Un-claiming the world, because (2) ... there's another world

Classical judaism wasn't (and isn't) interested in another world nor in afterlife - and it is informative to look how that strange and noble belief developed out of poor roots.

1. The first step was laid in the times of the Babylonian occupation. Jews came into contact with the Persian religion which was highly interested in "eschatology" - fears and hopes about the final conflict between good and bad - and which worked out an ideal about "the end of all times". Jews being in misery because of their military defeat get a grip to those speculations, as is seen in the Prophets. But the "other world" was somewhat which existed in the future and would be no more than a corrected and ameliorated version of traditional society.
2. The second step was laid in the Maccabean wars when hopes were uttered that the dead heroes and freedom fighters might rise again in the new ideal state of the Messiah. So the "other world" began to become at least partly something more than a corrected society.
3. By the times of the Jesus Movement there had formed a popular belief that not only the fighters, but all or most dead would rise again at the end of times. That's a belief which was shared by the Pharisees and the Jesus Movement.
4. But that "other world" had still been no more than a matter of future. It seems to have been the Jesus Movement which firstly told people that the kingdom of God was already present in a way.
5. In early Christianity that mystical presence of the future world was melted with the idea - already well known outward of Judaism - that also the dead would not only rise again but were living in a world (ore different worlds) aside of us (Heaven, Hell and Purgatory).
6. Catholicism at last formed secure and everyday ways in which the living and the dead could communicate - the living praying for the dead, and the dead praying for the living.

Now let's consider how the discovery of the other world was undone and sank into oblivion:
1. At first, Luther destroyed the ways of communication between the living and the dead. It was useless to pray for the dead or to hope on their prayers.
2. Secondly, Biblicism - which put the Torah above of Christian tradition - denied the idea of the dead actually living and restrained our hopes on a future where they might rise again. In the same way the kingdom of Christ lost its presence and became a mere matter of future.
3. Thirdly, enlightenment and liberalism reduced our future hopes to a kind of kingdom which would be nothing more than a corrected and ameliorated society.

The problem of a second or parallel world is important as it's the base of the idea of the Christian as a "resident alien". That idea was extremely dear to early Christians (as we know e.g. from the letters of St. Paul and the famous "Letter to Diognetus"). Stanley Hauerwas tried to revive it, and it has become somewhat popular in liberal circles. But if we don't really count on another world whose citizens we are, it's just lip service to tell that we were "resident aliens" here and now. And in fact liberal Christians act in no way as if they were "resident aliens".