Judgement and the world to come

The teaching

As each of Judaism, Christianity and Islam in its own scripture teaches it.

Sheol and the spirit returning

The oldest books of the Hebrew Bible say little of any life after death. The dead go down to Sheol, the pit, the land of silence, where great and small lie together: “The dead praise not the LORD, neither any that go down into silence.” The Preacher puts it plainly, “for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest,” and gives the other half of the picture in his last chapter: “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.” Life is the time to act, and the Bible's weight falls there.

The dead who will rise

Later Judaism teaches that the dead will rise. The Amidah, the standing prayer said three times a day, praises God in its second blessing as the one who gives life to the dead, and the Mishnah names the denial of the resurrection among the things that cost a share in the world to come. Maimonides made it the last of his thirteen principles of faith. The rabbis do not say how it will happen: it is the work of God at the end of days, with the coming of the messiah and the restoration of Israel.

The world to come

What lies beyond the rabbis call olam ha-ba, the world to come, and they are sparing with its picture. The Mishnah teaches that all Israel have a share in it, and the rabbis add that the righteous of the nations have a share too. The Talmud gives one image, in the name of Rav: in the world to come there is no eating or drinking, no envy and no rivalry, but the righteous sit with crowns on their heads and delight in the radiance of the divine presence.

Pirkei Avot gives the teaching its edge. This world is like a vestibule before the world to come: make yourself ready in the vestibule, so that you may enter the banquet hall. And better one hour of repentance and good deeds in this world than the whole life of the world to come.

Gan Eden and Gehinnom

For the time between death and the resurrection the rabbis speak of Gan Eden, the garden, for the righteous, and of Gehinnom for the wicked. Gehinnom, in rabbinic teaching, cleanses most of those who enter it rather than condemning them for ever. For that reason a mourner says Kaddish for a parent for eleven months and not twelve, so as not to suggest that the parent needed the full year of cleansing. The Kaddish itself never mentions death. It is a praise of God said by the living before the community, and its saying is counted as a merit for the dead.

The two judgements

Christianity teaches two judgements. At death each soul is judged, in what Catholic and Orthodox teaching call the particular judgement: “And as it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.” At the end of time comes the last judgement, when Christ returns and all the dead are raised. In Matthew's Gospel the nations are gathered before the throne and parted as a shepherd parts the sheep from the goats, and the measure is plain: the hungry fed, the thirsty given drink, the stranger taken in, the naked clothed, the sick and the prisoner visited. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”

The resurrection of the body

The Christian hope is not for the soul alone. The creeds close with the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. Paul teaches that the one raised is the same person changed: the body is sown in corruption and raised in incorruption; “it is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body.” The change comes at the end, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet.

Heaven and hell

Heaven, in Christian teaching, is above all the sight of God: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.” The Book of Revelation pictures a new heaven and a new earth, where God wipes away all tears and there is no more death or sorrow. Hell is the opposite: a separation from God that the person has chosen and that becomes final, pictured in the Gospels as fire and as outer darkness. The churches stress different things here. Catholic teaching names the loss of God as hell's chief pain. The Orthodox, following Isaac the Syrian, teach that the love of God is the same toward all, and is felt as light by those who love and as fire by those who refuse it.

Purgatory and prayer for the dead

Catholic teaching adds purgatory: those who die in God's friendship but not yet wholly purified are cleansed after death, so that they may enter the joy of heaven. They are saved, and their pain is the pain of longing and of being made ready, which Paul's words, saved “yet so as by fire,” are read to describe. Because all the faithful, living and dead, are one body, the living can help them with prayers, Masses, alms and good works offered in their name; the second book of Maccabees calls it a holy and wholesome thought to pray for the dead. Dante pictured the place as a mountain rising from the sea, its seven terraces cleansing the seven capital sins one by one, climbed in hope.

The Orthodox pray for the departed without defining such a place. Most Protestant churches teach that the faithful go at death to be with Christ, to wait for the resurrection.

The grave and the two angels

Islam teaches that at the appointed hour the angel of death takes the soul, gently from the believer and harshly from the one who denied. In the grave two angels, named in the tradition Munkar and Nakir, come to question the dead: Who is your Lord? What is your religion? Who is this man who was sent among you? The faithful answer that their Lord is God, their religion Islam, and the man the Messenger of God, and their grave is widened and opened toward the Garden. For the one who cannot answer it is made narrow. So the dead wait in barzakh, the barrier the Qur'an names, until the Day they are raised.

The Day of Reckoning

At the end the trumpet is blown and the dead rise from their graves to the great gathering, the Day of Resurrection, which the Qur'an also calls the Day of Reckoning and the Day of Judgement. Each person is handed the book of their deeds. The one who receives it in the right hand says to those around, here, read my book; the one who receives it in the left wishes it had never been given. Then the scales are set up so that no soul is wronged in the least: whoever has done an atom's weight of good will see it, and whoever has done an atom's weight of evil will see it.

The tradition adds the bridge, al-sirat, stretched over the Fire, finer than a hair and sharper than a sword, which all must cross, some like lightning, some like the wind, some crawling, each by the light of their deeds. And it adds intercession: by God's leave the Prophet will plead for his community on that Day.

The Garden, the Fire and mercy

The Qur'an tells the Garden as gardens beneath which rivers flow, with shade, fruit and peace, where the faithful are greeted with the word salam; and above all its joys stands the good pleasure of God, which the Qur'an calls greater, and, in the Prophet's words, the sight of God as plainly as the full moon is seen. The Fire is told as its opposite, in images just as strong.

Yet the last word of the teaching is mercy. In a saying of the Prophet, God declares that His mercy outstrips His wrath, and the Prophet taught that God made mercy in a hundred parts, sent one down to be shared among all creatures, and kept ninety-nine for the Day. The Qur'an forbids despair of God's mercy. Muslims are taught to hold fear and hope together, and to pronounce on no one's end, since that belongs to God alone.