The Different Doctrines of the Christian Afterlife Inscribed on Tombstones

 A couple days ago I was visiting a graveyard at the oldest AME Church in Maryland that still operates in its original location where a Civil War Union patriot lies in rest. As I started exploring the graveyard, I came across at least one inscription I thought demonstrated a point we often neglect in our contemporary Christian churches: There have always been different views on the Christian afterlife.

One such view is boldly inscribed on the tombstone in the photograph I took. It notes that the deceased is "Asleep in Jesus." The doctrine being alluded to, known popularly as "soul sleep" is one almost entirely ignored by many Christians today, but rose in popularity in the 1830s (note the dates on the tombstone) through the preaching of the Millerites and some Methodists like George Storrs. Later Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventists picked up on a strain called Annihilationism.

The doctrine of soul sleep comes from a literal reading of 1 Thessalonians (considered one of the oldest epistles and most likely one of the seven written by the hand of Paul the Apostle according to NT scholars). In it, Paul tells us that the dead in Christ will rise first upon his return, not before, and those remaining on earth will be caught up with the Lord in the sky. The soul and body therefore go through a sort of hibernation period. The soul and body are never extinguished. The body is eventually reified. Some, who felt this did not sufficiently answer the question of what happens to the soul in the interim between death and eternal life, claimed it had to be in the presence of Christ. And there certainly is this strain in Paul as well. “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord” he tells us. At least for Paul, aside from what appear to be contradictions, the human is a complicated body of eternal and temporal principles. He is an inward man, an outward man. He is spirit. He is soul. He is raised to a spiritual body, all depending where you read Paul. But if the soul is the essence of who we are, 1 Thessalonians doesn’t give us more than the “we” as a body in the ground awaiting the Lord. To try to resist soul sleep by saying that soul is somewhere else while it awaits final union with its body then seems an impoverished view given that the believer is identified with that body in Paul’s message!  At the least, soul sleep challenges the idea that the soulical Christian goes to heaven immediately after death.