#1003 Life in the Intermediate State

Dr. craig’s response

In my current work on eschatology, Markus, I’ve been thinking about life in the intermediate state. Theologians never seem to ask your question. They typically content themselves with examining the biblical data supporting the fact of an intermediate disembodied state of the soul between physical death and eschatological resurrection. But they do not ask what it is like. Let me share a bit of my thinking on this question.

I have found the seminal work of philosopher H. H. Price to be illuminating.^[i] As a secular thinker, Price takes no cognizance of the biblical doctrine that the souls of the redeemed go to be with Christ in heaven or paradise, while the souls of the unredeemed experience torment. Nevertheless, his characterization of disembodied existence after death can be easily adapted to fit a Christian worldview. 

Price wants to know whether we can form any idea of what a post-mortem disembodied human life might be like. The question is difficult because in a disembodied state, the supply of sensory stimuli is presumably cut off, since the soul has no sense organs and no nervous system. Therefore there can be no sense perception. Those in the intermediate state must, as Price insists, inhabit “another world” of their own or the “next world.” 

Like you, Price makes the provocative suggestion that the next world might be conceived as a kind of dream world. He does not mean that we are thoughts in the mind of God. Rather the next world would be like the worlds of our dreams. When we are asleep, sensory stimuli are largely cut off, but we still manage to have visual, auditory, and even tactile experiences. In our dreams we are provided with a multitude of objects of awareness about which we think and towards which we have desires and emotions. These objects are evidently not governed by the laws of physics and so often behave in bizarre ways. Price thinks that the next world might similarly be a world of mental images. 

In dreams we mentally form images of various objects. Price thinks that in a postmortem disembodied state, the soul may similarly image a surrounding world of objects. Imaging would replace sense perception, providing us with objects about which we could have thoughts, emotions, and wishes. One could have visual images of one’s own body that might form the continuing center of one’s image-world just as one’s body does in life. “Indeed,” he says, “to those who experienced it an image-world would be just as ‘real’ as this present world is; perhaps so like it, they would have considerable difficulty in realizing that they were dead. . . . It would be a satisfactory substitute for the material objects which we perceive in this present life.” 

In the intermediate state, there will be a multiplicity of souls, each imaging its own world. Nevertheless, Price suggests that “we can quite easily conceive that ‘meeting’ of a kind might still be possible between discarnate experients . . . provided we allow that telepathy is possible between them.” Not only would telepathic communication between souls be possible, but Price envisions as well what he calls “telepathic apparitions” of souls to one another. Price was a member of the famous Society for Psychical Research and so was open to the veridicality of various parapsychological phenomena like telepathy, clairvoyance, and communication with the dead. The notion of telepathic apparitions plays a significant role in contemporary discussion of the post-mortem appearances of Jesus. Some researchers think that apparitions of the recently deceased or of the Virgin Mary are best explained as telepathic apparitions which can be shared by a plurality of persons. In this case, it is living persons who telepathically prompt others to see apparitions of dead people. Whatever one thinks of the phenomenon of telepathy in this life, it does not seem to be a stretch of imagination to think that disembodied souls in the intermediate state would communicate with one another telepathically. Indeed, it is hard to see how they could communicate in any other way. 

But their images of one another need not be thought of as telepathically prompted by others, for such images may instead be mental projections of the experient. Perhaps Christ does cause an appropriate image of himself to be seen by every person in the intermediate state. But for the rest, mental projections would suffice. In that case, the same person may be differently visualized by other persons in the intermediate state. This would help to explain sympathetically various near-death experiences of persons who reported seeing bodily images of relatives and people with wings like angels and even fantastic beasts. Price is correct to suggest that disembodied souls need not be thought of as existing in darkness and silence rather than in a shared world of experiences, especially of one another.

There’s much more to be said about this, but I think these reflections can help to reduce the existential dread of such an intermediate state, though you need not be ashamed of having such dread, Markus, since the apostle Paul felt the same way. This doesn’t address your question about angels, who can, after all, materialize in the physical world in order to interact with physical objects. But that’s a question for another day!

[i] H. H. Price, “Personal Survival and the Idea of Another World,” in Classical and Contemporary Readings in the Philosophy of Religion, 2d ed., ed. John Hick (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1970), 379–393. ↩