Immortality is prized by Christians as God's gift to whoever places their faith in Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of their sins. Its most famous formulation is in John's gospel when Jesus' tells Nicodemus: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (KJV)
And yet much of Western evangelicalism promises everlasting life to non-believers. Well, strictly speaking, they promise the faithless eternal life in the torments of hell. But the premise of that promise/threat is clear: every human being will live forever, it's just a question of where.
How has modern evangelicalism come to contradict so much of our own scripture? The natural immortality of all humans is nowhere taught in scripture. There are so many passages describing the end-state of the unredeemed as death, destruction, and perishing,
The sole basis for this belief centers upon a few "proof-text" verses—four, to be precise—that seem to indicate ongoing, endless punishment for the unredeemed. I contend evangelicals have uncritically accepted the Hellenistic Greek belief in natural immortality.
In 1991 Zondervan published a book entitled "Four Views Of Hell," in which the late Dr. Clark H. Pinnock (Canadian) argued the view of Conditional Immortality. It was hard to take seriously, given that none of the four views was Universalism. It took them 25 years to publish a 2nd edition that includes Universal Salvation. But in the original/first edition, Pinnock addressed Universalism very clearly as an underground, but increasingly widespread belief—primarily due to the lack of teaching and preaching about hell from evangelical pulpits.
Here's the link to freely download the original version of the book:
https://ia803008.us.archive.org/12/items/fourviewsonhell00croc/fourviewsonhell00croc.pdf
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