The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

IV. Multiple Arguments for Conditional Immortality

1. UNION WITH GOD PREREQUISITE TO IMMORTALITY

Book three turns even more fully to declaring “the truth.” Chapter four refers to the Second Advent, when Christ “shall come in glory, the Saviour of those who are saved, and the judge of those who are judged,” and with “eternal fire” prepared for those who pervert truth, and “despise His father and His Advent.” ²³ But to the redeemed He comes to restore “liberty to men” and to bestow on them “the inheritance of incorruption.” ²⁴ And in chapter eleven Irenaeus speaks of the four gospels as the “four pillars” of the church, “breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh.” ²⁶ And in chapter eighteen he states, “Unless man had been joined to God, he could never have become a partaker of incorruptibility.” CFF1 893.6

Irenaeus alludes to the “disobedience of the one man [Adam] who was originally moulded from virgin soil,” and thus “many were made sinners, and forfeited life.” ²⁷ Then in chapter nineteen he refers to those who have not known “Emmanuel” and are thus “deprived of His gift, which is eternal life.” They are “debtors to death,” not having obtained “the antidote of life.” ²⁸ Then he states: CFF1 894.1

“For by no other means could we have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless, first, incorruptibility and immortality had become that which we also are, so that the corruptible might be swallowed up by incorruptibility, and the mortal by immortality, that we might receive the adoption of sons?” ²⁹ CFF1 894.2

Irenaeus recognizes the full deity of Christ as Life-giver, who “is Himself in His own right, beyond all men who ever lived, God, and Lord, and King Eternal.” ³⁰ There is remarkable clarity all the way through. CFF1 894.3

2. MUST SENSE DEPENDENCE UPON THE LIFE-GIVER

In alluding to Jonah, chapter twenty, who was not left to “perish” in the whale, Irenaeus declares that God allowed “man to be swallowed by the great whale, who was the author of transgression.” This, says Irenaeus, was done “that man, receiving an unhoped-for salvation from God, might rise from the dead, and glorify God.” Our salvation, he again insists, is “derived” from God. And why?—“that no flesh should glory in the Lord’s presence,” and suppose that “the incorruptibility which belongs to him is his own naturally,” and thus judge himself equal to God. ³¹ CFF1 894.4

The purpose of God was that man, “attaining to the resurrection from the dead,” and sensing the “source of his deliverance,” shall glorify God, and though “mortal and weak” shall obtain “from Him the gift of incorruptibility,” for “He [God] is immortal and powerful to such a degree as to confer immortality upon what is mortal, and eternity upon what is temporal.” ³² Thus mortal man, “who had been disobedient to God, and being cast off from immortality, then obtained mercy.” ³³ CFF1 895.1

3. ADAM SEPARATED FROM TREE LEST HE BE “IMMORTAL SINNER.”

In chapter twenty-three Irenaeus deals with the fall of man, who “had been created by God that he might live.” But, “losing life” after the Fall, God did not leave him “abandoned to death.” Provision was made for the “second man” (Christ) to “bind the strong man” (Satan), and having “spoiled his goods,” Christ thus provides a way of salvation. The first Adam was deceived under the “colour of immortality.” ³⁴ Or differently stated, in “the case of Adam,” he was “beguiled by another under the pretext of immortality.” ³⁵ CFF1 895.2

Thus God “drove him out of Paradise, and removed him far from the tree of life.” And, Why? “Because He pitied him, [and did not desire] that he should continue a sinner for ever, nor that the sin which surrounded him should be immortal, and evil interminable and irremediable.” ³⁶ Thus it was that Adam came to receive “new life.” And thus the “last enemy” is to be “destroyed.” So “salvation is death’s destruction. When therefore the Lord vivifies man, that is, Adam,” death is destroyed. ³⁷ CFF1 895.3

4. BELIEVING AND OBEDIENT “HONOURED WITH IMMORTALITY.”

In book four, chapter eight, addressing himself to Marcion’s fallacies, Irenaeus declares that “those who disallow his [Abraham’s] salvation, and frame the idea of another God besides Him who made the promise to Abraham, are outside the kingdom of God, and are disinherited from [the gift of] incorruption.” ³⁸ For, he continues, Christ “Himself suffering death, that exiled man might go forth from condemnation, and might return without fear to his own inheritance.” ³⁹ CFF1 896.1

Life in Christ is the continuing strain. Thus in chapter eleven Irenaeus says that to the wicked “He assigned everlasting perdition by cutting them off from life.” ⁴⁰ But he assures the obedient that “He grants to those who follow and serve Him life and incorruption and eternal glory.” ⁴¹ And he adds, at the close of chapter fifteen, that “those who have obeyed and believed on Him should be honoured with immortality,” ⁴³ while in chapter eighteen he refers to those who have “the hope of the resurrection to eternity.” CFF1 896.2

5. GIFT OF IMMORTALITY RESTRICTED TO BELIEVERS

In chapter twenty Irenaeus tells how “man might attain to immortality, having been invested with the paternal light,” and states that God “confers [upon him] incorruption for eternal life.” And he adds that “the means of life is found in fellowship with God.” Then he declares, “Men therefore shall see God, that they may live, being made immortal by that sight.” ⁴⁴ On the contrary, “The punishment of those who do not believe the Word of God, and despise His advent, and are turned away backwards, is increased; being not merely temporal, but rendered also eternal.” ⁴⁵ CFF1 896.3

Picture 1: The Seer of Patmos:
John, the Seer of Patmos, Viewed in Vision the New Earth With Its Immortalized Inhabitants Dwelling There Forever.
Page 896

Then this thought is added on the immortality of the righteous: “For they all received a penny each man, having [stamped upon it] the royal image and superscription, the knowledge of the Son of God, which is immortality.” ⁴⁶ On the contrary, those who do not come to God “cannot receive His immortality.” ⁴⁷ Christ, the “perfect bread,” Irenaeus adds interestingly, provides for us the “Bread of immortality.” ⁴⁹ Irenaeus presses on the point that man’s disobedience “is his death.” And he asks the searching question, “How, again, can he [created, mortal man] be immortal, who in his mortal nature did not obey his Maker?” CFF1 897.1

6. ETERNAL FIRE FOR SATAN AND HIS FOLLOWERS

Chapter forty opens by declaring that God “has prepared the eternal fire for the ringleader of the apostasy, the devil, and those who revolted with him.” But “impenitent” man will also share this “eternal fire and outer darkness.” ⁵¹ In the same chapter it is also twice called a “furnace of fire,” “prepared for the devil and his angels,” but including “those persons who deserve it.” ⁵² Then Irenaeus appeals to men to “be converted, and come to repentance, and cease from evil,” that they might “have power to become the sons of God, and to receive the inheritance of immortality.” ⁵³ CFF1 897.2

7. IMMORTALITY RECEIVED ONLY THROUGH CHRIST

And now in the final book five, chapter one (on “Christ Alone Is Able to Teach Divine Things, and to Redeem Us”), Irenaeus further counters Gnosticism and praises Christ the Creator as “the only best and good Being,” who has “the gift of immortality.” He has redeemed “us by His own blood,” by “giving His soul for our souls, and His flesh for our flesh,” thus “attaching man to God by His own incarnation, and bestowing upon us at His coming immortality durably and truly.” Then Irenaeus declares impressively, “All the doctrines of the heretics fall to ruin.” ⁵⁴ CFF1 897.3

Striking again, in chapter two, at the Gnostic depreciation of the flesh, he chides the heretics who despise the provision of God and “disallow the salvation of the flesh, and treat with contempt its regeneration.” Then he asks, “How can they affirm that the flesh is incapable of receiving the gift of God, which is life eternal?” ⁵⁵ His own view is crystal clear. Immortality as a conferred gift is a continuing strain running all through the treatise. CFF1 898.1

8. GOD WHO GIVES “EARTHLY” LIFE, CAN BESTOW IMMORTALITY

In chapter three (on “The Power and Glory of God” to “Render Our Body a Participator of the Resurrection, and of Immortality,” and to “Bestow Upon It the Enjoyment of Immortality”) Irenaeus once more affirms Christ’s ability as Creator to “reinstate again [through resurrection] those who had a former existence,” in this present life, and chides those who “maintain the incapacity of flesh to receive the life granted by God.” Man, Irenaeus insists, is an “infirm being, and mortal by nature,” while God by contrast is “immortal and powerful.” Irenaeus asserts that “if He does not vivify what is mortal, and does not bring back the corruptible to incorruption, He is not a God of power.” ⁵⁶ He climaxes his argument by saying: CFF1 898.2

“For that the flesh can really partake of life, is shown from the fact of its being alive; for it lives on, as long as it is God’s purpose that it should do so. It is manifest, too, that God has the power to confer life upon it, inasmuch as He grants life to us who are in existence. And, therefore, since the Lord has power to infuse life into what He has fashioned, and since the flesh is capable of being quickened, what remains to prevent its participating in incorruption, which is a blissful and never-ending life granted by God?” ⁵⁷ CFF1 898.3

Thus he bore witness against the theory of a merely spiritual resurrection, already being agitated in Alexandria. CFF1 898.4