The Seventh-day Adventist Church was influenced in its belief of conditional immortality¹ by some in the Millerite movement, particularly George Storrs, one of its most influential leaders in the late summer and early fall of 1844.² It was around 1840 that Storrs, still a Methodist preacher, became convinced that humans are not immortal, but receive immortality only through the condition of faith in Christ at the resurrection. As a corollary, he also believed that the wicked who live and die in their sins will be punished through fire and utterly exterminated, rather than live in suffering forever.³ Storrs strongly emphasized that death is a total deprivation of life, but most of his arguments are directed against the traditional belief in hell as a place of eternal torment. When he talks about the righteous, he wants to balance his statements in view of the resurrection promise, and he does that by means of the sleep concept. He says, “When men die they ‘sleep in the dust of the earth’ (Dan 12:2). They wake not till Christ returns ‘from heaven;’ or till the last trump.”⁴

As early as 1842, Storrs’ conditionalist ideas were accepted by Calvin French, a Baptist minister who also joined the Millerites. Despite his acceptance of the aberrant view that Christians can become so holy as to be above sin,⁵ French was able to advance the arguments concerning death as an unconscious state. And in order to do that, he also appealed—rather extensively—to the biblical metaphors of sleep and rest, arguing that “the righteous and the wicked rest together in the grave in an unconscious state until they hear the voice of the Son of man, and come forth to the resurrection of life or damnation,” and that “they who sleep in Jesus will awake at the first resurrection,” while “the rest of the dead will awake at the second resurrection, and appear before Christ at the judgment.”⁶ This seems to have been one of the first occurrences among the 1840s Adventists of the expression “sleep in Jesus,”⁷ which would become rather popular even among the later SDAs,⁸ especially in obituary notices. Storrs’ biographical sketch published as an introduction to the 1855 edition of his Six Sermons so refers to Charles Fitch’s sudden death in October 1844: “He fell asleep in Jesus, in the glorious hope of soon awaking at the voice of the Son of God.”⁹ This mention of Fitch, one of the top Millerites, is fitting inasmuch as he became Storrs’ first ministerial convert to the doctrine of conditional immortality within the Adventist ranks while the other movement leaders strongly rejected it.

With the fragmentation of the Millerite movement after October 22, 1844, several Adventist groups continued to believe in conditionalism and annihilationism¹⁰; this¹¹ was the case with Sabbatarian Adventism, to whom the concept of sleep started playing a central role in their understanding of death vis-à-vis the resurrection. In their first publication, in 1847, James White refers twice to the “sleeping saints” who will be raised by Jesus Himself at His second coming.¹² Ellen G. White would use this expression at least fifteen times in her own writings. In fact, in the following years, she would make an extensive use of the concept of death as sleep in its various forms. Besides speaking of the “sleeping saints” who will be “kept in safety” until the resurrection morning, when they will be “awakened” by the voice of the Son of God and “called forth” from their graves, she also refers dozens of times to those who are now silently and for a little while sleeping/resting in their graves. She uses the expression even for herself, as in her diary entry for December 26, 1904: “May the Lord spare my life to do this work before I shall rest in the grave, is my prayer.”¹³ Two years later she would write in a letter: “I am waiting my summons to give up my work, and rest in the grave.”¹⁴

In a biographical article published in 1876, Mrs. White makes two surprising statements. After reporting a conversation her mother had had with another woman in reference to a discourse they had heard on the nature of death, she came to her mother and, deeply impressed by the comments, started inquiring about the issue. At a certain point she asked: “But, mother … do you really believe that the soul sleeps in the grave until the resurrection?” A few paragraphs later, when describing the impact that this new doctrine had on her, she says: “This new and beautiful faith taught me the reason that inspired writers had dwelt so much upon the resurrection of the body, it was because the entire being was slumbering in the grave.”¹⁵ Even though this episode took place more than thirty years earlier, in 1843 when Ellen White (then Ellen Harmon) was only sixteen, she seems to be reproducing the very language she used at that time, equating the soul sleeping in the grave with “the entire being.” Nowhere else does she speak of the soul sleeping, resting or slumbering in the grave. She seems to have avoided talking about dead souls. The¹⁶ closest she comes to the idea of a dead soul is when she speaks figuratively of sinners who have not yet accepted Jesus as their Savior. “A soul without Christ,” she says, “is like a body without blood; it is dead. It may have the appearance of spiritual life; it may perform certain ceremonies in religious matters like a machine; but it has no spiritual life.”¹⁷

In addition to Ellen G. White’s writings, other Adventist works also use biblical language to describe the state of the dead as a “sleep.”¹⁸ To those who were unfamiliar with the Seventh-day Adventist understanding of biblical anthropology whereby “man is a unit—that soul and body are not separate beings,” as R. F. Cottrell expressed it in 1865,¹⁹ the insistence on the concept of death as a sleep was open to misunderstanding. “We do not,” he said, “teach that ‘the soul sleeps with the body in the grave.”²⁰ One modern Adventist reference work brings out this distinction somewhat differently. After listing seven points of comparison between sleep and death in order to demonstrate why the former “is a fitting symbol” of the latter, it goes on to equate the person’s “spirit” with “the character … which God preserves until the resurrection.”²¹ Less cautious is the suggestion by one that soul-sleep is taught in the NT.²² Another is only a little more careful: “death is not complete annihilation—it is only a state of temporary unconsciousness while the person awaits the resurrection. The Bible repeatedly calls this intermediate state a sleep.”²³ Such statements are liable to be misunderstood by those holding to a dualistic anthropology. To be fair, it should also be pointed out that the official statements of Adventist beliefs have never used such terminology.²⁴

Death as Sleep in Scripture

In Scripture sleep is used both literally and metaphorically. When it is used literally, which is the most common usage, it simply denotes the physical act of sleeping as part of human experience (Gen 28:11; Job 33:15; Dan 10:9; Luke 9:32). In its metaphorical sense, sleep may denote spiritual dullness, indolence, or lack of vigilance. In Proverbs laziness, indolence, and sleep are used in a quasi-moral way to depict the negligent person who refuses to acknowledge the reasonable needs of human life (6:9–11; 19:15; 20:13; 24:33, 34). In Isaiah (29:10) and frequently in the NT (Mark 13:35, 36; Rom 13:11; Eph 5:14; 1 Thess 5:6–9) sleep describes a spiritual lethargy that must be thrown away in order to remain awake in this evil world. When it is used in this way, the context is very often eschatological, warning us to be alert to the signs of the times.

Sleep (as well as lying-down and rest) is also used as a metaphor for death.²⁵ This is common in the OT (1 Kgs 1:21; Job 7:21; 14:12; Ps 13:3; Jer 51:39, 57; Dan 12:2). The expression “slept [or rested] with his fathers” is a fixed formula in reference to the death of Israel’s and Judah’s kings; it is used 36 times in the books of 1–2 Kings and 2 Chronicles. The metaphor is also found in the NT. When Jesus rose from the dead, we are told that “many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised” (Matt 27:52). After being stoned, Luke records that Stephen knelt down, said his last words, and “fell asleep” (Acts 7:60). By the time of his third missionary journey, Paul says that some of those “more than five hundred” who had seen the resurrected Christ had already “fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:6). He also refers to those who “have fallen asleep in Christ” (vs. 18), to the resurrection of Christ as the “first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (vs. 20), and to his hope that not all of them would “fall asleep” before Jesus’ second coming (vs. 51). In 1 Thessalonians, while addressing the situation of the brothers and sisters who had already died, Paul refers to them three times as if they had “fallen asleep” (4:13–15). Other NT references are Acts 13:36, 1 Corinthians 7:39, 11:30, 1 Thessalonians 5:10, and 2 Peter 3:4.²⁶

According to the Gospels Jesus also used this metaphor in two different occasions. The first was in relation to Jairus’ daughter, who had just succumbed to her illness and died (Mark 5:35).²⁷ Upon His arrival at Jairus’ home, Jesus saw the commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly (vs. 38), after which he said: “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead, but sleeping” (vs. 39). The mourners responded cynically to Jesus and ridiculed Him (vs. 40). They could not make sense of His words, which seemed to imply that the girl was literally sleeping, while they knew that she was dead (vs. 35; cf. Luke 8:53).²⁸

The second occasion was when Lazarus died. When he was informed that the one he loved was sick (John 11:3), Jesus did not respond immediately. Instead he stayed two more days in the place where he was (vs. 6), time long enough for Lazarus to die. When he finally decided to go to Bethany, he said: “Our friend Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awake him” (vs. 11). This confused the disciples, who took Jesus’s words at their face value, concluding that sleep would be good for Lazarus (vs. 12), and Jesus would not have to risk His life by going to Judea (cf. vss. 7, 8). The evangelist then intervenes and informs the reader that the disciples did not understand Jesus correctly. As in the case of Jairus’s daughter, Jesus was not speaking about sleep in its normal sense, but figuratively as a reference to death (vs. 13). It was necessary for Him to tell them plainly: “Lazarus is dead” (vs. 14).²⁹

Thus, in both stories Jesus resorted to the sleep metaphor to refer to death, and in both of them he was greatly misunderstood. The misunderstanding, however, was not because the metaphor was a novelty introduced by Him, but because he used it in an unconventional way: not simply to describe death itself, but to deny its irrevocable character. That the metaphor of death as sleep was not alien to Jesus’ contemporaries can be argued not only from its usage in the OT, but also from its recurrence in both Jewish literature³⁰ and Jewish tomb inscriptions in Greek and Latin, as Craig S. Keener has shown.³¹ As a matter of fact, death as sleep was also common in Greco-Roman literature.³² Because of their resemblance, Sleep and Death were twin brothers in popular religion.³³ This unequivocally points to the fact that sleep was (and still is in several modern cultures) a widespread metaphor for death because of their phenomenological resemblance,³⁴ that is, death looks like a sleep and is therefore described as such.³⁵

Before any theological conclusion be drawn from the presence of this metaphor in Scripture, therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge the simple fact that the use of sleep in reference to death is not restricted to Judaism and Christianity, and that such a use owes its origin to the phenomenological similarity of both. If the mourners (in Jairus’ daughter’s story) and the disciples (in Lazarus’ story) misunderstood Jesus it was only because in both cases he used sleep to describe the tragedy of death in light of the approaching miracle, something they had no means to predict or reasons to expect. On a rhetorical level, both statements of Jesus (Mark 5:39; John 11:11) are clear examples of irony, in which what is meant is different from what is said.³⁶ That is to say, in no statement is Jesus rejecting the notion of a real death, “but rather . . . superimposing upon it a secondary . . . frame of reference. Death is not final, not ultimate.”³⁷ There is an interesting rabbinic parallel to this concept in Genesis Rabbah, where Jacob is told, “Thou shalt sleep, but thou shalt not die.”³⁸ The contrast in this passage is clearly between physical death and the resurrection, and it is this same contrast that appears in Mark 5:39 and John 11:11.

These are two important points: sleep is not an essential description of death, and on the lips of Jesus it only highlights the reality—and the imminence—of the resurrection (cf. John 11:23–25). This means that it is not appropriate to use sleep to understand the nature of death and by extension the condition in death or the ontological state of the dead. Neither the metaphor itself nor its use by Jesus allows such a procedure. Death is not sleep. One may resemble the other, but they are in fact two different things. As Bruce Reichenbach insists, “the metaphor ‘sleep’. . . does not describe the ontological state of the dead, but rather refers to the possibility of the deceased: that though they now no longer exist, by the power of God they can be recreated to live again.”³⁹

The biblical description of death is that of termination or annihilation (Job 7:21; 14:12). When the person dies, nothing remains, as the breath of life returns to God and the body decomposes to the basic elements from which it was formed (Ps 146:4; Eccl 12:7; cf. Gen 2:7; Job 33:4; Eccl 9:5, 6, 10). As Haynes explains, “the union of two things, earth and breath, served to create a third thing, soul. The continued existence of the soul depended wholly upon the continued union of breath and body. When that union is broken and the breath separates from the body, as it does at death, the soul ceases to exist.”⁴⁰ Samuel Bacchiocchi puts it this way: death is presented in Scripture “as a return to the elements from which man originally was made. . . . [Death is] the termination of one’s life, which results in the decay and decomposition of the body. . . . [It means] the deprivation or cessation of life.”⁴¹ While this cannot really be equated with sleep, the biblical metaphor remains important to the Adventist understanding of death.⁴² More questionable are statements that seem to endorse the soul-sleep concept, as if death were an intermediate state in which the person lies inactive in the grave until the resurrection morning.⁴³

Now, there is no question that there will be a resurrection, as in the case of Jairus’ daughter, Lazarus, and several others, besides Christ Himself. Some will resurrect “to everlasting life” and some “to shame and everlasting contempt” (Dan 12:2; cf. John 5:28, 29). And the resurrection to everlasting life will be possible precisely because of the resurrection of Christ (1 Cor 15:17,18; 1 Thess 4:14). This is also how the expression “the firstborn from the dead” (Col 1:18; Rev 1:5) or “the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Cor 15:20; cf. vs. 23) has traditionally been understood.⁴⁴ To use a classical statement, “the resurrection of Christ is a pledge and proof of the resurrection of His people.”⁴⁵ So the biblical teaching is that, though death means complete termination or annihilation, it is not final or definitive, except for what the Bible calls “the second death,” which refers to the final extermination of the wicked (Rev 20:11–15; 21:8). For believers, death does not have the last word (1 Cor 15:26, 54, 55; cf. Rev 2:11; 20:4, 6).

But then comes the paradox: if death means termination, resurrection is much more than an awakening. It truly means recreation. If there is nothing left, there is nothing to be awakened or to come out of the tomb. All aspects of the present life reach their end at death. The memory of the personality and character of the deceased is preserved by God.⁴⁶ Sometimes not even the bones are extant. Yet, they will live again (John 5:25, 28; 11:25; Rev 20:6). So in order to be resurrected there has to be a new creation, this time not from dust, but from heaven (cf. 1 Cor 15:47–50). There is no physical link between this life and the new life in the resurrection. “Though they no longer exist, by the power of God they can be recreated to live again”⁴⁷ — a recreation out of nothing, a new life out of our annihilated and crushed life. Thus, the awakening metaphor, also frequently used in the Bible, is simply the counterpart of the sleep metaphor. One is just the logical equivalent of the other.⁴⁸ As sleep does not convey the nature of death, awakening does not express the character of resurrection.

Conclusion

The Seventh-day Adventist view of what happens at death has sometimes been misunderstood; first, because of the way we ourselves have occasionally described our views and, second, as a result of the dualistic connotation traditionally associated with soul-sleep. It could be argued that this comes from a reading of Adventist literature unmindful of the larger context of biblical anthropology in which these statements are made. But this is no excuse for making every effort to express our understanding of the subject as clearly and completely as possible.

The sleep metaphor does not fully express the condition of human beings in death, because death means the complete cessation of life with all that that includes. Sleep is only a phenomenological description of death. Jesus employed many metaphors in order to convey the meaning of concepts beyond ordinary human understanding. When describing death as a sleep, He relates it more directly to being “awakened,” i.e., to the assurance and immediacy of the resurrection than to death itself.

Therefore, we should to use the sleep metaphor judiciously to avoid understating the seriousness of death and detracting from the uniqueness of resurrection. An exaggerated emphasis on death under “the gentle image of sleep,”⁴⁹ may fall short of conveying the real nature of both death and resurrection.