What Happens When We Die?

What happens when we die is a question that remains off stage in the wings during much of our lives. Most of us probably give it little attention, and it therefore remains abstract and theoretical.

If, however, a doctor determines we have a fatal disease, the question of an afterlife can quickly take center stage and push out of the way much of what we had planned. The question now becomes concrete and actual, and we may begin to think, life is over so fast. There is some truth to the quip, everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to die. The unknown can be terrifying.

Atheists believe that, since there is no God, there can be no afterlife. When we die, our bodies just decompose. They degenerate from an astoundingly organized and complex set of mutually regulating systems, into mere disorganized matter. Human beings, they insist, delude themselves when they believe they have or are souls or spiritual beings.

Since no one can prove there is no God, atheists are not as rigorously logical as agnostics, who leave open both the question of God’s existence and whether there might be an afterlife. Those who claim to be certain that neither one exists are out of their depths. They are unable or unwilling to distinguish between philosophic and scientific questions. Science concerns the physical world, and to try to leap from the physical to the non-physical is to fall into a ditch.

Some Christian theologians believe that when people die, those who have spurned God’s love simply cease to exist. By contrast, those who have responded to God’s love, as revealed in Christ, spend eternity in heaven. Such a view has the advantage of rejecting the idea of hell.

Others believe some people spend eternity in hell, but that hell is a metaphor for an existence separated from God. According to them, people can choose indefinitely to continue in a state of abject spiritual loneliness. Hell, therefore, is something they choose, and after death may persist in choosing.

One branch of Christianity maintains that most if not all who spend eternity with God must go through a process of purification after they die. Their souls will be further purged of sin, so that they become fit citizens of heaven and true siblings of Christ.

There are millions of Christians who believe that when Jesus referred to people suffering in hell, he meant it. They are reluctant to water down the words of Jesus in the gospels, and as uncomfortable as it may make them, they insist on a literal place or condition of torment.

Some have trouble conceiving of a loving God who, in the stark words of one Christian, takes a blowtorch to those he created. They believe that whatever the afterlife consists of, it cannot be interminable suffering.

Another wing of the Christian church expresses the belief that, for reasons no human can or should attempt to understand, God chooses some to spend eternity in heaven and others eternity in hell. If God chooses a person as destined for heaven, that person will be unable to resist God’s will. Nor will a genuine Christian ever renounce the Christian faith. They may or may not take the ideas of heaven and hell literally.

Still another body of Christians believe people must choose to respond to God’s love, and that they can refuse not to. They have free will, which God will not override. Those who lay great emphasis on this human decision usually take heaven and hell as physical rather than spiritual realities.

Many in eastern religions do not believe in a personal God but do believe in reincarnation. The usual idea is that a person’s next incarnation will depend on how he or she has acted in this one. Regardless of the nature of heaven or hell—most do not believe in hell—the central axis of faith has to do with the existence of God, who for Christians is the object of that faith and therefore of hope.

Hope is confident expectation. Christians do not know, and can only speculate, about what happens when we die. Their hope is that, like Christ, they will be resurrected. Exactly what this means remains a mystery, but because of what Jesus revealed about God, Christians believe resurrected life will be be gloriously desirable. That, in fact, is a large part of the message of the gospel, the good news.