where we really go when we die

When someone dies, especially in times when that death was unexpected or what seems to soon in that person's life, we often hear that while the dead are dead in body, they are nonetheless "now with the Lord" or " in heaven" or that they are "at peace". We seem beholden to a certain body/mind/soul distinction that while the body is that impermanent part of the self there is a permanent part that must go somewhere when the body dies.

In Scripture and in the course of human history this kind of distinction of the parts of the self is clear, especially if we take a trip down the road of Plato which has left its indelible geographic mark amidst seemingly all forests of discourse. The leap we make with this distinction is that the permanent part of the self that remains after the bodies dies must be conscious and that it must "go" somewhere right at the time the body ceases to work as a physiological container to be happy.

This sounds like a profoundly Greek idea since if the flesh is that part of the human self that succumbs to sin (see Romans 7) the soul must be that part that does not and therefore must go to that perfect resting place that is incorruptible. This idea alone sems to be a common one so it's not a question of if something lke this will happen. The question is when.

So do we go somewhere to be with God at the moment of death? Do we go to that light at the end of the tunnel? This is where Scripture is silent. Sure Paul talks about his own desire to be with God after death (e.g., 2Cor. 5:8, cf. Phil. 1:23). Jesus and Paul along with others talk about a resurrection of the dead accompanied with a last judgment (e.g. Matt. 22 and Rev. 6 among others). But none of it ever talks about going to "be with God" at the very moment of physical death. Rather, these are all references to an eschatological "general resurrection of the dead" that will happen at some point in time. It seems that the belief presented in Scripture is that all the dead will rise at some point in the eschaton, but there surprising silence that it occurs right off as our popular and pastoral sensibilities would lend us to believe.

The hymnody and litugies of the church for the bereaved focus on the notion that those who served Christ and believed will go to heaven as soon as they succumb to death. As the words in the hymn For All the Saints by William How (1864) attest:

O blest communion, fellowship divine!
We feebly struggle, they in glory shine;
yet all are one in thee, for all are thine.

Perhaps we preach the idea of raising to be with God (or the fear that non-conversion to Christ will send one to the firey pits of hell) at the moment of death as a comfort to the bereaved in times of utter sadness. Death of a loved one forces one to stand at the precipice of the void that rents life asunder at the most inopportune moments. Death is a hole in reality because a consciousness is not longer participating in one's reality.  Nothingness is a void that any life one can offer cannot fix, but desires greater compensation somewhere to fill it. Perhaps belief in this immediate union with God at the point of physical death is a way to anaethetize the sting of death.

I raise this because it is an assumption that we make in the church, but upon closer examination, there is only at best very very weak support that this is what happens. The best evidence we have in Scripture is that when we die we must remain unconscious as in a sort of sleep until the time arrives for this general resurection of the death which will be accompanied by a final judgment of God. To the one raised from the dead in this manner, the moment is instantaneous for there is no sense that time has passed at all. It is as if you have been sleeping and wake up with no memory of dreaming. To someone who wakes it is like time has not passed at all.

If this is true, and I see no rational conclusions from Scripture that would effectively argue otherwise, then it is not the dead who need prayers, but it is the bereaved that need consolation and spiritual compensation in a time of loss and indescribable void. It means that prayers for the saints to intercede and that prayers for the dead are wholly ineffectual except as a remembrance or veneration among the living. Our hopein death is in the final judgment. When we arise from our sleep in death, we will not have experienced a moment of time beyond the time when our bodies stopped working.

Related posts:

1. sin kills god: why jesus had to die
2. revised statement of faith