Christian afterlife, harrowing of hell
Jul. 20th, 2024 10:14 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackA little while ago I was reminded that in the Jesus-sponsored version of the afterlife people "die, wait for judgement day, be sent to eternal life or to eternal fire" (despite the common expectation of going to heaven or hell immediately).
I thought I had understood that (with some variation like whether "eternal life" is heaven or messiah-perfected-earth or something else, or whether eternal fire is eternal punishment or not). And separating out what Jesus' listeners would have thought from how people interpret Jesus nowadays.
But this week I was suddenly reminded of the harrowing of hell. If you believe in that, and Jesus descended into the underworld and released some of the people there, where did they GO after getting released? Did they get fast tracked to heaven but everyone else still has to wait for the end of time? Did they go straight to heaven but heaven exists outside time so everyone who goes to heaven ever have always been up there?
Wikipedia thinks that it was common for Jesus' contemporaries to believe in a greek-underworld-like afterlife (Sheol) which is mentioned in the torah but wasn't the official belief of priests or rabbis at the time. If so the story may be, "Jesus let good people out of Sheol and into heaven". And that Jesus was describing an end-of-time judgement, but that belief about where people were in the meantime was ambiguous, perhaps previously assumed to be sheol, but now more interpretations like "nothing" and "purgatory" were starting to occur and be debated in Christianity?
I thought I had understood that (with some variation like whether "eternal life" is heaven or messiah-perfected-earth or something else, or whether eternal fire is eternal punishment or not). And separating out what Jesus' listeners would have thought from how people interpret Jesus nowadays.
But this week I was suddenly reminded of the harrowing of hell. If you believe in that, and Jesus descended into the underworld and released some of the people there, where did they GO after getting released? Did they get fast tracked to heaven but everyone else still has to wait for the end of time? Did they go straight to heaven but heaven exists outside time so everyone who goes to heaven ever have always been up there?
Wikipedia thinks that it was common for Jesus' contemporaries to believe in a greek-underworld-like afterlife (Sheol) which is mentioned in the torah but wasn't the official belief of priests or rabbis at the time. If so the story may be, "Jesus let good people out of Sheol and into heaven". And that Jesus was describing an end-of-time judgement, but that belief about where people were in the meantime was ambiguous, perhaps previously assumed to be sheol, but now more interpretations like "nothing" and "purgatory" were starting to occur and be debated in Christianity?
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Date: 2024-07-20 11:07 am (UTC)