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Between Death and Judgment: Conflicting Images of the Afterlife in Late Seventeenth-Century English Eulogies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

William M. Spellman
William M. Spellman
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Asheville
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Extract

One of the more troublesome issues facing Protestant reformers after the abolition of the Roman Catholic purgatory in the early sixteenth century was the need to explain the status of body and soul in the interim between death and resurrection. Eager to identify the precise destination of the whole person after bodily expiration but before the general judgment, preachers sought to bring comfort to bereaved survivors of the recently departed by formulating an acceptable counterpoise to the centuries-old Roman Catholic geography of the other world. Unlike the authors of learned theological treatises on the nature of the soul and body, eulogists faced the unenviable task of interpreting the experience of death and its sequel to an audience that often lacked the sophistication required for the rigors of sustained exegesis. The task of the eulogist was to attempt to make plain the contours of postmortem existence in a manner designed both to warn and to reassure. In their efforts to define an emotionally satisfying alternative to the Roman Catholic story, however, English Protestants formulated an increasingly wide variety of disparate—and sometimes contradictory—accounts of life after death, each of which was normatively based upon a personal understanding of scripture. By the late seventeenth century, even as English funeral sermons that treated the afterlife began to reflect a broad consensus regarding the separate destinations of body and soul, there remained much confusion over the precise condition of those eternal partners before Christ's promised return. The failure to resolve this dilemma in a satisfactory manner and the inability to arrive at an acceptable consensus on a matter of central concern to believing Christians contributed to the growth of mortalist and annihilationist theories by the close of the century. Conceptual disarray within the orthodox camp, then, provided an opportunity for more innovative thinkers to step forward, persons whose understanding of eschatological time, anchored in their own unique interpretation of the Christian scriptures, negated any need for continued debate about a putative “middle place”.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 87 , Issue 1 , January 1994 , pp. 49 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1994

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References

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