ABSTRACT

Eternal life as a different quality of life here and now, in this world, as well as a personal survival of death. Eternal life involves a change in the way the individual lives. Believers talk of a "new birth" into a new way of looking at and approaching life. Christianity has always maintained that, at the minimum, eternal life involves a different quality of life here and now. To "live in the eternal" is to be born again into a new way of living and approaching life. Talk of the immortality of the soul refers to a person's relation to the self-effacement and love of others involved in dying to the self, it does not refer to post-mortem existence. Where the soul is the form of the whole body and becomes temporarily separated from the body on death, but is reunited with a new and glorious body at some time after death when the individual's sins have been purged.