ABSTRACT
Death, dying, and the afterlife were issues of central importance from the very beginning of the protestant Reformation. Purgatory and indulgences had been elements of Catholic teaching from the twelfth century onward, but throughout the Middle Ages, the selling of indulgences increased in popularity, and a growing commercialism led to abuses, which had already caused concern to the Roman Church in the centuries before the Reformation. The emergence of evangelicalism nuanced earlier understandings of conversion and belief in subtle and significant ways. Martin Spence has argued convincingly that the resurgence of premillennialism within evangelicalism at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century resulted in a distinct shift in the way in which time and eternity were understood by evangelicals. Annihilationism denies the reality of eternal punishment, positing, instead, a period of judgment after which the soul ceases to exist.
