Christian eschatology is the doctrine of the last things: death, judgement, resurrection, the return of Christ, and the final state. Its creedal core is short and almost universally shared, that Christ "shall come again with glory to judge the living and the dead", and that the church looks for "the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come". Nearly everything beyond that has been disputed.
The scriptural material is concentrated in the synoptic apocalypse (Mark 13 and its parallels), in Paul's letters to Thessalonica and in 1 Corinthians 15, and in Revelation, with Daniel standing behind them all. The question that governs every other is how far this language is meant as a description of a future sequence. Historical-critical scholarship since Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer has emphasised that Jesus preached within a Jewish apocalyptic framework and expected an imminent end, and has treated the delay of that end as one of the formative pressures on early Christianity. C. H. Dodd argued instead for a "realised eschatology" in which the decisive events had already occurred in Jesus' ministry. The widely adopted mediating position describes an eschatology inaugurated but not consummated, already and not yet. Confessional treatments and historical-critical ones diverge sharply here, and the divergence is worth naming: the second asks what the texts expected and whether it happened, the first asks what the church should confess, and they are not the same question.
Individual eschatology adds its own divisions. Whether the dead are conscious between death and resurrection or "sleep" has been argued since the Reformation. Purgatory is defined doctrine in Catholicism, affirmed at the Second Council of Lyons and at Trent, was rejected by the Reformers as unscriptural and as entangled with indulgences, and has no Latin equivalent in Orthodoxy, which prays for the dead without the developed doctrine. And the nature of hell divides those who hold everlasting conscious punishment, those who hold that the lost finally cease to exist, and those who hope or hold that all are saved, a position with a patristic advocate in Origen, condemned in the sixth century, and a persistent minority presence ever since.