Death is not God's desire for creation and specifically man. It requires an explanation because death breaks into life and causes disharmony where life is natural and continues. Death is unnatural to man as our souls are promised immortality, our bodies experience death.
2. The New Testament notion of paradise, or heaven.
The Old testament refers to the garden and the promise land as the dwelling place of God. While paradise in the New Testament dwelling place of God is in heaven that the covenant people are called to.3. Purgatory.
Purgatory is derived from the Catholic doctrine as a place of punishment for temporal sins, and purification from them. Accordingly, the Church can reduce this punishment by interceding with good works and indulgences, etc. There is no such place in reformed doctrine as the dead are either delivered to paradise or await the final judgment apart from God.
4. Distinction between the resurrection of the body and the resurrection of the flesh.
The resurrection of the body is the promised recreation and redemption fulfilled before the day of judgement. This is a recreative act of God that does not rely upon the particles of the flesh. Whereas the resurrection of the flesh is the belief that the totality of matter must be gathered and reassembled.
5. Premil, postmil, amil, preterist.
Premillennialism believes that Christ will return before the 1,000 year literal reign of an earthly kingdom. Postmillennialism believes that Christ will return after a 1,000 year literal reign of the church. Amillennialism believes in the inaugurated kingdom that Christ brought about in his first coming, as He still reigns in a non-literal 1,000 years currently until his final and triumphant return. Preterists believe all prophecy of judgment and the second coming occurred in the past and specifically 70 AD with the destruction of the temple. All millennial views place the judgement and return of Christ in the future.
6. Intermediate corporeality.
Intermediate corporeality is the belief that when the body dies it receives a temporary body, in which contact with the living world is still possible.
7. Invocation of the saints.
Invocation of the saints is the belief that the dead can make intercession on behalf of the living, and so they are prayed to, invoked and venerated by the church in hopes of blessing. There is no biblical foundation for this, but Catholics use 2 Mac 15 as a proof text.
8. Waltke: "The dross of the Old covenant."
Waltke refers "the dross of the Old covenant" as the shadow, precursor and temporal reality of the greater spiritual everlasting truth to come in the New Covenant.
9. Waltke: "Spiritual Israel today."
To Waltke, "Spiritual Israel today" is the current community of the church as the true, real, everlasting, spiritual Israel promised to endure forever.
10. Soul-sleep.
Soul-sleep is the belief that upon death there is a complete separation and break with the psychic power of the mind to interact with knowledge and therefore must sleep, rest without interaction until judgment. This creates a false dualism between mind and matter, soul and spirit.
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