Catholic Answers Live 2020-07-17 2nd hour 1:01:40 to 1:09:18
Seventh Day Adventists believe that after you die your soul goes to sleep until the Second Coming and it will then be raised up
Maria from Bermuda (West Indies): I was raised a Seventh Day Adventist and I was told when I read 1st Samuel that when Saul was speaking to Samuel, who is dead, that dead people can’t speak to people who are alive because Seventh Day Adventists believe in something called soul sleep. So Samuel must have been speaking to a demon or something and I was taught that all dead people go to sleep and at the Second Coming, that’s when they’re raised up. So there is no way one can pray to a saint or anyone can talk to a ghost or anything. So I just want to know about that.
Jimmy Akin: The idea of soul sleep, which you described very well, is something that is found in Seventh Day Adventism, it’s also found in some Protestant groups, it is not very common, it is not the majority Protestant view, but it is found sometimes. And it is not the Catholic view. The Catholic view is that the souls of the departed are conscious and they’re having experiences and there is a variety of different passages in both the Old Testament and the New Testament to support that. One passage which is in the Catholic Old Testament, but it’s not in the Protestant Old Testament, is found in the Book of 2nd Maccabees. Now this isn’t going to be biblical evidence for a Protestant or for a Seventh Day Adventist but it is for Catholics and in the passage there is a Jewish leader named Judah Maccabeus and God gives him a vision in a dream of the deceased High Priest Onias and of the deceased prophet Jeremiah. And both Onias and Jeremiah are conscious in the afterlife and they’re praying for the people of Israel. And we see similarly, in the New Testament, we see indications that the departed are conscious and they’re not just going to become conscious on the Last Day. One of the things that we see in the Gospels is Jesus’s story of Lazarus and the rich man where both Lazarus and the rich man die and then they have two different conscious experiences. The rich man because he lived purely selfishly is experiencing punishment and Lazarus, because he lived righteously, is being comforted with Abraham. So you have all three of these people: Lazarus, the rich man, and Abraham having conscious experiences in the afterlife. Now you could say, well, isn’t this a parable? Maybe. It does look like it is a parable. But it is kind of a strange parable because it’s the only parable of Jesus which has a named character. Jesus never names his characters otherwise in His parables. He doesn’t say Bob the Farmer had two sons and here is what happened. This is the only parable with somebody who is named. Lazarus. And, incidentally, in the parable it is suggested that Lazarus should return from the dead. And even though that doesn’t happen in the parable, don’t we know someone named Lazarus who really did return from the dead? I mean, it is right there in John 11. And his sisters Mary and Martha are even mentioned in Luke’s Gospel. So Luke should have known the story of Lazarus who returned from the dead. And so it’s hard to escape the idea that maybe this is something more than a parable, maybe it’s an account of what happened with Lazarus. On the other hand, even if it is just a parable, Jesus’ parables are based on real life. And so the parables have kings and servants and farmers and sons and fields and crops and all this stuff and if they also have conscious dead people in them that would suggest that conscious dead people are a real thing, just like kings and servants and fields and farmers and crops. Then when we move to the Book of Revelation we see the souls of the martyrs, this is the Sixth Seal in the Book of Revelation, we see the souls of the martyrs crying out to God for justice. And they’re clearly dead. They’re martyrs, they’re not yet resurrected, we see other people coming up from the Earth, their souls coming up from the Earth and John is asked “Who are these?” and he says to his guide, “Well, you know, you tell me,” and the guide says these are those who have died in the great tribulation. We again see souls of people who died having conscious experience before the resurrection of the dead. There is also St. Paul’s statement that he wished he could go and be with Christ right now, which suggests that he would be experiencing things consciously with Christ, not in the resurrection in a resurrected body, but right now, he’s talking about dying and being with Christ, which is also suggestive that he expects a conscious afterlife. And then we have the passage you started with, in the Old Testament, where King Saul goes to a medium in the town of Endor, so she’s commonly called the Witch of Endor, and that’s where we get Endora on the show Bewitched, if you remember that, but he asks her to call up the soul of Samuel and she does and if you read the text right there in the historical book it doesn’t say anything like “this is a demon,” it says “Samuel talked to her” and “Samuel said this to King Saul”. So the text does not present this as a demon, that is an inference that people have tried to draw because they want to get away from the idea that maybe God will allow dead people to return and communicate. But the way the text presents it, this is really Samuel talking. And there happens to be an additional piece of information in the Catholic bible that deals with this. Now, again, this isn’t in the Protestant bible, so it won’t be in Seventh Day Adventist tradition but in Sirach Chapter 46 verse 20 it mentions how, even after Samuel died, he prophesied to King Saul about how he (King Saul) would die, and out of the grave he spoke as a prophet. So you have the author of Sirach, who was at least an early Jewish author, and from a Catholic point of view he was not just an early Jewish author, he was an inspired Jewish author, also saying that, yes, that was Samuel, it really was his departed spirit who God had allowed, He doesn’t often allow this necessarily but at least in this case He allowed Samuel’s departed spirit to come back and prophesy to King Saul.
Maria: Thank you.