Christ will return. The dead will be raised. All will face judgment. That’s what we confess every Sunday in the Creed, and it’s enough.
Orthodoxy doesn’t have a detailed timeline of the end times. We don’t have charts mapping out seven-year tribulations or secret raptures or a thousand-year reign. If you grew up Baptist or spent time in a non-denominational church here in Southeast Texas, you probably heard a lot about the rapture, believers suddenly disappearing, planes falling from the sky, the Antichrist rising. That whole system comes from dispensationalism, a nineteenth-century interpretive framework that reads the Bible like a coded timeline. It’s not how the Church has ever understood Scripture.
The Nicene Creed gives us what we need to know. “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.” A few lines later: “I look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.” That’s our eschatology in a nutshell. Christ returns once, publicly, cosmically. The dead rise bodily. Judgment happens. Eternal life begins fully for those united to God.
Notice what’s missing. No secret phase where some Christians vanish while others get left behind. No separate resurrections separated by a millennium. The Orthodox understanding is simpler and older. One Second Coming, visible to all. One resurrection of all the dead, righteous and wicked together. One final judgment where what’s been true all along becomes manifest, we’re either with God or we’re not.
But Orthodoxy also refuses to systematize what Scripture leaves mysterious. We don’t claim to know exactly what happens in the moments after death. The tradition offers images: the soul meeting Christ, angels and demons, a kind of reckoning. Some later Byzantine writers described “toll houses” where the soul faces its sins. But the Church has never made this a dogma. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware points out that the first-millennium fathers rarely mentioned such things, and when they did, they used different images. The point isn’t the mechanics. It’s that death is serious, judgment is real, and we should live accordingly.
What we do know is that death doesn’t end our existence. The soul continues, conscious and aware. Those who’ve died in Christ are alive in Christ, which is why we ask their prayers. The final reunion of body and soul happens at the general resurrection when Christ returns. Then comes the judgment, and then the fullness of the Kingdom.
Heaven and hell aren’t just locations. They’re states of being in relation to God. St. Isaac the Syrian wrote that the fire of hell and the light of heaven are the same thing, God’s love, experienced differently depending on whether we’ve been healed enough to receive it as life or whether it burns us because we’ve refused it. Salvation isn’t about escaping a cosmic courtroom. It’s about being healed, transformed, made capable of union with God. That process starts now, continues after death, and reaches its fullness in the resurrection.
This is why Orthodox Christians don’t get worked up about decoding Revelation or identifying the Antichrist in current events. Fr. Thomas Hopko used to say that the Apocalypse is about every age, not just the last one. The beast and the harlot and the dragon are always present, always opposing Christ and His Church. The book was written to encourage persecuted Christians in the first century, and it still encourages us. But it’s not a newspaper written in advance.
So what should we do with end times questions? We should prepare. Not by stockpiling food or charting timelines, but by repenting, praying, fasting, receiving the Mysteries, loving our neighbors. We should live as if Christ might return today, which is what Christians have always done. The Jesus Prayer includes the line “have mercy on me, a sinner.” That’s eschatological readiness. Humility. Watchfulness. Trusting that God knows what He’s doing and we don’t need to.
When your coworker at the refinery asks if you believe in the rapture, you can say no, not the way he means it. But you do believe Christ is coming back. You do believe the dead will rise. You do believe in judgment and eternal life. And you believe the Church has been confessing this for two thousand years without needing to turn it into a thriller novel plot. The end times aren’t a puzzle to solve. They’re a hope to live into, starting right now.
