/lit/ - Literature

>>6090229
The afterlife is to be eternally in the presence of God, the pillar of eternal fire and unapproachable light--power so immense and infinite that it would destroy that which looked upon it. Christianity teaches the possibility of unity with this unconscionably ineffable thing we call God, because God extended his hand to us in the literal unification of Man and God in Jesus, God the Son, the Logos, God in the flesh.

We are ALL in the presence of God when we die (he is everywhere and in all things). "Hell" is to be in the presence of divine love and to hate it. To hate truth and love but to be in the undeniable presence of it is the real fire of hell--the divine fire of God experienced by those who cannot accept his love. For those who unify themselves with love and truth, the presence of God is experienced as eternal joy.

The whole bit about getting our bodies back refers to the existence that comes after the end of this world, this universe of material existence inevitably ends for every individual and ultimately for everything, and is replaced by a new existence at the end of time. Jesus' preternatural form after the Resurrection is a glimpse of that new existence unconstrained by time and space. Don't let pagan holdovers warp your view of the afterlife as described by the Church Fathers.