Self, Death and Afterlife

Question 1

What is the meaning and purpose of life?

Answer 1

• To glorify God and to have a personal relationship with him.
  o Humans are made in God’s image, so their purpose is to reflect God’s glory in their lives and actions.
• To prepare for judgement.
  o The Genesis story reflects the Christian view that the relationship between God and humans was broken.
  o Jesus died on the cross to atone for human sin, and this process is completed by judgement at the end of time.
  o For some, this judgement is literally to heaven or hell; for John Hick, for example, God’s love means that in the end everyone will be saved.
• To bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth.
  o Some Christians see the hope of establishing God’s Kingdom as eschatological (at the end of time).
  o Others see it as a present reality, thinking that it is possible to establish the qualities of God’s Kingdom on Earth.

Question 2

What is resurrection?

Answer 2

• Resurrection of the body is described in the writings of Augustine.
  o The flesh is needed so that both the spiritual and physical effects of sin can be removed, and Augustine presumes from the Gospels that Jesus’ resurrection is physical.
• The idea of spiritual resurrection is influenced by Plato’s dualistic philosophy, where a person is essentially a non -material soul housed in a physical body.
  o St Paul seems to support the idea of a spiritual resurrection where he says that what is sown a physical body, is raised a spiritual body, although perhaps Paul’s idea of a new, incorruptible, heavenly body retains some kind of physical aspect.
• 1 Corinthians 15: 42-44 and 50-54 is about Paul’s responses to those in the Corinthian Church who doubted that humans could follow Jesus’ example and resurrect after death.
  o Paul’s answer is important as an early piece of Christian theology from a time only 20-25 years after Jesus’ death.

Question 3

What are the different view on Judgement, heaven, hell and purgatory?

Answer 3

• Some understand judgement, heaven, hell, and purgatory as physical.
  o The reality of pain in the era before anaesthetics made the idea of physical punishment after death a likely one to expect.
  o Moreover, the bodily suffering of Jesus on the cross was real, so physical pain as punishment for sin was a natural idea.
• Others understand them as spiritual realities, in which suffering might be seen as a spiritual loss, such as permanent or semi-permanent separation from God
• For many liberal Christians, judgement, heaven, hell, and purgatory are perhaps psychological realities, generated by the mind, so ‘heaven’ in this sense might be a life of peace and contentment, whereas those who live in conflict might experience psychological ‘hell’ from which escape might come through some form of reformation, perhaps through psychoanalysis.
• Process theologians generally reject any idea of subjective immortality (that is, where the individual retains the same consciousness after death).
  o Since God exists panentheistically with the physical universe, God is the totality of both mental and physical experience.
  o If the universe is ‘in’ God, then all humans are ‘in’ God, and in fact when any being dies, it stays as a real and permanent object in the mind of God.