Is there such a thing as "soul sleep" after death?

There is the view that those believers who have died are asleep until the return of Christ.^1,2,345,678 However, as Ridderbos has rightly pointed out, for Paul the words to be with Christ must have had a specific meaning in regard to the time immediately after death, and hence before the resurrection.⁹ Why else should that time be considered gain? What is at stake is a conscious state: the being with Christ. Paul’s words about being with Christ have at times been considered contradictory to what he wrote in 1 Thessalonians 4:17, where it says that we will only be with Christ after his return. Thus, several commentators have suggested that there is a certain development to be detected in Paul’s writing about death and resurrection in the letter to the Philippians.^{10,11,121314,15,16,171819} The idea of fellowship with Christ between the believer’s death and Christ’s return is one the apostle would have developed later on. Wiefel, and Pfleiderer after him, provide a detailed description of this so-called development in Paul’s theological thinking regarding his expectation of the future.^202122,23 This process of development, they suggest, would run from 1 Thessalonians 4:1–18 via 1 Corinthians 15:1–58 and 2 Corinthians 5:1–21 to Philippians 1:1–30. In 1 Thessalonians we would encounter the beginning of Paul’s view regarding the future. His view would then still be strongly dominated by Jewish apocalyptic thinking. In 1 Corinthians the same view reappears, but based on Hellenistic thought we now also detect a pneumatic expectation of the future. The death threat the apostle experienced between the writing of the first and second letter to the Corinthians would have made him renounce his belief in the resurrection of the dead and instead accept a Hellenistic teaching about the pneuma. The Spirit-filled believer would join Christ immediately upon death. We would then be seeing Paul’s final eschatological views reflected in the letter to the Philippians (for a detailed account of a possible development in Paul’s thinking about the future, see Gnilka’s elaborations 1 and 2²⁴). It must be noted here, however, that it cannot be deduced from 1 Thessalonians 4:17 that the apostle did not yet possess the insights he had when he wrote Philippians 1. The case is certainly not that Paul’s views about the future in Philippians 1:23 contradict his reflections in 1 Thessalonians. The subject of chapter 4 is not death, but about the problem of the second coming. What happens to a person after death is neither at stake nor is it raised as a problematic issue by the apostle. The believers in Thessalonica apparently did not expect any of the brothers or sisters to die before Christ’s return. When this did in fact happen the question was not what the deceased’s situation might be in the interim, between their death and resurrection, but rather what would happen to them on the day of the resurrection. The question was not whether those who had died would be excluded forever, but if those who remained alive would not have an advantage over the deceased at the second coming (1 Thessalonians 4:15). After all, those who had already passed on were no longer on earth! It is then in this regard that Paul reassures the Thessalonians: those who already died will first be called back to earth before the church will receive her Saviour. As Michaelis has rightly noted, the apostle’s future expectation as found in Philippians 1:23 is no different from his elaborations hereupon in the two letters to the Corinthians and the first letter to the Thessalonians.²⁵ In Paul there is no doubt about the reality of believers joining Christ immediately after death. Other than in Philippians 1:23 and 2 Corinthians 5:1–10 the apostle does not give separate and deliberate attention to this fact. We should, however, always bear in mind that Paul’s conviction of being with Christ immediately after death does not constitute an independent part of his preaching, but rather forms part and parcel of the hope of the resurrection. What Philippians 1:23 shows us is Paul’s certainty that death does not sever the bond between Christ and the believer.²⁶