And in 2012, Mr. Fudge achieved the ultimate mark of American celebrity, the biopic. “Hell and Mr. Fudge” can be streamed in its entirety on the web, allowing one to see Mr. Fudge — played by Mackenzie Astin, best known for his childhood role on the 1980s TV series “The Facts of Life” — first as a boy, then in his college days, courting his wife, and, as an adult, doing the research that led him to renounce the traditional view of hell.

Advocates of conditional immortality say that their view reflects a common-sense reading of the Bible. They point to passages like Romans 6, where Paul says, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The “eternal life” of the saved is contrasted with the ultimate “death” of the unsaved. And in the Book of Revelation, Jesus refers to a “second death,” which these theologians say means the dying-again of the resurrected wicked. Their final, irreversible punishment may involve torment, but it will come to an end.

“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.

Image In his seminal 1982 book, “The Fire That Consumes,” Mr. Fudge argues that the suffering of the wicked in hell is finite. Credit... Michael Stravato for The New York Times

But Shawn Bawulski, who teaches at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix and has written in opposition to conditionalism, said that while “you can find early Christian writers who would say things sufficiently vague” that they might support a conditionalist view of hell, “you don’t have much by way of conditionalism in church history until Victorian England.”