What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionA final reckoning, in which every life is weighed.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and The Plymouth Brethren are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across9 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God · 1989 CE
Turns up as21 tenets · 6 storys · 2 figures · 1 code
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 22 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
Christ will come again.
The creed's unfinished clause: history has a direction and a judge, and the same figure who came in weakness returns in glory. Every liturgy leans toward it — come, Lord.
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The body rises. Not the soul only.
The creed says resurrection of the body and it means the body. That is why Christians buried rather than burned for most of their history, why the catacombs exist, and why the Orthodox still resist cremation — Rome permitted it in 1963, with conditions about where the ashes may end up.
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Salvation has degrees of glory.
Nearly everyone is saved into something; the question is proximity, not admission.
held by most
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The dead will rise.
Techiyat hametim sits in the second blessing of the Amidah, said standing, three times a day: who revives the dead. Orthodox Jews say it as written. Classical Reform changed the line to who gives life to all, and recent Reform prayer books print both and let the congregation choose.
held by most
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There is a world to come, and Judaism will not describe it.
Olam haba is promised constantly and pictured almost never. Gehinnom is capped at twelve months in rabbinic law, which is exactly why a child says kaddish for a parent for eleven — nobody implies their parent needed the full sentence.
held by most
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Nobody says out loud that they are saved.
Assurance of salvation is heard as presumption about God's verdict. The Amish speak of a living hope instead, and an Amish-raised person who joins an evangelical church and announces they are saved is one of the most common causes of a family breach.
held by most
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You do not have an immortal soul, so there is nowhere to torment you.
The dead are unconscious and know nothing until the resurrection. Immortality is not a possession but a gift given at judgment to those found faithful; the rejected are destroyed rather than punished forever. There is no devil as a person — the diabolos of Scripture is read as human sinful nature.
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God's Kingdom is a real government.
Established, Witnesses hold, in 1914 — soon to replace every human rule. The good news is an announcement of state.
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Christ's return is near and literal.
The Advent that named the movement: visible, personal, soon.
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Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Six things are asked of belief.
God, His angels, His books, His messengers, the Last Day, and the decree — the good of it and the bad of it. A stranger walked into the mosque, asked the Prophet to define faith, and got exactly that list. The stranger was Jibril.
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Every soul stands before God on the Last Day.
Judgment weighs each deed — and, the tradition insists, mercy outruns wrath.
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Karbala.
Husayn's small camp, cut off from the river, refused allegiance to Yazid and was destroyed on the tenth of Muharram. Shia Islam does not commemorate the event so much as refuse to let it finish happening.
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The soul goes on, and keeps going.
It comes into being at conception, is not pre-existent, does not return to another body, and after death continues to develop through worlds the living cannot picture. Heaven and hell are conditions of nearness or distance from God, not places, and progress after death remains possible.
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Vedic Religion
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The boy who waited three days at Death's door.
Given away to Death by an angry father, Nachiketa waits unfed and is offered three boons. He spends the third on what happens after death, and refuses every bribe Yama offers — horses, women, empires, long life — to make him ask for something else.
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Y
Yama — the judge of the dead.
An inherited judge and a whole bureaucracy of hells, plus the insistence that no one is being punished: the realms are karma ripening, and every one of them empties out in the end.
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The bardo — the interval.
Forty-nine days between death and rebirth, mapped in detail: lights, sounds and wrathful figures, all of them your own mind, and every one of them an exit if recognised in time.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— one faith of this family holds it
Armageddon, and who would be left.
From 1989 Asahara taught that a final war was coming, first in the 1990s and then imminently, and that only Aum practitioners would survive it. The doctrine shifted from surviving the catastrophe to bringing it about — a change the group never announced and its ordinary members largely did not know had happened.
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Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
March 1990, in the shelters.
Members had built and stocked fallout shelters at the Montana ranch on Prophet's reading of a coming nuclear attack. The date passed. The church acknowledged the failure and stopped naming dates.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
The kingdom of heaven is a physical place and you get there in a craft.
The group read the gospels as a literal account of visitors: the Next Level is a real civilisation, its members have bodies, and the resurrection was a transfer. This is why the teaching has no mysticism in it at all — it is closer to an emigration procedure than to a devotion.
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The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
The morning of 5 July 1998.
Nothing came. The membership had gathered at a campground in western New York and stayed up for it. The explanation offered — that the date had been printed backwards, or that Bob had sold the planet's coordinates and pocketed the fee — became the mechanism by which the date is rescheduled every year since, and the failure became the festival.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Death is going home, if you did it right.
Aye, the world, and orun, the beyond, are two halves of one thing, and an old person with children who dies in their own house has completed a journey and joins the ancestors. Dying young, or childless, or violently, is a rupture — and is mourned rather than celebrated.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
The Bridge of the Separator.
Three days after death the soul comes to a bridge, which widens for the good and narrows to a blade's edge for the wicked. The thoughts, words and deeds are weighed by Mithra, Sraosha and Rashnu, and the soul meets its own conscience — beautiful or hideous, depending on what it has been doing.
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The end is renovation.
Frashokereti: evil defeated finally, the dead raised, the world made fresh — the template later apocalypses inherited.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
There is a judgment, and something is at stake in it.
Eternal conscious punishment is the historic majority position. Annihilationists hold that the lost simply cease. Universalists hold that everyone is finally restored, a reading Gregory of Nyssa held openly and a version of which was condemned in 553. The question is louder now than it has been in centuries.
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