In Christian eschatology, the intermediate state or interim state refers to a person's "intermediate" existence between one's death and one's resurrection from the dead. In addition, there are beliefs in a Particular judgment right after death and a General judgement or Last judgment after the resurrection.
As long as Christians looked for an imminent end of the world, they had little interest in an interim state between death and resurrection. Later, the Eastern Church came to admit of such an intermediate state, but refrained from defining it, so as not to blur the distinction between the alternative definitive fates of Heaven and Hell. In the West there was much more curiosity about the intermediate state, with evidence from as far back as the Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity (203) of the belief that sins can be purged by suffering in an afterlife, and that the purgation can be speeded up by the prayers of the living. Eastern Christians too believed that the dead can be assisted by prayer.[1]
East and West, those in the intermediate state have traditionally been the beneficiaries of prayers, such as requiem masses. In the East, the saved are said to rest in light while the wicked are confined in darkness. In the East, prayers are said to benefit even pagans.[2] In the West, Augustine described prayer as useful for those in communion with the church, and implied that every soul's ultimate fate is determined at death.[2] In the West, prayer came to be restricted to souls in purgatory.[2] In the Middle Ages, the Western church offered indulgences for those in purgatory.[3] Protestants largely ceased praying for the dead.
Protestants denied the Catholic purgatory. Luther taught mortality of the soul, comparing the sleep of a tired man after a day's work whose soul "sleeps not but is awake" ("non sic dormit, sed vigilat") and can "experience visions and the discourses of the angels and of God", with the sleep of the dead which experience nothing but still "live to God" ("coram Deo vivit").[4][5][6][7] Calvin depicted the righteous dead as resting in bliss.[8]
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The early Hebrews had no notion of resurrection of the dead[9] and thus no intermediate state. As with neighboring groups, they understood death to be the end. Their afterlife, sheol (the pit), was a dark place from which none return. By Jesus' time, however, the Book of Daniel (Daniel 12:1-4) and a prophecy in Isaiah (26:19)[10] had made popular the idea that the dead in sheol would be raised for a last judgment. The intertestamental literature describes in more detail what the dead experience in sheol. According to the Book of Enoch, the righteous and wicked await the resurrection in separate divisions of sheol, a teaching which may have influenced Jesus' parable of Lazarus and Dives.[11]
In the Septuagint and New Testament the authors used the Greek term Hades for the Hebrew Sheol.
The parable of the Rich man and Lazarus describes Hades along the lines of intertestamental Jewish understanding of a Sheol divided between the happy righteous and the miserable wicked.[12] Later Hippolytus of Rome expanded on this parable and further described the Bosom of Abraham in Against Plato.[13]
Two martyr stories describe the martyrs as praying for the dead to improve the conditions of the dead in an intermediate state.
In the East, the intermediate state was described as light, freedom, and rest for the righteous and the opposite for the wicked. The intermediate state is sometimes described as the presence of God, which delights the believer and torments the unrepentant.
In the West, Augustine wrote that only those in communion with the church are aided by prayer. To the standard two-way division, he recognized separate states for the "not so good" and "not so bad" souls. He insisted that unbaptized babies were excluded from heaven. Gregory the Great confirmed Augustine's understanding that only the saved benefit from prayer, and he connected suffering after death with penance left unpaid in life.
The Venerable Bede and Saint Boniface both report visions of an afterlife with a four-way division, including pleasant and punishing abodes near heaven and hell to hold souls until judgment day.
In the 12th century, the medieval Catholic church defined purgatory, the intermediate state for the saved who have just punishment yet to suffer. The righteous were said to go direct to heaven, and the wicked direct to hell. All Souls' Day commemorates the souls in purgatory. The church sold indulgences to release the donors' departed loved ones from suffering in purgatory, or the donors themselves.
In the 16th century, the Protestant Reformation challenged purgatory. Martin Luther wrote that the soul slept unconsciously until the resurrection. John Calvin, in an acerbic response to Luther , described the soul as resting in light. Protestants largely rejected a distinction in fates other than the difference between heaven and hell. They rejected distinctions of fate within heaven or hell and rejected purgatory almost entirely.
Some theological traditions, including most Protestants and Eastern Orthodox, teach that the intermediate state is a disembodied foretaste of the final state. Therefore, those who die in Christ go into the presence of God (or the bosom of Abraham) where they experience joy and rest while they await their resurrection (cf. Luke 23:43). Those who die unrepentant will experience torment (perhaps in hell) while they await final condemnation on the day of judgment (2 Peter 2:9).
I. The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, 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. And the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day.[4] Beside these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledges none.
— Westminster Confession 1646, chapter XXXII, Of the State of Men after Death, and of the Resurrection of the Dead
The neutral historical term for this belief today is usually Mortalism or Christian Mortalism.[14][15][16][17] The terms Soul sleep[18] Psychopannychism[19] are somewhat loaded by their derivation from a tract (1534) by John Calvin,[20][21][22] though use of the terms are not necessarily polemic or pejorative.[23] Both terms may be used together.[24][25]
A minority of Christians, including William Tyndale, Martin Luther[26] some Anglicans such as E. W. Bullinger, and sects such as Seventh-day Adventists,[27] Christadelphians and others, deny the conscious existence of the soul after death, believing the intermediate state of the dead to be unconscious "sleep". Jehovah's Witnesses also believe this with the exception of the 144,000.[28] In this case, the person is not conscious of any time or activity and would not be aware even if centuries elapsed between their death and their resurrection. They would, upon their death, cease consciousness, and gain it again at the time of the resurrection having experienced no time lapse. For them, time would thus suspended, as if they moved immediately from death to resurrection and the General Judgment of the Judgment Day.
The intermediate state is sometimes referred to by the Greek term hades, even in other languages. The term is equivalent to Hebrew sheol and Latin infernum (meaning "underworld").
The Roman Catholic Church teaches that all who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven, a final purification to which it gives the name "purgatory"[29]
Roman Catholic theologians have given the name "limbo" to a possible fate of infants who die without baptism. The just who died before Jesus Christ are also spoken of as having been in limbo until he had won salvation for them.
In Islamic eschatology, Barzakh (Arabic: برزخ) is the intermediate state in which the soul of the deceased is transferred across the boundaries of the mortal realm into a kind of "cold sleep" where the soul will rest until the Qiyamah (Judgement Day). The term appears in the Qur'an Surah 23, Ayat 100.
Barzakh is a sequence that happens after death, in which the soul will separate from the body. Three events make up Barzakh:
Please note that in Islam all human beings go through four steps of age:
According to the native Indonesian beliefs, the soul of a dead person will stay on the earth for 40 days after the death. When the ties aren't released after 40 days, the body is said to jump out from the grave to warn people that the soul need the bonds to be released. Because of the tie under the feet, the ghost can't walk. This causes the pocong to hop. After the ties are released, the soul will leave the earth and never show up anymore.
Bardo refers to the state of existence intermediate between two lives on earth, usually within 49 days.
In Taoism a newly deceased person may return (回魂) to his home at some nights, sometimes one week (頭七) after his death[30] and the seven po would disappear one by one every 7 days after death.
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