Conditional Immortality

Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses affirm conditional immortality, that human beings are not naturally immortal but mortal, that the dead are unconscious (a "sleep") until the resurrection, and that eternal life is God's gift to the saved rather than a possession of every soul. From this follows annihilationism: that the finally unrepentant are not tormented forever but are destroyed, ceasing to exist. They hold that the notion of an immortal soul suffering eternally derives from Greek philosophy rather than scripture, which speaks of death, perishing, and destruction.

Conditionalist and annihilationist readings of scripture did not originate with these two movements: elements of the position appear among radical Reformation figures in the sixteenth century, some of whom taught psychopannychism, the soul's unconscious sleep between death and resurrection, and the view was argued at length in England in the nineteenth century by conditionalist theologians such as Henry Constable and Edward White, writing independently of the Adventist and Bible Student movements developing in America during the same period; both English and American strands drew on the same core scriptural argument, that biblical language of death, destruction, and perishing should be read literally rather than as a poetic description of unending conscious torment.