This is the basis of the idea of Hell. Hell has traditionally been depicted as a place of eternal fire that symbolises pain and suffering. This is seen as the result of the refusal to accept the happiness that God wants people to share with him. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that after death there is a state of Purgatory. This is a place where some people who have sinned are purified in a 'cleansing fire', after which they are accepted into Heaven.
Most Christian churches do not accept the idea of Purgatory, believing instead that once judgement happens, people will either be in Heaven or Hell for all eternity. The Christian creeds teach:. There is no clear explanation of how this belief will come into practice.
Some Christians say that at the end of time, everybody will be raised up in a physical state on a new Earth. Some people feel that this simply refers to the idea that the whole person will be present in Heaven. What does Christianity say about life after death? Some of the guiding principles for what will happen upon death include: Judgement Some Christians believe that this judgement will happen when they die.
A belief in God and an afterlife does not become spontaneously comforting and existentially strengthening. Despite my rational, conscious acknowledgment that I would die someday, the shattering reality of a fatal diagnosis provoked a remarkably strong psychological denial of mortality. That happens to others, but not to me. When I said these outrageous words out loud, I realized that this delusion had been the actual operating principle of my heart.
The cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker argued that the denial of death dominates our culture, but even if he was right that modern life has heightened this denial, it has always been with us. If we see a dead body, we may philosophize briefly about the fleeting nature of life, but the moment we turn away from the sight the thought of our own perpetuity remains fixed in our minds.
Read: When medicine and faith define death differently. For the same reason, our beliefs about God and an afterlife, if we have them, are often abstractions as well. A feigned battle in a play or a movie requires only stage props.
I spent time as a pastor with sick and dying people whose religious faith was nominal or nonexistent. Many had a set of beliefs about the universe, even if they went largely unacknowledged—that the material world came into being on its own and that there is no supernatural world we go to after death. Death, in this view, is simply nonexistence, and therefore, as the writer Julian Barnes has argued, nothing to be frightened of. So when the certainty of your mortality and death finally breaks through, is there a way to face it without debilitating fear?
Is there a way to spend the time you have left growing into greater grace, love, and wisdom? I believe there is, but it requires both intellectual and emotional engagement: head work and heart work. I use the terms head and heart to mean reasoning and feeling, adapting to the modern view that these two things are independent faculties.
The Hebrew scriptures, however, see the heart as the seat of the mind, will, and emotions. And so I set out to reexamine my convictions and to strengthen my faith, so that it might prove more than a match for death. P aul Brand , an orthopedic surgeon, spent the first part of his medical career in India and the last part of his career in the U. Why is it that people in prosperous, modern societies seem to struggle so much with the existence of evil, suffering, and death?
In his book A Secular Age , the philosopher Charles Taylor wrote that while humans have always struggled with the ways and justice of God, until quite recently no one had concluded that suffering made the existence of God implausible.
For millennia, people held a strong belief in their own inadequacy or sinfulness, and did not hold the modern assumption that we all deserve a comfortable life. When I got my cancer diagnosis, I had to look not only at my professed beliefs, which align with historical Protestant orthodoxy, but also at my actual understanding of God.
Had it been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go?
The answer was yes—to some degree. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may feel freeing—but it offers no remedy for anger. Ironically, I had already begun working on a book about Easter.
Before cancer, the resurrection had been a mostly theoretical issue for me—but not now. Read: What people actually say before they die. I returned to his material now, with greater skepticism than I had previously applied. But as I reread his arguments, they seemed even more formidable and fair to me than they had in the past. They gave me a place to get my footing. Still, I needed more than mental assent to believe in the resurrection. The heart work came in as I struggled to bridge the gap between an abstract belief and one that touches the imagination.
As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey.
In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart. The Bible is filled with sensory language. That was no repudiation of his theology, but Thomas had seen the difference between the map of God and God himself, and a very great difference it was. The Psalms show me a God maddening in his complexity, but this difficult deity comes across as a real being, not one any human would have conjured.
And forget not all his benefits. They are not so much listening to their hearts as talking to them. They are interrogating them and reminding them about God. They are taking truths about God and pressing them down deep into their hearts until they catch fire there. I had to look hard at my deepest trusts, my strongest loves and fears, and bring them into contact with God. My imagination became more able to visualize the resurrection and rest my heart in it. I pray this prayer daily. Occasionally it electrifies, but ultimately it always calms:.
And as I lay down in sleep and rose this morning only by your grace, keep me in the joyful, lively remembrance that whatever happens, I will someday know my final rising, because Jesus Christ lay down in death for me, and rose for my justification. Read: Why I hope to die at
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