Interesting article about preterism along with comments

[DRDS]

Hey everyone,

I was wanting to share with you all something I learned last night regarding the view of preterism and how it pertains to the afterlife. This was something I was wondering about as well as worried about for quite sometime. And for awhile I couldn't get any solid answers from anyone who either is a preterism or knows fully about what preterists believe.


Here is the link to that article, it's written by a preterist on a preterist website.

http://www.newcreationministries.tv/the-afterlife.html

What I think this article helped clear up for me is that if the view of preterism is true but partial or even full there is still a afterlife for believers.

Originally I thought most if not all full preterists and even maybe some partial preterists take the Bible so figuratively and from such a vague spiritual perspective that the concept of the afterlife or heaven and hell only exist for this people living in the present only and just like under atheism or atheistic naturalism fades out when a person dies.

Which not only poses major problems for most Christians for obvious reasons but it also raises the question about suffering if indeed a follower of Christ now is living in "heaven" in their present lives why do they still experience pain and suffering, when clearly the bible indicates that in heaven pain,suffering, sin as well as death will fully cease.

However the article suggests that most full preterists while believing that a afterlife does exist the author did stress that it will be a "spiritual afterlife" and we will only have "spriitual bodies" instead of physical ones. But of course to me that raises another problem about Christ having a physical body after His resurrection. I assume that most full preterists would then respond by saying that Christ's resurrection was either fully spiritual or more spiritual rather than physical.

But then the author did say that only a small few of full preterists did however hold to the no afterlife view that I mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. I assume mostly because once you take away a conscious afterlife whether it be fully or mostly physical or spiritual you pretty much render Christianity useless other than it being just another good set of moral values to have and a good state of mind to have while alive.

But I'm very glad to see this "no afterlife" view among Christianity is just mostly a strange fringe minority with little to no serious scholarship and biblical evidence to support it.

[Seraph]

Do Preterists not believe in an afterlife? I thought they they just belived that certain events in Revelations, such as the Great Tribulation, already occurred and referred to persecution of Christians and the fall of Rome.
At the very least, they've got to believe in spending eternity with God in the "New Heaven and Earth".

[DRDS]

As I mentioned above, most full preterists I think believe in a "spiritual afterlife" as we don't have physical bodies after we die but we are still conscious in some way. But there are a few full preterists that believe in no afterlife and that heaven for believers is right now and only now in this temporal life here on earth.

And as far as partial preterists go I guess they range from ones who believe in a bodily resurrection and bodily physical existence in heaven and those who believe that our afterlife will be spiritual just like most full preterists. As far as what I've studied thus far I think that's how most of them believe.