All of the following, of course, is completely a matter of conjecture. I’ve got no special revelation about anything, including the après vie.
One thing I believe about the transition from this life to the next is that it’s a move from within time to outside of time. (That’s fairly orthodox now, IIRC. And since we now see the universe as a four-dimensional bubble of spacetime, it’s hard for me to imagine it any other way.) If this is so, then there’s really no distinction between waiting until the Second Coming and ‘this day you will be with me in paradise.’
The Bible has many verses that suggest that some will go to heaven, and others to hell. It also has many verses that suggest universal salvation. What side of that divide one falls on depends on what sort of person one is, I guess.
Christians have come up with such arbitrary schemes for how they believe people are assigned to heaven or hell, and I know that has to put off nonbelievers in a big way. Calvinists believing that we’re all predestined one way or the other (so that if you’re predestined to go to hell, that’s that, no matter what sort of life you live); Baptists and many other conservative Christians believing it all comes down to whether you’ve accepted Jesus as your personal Savior before you kicked (leading to all the ‘suppose you get hit by a car tonight’ BS); Mormons believing…well, whatever it is they believe about being able to give their ancestors an extra chance at heaven, that prompts their impressive efforts in genealogical research (Monty, Flinx - feel free to clarify); old-style Catholics’ believing that it’s all tied in with your observation of the appropriate sacraments; and so on, ad infinitum.
Another thing I would expect is that whatever’s true would have a fundamental unity and elegance; if God can create a universe where the physics has the underlying elegance that it seems to have, I would expect that same quality out of eternity.
So any theology of the afterlife that seems full of apparent contradictions, or where you can still see the scotch tape where they patched over some of the worst problems, I tend to reject out of hand.
Along the same lines, I do the same with any scheme that makes God seem arbitrary and capricious, partly for the same reasons, but primarily because what I believe to be my experience of Him tells me that that’s the last thing He is.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that the distinction between saved and damned came down to the distinction between those who, at the end, came face to face with God and said, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God had to say, “thy will be done.” That was fundamental enough to satisfy me for a long time.
Madeleine L’Engle’s take on the subject, though, amounts to the fact that God has eternity to change the hearts of the latter group - and God, as she experiences Him, is the sort of God who would want to do just that. And she reminds us that God’s love and patience will outlast any human being’s hardheartedness.
I had to think about that one for a few years, but I’ve settled into being pretty much satisfied with her reasoning, both at an intellectual and a moral level. It’s universal salvation, but in a way that’s not absolution without conversion and change.
Like I said, this is all conjecture. But it’s what I believe, and it seems to fit together well, IMO.
