At some stage every child asks this question, and when we grow up, every bereavement, every news report of human tragedy reminds us that there is no easy answer. The Apostles' and Nicene Creeds give little help, the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles avoid any positive statement on the matter, and even Alpha, one of the most popular of recent courses to help people grow in their faith, provides no information. A recent survey in Britain showed that about a quarter of the people who were asked believed in reincarnation, even - the idea that after we die, we are reborn as other people (or indeed as other animals), and that these people were not all Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists or New Agers, but included a substantial number of Christians of all denominations!
We have all heard of people who claim to remember a previous existence, usually as an Egyptian princess or a mediæval courtier or some such. None of these stories has ever been proved true, and most have been proved false. Nothing in the Bible supports a belief in reincarnation, and no regular Christian denomination has ever taught it. So what does happen?
It would be wrong to start with the few "official" statements the churches have made. These have mostly arisen out of conflicts of opinion. The Council of Florence in 1439 tried to find common ground between the beliefs of the Roman and Eastern churches. And in Britain, the Westminster Confession set out the Puritan, Calvinist, view in opposition to the Anglican view. (I cannot resist quoting it, even though it is wrong. Here is Chapter 32.)
The bodies of men, after to 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 judgement of the great day. Besides these two places, for souls separated from their bodies, the Scripture acknowledges none.
The Bible is a good place to start, but it scarcely gives as clear a picture as the 17th-century Puritans read into it. To begin with, writers at different periods had different ideas. In Psalm 6:5, for example, we find the early view: "In death there is no remembrance of you: in the grave who shall give you thanks?" The Hebrew word for grave, sheol, often appears together with ideas of decay and destruction - it is a negative sort of place, though also a place of rest from the cares of the world (Job 3:17-19).
But coupled with the idea of being "abandoned to sheol", the idea arose that favoured people would "delight at God's right hand for ever." (Ps 16:10-11) Sometimes this was depicted in vivid terms. As with Enoch (Gen 5:24), so too Elijah is "taken by the Lord" (2 Kings 2:11) - in this case by a mighty whirlwind. Towards the end of the Old Testament period, a new idea arose, that death would indeed be a time of sleep, but at the end of time, a Messiah would come and God would establish a new kingdom. The dead would rise, and God's people would share the joys of this kingdom.
To the fundamentalists of the time, this idea was unscriptural. But Jesus was no Sadducee. He believed in a resurrection because he was the Messiah, he was himself the resurrection and the life. And, as the Apostles' Creed asserts, it would be a "resurrection of the body", though not quite as we know it (thank Heaven!) - see Mark 12:25, or the whole of 1 Cor 15.
The mechanics of all this are not at all clear, and the Westminster Confession is wrong to suggest that they are. Jesus and the writers of the New Testament look on death as a form of sleep, where the sleepers are not outside the reach of God - either because they are with God in "Paradise", or because God can still call them (or indeed, as with Jairus' daughter, even restore them to life).
The idea of a place of torment, with a "great gulf fixed" between it and anywhere else was a favourite topic of mediæval writers, but is not really part of the Gospel message. The fires of Gehenna, the rubbish pit outside Jerusalem, were not to torment, but merely to dispose of rubbish. And the fire Paul mentions in 1 Cor 3:15, which underlay the mediæval concept of purgatory, was also one that cleansed, not one that punished.
Stephen, before he died, saw Heaven in a vision. And Paul in 2 Cor 12:2 talks of being caught up into "the third heaven." Death is a time of preparation for seeing this vision clearly. Nothing, says Paul, can separate us from this, except our own sin.
But through Jesus, our sins are forgiven - even our denying him (Matt 12:32) (though we are not forced to be forgiven against our will - this seems to be the "sin against the Holy Spirit"). There may well be people among God's flock who do not experience God's forgiveness in this world, when living. But for them, there is the offer - and the assurance - of forgiveness in the next.
HD