During the second half of the nineteenth century, as language and ideas of spiritualism permeated the common culture, the Church of England's theology of the afterlife had, in some quarters at least, shifted towards the possibility of post-mortem spiritual progress. At the same time, as we saw in chapter five, sermons and liturgy remained largely framed in the traditional language.

During the Great War this traditional frame was disrupted. The Church of England, confronted by the deaths of so many young men, became more inclined to speak about the state of the dead, as distinct from the living, and thus re-evaluated the imagery of the afterlife. Theologians moved decisively from discussing the duration of eternity, and the punishment of the wicked, to emphasising with increasing confidence the possibility of forgiveness and progress beyond death. Prayers and liturgies written during and immediately after the First World War employed language that was markedly different from the memorial sermons of the nineteenth century, and was instead strikingly similar to that offered in spiritualism. The preachers spoke with confidence, rather than caution, about the afterlife, and offered vivid images which suggested that the dead soldiers enjoyed a new life beyond the grave – thus presenting a fresh vision of a dynamic afterlife and a certainty of heaven.

Once again, this is not a straightforward narrative of a movement away from traditional theology and language towards more liberal expressions of faith. The Church's development of ideas about the afterlife was more complex, and indeed, when the war was over, the Church lost some of the vivid images and returned to a more cautious theology when the Prayer Book was revised. What was offered in 1928, however, was a liturgical expression of a twentieth-century theology that was born out of late-nineteenth-century debates and the beliefs circulating within the common culture. The Church rejected both the traditional theology of the seventeenth century and the more radical language of the war period in a new presentation of the afterlife.

Redefining the afterlife in doctrine

In twentieth-century academic discussions about the future life, theologians moved away from the considerations of God's punishment of the wicked and the definition of eternity that had exercised them a few years earlier.