Articles about Conditional Immortality
What is the Judeo/Christian hope? Jeff Vann, David Davis, and Penny Vann explain why “Resurrection” is the answer.
[A]fter 25 years or so of pastoring in Advent Christian circles (I only have pastored two Advent Christian Churches in my 39 years of ministry) I began to question if what I had come to believe regarding conditional immortality was indeed Biblical. I left the shire and went on this “kind of scary” adventure and after some time found myself rejecting conditional immortality and embracing the traditional view of eternal conscious torment of the wicked….
In A Devil of A Dilemma: Part 1, we examined Revelation 20:10 honestly and cogently, but many were not impressed or satisfied with what we termed a sort of “modified conditional immortality view.” In truth, that is not a particularly good name since there is nothing actually modified about it per se, it merely states the main assertion of conditional immortality in plain language and follows it to its logical conclusion.
“Impatient”- it is a word that singularly describes most of us who are Americans. From our fast-food to our hi-speed internet, we are seldom satisfied by anything less than instant gratification. We must have it all, right now.
I know, you have been told that human souls are immortal: they can never die. You have been told “you have an immortal soul and are capable of living in immortal glory.”[1] But what if the Bible spoke of souls as dying, and referred to the dead as dead souls. Would that make a difference.? Would you have to re-examine your theology of the soul? I hope you would.
In a recent Advent Christian Voices article, Corey McLaughlin examines conditionalists’ treatment of Revelation 20:7-10 and concludes that our exegesis of that text has been “poor”, and based on “logic stretched thin.” He suggests that our problem is that we are trying to make Revelation 20 say that the lake of fire will come to an end, but that the text insists that it will not. To accurately reflect what is taught in Revelation 20:10, conditionalism will need to be modified to allow for the eternal conscious torment of the devil and his demonic agents.
Every theological system I have studied has at least a few unruly texts that scratch and claw like a cat being pushed into a bathtub whenever someone tries to clean them up and fit them into their particular theological framework...
We have stated that the materialist thinks of man as purely a physical being with mental and emotional development as a higher organization of his nerve system. The mystic thinks of man as essentially a spiritual being with a material body that is a temporary but not necessary residence. The Bible, however, presents man as a rational balance of both of these limited and distorted views. L
One of the things that is most attractive to me about the Advent Christian denomination is its biblical and completely reasonable view of man. When I first met the Advent Christian group, I was a graduate student majoring in geology at Brown University and later at Harvard. I was a Bible-believing Christian and a member of a large conservative Protestant church. However, there were one or two things taught by my church that I, as a scientist, had great difficulty accepting.
Perhaps there are other major branches of theology besides Theology Proper, Anthropology, Soteriology, Ecclesiology and Eschatology; but, these five will certainly do for a vivid illustration of my thesis: that Conditional Immortality is not only the true teaching of the Bible, but that it is also “extremely important” – so important, in fact, that we have found that denying it would lead us into irremediable error
“Confession: I am an annihilationist. I believe that the wicked will be resurrected on the last day, judged and condemned by God Almighty, and cast into hell to suffer and die. Some of my fellow annihilationists may have just experienced a bit of theological whiplash. You were offering a hearty “Amen” to my belief statement until I threw in the word “suffer.” If that describes you, put on your big boy/big girl pants, because I’ve got something to say that you might not like…”