Quite a few Christian denominations don’t think that souls go to heaven immediately after death. Seventh-Day-Adventists, for example, believe that you’re basically dead until Judgment Day, when you will be resurrected in a version of your previous material body. You might want to look into the biblical textual support that SDAs and similar denominations use to justify these beliefs.
I don’t think that would actually help. I recall, back when I was a christian I read an overview of various eschatologies—and decided that none of the views had any appreciable chance of being correct. IMO, people take the most attractive eschatology they’ve heard and read it into the text. Arguing from the text can’t change their minds, because the text is not actually the source of their belief (even though they strongly believe that it is). Changing my parents’ minds about a point of doctrine seems (to me) to be on the same order of difficulty as the original problem.
I don’t think looking up textual support would do you much good, though. The entire field of Christian eschatology is incredibly confused and basically rests on the precise interpretation of maybe a half-dozen passages in the Bible; outside of a few denominations like the SDA, I don’t get the impression that folk Christianity takes it very seriously.
Quite a few Christian denominations don’t think that souls go to heaven immediately after death. Seventh-Day-Adventists, for example, believe that you’re basically dead until Judgment Day, when you will be resurrected in a version of your previous material body. You might want to look into the biblical textual support that SDAs and similar denominations use to justify these beliefs.
I don’t think that would actually help. I recall, back when I was a christian I read an overview of various eschatologies—and decided that none of the views had any appreciable chance of being correct. IMO, people take the most attractive eschatology they’ve heard and read it into the text. Arguing from the text can’t change their minds, because the text is not actually the source of their belief (even though they strongly believe that it is). Changing my parents’ minds about a point of doctrine seems (to me) to be on the same order of difficulty as the original problem.
Islam has similar doctrine, if memory serves.
I don’t think looking up textual support would do you much good, though. The entire field of Christian eschatology is incredibly confused and basically rests on the precise interpretation of maybe a half-dozen passages in the Bible; outside of a few denominations like the SDA, I don’t get the impression that folk Christianity takes it very seriously.