A Catholic Reading Guide to Conditional Immortality: The Third Alternative to Hell and Universalism

By Robert Wild

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1498297277
• ISBN13: 9781498297271
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Resource Publications (CA)
• Length: 218 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 8.9"