CHRISTIANITY AND THE AFTERLIFE (original) (raw)
Related papers
On Two Reasons Christian Theologians Should Reject The Intermediate State
Journal of Reformed Theology, 2017
Typically, Christian theology includes an understanding of human afterlife consisting of two stages. The first is a disembodied existence as an immaterial being in the time between death and resurrection. Normally, it's affirmed that some disembodied humans go to Heaven/Paradise between one's death and resurrection; this is a state I call The Intermediate State. The second stage is the bodily resurrection. In this paper, I focus on The Intermediate State. Though the majority of the Christian tradition affirms it, I think it's mistaken. To show two reasons why, I argue that a traditional metaphysics of human persons deployed to explicate The Intermediate State brings with it one or the other of at least two untoward consequences for Christian theology.
Heaven before Resurrection : Soul, Body and the Intermediate State
Heaven and Philosophy, 2017
According to a traditional Christian doctrine, the soul of the person continues to exist in a disembodied state between bodily death and bodily resurrection. This doctrine places theoretical constraints on a Christian metaphysics of the human person (the nature of her body and her soul). In this paper, I consider seven different philosophical anthropologies and try to adjudicate which one is the more suited to account for the doctrine of the Intermediate State. I argue that a kind of "Compound Dualism" is the best candidate.
Special issue "Images of Afterlife", Thanatos 4: 2/2015
What would human life look like if it were not about images of this world and the otherworld? Could such a life sustain people, their societies and cultures in an appropriate way? These are questions, which preoccupy the contributors to this special issue. The goal of this volume is to gather a large scale of discussions to highlight how the questions may be taken seriously. Also, the aim is to show how the questions are meaningful for the scholars working in these areas or for those who are interested in the study of death more generally. The papers of this volume originate from the conference "Images of Afterlife", organized by the research project Mind and the Other, at the University of Turku.
Religious Inquiries, 2015
This article studies the problem of eternal life from a philosophical perspective. It focuses on the approaches of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger from contemporary philosophy, and shows that using these three philosophical approaches can better explain certain aspects of revealed theology, such as resurrection of flesh, eternity in a transcendent dimension, and eternal life as the angels in heaven. In this way, a point of interaction between philosophy and theology is highlighted.