V. Congregation Splits Over Immortality and Resurrection Issues

From the very beginning of the century things began to happen to congregations. In fact, in 1798, just before we enter the nineteenth century, a split occurred in the Parliament Court Chapel, a non-Conformist church in London. Those withdrawing drew up a declaration setting forth the grounds of their separation. Among other things they declared, significantly enough, that they “could not reconcile the teaching of the immortality of the soul with the New Testament doctrine of the resurrection of the dead.” So in 1810 they built a meetinghouse in the Crescent, in Aldersgate Street. And for several years they issued a monthly Free-thinking Christians’ Magazine. The following extracts, from an early article “On the Nature and Condition of Man,” clearly set forth their views.CFF2 255.3

Here are the alternatives presented—Immortal-Soulism versus the resurrection:
“Suffice it then to say, that the doctrine of the immortality of the soul is at direct and perfect variance with the promise of a resurrection from the dead; the terms of the two propositions are indeed directly opposed to each other; they contain at once a verbal and an actual contradiction within themselves. That they cannot therefore both be true is apparent; one of them must be false ....CFF2 256.1

“Jesus came to teach a resurrection from the dead, through the will and by the unaided power of the same Being who first called us into existence; but if the soul be immortal, we can have no occasion for such a resurrection; it is an event which can never be required, and which consequently never can take place. Should therefore the soul be proved immortal, Jesus was an impostor, we need no longer to be Christians, no longer to look forward with anxious and trembling hope to the day of restoration into life: the spark of immortality is within us, eternity is mixed up in the very essence of our nature, and it becomes an unalterable law of our being that we should never die!” ^{1313) Free-thinking Christians’ Magazine, vol. 3, 1813.}CFF2 256.2

That was the Conditionalist witness from the Crescent Meeting House just as the century began.CFF2 256.3