So, my question is: what is the Christian afterlife, and when do people go there? Because I'm under two simultaneous impressions:
1. Paradise is Heaven, an alternate state from the temporal realm, to which people's immortal souls go swiftly after death, leaving their physical bodies behind.
2. Paradise is here on Earth, in the Millennial future, when Christ reigns as king and the dead are physically resurrected before the Last Judgment and live eternally in renewed physical bodies.
Is only one true, and the other a widespread misconception? Are neither true, and I've oversimplified or misunderstood things entirely? Or are they both true? If so, how? Is Heaven actually just a sort of second-best paradise, pleasant enough for souls to wait in, but not as great as Earth will be in future, so souls eventually come down from heaven back into physical bodies to live an even more glorious existence as perfected physical beings?
Incidentally, I have asked others about this before and have gotten several responses. One person wrote that the Resurrection is the beginning of the afterlife in Christianity, and wrote about the incorporeal-souls-go-to-Heaven idea as a sort of folk belief that most Christians wouldn't really claim to be real doctrine if you pressed them about it, but which gets talked about from time to time. Another person claimed that we are instantly with God upon death, so therefore a delay between death and resurrection in which we are not with God cannot be true. (He supported these claims by citing 2 Corinthians 5:6-9 and Philippians 1:23.)