Judged Twice, Once at Death

Catholic and Orthodox Christian teaching holds that every soul faces two judgments: a particular judgment immediately at death, in which the individual soul's eternal destiny, heaven, hell or a purifying intermediate state, is decided, and a general or last judgment at the end of history, when body and soul are reunited and the verdict is made public before the whole of creation.

The particular judgment answers a practical question the New Testament leaves largely implicit, what happens to a person between their death and the general resurrection, and Catholic theology developed the doctrine of purgatory partly to give that interval doctrinal content for souls whose particular judgment finds them destined for heaven but not yet ready for it.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church states the particular judgment explicitly, citing texts such as the parable of Lazarus and the rich man and Paul's language of departing to be with Christ as scriptural support, though the doctrine's developed form owes as much to patristic and medieval theology as to any single biblical passage. Eastern Orthodoxy holds a broadly similar two stage structure while resisting some of the juridical precision of the Western tradition, preferring language of a foretaste of judgment over a fully rendered verdict.