Death in Christian Theology

The Last Enemy

Paul writes that Christ must reign until he has put all enemies under his feet, and then adds with a clarity that does not invite sentiment: “The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Corinthians 15:26). Not softened. Not relativized. Named: death, enemy, last. This is the early church’s settled conviction, and it stands against every intuition that wants death to be something else — a natural transition, a release, a homecoming. Death is the wages of sin, and it entered the world through one man, so that death came to all (Romans 5:12; Romans 6:23). The mechanism is solidarity: Adam’s act placed humanity in a single covenantal head whose decision bound the many. Death is not built into the system. It is the system’s corruption.

Augustine, pressing this logic across the City of God and the Enchiridion, locates death’s origin not in the body’s materiality but in the will’s turning inward—the privatio boni, the falling-away from the source of life (see Original Sin for the mechanism through which this affects all humanity). The soul that turns from the unchangeable good toward created things finds itself suspended, unable to return on its own. This is what death is: not annihilation, but the rupture of the connection that sustains. God made humanity for communion with himself; death is what happens when that communion is severed. It is the sentence the world is under. It is the covenant broken. It is the grave where the fallen await the one who will call them back.

And yet death persists. Christians die. The early church did not pretend otherwise. The martyrs were not praised for achieving immortality. They were praised for holding fast when death—real death, violent death, the kind that stops your breathing—came for them. The Paschal mystery is not the denial of death. It is the crossing of death, through it, and out the other side.

What the Cross Does Not Do (and What It Does)

The cross does not make death harmless. Christ dies. The early church confesses this without flinching: crucified, suffered, and was buried according to the Constantinopolitan Nicene Creed; crucified, died, and was buried; he descended to the dead according to the Apostles’ Creed. Death is real. The cross does not spell-check it.

What the cross does is this: it enters death from the inside. It does not avoid the sentence. It absorbs it. The Christ who is fully God and fully human — the mystery of the Incarnation — walks into the territory of the enemy and refuses to leave on the enemy’s terms.

Irenaeus of Lyon, pressing this point in the second century, frames it as the One who was without sin dying for the one with sin—and in that exchange, something shifts in the logic of death itself. Death expected to receive a condemned man. It received God incarnate. The transaction did not go as death planned. This recapitulation logic—anakephalaiōsis—runs through Adversus Haereses Book V.14, where Irenaeus argues that Christ, as the new Adam, undoes Adam’s disobedience from within the human condition he assumes. The second Adam does not simply forgive the first Adam’s debt; he restores humanity from the inside, living the life Adam should have lived, dying the death Adam’s disobedience earned. The trap that death set for humanity becomes the trap that catches death itself.

Athanasius presses this a century later in On the Incarnation (chapters 20-25). Death, having entered through sin, held humanity in its grip—not because humanity had no capacity for life, but because sin had severed the connection to the source of life. God had to come among us, not merely announce the sentence lifted. Athanasius uses varied imagery: death is swallowed up, destroyed, overcome as corruption. He does not frame this as a lockup from which humanity is broken out. That metaphor is useful for a technical audience, but Athanasius’s own language is richer: the Son of God, who is life itself (ho zōn), enters death and by his presence transforms it. What death thought it possessed becomes the very site of its own undoing. “The reason the Word appeared in a body at all,” Athanasius writes, “was so that, having shared in our birth and in our death, he might annihilate both in himself.”

Shared Conciliar Teaching

The Nicene Creed (325, amplified at Constantinople 381) established the foundation for understanding Christ’s death as cosmically effective. The one who dies is homoousios—of one substance with the Father (see The Trinity)—and this is what makes his victory over death something more than a noble example or a spiritual metaphor. The Creator himself enters the death of his creature and, by that entry, breaks the grip sin had on the creature’s destiny. Nicaea answered Arianism, the denial that Christ was truly God. The Nicene confession is the reason the cross is not merely a good man dying, but the act of the eternal Son taking on flesh and submitting to death so that “he might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death were subject to slavery throughout their lives” (Hebrews 2:14-15).

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in Canon 1 Fidem Catholicam, gave definitive form to the resurrection of the body as Catholic doctrine. The council taught that “all shall rise again with their bodies which they now bear about with them,” affirming both the universality of resurrection and the bodily identity of the risen person with the person who died (see Resurrection of the Body). This was not new teaching; it was the biblical and patristic consensus given conciliar form, and it closed the door on various spiritualizing interpretations that had circulated in the medieval period. Death does not release the soul into pure spirit. Death separates body and soul temporarily, and at the end of time reunites them. The human being is a body-soul unity, and the resurrection restores that unity in a glorified form.

Benedictus Deus (1336), the papal constitution of Benedict XII, further defined what happens between death and resurrection: souls receive their particular judgment immediately upon death, the just entering the beatific vision and the unjust being eternally separated from God (see Heaven and Hell). The intermediate state—the time between particular judgment and the final resurrection—is thus one of completion for the blessed and of definitive loss for the damned. This teaching, defined against certain Dominican and Franciscan positions that had held the beatific vision was delayed until the general resurrection, established the schedule the article works from: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ (1 Corinthians 15:23). The “already” and the “not yet” are both real. The soul that dies in grace already shares in Christ’s risen life. The body that died awaits the resurrection that will complete what the soul already possesses.

Latin Elaboration: The Augustinian Frame

The Latin tradition, shaped by Augustine and developed through Scholastic theology, frames death primarily as the poena peccati—the punishment of sin. This does not mean death is not real, or that it is only spiritual. Augustine is clear that death includes the separation of soul from body and the dissolution of the human composite. But Augustine’s deepest insight is that death, though physical, originates in the will’s disorder. The body dies because the soul, which should govern the body, has turned from the source of life. Sin broke the order; death is the consequence of that broken order manifesting in the body.

Augustine’s Enchiridion (c. 421-423) develops this with pastoral precision. He distinguishes between death as punishment (which is what we experience) and death as it was in the original design (which would have been a kind of “change” without suffering or fear). In paradise, humanity was granted the ability not to die—the tree of life stood as the sign of that immortality. Sin removed that protection. Death entered not as a natural limit but as a hostile intruder, and the whole of Scripture is the account of God’s campaign to undo it.

Thomas Aquinas develops this framework in the Summa Theologiae (I-II, q. 85-97; III, q. 53-59; Supplement qq. 75-86). For Aquinas, death belongs to the order of nature only after the fall; in the original state, humanity was immortalis—not incapable of dying, but granted the gift of not dying as long as they remained in communion with God. The loss of original justice brought with it the vulnerability to death. The soul, as the form of the body, naturally sustains the body; when sin disrupts that relation, the body becomes mortal. Aquinas holds this in tension with the soul’s natural immortality: the soul does not die because it is spiritual, but the body does because it has lost the donum originale that held it in union with the soul’s life. The resurrection repairs this disruption by reuniting soul and body in a glorified mode, where the body is now permanently configured to the soul’s spiritual life and can never again fall away.

The Latin tradition, from Augustine through Aquinas, also emphasizes what might be called the forensic dimension: death is the wages of sin, and Christ’s death pays that wage. This is not the whole of the Latin soteriology. Augustine also speaks of Christ as the way of return, the physician who heals the wound—a dimension the debt metaphor illuminates only partially. The cross addresses the debt. The resurrection vindicates Christ and begins the restoration of what the debt had purchased.

Greek Elaboration: The Cappadocian and Orthodox Frame

The Greek tradition, while fully compatible with the Latin on the essentials, tends to frame death differently—less as punishment (poena peccati) and more as corruption (phthora). Gregory of Nyssa, in De Opificio Hominis and the Oratio Catechetica Magna, argues that human nature was created in a state of immortality not by having an immortal soul but by being oriented toward communion with the Life that is God. The image of God in humanity is not a property but a relation: the human being is made to participate in divine life, and that participation is what immortality means. When sin disrupts that participation, death enters not as a penalty added from outside but as the natural consequence of severed communion. Gregory’s argument against both materialist and Platonic reductions of resurrection is anthropological: if the human being is constituted as body-and-soul, resurrection must be of the whole person, not just the soul’s escape.

Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catecheses (especially 18-20), addresses resurrection against those in his audience who doubted the body’s resurrection. His argument is scriptural and practical: if God made the body, he can remake it. The same God who raises the grain from the dead seed can raise the human body from the grave. Cyril’s method is also instructive for how the early church taught this doctrine; he begins with the symmetry of creation (God made body from dust) and moves to the symmetry of redemption (God remakes what he first made). The resurrection of the body is the vindication of the material order, not its rejection.

John of Damascus, in De Fide Orthodoxa IV.25-29, gives the most comprehensive Greek systematic treatment of death and resurrection before the modern period. He describes death as the “dissolution of the compound” (lysis tes sustaseos)—the temporary separation of soul and body that constitutes the human person in their fallen state. For John, as for Gregory of Nyssa, death is alien to human nature as originally created, and the resurrection of the body is the restoration of the whole person to the communion with God for which they were made. The Greek tradition’s language of theosis—deification, or participation in divine life—is the frame within which resurrection makes ultimate sense: not merely the return of a soul to a body, but the elevation of the whole person to a mode of existence that surpasses what Adam possessed before the fall.

Maximus Confessor, in his Quaestiones ad Thalassium and Ambiguum 41, develops the connection between Christ’s descent to the dead (descendit ad inferos) and the broader economy of salvation. For Maximus, Christ’s presence in Hades is not merely a local descent but an act of universal redemption: Christ, by his burial, brings the old Adam’s domain within the reach of the new Adam’s victory. The descent to the dead is the completion of the incarnation, the moment when the one who is truly life enters the domain of death and announces that the sentence has been reversed. This is also the moment when, according to 1 Peter 3:18-20, Christ “proclaimed to the spirits in prison”—those righteous dead who had awaited redemption before Christ’s coming. The Hades language in the Apostles’ Creed is not a local reference to a geographical underworld but a confession that Christ’s victory extends even to those who had died before his incarnation, closing the gap between the old covenant and the new.

Charitable Differences

The Latin and Greek traditions agree on the essentials: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again. The resurrection of the body is not an afterthought but the fulfillment of the gospel. The disagreements that exist are real but limited in scope.

On the mechanism of original sin and the nature of death’s entry, the Latin tradition (following Augustine) emphasizes guilt and punishment, while the Greek tradition (following the Cappadocians and John of Damascus) emphasizes corruption and the rupture of communion. Both hold that death entered through sin, that death is not natural in the sense of being part of God’s original design, and that Christ’s death and resurrection undo death’s power. The difference is one of emphasis and primary metaphor, not of substance.

On purgatory, the Catholic doctrine of an intermediate state of purification before the beatific vision has no direct Orthodox counterpart (see Purgatory). Orthodox theology holds that the souls of the departed may be aided by the prayers of the living and by the Eucharist, but it does not define a formal purgatory as a place or state of temporal punishment satisfying divine justice. This is a real difference, not merely a terminological one, though it does not touch the resurrection of the body — both traditions hold that the body will be raised and the whole person glorified or condemned.

On the descent to Hades, both traditions affirm it. The Latin West has traditionally given less emphasis to this article of the creed than the Orthodox East, where the Harrowing of Hell is a major liturgical and theological theme. But Fourth Lateran Canon 1 and Benedictus Deus both implicitly affirm Christ’s presence in the realm of the dead between his death and resurrection, and Catholic theology, particularly in its catechesis on the Paschal triduum, has increasingly recovered this dimension. The divergent liturgical and theological emphases between East and West on this point reflect broader patterns explored in the East-West Schism.

The TypeScript Analogy

The theological claim is specific: death is not the absence of existence but the suspension of it, held in a kind of holding pattern, unable to return to the source of life on its own. The TypeScript analogies that follow work because they preserve this structural claim — death is rupture, not homecoming.

Example 1: Shared Foundation — Death as Suspension

In many runtime environments, memory that is no longer reachable is not immediately freed. It sits. The garbage collector is not a soul and a dangling pointer is not sin, but the language of a heap that retains what it should release — held, not erased — maps to the theological claim about death with unusual precision.

// ANALOGY BOUNDARY: Memory-management language illuminates structure,
// not metaphysics. The heap is not the cosmos; the garbage collector
// is not God. The analogy preserves the "held, not annihilated" dynamic.
interface HeldPerson {
  identity: string;
  referenceCount: number; // Infinity while God sustains
  isAlive: boolean;
}

class HumanExistence implements HeldPerson {
  identity: string;
  referenceCount: number;
  isAlive: boolean;

  constructor(name: string) {
    this.identity = name;
    this.isAlive = true;
    this.referenceCount = Infinity; // God — the sole reference holder — does not let go
  }

  die(): SuspendedState {
    // Death = suspension, not zero reference, not annihilation.
    // God still holds the reference. The heap still contains this object.
    // What is suspended is the relationship, not the existence.
    this.isAlive = false;
    return new SuspendedState(this.identity, this.referenceCount);
  }
}

class SuspendedState {
  identity: string;
  referenceCount: number;

  constructor(identity: string, refCount: number) {
    this.identity = identity;
    this.referenceCount = refCount; // Still Infinity — God has not GC'd this
  }
}

// ANTI-PATTERN: Annihilationism — treating death as non-existence.
// This is a distinct error from Gnosticism: Annihilationism denies the
// intermediate state and treats resurrection as re-creation from nothing;
// Gnosticism/body-as-prison denies the goodness of material embodiment
// and treats the body as a prison to be escaped. The early church
// rejected both, but for different reasons. If the reference count
// went to zero, resurrection would be re-creation, not reanimation
// of what was held. The tomb is not empty because the soul escaped
// — it is empty because the Life that created body-and-soul came
// to reclaim both.
class AnnihilatedState {
  identity: string; // undefined — the object was collected
  referenceCount: 0;
  // This is not what death is. If it were, resurrection would be
  // a new creation, not a raising of the same person. That is
  // the Gnostic concession to death that the early church rejected.
}

Resurrection is not garbage collection. It is not passive reclamation. It is the dead getting up and walking out, because the reference count never reached zero. The human being is held — Someone holds us — and what holds us is the love of God in Christ who does not let go of what he has made, even when what he has made has gone dark.

Example 2: Latin Elaboration — Death as Poena Peccati

The Latin tradition frames death not only as suspension but as sentence — the poena peccati, the punishment that follows guilt. This is the forensic dimension: death is the wage of sin, the debt owed. The analogy extends naturally through a debt-ledger interface, without reducing salvation to a mechanical transaction.

// ANALOGY BOUNDARY: Debt ledger language is analogically apt for the
// Latin *poena peccati* frame. It does not capture the healing,
// restorative dimension that the Latin tradition also holds. The analogy
// is one-sided: the debt metaphor illuminates the wage/sentence logic
// but flattens the medical/physician dimension of Augustinian soteriology.
// Read this as a complement to Example 1, not a replacement.
interface DebtLedger {
  computeDebt(): number; // Balance owed: sin's wage
  recordPayment(amount: number): void;
  isPaidOff(): boolean;
}

class LatinDeathState implements DebtLedger {
  private readonly wagePerSin: number = 1; // Each sin = one death (Romans 6:23)
  private sinCount: number;
  private paymentReceived: number = 0;

  constructor(sinCount: number) {
    this.sinCount = sinCount;
  }

  computeDebt(): number {
    return this.sinCount * this.wagePerSin;
  }

  recordPayment(amount: number): void {
    // Christ's death pays the wage — not as natural compensation
    // but as satisfaction (satisfactio) offered to the Father.
    // The ledger closes not through works but through gift.
    this.paymentReceived += amount;
  }

  isPaidOff(): boolean {
    return this.paymentReceived >= this.computeDebt();
  }

  getRemainingDebt(): number {
    return this.computeDebt() - this.paymentReceived;
  }
}

// CORRECT PATTERN: Satisfaction soteriology — Christ's death pays the debt
// The payment is not arbitrary bookkeeping. It is the gift of the
// incarnate Son receiving the sentence that was owed, absorbing it,
// and closing the ledger. Fourth Lateran's Canon 1 vindicates the
// just and condemns the unjust — the forensic frame is real.
const fallenLedger = new LatinDeathState(1); // Adam's one act, binding the many
fallenLedger.recordPayment(Infinity); // Christ's single payment: infinite value
//fallenLedger.isPaidOff() === true

The debt metaphor illuminates what the Latin tradition emphasizes: death is not a neutral transition but a sentence. Christ’s death addresses that sentence not by annulling it but by paying it — the just for the unjust, the innocent for the guilty. This is the forensic dimension Augustine and Aquinas develop alongside the healing dimension. The analogy has limits: a paid debt does not naturally produce a glorified body, and the resurrection is not explained by ledger logic alone. It is one window into the mystery.

Example 3: Greek Elaboration — Death as Phthora and Theosis

The Greek tradition tends to frame death less as punishment and more as corruption — phthora, the dissolution of communion with the Life that is God. Gregory of Nyssa and John of Damascus describe death as the temporary dissolution of the body-soul compound, and resurrection as the restoration of that communion, now elevated through theosis — participation in divine life that surpasses what Adam possessed before the fall.

// ANALOGY BOUNDARY: Corruption/repair language is analogically apt for
// the Greek *phthora* frame. It captures the rupture-of-communion and
// healing-through-union logic without forcing the forensic/debt metaphor.
// The analogy does not capture the full depths of theosis, which exceeds
// what any TypeScript model can represent — it is participation in the
// uncreated energies of God, not an interface implementation.
interface CorruptionLevel {
  communionIntegrity: number; // 1.0 = full communion with Life; 0.0 = death
  isCorrupted: boolean;
}

class GreekDeathState implements CorruptionLevel {
  communionIntegrity: number;
  isCorrupted: boolean;

  constructor(priorIntegrity: number) {
    // In the fall, communion integrity drops. In death, it approaches zero.
    // But zero is not negative — it is the lowest corruption state,
    // not annihilation. The person remains held.
    this.communionIntegrity = Math.max(0, priorIntegrity - 1.0);
    this.isCorrupted = this.communionIntegrity < 1.0;
  }
}

// CORRECT PATTERN: Theosis — restoration and elevation of communion
// Gregory of Nyssa: human nature was created for communion with God,
// and that communion IS immortality. When sin disrupts communion,
// death enters as the natural consequence of severed relation.
// Resurrection restores communion AND elevates it: not mere return
// to pre-fall state, but participation in divine life (2 Peter 1:4).
interface TheoticState {
  communionIntegrity: number;
  deificationRank: 'pre-fall' | 'post-fall-restored' | 'theotic';
}

class ResurrectedWithTheosis implements TheoticState {
  communionIntegrity: number;
  deificationRank: 'pre-fall' | 'post-fall-restored' | 'theotic';

  constructor(identity: string, corruption: GreekDeathState) {
    // Christ's resurrection initiates the restoration.
    // At his coming, the rest of the crop follows (1 Corinthians 15:23).
    // Theosis is not incremental — it is a mode, not a degree.
    this.communionIntegrity = 1.0; // Elevation to full theotic communion, not scalar addition
    // The elevation exceeds original state: Adam was grantable
    // not-to-die; the risen are incorruptible (1 Corinthians 15:54).
    this.deificationRank = 'theotic';
  }
}

// ANTI-PATTERN: treating death as natural process / the body as prison
// ANALOGY BOUNDARY: If death were merely the soul's release from a
// prison-house (Platonic reading), then resurrection would be optional.
// This anti-pattern maps to the Gnostic/Docetist error the early
// church rejected: the body is not a prison. The tomb is not empty
// because the soul escaped — it is empty because the Life that
// created body-and-soul came to reclaim both.
class SoulFlightState {
  released: true;
  bodyRelevant: false; // Body considered incidental or illusory
  resurrectionNeeded: false;
  // This is the Gnostic error: treating the composite as dispensable.
  // Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa both reject this from different
  // angles. If the body does not matter, resurrection is theater.
}

Death in the Greek frame is the dissolution of the compound — the temporary separation of body and soul — that follows when sin cuts humanity off from the source of life. Resurrection is the reunification of that compound, now glorified, now elevated into communion with God that Adam in paradise only began. This is theosis: not merely survival, not merely forgiveness, but participation in the divine nature. The code analogy is partial, as all analogies are. What it preserves is the direction: from corruption to communion, from severance to healing, from the fall’s diminishment to the resurrection’s elevation.

The Already and the Not Yet

If death is defeated, why does it still win?

Paul faces this squarely in 1 Corinthians 15. He has just made the resurrection case—if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, you are still in your sins, you are of all people most to be pitied—and then he turns to the objection he knows his listeners have: what about those who have already died? His answer is not an explanation. It is a schedule. Each in his own order: Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ (1 Corinthians 15:23). The general resurrection at Christ’s return is also the moment of the Last Judgment, when all are raised and judged together.

The defeat of death is not a past event that resolves a present problem. It is a beginning—the first move in a sequence that ends with the last enemy under his feet. The cross and resurrection are the prolepsis, the advance copy, of what God will do when all things are restored. Death is already dethroned. It is not yet abolished. The king is dead; the kingdom has not yet fully come. Christians live in that gap—saved by what happened, waiting for what will.

This is Augustinian eschatology in broad strokes, compressed into a single frame. The structure holds: Christ’s resurrection is the down payment; ours is the balance. The souls of the just, upon particular judgment, enter the beatific vision (Benedictus Deus, 1336). The body awaits the general resurrection at Christ’s return. The full adoption—the redemption of our body (Romans 8:23)—is still outstanding. We are already forgiven. We are not yet glorified.

This has pastoral weight. Grief is not a failure of faith. The deaths of the saints are real losses—losses that will be undone. Christians are not people who have escaped death; they are people who have a future when death has finished its work. The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law, but when this perishable body puts on imperishability and this mortal body puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: “Death is swallowed up in victory” (1 Corinthians 15:54-55).

Finality That Is Not Final

There is a logic to resurrection that resists smoothing. It does not make death comfortable. It does not tell you that the person you lost is “really” not gone. It says something harder and more hopeful: they are gone, and they will return.

The early church formulated this as the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come. Not: the soul survives. Not: death is an illusion. The resurrection of the body. The same persons, the same identities, reconstituted by the one who made body and soul in the first place.

This is what distinguishes Christian eschatology from the Hellenizing drift that wanted to spiritualize resurrection into something like immortality of the soul. The Gnostic option—escape from the body into pure spirit—was a live alternative in the second and third centuries, and the broad patristic consensus (Irenaeus, Tertullian, Athanasius, Gregory of Nyssa) rejected it precisely because it conceded too much to death. If the self is essentially immaterial, death only releases it. But if the self is body-and-soul, death is a maiming, not a homecoming. The tomb is empty. The same man who was buried walks out. And the same power that raised him will raise us.

Fourth Lateran (1215) gave this consensus conciliar form: “All shall rise again with their bodies which they now bear about with them.” The resurrection is bodily. The judgment is universal. The outcome is eternal. There is no category—not soul-flight, not spiritual immortality alone, not mere survival—that satisfies the early church’s confession. Death is the last enemy, and it will be destroyed. Not tamed. Not explained. Not transcended by a better attitude. Destroyed.

Sources and Further Reading

Scripture

• 1 Corinthians 15:26 — death as the last enemy
• Romans 5:12 — sin entered, death through sin, death came to all
• Romans 6:23 — wages of sin is death
• Romans 8:23 — redemption of our bodies
• 1 Peter 3:18-20 — Christ proclaiming to spirits in prison
• Ephesians 4:8-10 — he led captivity captive
• Hebrews 2:14-15 — destroys the one who has the power of death

Councils

• Nicaea I (325) — Christ’s full divinity
• Constantinople I (381) — epathen (suffered)
• Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Canon 1 — resurrection of the body
• Benedict XII, Benedictus Deus (1336) — particular judgment and beatific vision

Latin/Catholic Fathers

• Augustine, Enchiridion de Fide, Spe et Caritate
• Augustine, De Civitate Dei Book XIII, XXII
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 85-97; III q. 53-59; Supplement qq. 75-86
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV.79-97

Greek/Orthodox Fathers

• Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses V.14 — recapitulation
• Athanasius, De Incarnatione 20-25
• Gregory of Nyssa, De Opificio Hominis; Oratio Catechetica Magna
• Cyril of Jerusalem, Catecheses 18-20
• John of Damascus, De Fide Orthodoxa IV.25-29
• Maximus Confessor, Ambiguum 41; Quaestiones ad Thalassium 1-2

Related Concepts

• Resurrection of the Body — the final glorification of the body at the end of time
• Original Sin — the mechanism by which death entered through one man
• Heaven and Hell — particular judgment and the intermediate state
• Incarnation — Christ’s death is effective because he is fully God and fully human
• The Trinity — the cross is the act of the incarnate Son
• East-West Schism — the theosis/filioque differences and divergent emphases
• Purgatory — the Catholic intermediate state of purification after death
• Last Judgment — the general resurrection and final judgment at Christ’s return