- What does your denomination teach about where people go when they die-straight to Heaven, stay put in the ground until called, or something else?
- If your child or grandchild asks (concerning a recently deceased loved one), “Is (Insert Name Here) in Heaven?”, what do you tell them?
As a Catholic, I was always taught that the virtuous dead go directly to Heaven. After all, didn’t Jesus tell the thief being crucified alongside him, “This day, you will be with me in Paradise.”
Which is why it surprised me that my first wife, a fundamentalist Protestant, grew up believing the dead were asleep until the end of the world.
As for what I’d tell kids? It so happens I have a 7 year old who asks this kind of question regularly.
If he asks whether his Grandma is in Heaven, I have no hesitation about saying “Yes,” because she lived her faith so completely (she was the type who got up early and cooked breakfast tacos to distribute to the homeless).
If he asks me whether someone I didn’t really know (or someone I know to be deeply flawed) is in Heaven, I’ll say, “I hope so.” Since I’m not God, “I hope so” is sometimes the best answer I can give. That and “God loves everyone He created, and he WANTS us all to be with him forever.”
I believe God is infinitely wiser and better than I am, and that He’ll get it right.
Episcopalian here, so in answer to #1, my denomination doesn’t have a specific teaching. I think there are a number of interpretations that are arguable, but my belief is that the soul of the deceased person wakes up in paradise immediately. I recognize I could be wrong, but it’s not a pivotal doctrine.
#2 We tell them “yes.” When our children were very young (around 2) our next door neighbor died, and we explained that he had died and was now with Jesus. No need to get into all the doctrinal nuances with them at this age.
Further clarification-I don’t care if you believe that time doesn’t pass for the dead so that, as far as they are concerned, they go to Heaven instantly. I am talking only about the perspectives of those still living only.
What astorian said, only I’m a protestant.
Any response from those who believe that the dead stay buried until Christ returns?
I am not a Christian in the sense of believing the myths or in life or death. But a pastor I know and am fond of used to say that the question about when the virtuous go to heaven – immediately, or after a time asleep – wasn’t really meaningful, because Eternity is entirely different from mundane time. From the point of view of someone in Heaven, they and all their loved ones in Heaven arrive there at the same instant, and from Heaven (in which Eternity reigns) one may, if one chooses, see any moment in mundane history one wishes. God and the angels, being outside of time, must choose at one instant to insert themselves if they choose to interact with mortals. From the point of view of one on Earth, the dead remain dead until the Trump.
And the point of view of those on Earth is the only one we are concerned with in this thread.
I thought you might say that, not least because I didn’t express the concept well. The idea, as I understood it, was that too seemingly-contradictory statements were true. The dead did not rise until Judgment Day, and yet they were already in Heaven.
This was told not to me but to my then-girlfriend, whose mother had just died. Her minister, trying to comfort her, told her that her mother would not miss her while she (my girlfriend) was living but her mother was in Heaven; she was “already” there, and Lynn could count on her mother’s continuing love and knowledge of her for the rest of her life, even though her mother’s physical resurrection would not happen till the Trump.