Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.

What does the Bible say about immortality and the afterlife? In this study, we discover the origins and development of religious beliefs in life after death, and the existence of beings from realms beyond. In mounting this comprehensive and scholarly study of the Old Testament, W. O. E. Oesterley examines a variety of pertinent passages from the Biblical lore. By the time the Bible was written, demons and their ilk were already an established presence in ancient belief systems. Ancient Judaism included a variety of new demons, together with details on their habitat, behaviors and interaction with humans living on Earth. With demons synonymous with evil, angels were synonymous with good, enacting God's will that humans spend their mortality in virtue. What happens to humans after death has for millennia been an important spiritual question. The Bible contains a series of details on the traversal and immortality of the deceased's souls. In the ancient times ancestor worship was common, and these cults of the dead are acknowledged in the Old Testament. To compliment his narrative, the author also provides supplementary historical details of mourning and funerary customs, with a series of rituals said to ensure the soul's safe transit to the immortal realm.

Most evangelical Christians believe that those people who are not saved before they die will be punished in hell forever. But is this what the Bible truly teaches? Do Christians need to rethink their understanding of hell? In the late twentieth century, a growing number of evangelical theologians, biblical scholars, and philosophers began to reject the traditional doctrine of eternal conscious torment in hell in favor of a minority theological perspective called conditional immortality. This view contends that the unsaved are resurrected to face divine judgment, just as Christians have always believed, but due to the fact that immortality is only given to those who are in Christ, the unsaved do not exist forever in hell. Instead, they face the punishment of the "second death"--an end to their conscious existence. This volume brings together excerpts from a variety of well-respected evangelical thinkers, including John Stott, John Wenham, and E. Earl Ellis, as they articulate the biblical, theological, and philosophical arguments for conditionalism. These readings will give thoughtful Christians strong evidence that there are indeed compelling reasons for rethinking hell.

In the nineteenth century, many American Protestants expected almost limitless, orderly progress as Christianity and democracy spread and as technology and prosperity increased. Yet they also believed that, many centuries hence, after progress had run its course, the Second Coming of Jesus and a supernatural End to the world would occur. If these Protestants had one foot in the world of steamships and the telegraph, the other remained firmly planted in the cosmos of the Apocalype--a universe where angels poured out vials of wrath, where the dead would rise again, and where the wicked would be cast forever into a lake of burning fire.

The introduction of Aristotelianism into the West created conflict, disruption, and turmoil. Not least, it confronted the Middle Ages with a serious problem concerning the possible conflict between reason and faith. In part, the controversy surrounding Aristotelianism in the Christian world came from the Islamic channels through which much of the Aristotelian philosophical heritage came to the West. The great turning point of Christian thought, the point at which Christian intellectual history began to be dominated by Aristotelian patterns, began when Christian scholars were exposed not only to the philosophy of Aristotle, but also to the commentaries of Averroes. The names of Averroes and Aristotle became inextricably linked by the middle of the thirteenth century. A clear and careful analysis of the links between the thoughts of Averroes and Aristotle, an explication of the impact of Averroes' thought on Christian theology and on Aquinas in particular, this monograph is of crucial importance in the history of Christianity. It is emphatically apposite to the discussion of monistic and qualistic theological anthropologies. Further, the discussion throws light upon a topic which should be of much greater interest to scholars: the impact of Islam upon medieval Christian thought. Mohammed centres specifically upon Averroes' doctrine of immortality—a doctrine that posited immortality for man as a being entire, not merely for his soul.