A Catholic Reading Guide to Conditional Immortality

Like many other people, the long tradition about hell has been a source of serious confusion and distress for me. Over the past six years or so I was relieved to discover two other alternatives that are also part of the Christian tradition, though less prominent—universalism and the subject of the present book, conditional immortality. Universalism—that everyone would eventually be saved—did not, in the final analysis, seem to really come to grips with the overwhelming scriptural testimony that some kind of radical fateful decision is possible to people. Conditional immortality—that people who absolutely refuse God's plan for them will be taken out of existence—seems to me the best scriptural understanding of what the Lord meant by "losing one's soul"—not everlasting punishment but the withdrawal of existence. This book is an attempt to explain this theological theory. It is not presented as a definite dogma or teaching of the church, but as one of the possible results of a persistent and irrevocable decision against God.