Intermediate state (Christianity)
Early Christians looked for an imminent end of the world and many of them had little interest in an interim state between death and resurrection.
The Eastern Church admits of such an intermediate state, but refrained from defining it, so as not to blur the distinction between the alternative definitive fates of Heaven and Hell.
In the East, the saved are said to rest in light while the wicked are confined in darkness; the dead can be assisted by prayer.
[2] In the West, Augustine described prayer as useful for those in communion with the church, and implied that every soul's ultimate fate is determined at death.
[2] Such prayer came to be restricted to souls in Purgatory,[2] which idea has "ancient roots" and is demonstrated in early Church writings.
[3] The Roman Catholic Church offers indulgences for those in purgatory, which evolved out of the earlier practice of canonical remissions.
Protestants universally reject the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory, while affirming the existence of an intermediate state, usually termed Hades.
According to the Book of Enoch, the righteous and wicked await the resurrection in separate divisions of sheol, a teaching which may have influenced Jesus' parable of Lazarus and Dives.
[18] The Venerable Bede and Saint Boniface both report visions of an afterlife with a four-way division, including pleasant and punishing abodes near heaven and hell to hold souls until judgment day.
The Catholic Church believes that the living can help those whose purification from their sins is not yet completed not only by praying for them but also by gaining indulgences for them[20] as an act of intercession.
[21][4] In the 16th century, Protestant Reformers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin challenged the doctrine of purgatory because they believed it was not supported in the Bible.
[7] Therefore, those who die in Christ go into the presence of God (or the bosom of Abraham) where they experience joy and rest while they await their resurrection (cf.
The bodies of men, after death, return to dust, and see corruption: but their souls, which neither die nor sleep, having an immortal subsistence, immediately return to God who gave them: the souls of the righteous, being then made perfect in holiness, are received into the highest heavens, where they behold the face of God, in light and glory, waiting for the full redemption of their bodies.
And the souls of the wicked are cast into hell, where they remain in torments and utter darkness, reserved to the judgment of the great day.
[32][33] A minority of Christians, including some Anglicans such as William Tyndale and E. W. Bullinger, as well as churches/groups such as Seventh-day Adventists,[34] Christadelphians and others, deny the conscious existence of the soul after death, believing the intermediate state of the dead to be unconscious "sleep".
Three events make up barzakh:[44] In Islam all human beings go through five steps of age: According to the native Indonesian beliefs, the soul of a dead person will stay on the earth for 40 days after the death.
It is a concept which arose soon after the Buddha's passing, with a number of earlier Buddhist groups accepting the existence of such an intermediate state, while other schools rejected it.
