There is no clear dogmatic teaching of our Orthodox Church on death and what happens when we die. There is a lot of interest about death as reflected by the amount of books written about after death experiences, salvation and damnation. Furthermore, there are questions about the soul after death and the intermediate state (i.e. the period between when we die and the world's end). Christ is coming in glory and because the millennium is coming up, which by the way is the year 2001 with 2000 being the last year of the second millennium, has stirred interest in the 'end time', the 'coming of Christ', and 'the judgement of God on the world' are the interpretations of the time.
There is a lot of discussion going on right now on death, how we understand dying and what we are to say about those who are biologically dead already. There are related questions like praying for people who have departed this life. We Orthodox people just love to have memorial services. We have the Divine Liturgy and nobody is there, but when we have a Memorial Service the church is packed.
I will now make some very simple points, which I think are clearly the teaching of our Orthodox Church, although this may be debatable. I am not giving just my opinion; I am giving my opinion about what I believe the Church is teaching us.
Let us take the interpretation of the Holy Scripture, Church Fathers, Saints and Services of the Church together and ask certain questions, such as:
What is death? How do we understand death? What do we think happens? How are we to relate to it? What kind of answers would we get from the Holy Scripture?
The Holy Scripture is our basic authority of faith and is the witness of what the Christian faith is, and our tradition is an interpretation and understanding of Scripture. Our tradition is a way of understanding the Scripture and has a sense of which even the Scripture itself is a testimony to the tradition of faith or the kanonaspisteos (the rule of faith) that even antedated the writing of Scripture. Because, certainly there was the Christian faith before the writing of the New Testament Scriptures, which are basically interpretations of the Old Testament Scriptures. By the way, when the New Testament says "the Scriptures" it means what we call the "Old Testament", which includes the Law, Psalms, and the Prophets.
It is beyond any doubt that we Christians are convinced that we are created for life; it is not God's will that we die. God doesn't want death; He wants life. In the Scripture, death is the enemy. The Apostle Paul even calls death, "the last enemy". Death is not natural, not a natural part of our life and not willed by God. The Wisdom of Solomon, which for us is part of the Bible, says very clearly, "God did not create death". Death comes into the world as a rebellion against God. Death comes into the world because people do not choose life, but choose death, darkness, and themselves over God.
St. Athanasios said, "if you choose yourself you are choosing nothing, because that what you are without God", since we are created out of nothing. For God gives our whole life to us, Who is the living God and the only One Who lives.
It is our teaching that death results from human rebellion against God from the beginning and with the help of the demons (who are lovers of death, darkness and evil). The Bible actually teaches kind of a package plan, you have God, truth, life and glory, or you have the demons, darkness, death, satan, sin, corruption, ugliness and rot. This is the basic reality, and there is no middle path.
In the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, the Apostle Paul says, "working in our members is always a heterosunos (another law)". Human beings think that they are economists, in other words, they are 'a law unto themselves', but according to the Scriptures we are not. Either there is the law (nomos) of Christ, which the Apostle Paul calls the law of the Holy Spirit and Life in his Epistle to the Romans, or there is the law of sin and death. There is either one law or the other that works, if it isn't the one it is the other. Here we interpret the Genesis story as the choice of death. Furthermore, it is even not strictly Orthodox to think of sin as a corrupted choice or making the wrong choice. I believe that our teaching is that the problem is not whether it is right or wrong but choice itself (as taught by St. Maximos the Confessor), because if you are a creature you have no choice.
If there is God and God is God and God is the living God and God is Who He is, our only choice is to give up our choice and listen to and obey Him. This is very important to understand, because modern people think that the more choices they have and the more they deliberate the more free they are, however this is not Biblical. What we say is that if there is God, at any given moment the only choice we have is to give up choice and obey Him, listen to Him, trust Him, to love Him and to believe Him. The primordial sin is exactly saying "no, I will not obey, trust or love God. I will do it my way". You know what takes place when you do it your way; you perish and die. That is where death comes from. Where there is obedience, love and trust in God, there cannot be death. If one was to obey God totally, live in communion with God, trust and love God in everything, that person will not be able to die.
It is interesting in the Genesis story, God did not say to Adam and Eve, "eat of the tree and I will kill you". He said, "you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil", meaning choice rather than obedience, "for when you eat of it you will surely die", for it is sin that kills you. God doesn't kill anybody, in that sense; we kill ourselves. So the minute we take our life in our own hands to do what we want to do, and do not obey God, basically we commit suicide. Furthermore, we put that death over to our children who are born in the same condition of death when born into the world. That is what the 'ancestral sin' is all about. A second point is that we would say that the human task is to overcome and destroy death, and to make death to die so that life can then live.
The whole Old Testament, which includes the Law, Psalms and Prophets, is really about teaching people the will of God to reconstruct a rebellious humanity in order that ultimately death can be destroyed. For example, in the Law of Moses you have two very interesting things, one is God says, through Moses, 'I present to you only two ways: the blessing and the curse' (i.e. life or death). Then it says, 'choose life and don't choose death'. The Law, Psalms and Prophets say: Obey God, give up your choice, obey God and you will live. For example, Psalm 118 (119) that is read in our funeral service and on the night of Holy Saturday before Pascha says, "Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the law of the Lord! Blessed are those who keep His testimonies, who seek Him with the whole heart!" Then the Psalm continues "If I keep Your law, I find life in it and I cannot die". That is why it is read over the body of the dead Jesus, because He is the only One who kept the Law of God completely, and therefore could not die.
What we believe is that Jesus Christ our Saviour came into the world in order to die. He is the only One who came in order to die so that He can transform death itself into a victory through His death. He is the only One, the only Person, and the only Human who has ever been born in order to die. He is also the only Human who is the Son of God, Who is divine with the same divinity as the Father, Who is born of a virgin, Who is begotten of the Father, Who comes exactly into the world for one purpose; to destroy the work of the devil and death, and to give us life.
Before the coming of Christ, according to the Bible, everyone is caught by death, no matter how good or bad they were. We can even say to this day that is the truth. Biologically, we are all dead; we are a room of dead people. It is a good idea once in a while to remember that. In fact, many of our monastics would even put a coffin and cross in their room to remember that. There is an American church story about some southern Protestants who heard about a Roman Catholic monk who used to write "remember death" and that he had a coffin prepared for his death. One of them says to the other, "You know that they used to do that, and sometimes they'd even sleep in that coffin?" Then the other character said, "Yep, they weren't as advanced as we is". However, the question is who is really advanced?
The problem, however, is that in our time death has been so naturalised nobody will even think of it as an enemy. In much literature it is considered the last stage of life, normal, or you go into some sort of light somewhere, and if you are tired of this life or this world you call some doctor to end your life. However for Biblical Christians, that is absolutely not the teaching.
Let us compare the death of Socrates to the death of Jesus. Socrates the philosophic man, corrupting the youth of Athens because of his teaching of philosophia, says that the real philosopher is the one who can face death. When they finally catch him to put him to death and his friends want to rescue him, he says no. When they bring him the hemlock he drinks it and dies. By the way, the euthanasia society in the state of Massachusetts in the United States is called the Hemlock Society.
Then look at how Jesus dies. He is in the garden and begs His Father to let 'this cup pass' and sweating blood. For Him it is an outrage to die or that any person would die; it is the total victory of the devil. We were created to sing hallelujah to God, not to be corrupted and rot in the tomb. In the Old Testament, there was a big debate about death. Some thought that death is natural and you just died and went to your fathers. They also believed that God continues to live in the people and the dry bones of Israel (or the people of Israel) are resurrected, but the individual person is lost. These people, at the time of Jesus, were called the Sadducees. The Sadducees, if you read the Bible, did not believe in the spirit, soul or the resurrection of the dead. However, the Pharisees believed in them all. They interpreted from the Scripture that there will be a resurrection from the dead and the dead will rise. They also believed that when the God Messianic age will come, when God's glory will fill creation, when God's kingdom will finally be established through the Messiah the main thing that will happen is that the graves will be opened (beside the blind seeing, the lame walking, the deaf hearing and the dumb talking...). Then all the dead will rise and God will judge every single person that has lived. That was the teaching of the pharisaic party and the Apostle Paul. If you read the Book of Acts, every time St. Paul got into trouble for preaching the resurrection of the dead, and that is what got him in trouble with the Sadducees.
The Sadducees had no hope, but the Pharisees had a certain hope that the dead would rise. However, according to the New Testament, even the Pharisees did not have the right hope because they thought that the dead would rise at the end of time, but they didn't know that the One who raises the dead had come. So what we believe as Christians is that Jesus Christ is the Resurrection and the Life. He who believes in Me, though he die, yet shall he live (John 11:25). So we believe that in the death of Jesus, death itself is destroyed. This is what we sing at Pascha: "Christ is risen from the dead, trampling down death by death, and upon those in the tombs bestowing life".
Now, here is an important point: You can't destroy death by avoiding it. The only way to destroy death is to die and to overcome it from within. In other words, you have to go into death, into the very belly of the beast, and kill it from inside. That is what Jesus does. He does not run away from death. He runs into it. He accepts it voluntarily. He dies and rises, and in rising He destroys death and raises all the dead with Him. So in His death, death itself is destroyed. St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, that the last enemy to be destroyed is death. In the Apocalypse (Revelation), it says that death and hades are thrown into the lake of fire. So death is destroyed. For us Christians, this means that death no longer has power over anyone. No one can really die. No one can be finally separated from God. Everyone is raised with Christ, whether they like it or not, because Christ has raised all of humanity with Himself. This is the teaching of the Church. This is why we can say with St. Paul, "O death, where is your sting? O grave, where is your victory?" (1 Cor. 15:55).
But this does not mean that everyone is saved in the sense of entering into the Kingdom of God. Everyone is raised from the dead, but the resurrection is for all, both the righteous and the unrighteous. The judgment is about how we respond to the love of God. Those who love God and have repented of their sins will enter into eternal life and joy. Those who do not love God and cling to their sins will experience the same presence of God as a consuming fire and torment. The fire of God's love is the same for everyone, but it feels like paradise to those who love God and like hell to those who hate Him. This is the teaching of the Holy Fathers, especially St. Isaac the Syrian and St. Gregory of Nyssa.
So when we die, we enter into the presence of Christ. We are judged by our own response to His love. The prayers of the Church and the intercessions of the Saints can help us, because we are all connected in the Body of Christ. Time is different for God; He hears our prayers for the departed even before they die, because He is outside of time. So we pray for the departed with confidence, knowing that our prayers are heard and that they can help those who have fallen asleep in the Lord.
We do not believe in purgatory as a place of punishment, but we do believe that there is a process of purification after death for those who have repented but are not yet perfect. This purification is not a punishment, but a healing. It is like passing through fire, as St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 3: "If anyone's work is burned, he will suffer loss; but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire". This is the fire of God's love, which burns away everything that is not compatible with His presence. For the righteous, this is a joyful purification; for the unrighteous, it is a painful one, but it can still lead to salvation if they are willing to repent. However, after death, the opportunity for changing one's fundamental orientation towards God is limited. The Church teaches that the moment of death is the moment of truth, and after that, our state is fixed by our own free will. But the prayers of the Church can still bring comfort and healing to the departed, even if they cannot change their fundamental choice.
In conclusion, we should not fear death, because Christ has destroyed it. We should prepare for death by living a life of repentance, prayer, and love. We should pray for the departed, and we should look forward to the Resurrection of the dead and the life of the age to come.