EXPLORING GOD’S WORD
Luther and Tyndale on Death:
“The Dead Know Nothing” Many believe the soul is immortal and remains conscious apart from the body after death. But early reformers Martin Luther and William Tyndale recognized what the Bible teaches about this—that those who’ve died have no awareness while awaiting a future resurrection. by Tom Robinson
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any people today believe the Bible teaches that when a person dies, that person has an immortal soul that remains conscious after death and goes on to live with God in heaven or goes to some kind of eternal torment in hell. But that is assuredly not what the Bible teaches. It informs us that man is a mortal soul able to die (Ezekiel 18:4, 20) and that to die is to “sleep the sleep of death” (Psalm 13:3). The Bible repeatedly compares death to sleep and not conscious existence—a sleep from which we must be awakened in a future resurrection (see Daniel 12:2; Job 14:12-14; 1 Corinthians 11:30; 15:51; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14). Scripture explicitly states that “the dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5, emphasis added throughout). It further assures that “there is no . . . knowledge or wisdom in the grave where you are going” (verse 10). Many recognize that the Bible teaches a coming resurrection. The traditional argument is that the immortal soul departs into bodiless yet conscious existence at death and that the resurrection is the raising up of a renewed body in the future for the soul to reinhabit. This concerns what is called the intermediate state of the dead—the nature of existence between the death of the body and the future resurrection. Given the biblical comparisons to sleep, some disparagingly refer to
28 Beyond Today
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belief in this intermediate state of unconsciousness as “soul sleep.” Yet this is simply taking Scripture for what it says, whereas belief in a disembodied soul in the afterlife came not from the Bible but from pagan religion and philosophy. Some have recognized the truth of this matter for centuries. It would no doubt greatly surprise many of today’s Protestants to learn that key figures they view as heroes of the faith—namely Martin Luther, father of the Protestant Reformation, and
All the Articles of M. Luther Condemned by the Latest Bull of Leo X, Art. 27, Works of Luther, Weimar ed., Vol. 7). Luther’s main concern in this was the Catholic conception of the conscious torment of souls in purgatory, which he rejected. Not long afterward he wrote: “It is probable, in my opinion, that, with very few exceptions indeed, the dead sleep in utter insensibility till the day of judgment . . . On what authority can it be said that the souls of the dead may not sleep . . .
As Luther and Tyndale taught, the Bible presents death as having no conscious awareness. in the same way that the living pass in profound slumber the interval between their downlying at night and their uprising in the morning?” (Letter to Nicholas Amsdorf, Jan. 13, 1522, quoted by Jules Michelet, The Life of Luther, translated by William Hazlitt, 1862, p. 133). Regarding the quote we earlier saw from Ecclesiastes, Luther later Martin Luther: “The dead sleep pointed out: “Solomon judges that the in utter insensibility” dead are asleep, and feel nothing at all. For the dead lie there accounting In 1517 Martin Luther posted neither days nor years, but when are his famous 95 Theses regarding the awaked, they shall seem to have slept errors of the Catholic Church. In defending many of these later in 1520 scarce one minute” (An Exposition of Solomon’s Book, Called Ecclesiastes or he listed the idea “that the soul is the Preacher, 1553, folio 151v). immortal” as among “all these endLuther viewed this as some sort of less monstrosities in the Roman comatose existence, elsewhere statdunghill of decretals” (Assertion of William Tyndale, who suffered martyrdom for his monumental work of translating the Bible into English —wrote against the immortality of the soul and against the idea of conscious awareness in death. These men were teachers of soul sleep—as were the inspired writers of Scripture, such as the apostle Paul.
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