immaterial soul.34
Now, you might expect this view to come from atheists and skeptics. And many atheists do hold it. But what is surprising is that a number of Christian thinkers have adopted some form of physicalism in recent decades. They argue that the idea of the soul was borrowed from Greek philosophy—from Plato, specifically—and that the Bible actually teaches a more unified, holistic view of the human person. On this reading, the dualism that has dominated the church for centuries is actually a distortion of the biblical view, one that tends to devalue the body and overvalue the soul.35
I understand the appeal of this argument. The Bible does present human beings as unified creatures, not as ghosts trapped in machines. The resurrection of the body is central to the Christian hope—not the escape of the soul from the body. These are real insights, and any good theology should take them seriously.
But physicalism creates enormous problems. And the biggest problem is this: if you are nothing but your body, then when your body dies, you die. Completely. The lights go out. There is no one left to be with Christ. There is no one left to wait in Hades. There is no intermediate state—only a gap, a void, an empty space between death and resurrection.36
Walls calls this the “gappy” or “gap-inclusive” view. He explains it with a creative analogy: think of the World Series in baseball. There are gaps between games when nobody is playing, but we still call it the same World Series. Maybe human existence is like that. Maybe there is a gap between death and resurrection, but when God raises you, your identity continues on the other side of that gap.37
That’s a clever idea. But it has a very serious flaw. The World Series is an abstract concept—a name we give to a series of events. A person is not an abstract concept. A person is a conscious being. And if your consciousness ceases to exist for centuries—or millennia, or however long the gap lasts—there is a real question about whether the person who is raised is actually you or just an exact copy.
Peterson puts the point sharply in Two Views of Hell: “If we completely cease to exist when we die, with no immaterial part surviving death, how is it that we are the same persons who are raised? It is better to call this resurrection a re-creation. The human beings who once existed no longer exist. The new human beings whom God will re-create are not the same persons who died.”38
That is a devastating objection. If there is no soul to bridge the gap between death and resurrection, then what God does at the end is not really resurrection at all. It is the creation of a new person who happens to have all the same memories. But a perfect copy of you is not you. It is a stranger wearing your face.
The physicist and theologian John Polkinghorne has tried to rescue physicalism with what he calls the “information bearing pattern.” On this view, the soul is not an immaterial substance but a dynamic pattern—the unique arrangement of information that makes you who you are. When you die, God preserves that pattern in His memory and uses it to re-create you at the resurrection.39 This is an ingenious proposal, but notice what it requires: God must do all the work of keeping your identity intact during the gap. You are not doing anything, because you do not exist. There is no “you” between death and resurrection. There is only God’s memory of you.
I do not think this is what the Bible teaches. When Paul says he desires “to depart and be with Christ,” he is not saying he desires to cease existing while God remembers him. When Jesus tells the thief, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” He is not saying, “Today I will store your pattern in the divine memory bank.” When John sees the souls under the altar crying out to God, they are not God’s memories of dead people. They are dead people who are still very much alive.40
The dualist view, by contrast, explains all of this naturally. The soul survives the death of the body. The person continues to exist. Consciousness is maintained. Identity is preserved. And the resurrection is not the creation of a copy but the reunion of a soul with its body, made new and glorious by the power of God.41
Walls makes an additional point that is worth noting. The intermediate state on the dualist view is “arguably more true to the reality that death is the last enemy yet to be overcome (1 Corinthians 15:26). Identity is sustained for the dualist, but in a form that is less than fully human since we are not embodied during the intermediate period.”42 In other words, dualism takes death seriously. The disembodied state is not ideal. It is not the final goal. We were made for embodied life, and the resurrection will restore what death has torn apart. But in the meantime, the soul preserves the person. You are still you, even without your body. Diminished, yes. Incomplete, yes. But real, conscious, and there.
Here is something that many people miss: the view you hold about the soul has a direct impact on what you believe about hell.
Edward Fudge, one of the most influential defenders of annihilationism, built much of his case on a physicalist anthropology. He argued that the Bible does not teach the “natural immortality of the soul”—and from that premise, he concluded that the dead simply cease to exist until God raises them, and that the lost are eventually destroyed rather than tormented forever.43
Now, Fudge was right that the Bible does not teach the natural immortality of the soul. On that point, I agree with him completely. As we saw above, the soul is sustained by God’s power and can be destroyed by God (Matthew 10:28). Immortality is a gift given in Christ, not an inherent property of human nature (1 Timothy 6:16; 2 Timothy 1:10).44
But Fudge went further. He denied that the soul survives death at all. As Peterson notes, Fudge defined “mortalism” as “the belief that according to divine revelation the soul does not exist as an independent conscious substance after the death of the body.”45 This is a very different claim from saying the soul is not naturally immortal. To say the soul is not naturally immortal is to say that God can destroy it. To say the soul does not survive death at all is to say that God does not sustain it beyond the grave.
Peterson rightly pushes back: “Fudge ignores this evidence and states that the idea of natural immortality is pagan in origin and has misled Christians to teach immortality and eternal hell. He thereby uses one theological error (denying our survival in the intermediate state) to try to prove another theological error, annihilationism.”46
Now, I want to be very careful here. I am not saying that all conditionalists are physicalists. Many are not. It is entirely possible—and this is my own position—to hold that the soul is real, that it survives death, that it exists consciously in the intermediate state, and also to hold that God can and will eventually destroy the soul of the finally impenitent. Conditional immortality does not require physicalism. It requires only the denial of natural immortality. And the Bible supports that denial clearly.47
But if you go the physicalist route—if you deny the soul entirely—you lose the intermediate state. And if you lose the intermediate state, you lose the theological space that makes the postmortem opportunity possible. You lose the conscious waiting in Hades that the Bible describes for the unsaved. You lose the souls under the altar. You lose Paul’s desire to depart and be with Christ. And you lose a key piece of the divine presence model.
John W. Cooper’s Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting remains the gold standard for the evangelical defense of the conscious intermediate state. His argument runs along several lines, and each one strengthens the case we have been making in this chapter.48
First, Cooper argues that the Old Testament, while less explicit than the New, already contains the seeds of a dualist anthropology. The language of nephesh (soul) and ruach (spirit) does not simply describe the body from a different angle. It points to a genuine inner reality—the spiritual core of a person that is distinct from the body, even if it is designed to be united with it.49
Second, Cooper argues that the intertestamental literature—the Jewish writings between the Old and New Testaments—widely assumed the survival of the soul after death and the existence of a conscious intermediate state. By the time of Jesus, the idea that the dead were conscious and waiting for the final judgment was not a Greek intrusion into Jewish thought. It was a genuine development within Judaism itself.50
Third, Cooper shows that the New Testament texts we have already examined—Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:6–9, Revelation 6:9–11, Hebrews 12:23—all converge on the same conclusion: believers enter a conscious, disembodied existence at death and remain there until the resurrection. The combined weight of these passages is very difficult to explain on a physicalist model.51
Fourth, and perhaps most importantly for our purposes, Cooper argues that the intermediate state is theologically necessary. Without it, the continuity of personal identity across death and resurrection becomes extremely difficult to maintain. The soul provides the bridge that keeps you the same person before and after death. Without it, the resurrection becomes a re-creation—the making of a new person, not the raising of the old one.52
Peterson, drawing on Cooper, lists three views that evangelicals have held about what happens after death: the intermediate state/resurrection view (in which the immaterial soul passes to either paradise or Hades at death and is reunited with its resurrected body at the last day), the immediate resurrection view (in which God gives us a body right away after death), and the extinction/re-creation view (in which we cease to exist at death and are re-created at the resurrection).53
The first of these—the intermediate state/resurrection view—is the historic view of the church. It is the most natural reading of the biblical texts. And it is the view that best supports the divine presence model. This is my position, and I believe it is the one that honors both the biblical evidence and the theological tradition most faithfully.
Sometimes a story makes a point better than an argument. Walls, in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, draws on a scene from Dante’s Purgatorio that beautifully illustrates what the conscious intermediate state might look like.54
In the story, Dante—who still has his body—arrives on the island of purgatory and encounters a boat carrying one hundred recently deceased souls. One of these souls rushes forward to greet him. Dante tries to embrace the spirit, but his arms pass right through—like hugging the air, he says, and his hands come back empty to his own chest.55
The spirit turns out to be Casella, Dante’s dear friend. Casella recognizes Dante. He remembers their friendship. He still has his feelings of love. He even sings a song for Dante—one that he used to sing when they were both alive. Casella says something deeply moving: “As I loved you when I was within my mortal flesh, so, freed from his flesh, I love you.”56
It is a beautiful scene, and it captures exactly what dualists believe about the intermediate state. The soul retains consciousness. It retains memory. It retains feeling and love and identity. There are real limitations—you cannot embrace a soul the way you embrace a body, and full human experience awaits the resurrection. But the person is there. Casella is still Casella. The soul preserves the person across the divide of death.
Walls draws out the lesson: “While Casella cannot enjoy a full human experience without his body, it is intelligible how his identity remains intact as he moves through purgatory. Only when his body is resurrected and reunited with his soul will he be fully human. But in the meantime, it makes sense to say Casella remains very much in existence and that he retains continuity with the man he was before he died.”57
That is exactly the picture I am painting in this chapter. We are embodied souls. When the body dies, the soul goes on—diminished, yes, but real. And the resurrection will restore what death has taken.
Now we come to the heart of the matter. Why does the intermediate state matter for the divine presence model?
It matters because the divine presence model is built on the idea that God’s presence is experienced differently depending on the condition of the human heart. In this life, God’s presence is partially hidden—what R. Zachary Manis calls a state of divine hiddenness. We do not see God face to face. We do not experience His full, unveiled glory. This hiddenness is not an accident. It is a divine mercy. God shields us from the full blaze of His presence because, in our fallen condition, we could not bear it.58
Manis describes this arrangement as part of the process of soul-making—God’s patient work of forming us into the kind of people who can receive His love fully. God “meets a person where he or she is, revealing Himself to the degree appropriate to his or her condition . . . in a gradual way that does not overwhelm or undermine creaturely freedom.”59 The divine presence, in other words, comes in stages. God does not blast us with the full force of His glory all at once. He turns up the dial gradually, giving us time to grow.
Manis describes the process of salvation as involving a “first unveiling”—the moment when a person voluntarily opens their heart to God in this life. Paul describes this in 2 Corinthians 3:16–18: when a person turns to the Lord, “the veil is removed,” and they begin to behold the glory of the Lord and be transformed into His likeness. This is the first stage of the process: the heart is opened, the veil is lifted, and the sanctifying work of God begins.60
Then comes the “second unveiling”—the return of Christ at the end of the age. The Greek word for this event is the parousia (literally “arrival” or “presence”), and the word for the revelation itself is apokalupsis (literally “unveiling”). At the second coming, Jesus is revealed in all His glory. The conditions of divine hiddenness are removed. The presence of God becomes “not only unmistakable but also inescapable,” as Manis puts it.61 For the righteous, this is the beatific vision—the fulfillment of every longing, the consummation of every joy. For the wicked, it is the source of unspeakable suffering—not because God is punishing them, but because they are experiencing the full blaze of a love they cannot bear.
But what about the time in between? What about the intermediate state? Manis offers a fascinating suggestion. He writes that “for all we know,” the intermediate state may be a period of ever-increasing divine disclosure—a gradual intensification of God’s presence that falls between the partial hiddenness of this life and the full unveiling at the final judgment. On this view, the dead are not simply waiting in a static state. They are experiencing a progressive revelation of God’s presence, one that grows stronger and clearer as the final day approaches.62
This is a remarkable idea, and it has profound implications. If the intermediate state involves a growing experience of God’s presence, then for believers, it is a time of deepening joy—a foretaste of the glory to come. For unbelievers, it may be a time of growing discomfort, as God’s presence becomes harder and harder to ignore. And for those who never had the chance to hear the gospel in this life, it opens the possibility that God might reveal Himself to them in the intermediate state—not yet in the full blaze of the final judgment, but in a measure sufficient to invite a genuine response.
Manis puts it this way in his discussion of the divine presence model’s framework: “Perhaps the damned are those who continue in their rebellion through an ever-increasing divine disclosure in the intermediate state, leading up to the Day of Judgment, at which point God is fully revealed and repentance is no longer possible for them.”63
This is not the same as final judgment. It is not the lake of fire. It is the middle ground—the in-between. And it is here, in this conscious intermediate state, that the divine presence model finds the space it needs for the postmortem opportunity that we will explore in the next chapter.
To bring this all together, let me sketch the full picture that the divine presence model paints of eternity, drawing on Manis’s framework of three “unveilings.”64
The first unveiling happens in this life. It is the moment of conversion—when a person, convicted by the Holy Spirit, voluntarily opens their heart to God. The veil is lifted. The process of sanctification begins. God reveals Himself gradually, carefully, in a way that does not overwhelm our freedom. This is what Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 3:16–18: turning to the Lord, having the veil removed, and being transformed into His image “with ever-increasing glory.”65
The second unveiling is the return of Christ. It is not voluntary. It is the act of God, and it happens to everyone—willing or not. At the parousia, Jesus is revealed in all His glory. Paul describes this in 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10: the Lord Jesus will be “revealed from heaven with his mighty angels in flaming fire,” and those who have rejected God will suffer “the punishment of eternal destruction from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might.” Notice: the destruction comes from the Lord’s presence, not away from it. The unveiling of Christ is itself the judgment.66
The third unveiling is the judgment of transparency—the moment when the contents of every human heart are laid bare before the light of God. This is the opening of the “books” in Revelation 20:12. As Kalomiros puts it, “The ‘books’ will be opened. What are these ‘books’? They are our hearts.”67 This third unveiling is not just the revelation of God to us but the revelation of us to ourselves. It is the moment of total honesty, when every self-deception is stripped away and we see ourselves as we truly are in the presence of absolute Truth.
Between the first unveiling and the second, there is the intermediate state. And this is where the conscious survival of the soul becomes indispensable. If there is no conscious existence between death and the parousia, then the graduated unveiling of God’s presence—the slow turning up of the dial—has no place to occur. The dead are simply gone, stored in the divine memory, waiting to be re-created. But if the soul survives death and continues in conscious existence, then the intermediate state becomes a stage in the unfolding drama of divine presence—a time when God’s presence grows more vivid and more inescapable, preparing the dead for the final moment when the veil is removed entirely.
For believers, this is good news beyond measure. The intermediate state is not an empty gap. It is the beginning of heaven—the first taste of the face-to-face communion with God that will reach its fullness at the resurrection.
For unbelievers, the intermediate state is a time of increasing confrontation with the reality they have spent their lives avoiding. God’s presence is growing stronger. The excuses are falling away. The self-deception that once insulated them from the truth is becoming harder and harder to maintain.
And for those who never heard the gospel—those who died without ever having a genuine chance to respond to the love of God—the intermediate state may be their first real opportunity. Not the final judgment. Not the full, overwhelming blaze of the parousia. But a real, measured, gracious revelation of God’s love—enough to invite a genuine, free response.
We will explore this hope in the next chapter.
This is the most common objection you will hear against the view I am defending. The argument goes like this: the idea of the soul is Platonic, not biblical. The Old Testament knows nothing of an immortal soul floating around apart from the body. The Hebrew view of human nature is holistic—the person is an integrated whole, not a ghost in a machine. When Christians imported the Greek concept of the immortal soul into their theology, they distorted the biblical message.68
There is a grain of truth in this objection, and it is important to acknowledge it. The Bible does present human beings as integrated wholes. The Old Testament does not give us a fully developed doctrine of the soul in the way that Plato does. And the idea of natural immortality—the claim that the soul cannot die—is indeed more Platonic than biblical. On this last point, the conditionalists are absolutely right.
But the objection goes too far when it denies the existence of the soul altogether. As Cooper has shown, the Old Testament language of nephesh and ruach, while not identical to Plato’s concept of psyche, does point to an inner, immaterial reality that is distinguishable from the body.69 And the New Testament is explicit. Jesus distinguishes between body and soul (Matthew 10:28). Paul expects to be with Christ immediately after death (Philippians 1:23). The souls under the altar are conscious and speaking (Revelation 6:9–11). The spirits of the righteous are made perfect (Hebrews 12:23). None of these texts can be explained on a purely physicalist reading.
The real issue is not whether the Bible teaches dualism or holism. It teaches both—in different respects. Human beings are designed for unified, embodied existence. Body and soul belong together, and the resurrection is the restoration of that unity. But when death tears them apart, the soul survives. This is not Platonic escapism. It is biblical realism about the power of God to sustain the person even through the devastation of death.70
Some Christians hold the view known as “soul sleep”—the idea that the dead are unconscious between death and resurrection. They point to passages where death is compared to sleep (e.g., John 11:11–14; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–14) and argue that the dead have no awareness until God wakes them at the last day.71
This view has a long history. Martin Luther himself sometimes spoke of death as a kind of “sleep,” suggesting that believers are “blissfully unaware of external surroundings” after death. As Fudge notes in Two Views of Hell, “Calvin writes voluminously in favor of a conscious intermediate state, while Luther often speaks of death as a ‘sleep’ and considers believers in this state to be blissfully unaware of external surroundings.”72
The comparison of death to sleep is real, and we should not dismiss it. But notice what it tells us and what it does not. The metaphor of sleep describes the body—the outward appearance of death. A dead body looks like it is sleeping. But the metaphor says nothing about what is happening to the soul. Jesus Himself used the metaphor of sleep when speaking of Lazarus (John 11:11), and then immediately clarified: “Lazarus is dead” (John 11:14). The metaphor was a gentle way of describing death, not a doctrinal statement about the state of the soul.73
When we turn to the passages that speak directly about what happens to the person after death—not the body, but the person—the picture is one of consciousness, not sleep. Paul does not say, “I desire to depart and sleep until the resurrection.” He says, “I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far.” The souls under the altar are not sleeping. They are crying out to God. These texts override the sleep metaphor and give us the full picture: the body rests, but the soul is awake.74
This is an important objection, and it deserves a nuanced response. Some conditionalists argue that you do not need substance dualism to hold conditional immortality. On a physicalist view, when the wicked are destroyed at the final judgment, they simply cease to exist—body and all. No soul needs to be destroyed, because there is no soul.
Technically, this is correct. Conditional immortality—as a bare doctrine about the final fate of the lost—does not require substance dualism. You can get to annihilation without a soul.
But here is what you lose. You lose the intermediate state. You lose the conscious waiting in Hades. You lose the theological space for the postmortem opportunity. You lose the rich picture of graduated divine disclosure that Manis describes. And you face the personal identity problem that we discussed earlier: if the dead simply cease to exist, how is the person who is raised at the resurrection the same person who died?75
So while CI does not logically require dualism, CI within the divine presence model absolutely does. The divine presence model is built on the idea that God’s presence is experienced in stages, and that the intermediate state is one of those stages. Without a conscious soul to experience that presence, the model collapses.
I believe the strongest version of conditional immortality is the one that takes substance dualism seriously: the soul is real, it survives death, it exists consciously in the intermediate state, and it encounters God’s presence in ever-increasing measure. At the final judgment, those who have set their hearts irrevocably against God are destroyed—body and soul—by the consuming fire of divine love (Matthew 10:28). This is the view I hold, and it is the view that the divine presence model supports most naturally.76
Some worry that affirming the conscious intermediate state makes the resurrection less important. If the soul is already with Christ after death, why does the body need to be raised?
This is a legitimate concern, and it is one that dualists must take seriously. But the answer is straightforward: the disembodied state is not the final goal. It is a temporary arrangement—necessary because of death, but not ideal. Human beings were made for embodied existence. The soul without the body is real but incomplete. As Walls writes, “Only when his body is resurrected and reunited with his soul will he be fully human.”77
The resurrection is the great hope precisely because it restores what death has broken. It reunites soul and body in a new, glorified, imperishable form. The intermediate state is better than death, but the resurrection is better than the intermediate state. Paul himself says this: “We do not wish to be unclothed but to be clothed with our heavenly dwelling, so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life” (2 Corinthians 5:4).78
Paul does not want to be naked—disembodied, stripped of his body. He wants to be “clothed” with his resurrection body. The intermediate state is necessary, but it is not ultimate. The resurrection is the prize. And far from devaluing the resurrection, dualism actually magnifies it—because it shows us that even the conscious presence of Christ that the dead enjoy now is not yet the full story. The best is still to come.79
Let me gather up what we have learned in this chapter.
Human beings are composed of both a material body and an immaterial soul. The soul is real. It is created and sustained by God. It can exist apart from the body, though it is not designed to do so permanently. When a believer dies, the soul goes to be with Christ—consciously, joyfully, immediately. When an unbeliever dies, the soul goes to Hades—a conscious state of waiting, not yet the final judgment, not yet the lake of fire.
The intermediate state is not a blank gap. It is not a dreamless sleep. It is a real period of conscious existence in which the dead experience God’s presence in growing measure. For believers, this is the beginning of paradise—a foretaste of the resurrection joy to come. For unbelievers, it is a time of increasing confrontation with the God they have spent their lives avoiding.
The soul is not naturally immortal. It does not live forever by its own power. God alone has immortality (1 Timothy 6:16), and He gives it as a gift in Christ. This means God can destroy the soul (Matthew 10:28)—a fact that is essential for conditional immortality. But the soul does survive the death of the body. It is sustained by God through the intermediate state and will be reunited with its body at the resurrection.
Physicalism—the denial that the soul exists at all—creates serious problems for the intermediate state, for personal identity, and for the divine presence model. Without a conscious soul, there is no one to be with Christ at death, no one to wait in Hades, no one to experience the graduated unveiling of God’s presence between death and the final judgment.
The divine presence model needs the intermediate state. It needs substance dualism. And as we will see in the next chapter, it needs both of these things to make room for one of the most hopeful features of the model: the possibility that God’s love does not stop reaching out to people when they die. If the dead are conscious, if God’s presence is real to them, if the veil is being lifted gradually—then there is space for the gospel to do its work even beyond the grave.
Our God is a God who pursues. His love does not stop at the border of the grave. Death cannot build a wall high enough to keep God out. The grave cannot silence the voice that spoke the universe into being.
Think about what that means. If you have ever lost someone you love—someone who never made a clear commitment to Christ—then the conscious intermediate state is not just an abstract theological point. It is a lifeline of hope. Because if the dead are conscious, and if God’s presence is real to them, and if the gospel can still do its work beyond the grave, then the story is not over yet. God is still pursuing. God is still speaking. God is still love.
And in the next chapter, we will explore what that means for those who never had the chance to respond to it in this life.
↑ 1. For the theological distinction between Hades (the intermediate state) and Gehenna/the lake of fire (the final state), see the discussion in Chapter 20 of this book. The two must not be confused.
↑ 2. The term "intermediate state" refers to the period between an individual's death and the general resurrection at the end of the age. See John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), especially chapters 3–7.
↑ 3. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 4–6. Cooper provides the most comprehensive evangelical treatment of the intermediate state in print.
↑ 4. Revelation 20:13–14 makes clear that Hades is emptied before the final judgment: "Death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them." Hades is thus a temporary holding state, not a permanent destination.
↑ 5. Luke 23:42–43 (NIV).
↑ 6. Peterson makes this point forcefully in his critique of annihilationism. See Robert A. Peterson, "A Traditionalist Response to Conditionalism," in Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2000).
↑ 7. The phrase "Truly I say to you" (amēn soi legō) occurs dozens of times in the Gospels, and in every case what follows "I say to you" is the content of the pronouncement. The attempt to read "today" as modifying "I say" rather than "you will be with me" is grammatically strained. See I. Howard Marshall, The Gospel of Luke: A Commentary on the Greek Text, NIGTC (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1978), 873–74.
↑ 8. Philippians 1:21–23 (NIV).
↑ 9. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapter 5. Cooper argues persuasively that Paul's language is unintelligible unless Paul expects to be conscious with Christ immediately upon death.
↑ 10. 2 Corinthians 5:6–8 (NIV).
↑ 11. Peterson, in Two Views of Hell, calls this "the most famous passage on the intermediate state" and notes that Paul's contrast between being "at home in the body" and "away from the body" presupposes a real distinction between the person and the physical body.
↑ 12. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 13. Revelation 6:9–11 (NIV).
↑ 14. Peterson, in Two Views of Hell, observes: "Plainly, these people are dead, they continue to exist, and their status is intermediate—they long for the end when God will set wrongs right. Here departed human beings are called souls."
↑ 15. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 16. Hebrews 12:22–24 (NIV).
↑ 17. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell. Peterson emphasizes that the expression "the spirits of righteous men made perfect" refers to deceased believers who have been sanctified and now exist in God's presence as disembodied spirits.
↑ 18. On the relationship between Sheol and Hades, see Philip S. Johnston, Shades of Sheol: Death and Afterlife in the Old Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2002).
↑ 19. Revelation 20:13–14 (NIV).
↑ 20. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God: An Essay on the Problem of Hell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024), pp. 382–84. Manis argues that "death and Hades will be destroyed, and more specifically, destroyed by the presence of God" at the final judgment. The lake of fire, on this reading, is the consuming presence of God Himself.
↑ 21. John F. Walvoord, "The Literal View," in Four Views on Hell, ed. William Crockett (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992).
↑ 22. Luke 16:19–31. Whether this passage is a parable or a literal description of the afterlife is debated. For our purposes, what matters is that Jesus presents the intermediate state as one of conscious experience for both the righteous and the wicked.
↑ 23. Peterson, in Two Views of Hell, summarizes the teaching of the parable in three points: (1) the righteous will be carried into God's presence after death; (2) the unrepentant will experience irreversible punishment; and (3) God reveals Himself through Moses and the prophets so that none who neglect it can fairly protest their fate.
↑ 24. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory: Rethinking the Things That Matter Most (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2015), chap. 5.
↑ 25. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 26. On Aquinas's view that the soul is the "form" of the body, see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), chap. 6. While Aquinas's view is technically hylomorphic rather than Cartesian dualistic, it agrees with substance dualism on the critical point: the soul can exist apart from the body after death.
↑ 27. The Hebrew word nephesh can mean "life," "being," "soul," or "self" depending on context. The word ruach means "wind," "breath," or "spirit." Together these terms reflect the Old Testament's holistic-yet-differentiated view of human nature. See Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 3–4.
↑ 28. Matthew 10:28 (NIV).
↑ 29. The Platonic idea that the soul is inherently immortal—that it cannot die under any circumstances—must be distinguished from the biblical claim that the soul is real and can survive death. The former is a philosophical assertion; the latter is a theological one rooted in God's sustaining power. See Clark Pinnock, "The Conditional View," in Four Views on Hell.
↑ 30. Pinnock, "The Conditional View," in Four Views on Hell.
↑ 31. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. This remains the most thorough evangelical treatment of the biblical evidence for dualism and the intermediate state.
↑ 32. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5. Walls writes that there is "a good case to be made that [dualism] is the view most compatible with the teaching of Scripture."
↑ 33. J. P. Moreland, The Soul: How We Know It's Real and Why It Matters (Chicago: Moody, 2014).
↑ 34. Prominent Christian physicalists include Nancey Murphy, Kevin Corcoran, and Peter van Inwagen. See Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
↑ 35. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5. Walls notes that "a number of Christian thinkers have argued that dualism is not the biblical view of human nature and that it was imported into Christian theology from Greek philosophy."
↑ 36. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 37. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5. Walls introduces the World Series analogy as a way of understanding the "gappy" view of personal identity.
↑ 38. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 39. John Polkinghorne, The God of Hope and the End of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 131. Walls discusses Polkinghorne's proposal in Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 40. The combined testimony of Luke 23:43, Philippians 1:23, 2 Corinthians 5:6–8, and Revelation 6:9–11 makes the case for conscious survival after death overwhelming. These are not merely metaphors or expressions of hope; they are specific descriptions of the state of the dead.
↑ 41. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 6–7.
↑ 42. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 43. Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: The Biblical Case for Conditional Immortality, rev. ed. (Carlisle, UK: Paternoster, 1994). Fudge argues that the entire case for eternal conscious torment rests on the unbiblical assumption of the soul's natural immortality.
↑ 44. 1 Timothy 6:16: "God alone has immortality." 2 Timothy 1:10: Christ "has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel." These texts make clear that immortality belongs to God by nature and is given to humans as a gift through Christ.
↑ 45. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell. Peterson cites Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), as quoted in Fudge.
↑ 46. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 47. Many conditionalists affirm substance dualism and a conscious intermediate state. See, for example, the discussions at Rethinking Hell (rethinkinghell.com), where the relationship between conditional immortality and the intermediate state is explored by various contributors.
↑ 48. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. The book is organized into three parts: the Old Testament evidence, the intertestamental evidence, and the New Testament evidence, each building the case for holistic dualism and the conscious intermediate state.
↑ 49. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 3–4.
↑ 50. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapter 5. Cooper demonstrates that by the Second Temple period, belief in conscious survival after death was widespread in Judaism and was not simply a Hellenistic import.
↑ 51. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 6–7.
↑ 52. Peterson, in Two Views of Hell, emphasizes this point: "The intermediate state/resurrection view demonstrates the continuity of personal identity. The same person who dies lives on without the body and will one day be reunited in body and soul in the resurrection of the dead."
↑ 53. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell. Peterson references Cooper's taxonomy of evangelical views on the state of the dead.
↑ 54. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5. Walls uses Dante's Purgatorio as an extended illustration of the philosophical issues surrounding personal identity after death.
↑ 55. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto 2, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam, 1984). As quoted in Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 56. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 57. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 58. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 276–80. Manis argues that divine hiddenness is a divine mercy: God shields us from His full presence because, in our fallen state, the experience would be overwhelming. The degree of hiddenness is calibrated to our condition.
↑ 59. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 279.
↑ 60. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 355–58. See also Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell: The Divine Presence Model (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2024), "The first unveiling: unveiling the heart."
↑ 61. Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, "Heaven and hell on the divine presence model."
↑ 62. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 334. Manis suggests this as a possibility in a footnote: "Perhaps the damned are those who continue in their rebellion through an ever-increasing divine disclosure in the intermediate state."
↑ 63. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, p. 334.
↑ 64. Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 346–74. See also Manis, Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, chapters 18–19.
↑ 65. 2 Corinthians 3:16–18 (NIV). Manis discusses this passage extensively in Thinking Through the Problem of Hell, "The first unveiling: unveiling the heart."
↑ 66. 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10. On the translation of verse 9, see Manis, Sinners in the Presence of a Loving God, pp. 357–58, where he argues that the destruction comes "from the presence of the Lord," not "away from" His presence. This is one of the most important exegetical points for the divine presence model.
↑ 67. Alexandre Kalomiros, The River of Fire: A Reply to the Questions: Is God Really Good? Did God Create Hell? (Seattle: St. Nectarios, 1980), section XIV.
↑ 68. This objection has been stated forcefully by Joel B. Green, Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008); and Nancey Murphy, Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies?.
↑ 69. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapters 3–4.
↑ 70. For a balanced treatment that affirms both the holistic emphasis of Hebrew anthropology and the reality of the soul, see Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting. Cooper calls his position "holistic dualism"—an integrated view of human nature that affirms the soul without denigrating the body.
↑ 71. The "soul sleep" view is sometimes called psychopannychism. John Calvin wrote an entire treatise against it: Psychopannychia (1542), defending the conscious intermediate state.
↑ 72. Fudge, in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 73. The metaphor of death as "sleep" appears in Daniel 12:2, John 11:11–14, Acts 7:60, and 1 Thessalonians 4:13. In every case, the metaphor describes the outward appearance of death, not the inner experience of the soul.
↑ 74. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting, chapter 6. Cooper argues that the "sleep" metaphor and the "conscious intermediate state" texts can be harmonized by recognizing that "sleep" refers to the body's condition, while the passages about being "with Christ" describe the soul's conscious experience.
↑ 75. Peterson, "The Case for Traditionalism," in Two Views of Hell.
↑ 76. This is the view defended throughout this book. The soul is real, it survives death, it can be destroyed by God (Matthew 10:28), and immortality is conditional—a gift given in Christ (1 Timothy 6:16; 2 Timothy 1:10). This position combines the insights of substance dualism, conditional immortality, and the divine presence model into a coherent whole.
↑ 77. Walls, Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, chap. 5.
↑ 78. 2 Corinthians 5:4 (NIV).
↑ 79. N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008). Wright argues powerfully that the resurrection of the body—not the escape of the soul—is the center of the Christian hope. The intermediate state is real but not ultimate. The prize is the resurrection, and everything else points toward it.