Conditional immortality (annihilationism)

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.

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.