A new book by a retired Adventist academic and administrator surveys the history of the belief in conditional immortality, also known as "Christian mortalism."

Published in the United Kingdom, The Soul Sleepers "is the book that I retired to write 10 years ago," says author Dr Bryan Ball.

"It is an account of the advocates of conditional immortality in the Reformation and post-Reformation eras," he explains, "and includes many well-known and influential thinkers of the period: Wycliffe, Tyndale, Milton, Christian philosophers Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, several highly-placed Anglican academics of the 18th century, besides dozens of other conditionalists, ending with Joseph Priestley, the famous scientist.

"The book examines why they believed as they did and so contains quite a lot of biblical material, as well as the historical and often controversial circumstances in which these believers wrote."

The Soul Sleepers presents new historical and theological insights into this topic. The book argues that for four centuries, conditionalism was a credible alternative in the English-speaking world to the widely-held traditional view of the soul's natural immortality.

"Of special interest to some Adventists will be the fact that, due to the material I discovered during the lengthy research process, I have had to challenge and correct some of the statements and conclusions in L E Froom's Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers," says Dr Ball.

Dr Ball served as president of Avondale College and president of the Adventist Church in the South Pacific prior to his retirement. He is the author of a number of books on historical theology, including The English Connection: The Puritan Roots of Seventh-day Adventist Belief, A Great Expectation: Eschatological Thought in English Protestantism, and The Seventh-day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales to 1800, as well as Can We Still Believe the Bible? which was published last year.

He is currently working on a revised edition of The Seventh-day Men.