The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 2

IV. Archeologist Wright-Eternity Entered by “Resurrection of Body”

Archeologist G. ERNEST WRIGHT, ²⁶ professor first at McCormick Theological Seminary and then at Harvard Divinity School, gives the important historical sweep and “perspective” —man’s creation, Christ’s death and resurrection, and then eternity, which latter man enters not through the escape of an innately immortal soul apart from the body but by the resurrection of the body. The final “death” of the wicked, he holds, is the “annihilation of the ‘soul.’” Here is how he phrases it: CFF2 872.4

“The Biblical perspective of time thus carries back before Abraham to the creation. It leads forward to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as its mid-point, and beyond that to the end of present history and the dawn of eternity. This eternity is not a timeless existence which men enter through the dissociation of soul from body by a natural process of transmutation. Death is taken much more seriously as the end of life, and annihilation of the ‘soul’ (nephesh). Eternity is the redemption of the present time and its extention. It is time stretched out, and one enters it by a miracle of God’s creation, the resurrection of the body.” ²⁷ CFF2 873.1

Picture 1: Bishop Schjelderup
Bishop Schjelderup of Norway--eternal torment not Biblical.
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