Christian teaching bout the afterlife

• Christians reject the idea that a human soul can leave one physical body at the point of death and be reborn into a new physical body in the same world

  (reincarnation)
• reject Plato's idea that the soul and body could part company, with the body decomposing whilst the soul moves on by itself

  (disembodied experience)
• Believe that life after death will take the form of resurrection where the person is given a renewed spiritual body
• Two sources for resurrection:

  NT & ancient greeks
• there are references to resurrection in the Jewish scriptures

  "The Abraham breathed his last and died at a good old age, an old man and full of years; and he was gathered by his people"
• There are biblical passages about future hope and the "Last days", in which there is a clear reference to resurrection

  "Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt." Daniel 12:2
• Life after death to the Jews may have seemed like the obvious solution to the problem of God's apparent injustice in this earthly life. In this life people suffer, sometimes because of their faithfulness to God. Therefore a God of love and justice must make it possible for those people to be rewarded after death.
• The Pharisees were distinctive in their beliefs in resurrection whilst the Sadducees taught that there was no afterlife
• Later in Judaism, the idea developed that dead people would be resurrected to begin a new kind of life, once the Messiah had come
• The ancient Greeks also had an influence on Christian ideas about life after death, Plato's dualist ideas about the body and the soul influenced the Christian view that we have a spiritual soul which is non-physical and survives the death of the body
• Christians believe that after Jesus' death, he was resurrected. They believe this is evidence that the same thing will happen to us, this however is not in the Gospel accounts
• Resurrection is a central belief which can be traced back to the very earliest New Testament writings when people were still alive during Jesus' lifetime.
• Jesus' resurrection in the Gospel accounts give no hint that this might be a pictorial way of saying something else (like EVERYONE being resurrected after death)
• The Gospel accounts still leave some questions unanswered which are addressed in Corinthians where Paul is trying to answer new christians in the church
• "For we know that if the early tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands. Meanwhile we groan, longing to be clothed instead with our heavenly dwelling, because when we are clothed, we will not be fund naked" 2 Corinthians 5:1-3

  Paul's use of a tent being replaced by a more solid house suggests an idea that at the moment we "live in" the bodies that we have now but they are not truly us
• Christian believe that resurrection will involve a bodily life of some form, not just a disembodied spiritual existence.
• Christians also believe that the resurrected person will be the same person as the one who died
• Christians believe that life after death will be a miracle given by God and not just a natural process