We need to think more about eternity, because we (and all creation) are permanent (i.e., immortal) — a gift given by God. At the Last Day, everyone will be resurrected, and all things will be restored in the great Universal Transfiguration.
But what about death in this world, before the Last Day? This was an anxious question for the Christians of the Thessalonian church. Some of them seriously worried that when Christ returned, only those who were alive then would join Him in the new age — all those who had died beforehand would simply be left behind.
St Paul assured them that actually, the “dead in Christ” will be raised first, and then we will join them.
So the question remains: what happens to a person when he or she dies before the Second Coming of Christ? What will their experience be like?
To be sure, we’re talking about matters that go beyond our understanding and our ability to think about. We cannot force the afterlife or any spiritual reality into our rationalizing habits.
Unfortunately, well-meaning Christians have tried to do this very thing for centuries … that is, they have attempted to impose rational thought onto what happens to the soul after death. The Scholastic movement after Thomas Aquinas was especially bad at this … and the Scholastic, hyper-rationalized theories about life after death have been transmitted to most of Christianity — including Protestants and the evangelical upbringing in which some of us were brought up.
Here is a list of things that we know (from the Bible and the teaching of the Church) about the afterlife, and things we don’t know:
1. Death is not flatlining on the heart monitor, or the absence of brain waves. The reality of death is not defined by medicine at all. Rather, death is when the soul is removed from the body. Death was permitted by God as the natural consequence of sin, and God has “redeemed” it as a limitation, so that sin could not last forever.
2. The physical body then declines back into the stuff from which it was made (“dust to dust”). But the soul always remembers its physical substance — a memory that God will use to resurrect a new glorious body on the Last Day. The body will rise again. Because of this, and because the soul continues to be alive, we do not really use the word “death” — Jesus, and the Church, prefers to use the word “repose,” or “falling asleep,” or “dormition.”
3. Death is something like a dividing line between the “soul/body” life on earth, and the “soul/spirit” life in the spiritual world. The soul is your consciousness/unconsciousness psyche: that is why you will remember life on earth, and will know that you are you. The soul then is plunged into the spiritual world. The soul will, until the Last Day, not have a physical body. But for the first time, it will experience the fullness of spiritual reality. We get glimpses of this reality even now: sometimes when we pray or celebrate the Liturgy … sometimes when we are struck by beauty and experience love. But when we fall asleep in the Lord, we will be completely in the experience of the angels — there will be no physical or sinful barriers to the angels, nor especially to the obviousness of God. We will be in the spiritual fullness of communication with God, with the angels (including your guardian angel, and with all of humanity (no one will be unknown or have to wear name tags: no one — you, me or anyone else, even a cave man from 10,000 BC — will be incognito).
4. There will be no possible way to doubt God’s presence. There will be no possibility of deception, no lies of the devil. In the afterlife, there will be no atheists, because demonic deception simply cannot be present in the complete “obviousness” and clarity of the presence of God. In fact, the presence of the demonic — which is always a reality in this life, and which depends on deception and “clouding over” God’s presence — that same evil presence may not be there in the afterlife at all. I know that many people — even in Orthodoxy and especially in the Roman Catholic doctrine of Purgatory and Hades — teach otherwise. But the presence of demons in the afterlife (such as in the Tollhouse teaching) is not a dogmatic certainty, and certainly does have Orthodox theological problems. The Tollhouse tradition has a robust history in monasticism, but it persists in the context of this tradition as a series of visions which must be interpreted with great discernment. As it stands prima facie, it does not rise to Orthodox dogma.
5. Even though Orthodoxy denies the “place” of Purgatory (from Roman Catholic doctrine), the fact remains that there will certainly be an experience of “purgation.” Here is where we need to especially rid ourselves of Western rationalistic tendencies — tendencies that insist on seeing sin as a criminal offense, something that God “must” punish so that He can maintain a courtroom-like sense of “justice.” For one thing, it can never be said that God “must” do anything, or that He “needs” to punish out of His sense of justice. Instead, in our experience of the clear light of God’s presence, we will face the reality of our life, and just how successful we were in loving God and loving humanity and creation, in our own particular life (that is the “talent” that God gave us at birth). Whatever shortcomings that will be shown to us in the light of God’s presence will be something we’ll have to work out. Perhaps we tried — as so many people do in today’s world — to ignore spiritual reality altogether. If that is the case, being plunged in the afterlife reality of the spirit is going to come as an enormous shock. But we will all have to struggle in the afterlife with working on any “unfinished business” of the vocation of love — a vocation to which God calls everyone, to follow Jesus Christ. Perhaps there will be a way to fix the sins we left behind in this life — that, obviously, is just a guess, but the fact remains that we have no idea as to what that struggle for each person will be like.
6. This is a redemptive struggle. What is certainly not certain, and what probably has no place in Orthodox teaching, is the idea of “retribution” or “juridical punishment.” Yes, I know that in some Parables, Jesus described punishment in the afterlife. For example: “And his lord was angry, and delivered him to the jailers, till he should pay all that was due unto him, even unto the last penny” (Matthew 18,34). But let’s remember that in the Parables (and in other “styles” of Scripture, like the Psalms and Revelations), there is much that needs to be taken figuratively, as the Lord Himself indicates. Anytime that the Gospels and Scripture talk of punishment, this needs to be more deeply understood as serious descriptions of the struggle, and how hard that struggle may be (especially for people who rejected the calling of divine love).
7. This redemptive struggle is a necessary cooperative work of our soul and God’s Grace in the afterlife. God always calls for our cooperation throughout life, and this is especially important in the afterlife. This struggle is necessary because it is a preparation for the Resurrection on the Last Day. Thus, the afterlife is not a passive state, as it is depicted in rationalistic doctrines. It is possible that the soul might be even more active in this afterlife in the spiritual world than it was in this physical world.
8. That struggle, which will be strenuous (and may call for suffering if we are not prepared in this life), is exactly why we are called upon by the Lord to pray for our loved ones who have fallen asleep, whose souls now life in the afterlife. Our prayers aid them. And their prayers aid us. No one is passive in the afterlife. The single life of the single human nature (whose head is the Risen Christ) persists in a single communion of the Church, living and deceased. That is why, at the end of Liturgy, the priest empties the particles on the Discos into the Chalice — particles that commemorate you and your family and your loved ones, living and departed: we are thus joined together in the Blood of Jesus Christ.
9. The Orthodox Holy Tradition, by the way, does not exclude the possibility of repentance in the afterlife.The famous Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus indicates this possibility. Prior to his death, the Rich Man was self-centered and lived to gratify his material desires. He cared nothing for no one, and was grossly insensitive to anyone in need around him — like poor Lazarus, who begged bread by the gate. But after death, while he was suffering (and Hades is the term used to describe this suffering), he begged that Lazarus might go and warn his brothers about his fate. There is more to the story than this. But let’s just stop and focus on this change. The Rich Man was no longer self-involved. He cared for his brothers’ spiritual state. He now actually loved. In the afterlife, he had changed. There are other stories in Holy Tradition about such change in Hades: the husband of St Xenia of Petersburgh is chief among them. She prayed and ministered for the redemption of her deceased alcoholic husband: and her prayers were answered. But we should never forget that salvation had to be by her husband’s cooperation as well: God does not save someone until he or she wants saving.
10. Love is never powerless. Repentance is never ineffective. This is true certainly in this life. But it is also true — perhaps even truer — in the next.
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