It is no accident that the birth and growth of the modern sciences took place in tandem with the birth and growth of modern biblical criticism within the context of (largely European and North American) Christian societies from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. Both kinds of enterpr...
In contemporary English, ‘hell’ is almost always used to refer either literally or metaphorically to a place of post-mortem punishment. However, in a longer perspective, the term was once commonly used to allude to the underworld more generally. In the latter sense in the Catholic West it b...
The Apostles’ Creed affirms that, between his death and resurrection, Jesus Christ descendit ad inferna, ‘descended to the realm of the dead’ or, more traditionally, ‘descended into hell’. Christians across time and history have expressed particular interpretations of this clause in liturgy...
Purgatory is a place, state, or stage in the Christian afterlife where, after death, the soul is purged of minor, unexpiated sin so that it can be fit for heaven. ‘Purgatory’ derives from the Latin purgare (to purge) and hence as the noun purgatorium it is a place of purgation and purific...
The word ‘millenarianism’ is used narrowly to describe the idea, expressed in Rev 20:1–10, of a thousand-year kingdom of the saints before the last judgment, and broadly to describe general expectations of imminent radical betterment on Earth that this idea has sparked throughout Christia...