LOL, need to look at your favourite scholar a bit closer, then!I don't even know what that means
Fallen Angels, reprised
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TheLightWithin
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Conditional immortality as I am familiar with it is closely related to annihilationism though it may be a broader term that is not identical to annihilationism. 4,5&6 on your list don't address it at all. 4, 5 & 6 seem to be extending salvation to certain groups of people.
In annihilationism/conditional immortality, the saved have eternal life, the unsaved do not. The unsaved have no eternal existence. No hell. Those who are not granted salvation/eternal life are eliminated, annihilated, or in some teachings (possible other religions) not resurrected at all. The state of the dead between bodily death and the general resurrection is unconsciousness.
I was once told that was the Jewish view, though I am now convinced that is not quite that clear cut.
Here's something I saved awhile ago about those who leaned towards conditional immortality throughout history (within Christianity)
Champions of Conditional Immortality in History
He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. To the one who conquers I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the paradise of God. (Revelation 2:7)
I'm not sure what you mean about "the US being the US" unless you are associating denominations with that teaching with the US?
IF that is what you mean, that is just partially accurate. The Christadelphians developed in the UK and North America, I believe, and remain more prominent in the Commonwealth than here. Further, every denomination that has declared conditional immortality/annihilationism to be truth has gotten their ideas from their read on bible texts. They have all also become worldwide.
To me 'conditional immortality' is that some will be saved, and some won't.
So 2 & 3 are not 'conditional' if that applies to humans only. If no devils are saved, then not all are saved unconditionally.
The rest are conditional, with the necessity of ticking certain boxes, as it were.
The New Testament is surprisingly annihilationist in tone.
OK.
As a universalist, I don't believe in annihilation, nor any mode of damnation, eternal or otherwise.
I'm inclined to agree with those theologians who regard any 'loss' with regard to creation as a defeat of God and in effect presents a limitation of His Infinite Wisdom, Justice, Mercy, and Love.
My Theology of Redemption is the Recapitulation Theory, as posed by Irenaeus of Lyon in the late 2nd century.
(The English 'recapitulation' is a translation of the Greek anakephalaiōsis, a 'summing up' or 'bringing together.')
"Christ is the head of all things already mentioned. It was fitting that He should be sent by the Father, the Creator of all things, to assume human nature, and should be tempted by Satan, that He might fulfil the promises, and carry off a glorious and perfect victory."
"1: He has therefore, in His work of recapitulation, summed up all things, both waging war against our enemy, and crushing him who had at the beginning led us away captives in Adam, and trampled upon his head, as you can perceive in Genesis that God said to the serpent ...
"... And therefore does the Lord profess Himself to be the Son of man, comprising in Himself that original man (Adam) out of whom the woman (Eve) was fashioned, in order that, as our species went down to death through a vanquished man, so we may ascend to life again through a victorious one; and as through a man death received the palm [of victory] against us, so again by a man we may receive the palm against death."
(Against Heresies, Book V, Chapter 21)
Yeah, not quite.
I apologise.
TheLightWithin
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Yes.... but what it MEANS is that only some will be immortal.
There's no existence of eternal hell in conditional immortality.
Souls are not immortal, at all, unless granted eternal life.
The state of the unsaved is death.
I personally believe that this may be the ultimate outcome of things, at the end of time.
But to circle back to what I said earlier about conditional immortality being the Jewish view... and it being not quite so...
I have looked into various Jewish views of the afterlife, and just about every afterlife theory that there is is touched in Judaism.
Heaven, purgatory, various forms of hell, reincarnation, ghosts, all theories, some Jewish thinkers have touched on it.
I suspect that all of those theories are possible and operational until the end of time, when the final countdown will include eternal life for whom God chooses, and permanent annihilation for whoever may have remained incorrigible over however long a span.
I can't prove it, I just can't help "believing" it or at least strongly suspecting that is the case, because in my brain it is downright plausible.
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By death I assume you mean utter non-existence – total extinction or annihilation.
In which case I agree. That seems to me a far more rational and reasonable idea, rather than an eternity of suffering in which the sufferer can neither learn nor change nor repent and which increasingly looks like inflicting suffering for its own sake ... it serves neither God nor the soul.
Indeed ...
... Bit ranged against this is the idea of God's Infinite Mercy and Infinite Wisdom.
St Paul said: “Death is swallowed up in victory. O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"
If God's providence overcomes death, and death is the result of sin, then God's providence overcomes sin, and if sin is overcome, then none lost to sin are beyond recovery, and none will be lost ... or conversely, if one soul is lost, then God's providence was not omnipotent.
The Universalist idea is that God will perfect every soul and remove the stain of sin, now I'm not going into details, but when I look at Hindu doctrines like the Multiple States of Being, and that this human state is but one state in a series of states that are both sequential and simultaneous ... I do see the possibility for an ongoing journey 'into' God, bearing in mind that God is Infinite so that journey actually has no boundary or destination – rather, just an eternal horizon which, when reached, is crossed into the eternal abyss which transcends every possible state of being and non-being and contains the possibility and potentiality of every such state within itself, indeterminately.
This über-state is that of a prior-to everything, itself without determination or distinction or difference ... it is the somehow knowing of this that leads all spiritually-oriented cultures to regard time not as linear but cyclical, and this über-state is the one everything comes from, and to which everything will return. a 'Golden Age' ...
+++
Well, that all depends on the nature of a soul .. G-d is eternal, and non-physical.
(as physical is the creation)
Our souls are non-physical, and belong to G-d.
Can G-d die? Obviously not.
Can our souls die, if they belong to G-d?
I would say that they do not .. and Scripture backs my argument up.
The journey is already underway .. and it does not end at physical death.
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Yes.
I was raised on the idea, so I really thought that's what was factual. There is scriptural support for it (which is where my grandfather's church go it) which I would have to look up but could find if needed.
And I agree.
TheLightWithin
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In some ways this sounds a little bit like Vedic thinking to me... though I could be waaayyy off... what little I know about Vedic thought is mostly impressionistic at this point. But things I've read are worded similarly to what you wrote above.