Part 2 Afterlife Through Eyes of Christians

Nadene Goldfoot                                   

                                                                     
                                                                     

Pastor John Hagee 
John Charles Hagee is the founder and senior pastor of Cornerstone Church, a megachurch in San Antonio, Texas. Hagee is also the CEO of his non-profit corporation, Global Evangelism Television. He is the 5th of 6 pastors in his family, all of whom were named John Hagee, dating back to the colonial era. Wikipedia He's of the Evangelical group of Christians that study
their Old Testament.  Hagee even conferred with a rabbi and wrote:

 IN DEFENSE OF ISRAEL .

" ... there will never be a day when you will not be, from now on. One million years, 10 million years, 50 million years from this moment your going to be alive and well, either in the splendor of heaven, or the horror of hell. I want you to hear this. You are going to live forever, the only question is where? - John Hagee.

" ... there will never be a day when you will not be, from now on. One million years, 10 million years, 50 million years from this moment your going to be alive and well, either in the splendor of heaven, or the horror of hell. I want you to hear this. You are going to live forever, the only question is where? - John Hagee.

Harold Lee Lindsey is an American evangelist and Christian writer. He is a Christian Zionist and dispensationalist author and television host, and
author of THE LATE GREAT PLANET, EARTH. I find that Evangelists
are the Christian group who read the Old Testament (Tanakh) the most. He
brought a group of Christians to Jerusalem and was at the Temple Mount.

Of the afterlife he says  his thoughts from Romans: which is in the New Testament.  Mostly, it's about sinning and being saved by Jesus Christ.  

First, understand that sin’s power to operate in the life of the Christian has been neutralized by our being united with Christ in His death. Sin is no longer your boss. Romans 6 says, “Our old self was crucified with Him, that our body of sin might be done away with, that we should no longer be slaves to sin; for he who has died is freed from sin….  So consider yourselves to be dead to sin, but alive to God in Christ Jesus.  Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body that you should obey its lusts….  For sin shall not be master over you, for you are not under law, but under grace.”  (Romans 6: 6, 7, 11, 12, 14 NASB)

Both Evangelicals are very supportive of Israel, while we see just the opposite in many other groups, even with some Jews today!  This is because of their understanding of our prophets and their concept of what will happen to Israel in the end times.  They need some Jews to fulfill their own religious outcome.  It's nice to finally be needed in the world after all the slander we have been under for the past 2,000 years.  This is why Hagee has not tried, at least to my knowledge, to convert Jews, as Christianity has tried to do for the past 2,000 years.  

Crusades upon reaching Jerusalem slaughtered Muslims
 and Jews alike in the Middle Ages in taking the land from Muslims who held Palestine.  There were about 5 Crusades starting in 1096 CE
going on till 1320 attacking Jews in France and Spain. Later,
by 1492 Spain will be fully into their Spanish Inquisition,
ridding themselves of Jews in their country where they were forced to
convert or leave.  None of this had any affect on their afterlife, evidently
as they all believed in Jesus.  

Christianity today is the most popular religion in the world  with  a 2 million population.  Compare that with the 14 million Jews we have today.   It's beginning took place with the followers in Judah of Jesus, born to Joseph and Mary.  Jesus was from Bethlehem, a smaller town than the large city of Jerusalem with all the astute rabbis.  He had his own interpretation of the political scene of his day, being born somewhere around 30 BCE. 

 At that period, Roman soldiers were occupying Judah, calling it Judea, and they were pretty rough with the population back then.  Judah had already suffered the Greek-Syrian occupation  earlier from 174 to 163 BCE when Antiochus IV Epiphanes had ordered the takeover of the coveted 2nd Temple.  They not only wanted their riches and loot, but wanted to Romanize the population into believing in their polytheistic religion, and had moved a statue of Zeus into the Temple along with other idols and such, forcing the people to follow their culture.  
                                                      

So Jesus and his 12 male followers lived in an atmosphere of Judaism, overlaid with Greek and Roman beliefs from occupiers forcing their thoughts upon the people for several hundred years already.  Life was almost unbearable for these 12 and all the other people.  They almost forgot what freedom of choice was, as the 12 were not students, but were workers, such as fishermen.  They were highly impressed by Jesus when they heard him speak, as he could get down to their level of understanding with stories of examples or parables.  There were the brothers Simon AKA Peter and Andrew, both fishermen; Matthew the tax collector, brothers James, and John;  James the Less;  Philip, Thaddeus, Thomas, Bartholomew, Simon the Canaanite and Judas Iscariot.  
                                                                   

The Roman Empire in 325 CE was led by Emperor Constantine I who held the First Council of Nicaea in Turkey with followers of Jesus to decide for his Empire how to fit him into their polytheistic religion.  "Its main accomplishments were settlement of the Christological issue of the divine nature of "God the Son" and his relationship to "God the Father", the construction of the first part of the Nicene Creed, establishing uniform observance of the date of Easter, and promulgation of early canon law".  It was at this meeting that Jews were said to be a problem and further strict laws concerning them were laid down.  They turned against the people from where most of Jesus's good teachings came from, seeing them as competitors to their new-found power over the population.  

Emperor Constantine's mother, Helena, had become a Christian in about 312 CE, and had visited Jerusalem, looking for items to take back home.  

                                   

American Baptist Church

"Mainstream Christianity professes belief in the Nicene Creed, and English versions of the Nicene Creed in current use include the phrase: "We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come." Although punishments are made part of certain Christian conceptions of the afterlife, the prevalent concept of "eternal damnation" is a tenet of the Christian afterlife."   What I hear the most as a Jew is that I won't go to heaven unless I "believe in Jesus."  Other Christians within earshot always concur with this. Jews feel that only they can help themselves in any afterlife and perform mitzvot, good deeds to have a clean slate.  
                                                                         

Jesus on stained glass window

The followers thought that Jesus was so special that they thought he was the son of G-d spoken of in their religious understanding of G-d.  This is where his followers broke away from the prevailing Jewish religion.  Judaism does not worship anyone.  They admired intelligence, but did not worship even Moses who led out 603,550 Israelites out of Egypt and delivered 601,730 into the border of Canaan after a 40 year trek.  He died, being sure to not let people know where exactly he laid in death, not wanting to be worshiped.

As I see it, the aim of Christianity's teachings is to be saved in afterlife.  They feel that if one believed that Jesus is the son of G-d and performed miraculous acts such as walking on water and turning water into wine, they will live after death with Jesus, of course.  They teach mostly about afterlife in their churches.  The teachings of Jesus come from his own Jewish background.  He was teaching Judaism and upgrading it for his own experience in the modern century of his day.  As we learned earlier in Part I, Judaism did not have much dogma about afterlife of the dead, and Christianity goes into it.  
                                                                       

"Jesus also maintained that the time would come when the dead would hear the voice of the Son of God, and all who were in the tombs would come out, who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation".(1)  

"The non-canonical Acts of Paul and Thecla speak of the efficacy of prayer for the dead, so that they might be "translated to a state of happiness"(1)

" The Catholic conception of the afterlife teaches that after the body dies, the soul is judged, the righteous and free of sin enter Heaven. However, those who die in unrepented mortal sin go to hell. In the 1990s, the Catechism of the Catholic Church defined hell not as punishment imposed on the sinner but rather as the sinner's self-exclusion from God. Unlike other Christian groups, the Catholic Church teaches that those who die in a state of grace, but still carry venial sin go to a place called Purgatory where they undergo purification to enter Heaven."   "The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.^— Catechism of the Catholic Church."                        

Christian version of Hell

 Limbo was never recognized as a dogma of the Catholic Church, yet, at times, it has been a very popular theological theory within the Church. Limbo is a theory that unbaptized but innocent souls, such as those of infants, virtuous individuals who lived before Jesus Christ was born on earth, or those that die before baptism exist in neither Heaven or Hell proper. Therefore, these souls neither merit the beatific vision, nor are subjected to any punishment, because they are not guilty of any personal sin although they have not received baptism, so still bear original sin. So they are generally seen as existing in a state of natural, but not supernatural, happiness, until the end of time.                                             

Jesus' descent into Limbo

In other Christian denominations it has been described as an intermediate place or state of confinement in oblivion and neglect. 

The notion of purgatory is associated particularly with the Catholic Church. In the Catholic Church, all those who die in God's grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven or the final purification of the elect,  While the Catholic Church has a defined doctrine on original sin, it has none on the eternal fate of unbaptized infants, leaving theologians free to propose different theories, which magisterium is free to accept or reject.  Limbo is one such theory.  

Catholics took the story from Genesis in the Torah of Adam eating the apple that Eve offered to him when they were told not to eat of it, and call that the ORIGINAL SIN.  From this, it's believed that all of us are sinners and must be saved--by Jesus.  

Anglicans of the Anglo-Catholic tradition generally also hold to the belief. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, believed in an intermediate state between death and the resurrection of the dead and in the possibility of "continuing to grow in holiness there", but Methodism does not officially affirm this belief and denies the possibility of helping by prayer any who may be in that state.                                              

Bethlehem Christians, down to 2% of the city's population, held 11,000 Christians in 2016 with Islamist population moving in. In the 1970s, Christians made up 5% of Bethlehem's population.   

Greek Orthodox in Jerusalem
History, traditions, and theology are rooted in the early Church Fathers and the culture of the Byzantine Empire.  Today, the most important centres of Christian Orthodox monasticism are Saint Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai Peninsula (Egypt), Meteora at Thessaly in Greece, Mount Athos in Greek Macedonia, Mar Saba in the Bethlehem Governorate of the West Bank, and the Monastery of Saint John the Theologian on the island of Patmos in Greece.

The Greek Orthodox Church is a little different from western Christianity.  " Orthodoxy is traditionally non-dualist and does not teach that there are two separate literal locations of heaven and hell, but instead acknowledges that "the 'location' of one's final destiny—heaven or hell—as being figurative." 

                                                      

Thou shalt not steal, one of 10 Commandments from Moses.  

"Instead, Orthodoxy teaches that the final judgment is simply one's uniform encounter with divine love and mercy, but this encounter is experienced multifariously (a lot of variety) depending on the extent to which one has been transformed, partaken of divinity (godliness) , and is therefore compatible or incompatible with God."  In other words, the final judgment depends on your behaviors while alive.  
Correction: 11:3am-not juice but water...

Resource:  https://jewishbubba.blogspot.com/2018/11/religions-of-world-reminder.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterlife (1)
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twelve_Apostles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Orthodox_Church
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pope-limbo/catholic-church-buries-limbo-after-centuries-idUSL2028721620070420
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helena_(empress)
http://biblelight.net/death.htm