Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. vs. Soul Sleep



For the living are conscious that they will die; but as for the dead, they are conscious of nothing at all, neither do they anymore have wages, because the remembrance of them has been forgotten. Also, their love and their hate and their jealousy have already perished, and they have no portion anymore to time indefinite in anything that has to be done under the sun . . . All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power, for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in She'ol, the place to which you are going. (Eccl 9:5-6, 10 New World Translation)

In Response to Douglas V. Pond on Biblical and LDS Anthropology and Eschatology I interact with various arguments by Douglas Pond, a Seventh Day Adventist, and the state of the dead, particularly the SDA belief in "soul sleep" (something other groups hold to, albeit in the more extreme form ["soul death"], including Jehovah's Witnesses and Christadelphians).

Not many LDS have interacted with such a doctrine as most of our critics believe in a conscious intermediate state. Notwithstanding, Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. briefly interacted with the common appeal to Eccl 9:5-6, 10:

The spirits do not “sleep” between death and the resurrection. There is a doctrine prevalent among some sects that would have us believe all spirits rest “as a child falls exhausted into bed at night.” The words quoted from Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6, 10 are misinterpreted and are not opposed to the teaching of Peter [from 1 Pet 3:18-20; 4:6]. The sixth verse makes it clear that the writer is referring to this life only. The dead are forgotten by whom? The living. The writer of Ecclesiastes was not considering the resurrection, or a future life, but was discoursing on the present life. True, there is no learning in the grave, but the spirit, which is eternal, never dies, and is released from the mortal body at death to enter the spirit world preparatory to a future resurrection of the body. “. . . neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun,” (Ecc. 9:6) because it is impossible for them to take worldly goods with them. We are quick to forget the dead, and the writer of Ecclesiastes has so declared. Joseph Fielding Smith Jr. Religious Truths Defined: A Comparison of Religious Faiths with the Restored Gospel [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1959], 299, comment in square bracket added for clarification)