Afterlife

Beliefs about what follows death vary more widely than on almost any other religious question, and the variation is not only in the destination but in what is thought to survive at all.

The Abrahamic traditions expect resurrection. Judaism's biblical material is largely reticent: Sheol is the shadowy common destination of the dead, described without much moral differentiation, and the Hebrew Bible's one unambiguous resurrection statement is late (Daniel 12:2). Rabbinic tradition then made the resurrection of the dead central, it is the second benediction of the daily Amidah, and the Mishnah lists denial of it among the positions forfeiting a share in the world to come (Sanhedrin 10:1), and held it alongside the immortality of the soul and the world to come without ever fixing the relation between them. Christianity affirms the resurrection of the body in its creeds, with an intermediate state whose character is disputed, followed by judgement and by heaven or hell, and, in Catholic teaching, purgatory. Islam affirms bodily resurrection, the interval of the barzakh, the reckoning, and the Garden or the Fire, describing both in considerable physical detail, while a strand of the tradition running from the philosophers to modern reformists reads the descriptions as figurative.

The Indian traditions expect rebirth and seek release from it. Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism share the framework of samsara, the round of birth and death governed by karma, and they treat continued existence rather than annihilation as the problem to be solved. The goal is moksha or nirvana, variously described, and in Buddhism deliberately not described as the survival of a self, which raises the tradition's own hardest question, what is reborn if there is no self, answered by continuity without identity, as a flame is passed from one lamp to another.

Chinese traditions hold the ancestors to remain in relation with the living, requiring and repaying attention; Daoist traditions developed both an immortality of the transformed person and an elaborate bureaucratic underworld. Ancient Egyptian religion produced the most elaborate funerary apparatus known, oriented to the judgement of the heart and the continuing life of the akh. Greek and Roman religion expected a diminished shade in Hades, with the mystery cults offering initiates something better. Many Indigenous traditions expect the dead to join the ancestors in a land whose relation to this one is close and continuous, and resist the sharp division between the two that the question itself tends to assume.

Not every tradition expects anything. Strands of Israelite religion, the Sadducees, the Indian materialist Carvaka school and modern religious naturalism hold that death ends the person. Confucius' reported reply is the classic refusal of the question: "you do not yet know life, how can you know death?" (Analects 11:12).

The historical-critical account differs from the confessional ones and is worth stating separately. Scholars generally hold that Israelite religion had no significant afterlife hope for most of its history, that Sheol is not a place of reward or punishment but simply where the dead are, and that resurrection belief appears in Jewish sources in the Hellenistic period, in Daniel and in the literature surrounding the Maccabean persecution, where the deaths of the faithful created precisely the problem that resurrection answers. Whether Zoroastrian eschatology influenced this development is a long-standing question: Zoroastrianism has an early and developed doctrine of individual judgement, the Chinvat bridge, and a final resurrection and renovation of the world, but the dating of the Avestan and Pahlavi sources makes the direction of influence extremely hard to establish, and specialists disagree. Confident claims in either direction outrun the evidence.

Within traditions, the sharpest internal disputes concern hell. Everlasting conscious punishment has been the majority Christian position. Conditional immortality, or annihilationism, holds that the lost finally cease to exist and has had growing support among evangelical theologians since the later twentieth century. Universalism holds that all are finally saved; it had a patristic advocate in Origen, whose views were condemned under Justinian, more cautious support in Gregory of Nyssa, and a continuing minority presence since, including Hans Urs von Balthasar's carefully limited argument that Christians may hope that all are saved without asserting that they are. Islamic theology debated whether the Fire is everlasting for all its inhabitants, and Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn al-Qayyim are among those who argued that it might not be. Jewish tradition limits Gehinnom for most people to twelve months, which is why the mourner's kaddish is recited for eleven.

Modern challenges come from two directions. Empirically, the close identification of mental life with brain function makes survival harder to state coherently, and near-death experience research is claimed as evidence by some researchers and given neurological explanations by others; there is no scientific consensus supporting survival, and the question of what such experiences show remains contested. Morally, the doctrine of eternal punishment has drawn sustained criticism from within the traditions themselves as disproportionate to any finite offence, an objection at least as old as Origen and pressed hard since the nineteenth century. Survey data from Western countries consistently shows both a wide persistence of afterlife hope, including among people who report no religious affiliation, and a marked asymmetry: belief in heaven has declined much more slowly than belief in hell.