After that Jesus adds the words, “Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour is
coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God;
and they that hear shall live. For as the Father hath life in Himself; so hath
He given to the Son to have life in Himself.”

As yet He does not speak of the second resurrection, that is, the resurrection of the body, which shall be in the end, but of the first, which now is. It is for the sake of making this distinction that He says, “The hour is coming, and now is.” Now this resurrection regards not the body, but the soul. For souls, too, have a death of their own in wickedness and sins, whereby they are the dead of whom the same lips say, “Suffer the dead to bury their dead,” — that is, let those who are dead in soul bury them that are dead in body.

It is of these dead,
then — the dead in ungodliness and wickedness — that He says, “The
hour is coming, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son
of God; and they that hear shall live.” “They that hear,” that is, they who
obey, believe, and persevere to the end. Here no difference is made between the good and the bad. For it is good for all men to hear His voice
and live, by passing to the life of godliness from the death of ungodliness.
Of this death the Apostle Paul says, “Therefore all are dead, and He died
for all, that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves,
but unto Him which died for them and rose again.”

Thus all, without one
exception, were dead in sins, whether original or voluntary sins, sins of
ignorance, or sins committed against knowledge; and for all the dead there
died the one only person who lived, that is, who had no sin whatever, in
order that they who live by the remission of their sins should live, not to
themselves, but to Him who died for all, for our sins, and rose again for our
justification, that we, believing in Him who justifies the ungodly, and being
justified [made just] from ungodliness or quickened from death, may be able to attain
to the first resurrection which now is. For in this first resurrection none
have a part save those who shall be eternally blessed; but in the second, of
which He goes on to speak, all, as we shall learn, have a part, both the
blessed and the wretched. The one is the resurrection of mercy, the other
of judgment. And therefore it is written in the psalm, “I will sing of mercy
and of judgment: unto Thee, O Lord, will I sing.”

-Augustine, The City of God