Chapter 34

The Intermediate State, Substance Dualism, and Time After Death

Introduction: What Happens When We Die?

When a Christian closes his or her eyes for the last time in this world, what happens next? The New Testament gives us a surprisingly vivid answer. Jesus tells the thief on the cross, "Today you will be with me in Paradise." Paul says he longs "to depart and be with Christ, for that is far better." John sees the souls of martyrs under the altar in heaven, crying out, "How long?" None of these pictures shows a soul asleep. None shows a person dissolved into God. They all show a conscious self, still aware, still relating, still experiencing — but now without a body, waiting for the resurrection of the dead on the last day.

This in-between period is what theologians call the intermediate state. It is the phase of personal existence between physical death and bodily resurrection. For most Christians throughout history, the intermediate state has been a quiet certainty. They did not spend much time defending it; they simply believed it, lived by it, and died trusting it. In the last half-century, though, a growing number of thoughtful evangelicals have begun to question whether the intermediate state involves a conscious soul at all. Some now argue that the whole human person is material — body and mind together — and that death is a total dissolution, with existence resumed only at the resurrection. This view is sometimes called Christian physicalism or Christian materialism.¹

I do not think that view can be sustained, either biblically or philosophically, and I have argued at length against it in my earlier book on postmortem salvation.² In this chapter, I will not repeat that entire case. Instead, I want to ask a narrower but very important question: if substance dualism is true, and if the soul survives the death of the body in a conscious intermediate state, what is time like in that state? And further: what does the intermediate state tell us about God's relationship to time?

Here is my thesis for this chapter. The intermediate state involves a genuinely temporal mode of existence — there is real sequence, real waiting, real awareness that some things are past and others are still to come — but the texture of that temporal experience appears to be different from the clock-time we know in this life. The disembodied soul, cut loose from the rotation of the earth, the rhythm of breath, and the slow decay of the body, still lives in sequence, but in a mode that seems closer to what near-death experiencers (NDErs) report: time that is still genuinely temporal but no longer bound to seconds and calendars. That matches almost perfectly what I have been arguing about God throughout this book — that God is genuinely temporal but not bound to creaturely clock-time. In other words, the intermediate state becomes another strong witness for the model of dynamic divine temporality with transcendent access.

There is one more thread to pull. If God genuinely interacts with disembodied souls — hearing their prayers, receiving their worship, and (as I have argued elsewhere) continuing to press the offer of Christ on those who have not yet received Him — then God's engagement with the dead is itself a form of temporal interaction. A God who is locked outside of time cannot have a real-time conversation with a soul under the altar. A God who is genuinely temporal, and who also transcends the limits of our clock-time, can.

This chapter, then, has three tasks. First, I need to say just enough about substance dualism and the intermediate state to orient readers who have not read the companion volume on postmortem salvation. Second, I want to look carefully at the three most important biblical passages on temporal experience in the intermediate state — Luke 16:19–31, Revelation 6:9–10, and Luke 23:43 — to see what they actually teach about time after death. Third, I want to draw out the implications: first for our understanding of the intermediate state itself, and second — which is really my primary interest in this chapter — for our understanding of God's own relationship to time. My hope is that by the end of this chapter, we will see that a temporal God is not a theological embarrassment to be explained away but a living, relational reality whose temporality accounts for the full biblical picture in a way that divine timelessness simply cannot.

Substance Dualism in Brief: What I Am Not Arguing Here

I want to tread carefully here, because the case for substance dualism is big, and I have already made it at book length elsewhere. So rather than re-run every argument, let me do three things. First, state the view. Second, summarize the most important biblical and philosophical reasons for holding it. Third, point the reader to where the full case lives.

The view in plain language

Substance dualism says that a human being is made of two distinct but deeply united substances: a physical body and an immaterial soul (or mind). The soul is not merely a function of the brain. It is not a pattern of neural firings. It is a real, though immaterial, thing — a bearer of consciousness, memory, will, and personhood. When the body dies, the soul does not die with it. Instead, the soul continues to exist, in a conscious but disembodied condition, until the day when God raises the body and reunites body and soul in the resurrection.³

This view has been the dominant Christian position for most of church history. John W. Cooper, in what I consider the best single defense of the traditional view, has called it "holistic dualism." Cooper stresses that the Bible presents human beings as unified wholes — body and soul together — not as a ghost driving a car. But the same Bible also teaches that this unity can, for a time, be torn apart at death, and that the soul survives as a real, personal center of experience.⁴

Why I hold it

I hold substance dualism for several converging reasons, which I can only gesture at here:

First, the biblical witness. The Old Testament already distinguishes the body, which returns to the dust, from the ruach or nephesh that returns to God (Eccl 12:7). The New Testament intensifies this, with Paul describing himself as potentially "away from the body and at home with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8) and speaking of his longing "to depart and be with Christ" (Phil 1:23). Jesus commits His "spirit" into the Father's hands at the moment of death (Luke 23:46) and promises the thief, "today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43). The martyrs in Revelation 6 are under the altar as conscious souls, even though their bodies lie in graves around the Roman world.⁵

Second, the continuity of personal identity. If I am nothing but my body, and my body turns to dust, then the "me" who wakes up at the resurrection is a new creation with copied memories, not the same person who died. Substance dualism secures personal identity through death: the soul bridges the gap.⁶

Third, strong philosophical arguments from consciousness. The so-called "hard problem" of consciousness — the sheer strangeness of the fact that physical processes give rise to felt experience — has pushed a number of serious philosophers to doubt that consciousness is reducible to brain states. J.P. Moreland, Richard Swinburne, Charles Taliaferro, and others have argued from the unity of consciousness, from subjective experience, from mental causation, and from libertarian free will, that the mind cannot be merely the brain.⁷

Fourth, veridical near-death experiences. As I argued in Chapter 33, a subset of NDEs contain veridical details that the percipient could not have known from the position of the body — accurate reports of events in distant rooms, conversations that took place elsewhere, objects on hospital roofs. If even one such case holds up under careful scrutiny, it is very hard to explain without positing a center of consciousness that can operate, at least briefly, apart from the brain.⁸

These arguments stand behind everything else I will say in this chapter. If they are wrong, there is nothing happening in the intermediate state, and the rest of this chapter is an exercise in fiction. But I believe they are not wrong. And so I ask: what is time like, there, for the souls waiting in the presence of Christ?

Three Central Passages on Temporal Experience After Death

If the soul survives death and enters an intermediate state, what does Scripture actually say about what that state is like? Three passages stand out, and each one shows something important about time in the intermediate state. They are the story of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31), the souls under the altar (Revelation 6:9–10), and Jesus' promise to the thief (Luke 23:43). I want to take them in turn.

Luke 16:19–31: The Rich Man and Lazarus

Jesus tells this story in the middle of a sharp exchange with the Pharisees, who have sneered at His teaching on money. The account reads:

"There was a rich man who was clothed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate was laid a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who desired to be fed with what fell from the rich man's table. Moreover, even the dogs came and licked his sores. The poor man died and was carried by the angels to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried, and in Hades, being in torment, he lifted up his eyes and saw Abraham far off and Lazarus at his side. And he called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am in anguish in this flame.' But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner bad things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in anguish. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, in order that those who would pass from here to you may not be able, and none may cross from there to us.' And he said, 'Then I beg you, father, to send him to my father's house — for I have five brothers — so that he may warn them, lest they also come into this place of torment'" (Luke 16:19–31, ESV).

I am aware of the long debate over whether this is a parable or an actual report. Either way, the theological details of the story are drawn from Jesus' own assumptions about reality — He does not invent worlds that contradict what is really so. And on either reading, several features of post-mortem temporal experience jump off the page.

Notice, first, that both men are immediately conscious. Lazarus is not sleeping in a grave waiting for the general resurrection. He is carried by angels to "Abraham's side." The rich man is also not unconscious. He wakes up, looks up, speaks, remembers, and pleads. Whatever else is happening, Jesus describes the post-mortem state as one of awareness and experience.¹⁰

Notice, second, the sequence. The rich man's experiences happen one after another. He is in torment; he then lifts his eyes; he then calls out; he then hears Abraham reply; he then responds with a new request; he then hears the final word. This is temporal succession in its ordinary sense — one event after another, with real "before" and "after." As R.T. Mullins has stressed in his discussions of divine temporality, temporal succession just is "one thing happening after another," and that is precisely what we see in this story.¹¹

Notice, third, the presence of memory. Abraham says, "Child, remember that you in your lifetime received your good things." The rich man remembers that he has five brothers still alive. He remembers his father's house. Memory is a deeply temporal category. It presupposes a past that is genuinely past — a time before the present that can be recalled. If the rich man were in some timeless eternal now, memory would be impossible, because there would be nothing to remember and no "earlier than" to remember it from.

Notice, fourth, the presence of anticipation. The rich man is concerned about his brothers still living and about what they might come to. He is not in a state of completed, frozen experience. He is aware that other events are still happening, and that some are yet future. This too is a deeply temporal stance — the stance of one who has passed through time and is now looking forward and backward from a new vantage point.¹²

Finally, notice what is subtly absent. There are no clocks. There is no mention of minutes or hours. There is no sun rising or setting. The story presupposes time without tying that time to the physical rhythms that govern earthly existence. This is suggestive. It hints that life in the intermediate state is temporal, but not clock-bound in the way we are. We will come back to that.

There is one more thing worth pausing on here. The rich man's request — "have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the end of his finger in water and cool my tongue" — assumes that even in the post-mortem state, one soul can act upon another, or at least be sent by Abraham to minister to another. Abraham's refusal is not based on lack of communication or lack of time but on a fixed divine order ("between us and you a great chasm has been fixed"). The refusal is metaphysical, not temporal. What the exchange therefore implies is that the souls in the intermediate state are not only temporally aware but are, in principle, capable of temporal interaction with one another, even if God's ordered providence restricts such interactions in particular cases.

Revelation 6:9–10: The Souls Under the Altar

The second passage is even more striking. John sees under the heavenly altar "the souls of those who had been slain for the word of God and for the witness they had borne" (Rev 6:9). These souls cry out:

"O Sovereign Lord, holy and true, how long before you will judge and avenge our blood on those who dwell on the earth?" (Rev 6:10, ESV).

Let those words settle. "How long?" This is one of the most temporally loaded phrases in all of Scripture. You cannot ask "how long?" unless you are already waiting. You cannot wait unless you experience time passing. And you cannot experience time passing unless you are temporal.¹³

These are disembodied souls. Their bodies are not yet raised. Their enemies still walk the earth. The final judgment has not yet come. And yet they are conscious, articulate, morally engaged, and — this is the point — expecting something that has not yet happened. The fact that they ask "how long?" rules out any view on which the intermediate state is a timeless eternity or a mental blank. These souls know that time continues, and they are aware that there is a future event — the final judgment — that is still future from their perspective.

Consider the alternative carefully. If the intermediate state were truly timeless, or if the souls of the martyrs were now experiencing a tota simul of the whole future, it would make no sense for them to ask "how long?" They would already be seeing the judgment, or standing within it, or embracing it as a fact. Instead, they wait. They anticipate. They are promised that the number of their brothers and sisters must be completed — a temporal statement about a future not yet accomplished — and then they are told to rest "a little longer" (Rev 6:11). Even the answer is temporally tensed.¹⁴

One might object that this is simply symbolic language, or apocalyptic imagery not to be taken at face value. But the symbolism of Revelation is not free-floating. It symbolizes real spiritual realities. And if the reality symbolized is one where the martyrs are timeless, then why use intensely temporal imagery to symbolize it? The natural reading is that the temporal imagery reflects real temporal experience in the heavenly court — shaped and ordered by God in a way that differs from earthly clock-time, but real sequence nonetheless.¹⁵

Luke 23:43: "Today You Will Be With Me in Paradise"

The third passage is one of the most tender in all of Scripture. As Jesus hangs on the cross, one of the criminals executed with Him turns to Him in faith: "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom" (Luke 23:42). Jesus replies:

"Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in Paradise" (Luke 23:43, ESV).

There has been some debate about how to punctuate this verse, and some interpreters have argued that "today" modifies "I say" rather than "you will be with me." The resulting reading would be: "Truly I say to you today, you will be with me in Paradise (at some later point)." This reading has been used by some who deny the conscious intermediate state.¹⁶

I find this punctuation forced. The Greek phrase sēmeron met' emou esē en tō paradeisō reads naturally with "today" (sēmeron, σήμερον) modifying "you will be" (esē, ἔσῃ). In any case, the contrast with the thief's original request is crucial. He asks to be remembered when Jesus comes into His kingdom — that is, at some future point. Jesus does not accept the man's timetable. He accelerates it: today, before the sun has set on this terrible day, you will already be with me in Paradise. The point of the reply is its immediacy.¹⁷

Notice what this implies. The thief's entry into Paradise is dated. It happens on a particular day. There is a "before" (as he hung on his cross asking) and an "after" (when he is with Christ). This is temporal language. The thief does not step outside of time. He steps into a different mode of time — the mode of being "with Christ," which Paul later describes as "far better" (Phil 1:23) and which Jesus here calls "Paradise."

Notice also what this implies about Jesus. On this very day, while Jesus' body was laid in a tomb, He was, in some real sense, with the thief in Paradise. That is an extraordinary claim. It means that Jesus, in His own post-crucifixion experience — in the space between Good Friday and Easter morning — is Himself in a temporal mode of existence. He is there with the thief, receiving him. He is not in a timeless void. He is in a Paradise that is real, temporal, and relational.¹⁸

These three passages — Luke 16, Revelation 6, and Luke 23 — all converge on the same portrait. The intermediate state is conscious. It is temporal. It involves memory, anticipation, waiting, communication, and real relational engagement both with God and with other souls. It does not involve a timeless absorption into God. And yet it also does not appear to be simply more of the same clock-time we know here.

What Is Time Like in the Intermediate State?

Having established that the intermediate state is temporal, the next question is what kind of temporal experience it involves. Here I want to advance several claims, some more confident than others. The first three I hold with strong confidence. The next two I hold as what I take to be the best available reading of the evidence, but with some humility about the limits of our knowledge.

Claim 1: Real sequence, genuine succession

Whatever else is true about the intermediate state, it contains real sequence. The rich man cries out and then hears Abraham reply. The martyrs ask "how long?" and then receive an answer. Lazarus is carried by angels and then rests in Abraham's bosom. The thief dies on Friday and then wakes up in Paradise, with Christ arriving there later the same day (or at least on the same day).¹⁹

These are not mere narrative conventions. They describe how things are. And if there is real sequence in the intermediate state, then there is real temporality. The soul does not slip out of time at death. It slips out of the body, and into a different but still genuinely temporal mode of existence.

Claim 2: The soul's time is uncoupled from physical clock-time

The disembodied soul has no body, no metabolism, no neural rhythms. Its experience is not clocked by the rotation of the earth or the firing of neurons. Whatever time it experiences must be grounded in something other than physical cycles.²⁰

If A-theory is correct — as I have argued throughout this book, following Craig, Mullins, DeWeese, and others — then the basic metaphysics of time is not about clocks but about tensed facts. What makes time real is that events really happen, really pass, and really succeed one another. Clocks only measure time; they do not constitute time.²¹ That distinction matters here. If time is constituted by tensed facts and by real succession, then a disembodied soul does not need a body or a watch in order to be temporal. It only needs to have experiences that really follow one another.

Craig has argued that this is exactly why the notion of God's being temporal without a physical universe is coherent. God's experience of one thought after another is enough to constitute a kind of time, even in the absence of any physical measure.²² The same logic applies to a disembodied human soul. If it has one thought, one prayer, one act of worship, one act of waiting after another, it is in time — even without any physical clock to measure the intervals.

It may help to think of this concretely. Imagine a Christian who falls asleep in Christ on a Tuesday afternoon in November. Her body lies in a hospital bed. Her heart has stopped. Her brain activity has ceased. Her soul, however, is now present with Christ. What is that first moment of being with Christ like? Almost certainly not "3:47 p.m. on Tuesday, November 16." The timestamps of her earthly life fall away at death. What remains is the succession of her own conscious experience — meeting Christ, being welcomed, perhaps being reunited with loved ones who went before, beginning to understand what she is seeing. That succession is real. One experience follows another. But it is not measured in hours and minutes. It is measured in the native pulses of a soul that is no longer bound to biological rhythms.

We might put the point this way. In the intermediate state, time is no longer about how long; it is about what next. "How long" is a question that requires an external measure. "What next" only requires a living, thinking, willing soul. If that soul is in real contact with Christ, and with other saints, and with the ongoing history of salvation as it continues on earth, then the rhythm of "what next" in the intermediate state has a content of its own — not clockable, but genuinely successive.

I want to be careful to avoid one misunderstanding here. The claim is not that the dead are unaware of earthly time. The martyrs of Revelation 6 know how long they have waited. They know that their blood has not yet been avenged. They know that something is still going on "on the earth." Somehow, temporally, the dead and the living share the same redemptive history, even though their modes of temporal experience differ. How this is possible is a mystery. That it is so seems clear from the texts.

Claim 3: It is a real "waiting"

The martyrs of Revelation 6 wait. This is extraordinary. These are redeemed souls, with Christ, in heaven, and yet they wait. They are not yet in their resurrection bodies. The full number of their brothers and sisters is not yet complete. Their enemies are not yet judged. Their physical creation is not yet renewed. And so they wait — not in sorrow exactly, for they are comforted, but in real temporal expectation.²³

This tells us something important. The intermediate state is not the final state. It is a time of rest, but also of longing. Scripture everywhere distinguishes the present post-mortem condition from the eschatological, final, resurrection condition. To be "with Christ" in Paradise is "far better" than earthly life, but it is not the full New Creation. The intermediate state is a genuine, conscious waiting-with-Christ. And any real waiting requires real time.²⁴

Claim 4: Time there may feel stretched, compressed, or differently textured

Here I start to move from firm claims to more tentative ones. Many NDErs — as I documented in Chapter 33 — report that during their experience, time felt very different. Some say it "stopped" or "stood still." Others say that events they experienced in what must have been minutes of clock-time felt like hours or days of subjective experience. Still others report that past, present, and future seemed to be simultaneously available in certain episodes, especially life reviews.²⁵

I argued in Chapter 33 that NDEs probably do not give us knock-down proof of any particular metaphysic of time. They are brief, disembodied-like episodes and not the intermediate state itself. But they do provide a suggestive glimpse of what disembodied temporal experience could be like. The consistency of these reports across cultures, ages, and worldviews — and their consistency with the biblical hints that God's experience of time differs qualitatively from ours — gives us some evidence that time in the intermediate state is genuinely temporal, but qualitatively different from our clock-bound experience.²⁶

Michael Rea, in his lovely and unusual book God Inside Time, has suggested that time in heaven may be "symmetrical" rather than asymmetrical — that in a multi-dimensional heaven, arrows of time might not move only in one direction. He is careful to label his proposal speculative. But even if we bracket his particular physics, his broader point is valuable: it is not obviously required that time in the intermediate state be structured exactly as time in our universe is structured. It need only be really temporal.²⁷

Claim 5: The soul's experience is oriented toward the resurrection

The intermediate state is not an end point. It is a phase. The soul in Paradise awaits the resurrection of the body. The martyrs under the altar await the completion of history. The whole structure of the New Testament hope is that present post-mortem existence is provisional — "away from the body and at home with the Lord" is wonderful, but the goal is the day when "this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality" (1 Cor 15:53).²⁸

This is why Paul can say that he has "no desire" to be a "naked" soul (2 Cor 5:3–4) — the final goal is embodied, resurrected, glorified life. The intermediate state is good because Christ is there. But it is not the telos. And a state that has a telos is a state in time.²⁹

God's Interaction with Disembodied Souls: A Temporal Engagement

If the intermediate state is temporal, and if God interacts with souls in that state — hearing their prayers, receiving their worship, comforting them, and (as I have argued elsewhere) continuing to offer the gospel to those who died without Christ — then God's engagement with the dead is itself a form of temporal interaction. That is the argument of this section.

God hears the martyrs

Return to Revelation 6 for a moment. The martyrs ask "how long?" And what happens? God answers. "They were given a white robe and were told to rest a little longer" (Rev 6:11). This is an interaction. It is a real exchange between conscious souls and their Lord. And it is explicitly ordered in time: it has a question, a response, and a duration ("a little longer") extending into the future.³⁰

A God locked outside of time cannot answer "a little longer." Such a God cannot say now as opposed to later, cannot measure "a little," cannot speak to beings who are themselves measuring their experience in little whiles. The entire exchange presupposes that God is engaged with the temporal experience of the saints. He knows how long they have waited. He tells them how much longer they must wait. This is not the voice of a timeless Platonic form; this is the voice of a personal, temporal, relational God.³¹

God welcomes the newly dead

When Jesus tells the thief, "today you will be with me in Paradise," He is describing His own temporal interaction with the soul He is about to receive. Jesus expects to welcome the man on a particular day, at a particular point in the flow of events. This is consistent with the broader New Testament picture: Paul expects to be "with Christ" when he departs (Phil 1:23); Stephen at his death prays, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59). Jesus receives the souls of His people when they come. This is temporal reception.³²

God comforts the souls of the righteous

The description of Lazarus being carried by angels to "Abraham's side" or "Abraham's bosom" (Luke 16:22) is a picture of active divine care for the newly dead. There are angels at work. There is a welcoming embrace. There is, for Lazarus, a new kind of "being comforted" (Luke 16:25). This is not a static eternity but a lived experience of divine comfort — which requires the comforted to have a temporal history they are now being comforted from.³³

God's ongoing pursuit and the question of postmortem opportunity

In my earlier book on postmortem salvation, I argued that the New Testament leaves open — and in several places positively suggests — that God's offer of salvation in Christ does not automatically end at physical death. Passages about Christ's preaching to the "spirits in prison" (1 Peter 3:19), the gospel being preached "even to those who are dead" (1 Peter 4:6), and various hints in the Pauline corpus make the postmortem opportunity view at least a plausible reading of the New Testament. I leaned there toward a position combining conditional immortality with a final opportunity for faith at the last judgment, while acknowledging the attraction of a conservative biblical universalism.³⁴

For the purposes of this chapter, the key point is simpler. If God continues to pursue the unsaved even after death — whether through a single last chance at the judgment, or through a more extended period of post-mortem grace, or through some combination — then His pursuit is necessarily a temporal engagement. He speaks to souls now. They respond (or fail to respond) then. He receives their faith, if they come to faith, at a particular moment. There is sequence in this. There is real give-and-take.³⁵

I want to be careful here. I am not arguing that the postmortem opportunity view is a premise of my argument for divine temporality. If that view were rejected across the board, the rest of my argument would stand. But for those who, like me, find the postmortem opportunity view biblically defensible, it becomes an additional, powerful confirmation of divine temporality. God in the intermediate state is not a distant, frozen observer. He is actively loving, pursuing, welcoming, and engaging souls.³⁶

I want to linger on this for a moment because it matters pastorally. If you have ever lost a loved one who, as far as you know, died without faith in Christ, you know how dark that grief can feel. Standard evangelical theology often gives us no comfort here beyond "God is just." That is true, but it is not the whole truth. The God of the Bible is also patient, pursuing, and merciful. I am not a universalist in the hard-liberal sense — I am not saying everyone will certainly be saved regardless of their response. What I am saying is that the scriptural picture of God's temporal engagement with souls does not collapse at the moment of death. If the martyrs under the altar are being heard, why should we assume that every unbelieving soul is now permanently closed off from grace before the final judgment? The question is left open by the New Testament, and I think we should be open to it as well.

And crucial to that openness is the premise I have been arguing for throughout this chapter: that the God who engages souls in the intermediate state is a temporal God. Whatever exactly happens between death and the last day, it happens in time. God does not freeze souls in a timeless amber. He meets them where they are, in the present of their own ongoing conscious experience, and invites them (however we ultimately cash this out) into the fullness of His kingdom.

How the Timeless View Struggles to Account for the Intermediate State

Classical divine timelessness, as defended most ably in our day by Paul Helm, Brian Leftow, and (historically) by Boethius, Aquinas, and Anselm, holds that God exists in an "eternal present" (the tota simul) in which all of time is equally present to Him. I have argued throughout this book that this view faces devastating problems — problems of creation, Incarnation, divine action, emotion, and (I will now add) the intermediate state.³⁷

The problem of divine responsiveness

On the timeless view, God does not really respond to anything. He has, from eternity, willed whatever He wills, and any apparent "response" in time is simply the creaturely experience of God's single, timeless act. Helm's account of petitionary prayer is famously this: prayers are included in God's eternal decree; God does not change His mind in response to prayers; He has, in eternity, already willed whatever He is going to do.³⁸

But Revelation 6 shows God interacting in real time with His martyrs. They ask; He answers. They wait; He sets a duration. How does the timeless view make sense of this? It must say that the whole exchange — question and answer, waiting and comfort — is "encoded" in God's single eternal act. But then there is no real question, no real waiting, no real answer. There is only the appearance of exchange from the martyrs' side, with nothing on God's side that genuinely responds.³⁹

This seems to me to hollow out the text. When the martyrs ask "how long?", the text treats the question as a real question that God really hears and really answers. That treatment is not optional or decorative. It is how the text works. To insist that the appearance of exchange is only a creature-side phenomenon, with no corresponding "before and after" in God, is to impose a philosophical framework on Scripture rather than to let Scripture teach us.⁴⁰

The problem of souls under Abraham's side

The timeless view also struggles with the picture of Lazarus being welcomed, comforted, and settled in Abraham's side. Welcoming is a temporal act. It requires a "before" (not-yet-welcomed) and an "after" (welcomed). On the timeless view, there is no such "before and after" for God. So the welcome must be, from God's side, eternally willed rather than temporally given. But the text says Lazarus is carried by angels, which is a moving-through-time picture. Angels do not carry in a timeless moment; they traverse; they bear.⁴¹

The problem of the "fullness of time" and the interim

Finally, the timeless view has trouble making sense of the very structure of the intermediate state as an interim. An interim presupposes a "before" (the present life), an "after" (the resurrection), and a time in between. But if God is strictly timeless, He does not experience any "in between." For Him, the martyr's death, the waiting under the altar, and the resurrection are all equally and simultaneously present. This collapses the distinction between the intermediate and the final state — or reduces it to a merely creature-side appearance. Neither option does justice to the texts.⁴²

Mullins, in The End of the Timeless God and in From Divine Timemaker to Divine Watchmaker, has shown in detail that the timeless God cannot coherently make, sustain, or respond to a changing world. The specific case of the intermediate state is a powerful extension of his broader argument. The souls under the altar are changing — they are waiting, then comforted, then, in the end, resurrected. If God is in real relation to them — not just as a timeless cause, but as an interactive Lord — then God is in time with them.⁴³

Is Time in the Intermediate State the Same as God's Time?

An interesting and subtle question arises. Once we grant that the intermediate state is temporal, and that God engages temporally with the souls there, are we saying that the soul's time just is God's time? Is it the same time? Or is there still a distinction?

I think there is a distinction, and it matters. My position throughout this book has been that God has genuine temporal succession in His life but is not bound by creaturely clock-time. I have called this "dynamic temporality with transcendent access." The soul in the intermediate state is also genuinely temporal, and also not bound by clock-time as we know it. But the soul is still a creature. It is not divine. Its temporal life is dependent on God, whereas God's temporal life is grounded in the intra-Trinitarian perichoretic relations (see Chapter 26) and in God's own being.⁴⁴

I suspect the relationship is something like this: there is one divine life, with real sequence. God's engagement with each of His creatures takes place within that single, unfathomable divine temporal life, yet also in accommodation to whatever kind of creaturely time each creature is in. In the physical universe, God engages with creatures in clock-time. In the intermediate state, God engages with souls in the more purely mental, unclocked mode proper to disembodied consciousness. In the new creation, God will engage with embodied-and-glorified saints in yet another mode of time — the time of the eternal Sabbath, which is temporal without being corruptible.⁴⁵

Rea, in his final chapters of God Inside Time, hints at a picture along these lines. He suggests that heaven is not timeless but is a different dimensional structure of time — one in which movement, relation, and experience continue but in which the corrupting features of our time (entropy, decay, aging) are absent. The deep point is that "timelessness" is not the opposite of "corruption"; corruption-free temporality is the biblical picture of heavenly life, not a frozen eternity.⁴⁶

The NDE Evidence Revisited

Chapter 33 dealt with NDEs in depth. I do not want to repeat that treatment. But it is worth drawing a few specific threads from the NDE literature into the present discussion, because NDEs arguably give us the closest experiential window — short of death itself — into what early intermediate-state experience might be like.

First, NDErs very commonly report continued consciousness. They do not describe a blackout or an annihilation; they describe a continuation in a different mode. They describe seeing, thinking, remembering, and feeling. This is exactly what substance dualism predicts if a brief disembodied episode occurs during clinical death.⁴⁷

Second, NDErs very commonly report altered but not abolished temporal experience. As I discussed in Chapter 33, many say that time "stopped" or "had no meaning," but when you press them, they almost always describe sequence of experience: first they left the body, then they saw the room, then they moved through a tunnel, then they met a being of light, then they had a life review, then they were told it was not their time, then they returned. This is temporal sequence, even if the measure of that time is very different from clock-time.⁴⁸

Third, NDErs commonly report a "life review" in which they experience many years of their life in what seems like moments — and in some cases experience them from the perspective of others, feeling the effects their actions had on others as those others felt them. This is an astonishing phenomenon. It suggests that in the disembodied state, temporal experience can be "stretched" or "compressed" radically, and that something like simultaneous access to many moments becomes possible.⁴⁹

I argued in Chapter 33 that this does not prove the B-theory is correct. What it may show is that a non-embodied mode of consciousness can engage with many moments of one's own past in a way that a body-bound mind cannot. That has obvious implications for thinking about God. If a human soul, briefly disembodied, can experience many moments of its life in a way that a body-bound mind cannot, how much more can God, whose mode of existence is wholly different from ours, engage with all of created time in ways that transcend the limits of any single moment — while still genuinely experiencing succession in His own divine life.⁵⁰

I realize that some readers will be uncomfortable with drawing any theological conclusions from NDE testimony. I understand that caution and share much of it. My claim is modest: the NDE literature provides a small but illuminating window into what happens when consciousness begins to separate from its body. If that window shows temporal experience that is qualitatively different from clock-time but still genuinely temporal, then it converges with the biblical picture of the intermediate state and with my model of dynamic divine temporality. That convergence is evidence, even if it is not proof.⁵¹

Objections

Let me now consider several serious objections to the line of argument I have been developing.

Objection 1: "Absent from the body, present with the Lord" means instant transition, not sequence.

Some have argued that Paul's "absent from the body, present with the Lord" (2 Cor 5:8) is so immediate that it leaves no "room" for a temporal intermediate state at all. On this reading, the soul does not experience any sequence; it is simply with Christ, instantly and without duration.⁵²

Response: The immediacy Paul describes is the immediacy of arrival, not the erasure of time in the state to which one arrives. Paul's point is that there is no long delay and no lapse of consciousness. He is not saying that upon arrival in Christ's presence, one enters a timeless vacuum. The same Paul who says "absent from the body, present with the Lord" also describes himself as "longing" (2 Cor 5:2) to be further clothed with the resurrection body — a longing that presupposes the interim state is itself temporal and incomplete.⁵³

Objection 2: Heaven is eternal, and "eternal" means timeless.

This objection reflects a widespread confusion that I have tried to clear up throughout this book, especially in Chapter 3. The Hebrew olam (עוֹלָם) and Greek aiōn (αἰών) do not mean "timeless." They mean "age," "duration," or "enduring." They describe duration that goes on indefinitely — not duration that has been abolished.⁵⁴

Response: As I argued in Chapter 3, when the Bible calls something "eternal," it almost always means "age-enduring" or "everlasting," not "timeless." Eternal life, eternal kingdom, eternal inheritance — these describe everlasting temporal life, not a life in which time has ceased to exist. The intermediate state, like the new creation, is eternal in the biblical sense: it has no end. But "no end" does not mean "no time."⁵⁵

Objection 3: Biblical passages about the intermediate state are accommodative.

On this view, when Jesus describes the rich man and Lazarus, or when John describes souls under the altar, the temporal elements are accommodations to human ways of thinking. In reality, the intermediate state is timeless, and the apparent sequence in these passages is merely narrative scaffolding.⁵⁶

Response: This is a very strong claim, and the burden of proof rests on those who make it. Scripture teaches theology through these narratives, not around them. If the narratives are systematically misleading about a feature as basic as whether the dead experience time, we should expect the Bible somewhere to say so clearly. It never does. Moreover, the accommodation move proves too much: if any temporal language about the afterlife can be dismissed as accommodation, then there is no biblical data left for the doctrine of the intermediate state at all.⁵⁷

Objection 4: Christian physicalists deny there is any intermediate state.

Some Christian physicalists (notably Nancey Murphy, Joel Green, and others) deny the intermediate state entirely. On their view, the person does not survive death at all. Personal identity is re-established at the resurrection through God's act of re-creating the person. If this view is right, there is no temporal experience between death and resurrection because there is no "one" to have experience.⁵⁸

Response: I have already given my reasons for rejecting Christian physicalism: its difficulty with the biblical data, with personal identity across resurrection, with NDE evidence, and with the hard problem of consciousness. But there is a further problem specific to this chapter's concerns. On the physicalist view, what happens to the souls under the altar, the rich man and Lazarus, the thief in Paradise? These texts are either wrong, or they are so deeply metaphorical that they no longer mean what they obviously seem to mean. I do not think evangelical physicalism has offered a convincing alternative reading of these passages. And so I remain with the traditional position — which also happens to be the position that makes better sense of divine temporality.⁵⁹

Objection 5: A loving God would not make the saved wait

Some object on pastoral grounds: surely a good God would not subject His redeemed to an intermediate state in which they must wait for full redemption? Would He not simply give the full resurrection immediately? Doesn't a genuine waiting period seem cruel?⁶⁰

Response: The New Testament itself presents the waiting as good. "To be with Christ" is "far better" than this life, even if it is not yet the fullest blessedness. The waiting is not punitive; it is part of God's larger story, which climaxes in the simultaneous resurrection of all His people at the last day. The martyrs are comforted now; they will be fully vindicated then. The waiting binds the saints together with the still-living church in a single hope. It is redemptive patience, not cruelty.⁶¹

Moreover — and this is important — the waiting is genuinely shared. God waits, too. He waits for the last of His sheep to come home. He waits for the full number of the martyrs. He waits, as Peter says, not slow but patient, "not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance" (2 Pet 3:9). The intermediate state is a period in which the saints and their God wait together for the day of final redemption.⁶²

Implications for the Central Thesis of This Book

Let me now pull these strands together. The intermediate state provides strong, independent confirmation of the central thesis of this book: that God is genuinely temporal, not bound by creaturely clock-time, and engaged in real-time relationship with His creatures.

First, the conscious intermediate state requires a temporal engagement of God with disembodied souls. If God is timeless, He cannot hear "how long?" as a real question, cannot welcome a soul "today," cannot comfort a soul in its grief, cannot set a duration ("a little longer") for the waiting. The timeless view is not only in tension with Scripture's explicit statements about creation, Incarnation, and divine emotion (as I have argued in earlier chapters); it is also in tension with the texture of Scripture's teaching about life after death.

Second, the different texture of intermediate-state time reinforces the idea that divine temporality need not mean clock-bound temporality. If disembodied human souls live in real but differently textured time, how much more can we expect God's own temporal life to be radically unlike our clock-time — while still being genuine temporal succession. The intermediate state gives us a real-world (so to speak) example of a mode of temporality that is neither timeless nor tied to physical clocks.⁶³

Third, the NDE evidence, while not offering proof, converges suggestively with the biblical picture. The reports of altered temporal experience during brief disembodied episodes line up with the biblical hints that temporal experience in the intermediate state differs qualitatively from our present experience. Neither is timeless. Both are genuinely temporal. Both involve succession, memory, anticipation, and relation. But both operate in modes that are uncoupled from the physical clocks of this world.

Fourth, the ongoing engagement of God with the dead — receiving them, comforting them, answering them, and (I would argue) continuing to offer Christ to those who have not received Him — shows God acting temporally on a permanent basis. It is not that God is "temporal for the duration of the physical universe and then timeless again afterward." God is always temporal. He was temporal before creation (in the intra-Trinitarian life, as I argued in Chapter 26). He is temporal now in His engagement with the present age. He will be temporal throughout the new creation. And He is temporal, right now, in His relationship with the souls under the altar.⁶⁴

Pastoral Reflections

I want to close this chapter on a more personal note. I am a pastor's son. I have sat with Christians who have lost parents, children, and spouses. I have stood beside more than a few graves. Theology that cannot speak to those moments is dry theology, and theology that misleads in those moments is worse than useless.

What does all of this mean for the grieving Christian? It means that when our believing loved ones die, they are not asleep in some vacuum. They are not dissolved. They are not on ice. They are with Christ. They are conscious. They are at rest. They are comforted. They experience time, but in a way that is free from the aches and decays of this life. And they are waiting — not anxiously, not painfully, but in the way that the martyrs wait: oriented toward a future day when God will make all things right.⁶⁵

It also means that our prayers for those who have died matter differently than we sometimes assume. I do not believe in praying for the dead in the Catholic sense that our prayers somehow shorten their time in purgatory (I do not hold the doctrine of purgatory in that form). But I do believe that when we pray for the salvation of a friend or relative who has died without confessing Christ — if I am right about the postmortem opportunity — those prayers are real and God hears them. He meets souls in their moment. He pursues. He loves.⁶⁶

And for the grieving: the temporal God is the God who grieves with you. The Father did not watch Jesus die from a bored eternity. He grieved His Son in time. Jesus wept at Lazarus's tomb in time. The Holy Spirit is grieved by sin (Eph 4:30) — in time. The God who meets the dead meets the dying, and meets the bereaved. He is with them now, in the particular moment of their grief. And He waits with them for the day when He will wipe every tear from their eyes (Rev 21:4).

I think about my own grandmother, who died when I was a young adult. She was a quiet, faithful believer. She taught me to pray before I could read. When she died, I remember standing at her graveside and feeling the strange double reality of faith: her body in the casket, and yet — somehow, somewhere, in a mode I could not picture — her self with Christ. For years I found that double reality hard to hold together. The timeless God of much traditional theology did not help, because a timeless eternity made her state feel abstract, distant, and unreal. The God of dynamic temporality helps enormously. My grandmother is still with Christ — not in some frozen "eternal now" but in a living, conscious present that is continuous with her life of faith here. Her story has not been paused. It has continued.

This matters in another direction, too. If my grandmother's post-mortem existence is genuinely temporal — if she is still a living soul with experiences that follow one another — then the time between her death and my own, and between my own and the resurrection, is not merely subjective time "for us." It is real time for her as well, though measured differently. When I will meet her again at the resurrection, it will not be an awakening from a timeless sleep but a reunion of two continuous personal histories: mine here and hers there, each temporal, each real, now finally converging in the new creation. That picture, I think, is both more biblical and more comforting than any alternative I have encountered.

Conclusion

This chapter has argued that the conscious intermediate state involves a genuinely temporal mode of existence, and that God's interaction with disembodied souls during this period further demonstrates His temporal engagement with His creatures. Let me summarize what I have tried to establish.

First, substance dualism and the conscious intermediate state are well-grounded in both the biblical witness and in careful philosophical argument. I have summarized my reasons for holding this view without repeating the full argument, which lives in my earlier book on postmortem salvation.

Second, the three central biblical passages on temporal experience after death — Luke 16:19–31 (the rich man and Lazarus), Revelation 6:9–10 (the souls under the altar), and Luke 23:43 (the promise to the thief) — all portray the intermediate state as involving real temporal sequence, memory, anticipation, interaction, and waiting. There is no biblical warrant for reading these passages as descriptions of a timeless state.

Third, temporal experience in the intermediate state, while genuinely temporal, appears to be uncoupled from physical clock-time. This matches what NDE research suggests about disembodied or near-disembodied consciousness and it parallels the kind of temporality I have been arguing characterizes God Himself — genuine sequence, without being locked into the physical measures of our universe.

Fourth, God's engagement with souls in the intermediate state — welcoming, comforting, hearing, answering, and (on the postmortem opportunity view) pursuing — is inescapably temporal. A strictly timeless God cannot interact with disembodied souls in the ways Scripture describes.

Fifth, and most importantly, the intermediate state is yet another witness for the central thesis of this book. The God of Scripture is not a timeless Platonic Form, nor a distant observer of a block universe. He is a temporal, personal, responsive God, whose temporality transcends creaturely clock-time but is no less real for that. He lives with His people in time, whether they are embodied here, disembodied and at rest there, or — as He will one day make them — embodied and glorified in the new creation.⁶⁷

As we turn in the next chapter to the pastoral implications of divine temporality for prayer, suffering, and worship, we do so knowing that our loved ones who have gone before us are not outside of time in some Platonic eternity. They are with Christ, in a mode of time whose texture is different from ours but whose reality is fully preserved. Their waiting is real. Their comfort is real. Their expectation of the resurrection is real. And the God who is with them, and with us, is the same God — temporal, living, loving, and faithful — in every mode of time He has made. There is no clock beyond which we pass out of His reach. He is the God beyond the clock, and He is with us always, even unto the end of the age — and beyond.