Flavors of Christian Afterlife

American popular culture has a standard model of the afterlife in jokes, cartoons, and sentimental books such as The Littlest Angel. After death, the soul is an image of the living person, the same age and often in the usual clothes, that rises out of the body like a mist. This soul maintains the deceased’s name, memories, and other ego-traits and remains kin to souls gone before. “I’m going there to meet my mother." The first stop is a lectern on a puffy cloud in front of the Pearly Gates, where Peter consults a guest book. Souls whose names are written there (theories vary widely as to who qualifies) are issued white robes, halos, wings, and sometimes harps. The unlisted are dropped, sometimes through a trap door, to eternal torment by horned red devils with pitchforks in a fiery underground pit. Heaven is a walled city floating on clouds, with golden streets where the souls of the saved hang out forever in the presence of God and significant others, blissful renditions of more or less the people they were on earth.

This derives in part from the Apocalypse of John but is not found there in its entirety. Outside of that allegory, it has other scraps of basis in the Bible. However, the Hebrew texts that make up the Old Testament (except for two late references in Daniel and Isiah) don’t mention the resurrection of the dead. The word for soul, nephish, signifies a mortal animating principle present in animals as well as humans. After death, the souls of the dead become feeble ghosts in Sheol, a dark, silent place under the earth, cut off from God and life. Good and bad people alike languish in Sheol, translated Hades in the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible. In Book 11 of The Odyssey, shades from Hades throng hungrily around blood poured in a pit, and Achilles, the most illustrious of the dead, tells Odysseus that he would rather be the hireling of a poor man on earth than “lord over all the dead.” In 1 Samuel 28, at the request of Saul, a medium similarly calls up the shade of Samuel out of the ground. Being one of God’s favorites does not exempt him from Sheol.

In most of the Old Testament, God rewards His faithful (if at all) with wealth, long life, prestige, victory, security, health, and offspring. These are the blessings prayed for in the Psalms. When Job passes God’s test, his reward is long life, a double stock of sheep, oxen, and donkeys, and new sons and daughters. A piece of wisdom from Ecclesiastes is that the living know that they will die but the dead know nothing (9:5), which seems to have been the assumption for most of the early Jews. Emphasis on worldly legacy explains the genealogies in Chronicles and the custom of levirate marriage, wherein a man marries his childless brother’s widow and their first son is the brother’s heir “that his name may not be blotted out of Israel” (Deuteronomy  25:6). 

The only two clear references to life after death are in books written later—Isaiah 26:19 and Daniel 12:2–both of which describe corpses rising from their graves: “those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake” in Daniel and “their corpses shall rise, dwellers in the dust” in Isaiah. Unlike Samuel’s ghost, they rise in reconstituted material bodies, a miraculous event at the end time, not an ordinary fact of dying. For the first time in Judeo-Christian scripture, Daniel describes post-mortem judgement, the good raised up to “everlasting life." Daniel’s dead have physical bodies—walking a post-apocalyptic earth after centuries of “sleeping” in womb-like graves, not levitated as angels to cloud-heaven. For the ancient Jew, human and animal life depended on a physical body. Any concept of life after death without a body was apparently nonsense.

Even in Jesus’ time, the ideas of Daniel and of Isaiah (suspected of being late additions) were rejected by the Sadducees, the Jewish sect that administered the temple. According to the contemporary historian Josephus, they adhered to a traditional belief in Sheol and rejected both the immortality of the soul and the resurrection of the dead. The Pharisees, the other major Jewish sect, believed in the resurrection, some apparently in Daniel’s terms, while Josephus, himself a Pharisee, expected the souls of good people to be reincarnated. The common thread, that a human life requires a human body, continued into early Christianity. Jesus is, of course, said to have been physically resurrected still in a material body. He does not just float out of his tomb, but the stone is rolled away, and in the days between his resurrection and ascension, he walks, eats, and is touched. Moreover, according to Paul, he is “the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep” (1 Corinthians:15-20), a model for the general resurrection of the saved.

All the references to everlasting life in the New Testament involve human bodies, either mortal ones reborn in baptism or immortal ones transformed but still substantial after the resurrection. The Platonic concept of innately immortal souls in a bodiless realm is absent from the the New Testament. The dead are sleeping, waiting unconsciously to be reconstituted atom for atom when God’s trumpet blows in eternal bodies resembling Jesus' own post-resurrection one. Prophecies of the Last Day vary in detail, but all agree that Jesus will return to this earth and raise corpses out of it—a doctrine taught by the Catholic Church and enshrined in the Nicene Creed. In the first chapter of Acts, chosen witnesses see Jesus lifted up into a cloud. As they stand in amazement, two men in white robes appear—perhaps angels or Moses and Elijah repeating the transfiguration (Luke 9:30)—and assure the witnesses that he will return, “in the same way that you saw him go into heaven” (Acts 1:11), that is bodily returning to the earth.

Justin Martyr argues in AD 153 that nobody can be human without both a soul and a body, “but that which is composed of the two together is called a man, and if God called man to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but the whole." By Justin’s day, the church had absorbed the philosophy of Plato, so he speaks of an “incorruptible” soul  that is “part of God” but defends the human body. Even though temporarily corrupted by sin, it is the form in which the saved will live forever ("on the Resurrection" 8). Exactly in what sort of place this life is predicted is unclear in the combined prophecies. On the one hand, a “new earth” after a cleansing fire may be read as a restoration of our planet to its Edenic state, or, on the other hand, “earth” may be read metaphorically as “dwelling place,” allowing it to be conflated with a celestial heaven. Thessalonians 4:17, which refers to the saved being caught up in the clouds, suggests this figurative reading, but clouds are still earthly. Two distinct figures—Platonic souls gift-wrapped in spiritual body-forms and pre-Adamic bodies awakened by the gift of eternal nephish—stand balanced opposite each other in Christian orthodoxy.

Gnostic Christians, a minority sect in the early church, tipped this balance toward of Neoplatonism. There is no orthodox Gnostic doctrine, as it was held by disparate groups and never endorsed by the bishops, but Gnostics rejected the resurrection of the body. The core gnostic myth is that our world (not just the earth but the starry empyrean as well) is the work of a rebel angel, a would-be God identified with Yahweh, who created it all as a prison for divine sparks that he stole from the Good God in the real Heaven outside our world. The seven-day creation story is true, but Yahweh’s claim to be omnipotent and good is belied by his all-to-human actions in Pentateuch. He is, in fact, the Platonic demiurge, a spirit able to shape dead matter but powerless to create life, and we are living sparks taken hostage from our home in Heaven. The goal of life is to realize this—to achieve this knowledge or gnosis—and to return home. In effect, the God of Moses is Satan. Christ, the son of the Good God, was a messenger sent from Heaven to teach us how to escape our prison world. Jesus never had a body, but merely the appearance of one. He was never a prisoner. As a living soul of the highest order, perfect and immune to Satanic evil, he did not actually suffer or die but merely gave these appearances to instruct us. Gnostics saw human souls as pure and eternal, the work of the true God, human bodies as filthy cages to keep them out of Heaven, so bodily resurrection was anathema to them.

The gnostics embroidered these themes with elaborate mythologies that were never adopted by any church establishment, but Marcion of Sinope (c. 85-160), who adopted the simpler outlines of the theology, led a group of churches in Asia Minor. Studying the Christian canon in Rome, he concluded that Jesus’ account of a loving heavenly father was incompatible with Yahweh, the moody war-god of Hebrew scripture. This distinction was certainly not missed by orthodox writers, who tended to read Yahweh’s anger and other human foibles as primitive human projections, not as accurate descriptions of His nature.

Marcion did not buy this and taught a theology of dualism (two gods, good and evil) and docetism (the illusory nature of the incarnation). He was the first major Christian heretic, excommunicated when the church was still a persecuted minority, but his churches continued for centuries. Constantine’s state Christianity gave orthodox bishops police power, but dualistic churches survived on the fringes of the empire, emerging as the Paulicans in 7th century Armenia and in the 10th century as the Bogomils in Bulgaria, who apparently proselytized west into Italy and France to produce the last great flowering of Christian dualism, the Cathars, who claimed to preserve primitive Christianity, and and may be the remote heirs of Marcion.

The Cathars believed that ordinary men and women are doomed, not to hell, but to reincarnation in a world of suffering and corruption. Only the Cathar perfects, the clergy of the sect, could hope to escape Lucifer’s trap of flesh and see the heaven. Perfects were ordained in a ceremony of the laying on of hands by those already perfected, after which they had to abstain from meat, milk, eggs, sex, and oaths. The slightest lapse voided a perfect’s ordination and the ordination of everybody he or she had ordained. Most Cathars were supporters of these Good Men and Good Women whom they fed, admired, and supported, listening to their teachings.

The Cathar movement, similar in many ways to Buddhism, was no temporary anomaly in Christianity. It continued a millennium-long tradition and might have survived as a subset of Protestantism except for its fragile chain of succession. In 1200, it dominated Christianity in the south of  France, and, even after the brutal Albigensian Crusade (the first one called against a Christian nation) had decimated the the sect, even with the weakness that a perfect was easily exposed (unable to swear orthodoxy without ceasing to be perfected), it took a century for the Inquisition, which was organized specifically to destroy the Cathars, to accomplish that mission.