Intermediate State - History

History

In the Septuagint and New Testament the authors used the Greek term Hades for the Hebrew Sheol, but often with Jewish rather than Greek concepts in mind, so that, for example, there is no activity in Hades in Ecclesiastes. An exception to traditional Jewish views of Sheol, Hades is found in the Gospel of Luke parable of the Rich man and Lazarus which describes Hades along the lines of intertestamental Jewish understanding of a Sheol divided between the happy righteous and the miserable wicked. Later Hippolytus of Rome expanded on this parable and described activity in the Bosom of Abraham in Against Plato.

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.