A Dissent from the Mainstream

This affirmation departs from the historic Christian majority, which teaches the natural immortality of the soul and the eternal conscious punishment of the lost, and it goes with the two movements' broader return to what they regard as biblical rather than inherited doctrine. Both traditions read the biblical language of the fate of the wicked as pointing to final destruction rather than unending torment, a view sometimes shared by other Christians as well. Presented here as these bodies hold it, the belief is closely tied to their doctrine of the soul, death, and the resurrection.

The position is not confined to Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses alone: the influential evangelical Anglican theologian John Stott expressed cautious openness to conditional immortality in a 1988 dialogue published as Essentials, co-written with David Edwards, a statement that caused considerable controversy among fellow evangelicals precisely because it came from so mainstream and respected a figure rather than from the smaller traditions usually associated with the view; Stott's tentative position illustrates that the doctrine of the soul's natural immortality, though the historic majority view, has never been entirely without internal evangelical dissent even outside the traditions that hold conditionalism as settled teaching.