Some people are attracted to this idea, as it removes the doctrine of eternal torment and preserves the belief that few people will go to heaven. I'd be interested in the thoughts of others on this subject.
Considering we have verses like Psalm 22:29 which indicates that all who go to the dust (die) will praise God, it seems unimaginable that God would then destroy those who have already began to worship him following their resurrection.
It might be argued that Psalm 22:29 does not say all the dead will 'praise' God, but that they will all 'bow down' to Him eventually, perhaps in a mixture of submission and subjugation.
This seems consistent with the Old Testament view of life and death/dying, very Davidic. He liked to sing about living life now rather than the hereafter- symbolised as cohabiting/"embraced" by God, dwelling in His presence. The crux of the Psalms is the avoidance of death and how it compares to life, of which the LORD is God, as opposed to the dead in the grave.
I guess the tricky questions for the idea of conditional immortality are:
if God knows everything, including the future, why did He create people He knew He would have to destroy for ever?
does this not make God the cause of unnecessary suffering?
if we say God did not know how people would choose in the future, how does that square with biblical statements about His omniscience?
if God did not know how things would turn out in the end, would that not mean He was recklessly gambling with the fate of mankind?
what factor(s) make God decide when He has to destroy someone?
if we always have freewill and God really doesn't know the future, how can He rule out the possibility that someone He destroys might not have repented in the end?
if our freewills are truly unpredictable to God, is it possible we might all fall from grace like Satan and end up being destroyed after going to heaven?
There are many books supporting conditional immortality, and the well known Conservative evangelical theologian John Stott came to support it.
There are many scriptures that can seem to argue for conditional immortality, and it is certainly much preferable to the idea of everlasting hell for the 'rejected' (however defined)
But it does not do justice to the may scriptures that argue for the salvation of ALL; that Christ was the lamb of God 'who takes away the sins of THE WORLD' (John 1:29) etc
Considering we have verses like Psalm 22:29 which indicates that all who go to the dust (die) will praise God, it seems unimaginable that God would then destroy those who have already began to worship him following their resurrection.
This seems consistent with the Old Testament view of life and death/dying, very Davidic. He liked to sing about living life now rather than the hereafter- symbolised as cohabiting/"embraced" by God, dwelling in His presence. The crux of the Psalms is the avoidance of death and how it compares to life, of which the LORD is God, as opposed to the dead in the grave.