What Happens in Between, and the Minority Reports

Two questions have generated most of the disagreement: the state of the dead before the general resurrection, and whether every soul is by nature immortal.

The mainstream of patristic and medieval theology, carried into the Catholic, Orthodox and most Protestant churches, teaches bodily resurrection preceded by a conscious intermediate state, the dead are with God or otherwise await the end while remaining aware. Against this, some radical Reformers and later bodies such as the Seventh-day Adventists have held soul sleep (psychopannychism), the view that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection wakes them. A related minority position, conditional immortality, denies that the soul is inherently deathless and holds that unending life is a gift given only to the redeemed, so that the lost finally cease to be rather than suffering forever.

Historically, the doctrine's early defenders spent their energy against the opposite tendency: Gnostic and philosophical currents that treated the body as a prison to be escaped and read resurrection as a metaphor for the soul's liberation. The insistence on a raised body was, in that setting, a claim that the material creation is good and is not discarded at the end.