ON CHRIS DATE AND VIEWS OF EARLY CHRISTIANS

I find his remark below perplexing because apart from being an Annihilationist, Chris Date is also a Deterministic Calvinist.

And no early church father held that kind of Total Inability view until Augustine in the early 400sAD (who could have been influenced by his past Manichean Gnostic beliefs).

“I don’t think the traditional view became popular among Christians until the late second and early third centuries,” said Christopher M. Date, a software engineer and independent theologian who helped organize the recent conference. He believes that conditionalism was the rule for early thinkers like the second-century bishop Irenaeus, who wrote that God “imparts continuance for ever and ever on those who are saved,” while denying that same continuance to the unsaved.