The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Catholics Who Argue For Annihilationism

Been looking into Conditional Immortality and found some Catholic theologians who offer it as a possibility.

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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.

From Catholic Answers:

the Catechism itself is not an infallible document. This is one reason it is capable of being revised.

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/understanding-the-catechism-revision-on-the-death-penalty

Hi Cole -

Robert Wild has also done a book on Catholic Universalism (with a foreword by Robin Parry). It’s a good resource (it looks at the wider universalists tradition but also specifically at Catholic universalists. Hmmm - I wonder why he has now produced a reader on conditional mortality for Catholics? Perhaps he just wants to kick start debate that gets brushed under the carpet by many Catholics (I got the impression from the first book that he is a universalist - unless he’s changed his mind). I think the debate is more out in the open and in your face among Protestant - although I sense that my Catholic friends believe that hell will be empty in the end.

Yeah, he changed his mind.

That’s a shame :frowning: