8. Dead Persons No Longer Exist

Dale Ratzlaff, Feature, Truth About Adventist "Truth"

The Adventist teaching of soul sleep is set forth in the Fundamental Belief No. 26, “Death and Resurrection” as follows:

The wages of sin is death. But God, who alone is immortal, will grant eternal life to His redeemed. Until that day death is an unconscious state for all people. When Christ, who is our life, appears, the resurrected righteous and the living righteous will be glorified and caught up to meet their Lord. The second resurrection, the resurrection of the unrighteous, will take place a thousand years later.

Most evangelicals believe the spirits of deceased Christians go immediately “to be with the Lord.”1 Then they are reunited with a resurrected body at the second coming of Christ.2 Adventists interpret the “spirit” to be only breath. They teach that a “soul” is a living person with body and breath. Adventists, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, say that in death the souls are sleeping—actually don’t really exist—until the bodily resurrection.

In the book, Seventh-day Adventists Believe, under the heading “The Person Returns to Dust,” a “person” is said to be an “organic unity” in which “body and soul only exist together; they form an indivisible union.”3 The “soul” is not an entity having an individual self-conscious identity. It is nothing more than “breath,” or “the life principle.”4 Its return to God is nothing more than God withdrawing the power of life. The lifeless body, which is no longer a “person”, then disintegrates in the grave. SDA doctrine therefore denies that any real “person” exists between death and resurrection.

This creates a philosophical and ontological problem for Seventh-day Adventism. Clearly, according to such doctrine, in death a person ceases to exist. And if a person ceases to exist at death, then “resurrection” can have nothing to do with the person who died but will be the creation of another being altogether. Even if, at the resurrection, God were to install all the memories, thought patterns, even DNA structure, of such a previously existing person, it is still a new, different being. Of what interest can such a being be to one who knows his own existence will certainly come to a complete end at death?

Perhaps to counter this problem and the hopeless despair it necessarily entails, SDAs offer this statement:

Death is not complete annihilation; it is only a state of temporary unconsciousness while the person awaits the resurrection.5

The statement that, “death is not complete annihilation,” is disingenuous. It is not “complete” annihilation, in SDA thinking, because it is not final, but only “temporary.” But annihilation is final, and therefore complete, by definition. “Incomplete annihilation” is an oxymoron. To say, “the person awaits the resurrection,” is equally disingenuous. According to their own definitions there is no “person” between death and the resurrection. Awaiting implies anticipation. Anticipation is a function of consciousness requiring a conscious existence. Both are impossible during death according to SDA doctrine. No dead thing “awaits” anything.

If “a person” ends at death there can be no such thing as “eternal life” for persons who die. Those persons are gone, period. This is not the teaching of the New Testament. Jesus said,

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes has eternal life (Jn.6:47).

In Greek, “has” is present, indicative active, indicating eternal life is a present reality. Paul said,

Therefore, being always of good courage, and knowing that while we are at home in the body we are absent from the Lord—for we walk by faith, not by sight—we are of good courage, I say, and prefer rather to be absent from the body and to be at home with the Lord. Therefore also we have as our ambition, whether at home or absent, to be pleasing to Him (2 Cor. 5:6-9).

These statements show that the Christian now has eternal life and at death his spirit is going to be present with the Lord. Further, in the intermediate state there is consciousness as one can be “pleasing to the Lord” when absent from the body.

The Bible teaches that mankind is body, soul and spirit6 and our “spirit”6 is more than just breath. When we are “born again”, our spirits are reborn.7 We become new creatures and the Holy Spirit communicates with our spirit.

The Spirit Himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Rom. 8:16).   

Thus at death our spirits depart to be with Christ, and at the resurrection, they are reunited with new bodies; but all the while we exist because we now have eternal life.

Typical of Adventist teaching, those who disagree with their understanding and teaching are said to be deceived by Satan. Ellen White stated that,

Through the two great errors, the immortality of the soul and Sunday sacredness, Satan will bring the people under his deceptions. While the former lays the foundation of spiritual-ism, the latter creates a bond of sympathy with Rome. The Protestants of the United States will be foremost in stretching their hands across the gulf to grasp the hand of spiritualism; they will reach over the abyss to clasp hands with the Roman power; and under the influence of this threefold union, this country will follow in the steps of Rome in trampling on the rights of conscience.8

Ellen White teaches that Christians who believe that at death the human spirit “goes to be with the Lord” are deceived by Satan.

Endnotes

  1. See 2 Cor. 5:1-10; Phil. 1:21-26; 2 Tim. 1:10; Mark 12:18-27; Jn. 6:40, 47; Jn. 8:51; Jn. 11:25, 26.
  2. See 1 Cor. 15:35-58; 1 Thess. 4:13-18.
  3. P. 391.
  4. Ibid., p. 353.
  5. Ibid., p. 352.
  6. 1 Thess. 5:23; Heb. 4:12.
  7. Jn. 3:5-8.
  8. The Great Controversy p. 588. See also Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, p. 405.

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Dale Ratzlaff
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