By far the shortest of the Thirty-nine Articles of the Church of England is the third, ‘Of the going down of Christ into Hell’. In its entirety it reads: ‘As Christ died for us, and was buried, so also is it to be believed, that he went down into Hell’. One might be forgiven for thinking that the brevity of the article, together with the notable absence of polemic, indicates the doctrine’s relative unimportance amid the other great debates of the day. In fact, the descent of Christ into hell was one of the most controverted of all the creedal articles in the Reformation era. Article III is so short, not because it was a routine recital of the Apostles’ Creed, but because no further elaboration or explanation of the doctrine could command consent in the febrile climate of early Elizabethan England: disagreement over what was meant by ‘hell’, what was meant by Christ’s ‘descent’, and over the doctrine’s fundamental significance, was rife. This particular manifestation of the afterlife – be it only Christ’s afterlife, and only a temporary destination at that – is not the most obvious candidate as a theological cause célèbre of the Reformation era. But the intensity and the longevity of trie debates it fuelled make it at least an intriguing footnote to the study of the period.

Angelology – the science of angels – exercised a compelling hold on the medieval and early modern mind. The role that angels had in the belief and ritual associated with death was perhaps its most theologically resonant aspect – angels were intimately involved in the system of eschatology and the rites associated with dying, mourning and burial. Their responsibilities at the end of life included participation in the cosmic struggle enacted around the deathbed, where good and evil angels were thought to contend for the custody of the soul of the dying; and stewardship of the soul after death, when angels were believed to carry it to its final resting place, as Lazarus was carried to Abraham’s bosom in Luke 16: 19–31. However, angels also assumed important responsibilities after death; they featured prominently in the narrative of the Last Judgement and the strategies adopted by Christians to conceptualize and prepare for the afterlife and the events of the Apocalypse.

When the Massachusetts schoolteacher Benjamin Tompson pictured his unmarried sister Elizabeth in heaven, he saw her in a palace-like ‘nunnerye’ where ‘Chast virgins have faire entertainment free’. Elizabeth and the other virgins in heaven ‘Enjoy their purest love in sacred mirth’ as ‘Great Jesus daily steps of his bright throne/And gives them hart embraces every one.’ Colonial Puritan elegies such as this one challenge our inherited scholarly categories, which contrast a spiritualized Christian heaven with a corporeal Muslim one and set ‘a distant, majestic [Protestant] God’ in opposition to the intimate afterlife of medieval Catholic mystics. The most interesting part about Elizabeth Tompson’s elegy, however, is that she narrates it herself. Benjamin imagined her speaking to him from the bosom of Christ, saying ‘I Dare not tell what hear in heart i find’, and then going on to describe her experience of the afterlife in the first person. Christ leads her to the top of a ‘mount of pleasure’ where, she says, ‘i [have] all [the] flowers of paradice to Crop.’ A Protestant saint embracing a physical Jesus, picking flowers to her heart’s content, and telling her brother about it – these are all images which challenge our notions of early modern views of heaven and demonstrate the fruitfulness of elegies, or funeral poems, for opening up the imaginative worlds of early modern belief.

Life, the afterlife, and life beyond the Earth are matters of scientific inquiry as well as religious belief. As we might expect, in the wake of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the afterlife was subjected to new scrutiny. Such scrutiny, notably the demonology of Joseph Glanvill and Henry More, both fellows of the Royal Society, was undoubtedly scientific and serious, even if it has rarely been treated as such by scholars preferring to treat belief in witchcraft as a hangover from an earlier age. Far from being opposed, or necessarily pulling in opposite directions, the conjunction of science and religion in this era breathed new life into old problems and opened up new questions for debate. One such area, with a long history as a philosophical conundrum, was the possibility of life beyond Earth. It is this question, its place within religious cultures, and its relation to traditional ideas about the afterlife, that is the subject of this essay.

The Chinese Rites Controversy is a question that is as much ecclesiastical or missiological as sinological, and the researcher, therefore, has to attempt to embrace two very complex and demanding fields. It was, of course, an argument about cross-cultural understanding (and misunderstanding), and the peculiarities of Chinese religion and language; and an episode in the fraught historical relations between China and the West. But the controversy itself was ecclesiastical, among ecclesiastics, and it was the papacy and its offices which determined the outcome.

According to Protestant eschatology, the dead are no longer with us. In the forceful words of Eamon Duffy they are ‘gone beyond the reach of human contact, even of human prayer’. But if this was the most devastating change in the mind of Protestants, Catholics affirmed Tridentine teaching on the cult of the dead by an ‘obsessional multiplication’ of suffrages or intercessory prayers, especially post mortem masses. This belief was still strong in eighteenth-century Catholic Europe. Italy, Spain and south-west Germany all exhibited such religious ‘frenzy’. Only France may be cited as an example to the contrary. Michel Vovelle has successfully proved that in Provence the will became simply a legal act distributing fortunes, with no reference to the pious clauses. However, we cannot extend this thesis, as Philippe Aries has mistakenly done, to the entire Catholic West.

On Thursday, 1 May 1755, the small churchyard in Harbury, Warwickshire, was the scene of an extraordinary incident. An unnamed member of the local community claimed to have met and had a long conversation with an apparition, which emerged from amongst the tombstones. The precise details of this encounter no longer survive, but it clearly had a powerful impact upon the inhabitants of this sleepy rural village. The interest excited by the appearance persuaded Richard Jago, Vicar of Harbury, to put the episode to a useful didactic purpose. Just a few days later Jago based his Sunday sermon upon this event, which had quickly become the focus of intense curiosity.

In 1493–94, Pope Alexander VI divided the globe between Spain and Portugal with reference to their conquest of the territories of the New World. In the eighteenth century, Anglicans divided the globe into the territory of Christ and the lands and peoples under the dominion of Satan. The Bishop of Carlisle in 1719 was adamant that that indigenous heathen peoples were ‘insensible of the great Concernments of their immortal Souls, and very much uncertain, at best, in their apprehensions of a future life; they are abandoned to their lusts and passions; and under the dominion of Satan’. Consequently, affirmed Edward Waddington of Eton College in 1720, Satan was alarmed by the formation of a new Anglican mission society for work in British North American and West Indian colonies ‘at the approaching Loss of so many Millions of Subjects’. Through heathen ignorance of their spiritual captivity the Devil ‘supported an Empire of almost equal extent with the Universe, and led the World captive at his pleasure’, except where Christ had delivered humankind from devilish tyranny and dominion.

Following its introduction to Korea in 1784, the Catholic Church grew and developed within a rich and varied religious milieu. An indigenous tradition of popular religion, characterized in part by shamanistic practices, existed alongside two imported traditions: Confucianism and Mahāyāna Buddhism. The latter had enjoyed state patronage in the Koryŏ period (918/935-1392) but, with the establishment of the Chosŏn dynasty (1392–1911), it was supplanted by Chu-Hsi Neo-Confucianism (Chuja-hak). This became central to a policy of social reformation and was elevated to the position of state orthodoxy. Neo-Confucianism thereby became the dominant social, political and metaphysical system, and, during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its influence spread to all levels of Korean society. Buddhism was increasingly discriminated against, while popular religion was disparaged as superstitious and potentially subversive. Buddhist monks and nuns, together with shamans (mudang), were classed among the ch’ŏnmin, the ‘base people’, the very bottom of society whose members included butchers as well as slaves.

This paper explores the nineteenth-century doctrine of the ‘restitution of all things’, a concept of the afterlife which emphasized material continuity with the present and generated detailed speculation about the activities and events which would take place in the eternal realm. Such beliefs, it will be suggested, resonated with broader developments in nineteenth-century theology which tended to soften the boundary between this life and the life to come, and increasingly suggested that the Christian hope was for the coming of the kingdom of God on earth rather than for the soul to go to heaven after an individual’s death. This belief has been almost completely neglected in previous historiographical discussions of nineteenth-century evangelical eschatology. To recognize its existence challenges many historiographical depictions of the ‘world-denying’ nature of Evangelicalism in general and the pessimistic temperament of pre-millennialism in particular.

In 1852 an American medium, Maria Hayden, crossed the Atlantic, landed in London and began offering séances in fashionable salons. From this point on, and certainly well into the twentieth century, spiritualism proved attractive to many. What spiritualism offered was, primarily, an extravagant claim: that it was possible for the living to communicate with the departed. By various means, people from all classes, religious traditions and geographical locations ‘tried’ the spirits, seeking to make contact with famous characters from history or departed family members. Spiritualism offered, sometimes, spectacular signs and wonders: flying furniture, levitating mediums and ghostly presences, all of which attracted the attention of journalists. Fashions for such signs came and went; the claim to communicate with the dead, however, remained at the heart of spiritualism.

For most educated Britons the First World War is synonymous with death on a massive scale. Although reliable estimates remained elusive for many years (this deceptively straightforward process being complicated by issues such as determining the nationality of the fallen and when to stop counting deaths as war-related), the figures are sobering enough: according to research published in the 1980s, as many as 772,000 Britons died in military service during the First World War. Despite the problems of the statistician, the fact of mass mortality was acutely and painfully obvious to contemporaries, so much so that, in an important essay published in 1981, David Cannadine characterized inter-war Britain as a society that was ‘obsessed with death’. Since 1918, the identification of death with the experience of the First World War has lodged itself deep in the national psyche, spawning the myth of ‘the lost generation’ and dominating the perceptions of posterity. As Dan Todman recently observed:

Most studies of Christianity in recent British history are pessimistic about church life in Britain, varying only in the depth of their pessimism. Alongside the assumption that Christianity in Britain is in inexorable decline is the assumption that traditional Christian notions about the afterlife – and indeed stress on the afterlife at all – are fast disappearing. Even studies of charismatic Christianity, the most recent major Christian movement, see it as stagnant or in decline. However, a study of the city of York shows such pessimism to be overstated. Whilst mainline denominations are mostly in slow or rapid decline, a large number of ‘new churches’ have arisen. This paper shows how these churches perceive the afterlife. It uncovers a rich seam of contemporary theology from below. Though largely unknown to those outside its congregations, this strand of belief is already of considerable significance and is likely to become more so in the twenty-first century. This paper offers contemporary religious history, showing that dramatic shifts within Christian history are not solely the preserve of previous centuries, but have taken place in recent decades.

When asked to address the issue of the afterlife in African Christianity, my immediate reaction was to doubt whether there is much stress on the afterlife in contemporary African Christianity. This brought the response: ‘Well, deal with that; a Christianity from which the afterlife has been displaced.’ What follows is an attempt to do just that.