Hebrews 9:27 – No Ghosts Allowed?
Often when engaging in discussions with some Christians around the subject of ghosts, the main text (ab)used to argue they cannot be human (and therefore by implication, evil impersonators) is Hebrews 9:27, which I’ll use in the form which is quoted in many arguments:
“it is appointed for man once to die and after that the judgement.”
There you go! Proof if ever that when you die, there’s no possibility of there being ghosts. Done! Dusted! Move on to the next topic – because there’s nothing to see here any more. By one single slice with the “Sword of the Spirit”, we’ve just seen biblical proof that no intermediate state exists and therefore ghosts don’t exist. Ghosts begone! GotQuestions [1] and Bates [2] perform this particular argument.
Snipping Scripture – Dishonest Abuse!
Except…. Let’s actually look at what the Good Book says. After all, we’re all wanting to use Scripture properly and in context, right? So, if we look at the text, it doesn’t start with “it is…”, there’s a bit before then, which starts the sentence, and it doesn’t end at the arbitrary “next verse” position; it goes on to verse 28, where the sentence finishes. Verse 27 is only part of the comparative statement [3] that flows into the next verse (9:28):
27 And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once, and after that the judgement, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
Hebrews 9:27-28 (NRSVA)
The “And just as…” prefix means that the upcoming two statements are similar:
| Hebrews 9: | Before | TIME | After |
| 27 | And just as it is appointed for mortals to die once | … | the judgement |
| 28 | Christ having been offered once to bear the sins of many (at the Crucifixion) | … | will appear a second time, not to deal with sin, but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him. |
Here we see two statements compared against each other. The first says we die once [4] and after that, there’s the judgement (notice the definite article ‘the’, meaning the one, final Judgement at the end of the ages). The second says Christ died once [5] and will appear a second time. Reading both verses in entirety together, the comparison is between the single act of the death of a human being followed by the judgement, with the one-time only act of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross and then his ‘return with salvation’ [6].
Let me ask you… Has Christ appeared a second time yet? No [7].
“Christ has died, Christ has risen, [you and I are here now], Christ will come again, Hallelujah!” as we say in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.
We exist in the time between the Crucifixion and the Second Coming. Currently there’s nearly a 2000 year gap between those two events. Now, “just as” there’s a 2000 year gap between those events in the last part, the comparative language structure of the entire sentence means there is also a gap between the death of a person and the Judgement (at the end of ages). What this simply means is that currently there are souls of the dead somewhere which exist and are awaiting the Judgement.
If you simply argue using the “snipped verse”, to deny the existence of ghosts (saying they’re impersonating spirits) on “biblical” grounds, you’re being dishonest with the biblical text as a whole. As my theology tutors would constantly remind us: ‘A text without a context [of the surrounding text] is a pretext for a prooftext.’ Trimming the sentence is badly distorting it to fit one’s preconceived ideas that there cannot be human ghosts.
Just as there’s a gap between the death of Jesus and the second coming, there’s a gap between human death and the judgement. This gap means there indeed could be the possibility for “ghosts” to exist. However, because of an a priori commitment to human ghosts not existing, they have to somehow remove this gap. Is this possible? If it is, it stands to reason that Hebrews 9:27, even if not truncated, disproves an intermediate state, and therefore the non-existence of human ghosts.
Bypassing Time – A Fudging Absurdity
Some are honest enough to acknowledge the gap. However, they try to get around this by arguing that when we die, we instantly jump forward in time to the Final Judgement, receiving a resurrection body, somehow bypassing all of human history after we die [8]. I call this the “Time Bypass” (TB) proposal. TB proponents attempt to back up their idea with scriptures such as 2 Cor. 5:1-10, which appear to speak of being at home with Christ immediately after death, receiving a new, heavenly body after putting off our earthly body. A technical analysis of the precise wording of this passage in the original Greek is found in Yates [9], who concludes that this passage cannot be used to conclusively prove what TB proponents argue.
TB proponents also say that when we die we enter into the timeless existence of God’s abode, which allows us to immediately zoom forward to the Second Coming. Philosophically this makes no sense as a change takes place with the clothing of the heavenly body at the resurrection of the dead, and change requires time to occur.
The final nails in the coffin of the TB argument is found in the three-day timeline of events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection. These show the TB argument is absurd, contradicting both the scriptural narrative and Creedal understanding of the events. Jesus didn’t die, enter paradise with the thief, [10], descend to the underworld [11], preach to the spirits in prison [12], then go to the end of time, play out the Final Judgement with all humanity, before slipping back into the timeline of humanity three days later in our time-frame, as if it were some sort of Dr. Who timeline which had gone wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey. All this activity of Christ between death and resurrection requires time to take place, it doesn’t happen in timelessness – change occurs, itself requiring time!
Moreover, TB advocates who say we immediately receive the resurrection body due to fast forwarding through time to the end are really proposing the following: from the point of Jesus’ final breath expiring, when his body was taken down, prepared and placed into the tomb, it was in fact the resurrection body of Jesus which the disciples had been handling! Are we really going to believe that the lifeless corpse of Jesus, lying in the tomb three days was actually his resurrection body? It contradicts common sense, and the texts themselves which show the disciples astounded at the new life Jesus had after 3 days.
To argue that we immediately go from death to the Final Judgement is philosophically absurd and breaks the narrative of the New Testament’s account of the death and resurrection of Jesus as well as other passages like Revelation 6:9. Here, John of Patmos (who wrote Revelation) sees the souls of the dead martyrs under the altar of God asking how long it would be before their deaths were avenged [13]… How long? Until the Second Coming of Christ, a still future event for them and for us.
Therefore, an intermediate state really does exist between death and the resurrection body being put on. For the believer in Christ, this intermediate discarnate existence is not seen as bad at all, because being “at home with the Lord” (a state of relationship with God rather than a location somewhere) is far better than the burden of a body which is subject to decay. The discarnate existence between death and the Second Coming is like the non-human spirit beings. But, for humans, it is a penultimate state, which will receive a new physical body.
Conclusion
We finally return to the Hebrews verse, having seen how the non-belief in an intermediate state to nullify a belief in ghosts requires:
- Scriptural abuse (of the verse itself and gospel narratives)
- Reasoning absurdities (in light of the gospel narratives of the death and resurrection of Jesus)
- Tradition abandonment – of 2000 years of understanding encapsulated in the Apostles and Athanasian Creeds
Being a good Wesleyan Quadrilateralist, I would have to add in the abuse of Experiences that people have had in unexpectedly encountering spirits of the departed. As we see in other articles (like the ghost of C. S. Lewis), human spirits can communicate with us, we just have to test them to see if they are from God or not. We do this by testing what they say against Scripture (for God will not give a contradictory message compared to what has been revealed previously), and the fruit of what comes out of that message.
Hebrews 9:27 cannot be used to justify ghosts not existing due to no intermediate state. In fact, taken sensibly as a whole sentence, it actually does the reverse!
Breaking Open Ancient Wells?
The Reformation helped downplay the role of the dead in the lives of the living, with Luther and Tyndale holding the notion of “soul sleep” in order to remove belief in an active dead. This view, called psychopannychism, holds that upon death, the soul enters a sleep state and is inserted into a fresh body at the resurrection of the dead. We explore this notion and see why sleep is the perfect metaphor for physical death, but not in the manner that adherents to psychopannychism propose, in this article.
Yet a conscious intermediate state was believed by many Protestants, including Wesley (Methodist) [14] and Matthew Henry (Presbyterian) [15]. Even Jean Calvin wrote against the mortalist heresy of “soul sleep” in his tract Psychopannychia, arguing instead that the dead in Christ went to Abraham’s Bosom (as per The Rich Man and Lazarus), whilst the dead outside of Christ resided in Hades, located near the lake of fire mentioned in Revelation 20:14. Calvin believed in an intermediate state for the believer in paradise, which was not the same place as heaven as his later followers believed.
Therefore, it is only recently in the history of the Church that there has been the need to abuse texts and reason in order to remove the possibility of ghosts being given biblical backing. I suspect the concerted effort in the 20th century was a knee-jerk response inherited after the end of WWI with the millions of deaths and the rise of Spiritualism; couple that with a lack of awareness (willing or otherwise) of the rich depths of Christian beliefs in the past which can speak into these situations. But that is for another article to explore.
The intermediate state opens up the possibility for Protestants to re-explore several Christian beliefs about the afterlife, held for the first 1500 years of Christian Faith, until some Reformers denied or downplayed their biblical basis: prayers for the dead, and the ministry of the Communion of Saints.
With new textual evidence from archaeological discoveries, as well as an evolution of theological understanding, perhaps the politics of 500 years ago has sufficiently cooled to allow these topics to be approached sensibly, biblically and intelligently once more. We certainly shall be in later articles on this site.
Bibliography
Giles, K. (1982), Understanding the Christian Faith, Canberra, Acorn.
Henry, M. Online Commentary of Luke 16.
Lane, W. L. (1991) Word Biblical Commentary 47B: Hebrews 9-13, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.
Outler, A. C. (Ed.) (1987), The Works of John Wesley Volume 4 Sermons IV (115 – 151), Nashville: Abingdon Press.
Yates, J. (1987) ‘Immediate or intermediate ? The state of the believer upon death’, Churchman, vol. 101, no. 4, pp. 310-322.
Footnotes
[1] GotQuestions.org (2019) What does the Bible say about ghosts / hauntings? | GotQuestions.org. [online] Available at: https://www.gotquestions.org/ghosts-hauntings.html
[2] Bates, G. (2019) Are ghosts real? – creation.com. [online] Creation.com. Available at: https://creation.com/are-ghosts-real
[3] Lane, 134.
[4] No reincarnation I’m afraid, though I’m conscious that one verse on its own does not create an argument against reincarnation (that would be prooftexting!). Christ died once, so do we.
[5] And was resurrected and ascended into heaven…
[6] Lane, 134.
[7] Unless you’re one who believes Jesus has come back, whether visibly or invisibly, but that’s going to place you outside of the main corpus of Trinitarian, Christian eschatological teaching.
[8] Giles, 73.
[9] Yates, 310-313. Yates considers arguments for and against the immediacy of the resurrection body based on this passage, concluding that exegesis alone cannot conclusively proof one way or the other on the immediacy of the resurrection body being received at death with time compression / bypassing to the Second Coming.
[10] Luke 23:43
[11] ‘He descended to the dead’ – Contained in both the Apostles’ and Athanasian Creeds.
[12] 1 Peter 3:19-20 – These were the Watchers who were imprisoned (not in hell!) when they were judged after sinning by crossing the cosmic order boundaries, leaving their heavenly estate to have sexual union with human women to produce hybrid offspring, or “bastard sons of God”. This will be another future blog series.
[13] Revelation 6:9 – this is at the opening of the “fifth seal”, which is anyone’s guess when that happened / happens.
[14] Wesley, What is Man?, sermon delivered in 1788, writes: “I? But what am I? Unquestionably I am something distinct from my body. It seems evident that my body is not necessarily included therein. For when my body dies, I shall not die. I shall exist as really as I did before. And I cannot but believe this self-moving, thinking principle, with all its passions and affections, will continue to exist although the body be mouldered into dust” Outler, Sermons 4:23.
[15] Henry, commenting on Luke 16:22 says of Lazarus: ‘His soul existed in a state of separation from the body. It did not die, or fall asleep, with the body his candle was not put out with him; but lives, and acted, and knew what it did, and what was done to it… His soul removed to another world, to the world of spirits; it returned to God who gave it, to its native country… The soul of man, if not chained to this earth and clogged by it as unsanctified souls are, has in itself an elastic virtue, by which it springs upward as soon as it gets clear of the body…
Indeed.
Christ said to the thief “Today you shall be with me in Paradise”.
Paradise is not the Final Destination.
Your Bible is incomplete on this point.
“Paradise is a state of peace… until the time of their resurrection”
“Outer darkness is a place of fear of wrath… until the time of their resurrection”.
I have more to read on your posts… but are any of the ghosts or apparitions being investigated benign or ‘good’?
Hi,
Thanks. Not sure the Bible is complete on this point as the book of Revelation and other passages in the Bible refer to a time after paradise – when heaven comes “down” to earth.
As to benign / good ghosts / apparitions, take a look through the Articles page, especially the New Testament articles, and also the C. S. Lewis pages, which should answer your query. As time goes by, there’ll be more articles on here like these, exploring ghost accounts which can only be reckoned to be of a good source. Stay tuned :).
This is very well written. I plan to cite this article in my own writing in the future. It should also be noted that famed apologist John Warwick Montgomery entertained the idea of ghosts as the truly human dead, and he did not see this as incompatible with the Hebrews passage in question. The following is from page 142 of his Principalities and Powers, published 1973:
Ghosts as the dead themselves, on their way to the reward determined once for all by their relationship or lack of relationship to Christ on earth, but not yet entered fully into that reward. Wrote the great Jung- Stilling: “Those souls, which are not yet dead to the world, and whose imagination is still occupied with the favourite ideas of their former life, seek to realize these ideas…. Hence the notorious haunting of old buildings.” It should be emphasized that this is not the Roman Catholic purgatorial concept (there is no hint of expiating one’s own sins in a works-righteous fashion), nor is any necessary violation done to Heb. 9:27 (“it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment”), since no postponement or possible reversal of the judgment at death is suggested. Only the time-lag be- tween death and heaven, or death and hell, is extended to account for ghostly phenomena that show more self- direction than the “human aura” would allow for, and yet do not engage either in angelic or in demonic missions to the living.