Christian conditionalism

In Christian theology, conditionalism or conditional immortality is a concept in which the gift of immortality is attached to (conditional upon) belief in Jesus Christ. This doctrine is based in part upon another biblical argument, that the human soul is naturally mortal, immortality ("eternal life") is therefore granted by God as a gift. This viewpoint stands in contrast to the more popular doctrine of the "natural immortality" of the soul. Conditionalism is practically synonymous with annihilationism, the belief that the unsaved will be ultimately destroyed, rather than suffer unending physical torment in hell. The view is also sometimes connected with the idea of soul sleep, in which the dead sleep unconscious until the Resurrection of the Dead to stand for a Last Judgment before the World to Come. The British Evangelical Alliance ACUTE report states the doctrine is a "significant minority evangelical view" that has "grown within evangelicalism in recent years". In the 20th century, conditional immortality was considered by certain theologians in the Eastern Orthodox Church. Proponents of conditional immortality ("conditionalists") point to and , where the Tree of Life is mentioned. It is argued that these passages, along with teach that human beings will naturally die without continued access to God's life-giving power. As a general rule, conditionalism goes hand in hand with annihilationism; that is, the belief that the souls of the wicked will be destroyed in Gehenna (often translated "hell", especially by non-conditionalists and non-universalists) fire rather than suffering eternal torment. The two ideas are not exactly equivalent, however, because in principle God may annihilate a soul which was previously created immortal. While annihilationism places emphasis on the active destruction of a person, conditionalism places emphasis on a person's dependence upon God for life; the extinction of the person is thus a passive consequence of separation from God, much like natural death is a consequence of prolonged separation from food, water, and air.