The last things

Death, judgment, and the life of the world to come

What happens when you die, what the Church prays for the dead, and why the hope is resurrection rather than heaven.

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The Creed ends with the last things, and they are not an appendix. He shall come again with glory to judge both the living and the dead... I look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.

Four claims all four traditions hold.

Christ will return. Visibly, in glory, to judge. History has an end and it is a Person.

The dead will rise bodily. Not souls surviving but bodies raised and transfigured. This is the Creed's last article, and it is what the apostles were mocked for in Athens.

There will be a judgement. Every person, and the criterion will not be a surprise - Matthew 25 lists it.

The end is a new creation. Not disembodied souls in a cloud but a new heaven and a new earth, with God dwelling among His people. Revelation's last picture is a city coming down, not people going up.

Between death and the resurrection there is an intermediate state, and this is where the four differ. The departed are with Christ - Paul says to depart and be with Christ is far better - and they await the resurrection. Catholic teaching holds that those who die in grace but imperfectly purified undergo purgatory. Orthodoxy prays for the departed extensively but declines to define what happens. Lutherans and most Anglicans reject purgatory as lacking scriptural warrant, though many Anglicans pray for the dead.

The commonest popular error is to imagine the Christian hope as going to heaven when you die. That is real but provisional. The hope the Creed confesses is larger: the dead raised, creation renewed, and God dwelling with His people on a remade earth.

Death

Christianity does not treat death as natural, a friend, or a doorway. It is an enemy - Paul calls it the last enemy that shall be destroyed - and grief is therefore appropriate. Christ weeps at Lazarus's tomb knowing He is about to raise him.

At the same time it is a defeated enemy. O death, where is thy sting? The Christian attitude is therefore double and both halves are required: real grief, and a hope that changes how one grieves - that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope. Paul does not say do not sorrow.

Death entered through sin, and Christ has broken it from inside. The Paschal proclamation of the East is the Church's best summary: trampling down death by death.

Pause and thinkPause: what is the difference between the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the body, and why does the Creed confess the second rather than the first?

The intermediate state

Scripture says less about this than people want. What it says:

The penitent thief is told today shalt thou be with me in paradise.
Paul desires to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better, and speaks of being absent from the body and present with the Lord.
The martyrs in Revelation 6 are under the altar, conscious, and are told to rest yet for a little season.
And the resurrection is still future for all of them.

So: the departed in Christ are with Him, conscious, at rest, and awaiting something not yet arrived. The four traditions agree on that much and diverge on what else is happening.

Catholic

The Church teaches purgatory: those who die in God's grace but are still imperfectly purified undergo a purification after death so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter heaven. The Catechism is careful about what this is and is not. It is not a second chance - everyone in purgatory is certainly saved. It is not punishment in the sense of retribution; the Council of Trent avoided specifying its nature or duration, and the popular imagery of fire and time is not doctrine. The distinction that makes it intelligible is between guilt and the disordered attachment that sin leaves behind: absolution removes the guilt, and what remains is a person who still loves wrongly and must be healed before he can bear the presence of God. Prayer for the dead follows directly, and the Church prays for the dead at every Mass. Indulgences belong here: the remission of temporal punishment for sin already forgiven, drawn from the merits of Christ and the saints - a doctrine whose sixteenth-century abuse through sale was real and was prohibited by Pius V in 1567. The particular judgement at death determines heaven, purgatory or hell; the general judgement at the end is public.

Orthodox

Orthodoxy prays for the departed more extensively than any other tradition - panikhida memorial services, commemorations on the third, ninth and fortieth days and annually, Saturdays of the Dead through the year, and the offering of koliva, boiled wheat, as a sign of the resurrection. But it explicitly rejects purgatory as a Latin doctrine, and declined it at the Council of Ferrara-Florence. The East holds that the departed are in a state of anticipation - the righteous in a foretaste of blessedness and the unrighteous in a foretaste of grief - and that their condition can be helped by the Church's prayers, without defining a mechanism. Some Russian sources describe the aerial toll houses, a vivid ascetic image of the soul's passage after death; this is a devotional tradition rather than dogma, and Orthodox theologians disagree publicly about its status. The characteristic Eastern move is reticence: the Church prays for the dead confidently and refuses to explain what her prayers accomplish. A minority tradition, represented by Gregory of Nyssa and taken up by some modern theologians, has hoped for the final restoration of all - apokatastasis - which the Church has never accepted as doctrine and generally treats as a hope that may not be taught as certain.

Lutheran

Lutherans reject purgatory and the whole apparatus of indulgences; this was the presenting issue of the Ninety-Five Theses, and the Smalcald Articles call purgatory a mask of the devil because it conflicts with the chief article that Christ alone, not human works, helps souls. The Confessions also object that praying for the dead as a work performed for payment corrupts the gospel, though Luther himself allowed that a Christian might privately commend the departed to God once or twice without making it a practice or a commerce. On the intermediate state, Lutheran theology speaks of the departed resting in Christ, and Luther sometimes used the image of sleep - a peaceful waiting until the resurrection - while being clear that it is a waiting in Christ's presence rather than unconsciousness or non-existence. The emphasis throughout is that death holds no terror for the baptised: the Christian who dies is not going to be examined but has already been judged in Christ, which is why Lutheran funerals are notably confident and why the tradition's hymnody on death is among its strongest.

Anglican

Article 22 condemns the Romish doctrine concerning purgatory as a fond thing vainly invented, grounded upon no warranty of Scripture - and the precision of the wording has been argued over for centuries, since it condemns the late-medieval Roman system rather than every conceivable belief about a state of purification. In practice the Anglican position is broad. The Prayer Book's burial service commits the body to the ground in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, and the prayers ask that we with all those that are departed may have our perfect consummation and bliss - a commendation of the departed that stops short of praying them out of anywhere. Anglo-Catholics pray for the dead freely and some hold a doctrine of purification; evangelicals do not pray for the dead; and both cite the formularies. All Souls' Day is observed in many parishes. The Anglican instinct here is the same as elsewhere: to hold the creedal affirmations firmly and to leave the mechanisms undefined.

Judgement, heaven and hell

Judgement is affirmed by all four. Christ is the judge - which is the whole comfort of the doctrine, since the one who will judge is the one who was judged for us and still has the wounds. Matthew 25 gives the criterion, and it is startlingly practical.

Heaven is not chiefly a place but a state: the beatific vision, seeing God as He is, which in the East is described as participation in the divine energies and endless growth into Him. The traditions agree it is not static, not boring, and not adequately pictured by clouds.

Hell is affirmed by all four and none of them enjoys it. The shared teaching is that hell is the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God. The Catechism puts it in terms of free choice persisted in to the end. Eastern theology often frames it as experiencing the same divine love as torment because one has refused it - the fire is God's presence, and what it feels like depends on what one has become. All four resist the picture of a God eager to punish. And all four hold that we are not in a position to say of any individual that he is there - the Church has canonised many and damned no one by name.

The end

The Christian hope is not escape but renewal.

Revelation's final vision is not souls ascending. It is a city descending - the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven from God - and a voice saying behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them. The direction is downward. God moves in.

Paul says the creation itself groans, waiting to be delivered from bondage into the liberty of the children of God. The world is not scenery to be discarded once the souls are safely extracted.

And the last enemy is destroyed. He will swallow up death in victory; and the Lord God will wipe away tears from off all faces.

Where modern denominations differ

Who differs: Most Baptist, Pentecostal, Reformed and evangelical churches hold the resurrection, the return of Christ and the judgement, and are allies on the essentials. Three real differences: dispensational premillennialism, dominant in American evangelicalism, which teaches a rapture of the Church followed by a seven-year tribulation and a literal thousand-year reign - a scheme developed by John Nelson Darby in the 1830s and popularised by the Scofield Reference Bible; annihilationism or conditional immortality, held by some evangelicals and by Seventh-day Adventists, that the lost are destroyed rather than eternally conscious; and soul sleep, held by Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, that the dead are unconscious until the resurrection. All reject purgatory and prayer for the dead.

How to answer the rapture scheme: be careful and courteous, because many sincere Christians hold it and it is often the only eschatology they have been taught. The four traditions are amillennial or postmillennial, reading Revelation 20's thousand years as symbolic of the present age between Christ's first and second comings rather than as a future period. Three observations are usually enough. First, the scheme is recent: no Church Father, no medieval theologian, no Reformer taught a pre-tribulation rapture, and Darby's system dates from the 1830s - which is a heavy burden for a doctrine claimed to be the plain sense of Scripture. Second, its principal text, 1 Thessalonians 4:17, describes the Church being caught up to meet the Lord in the air, and the Greek apantesis is the technical word for a delegation going out from a city to meet an arriving dignitary and escort him in - which is a description of Christ's return, not of a secret removal. Third, the Creed knows of one return, not two.

On annihilationism: the texts are genuinely difficult on both sides, and the traditional position should be argued rather than assumed. Matthew 25:46 puts everlasting punishment and life eternal in the same sentence with the same adjective, which makes it awkward to read one as temporary and the other as endless. But the annihilationist is appealing to real language about destruction and perishing, and is usually motivated by a concern for God's justice rather than by laxity.

On soul sleep: the penitent thief is told today; Paul desires to depart and be with Christ, which he would not describe as far better if it meant unconsciousness; and the martyrs in Revelation 6 are awake, speaking and asking questions.

On prayer for the dead, expect the sharpest resistance, and separate the question from purgatory - Lutherans reject purgatory and Anglicans are divided, but Orthodoxy prays for the dead extensively while rejecting purgatory outright, which shows the two are separable. The practice is ancient: the catacomb inscriptions do it, and 2 Maccabees 12 shows it was already Jewish practice before Christ. Whether one accepts it will turn on where one stands on Tradition, and it is more honest to say so than to pretend a proof text settles it.

Work with it

Check yourself

What is the Christian hope as the Creed states it?

Check yourself

What does Catholic teaching say purgatory is, and what does it deny?

Check yourself

Why do the four traditions reject the pre-tribulation rapture scheme?

Objection drill

A loving God who tortures people forever for a finite life of sin is a moral monster. Either hell is not real, or your God is worse than any human tyrant. Infinite punishment for finite crimes fails every standard of justice you would apply anywhere else.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

A model answer

This is the hardest objection in the course and it deserves to be treated as hard rather than managed. Let me take it in pieces, conceding where a concession is owed.

First, what the traditions do not teach. They do not teach that God takes pleasure in punishing, or that He is looking for reasons to condemn. As I live, saith the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 33:11). They do not teach that anyone is sent to hell for a technicality, or for never having heard, or for belonging to the wrong church - the Catholic Catechism and the Orthodox tradition both leave the fate of those outside the visible Church to God's mercy, and no tradition covered here has ever declared a single named person damned.

Second, the picture the objection assumes is not the one the traditions hold. The torture-chamber image, with God as jailer and the damned as prisoners He is punishing, is largely medieval art and Dante rather than doctrine. The Catechism describes hell as the state of definitive self-exclusion from communion with God - a condition freely chosen and persisted in, not a sentence imposed from outside.

The Eastern framing goes further and is worth knowing, because it reorganises the question. In much Orthodox theology there is no separate substance called hellfire. There is God's love, which is one thing, everywhere, and which is experienced as blessedness by those who have become able to receive it and as torment by those who have spent a life refusing it. Isaac the Syrian says those in hell are scourged by the scourge of love. On that account God does not send anyone anywhere. He is present, as He always is, and what that presence feels like depends on what a person has made of himself.

Third, on the finite-crime arithmetic. The traditions would question the accounting model the objection is using. Hell, on the account above, is not a fixed tariff for a quantity of offences. It is a condition - a person who has, over a lifetime, made himself into something that cannot bear the presence of God. The relevant question is not how much punishment does this much sin deserve but what has this person become, and whether that is still changing.

Which is also why the eternity is not obviously arbitrary. If someone has finally and settledly refused, the refusal does not expire. C. S. Lewis's formulation, which is not doctrine but is a fair summary of the tradition's instinct, is that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.

Fourth, the reason the doctrine cannot simply be dropped. It follows from taking human freedom seriously. If God will not override the will - and the whole of Christian teaching on grace insists He invites rather than compels - then a definitive refusal has to be possible, or the invitation was never real. A universe in which everyone is saved regardless of what they choose is a universe in which nothing anyone chooses matters. The doctrine of hell is the cost of the doctrine that your life is not a rehearsal.

Fifth, and this is where honesty is required: the tension does not fully resolve. The Church holds both that God wills all men to be saved and that some may be finally lost, and she has never produced a satisfying reconciliation. Serious Christians have felt the weight of this and said so. Gregory of Nyssa hoped for the restoration of all. Balthasar argued that Catholics may hope, though not teach, that hell is empty. The liturgy prays for the salvation of all. The traditions' settled position is to take hell seriously as a possibility for oneself, to make no pronouncement about anyone else, and to pray for everyone.

And one thing worth putting back, gently. The objection assumes that a God who simply disregarded evil would be more loving. Consider what that would mean in practice: that the torturer and the tortured arrive at the same end regardless, that what was done to the victim finally did not signify, and that nothing anyone did in their life mattered enough to have consequences. Most people, asked whether atrocity should ultimately count for nothing, find they do not believe it. A God indifferent to evil would not be kinder. He would be the one who did not care what happened to you.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.

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