The Christadelphians

Denomination·Founded 1848 CE·Around 50,000 worldwide in roughly 120 countries is the figure usually cited, from the Columbia Encyclopedia and repeated widely. There is no central body and no census: each ecclesia keeps its own roll and no one aggregates them, so the number is an estimate and should be read as one. Substantial communities exist in Britain, Australia, North America, Malawi, Mozambique and India.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → The Christadelphians

Branch
Core tenet of The Christadelphians

You do not have an immortal soul, so there is nowhere to torment you.

The dead are unconscious and know nothing until the resurrection. Immortality is not a possession but a gift given at judgment to those found faithful; the rejected are destroyed rather than punished forever. There is no devil as a person — the diabolos of Scripture is read as human sinful nature.

Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Conditional immortality and the unconsciousness of the dead — sometimes called soul sleep — do a great deal of work in the system. If a human being is a body animated by breath rather than a body containing a soul, then death is the end of the person until resurrection, and every doctrine of an intermediate state, of purgatory, of eternal conscious torment, and of going to heaven when you die falls away together. Christadelphians hold that only those who have known God's requirements are raised for judgment at all; the rest simply remain dead. There is no personal devil: the satan and diabolos of Scripture are read as adversary and slanderer, personifying the sinful inclination in human nature and the systems it builds. This reading is the movement's most distinctive contribution and its members will explain it at length to anyone who asks, which is the point of the public lecture programme.

The same ground, other faiths

claims that share this one's ideas
The dead will rise. Judaism Go deeper →
The body rises. Not the soul only. Christianity Go deeper →
The grave is not empty waiting. Islam Go deeper →
The end is renovation. Zoroastrianism Go deeper →
The boy who waited three days at Death's door. Hinduism · story Read it in full →

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