Changelog RB1
Changes to Is Conditional Immortality a New Teaching?
2 recorded changes to part RB1, newest first. Each entry names the problem and the decision taken.
- Clarification
Reframed Augustine as a decisive influence within a longer development.
- Issue raised
- The source document says Augustine appears to be the one who established eternal conscious torment as the predominant view, which compresses a long development into a single figure.
- Decision taken
- Augustine is presented as an important and probably decisive influence, within a development that runs well beyond him. His own remark that very many in his day denied eternal torment is retained with its full locator.
- Correction
Narrowed the early-church claim from a counted majority to the narrower claim the evidence supports.
- Issue raised
- The source document states that conditional immortality was apparently the majority view until at least AD 300. The surviving corpus from that period is small, much of it is indirect, and several figures say nothing usable about final punishment, so a counted majority is not demonstrable.
- Decision taken
- The public wording now says that eternal conscious torment was not the universal or uncontested position of the earliest centuries, and that identifiable early writers describe the end of the wicked as the loss of life. The original wording is preserved in the migration ledger.
- Further detail
- The evidence table distinguishes clear, probable, disputed and indeterminate cases rather than assigning every figure to a side.