HistoricalChristian.Faith

Doug Wilson on the Intermediate State

Dates: c. 2021 · Wikipedia
Summary: Douglas Wilson (b. 1953), a Reformed/CREC pastor in Moscow, Idaho, is the modern proponent whose expository sermon "The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments" put the two-compartment Hades back on the table — a structured underworld in which a chasm divides Tartarus (the prison of the rebel angels) from Paradise / Abraham's Bosom (the righteous dead). On this reading the descended Christ heralded his victory to the imprisoned angels rather than offering them the gospel (1 Pet 3:18–20).

Claims & evidence

Hades is a structured place — a chasm divides Tartarus from Paradise

There was a chasm between Tartarus on the one side, and Paradise on the other. … The lowest pit of Hades there was called Tartarus, and that is where the angels were locked up—the ones that Jesus preached to.

— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. Wilson reads Hades as a divided geography: at the lowest pit is Tartarus, the prison of the rebel angels (2 Pet 2:4, tartaróō); on the other side of the chasm is Paradise / Abraham's Bosom, where the righteous dead rest (Luke 16:22–26, the rich man and Lazarus separated by "a great gulf fixed"). It is to this Paradise that Christ tells the penitent thief he will come — "that day" (Luke 23:43) — making the intermediate state a real, peopled place between death and the resurrection rather than an undifferentiated sleep or an immediate final heaven/hell.

What to flag. Wilson's chasm-divided Hades describes the cosmography at the descent — his own verb is past tense ("there was a chasm") — and as that snapshot it is well-grounded. What needs tempering is any untempered present tense that lets the two-compartment arrangement stand unchanged today: the descent empties the righteous compartment (Abraham's bosom transferred to Christ), so the righteous no longer wait in it. The place of torment and the angelic Tartarus persist — a structured Hades survives — but the righteous room's tenancy has changed, and Wilson himself affirms as much in a companion sermon ("the part of Hades that contained the saints of God has been emptied out," Apostles Creed 11). So the flag is on the present-tense wording, not the structure: weighed on the two-compartment Hades argument page (assessment: contested), where the present tense is treated as a proponent-wording caveat rather than a defeater of the structured reading.

1 Peter 3:18–20: Christ heralded victory to the imprisoned angels, not the gospel

The word rendered as preached here is not the word for preaching the gospel, which means that this was not an offer of a second chance. The word means to "herald," or to "announce." … The Lord was declaring that He was now the final victor, and that He now held the keys to Death and Hades (Rev. 1:18).

— The Nephilim, Hades, and Other Oddments, dougwils.com. On Wilson's reading the descended Christ goes to Hades and proclaims victory to the disobedient angels of Noah's day locked in Tartarus — distinguishing kēryssō ("to herald / announce") from euangelizō ("to preach the gospel"), so that the proclamation is one of conquest, not salvation: Christ now "held the keys to Death and Hades" (Rev 1:18). This locates the "spirits in prison" among the rebel angels rather than the human dead — a genuinely contested move, since the patristic commentators surveyed here read the spirits as human.

What to flag. Wilson's lexical claim — "the word rendered as preached here is not the word for preaching the gospel" — is overstated. Kēryssō ("to herald / announce") is in fact the New Testament's ordinary verb for proclaiming the gospel ("preach the gospel [kēryxate to euangelion] to every creature," Mark 16:15; "this gospel … shall be preached," Matt 24:14), so the verb does not by itself exclude salvific content; the herald-of-victory reading is carried by the identity of the spirits (the bound angels) and the context, not by the lexeme. The point bears not only on who the spirits are but on what Christ proclaimed to them — a herald of condemnation/victory, or an offer of salvation — weighed on the content-of-the-proclamation argument page (assessment: contested), where the patristic mainstream's salvific reading of the descent (Clement, Irenaeus, Cyril of Alexandria, Hippolytus, Bede on 1 Pet 4:6) runs against the claim for the human dead even as it leaves the fallen angels uncontested.

Notes

• Wilson's fuller treatment of these texts — the angelic reading of Genesis 6, the embodiment mechanism, and the same Hades and 1 Peter material in their original Nephilim context — is on his Doug Wilson on the Nephilim page; the "spirits in prison" sub-claim is adjudicated there on the 1 Peter 3:19 argument page (assessment: contested — a weak leg by patristic-reception lights, a strong one by modern-critical lights). This page carries only the part of his sermon that bears on the intermediate state.
• The structured two-compartment Hades Wilson describes draws on Second Temple cosmology (the neighboring infernal regions of Sheol and the angelic abyss, as in the 1 Enoch imprisonment tradition). The reading is weighed on this doctrine's own two-compartment Hades argument page (assessment: contested).
• When that structured-Hades reading was challenged as a Hellenistic intrusion — Greek underworld cosmography (the Aeneid's Tartarus/Elysium) in Jewish dress — Wilson answered the charge directly in Hell and Hellenism: the "Hellenism" label "is not enough to condemn it," Peter himself uses Tartarus (2 Pet 2:4), and "why did God switch to Greek for the New Testament?" (dougwils.com). Andrew Perriman rebutted him point-by-point (postost.net) — most tellingly that the Elysium = Abraham's bosom equation is unevidenced and that 2 Peter's Tartarus holds only the fallen angels, "no reference to torment," so it cannot also be the rich man's place of torment. The exchange is weighed on the two-compartment Hades argument page.
• Wilson's account stands in the older patristic stream — a populated, structured Hades with the descended Christ active in it (so Tertullian and Hippolytus). The stricter Reformed-confessional view, by contrast, tends to collapse Hades into the final heaven/hell: the Westminster Confession (32.1) sends the righteous dead directly to "the highest heavens" and the wicked to hell, leaving no intermediate two-compartment underworld of the patristic kind. Wilson, himself a Reformed/CREC pastor, is therefore reviving against his own confession the cosmology Calvin and Westminster set aside — a tension internal to his tradition. That confessional denial bears on Wilson's consistency, not on whether the structured reading is true; it is treated as a proponent-consistency point, not a leg of the assessment, on the two-compartment Hades argument page.
• In a companion sermon Wilson presses the descent's effect on the human dead: "all the saints in the Old Testament who had died and gone to Abraham's bosom were transferred when Paradise was moved … the part of Hades that contained the saints of God has been emptied out" (The Apostles Creed 11: He Descended Into Hades, dougwils.com). The descent itself here is the creedal mainstream and largely sound; what to flag is the unguarded "Paradise was moved … emptied out," which rests the whole weight on reading Ephesians 4:9's "lower parts of the earth" as Hades — a step even Aquinas held as only one of two readings (the other being the incarnation). This is weighed on the descent-to-the-dead argument page (assessment: plausible).