Chapter 3

What Christianity Has Always Taught About Dying

Two Thousand Years of Pastoral Wisdom at the Bedside — and the Charge That It Was All a Greek Mistake

An Old Man at the Stake

The fire was already lit when Polycarp prayed.¹ He was eighty-six years old. He had been a Christian, by his own count, for every one of those years. The proconsul had pressed him hard. Just swear by the genius of Caesar. Just say “Away with the atheists.” Just curse Christ, and you can go home. Polycarp answered the way the early Christians often answered: I have served Him eighty and six years, and He has never done me wrong. How then can I blaspheme my King who saved me?²

So they nailed him to the post and stacked the wood. The crowd in the stadium at Smyrna was loud. A few minutes earlier the proconsul had threatened him with wild beasts; Polycarp had answered that the beasts could be sent in if it pleased him, but that he would not change his mind. The proconsul had threatened him with fire; Polycarp had answered that the proconsul’s fire burned for an hour and went out, but that there was another fire he had not yet learned about — the fire of the judgment to come, kept for those who refused God.³ Then the soldiers took him and bound him for the pyre.

And just before the wood caught, he prayed. The prayer is recorded in The Martyrdom of Polycarp, a letter the church at Smyrna wrote shortly afterward to other Christian congregations. Polycarp blessed God for counting him worthy to be received into the company of the martyrs and to share — in soul and body, by the Holy Spirit — the cup of Christ.⁴ He prayed for resurrection. He prayed his thanks. Then the wood caught.

Notice what is not in this prayer. There is no panic. There is no despair. There is no pleading with God to be allowed to live a little longer. There is no hint that Polycarp thought he was about to fall asleep for fifteen hundred years and then wake up at the end of the world. He believed, very specifically, that in a few minutes he would be with Christ. He believed his soul would join the souls of the martyrs already there. He believed his body would be raised someday. None of this is unusual in early Christian writing. It is the air the early church breathed.

About fifty years later, in Carthage, a young Roman woman named Vibia Perpetua was sitting in a holding cell awaiting her death. She was twenty-two. She had a nursing son. She had been a Christian only a short time. Her father had begged her to recant; she had refused. Her diary survives — one of the earliest pieces of writing we have from a Christian woman, and one of the most moving documents in the entire patristic period.⁵ In it she records visions. In one she sees her dead younger brother, Dinocrates, in a place of suffering. She prays for him. In a later vision she sees him healed and clean and at peace. In another vision she sees a ladder reaching from the ground to heaven, with a serpent coiled at the foot. She climbs over the serpent and walks into a vast garden, where a white-haired shepherd hands her a curd of cheese, which she takes in cupped hands and eats. The vision ends, she writes, and she understands she will be martyred and that the shepherd is Christ.⁶

On the morning of the games, the diary stops. An eyewitness picks up the narrative. Perpetua walks into the arena with what the eyewitness calls a shining face. She faces the wild cow that the soldiers have driven at her, then helps her friend Felicitas to her feet. She is wounded. The crowd asks for the prisoners to be killed publicly. The young swordsman trembles. Perpetua takes his hand and guides his blade to her own throat.⁷

I begin with these two stories because they are early. The Polycarp account dates from around AD 155–167 — perhaps thirty years after Polycarp’s death, written by people who had known him. The Perpetua account dates from AD 203, with the diary section written by Perpetua herself only days before she died. These are the first generation of Christian deathbed witnesses, and what they show us is not a tradition that someone invented later. It is what the Christians of the second and early third centuries actually believed, said out loud, and bet their lives on. They believed the dying Christian was going somewhere. They believed Christ would meet them there. They believed they would be conscious, awake, themselves — not unconscious, not dissolved, not asleep until the end of time.

That conviction did not come from nowhere, and it did not stay there. It is, quite simply, what Christianity has always taught about dying.

Two Thousand Years, One Settled Conviction

Walk with me through the next two thousand years and watch what does not change. The languages change. The empires fall and rise and fall again. The liturgies of the East go one way, the liturgies of the West another. The medieval church layers up devotions and practices the early church never imagined. The Reformers strip away everything they think is unbiblical. The eighteenth century comes with its Enlightenment skepticism. The nineteenth century buries God and brings Him back. The twentieth century moves the dying out of homes and into hospitals and forgets what dying even looks like. And through all of that, the central Christian conviction about the dying soul stays where it has always been.

The dying Christian goes to be with Christ. Not someday — today. The soul departs the body. The soul is conscious. The soul is welcomed. Christ comes to receive the saved. Angels accompany the soul. The prayers of the church surround the deathbed. Death is real and frightening, but Christ has gone before, and so death is no longer the last word. Resurrection is the last word, and the conscious intermediate state — the “between” period from death until the resurrection at the end of time — is real, and it is awake.

This is what I want to demonstrate in this chapter. Not as a piece of antiquarian history. The point is not to admire what dead Christians used to think. The point is that this consistent tradition is now under attack from inside the church, and the attack is sharp enough to deserve a careful answer. Some thoughtful Christians today — mostly philosophers and biblical scholars who call themselves Christian physicalists — argue that this two-thousand-year stream of teaching about the dying soul is not Christian at all. It is, on their reading, a Greek philosophical idea that snuck into the church through the back door, contaminated the Bible’s original Hebrew vision of the human person, and has been distorting Christian pastoral practice ever since. The cure, they say, is to throw it all out and start again with a strictly physicalist anthropology — the view that we are nothing but our bodies, that there is no soul that survives bodily death, that the dying Christian simply ceases to exist until God recreates them at the resurrection.⁹

I think that proposal is mistaken. I want to take it seriously, and I will, in the last main section of this chapter. But before any argument can land, the actual tradition has to be on the table. So let me lay it out, period by period, in its own words. I will move quickly — this is one chapter, not a book — but I will quote the sources. And then we can talk about whether the Christian who hopes to die in the arms of a waiting Christ is following a Hebrew biblical pattern or, in fact, a leftover from Plato.

One more note before we begin. As we saw in Chapter 2, the live theological question for many in the conditional immortality movement — my own theological tradition — is whether to hold a dualist anthropology (body plus soul) or a physicalist one (body only). Most of the historic conditionalists held some form of dualism.¹⁰ The newer wave has pulled in the physicalist direction. So the question I am asking is not just an academic one. It is a question about which way one of the most important contemporary evangelical movements is going to go.

The Patristic Period: The Soul That Goes To Christ

The earliest Christian writers are the apostolic and post-apostolic Fathers — men who knew the apostles, or knew people who knew them, and who wrote in the late first and early second centuries. Their letters are short and pastoral. They are not philosophical treatises. But they keep saying the same thing about dying.

Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to Rome to be killed in the arena around AD 107, wrote ahead to the Roman church begging them not to interfere. He wanted to die. He explained why. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ.¹¹ Then a few lines later: Suffer me to be eaten by the beasts … suffer me to follow the example of the passion of my God.¹² The word he uses for what comes next is consistent across his seven authentic letters: he is going to attain to God. He is going to belong fully to Christ. He is going somewhere, immediately, and Christ is there. There is no sense at all that he is about to enter a long unconscious gap.

The same vocabulary fills the early martyrologies. Stephen, in the book of Acts, dies seeing the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God, and he prays, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59). The early martyrs imitate that prayer almost word for word. The pattern is set: the dying Christian gives up the spirit, and Christ receives it.

By the middle of the second century the patristic writers begin to say the same thing in slightly more theological language. Justin Martyr, writing around AD 150, refers without hesitation to the souls of the righteous dead living in a state of awareness, awaiting the resurrection.¹³ Irenaeus of Lyons, around AD 180, takes for granted that the soul goes to a place of waiting at death and that Christ Himself, in the three days between His crucifixion and resurrection, descended there to bring the Old Testament saints out into His presence. Irenaeus quotes a saying he attributes to one of the elders: that the Lord descended into the regions beneath the earth, preached His coming there too, and proclaimed the remission of sins to those who would believe.¹⁴

This belief in the descent of Christ — what later tradition called the “harrowing of hell” — is not a fringe doctrine. It is widely attested in the second and third centuries: Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Tertullian, Origen, and many others affirm it. Their interpretations differ. Some emphasize that Christ defeated the powers that held the dead captive. Some emphasize that Christ preached the gospel to those who had not heard it. Some emphasize that Christ released the patriarchs and prophets and brought them with Him into glory.¹⁵ But all of them assume two things: the dead are conscious, and Christ went to be with them. As Chapter 25 will develop in detail, the patristic descent tradition is one of the earliest and most theologically rich pieces of Christian teaching about what happens at the threshold of death. It assumes a substance-dualist anthropology from the very start.

The early Christian funeral practices say the same thing. We can see what the early Christians believed by looking at how they buried their dead and what they wrote on the walls of the catacombs. The Roman pagans cremated their dead, partly because they did not expect bodily resurrection. The Christians, almost without exception, buried theirs — sometimes at great expense, sometimes at risk of legal trouble — because they did expect bodily resurrection. The catacomb inscriptions are remarkable. They speak of the dead being “in peace,” in pace, often with a date that records the day the soul was “received” or “welcomed.” They speak of the dead person now living — the verb is in the present tense — with God, with Christ, in light, among the saints. They sometimes name the welcoming Christ Himself.¹⁶ The early Christians did not paint or carve their dead as gone. They painted them as alive somewhere else.

Prayers for the dead — another widespread early Christian practice — depend on the same picture. If the dead are unconscious, prayers for them make no sense. The early Christians prayed for them anyway. We saw it in Perpetua’s diary, where she prays for her brother Dinocrates and is given a vision of his improved condition. We see it in inscriptions, in funeral masses, in the writings of Tertullian, who refers to the customary annual prayers for the dead in language that suggests the practice is already old.¹⁷ Whatever the theological warrant for the practice (and the post-Reformation churches have disagreed sharply on that point, which is not my topic here), the assumption underlying it is unmistakable: the dead are conscious, the dead are still in some sense the persons they were, and the prayers of the living can reach them.

By the time we reach the great patristic synthesis — Athanasius and the Cappadocians in the East, Augustine in the West — the framework is settled. Augustine famously corrected his own earlier flirtations with Neoplatonism in his Retractions, but he never abandoned the conviction that the human person is a body-soul composite, that the soul survives the body’s death, and that the soul of the believer goes to be with Christ.¹⁸ What Augustine took from Plato was not the doctrine of an immortal soul that pre-exists embodied life; that he explicitly rejected. What he took was a vocabulary — words like anima and spiritus — that he then bent to fit the biblical picture. As Andrew Hronich rightly puts it, Augustine’s position is not Platonism warmed over but the Bible interpreting itself with the help of available philosophical tools; his doctrine of the soul’s immortality is grounded in God’s breathing life into Adam, not in Platonic pre-existence, and his Christian commitment to the resurrection of the body is something Plato never affirmed.¹⁹

By the close of the patristic period, the basic Christian story of dying is in place. The dying Christian commends the spirit to Christ. The soul departs the body. The soul is met — by Christ, by the angels, sometimes (in the literature) by the saints who have gone before. The soul enters a state of conscious waiting, with the saved in the presence of Christ and the unsaved in some other place that the Fathers most often call Hades. The body is buried with hope. The resurrection is the final word.

This is what the medieval church inherited.

The Medieval West and the Rise of the Ars Moriendi

For most of the Middle Ages, dying happened at home. The dying person lay in a bed, typically the same bed they had slept in for years, sometimes the same bed they had been born in. The room was not private. It was crowded. The family was there. The neighbors were there. The priest was there with the sacraments. Often the local children were brought in to see what dying looked like, because dying was something Christians ought to know how to do. The whole village understood that what was happening in that room mattered — not just for the dying person but for everyone watching.²⁰

The medieval church developed a substantial pastoral literature for these moments. The greatest flowering of this tradition came in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in the wake of the Black Death and at a time when the church was painfully aware that millions of Christians were dying badly — without preparation, without the sacraments, without even a priest. Out of that crisis emerged a body of texts called the Ars Moriendi, the “Art of Dying.”²¹

The Ars Moriendi tradition came in two main forms. The longer version, the Tractatus artis bene moriendi (a Latin phrase meaning roughly “treatise on the art of dying well”), was written probably between 1414 and 1418, possibly by a Dominican author at the Council of Constance. The shorter version, the Speculum artis bene moriendi, was an illustrated book aimed at lay readers and pastors who needed a quick reference at the bedside. It was one of the very first books printed when the printing press came to Europe, and it spread across the continent with extraordinary speed in the late fifteenth century.²²

What did these books teach? They taught, in the most concrete and practical way, that dying was a moment of spiritual struggle, that the dying soul faced specific temptations, that those temptations had specific answers, and that the work of the deathbed was to help the dying soul cling to Christ. The illustrated version laid out five temptations that a dying Christian was likely to face, each paired with a corresponding consolation.

The first temptation was a temptation against faith. As death approached, the demons (in the iconography) whispered to the dying person that the gospel was a lie, that there was no resurrection, that all the years of trust had been wasted. The corresponding consolation was the appearance of the saints — David, Moses, Mary Magdalene, Peter — reminding the dying soul of the long history of God’s faithfulness to sinners and to the wavering. The second temptation was despair: the dying soul was pressed to remember every sin, every failure, every betrayal, until it concluded it could not possibly be saved. The corresponding consolation was the appearance of Christ on the cross, with His outstretched arms, reminding the soul that the death of Jesus was sufficient even for this. The third temptation was impatience: the dying soul, in physical agony, was tempted to curse God for the suffering. The consolation was the patient endurance of the saints. The fourth temptation was vainglory or spiritual pride: the dying soul was tempted to congratulate itself on a faithful life and so to die complacent. The consolation was humility. The fifth temptation was avarice or worldly attachment: the dying soul was tempted to grieve more for the loss of family, possessions, and life itself than for the loss of God. The consolation was the surrender of every earthly tie into Christ’s hands.²³

These were not abstractions. The medieval pastor knew, from years of bedside experience, that these are exactly the temptations the dying actually face. Modern hospice chaplains will tell you the same thing today. The phenomena have not changed. What changed, eventually, is that the church stopped naming them, stopped preparing the dying for them, and stopped equipping pastors to recognize and address them.

Around the temptations and consolations, the Ars Moriendi structured a full set of bedside practices. The dying person was to make confession. They were to receive the eucharist (called the viaticum, the “food for the journey”) one last time. They were to be anointed with oil. The seven penitential psalms were prayed. The litany of the saints was sung. The crucifix was held in the dying hand or set before the dying eyes. As the moment approached, the priest or family member began the prayers of commendation: Go forth, O Christian soul, out of this world, in the name of God the Father almighty who created thee, in the name of Jesus Christ the Son of the living God who suffered for thee, in the name of the Holy Spirit who was poured out upon thee … may thy place this day be in peace, and thy abode in holy Sion.²⁴ The whole structure pointed in one direction: hand the soul over to Christ.

You can see in this material exactly the same theological assumptions the second-century Fathers made. The dying are conscious. The dying are facing a real spiritual encounter. Christ is there. The angels are there. The soul is going somewhere. The body will rise. The medieval iconography famously shows the dying Christian in bed, with demons reaching up from beneath and angels reaching down from above, and Christ Himself often visible in the upper corner of the image, waiting. That iconography is not a mistake. It is what the medieval church believed was happening, on both sides of the visible curtain, when a person died.

Did the medieval church get everything right? Of course not. Some of what grew up around dying in the late medieval West — the elaborate calculations about purgatory, the sale of indulgences for the dead, the obsession with last-minute interventions — the Reformation rightly cleared away. But underneath the medieval excesses was the older patristic conviction, and that conviction passed straight through the Reformation untouched, because it was not the medieval excesses but the patristic core. The Reformers did not believe the dying Christian fell asleep until the resurrection. They believed, with Polycarp and Perpetua and Augustine and Bonaventure, that the dying Christian went to be with Christ.

To which we now turn.

The Reformation Inheritance

In 1519, two years after he posted the Ninety-Five Theses, Martin Luther preached and then published a short pastoral piece called A Sermon on Preparing to Die. It is one of his most accessible writings. Luther wrote it for a lay friend who was facing a serious illness and needed concrete pastoral counsel. The sermon is striking for several reasons. First, it is written entirely in the medieval Ars Moriendi tradition. Luther knows the tradition; he uses it; he is a Catholic monk turned Reformer, not an enemy of pastoral care. Second, it strips out the elements he considered unbiblical — the elaborate purgatorial calculations, the indulgence trade — and keeps the core. Third, it gives the dying Christian three pictures to hold on to in the moment of death: look at Christ on the cross, and see your sin nailed there with Him; look at Christ’s death, and see your own death already died; look at Christ’s grace, and see your own grace already given.²⁵

What Luther does not do, anywhere in this sermon, is suggest that dying is the soul’s annihilation. Luther occasionally used the metaphor of “sleep” for the dead — he is sometimes cited by modern soul-sleep advocates because of it — but a careful reading of the body of his work makes clear that he meant the metaphor as the New Testament uses it: the body sleeps in the grave, awaiting resurrection. Luther is firm that the soul of the believer is with Christ. In his commentary on Genesis he says plainly that the soul of Abraham lives with God, and that Abraham is even now alive, awaiting the resurrection of his body.²⁶ The dying Lutheran — the dying Lutheran of Luther’s own teaching — goes to be with Christ.

Calvin is even more emphatic. His earliest theological book, Psychopannychia (1534), is an extended attack on the soul-sleep doctrine taught by some Anabaptists of his time. In it Calvin argues, page after page, that the souls of the saints are awake and consciously with Christ. He is unsparing. He calls the doctrine a heresy. He thinks soul-sleep makes nonsense of Paul’s longing in Philippians 1 to depart and be with Christ, of Christ’s promise to the thief in Luke 23, and of John’s vision of the souls under the altar in Revelation 6.²⁷ Calvin would have been startled to hear that his own theological tradition might one day include people who taught what he had spent his first major work refuting.

The Reformed catechisms carry the same conviction forward. The Heidelberg Catechism (1563) is one of the great Reformation pastoral documents. Its first question and answer remain, after four hundred and sixty years, one of the most beloved passages in any catechism ever written. What is your only comfort, in life and in death? The answer runs to seven lines, and the very first phrase is the heart of the matter: That I am not my own, but belong — body and soul, in life and in death — to my faithful Saviour, Jesus Christ.²⁸ Notice the anthropology: body and soul. Both belong to Christ. Both, in life and in death. The dying Reformed Christian, in this catechism that German children memorized for generations, does not become unconscious at death; they remain Christ’s, body and soul, through the dying and beyond. Question 57 of the same catechism is even more direct: it asks what comfort the resurrection of the body gives, and answers that the soul will, immediately after this life, be taken up to Christ its head, while the body waits for resurrection at the last day.²⁹

The English-speaking Reformation produced its own great pastoral text on dying, and it remained in print for almost three hundred years. Jeremy Taylor, the Anglican bishop and writer, published The Rule and Exercises of Holy Living in 1650 and The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying in 1651. The two volumes were sold and read together. Taylor was writing during the English Civil War, in a country where churches had been closed, where the Book of Common Prayer had been suppressed, and where ordinary Christians were dying without pastoral care of any kind. He wrote Holy Dying as a substitute — a manual that any literate Christian could pick up and use at the bedside of a dying friend.³⁰

The book is a treasure. Taylor walks through the whole Christian life as preparation for the moment of death. He insists, with Luther and the medieval tradition, that the work of dying well is not a five-minute crisis at the end but the natural fruit of a life lived in awareness of death. He gives prayers for the dying. He gives instructions for the visitors. He addresses the temptations that will press on the dying soul — despair, fear, attachment to life — with the same realism the Ars Moriendi manuals had shown two centuries earlier. He assumes throughout that what is happening at the deathbed is the soul’s passage to be with Christ. The book ran through edition after edition. John Wesley used it. Samuel Johnson read it on his own deathbed. The Anglican tradition’s pastoral theology of dying owes more to Taylor than to any other single writer.³¹

The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), the great Reformed creedal statement of the Puritan period, is similarly explicit. Chapter 32, on the state of human persons after death and the resurrection, says that the bodies of human beings after death return to dust, but that their souls — which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence — immediately return to God who gave them. The souls of the righteous are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies. The souls of the wicked are cast into hell.³² The phrase “neither die nor sleep” is not a throwaway. The Westminster divines knew about the soul-sleep doctrine. They knew about the Anabaptist position. They wrote neither die nor sleep precisely to rule it out. The Puritan Reformed tradition is uniformly clear on this point. The dying Christian goes to be with Christ.

The same picture runs through the Wesleyan tradition. John Wesley’s sermons and letters speak constantly of the soul’s entrance into the presence of Christ at death. The famous deathbed scenes recorded by Wesley’s biographers — his own (“The best of all is, God is with us”) and those of his early Methodists — assume that what is happening is conscious passage, not unconscious sleep. The Methodist hymnal that Charles Wesley wrote for his brother’s movement is full of language about being “with Christ” in the moment of death. The Anglican Book of Common Prayer’s burial service, written by Cranmer in the sixteenth century and still used in much of the English-speaking world today, prays for the soul of the departed servant of God on the assumption that the soul is somewhere conscious to receive God’s mercy.³³

One could keep going. The Anglican Caroline divines, the Continental Reformed, the Lutheran orthodoxy, the Puritans, the Pietists, the early Baptists, the early Methodists, the Anglican evangelicals of the eighteenth century, the Princeton Reformed of the nineteenth, the high-church Tractarians of the same era, the missionary movement of the nineteenth century — you would search a long time before you found a major Protestant tradition that taught that the dying Christian was unconscious until the resurrection. The mainstream Reformation tradition kept the patristic and medieval framework intact. It cleaned out the medieval excesses. It did not touch the basic shape.

And then there is the East.

The Eastern Orthodox Tradition

The Eastern Orthodox church, separated from Rome by the schism of 1054 but tracing its theology and worship in an unbroken line back to the same patristic period that the West does, has its own rich theology of dying. Most Western Christians know almost nothing about it. That is a loss, because the East often preserves — sometimes more vividly than the West does — the patristic emphases that the West has dulled.

The Orthodox have a service called the Canon for the Departure of the Soul, which is prayed at the bedside of a dying Christian. It is sometimes attributed to Andrew of Crete in the eighth century. The canon walks the dying soul through nine sections of prayer, addressing in turn the angels, the Mother of God, the saints, and Christ Himself. The dying person, if conscious, is asked to participate; if not, the priest and family pray on their behalf. The whole service is built on the assumption that the soul is on the threshold of an encounter and that the prayers of the church accompany it across.³⁴

The Orthodox funeral service is similarly striking. The dying are remembered as fallen asleep in the Lord, but the language of “sleep” is liturgical and metaphorical, not anthropological. The same service prays for the soul of the departed in language that assumes full conscious presence with Christ. The body is buried with great care. Photographs of Orthodox funerals show the open coffin, the priest reading the appointed prayers, the family kissing the icon placed on the chest of the dead. The whole structure is a confession that the body matters, that the soul is now with Christ, and that the resurrection is coming.

One feature of Orthodox folk theology has occasionally drawn Western attention. In some Orthodox circles, especially in Russian and Slavic Orthodoxy, there developed a teaching about what are called the teloniai, often translated “tollhouses” or “customs houses.” The idea is that the soul, after leaving the body, ascends through a series of stations, each presided over by spiritual powers, where its sins of a particular kind are examined. The soul of the believer, accompanied by angels, is given the grace to pass through; the soul of the wicked is held back. The teaching has its roots in some patristic homilies and in certain monastic visions, particularly the well-known account of the soul of Theodora in the Life of Saint Basil the Younger.³⁵

Most contemporary Orthodox theologians treat the tollhouse teaching with caution. Some accept it as a legitimate folk-theological elaboration of biblical and patristic themes. Some regard it as dangerous mythology that ought to be retired. The official Orthodox dogma does not require it. What no Orthodox teacher denies is the underlying conviction: that the soul, on leaving the body, passes through a real spiritual encounter, that powers of evil seek to frighten or claim it, and that the prayers of the church and the grace of Christ carry the believer through. The folk-theological elaborations differ between East and West — the Eastern tollhouses, the medieval Western demons in the Ars Moriendi woodcuts — but the underlying picture is the same. The dying soul is conscious, the soul is in real spiritual encounter, and Christ is the one who finally meets it.

I introduce the Eastern tradition not because the book’s argument depends on its specifics, but because it provides one more witness to the consistency of the historic Christian theology of dying. East and West, separated by language, liturgy, and a thousand years of canonical estrangement, agree on the framework. The dying Christian goes to be with Christ. The soul is conscious in the meantime. The body waits for resurrection. This is not the position of one branch of Christianity. It is the position, with minor variations, of every major branch.

The Twentieth Century: A Tradition Lost

And then, in the twentieth century, something changed. Not the doctrine. The doctrine never changed. What changed was the practice.

For nearly two thousand years, Christians had died at home. They had died with their families around them. They had died with the priest or pastor at the bedside. They had died with the sacraments, or the prayers, or at least the songs of their tradition. They had died with people who had seen others die and so were not panicked when it happened to one of their own. They had died inside a tradition that knew what dying was for.

By the middle of the twentieth century, almost none of that was true. Dying had moved into hospitals. The dying patient was surrounded by professionals — doctors, nurses, technicians — who, however good and kind, were not part of the patient’s family or church and could not pray with the dying patient at the level of communal participation that the older deathbed had assumed. The family was visiting hours. The pastor was on call. The sacraments, if administered at all, were administered hurriedly, often by a chaplain the patient had never met. The dying experience was medicalized, professionalized, and de-ritualized. Dying became a private medical event managed by strangers.³⁶

Atul Gawande, the surgeon and writer whose 2014 book Being Mortal documents this shift more powerfully than any other recent treatment, points out a striking statistic. In 1945, about half of Americans died at home. By the 1980s, that figure had fallen below fifteen percent. The shift was so complete that for two generations of American Christians, almost no one alive had ever seen a person die. The deathbed was something on television. The actual dying happened behind hospital doors, often after the family had gone home for the night, often in the company of a nurse who had a chart to fill out.³⁷

The pastoral consequences were severe. Pastors stopped going to deathbeds because there were no deathbeds in the sense that the older tradition had known — only hospital rooms, where pastors had limited access and no clear role. Lay Christians stopped knowing what to do at a deathbed because they had never seen one and had no liturgy and no pastor to lean on. Families came apart at funerals because the funerals had nothing to say about what had just happened. Christians died without their tradition’s resources because their tradition’s resources required a setting and a community that no longer existed.

The doctrine was still there. You could open the catechism and read that the dying Christian goes to be with Christ. You could read Heidelberg Q. 1 in any Sunday morning service. But the practice had thinned to almost nothing. The historic Ars Moriendi wisdom — the temptations of the dying soul, the consolations, the bedside prayers, the communal accompanying of the dying through the threshold — was largely gone. Lydia Dugdale, the physician and bioethicist who has done more than almost anyone to document this loss, calls it “the lost art of dying,” and her book by that title makes the case that we have not just lost a body of texts but a way of being Christian at the end of life.³⁸

The loss is not because the doctrine was wrong. The loss is because the practices that made the doctrine livable have not survived modern medicine and modern individualism. The dying Christian today still goes to be with Christ; the soul is still conscious; the body is still going to rise. But the modern Christian often does not know how to live in that picture. The pastor often does not know how to preach into it. The bereaved often do not know how to name what they are grieving. The church has the doctrine; it has lost the practices that made the doctrine into pastoral wisdom.

The Contemporary Recovery

The good news is that recovery is underway. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, three streams have started to bring the historic Christian theology of dying back into pastoral and academic visibility. The first is the hospice movement. The second is a body of recent theological writing on dying. The third is — though most of its writers do not yet recognize the connection — the careful study of near-death experiences, which is the subject of the rest of this book.

The hospice movement, founded by Cicely Saunders in London in the late 1960s, was Christian to the core in its origins. Saunders was an Anglican who had worked as a nurse, then a social worker, then a physician, all with the dying. She founded St. Christopher’s Hospice in 1967 with the explicit intention of bringing back what hospitals had lost: holistic, embodied, religiously aware care for the dying. The movement she started has gone global. Today, hospice care — which now operates in most of the developed world, often delivered in patients’ own homes — brings the dying back into the social and religious settings the older tradition assumed. Hospice is not, by itself, a Christian theology of dying; many hospice patients are not Christians. But the framework hospice provides — presence, listening, attention to spiritual as well as physical pain, the affirmation that dying is a part of living — is recognizably the framework the historic church had developed.³⁹

The second stream is recent theological writing. Allen Verhey’s The Christian Art of Dying: Learning from Jesus (2011) is the most ambitious recent attempt to retrieve the Ars Moriendi tradition for contemporary readers. Verhey, who was both a theologian and a hospital ethicist, walks through the medieval texts in detail, then asks what their pastoral wisdom might look like in twenty-first-century settings. He does not romanticize the medieval. He notices its excesses. But he insists, rightly, that the medieval church knew things about dying that the modern church has forgotten and that we cannot afford not to relearn.⁴⁰

Stanley Hauerwas, especially in Naming the Silences (1990), has written for decades about how Christians die and how the church can companion them. His emphasis is less on the medieval texts and more on the formation of communities in which dying is something Christians do together. Lydia Dugdale’s The Lost Art of Dying (2020) brings the conversation into the contemporary medical setting; she is a physician writing for fellow physicians and for patients about what dying ought to look like and why our current medical culture is so bad at it.⁴¹

And then there is the third stream, which is what most of this book is about. The careful study of near-death experiences over the past fifty years has begun to provide something the older tradition never had: empirical data on what dying looks like from the dying person’s side of the curtain. The historic Christian tradition spoke about the soul departing the body, the encounter with Christ, the angels, the conscious intermediate state, on theological grounds. The contemporary NDE researchers — many of whom did not begin as Christians and most of whom were not trying to vindicate any particular theological position — have documented thousands of cases in which dying people report exactly these phenomena: the sense of leaving the body, the awareness of the medical team working on them, the encounter with deceased loved ones, the encounter with a being of light who is often (especially among Christian NDErs) identified as Christ. As Chapter 24 will argue at length, the NDE evidence is not undermining the historic Christian theology of dying; it is confirming it from outside.

What Stays the Same, What Has Varied

I have moved fast through two thousand years. Let me stop and do the obvious work of asking what is consistent across the tradition and what has varied.

Consistent across the whole tradition, from Polycarp to the present, are six convictions. The dying Christian goes to be with Christ. The conscious intermediate state is real. The soul is accompanied by angels at the moment of death. Christ Himself comes to receive the dying soul. The dying are surrounded, ideally, by the prayers of the church. Death is fearful but not despairing, because Christ has gone before and made the road His own. Every major branch of the Christian tradition — Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Wesleyan, Baptist, Pentecostal — has held these convictions. The terminology has varied. The liturgical practices have varied. The doctrinal framework around the convictions has varied. The convictions themselves have not.

What has varied is the iconography and the framework. The medieval West pictured the deathbed crowded with demons and angels in a visible struggle for the soul. The patristic East pictured a more processional encounter, with angels accompanying the soul on a journey upward. The Slavic Orthodox tradition added the tollhouses. The Roman Catholic tradition developed the doctrine of purgatory. The Anabaptists, on the very edge of the Reformation, rejected most of this and produced (in some quarters) a soul-sleep theology that the mainline Reformers fought hard. The contemporary Christian-physicalist position rejects the framework even more thoroughly than the Anabaptists did. These are real differences. They are not minor.

But notice where the differences fall. The medieval and patristic and modern conservative positions differ from one another about how the dying soul makes its journey, where exactly it goes, what intermediate stations (if any) it passes through, and what theological status the prayers of the living have for the soul of the dead. They do not differ about whether the soul is conscious, whether the soul exists separate from the body in the meantime, or whether Christ meets the dying soul. The serious dissenters on those questions are the Anabaptist soul-sleep tradition (a tiny minority of historic Christianity) and the contemporary Christian-physicalist tradition (a creature of the second half of the twentieth century). Both are dissenters from a stream so wide and so old that it is fair to say they are dissenters from Christianity’s consensus position on dying.

That observation brings us to the most important question this chapter has to answer. The Christian-physicalist objection is not that the historic tradition is inconsistent. The Christian-physicalist concedes that the historic tradition is consistent. The objection is that the historic tradition is wrong — that it has been consistently making the same mistake for two thousand years, and that the mistake was inherited from Greek philosophy rather than learned from the Bible. The historic tradition, on this telling, took the biblical writers’ rich and integrated picture of the human person and ran it through a Greek philosophical filter that broke the person apart into “body” and “soul,” with the soul understood as the real self that survives bodily death. Once you remove the Greek filter, the argument goes, the Bible looks rather different.

This is a serious argument. It has been advanced by serious Christians. It deserves a careful answer.

The Greek-Contamination Charge — And Why It Fails

The most thoroughgoing recent statement of the Christian-physicalist position is Joel Green’s Body, Soul, and Human Life: The Nature of Humanity in the Bible (2008). Green is a New Testament scholar, a methodist, an evangelical, and a careful and gracious writer. His book is widely cited, including by some in my own conditional immortality tradition. Nancey Murphy’s Bodies and Souls, or Spirited Bodies? (2006) makes much the same case from a more philosophical angle. Together, these two books represent the strongest Christian-physicalist position currently in print.⁴²

The Green-Murphy argument runs roughly as follows. The Hebrew Bible presents a holistic picture of the human person. The Hebrew word nephesh, often translated “soul,” does not refer to a separable immaterial part of the human being; it refers to the human being as a whole, considered as a living creature. The same is true of the Hebrew ruach (“spirit”). The Old Testament does not have a doctrine of an immortal soul. The New Testament, on this reading, mostly continues the Hebrew picture, though it has absorbed some of the Greek vocabulary and so uses words like psyche and pneuma in ways that can be misread as dualistic. The early church, increasingly Greek-speaking and Greek-thinking, took this New Testament vocabulary and ran it through a Platonic and Neoplatonic filter, producing the doctrine of the immortal soul that has dominated Christian theology since. To recover the biblical picture, we have to reverse the filter, which means giving up the doctrine of the immortal soul and recognizing that the human person is a unified embodied being who simply ceases to exist at death and waits for God’s recreation at the resurrection.⁴³

I want to take this argument seriously and respond to it carefully. Let me offer three responses, in order of strength.

First. The Christian-physicalist exegesis of the relevant biblical texts is strained. There are too many of them and they say too much. Genesis 35:18 says of Rachel, in childbirth, that as her soul (nephesh) departed (tetzeh) — for she was dying — she called her son’s name Ben-Oni. The narrator’s assumption is plain: something departs when Rachel dies. First Kings 17:21–22 records Elijah praying that the soul of the widow’s son return to him; the boy comes back to life. Ecclesiastes 12:7 says that at death the dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it. Daniel 12:2 speaks of those who sleep in the dust of the earth, with some awakening to everlasting life and others to shame. Matthew 10:28 distinguishes those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul from God who is able to destroy both body and soul in Gehenna. Luke 23:43 has Jesus telling the dying thief that he will be with Christ today in Paradise. Second Corinthians 5:6–8 has Paul saying that to be away from the body is to be at home with the Lord. Philippians 1:23 has him longing to depart and be with Christ. Revelation 6:9–11 shows John the souls of those slain for the word of God, conscious, crying out for vindication, given white robes, and told to wait. Hebrews 12:23 speaks of the “spirits of the righteous made perfect” who are present with the assembly of the firstborn in heaven.⁴⁴

You can read each of these texts in ways that minimize the dualist reading. You can do that with one or two of them and end up with a defensible alternative. Doing it with all of them at once requires sustained reinterpretation against the natural reading of the texts. The conditional immortality tradition has long held that careful biblical exegesis — the kind that takes the Hebrew background seriously, that respects the author’s intent, that does not collapse the texts into a system — favors a substance-dualist anthropology with a conscious intermediate state and a final destruction (rather than eternal torment) of the irrevocably wicked. Edward Fudge, the dean of conditional-immortality biblical scholarship, was always emphatic on this point. So is Stephen Jonathan in Grace Beyond the Grave. So is James Beilby in Postmortem Opportunity. The dualist anthropology is built into the entire CI/PO tradition, not because of Greek metaphysics but because of careful biblical reading.⁴⁵

Second. The corruption argument proves too much. If the Greek philosophical world really did distort the biblical anthropology of the early Christians as severely as Green and Murphy claim, the same Greek world ought to have distorted other early Christian doctrines too. But it is the same Fathers — Athanasius, the Cappadocians, Cyril of Alexandria, Augustine — who gave us the orthodox doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation, the two natures of Christ, and the relation of Christ’s humanity to His divinity. If we are going to say that these Fathers were Hellenized into a wrong anthropology, we have to give a principled account of why their Hellenization left their Christology, Trinitarian theology, and sacramental theology intact while corrupting their anthropology. Christian physicalists generally do not give that account. They tend simply to assume that on the points where the Fathers disagree with their position, the Fathers were Hellenized, while on the points where the Fathers agree with their position, the Fathers were faithful. That is not an argument. It is a rhetorical strategy. The historic Christian theology of dying is a piece of the same patristic synthesis that gave us Nicea and Chalcedon. We do not get to keep one and throw out the other.⁴⁶

Third. The empirical evidence the rest of this book examines supports the historic tradition’s reading. This is the heart of the matter. If the Christian physicalist were right — if the soul is not a thing that can be separated from the body and survive its death — then we should not expect to find documented cases of conscious, perceptive, accurate awareness during periods of clinical death when the brain is not functioning. We should especially not expect to find such cases involving accurate visual perception by the congenitally blind, accurate awareness of events at distant locations, encounters with deceased relatives unknown to the patient to be dead, or any of the other markers of veridicality that NDE research has documented. The strict physicalist prediction has been very clear for decades. The empirical findings have been very clearly contrary to the prediction. As Chapter 23 will argue in detail, the cumulative case from veridical NDE research is best explained by a substance-dualist anthropology — which is precisely the anthropology the historic Christian tradition has held. The empirical evidence and the theological tradition converge.

Let me put the three responses together. The Christian-physicalist case is that the historic tradition is biblically wrong, philosophically Hellenized, and theologically expendable. The historic tradition’s case is that it is biblically grounded, philosophically appropriate (using Greek tools without being captured by Greek metaphysics), and theologically central. The empirical evidence the rest of this book examines is consistent with the historic tradition and very difficult to reconcile with the Christian-physicalist alternative. I do not say this to score points. I say it because the choice has real pastoral consequences. If the Christian physicalist is right, the dying Christian is approaching annihilation followed by recreation. If the historic tradition is right, the dying Christian is approaching a conscious encounter with the Christ they have loved. These are not the same. They produce different deathbeds, different funerals, different pastoral practices, different ways of being a church.

I think the historic tradition is right.

Toward a Recovered Christian Practice of Dying

So what would it look like for the contemporary church to recover this tradition? Not as a museum piece. As a living pastoral practice.

I will not develop the full pastoral vision here; Chapter 32 takes up that work in detail and Chapter 33 develops the companion question of how those who are not themselves dying can walk with those who are. But I want to sketch the horizon, because the horizon shapes how we read the rest of this book.

A recovered Christian practice of dying would begin long before the deathbed. It would begin in catechism and discipleship. It would teach Christians, while they are healthy, what dying is and what it is for. It would not hide death from children. It would not pretend that the elderly and the dying belong somewhere out of sight. It would treat the long Christian life as preparation for a single, climactic, hope-filled passage. Jeremy Taylor knew this. Lydia Dugdale knows it. The medieval village knew it. We have largely forgotten it.

A recovered practice would have liturgical resources for the deathbed. Some traditions still have these — the Roman and Anglican rites of anointing and commendation, the Orthodox Canon for the Departure of the Soul. Other traditions, including most evangelical free-church traditions, have nothing to offer the dying except improvised prayer and a few Bible verses. That is a poverty. Free-church evangelicals especially could benefit from carefully recovering the patristic and Reformation prayers of commendation, adapting them where their theology requires, and putting them in the hands of pastors and lay believers who are willing to use them at bedsides.

A recovered practice would train pastors. Many evangelical pastors today have never been at a Christian deathbed. They are not at fault; the structural conditions have changed under them. But ministerial training programs can teach what the older tradition knew: how to identify the temptations of the dying soul, how to address them, how to pray with the dying, how to conduct the moment of death and the family’s grief afterward. The historic tradition is not just a set of beliefs. It is a set of practices, and practices have to be taught.

A recovered practice would partner with hospice and palliative medicine. The hospice movement was Christian in its origins and is still substantially Christian-friendly in its outlook. Christians who work in hospice often find themselves doing the older tradition’s work without naming it. Christians who do not work in hospice can support the dying members of their congregations through hospice better than they often do, because hospice gives families and pastors back the time, presence, and pastoral access that the hospital had taken away. The Christian church should be hospice’s most natural ally and is not always so today.

A recovered practice would, finally, be unembarrassed about its theological convictions. The dying Christian is not entering nothingness. The dying Christian is entering Christ’s presence. The pastor at the bedside can say so, plainly and confidently, on the basis of two thousand years of Christian teaching and (the rest of this book argues) the empirical findings of careful NDE research. The bereaved can be told, plainly and confidently, that their loved one is conscious, in the presence of Christ, and waiting for the resurrection. The historic tradition has these resources. We can use them.

Closing

I started this chapter with two ancient deaths. Polycarp at the stake; Perpetua in the arena. They believed they were going somewhere. Specifically, they believed they were going to Christ. They believed it without philosophical hedging, without metaphysical sophistication, without footnotes. They believed it because they had read the words of Jesus to the dying thief, the words of Paul about being absent from the body and at home with the Lord, the words of Stephen as he gave up his spirit. They believed it because the Lord they had served had told them it was so.

Two thousand years of Christians have believed it after them. The medieval villager dying in his bed surrounded by his family. The Reformer reciting the Heidelberg Catechism. The Russian peasant praying the Canon for the Dying. The Anglican parishioner at evensong saying the words of Cranmer’s funeral service. The Methodist farmer hearing John Wesley’s “The best of all is, God is with us.” The Pentecostal grandmother dying in her hospital bed in Kansas. They have believed, with one voice across the centuries and around the world, that the dying Christian goes to be with Christ.

The contemporary Christian-physicalist movement, motivated by good intentions and serious biblical engagement, asks us to set this consensus aside. I have tried to argue, in this chapter, that we should not. The biblical case is strong. The patristic, medieval, Reformation, and Eastern Orthodox traditions are remarkably consistent. The Christian-physicalist exegesis of the texts is strained. The Greek-contamination charge proves too much. And the empirical evidence the rest of this book examines supports the historic tradition rather than the contemporary alternative.

The next chapters turn to that empirical evidence. We will look at what happens to the body as it dies (Chapter 4) and what happens to the brain (Chapter 5). Then we will spend many chapters on what NDE research has documented about what dying is like from the dying person’s side — the out-of-body phase, the tunnel and the light, the encounter with deceased loved ones, the encounter with the being of light who is so often, especially among Christian NDErs, identified as Christ Himself. By the time we have walked through that evidence, the question this chapter began with — whether the historic Christian tradition has been right about dying for two thousand years — will not be a question we have to answer on the basis of theology alone. It will be a question on which a great deal of empirical evidence converges. And the convergence, I will argue, is striking.

Polycarp prayed for resurrection and entered the fire. Perpetua took the swordsman’s hand and guided his blade. They were not, in the moment of death, alone. The next chapters will begin to show why we have good reason to think they were right.