This is Part 2 of a series of posts on Annihilationism, the Christian doctrine that the eternal destiny of lost souls is eternal death, annihilation, after the resurrection of the dead and the final judgment. This doctrine is contrary to the traditional orthodox position that lost souls consciously suffer eternal torment in hell fire, which I will refer to as “Traditionalism” and those who subscribe to the doctrine as “Traditionalists.” Part 1 of this series on annihilationism is found here on my blog.

As I previously contended in Part 1, Annihilationism is supported by Scripture, and the traditional doctrine of conscious eternal torment is not supported by Scripture, despite more than 17 centuries of acceptance of Traditionalist doctrine as orthodox. Traditionalism relies on the premise that the soul is immortal, a doctrine that is not found in Scripture. In fact, the Bible teaches that the soul is not immortal.  This post will further discuss the false doctrine of the immortal soul, the foundation upon which the doctrine of conscious eternal torment of the lost rests.  I will begin with some review of the Annihilationist doctrine as discussed in my prior post.

As I wrote in Part 1, the Biblical support for the Annihilationist view begins in Genesis, Chapter 3.

And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

Genesis 3:22-23 (New International Version 1984)

Whether you understand this passage and the Genesis creation story as literal history, or as a true myth provided by God as revelation of the fallen nature of humankind, or consider the Bible to be just an ancient text, in this passage God banishes mankind from the Garden of Eden expressly so that we cannot live forever. Sin entered the world accompanied by death.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (New International Version 1984)

Who gets eternal life?  Those who believe in Jesus Our Lord!  John affirms the gift of immortality to those who believe in this familiar passage:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:16 (King James Version)

Here, those who do not believe “perish.” The primary meaning of “perish” is to die. However, when a Traditionalist reads this, he or she substitutes “. . . should not suffer eternal torment in hell” for “. . . should not die.” In discussing this passage with a Christian friend, my wife asked her what the word “perish” meant. Without hesitation, her friend responded, “Eternal torment in hell.” If the word “perish” is used anywhere else to describe what happened to someone, in the newspaper describing a house fire, or an auto accident, we think “death”, the cessation of life. But we have been brainwashed to read “eternal torment in hell” whenever a Bible verse is referring to the fate of the lost, whether death, destruction, perish, or eternal punishment or destiny.

John 3:16 is clearly referring to eternal destiny of the believer, eternal life, and clearly should be read as referring also to the eternal destiny of the unbeliever; he or she will “perish”, will die.

You do not realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish.

John 11:50 (NIV)

In fact, the Traditionalist makes this substitution for all of the references to the “death”, “destruction”, and eternal “punishment” of the lost souls. It should be obvious that cessation of existence forever is an eternal punishment, but Christians tend to ignore this because of the strength of Traditionalism in the Christian Church and in our Western culture.  Capital punishment is the most serious punishment that we have in our human system of justice, and the Bible authorizes this punishment beginning in the Old Testament proportional system of punishment summarized in the well-known Biblical passage:

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Exodus 21:23-24 (NIV).  In order to accept the doctrine of eternal torment, the Christian must be able to accept the justice of eternal suffering in hell, conscious suffering forever, as justified by a temporal life of sin on earth which may be as short as a moment, if you believe that unbaptized infants go to hell, or 13 years for a teenager who dies an accidental death without a saving faith in Christ.

John Furniss was a 19th Century Roman Catholic priest who was known for his ministry to children.  In a book authorized by the Roman Catholic Church, Furniss mercilessly describes the fate of the child who dies without baptism, condemned by original sin:

“The fifth dungeon is the red-hot oven. The little child is in the red-hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out; see how it turns and twists itself in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor. God was very good to this little child. Very likely God saw it would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished more severely in hell. So God, in his mercy, called it out of the world in early childhood.”

quoted in Henry Constable 1868 – Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, pp. 141-142.  To write this, Furniss or anyone would have to overlook the barbaric injustice, and rely on some mysterious divine judgment that could justify such disproportionate and clearly sadistic punishment to an innocent infant without rational conciousness.  God gave us our conscience and moral sense.  Why would He have us believe that He would do this to an infant who dies without grace?

Henry Constable was an Anglican minister who wrote a definitive argument for Annihilationism in his 1868 book — the entire book in pdf is available here:  Henry Constable 1868 – Duration and Nature of Future Punishment.  The recent theologians who have argued for Annihilationism are indebted to Constable, including Edward Fudge, whose exhaustive 466 page study of the doctrine of eternal punishment, originally published 1982, examines Biblical references from Genesis to Revelation, and extra-Biblical references as well from the period between the Old and New Testament to look at what people at the time of Jesus thought about eternal destiny, arguing persuasively against the Traditionalist dogma of eternal conscious torment in hell, The Fire that Consumes.  As I wrote in Part 1, in reading Fudge’s book, I was surprised to find that F.F. Bruce, a prominent mainstream Evangelical historian/scholar, wrote the Foreward, commending Fudge’s work, claiming himself to be agnostic like C.S. Lewis on the question of eternal torment versus annihilation.  I highly recommend both Constable’s and Fudge’s books.  I also recommend Glenn People’s excellent paper, Why I Am an Annihilationist  which is among his work on annihilationism and other theological and philosophical subjects found on his blog.

For the Traditionalist, not only does the lost person suffer incredible torment forever for his temporal sins and inherited fallen nature, but the elect, the chosen ones, saved by the mercy of God, are supposed to rejoice.  Here, Jonathan Edwards describes what the saints in heaven will experience looking upon lost souls suffering torment in hell:

Every time they look upon the damned, it will excite in them a lively and admiring sense of the grace of God…The view of the misery of the damned will double the ardor of the love and gratitude of the saints in heaven.

Jonathan Edwards, “The Eternity of Hell Torments,” IV.

As Evangelical theologian and scholar Clark Pinnock, an Annihilationist, has described this unfathomable eternal schadenfreude as follows:

Not only is it God’s pleasure so to torture the wicked everlastingly, but it will be the happiness of the saints to see and know this is being faithfully done. It would not be unfair to picture the traditional doctrine in this way: just as one can imagine certain people watching a cat trapped in a microwave oven squirming in agony and taking delight in it, so the saints in heaven will, according to Edwards, experience the torments of the damned with pleasure and satisfaction.

Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper], p. 6 [First published in Criswell Theological Review: 4.2 (1990), 243-259]. Pinnock’s paper is the best short defense of Annihilationism I have read, and I recommend it highly.  I rely on it extensively in this post.

How can this be?  I cannot imagine feeling such joy, or being changed so that I put natural affection and empathy aside to experience “joy” at such eternal suffering.  If you believe that the lost souls suffer eternal torment in hell, it is apparently logically necessary (and psychologically necessary as well, to avoid cognitive dissonance), to also believe that the sanctified soul in heaven must rejoice in the sufferings of the lost because the Christian believes that there is no sorrow in heaven.   Surely, even if you are a Traditionalist and believe this is a Biblical doctrine, if you are honest and have any sense of empathy or pity or mercy, you must be admit that this is a miserable doctrine to attribute to the loving God that we find in the Bible, regardless of His wrath and hatred of sin which offends His pure and holy nature.  As Pinnock further writes:

Let me say at the outset that I consider the concept of hell as endless torment in body and mind an outrageous doctrine, a theological and moral enormity, a bad doctrine of the tradition which needs to be changed. How can Christians possibly project a deity of such cruelty and vindictiveness whose ways include inflicting everlasting torture upon His creatures, however sinful they may have been? Surely a God who would do such a thing is more nearly like Satan than like God, at least by any ordinary moral standards, and by the gospel itself. How can we possibly preach that God has so arranged things that a number of His creatures (perhaps a large number redestined to that fate) will undergo (in a state of complete consciousness) physical and mental agony through unending time? Is this not a most disturbing concept which needs some second thoughts? Surely the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is no fiend; torturing people without end is not what our God does. Does the one who told us to love our enemies intend to wreak vengeance on His own enemies for all eternity? As H. Küng appropriately asks, “What would we think of a human being who satisfied his thirst for revenge so implacably and insatiably?”

Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper], p. 8.

I reviewed arguments for Annihilationism in my first post on the subject.  Now I want to concentrate on the foundation of the Traditionalist doctrine — the doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  The Bible says there is one who is immortal, God.

God, the blessed and only Ruler, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone is immortal . . . . 

1 Peter 6:15-16 (NIV)

Paul clearly tells us that the gift of eternal life clothes us mortals with immortality.

To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life.

Romans 2:7 (NIV) and further, describing the believer’s transformation, clothed with the gift of eternal life, Paul writes:

 I declare to you, brothers, that flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. . . . For the perishable must clothe itself with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.”

1 Corinthians 15:52-54 (NIV)

Immortality is the gift of eternal life given to those who believe, not to those who are damned.  And yet, in order for souls to suffer eternal torment they must also be given eternal life.  If lost souls literally suffer torment in fires of hell, then, as Glenn Peoples puts it, either the lost must be given an infinite mass in order to be consumed in fire forever, or God must constantly regenerate the resurrected body cast into hell as it is consumed by the eternal fires of hell moment by moment forever. The honest traditionalist admits that the lost soul must also be given immortality in order to suffer in hell for forever, even though there is no Biblical support for a gift of eternal life to the lost, only to the saved.

Pinnock sums up succinctly as follows:

Belief in the immortality of the soul has long attached itself to Christian theology. J. Maritain, for example, states: “The human soul cannot die. Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily exist forever and endure without end.”18 To this we must say, with all due respect, that the Bible teaches no such thing. The soul is not an immortal substance that has to be placed somewhere if it rejects God. The Bible states that God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) and that everlasting life is something God gives to humanity by grace (1 Cor. 15:51-55). Eternal life is not something we possess by any natural right according to Scripture. Immortality is not inherent in human beings. We are dependent on God for what happens to us after death. Rather than speaking of immortal souls, the Bible refers to resurrected bodies, to persons being reconstituted through the power of God (Phil. 3:20). In a word, Jesus Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).

Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper], p. 14.

How did this happen?  As Constable and others have written, in the 3rd century, the Christian Church incorporated the Greek concept of the immortal soul into the theology of eternal destiny.  Augustine was the Church father who is most responsible for the adoption of the immortality of the soul, and the consequent doctrine of eternal torment.  In his theology, Augustine adopted the Platonic belief of the immortality of the soul, though he did not believe in the Platonic belief in the preexistence of the soul.  According to Peter Brown, writing in Augustine of Hippo, in the period just before Augustine’s conversion to Christianity and his baptism in 387, Augustine absorbed himself in the writings of the neo-Platonists where he learned his Platonism.  Plato’s own writings were not available to him then.  In that same year of his baptism, Augustine published a series of “sketches” titled On the Immortality of the Soul.   There, Augustine argues for the immortality of the soul from reason, not from Scripture.  For Augustine, the soul is the Platonic form of the body, the eternal idea derived from God, the Supreme Good, and the body is animated by the soul. The body gets is form and its life from the soul which is derived from God, the Supreme Good.  As such, the soul is immortal.  Augustine reaches this conclusion as by arguing the soul and reason to be inseparable because he also has found the mind and reason co-exist and the soul and the mind are one.  He concludes:

Consequently, if, as we said above, the soul is a subject in which reason is inseparably (by that necessity also which it is shown to be in the subject), neither can their be any soul except a living soul, nor can reason be in a soul without life, and reason is immortal; hence the soul is immortal.

A Christian relying on revelation in Scripture could easily call this nonsense, but this is Augustine, and apparently, the Church has not been interested in tracing his belief in the immortality of the soul.  This immortality come to us living in our body on this earth in this life through our soul.  Plato equated the form of the Good, the ultimate form, with God, and Augustine does as well, for example, in Chapter XV Augustine writes:

The soul is prior to the body in connection with those supreme and eternal principles which survive unchangeably and are not contained in space; and the soul’s connection is not only prior but also greater; as much prior as it is nearer, and for the same reason as much greater as it is better than body.  And this nearness is not in place but in the order of nature.  According to this order it is understood that the supreme essence bestows form upon the body through the soul by which it exists in whatever degree it does exist.  Therefore, the body subsists through the soul, and it exists to the extent that it is animated, whether universally, as the world, or particularly, as some animal or other within the world.

This is philosophy.  It is not theology.  There are no citations to Scripture supporting the immortality of the soul in Augustine’s On the Immortality of the Soul.  The soul is immortal for philosophical reasons, based on a Platonic idea of God.

Later in life, Augustine wrote a masterpiece, the City of God, comparing the world with the kingdom of God using the analogy of two cities (from which my blog gets its name).  In the City of God, Augustine is arguing against annihilationists of his time who believed that the lost, those who die without Christ, do not live forever in torment in hell.  Without any reference to Scripture regarding the immortality of the soul, which is unusual for the mature Augustine, Augustine refuted the annihilationist by assuming the soul’s immortality as follows:

The soul gives life to the body by its presence: it rules the body; and this soul itself can suffer pain, while incapable of death. Here we have found something which feels pain and yet is immortal. This property, which now, as we know, belongs to the souls of all men, will at that time belong to the bodies of the damned.

Augustine, City of God, Book 21, Chapter 3, Penguin Books (2003), Trans. Henry Bettenson (1972).

Interestingly, early Church father and theologian Origen also assumed the Greek idea of the immortality of the soul and further adopted the Platonic belief in the preexistence of the soul.  However, because Origen believe that Scripture teaches that God eventually eradicates evil, and death and hell, Origen taught that the souls in hell eventually were save, adopting a universalist position on salvation.

Constable describes the contradictory positions that resulted from Augustine and Origen’s belief in the immortality of the soul:

Before the preaching of the Gospel, the highest order of heathen philosophy had framed for its satisfaction a theory of the immortality of the soul. While the great mass of mankind had absolutely no hope of any future life; and while far the greater number of philosophers taught that death was for all an eternal sleep; there were “high spirits of old” that strained their eyes to see beyond the clouds of time the dawning of immortality. Unable, as we are able, to connect it with God as its source, and with his promise as their assurance, they framed the idea of an immortality self-existing in the human soul.  Egypt, the prolific mother of religious error, appears, from the best authorities in our hands, to have been the source of this idea. But it was extracted from the tombs and the hieroglyphics of Egyptian priests by the brilliant and restless curiosity of Greece. Socrates, and his great pupil, Plato, presented it to the human mind wherever the Grecian intellect penetrated, and the tongue of Greece was known.  Cicero recommended the theory of the Academy to his contemporaries in his “Tusculan Questions.” They did not indeed teach it at all consistently, nor do they appear themselves to have relied with any firmness on its reality.  It was with them a great hope fitfully entertained, rather than a sober conviction. “I have perused Plato,” Cicero sadly complains, “with the greatest diligence and exactness, over and over again; but know not how it is, whilst I read him I am convinced; when I lay the book aside and begin to consider by myself of the soul’s immortality, all the conviction instantly ceases. It is indeed doubtful whether any of the great minds of antiquity in their esoteric or inner faith held more than the tenet of Buddhism, which teaches that the soul, originally derived from Deity, is at length to be re-absorbed and lost in Deity again:

“That each, who seems a separate whole
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fail,
Remerging in the general Soul.”—TENNYSON.

5. However this may be, those of whom we speak presented to the common mind an idea not so vague as this. The conception of it kindled their imagination, and the discussion of it afforded a theme for their logical powers. According to it, the soul was possessed of an inherent immortality. It had no beginning and could have no end. What was true of one soul was equally true of all souls, good or bad. They must live somewhere, be it in Tartarus, or Cocytus, in Pyriphlegethon, or the happy abodes of the purified. This idea, sublime for a heathen, passed readily and early into the theology of the Christian Church. Philosophers, converted to Christianity, brought with them into their new service too much of their ancient learning. Heedless of Paul’s warning voice against philosophy in general, they considered that a considerable portion at least of Plato’s philosophy must be exempted from the apostolic condemnation. We find accordingly the Platonic philosophy of the soul’s immortality running through and blending with the theological reasoning of Athenagoras and Tertullian, of Origen and Augustine.  Teachers who should have consulted only the oracles of God, leaving behind them their heathen lore as Moses left behind him the learning of Egypt, supplemented those living oracles with theories drawn from a brilliant Greek philosophy, which was in its turn suggested by the priest-craft taught in Egyptian temples. Their theory was that the life of the wicked must be as eternal as the life of those here redeemed and brought to Christ, because every soul of man was immortal.

6. A moment’s reflection will show us that a dogma of this kind could not remain idle. It must influence irresistibly in one direction or another this whole question of future punishment. It must mould the entire doctrine of the Church upon the subject.  According as men connected it with one truth of Scripture or another, it must give rise to two opposite schools of thought. Connect the immortality of the soul with the scriptural  doctrine of the eternity of punishment, and you inevitably create the dogma of eternal life in misery, i.e. of Augustine’s hell. Connect it with another great truth of Scripture, the final extinction of evil and restitution of all things, and you as inevitably create Origen’s Universal Restoration. For each of these opposing theories there is exactly the same amount of proof, viz.:—Plato’s dogma and a dogma of the Bible; and if Plato’s dogma could be proved to be a scriptural doctrine, then, by every law of logic, Scripture would be found supporting two contradictory theories, or, in other words, would itself destroy all its claims to authority.

7. Accordingly, this philosophical idea of Plato is found influencing most powerfully and most unfairly the interpretation of Scripture from the second century down to our own time. An example of this will probably show this more forcibly than any words of ours. Tertullian is commenting upon our Lord’s teaching in Luke xix. 10: “The Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which is lost.” (Vulgate, quod perierat). No one knew better than Tertullian the primary and proper meaning of the Latin verb pereo, and that it meant, “to vanish,” “to die,” “to perish,” “to be annihilated.”  Why would he not attach this meaning to it when he was commenting upon the text of the Latin version? Here is his own account:  ”We, however, so understand the soul’s immortality as to believe it lost, not in the sense of destruction, but of punishment, that is, in hell. And if this is the case, then it is not the soul which salvation will affect, since it is ‘safe’ already in its own nature by reason of its immortality; but rather the flesh, which, as all readily allow, is subject to destruction.”  Such was the influence upon the interpretation of Scripture which his theory of the soul forced upon Tertullian. It led him to deny to the terms of God’s word what he knew to be their primary and proper meaning, and to affirm that the salvation of our Lord had no relation to the human soul, but only to the bodies of men! A similar influence this theory has had upon theologians down to the present day.

[footnotes omitted]  Henry Constable 1868 – Duration and Nature of Future Punishment, pp. 14-19.

There are several passages of Scripture that Traditionalists use as proof texts that have been discussed by the prominent scholars who believe Annihilationism is supported by Scripture, including John Stott in “Essentials”  See  john-stott-discusses-hell.  Clark Pinnock discusses the passages that support Annihilationism followed by the passages cited by Traditionalists in the previously cited article, which since this is a blog, is worth citing in its entirety as follows:

III. THE CASE FOR THE ANNIHILATION OF THE WICKED

What I want to do is what I am assured cannot be done, namely, to show that the Bible does not teach Augustine’s version of the doctrine of hell.  Almost all who defend his view admit that the idea of everlasting torment is a genuinely awful concept, but they go on to defend it anyway on the assumption that it is nevertheless mandatory scriptural truth (much as a strict Calvinist argues in defense of his doctrine of the sovereign reprobation of the nonelect—recall Calvin’s reference to “the horrible decree”).  They tell us that they do not like the doctrine any more than anyone else but have to espouse it because it is a biblical idea and they have no choice but to uphold it. They make it sound like the infallibility of the Bible were at stake. Let us ask then whether the traditional doctrine of hell is biblically and theologically sound. In my view it is not.

1. The strong impression the Bible creates in this reader with regard to the fate of the finally impenitent wicked is a vivid sense of their final and irreversible destruction. The language and imagery used by Scripture is so powerful in this regard that it is remarkable more theologians have not picked up on it. The Bible repeatedly uses the language of death, destruction, ruin, and perishing when speaking of the fate of the wicked.  It uses the imagery of fire consuming (not torturing) what is thrown into it. The images of fire and destruction together strongly suggest annihilation rather than unending torture. It creates the impression that eternal punishment refers to a divine judgment whose results cannot be reversed rather than to the experience of being tormented forever.

Frankly it is a little annoying to be told again and again by the defenders of everlasting torment that there is no biblical case for the annihilation of the wicked. A. Pink, for instance, calls the position an absurdity, while W. Hendriksen says he is aghast that anyone would argue otherwise than for hell as everlasting torment; and Packer attributes the position to sentimentality, not to any scriptural ground. But is it not really quite the other way around? Does the burden of proof not rest with the traditionalists to explain why the strong impression of the destruction of the wicked which the Bible gives its readers should not just be believed?

A brief overview of the Bible will show what I am driving at. The Old Testament gives us a clear picture of the destruction of the wicked (perhaps because it is more oriented to this world than the next) and supplies the basic imagery of divine judgment for the New Testament as well. Consider Psalm 37 where we read that the wicked fade like grass and wither like the herb (v. 2), that they will be cut off and be no more (vv. 9, 10), that they will perish and vanish like smoke (v. 20), and be altogether destroyed (v. 38). Listen to this oracle from the prophet Malachi: “For behold, the day comes, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch” (4:1). The message is plain—the finally impenitent wicked will perish and be no more.

Turning to the New Testament, Jesus’ teaching about the afterlife is sketchy in matters of detail. While he certainly referred to a destiny beyond the grave either of bliss or woe, he did not bother to give us a clear conception of it. He was not a systematic theologian but a preacher more concerned with the importance of a decision here and now than with speculations about the furniture of heaven or the temperature of hell. At the same time Jesus said things which support the impression the Old Testament gives us.

He presented God’s judgment as the destruction of the wicked. He said that God could and perhaps would destroy body and soul in hell, if He must (Matt. 10:28). Jesus’ words are reminiscent of John the Baptist’s when he said that the wicked are like dry wood about to be thrown into the fire and like chaff to be burned in the unquenchable fire (Matt. 3:10, 12). He warned that the wicked will be cast away into hell like so much rejected garbage into the Gehenna of fire (5:30), an allusion to the valley outside Jerusalem where sacrifices were once offered to Moloch (2 Kings 16:3; 21:6), and possibly the place where garbage actually smoldered and burned in Jesus’ day. Our Lord said that the wicked will be burned up there just like weeds when thrown into the fire (13:30, 42, 49, 50). The impression is a very strong one that the impenitent wicked can expect to be destroyed.

The Apostle Paul communicates the same thing, plainly thinking of divine judgment as the destruction of the wicked. He writes of everlasting destruction which will come upon the wicked (2 Thes. 1:9). He warns that the wicked will reap corruption (Gal. 6:8). He states that God will destroy the wicked (1 Cor. 3:17; Phil. 1:28). He speaks of their fate as a death they deserve to die (Rom. 1:32) and which is the wages of their sins (6:23). About the wicked, he states plainly and concisely: “Their end is destruction” (Phil. 3:19).

It is no different in the other New Testament books. Peter speaks of “the fire which has been kept until the day of judgment and the destruction of ungodly men” (2 Pet. 3:7). The author to the Hebrews speaks of the wicked who shrink back and are destroyed (Heb. 10:39). Peter says that false teachers who deny the Lord who bought them will bring upon themselves “swift destruction” (2 Pet. 2:1, 3). They will resemble the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah which were “condemned to extinction” (2:6). They will perish like the ancient world perished when deluged in the great Flood (3:6, 7). Jude also points to Sodom as an analogy to God’s judgment, being the city which underwent “a punishment of eternal fire” (Jude 7). Similarly, the Apocalypse of John speaks of the lake of fire consuming the wicked and of the second death (Rev. 20:14, 15).

At the very least it should be obvious to any impartial reader that the Bible may legitimately be read to teach the final destruction of the wicked without difficulty. I am not making it up. It is not wishful thinking. It is simply a natural interpretation of Scripture on the subject of divine judgment. I think it is outrageous for traditionalists to say that a biblical basis for the destruction of the wicked is lacking. What is in short supply are texts supporting the traditional view.

2. Some advocates prefer to call their position conditional immortality rather than annihilationism because it sounds more positive to the ear. Underlying the doctrine of annihilation, after all, is a belief in conditional immortality, the understanding that our immortality is not a natural attribute of humankind but God’s gift. This is clearly an important issue in our discussion because belief in the natural immortality of the soul which is so widely held by Christians, although stemming more from Plato than the Bible, really drives the traditional doctrine of hell more than exegesis does. Consider the logic: if souls must live forever because they are naturally immortal, the lake of fire must be their home forever and cannot be their destruction. In the same way, the second death would have to be a process of everlasting dying and not a termination of existence which is impossible. I am convinced that the hellenistic belief in the immortality of the soul has done more than anything else (specifically more than the Bible) to give credibility to the doctrine of the everlasting conscious punishment of the wicked. This belief, not holy Scripture, is what gives this doctrine the credibility it does not deserve.

Belief in the immortality of the soul has long attached itself to Christian theology. J. Maritain, for example, states: “The human soul cannot die. Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily exist forever and endure without end.”18 To this we must say, with all due respect, that the Bible teaches no such thing. The soul is not an immortal substance that has to be placed somewhere if it rejects God. The Bible states that God alone has immortality (1 Tim. 6:16) and that everlasting life is something God gives to humanity by grace (1 Cor. 15:51-55).  Eternal life is not something we possess by any natural right according to Scripture. Immortality is not inherent in human beings. We are dependent on God for what happens to us after death. Rather than speaking of immortal souls, the Bible refers to resurrected bodies, to persons being reconstituted through the power of God (Phil. 3:20). In a word, Jesus Christ “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10).19

The Greek doctrine of immortality has affected theology unduly on this point. It is one of several examples where there has been an undue hellenization of Christian doctrine. The idea of souls being naturally immortal is not a biblical one, and the effect of believing it stretches the experience of death and destruction in Gehenna into endless torment. If souls are immortal, then either all souls will be saved (which is unscriptural universalism) or else hell must be everlasting torment. There is no other possibility since annihilation is ruled out from the start. This is how the traditional view of hell got constructed: add a belief in divine judgment after death (scriptural) to a belief in the immortality of the soul (unscriptural), and you have Augustine’s terrible doctrine.

Nevertheless, I do not call my position conditional immortality. It is a necessary, but not a sufficient condition of my view. Conditional immortality has to be true for a negative reason—to make the destruction of the wicked conceivable, but it does not positively establish annihilation simply because it would still be possible that God might give the wicked everlasting life and condemn them to spend it in everlasting torment.  Conditional immortality then, while necessary to belief in annihilation, does not prove that annihilation is true. The key issue remains my first argument: the Scriptures suggest the destruction of the wicked.

3. As I intimated earlier, everlasting torment is intolerable from a moral point of view because it makes God into a bloodthirsty monster who maintains an everlasting Auschwitz for victims whom He does not even allow to die. How is one to worship or imitate such a cruel and merciless God? The idea of everlasting torment (especially if it is linked to soteriological predestination) raises the problem of evil to impossible dimensions. A. Flew was quite right (I think) to say that, if Christians want to hold that God created some people to be tortured in hell forever, then the apologetic task in relation to theodicy is just hopeless.  Stott seems to agree: “I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain.”  I even wonder what atrocities have been committed by those who have believed in a God who tortures His enemies?

Naturally, various attempts have been made by the traditionalists to hide the gruesome problem. C. Hodge and B.B. Warfield, for example, make use of postmillennial eschatology to argue that very few persons (relatively speaking) will go to hell anyway. Presumably we do not need to worry much if only a negligible number is tormented while a numerical majority is saved. Such a calculus, however, achieves little: first, because few today would accept the postmillennial premise to begin with, and second, because the tens of millions still suffering everlasting torture even under their scenario are tens of millions too many.

Alternatively it is common to try to hide the moral problem by redefining hell. C.S. Lewis tries this when he pictures hell in The Great Divorce as almost pleasant, if a little gray, being the kind of place from which one can take day trips on the bus into heaven and return again to meet with the theological society which meets regularly in hell.  This resembles Sartre’s picture of hell in No Exit as consisting of being cooped up with the other people forever. In these terms, hell is nasty and inconvenient, but certainly no lake of fire. Thus by sheer speculation the biblical warnings are emasculated and the moral problem dealt with by fancy footwork devoid of exegesis. The fact is that the biblical warnings spell a terrible destruction awaiting the impenitent wicked, and if hell is everlasting there is no way to make it other than endless torture. I understand why traditionalists want to take the hell out of hell, but it should not be permitted, because it breaks the concentration and prevents people from seeing the need for theological renewal on this point.

4. The need to correct the traditional doctrine of hell also rests upon considerations of the divine justice. What purpose of God would be served by the unending torture of the wicked except sheer vengeance and vindictiveness? Such a fate would spell endless and totally unredemptive suffering, punishment just for its own sake. Even the plagues of Egypt were intended to be redemptive for those who would respond to the warnings.  But unending torment would be the kind of utterly pointless and wasted suffering which could never lead to anything good beyond it.  Furthermore, it would amount to inflicting infinite suffering upon those who have committed finite sins. It would go far beyond an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. There would be a serious disproportion between sins committed in time and the suffering experienced forever. The fact that sin has been committed against an infinite God does not make the sin infinite. The chief point is that eternal torment serves no purpose and exhibits a vindictiveness out of keeping with the love of God revealed in the gospel. We should listen to H. Küng:

Even apart from the image of a truly merciless God that contradicts
everything we can assume from what Jesus says of the Father of the lost,
can we be surprised at a time when retributive punishments without an
opportunity of probation are being increasingly abandoned in education
and penal justice that the idea not only of a lifelong, but even eternal
punishment of body and soul, seems to many people absolutely monstrous?

5. Finally, from a metaphysical point of view, everlasting torment gives the clear picture of an unending cosmological dualism. Heaven and hell just go on existing alongside each other forever. But how can this be if God is to be “all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28) and if God is making “all things new” (Rev. 21:5)? It just does not add up right. Stott asks: “How can God in any meaningful sense be called ‘everything to everybody’ while an unspecified number of people still continue in rebellion against him and under his judgment?” It would make better sense metaphysically (as well as biblically, morally, and justicewise) if hell meant destruction and the wicked were no more. Otherwise the disloyal opposition would eternally exist alongside God in a corner of unredeemed reality in the new creation.

6. Nevertheless, the reader may be asking, have I not forgotten something important? What about the texts which have always been taken to support the doctrine of everlasting conscious torment? In regard to them I would say that their number is very small. The texts which can be taken to teach this doctrine are few in number and capable of being fairly interpreted in harmony with the majority of verses which teach the destruction of the wicked. I deal with these “difficult” texts in the way that biblical inerrantists or high Calvinists deal with the difficult passages they face.

(1) “Their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched” (Mark 9:48).  This imagery is taken from Isaiah 66:24 where the dead bodies of God’s enemies are being eaten by maggots and burned up. It is safe to say there is not a hint of everlasting suffering in the verse. The fire and the worm destroy the dead bodies; they do not torment them. The fire will be quenched only when the job is finished, not before. The tradition simply misreads the verse.

(2) “They will go away into eternal punishment” (Matt. 25:46). I admit that the interpretation of everlasting, conscious torment can be read out of this verse if one wishes to do so. Such a meaning is not at all impossible from the wording, especially if one smuggles the term “conscious” into it as is very common.26 But there are considerations which would bring the meaning more into line with what I judge to be the larger body of evidence. Jesus does not define the nature of eternal life or eternal death in this text. He just says there will be two destinies and leaves it there. One is free to interpret it to mean either everlasting conscious torment or irreversible destruction. The text allows for both possibilities and only teaches explicitly the finality of the judgment itself, not its nature.  Therefore, one’s interpretation of this verse in respect to our subject here will depend upon other considerations. In the light of what has been said so far, I think it is better and wiser to read the text as teaching annihilation.

(3) But did not the rich man suffer torment in the flames in a famous parable of Jesus? (Luke 16:23ff.). Yes, this is part of the Jewish imagery Jesus uses. But one should keep two things in mind here: first, the mention of Abraham’s bosom (v. 22) should alert us to the fact that we are dealing with imagery, not literal description; and second (and more importantly), the story refers to the intermediate state between death and the resurrection and is not really relevant to our subject. This point should not be missed given the fact that the passage is used regularly (and erroneously) in the traditionalist literature to describe hell, not the intermediate state.

(4) But what about those passages in the book of the Revelation of John which speak of Satan, the false prophet, the beast, and certain evildoers being tormented in fire and brimstone (Rev. 14:11; 20:10)? Only in the first case (14:11) are human beings at all in view, and it is likely that what is being described is the moment of their judgment, not their everlasting condition, with the smoke going up forever being the testimony to their final destruction. In the other verse (20:10), it is the Devil, the beast, and the false prophet who are the only ones present, and they cannot be equated with ordinary human beings, however we should understand their nature. John’s point seems to be that everything which has rebelled against God will come to an absolute end. As Caird comments: “John believed that, if at the end there should be any who remained impervious to the grace and love of God, they would be thrown, with Death and Hades, into the lake of fire which is the second death, i.e. extinction and total oblivion.” I think it would be fair to say that the biblical basis for the traditional view of hell has been greatly exaggerated.

Positively I am contending that Scripture and theology give solid support to the doctrine of the annihilation of the wicked. The case is impressive if not quite unambiguous, and the traditional view looks less likely in comparison with it. Yet I would not say that either side wins the argument hands down largely because the Bible does not seem concerned to deal with this question as precisely as we want it to. But it is amusing to hear traditionalists claiming that they alone hold to the infallibility of the Bible as illustrated by their holding to everlasting torment of the wicked.  Their position is in fact very weakly established biblically.

[footnotes omitted] Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper], p. 11-19.

In conclusion, the Traditionalism, the doctrine that the lost suffer conscious eternal torment in hell, relies on a false doctrine of the immortality of the soul.  Scripture strongly supports the Annihilationist doctrine.   In his paper, Clark Pinnock has strong initial words expressing his outrage at the defenders of the Traditionalists who argue that the Annihilationist position is grounded in secular sympathy for the lost.  His words are worth pondering:

How should I begin? Shall I treat the subject in the calm way one would when dealing with another issue? Would it be right to pretend to be calm when I am not? To begin calmly would not really communicate a full account of my response. I do not feel calm about the traditional doctrine of hell, and so I will not pretend. Indeed, how can anyone with the milk of human kindness in him remain calm contemplating such an idea as this? Now I realize that in admitting this I am playing into the hands of the critics, when I admit how disturbed the doctrine makes me. They will be able to say that I have adopted arguments on the basis of sentimentality and a subjective sense of moral outrage. In a recent paper, J.I. Packer has said that he dislikes the idea which critics of everlasting conscious punishment seem to have of their moral superiority, when it is not spiritual sensitivity, he says, but secular sentimentalism which motivates them (referring in the context to none other than his esteemed evangelical and Anglican colleague J. Stott).  Nonetheless, I will take the risk of beginning at the point of my outrage and hope people will hear me and not put it down to sentimentality. To such a charge I would reply: if it is sentimentality which drives me, what drives my opponent? Is it hard-heartedness and the desire for eternal retribution? Such recriminations will get us nowhere fast.

Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper], p. 7-8.

Our God is a loving God, who shows mercy to us who believe as a matter of grace alone.  In addition to conforming to Scripture, it is fitting that a righteous judge whose nature is love would justly punish the lost after the first death, and then end their existence in the second death, rather than punish with conscious excruciating pain forever.

I conclude with a video of a lecture by Edward Fudge on “Three Views of Hell.”

For reference, Part 1 of my discussion of the doctrine of conscious eternal torment of the lost in hell and Annihiliationism is found by clicking here.

I want to give a little background, before I tell what the Lord did with my life. I am an only child, my mother took her own life when I was 3. She had several miscarriages after I was born and I was told later that she was very depressed. I grew up believing she had died of pneumonia, I was told that by my aunt, but I found out the truth when I was about 16 from my father. I myself had 4 miscarriages after our son was born so I can relate to her grief and sorrow in that respect. I only have two memories of my mother, one is of her taking me to church and I also remember the song “Jesus Loves Me” from that time in my life. So I have hope that I may meet her one day in heaven.

Barely a year after she died, my father married a woman he had known in medical school named Dorothy. She was recently divorced from a man who had been unfaithful to her. As a result, she had been excommunicated from the Catholic church and she was a very angry and bitter person. My stepmother did not like children and particularly did not like me…I was little and looked like my mother whom she had known – secretary to the dean of the medical school they went to – and my father loved me, that was enough for her.

As soon as I was old enough, around 6, she started sending me away. I really grew up in summer camp, boarding school and with relatives, anywhere but home. One of the strongest childhood memories I have was of being homesick for a home that didn’t really exist. I wanted to go home, but then I would get there and it would be just awful. But mostly, I was just terribly lonely. My dad loved me, but I never got to spend enough time with him.

Although I spent many years in Catholic boarding school, we never went to church and there was virtually no mention of God in our home, other than profanity. The nuns always tried to get me to be baptized and become a Catholic. We used to collect dimes to “buy a pagan baby” in Africa and what that meant was to buy a baptism for them and the joke was always we are saving the dimes for Suzie.

My sense was if you were white, well off and Catholic you could go to heaven, but I felt a sense of hypocrisy which I didn’t understand at the time and I just didn’t quite believe them. I wanted to belong and I tried but I just couldn’t believe what they did. They were absolutely in love with Mary. We were always supposed to be ‘Mary-like”, not a bad thing – they stressed modesty and reverence. But we should have been Christ-like.

After 10 really turbulent years, my father divorced my stepmother when I was in high school and he immediately remarried a nurse he met at work. My new stepmother, Dale, was 9 years older than I, so I was 15, she was 24 and he was 49. When he first brought her home, she was so young, I thought she was supposed to be a friend for me. Dad, I have friends and they’re way cooler than her! It was a very peculiar situation, but over the years she and I have grown very close; she is the only mother I have ever known and she has always loved me, both for my father’s sake and for my own and she is very precious to me. And by the way, God did a healing work in my spirit and I have been able to truly forgive Dorothy for the heartache and rejection of those early years. I understand her better as an adult than I did as a child, among other things she was an alcoholic, so that explains a lot I didn’t understand then.

After high school I started college but I dropped out and I spent the next 20 years or so moving from job to job, boyfriend to boyfriend, city to city. I had some interesting adventures. I lived in a hippie commune in the Haight Ashbury. Lived on a pot farm one summer. I worked as a flight attendant for an international airline for five years. I traveled all over the world. I went everywhere I ever dreamed of and places that never crossed my mind. I worked in the television and film industry for about five years after that. I was in a terrific car accident at one point, in which neither I nor my passenger were injured, but I was sued and that was a interesting and horrible experience. So interesting that I went to paralegal school which I found fascinating and I worked for some lawyers after that.

When I was about 36, I was living in the small town in northern California that I grew up in, Carmel, kind of an artist colony, tourist destination, but also a retirement community. I had an apartment, a job, a cat and a pretty empty life. About that time, two things happened to begin to change the course of my life. I had spent the weekend in the Bay Area with a good friend I had flown with and partied and carried on with for years and she had recently gotten married. My job had sent me to Bali for 3 weeks and I missed her wedding, so I went to see her after I returned. I was really impressed with how well marriage suited her. She had been such a wild woman. She was calm and happy and sober and that made a huge impression on me. It crossed my mind to reconsider never getting married because I had decided a long time before-when I was 11 or 12 – never to get married or have children. (You would have to have really known my stepmother.) I had just so rarely seen a long-lasting marriage that was happy.

So I was thinking about marriage. The other thing that came to my mind about that time was that I needed some sort of a “spiritual life”. I had no idea what I meant by that, I was thinking maybe Buddhism, something to do with “inner harmony” or peace, maybe the ‘supernatural’. I just didn’t want anything that was going to take up too much time or make me change in any way.

About 2 weeks later I ran into a man named David whom I had met several times before. The first time I was having lunch with my stepmother Dale, he was introducing himself to everyone in this little café and asking people to vote for him, he was running for city council. I read later in our little town paper, the Carmel Pinecone, he was a lawyer from LA. And I thought ugh! I’ll never vote for him and I didn’t. It turns out I actually married him, but I didn’t vote for him.

But I saw him at my work one day and we started talking. We actually intersected outside my building, I was walking home for lunch and he walked with me. It was a Wednesday and he asked me to go to church with him that night. I thought, this is really strange, not dinner or cocktails or the movies, but church? People go to church at night? Why?? I hadn’t been on a date in a long time and I thought well, either he is weird or he’s special but I said I would go. He made it clear he was a Christian and he got saved reading the Bible in college.

And what do you know? The pastor was teaching on sin that night, I remember it was the gospel of John. I was positive that everyone in that whole church knew who the sinner was that he was talking about. I felt as if there was a spotlight on me, not knowing the first thing about the Holy Spirit and how He works. I remember the pastor saying that God does not grade sin like humans do, in other words that some are severe and others are not so bad. He said that you either live your life in God’s will or your own, that there was no fence to sit on.

He specifically talked about some activities and behaviors that God calls sins which I considered at that point in my life a form of entertainment…sleeping with people you weren’t married to, drug and alcohol use (abuse), gossip and backbiting, things I had done for years and so did almost everyone else I knew. I almost always felt bad after I had done these things, but just kept doing them anyway time and time again.

But the pastor’s words from the Bible rang true like nothing I had ever heard and were such a comfort to me. I found out that there was a way to live and feel good about yourself and know what was right and why. After the service, I told David I don’t know if you are going to come back on Sunday, but I am definitely going to be here. He said he would bring me back.

I told you my mother had taken her own life when I was three. My father had killed himself when I was 28. It was absolutely the shock of my life. I loved my father completely and after that I had periods of severe depression and I was troubled with suicidal tendencies for years. I sometimes felt as if I couldn’t control them. I didn’t want to die, but I often didn’t want to live either. It was an emotional burden that I always carried with me. I always thought when things got rough, well if your parents can just check out and leave you, why not? One counselor I did talk to helped me to understand it a little, he said if someone you loved had been murdered, you might feel like killing someone, you identify with their experience – it made sense at the time. About a week after I met David and had been to church twice, the thoughts of suicide were overpowering. I had actually scheduled an appointment with a psychologist.

I saw this woman and she said how horrible it all was that my parents both killed themselves and how I would have to be in therapy for at least a year, and there was no assurance that she could help me but it was just so depressing. So afterward I went by Dave’s office and immediately he asked what was wrong with me. I just met him and I really wanted him to like me and I didn’t want him to know how messed up I was, but I just felt drawn there, so I told him all about it and he asked if I had ever prayed about it.

Well, of course not. This wasn’t a problem for God, this was my problem. He had to run the universe. What could God do or what would He do? I really didn’t know who God was. The only prayers I knew were Our Father and Hail Mary and I was pretty sure that wasn’t what I needed.

Since I was so upset and didn’t know what else to do I went home. I had never prayed anything but emergency prayers in my life, you know, God pleeeeeease don’t let this airplane fall out of the sky, I had had a couple of close calls, one in a jungle in Africa and believe me, I was praying. Or God, if you get me this job, I promise I will do something, not do something. I truly did not know how to talk to God but I remember saying, “You know how terrible I feel and I don’t want to die and I don’t want to live like this any more. Please help me”.

The Lord spoke to my heart for the first time I ever really heard Him. His message was clear and unmistakable, in words I heard in my brain not in my ears. These are the exact words He said, “Forgive those people. Don’t look behind yourself at them, look ahead to Me.” Instead of the suicide thing that is what filled my brain! I almost fell over, I could not believe that God Himself had a message for me. I was surprised to know I needed to forgive my parents, but I immediately did. The Lord delivered me at that moment 24 years ago and I never felt suicidal again. I didn’t even know the Lord but I was already experiencing His power. He was “calling me out of darkness into His marvelous light”.

After that 1st Bible study, I kept asking Dave questions. I wanted a rational intellectual explanation about God and why someone ought to make a commitment to follow Him. So he always would point me to a Scripture, give me a tape (he had 100′s of them, it seemed, one for every question) or give me a book that I could find answers in, but he never tried to convince me himself. About 2 weeks after that first night at church, I committed my life to the Lord. I confessed that I was a sinner in need of a Savior and asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life. I have joy on earth in place of the emptiness and loneliness of all those years and I know for certain I have the promise of heaven. One of my favorite scriptures is from Isaiah, also found in Romans 10 – “I was found by those who did not seek me, I revealed myself to those who did not ask for me.” So true in my life!

I have two dear younger cousins who are Christians who had prayed for me for a long time. When I called the older sister Jenny to tell her I was saved, we were weeping with joy. She said, “I prayed for you and my brother for ten years and you were both saved the same year. You were on my ‘impossible list’, but God doesn’t have an impossible list!” So I want to encourage you to continue to pray for that impossible person, because He saved even me! Don’t give up!

I said I lived in the Haight, I had been a flower child in the late 60′s and all that goes with it, and I do mean all. I changed my wardrobe – I wasn’t still wearing the leather dresses and embroidered everything, but that’s about all. I had quit drinking and smoking cigarettes and using other drugs when I met David because I knew he didn’t like those things but I had never promised the Lord that I would quit doing it.

I also had another bad habit that I hadn’t quit and that was soap operas. Don’t take this wrong if you watch soaps, some things are okay for some people that aren’t for others. I had gotten hooked on them many years earlier living with a roommate who watched them. Later I worked on some soaps and I actually met Nicki and Victor and Ashley and some of the others. If you are smiling, you know who they are. I would tape 3 or 4 soaps every day and watch them at night. If you are unfamiliar with this particular bad habit, I suppose it is similar to pornography, it can be very addictive. Maybe not wrong for everyone, but not good for me as a new believer.

So one morning I was getting ready for work and all of a sudden I had this terrible pain in my stomach. I was in my kitchen and I doubled over. I was standing in front of the refrigerator and when I opened my eyes I saw this magnet “The Young and the Restless”. I knew the Lord was telling me it was time to give it up. I went to the VCR and took the tape out and promised Him I would not entertain myself with tv shows, movies, magazines and things like that that were ungodly. With His grace, I have been faithful to that promise for the most part.  The pain began to subside and as I walked back to the other room, it suddenly came again. Much more painful, like I had swallowed acid. If I had not been a believer I would have dialed 911, but I began to pray instead for relief. I lay on the bed curled up and the Lord began to remind me of many of the times and people I had had the opportunity to be a good example to and I was not. He reminded me of people I had totally forgotten and things I had done. He spoke to my heart that when I put the name of Christ over my own, I had a commission to be His representative on earth. He took away the desire that day and delivered me.

A lot of other things happened during that time. I had a back injury 15 or more years earlier and it caused a lot of pain, particularly while sitting. Every Sunday at the end of the service our pastor read from James 5:14, If any man is sick …. he should be anointed with oil, and the elders will pray for him. I had been going to a chiropractor for the pain for years, but every Sunday when he read that I could sense the spirit of God urging me to go forward. For some reason, I just wouldn’t do it. Self conscious, embarrassed, I don’t know.

After months, finally one Sunday I went forward. I told the two elders why I was there and they asked if I believed that God could heal. Of course I did. They asked if I had faith for God to heal me. I did not and I said so. They said, well, that’s all right because we do, very enthusiastic, very confident, I’m thinking, yeah right. As they prayed I thought I sensed a warmth flowing through my body, but I convinced myself that it was my imagination. However, that particular pain left that day and I am sure that chiropractor wondered what happened to me, but I never needed him again. I do have some back problems. I found out I have spina bifida, scoliosis, bone spurs, some fused discs, arthritis and of course I still have damage from that injury, but that particular pain, pain from sitting, they prayed for went away.

David and I dated for about a year and he (finally) asked me to marry him, about a year after we had met. The Lord directed us to move to Arizona after the wedding in 21 yrs ago this past December and we spent the first night here in a hotel. We went to bed and I couldn’t sleep. I was seized with the most paralyzing fear. I had left my home, my family, friends, church, pastor, job, town and moved to this place –I remember he said the Phoenix area was 400 square miles and that terrified me, my home town city limits are one square mile–I didn’t know anyone here.

I just said what have I done? Who will be my friend? The room was absolutely pitch black and at that very moment I had a vision of Jesus. His eyes were looking right at me, His hair and skin and robe were luminous golden silver light and He spoke to me, not out loud, but He said, “Don’t be afraid. I will be your Friend.” Immediately the fear was replaced with the most incredible peace and I went to sleep. (I know this was a miracle because I couldn’t see anything with out my contacts and I could see Him perfectly.) He truly has been my Friend and has blessed me with many others over the years here.

The same month we got married, I became pregnant which was such a surprise and blessing. I guess it always is, but I was almost 40 and didn’t know if I could become a mother so that was a joy and still is. I once told David that people told me when they heard this story they were surprised that God delivered me so quickly in so many ways when they had struggled for years with some of the same things, quitting smoking for example. He replied, “Well, Susan, when I met you I had walked with the Lord for 20 years. I prayed for God to send to send me a wife for 8 years – not a girlfriend, a wife. He had to bring you to a level of faith quickly in order for us to be equally yoked. I couldn’t wait another 8 years for you to grow up spiritually so we could be married!”

I thought I would close by telling you the first time I gave my testimony and why, because it is kind of interesting and we have time. We were in a little church in Tempe, I had been a Christian for about 2 years, we had a newborn baby. The pastor said a lady was going to start a prison ministry and she wanted to tell us about it and see who wanted to help her. I thought, “That’s nice, crooks. No thanks.” And I really wasn’t listening to her at all, but the whole time she was speaking, the Lord was speaking to me “Susan, I want you to go. Susan, I want you to give your testimony.” And I was saying “No, no, no, no!” I don’t remember hearing a word she said, just this dialog in my head with the Lord. So afterward I went up to her and said, “God wants me to go jail with you.” – with a major attitude, and she was so excited, oh that’s great, praise God. So we went 1 Friday night a month, we took the church band, my husband played electric guitar and after several months of ministry, I did have the chance to share the story you just read.

But the interesting thing is the work he did in my heart the first night. We sang a song, “Change my heart oh God, make it ever true, change my heart o God, let me be like you.” And he showed me, basically told me there is no difference between you and them, just a blue suit – you’re on one side of the door and they’re on the other. I’m the One who decides who is where. Plenty of things you have done that could put you in one of those seats, sister. And it really did change my heart. But the sweetest thing would happen after service. We would sit in groups with the women and pray with them. It would absolutely break your heart. “Pray that my child would send me a postcard, I haven’t heard from him in 3 years.” “ Pray that my mother won’t die before I get out.” “ Pray that my daughter will forgive me.” So that prison ministry that I dreaded became the thing I looked forward to the most and the chance to tell them my story helped them to trust me.

Joel 2:25 says the Lord will redeem the years the locusts have eaten and he was so merciful to bless me, in spite of my rejection of Him for all that time, I feel like the locusts didn’t just eat those years, but I fed my life to them.

So the Lord has blessed me with a wonderful stepmother in place of the mother I never had, her husband, my stepfather who I love dearly, the husband I never wanted, the child I never dreamed of and now I have a step-sister and step-brother, 4 sister in laws, 3 brother in laws – 1 is in heaven already, he got saved the day he died, lots of nieces and nephews, truly a big family, and of course, all the brothers and sisters in Christ and many other dear and wonderful friends. Not only that, I have four children in heaven waiting to meet me. God is so good!

Thus, Calvinists believe that salvation is entirely a sovereign work of God.  Hence God’s sovereign election of those sinners to whom he shows His mercy and extends His grace is necessary that anyone be saved.  Salvation is solely a work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts and minds of men and women whose minds have been blinded to the truth:

The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

2 Corinthians 4:4 (NIV)

But without reading what John Calvin wrote, from the way Calvin is referred to in the history books, and commonly referred to in the public sphere, one could conclude that Calvinism is uniquely Calvin’s own doctrine of grace, somehow different from what the Bible teaches.

Hardly.  Calvin relies on Holy Scripture, Paul primarily, and Augustine’s anti-Pelagian writings (in which Augustine also relies on Paul), when he develops his argument for sovereign election of the saints, God’s chosen elect.  In this selection from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion (trans. Henry Beveridge), Chapter 34 from Book Three, Chapter 2, “Of Faith. The Definition of It. Its Peculiarities.“, Calvin explains how and why the work of the Holy Spirit is necessary for us to receive saving faith.

34. But as Paul argues, “What man knoweth the things of a man, save the spirit of man which is in him? even so the things of God knoweth no man but the Spirit of God,” (1 Cor. 2:11). If in regard to divine truth we hesitate even as to those things which we see with the bodily eye, how can we be firm and steadfast in regard to those divine promises which neither the eye sees nor the mind comprehends? Here human discernment is so defective and lost, that the first step of advancement in the school of Christ is to renounce it (Mt. 11:25; Luke 10:21). Like a veil interposed, it prevents us from beholding divine masteries, which are revealed only to babes. “Flesh and blood” does not reveal them (Mt. 16:17). “The natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him; neither can he know them, for they are spiritually discerned,” (I Cor. 2:14). The supplies of the Holy Spirit are therefore necessary, or rather his agency is here the only strength. “For who has known the mind of the Lord? or who has been his counselor?” (Rom. 11:34); but “The Spirit searcheth all things, yea, the deep things of God,” (1 Cor. 2:10). Thus it is that we attain to the mind of Christ: “No man can come to me, except the Father which has sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.” “Every man therefore that has heard, and learned of the Father, cometh unto me. Not that any man has seen the Father, save he which is of God, he has seen the Father,” (John 6:44, 45, 46). Therefore, as we cannot possibly come to Christ unless drawn by the Spirit, so when we are drawn we are both in mind and spirit exalted far above our own understanding. For the soul, when illumined by him, receives as it were a new eye, enabling it to contemplate heavenly mysteries, by the splendor of which it was previously dazzled. And thus, indeed, it is only when the human intellect is irradiated by the light of the Holy Spirit that it begins to have a taste of those things which pertain to the kingdom of God; previously it was too stupid and senseless to have any relish for them. Hence our Savior, when clearly declaring the mysteries of the kingdom to the two disciples, makes no impression till he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures (Luke 24:27, 45). Hence also, though he had taught the Apostles with his own divine lips, it was still necessary to send the Spirit of truth to instill into their minds the same doctrine which they had heard with their ears. The word is, in regard to those to whom it is preached, like the sun which shines upon all, but is of no use to the blind. In this matter we are all naturally blind; and hence the word cannot penetrate our mind unless the Spirit, that internal teacher, by his enlightening power make an entrance for it.

[emphasis added]

This is only one of many arguments Calvin makes with Scripture as his proof in his Institutes to explain why salvation is entirely the work of God.  It is odd to me that salvation, as entirely the work of God, is identified with Calvin, or Augustine, rather than Paul, when it is Paul who wrote:

 For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—  not by works, so that no one can boast.  For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Ephesians 2:8-12 (NIV), and

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.  For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love  he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.  In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace  that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. 

Ephesians 1:3-8 (NIV)

No one can understand why God saves some and others are condemned to die in their sin.  We can only testify to the truth as we are commanded to do, and let the Holy Spirit carry out the plan.  Nevertheless, it is wrong for anyone, even those who believe, to resist the truth revealed in Scripture because an imperfect human reason and moral sense cannot understand the ways of God, the Creator of the Universe, and his righteousness and justice.   As Paul bluntly says:

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

Romans 9:20-21 (NIV).

We can only bow our heads and humbly acknowledge his glory, thankful that He chose us, and pray for the salvation of those we love, or rather, those who the Spirit leads us to pray for, including those who seem impossible to love.

 Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God! 
   How unsearchable his judgments, 
   and his paths beyond tracing out! 
 “Who has known the mind of the Lord? 
   Or who has been his counselor?” 
 “Who has ever given to God, 
   that God should repay him?” 
 For from him and through him and to him are all things. 
   To him be the glory forever! Amen.

Romans 11:33-36 (NIV) (Doxology)

For the Christian, spiritual conversion is only the beginning of a lifetime process of sanctification, to approach a holy life in this life.  We must be humble and honest with ourselves, intermittently at best, to be able to recognize our sins and the accompanying habits that exhibit our faults. Prayer is a communication with God, and is surely a means to grace in the communion with God alone. Petition, however, seems to be more specific: a request for specific help from God. In the Scriptures, the authors occasionally use the words prayer and petition together in the same verse, which implies a distinction in meaning. For example, the prophet Daniel uses the words together here:

Daniel 9:17

Now, our God, hear the prayers and petitions of your servant. For your sake, O Lord, look with favor on your desolate sanctuary.

and Paul does so as well:

Philippians 4:6

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.

And the author of Hebrews:

Hebrews 5:7

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.

A prayer as a communication with God may lack petition as in the case of a prayer of worship and praise. For example, Psalm 72 contains petitions for God’s blessing on the King, but the concluding verses of Psalm 72, verses 18-20, are words of praise which are not directed at God, but are acts of praise and worship manifesting the awareness of the greatness of God in the prayer induced consciousness of the presence of God:

Praise be to the LORD God, the God of Israel,
who alone does marvelous deeds.
Praise be to his glorious name forever;
may the whole earth be filled with his glory.
Amen and Amen.
This concludes the prayers of David son of Jesse.

Also, a prayer of thanksgiving does not petition for favor, but thanks God for his provision, and should follow answers to prayer.

Nevertheless, in practice, prayer and petition are more synonymous than not: whether by weakness or design, we pray for action from God — on our behalf for ourselves or for others, or for God’s will to “be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

William Barclay’s prayer in this case, the First Sunday after Epiphany, is fully a petition to God for our own needs, in particular, the wisdom to know what we ought to do and the power to do what we ought to do. In order to act as we should, we need to be saved from the faults and habits that obstruct our ability to discern the right path and to follow it.  In this prayer, Barclay includes a comprehensive laundry list of universal human faults that interfere with our ability to act rightly and with love of God and neighbor. Honest review of the list of faults is humbling, at least it is for me. This is a prayer for deliverance from domination by evil. As Jesus taught us to pray: “Deliver us from evil.” While the habits on their face seem natural, commonplace, the fact that we are commanded to pray for deliverance reveals the supernatural source of the commonplace banal faults of humankind:

O God, our Father, give us wisdom to know what we ought
to do.

Save us from

The cowardice which will not face the truth;
The laziness which will not learn the truth;
The prejudice which cannot see the truth;
The stubbornness which will not accept the truth;
The pride which will not seek the truth.

Save us from

The folly that is deaf to conscience;
The arrogance which will not accept advice;
The self-conceit which resents all rebuke;
The shut mind that bars the door to the entry of the
Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth.

O God, our Father, give us grace and power to do what we
ought to do.

Save us from

The weakness of will which is too easily deflected from
its goal;
The lack of resistance which too easily yields to temptation;
The procrastination which puts things off until it is too
late to do them:
The want of perseverance which begins a task but cannot
finish it.

Save us from

The love of ease which chooses the comfortable way;
The fear of men which cannot stand alone;
The faint heart which will not venture for your name.

So grant us wisdom clearly to know and power faithfully to
fulfil your commands; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

——————–

Prior posts with William Barclay prayers:

Ash Wednesday Prayer for Christopher Hitchens

Prayer for the Church Invisible

Who Are the Hypocrites?

Morning Prayers

In 1996 in a studio on Kensington Church Street in London, Lucian Freud, 74 years old, and Isaiah Berlin, 86 years old, met again to make art.  Berlin sat for Freud more than a dozen times. Freud completed a charcoal drawing of Berlin’s head, but the oil portrait of Berlin sitting in an old armchair was never finished. Berlin’s biographer, Michael Ignatieff, describes Freud at work:

Isaiah sat in an old battered armchair while Freud sketched him first in pencil and then began to paint him in oils.  The time passed in gossip and then in silence, broken by the sound of charcoal on paper and paint on canvas.  As Freud worked, Isaiah passed in and out of sleep.  In the charcoal drawing, roughly eight by ten inches, Isaiah’s eyes are closed, his head back against the back of the armchair, his mouth shut, the curvature of his upper lip is perfectly caught, as is the shape of his bare forehead and his cheeks sunken and hollowed with age. In the oil painting, not much larger than a regular sheet of paper, Isaiah is shown leaning back with his head resting on the back of the battered armchair. Unlike the pencil sketch, his eyes are open. He is looking away to the left, full of melancholy, at something we cannot see.

(Ignatieff, Isaiah Berlin, a life, 1998: p. 296)

Berlin’s biography, Isaiah Berlin, a Life, was written by Michael Ignatieff, Canadian writer, Oxford and Cambridge academic, and former politician (the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and Leader of the Official Opposition from 2008 until 2011). Berlin, a Russian-Jewish British immigrant, had an incredible life, a friend of international scholars, artists, poets, politicians, and aristocrats. During the 40s, Berlin was a confidante and intermediary between Zionist leaders Chaim Weitzman and David Ben Gurion during the movement which established the nation of Israel. Berlin died in 1997. I refer you to the biography for his life.

At the end of his life, poet Stephen Spender, a lifelong friend from Oxford who died in 1993, sent Berlin a poem by a ninth-century Chinese poet, “which was an elegy for their lifelong friendship”:

We are growing old together, you and I
Let us ask ourselves, what is age like?
The idle head, still uncombed at noon.
Propped on a staff, sometimes a walk abroad;
Or all day sitting with closed doors.
One dares not look in the mirror’s polished face;
One cannot read small-letter books.
Deeper and deeper, one’s love of old friends;
Fewer and fewer, one’s dealings with young men.
One thing only, the pleasure of idle talk,
Is great as ever, when you and I meet.

Isaiah Berlin, A Life p. 287-88.

Idle talk between old friends is certainly exempt from any moral consequence, a fleet passing pleasure of conflict free company and is “great as ever” — even by facebook and email.

Pastor John:

I was walking today listening to Matthew’s gospel on my iPod, and I thought of you. We attended your church for nearly seven years.  I still listen to your doctrines of grace series on my iPod once a year or so. About nine or ten years ago you spoke in your sermon about vacationing at the Sea Ranch in Northern California. In 2002 I read a short poem, “Afternoon Walk: Sea Ranch” in Poetry Magazine, and I meant to send it to you. I forgot. I remembered today, found it in my archives, and hope it is God’s timing. I lived in Carmel, CA in the late 80s and drove by the Sea Ranch several times driving up Highway 1, looking out over the ice plants at the sea as I drove by. The poem moved me and I only drove by the Sea Ranch. Here is the poem, and I have attached it as PDF in case you like it and want to share it.

AFTERNOON WALK: THE SEA RANCH

In memory of E.L.G.

Late light, uneven mole-gnawed meadow,
gullies, freshets, falls, whose start and speckle
Hopkins would have loved – and you – you too,
who loved the sheen and shade, the forest dapple
where grass meets cypress just beyond the house –
you’d praise the mushroom-sprout, the chilly glisten
as the hedgerow folds into the solstice
and suddenly the last crisp leaves unfasten . . .

This time of year, this place, light dims at the pace
of a long late afternoon walk, light seems to slow
and sorrow as the meadow turns its face
into your unlived season, the winter hollow
where only a steep sky, in quarter inches,
adjusts descending sun, ascending branches.

SANDRA M. GILBERT

Poetry
October/November 2002

The “Hopkins” reference is surely to Gerald Manley Hopkins and his memorable nature poems written in 1877, of which this is his most famous:

GOD’S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

———————————-

The first poem in the email that I had forgotten to send him for 9 years describes the memory of walking through the Sea Ranch, a Northern California resort on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, with a deceased loved one, likely the poet’s spouse.

A few days later I was at Starbucks and noticed a younger man reading a book by R. C. Sproul, a favorite Christian theologian and writer.  He was also writing in a notebook.  I struck up a conversation, telling him how much I admired R. C. Sproul, and that Sproul’s book Chosen by God was one of my favorite books – a clear and concise discussion of predestination and Calvinism.  He said it was also one of his.  We were both Calvinists.  [As I see it, John Calvin adopts the doctrine of election and predestination first articulated by the Apostle Paul in his letters, and then by  St. Augustine.  Calvin relies on Scripture and Augustine, and states the doctrine so well, that his name was attached to the Biblical doctrine.  Martin Luther also accepted the Augustinian view of predestination and election].

The young man said he was a pastor of a church nearby, that he had come to Calvinism gradually, having been educated at an Arminian seminary, and was now a Presbyterian pastor, in the same denomination as Sproul.   Calvinists believe that God alone saves people — He chooses His elect before the foundation of the world, his grace is irresistible and once a person is saved, he will persevere.  Arminians believe that God, and man through the grace of God, and his free will, chooses God, that therefore God elects believers who choose Him, His grace is not irresistible, man can resist, and that once saved, a believer can fall away and lose his salvation.

I told him that I had come to agree with Calvinism over time in the late 90s, and that I became firm in that doctrine from the teaching of Pastor John, to whom I wrote the email above.  He said he was a good friend of Pastor John.  Then, he told me that Pastor John’s wife had died a week ago.  I had not heard about her death.

I was shocked to hear this.  I had just sent Pastor John a poem about walking at the Sea Ranch with a deceased loved one within a week after his wife had died, a dear loved one with whom he had surely walked at the Sea Ranch.  I hope that God wanted Pastor John to have that poem now, and that it was a blessing to him in his grief, and something he could refer to in the years ahead to recall fond memories.   If it was as I hope, then surely it was God’s timing for me to remember to send it to him after 9 years!

O God, you will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are fixed on you: for in repentance and rest shall we be saved; in quietness and trust shall be our strength.

Isaiah 26:3 and 30:15 (Adapted)

This devotional passage, which combines two verses from Isaiah, is adapted from the noon reading in the daily devotionals in the Anglican/Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (“BCP”). I prefer and have replaced “returning” in the BCP reading with “repentance” in the passage as the Hebrew is translated in the New International Version 1984.

I have the BCP daily devotionals as a personal document on my kindle for my use. Today I noticed the wisdom of placing this passage in the noon devotional. Mid-day is when we are half way through the stress of the work day and a pause for prayer for peace is just right. Noon can be a time of spiritual darkness – worry, anxiety, confusion, or just longing for the end of the work day or the work week as we contemplate a lonely sandwich, or skip lunch because there is no time.

In the mid-1980s, I remember waiting for a bus in Los Angeles while my spirit and mind were highly distressed about my life. Likely I was running out of money and wondering where I would find a job. I was carrying a pocket New Testament and I remembered Paul’s wonderful remedy for worry and stress:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable — if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Philippians 4:6-8 (New International Version 1984)

Paul tells us not to worry, and that through prayer for peace, we will have it. And with “thanksgiving” to give thanks, and to remind us of our dependence on God, and how He supplies our needs, including our emotional needs. Further he admonishes us to think on good things as a means to continuing peace. I remember reading that passage as a prayer waiting for the bus, and because it worked. It was the first time I had applied the passage in real time and I remember it vividly. The noon passage from the BCP is a very short prayer and petition for peace, hence the wisdom of including it at noon for devotions.

Paul’s admonishment is a practical application of Jesus’s words from the Sermon on the Mount:

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?

“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the lilies of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.

But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:25-34 (New International Version 1984)

This past February 2011, some college classmates of mine from the 60s were having a good time arguing the physics of hell on our class email discussion listserv. Is Hell endothermic or exothermic? While some argued hell was endothermic, absorbing heat, as the only Christian in the discussion, I argued from Scripture, and what I recalled from physics, that hell was exothermic, oxidizing all that was thrown into the consuming fire, and giving off heat. Arguing that hell-fire was consuming, I was reminded of the annihilationist interpretation, and wrote about it to my classmates, who I suspect had never heard of that concept. “Annihilationism is the view that eternal life is the gift of God, and that those who do not receive this gift will not live forever.”

I began to study this — beginning with the controversial writing of John Stott. I first discovered in 1996 that there was another view besides “Traditionalism,” the doctrine that the lost suffer eternal conscious torment in hell, when I read an interview with John Stott, the saintly British Evangelical theologian/evangelist /writer, who died this year.  The Christianity Today obituary calls Stott “an architect of twentieth century evangelicalism [who] shaped the faith of a generation.” Reading the interview in 1996 I was surprised to read that Stott had been sharply criticized for writing in support of “annihiliationism” as finding support in Scripture.   In February, I started my study reading Stott’s controversial statements in a long out-of-print book he wrote with David Edwards, Essentials – A liberal-evangelical dialogue, published in England in 1988, and a year later in the U.S. as Evangelical Essentials – A Liberal Evangelical Dialogue. David Edwards, the liberal, had credit as the author “with” John Stott. The American version changed the title to Evangelical Essentials, even though Edwards positions were not Evangelical, and John Stott responded to the liberal view with the Evangelical view. The name change must have been made for marketing purposes because of the larger Evangelical market in the U.S. I obtained a used copy of the 1988 British version, and read the controversial section written by John Stott on “Judgement and Hell” in response to Edwards liberal universalist view that all mankind is eventually saved by God. John Stott’s argument against universalism, but in favor of Scriptural support for annihilationism is found in an excerpt from Essentials by clicking here, John Stott discusses Hell I commend this passage to the reader as a courageous and powerful Scriptural case for annihiliation as the fate of the lost over the traditional dogma of eternal torment. The significance of this argument in the face of tradition is highlighted by Stott’s words of response to Edwards on pages 314-15:

You rightly say that I have never declared publicly whether I think hell, in addition to being real, terrible and eternal, will involve the experience of everlasting suffering. I am sorry that you use in reference to God the emotive expression ‘the Eternal Torturer’, because it implies a sadistic infliction of pain, and all Christian people would emphatically reject that. But will the final destiny of the impenitent be eternal conscious torment, ‘for ever and ever’, or will it be a total annihilation of their being? The former has to be described as traditional orthodoxy, for most of the church fathers, the medieval theologians and the Reformers held it. And probably most Evangelical leaders hold it today. Do I hold it, however? Well, emotionally, I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterising their feelings or cracking under the strain. But our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth and must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining it. As a committed Evangelical, my question must be -and is not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s word say? And in order to answer this question, we need to survey the biblical material afresh and to open our minds (not just our hearts) to the possibility that Scripture points in the direction of annihilation, and that ‘eternal conscious torment’ is a tradition which has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture.

He then follows up with nearly 15 pages of Biblical exegesis, i.e., the critical interpretation of the passages relevant to fate of those who do not believe, those who are not given eternal life with God in Heaven.  After the excellent and consciously controversial argument, Stott confesses his discomfort with challenging orthodoxy:

I am hesitant to have written these things, partly because I have a great respect for longstanding tradition which claims to be a true interpretation of Scripture, and do not lightly set it aside, and partly because the unity of the world-wide Evangelical constituency has always meant much to me. But the issue is too important to suppress, and I am grateful to you for challenging me to declare my present mind. I do not dogmatise about the position to which I have come. I hold it tentatively. But I do plead for frank dialogue among Evangelicals on the basis of Scripture. I also believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment.

I will briefly describe the fundamental Annihilationist view as I understand it.   The Biblical support for the Annihilationist view begins in Genesis, Chapter 3.

And the LORD God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

Genesis 3:22-23 (New International Version 1984)

Whether you understand this passage and the Genesis creation story as literal history, or as a true myth provided by God as revelation of the fallen nature of humankind, or consider the Bible to be just an ancient text, in this passage God banishes mankind from the Garden of Eden expressly so that we cannot live forever. Sin entered the world accompanied by death.

For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Romans 6:23 (New International Version 1984)

Everyone knows that Christian doctrine teaches that the lost sinner goes to hell to suffer conscious torment forever and ever.   As John Stott commented, this is the traditional orthodoxy for both Catholic and Protestant.  It is embedded in our Western Christian culture. Everyone is familiar with Dante’s travels through the levels of hell in his Inferno.  Cartoons frequently feature devils and naked souls commenting on the eternal accommodations.  So, who needs to quote scripture to support the awful doctrine?

There has been an ongoing argument for centuries about the eternal fate of the lost, the damned, the wicked. The majority view since around 200-300 A.D., the “Traditionalist” view, is that the Bible teaches that the lost spend eternity in conscious torment in a place called hell. The minority view is that the lost do not have immortality, but their fate is annihilation, a final second death, perhaps after a period of punishment after death. Those who hold this view are referred to as “Annihilationists” or sometimes, “Conditionalists,” who specify that life is conditional, that the soul is not immortal, as the Genesis quote above supports, and immortality is only promised to those who place their trust in Jesus Christ, as Jesus promises those who believe in Him.

John Locke, the great 18th Century British Enlightenment philosopher and political theorist, questioned whether the Bible teaches “endless torment, in hell-fire.” In 1695, in The Reasonableness of Christianity As Delivered in the Scriptures, on page 6, referring to the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden passage of Genesis quoted above where God banishes them so that they will not live forever, Locke wrote:

Death then entered, and showed his face, which before was shut out, and not known. So St. Paul, Rom. v. 19, “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin,” i.e. a state of death and mortality : and, 1 Cor. xv. 22, “In Adam all die;” i.e. by reason of his transgression, all men are mortal, and come to die.
This is so clear in these cited places, and so much the current of the New Testament, that nobody can deny, but that the doctrine of the gospel is, that death came on all men by Adam’s sin; only they differ about the signification of the word death: for some will have it to be a state of guilt, wherein not only he, but all his posterity was so involved, that every one descended of him deserved endless torment, in hell-fire. I shall say nothing more here, how far, in the apprehensions of men, this consists with the justice and goodness of God, having mentioned it above: but it seems a strange way of understanding a law, which requires the plainest and directest words, that by death should be meant eternal life in misery. Could any one be supposed, by a law, that says, “For felony thou shalt die;” not that he should lose his life; but be kept alive in perpetual, exquisite torments? And would any one think himself fairly dealt with, that was so used?

You can spend decades as a church-going Evangelical Christian in America and never hear from the pulpit or anywhere in the church that there are Scriptures that support annihilation as the fate of the lost instead of conscious eternal torment.

Although “eternal punishment” appears in Scripture, in Matthew’s gospel which I will discuss shortly, the term “eternal torment” does not appear in Scripture. Instead, Scripture most frequently refers to the fate of the damned as “death,” “destruction,” and “perishing,” but never eternal torment or torture. The doctrine of eternal conscious torment rests on a few ambiguous Scriptures that defy the clear teaching that only those who are saved receive the promise of eternal life. The Scriptures consistently promise death and destruction to the lost, not eternal life in torment in hell.  Jesus said:

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.
“Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.’
“Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.’
“They also will answer, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?’
“He will reply, ‘I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.’
“Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”

Matthew 25:31-46 (New International Version 1984)

For years when I read that parable, I substituted in my mind the concept of “eternal torment” in hell as I was taught by the church and Western culture for the express term “eternal punishment.” I never considered that the punishment might be death: final and eternal capital punishment. I never considered that the opposite of “life” is “death”, that the promise of life was to the saved, and the lost were not promised life, and that you would have to receive eternal life if you were going to suffer consciously for eternity in hell. Today, I do consider these things.

I have been a Christian for 40 years this past Spring 2011. For most of that time I believed that the lost, those who did not have salvation in Christ, were eternally damned to suffer conscious torment in Hell.  When I read the terms “death, “destruction,” and “perishing,” I apparently subconsciously substituted “conscious eternal torment in Hell.”  But according to Jesus, God saves us from “perishing”, not from “eternal torment,” and perish has always meant “death” to me:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

John 3:16 (King James Version)

I have read this promise thousands of times over the years, thought of it every time an NFL team tried an extra point or a field goal and someone in the crowd behind the goal waved a John 3:16 sign, but until February this year, 2011, I never considered the exclusiveness of the promise of eternal life, to those who believe, and the negative implication, that those who do not believe have eternal death instead.

In another familiar passage, Jesus discussed eternal destiny in a different way:

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

Over the years I must have subconsciously substituted “broad is the way that leads to eternal torment”, instead of “broad is the way that leads to destruction” because “destruction” is not synonymous with eternal life in torment and I never questioned whether what Jesus says here conflicts in anyway with the traditional view of hell.

The Apostle Paul also warns of destruction:

Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows. The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life.

Galatians 6:7-8 (New International Version 1984)

In another passage, Jesus warns,

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Matthew 10:28 (New International Version 1984)

The Annihiliationist Christian believes that the lost are punished with death.  After death in this life, whether there is a time of punishment thereafter or not, the final fate is death, annihiliation, and not eternal conscious life in torment in Hell separated from God. Annihilation is final, eternal, eternal destruction, eternal punishment, eternal separation from God, but not eternal life in Hell. I did a cursory investigation of the concept in 1996 when I first read about annihilation as an alternative fate for those who do not believe, but did not make a judgment about it, did not think much about it, effectively becoming agnostic about it like Stott claimed to be. I assumed there must be something hidden from human view about the magnitude of rebellion in the fallen soul, something unconscious, I supposed. I did not dwell on it, and rarely have I been able to think seriously about what it could be like to exist without hope in eternal torment, until my recent study this year of what the Scriptures have to say about the eternal destiny of the lost.

In 1982, a Evangelical seminary graduate, Edward Fudge, published an exhaustive 466 page study of the doctrine of eternal punishment, arguing against the traditional dogma of eternal conscious torment in hell, The Fire that Consumes. I read Fudge’s book after reading Stott’s argument. I was surprised to find that F.F. Bruce, a prominent mainstream Evangelical historian/scholar, wrote the Foreward, commending Fudge’s work, claiming himself to be agnostic like C.S. Lewis on the question of eternal torment versus annihilation. I had never heard of Fudge, but I had several of Bruce’s historical works, including a New Testament History and a history of the canon of Scripture.

Apparently, there was a great outcry in reaction to Stott’s public articulation of the controversial view, especially coming from such a well-respected orthodox Evangelical Christian, who wrote the bestselling foundational Basic Christianity, a Christian classic among his other standard Christian works. I found a Evangelical response to John Stott (and Fudge) by J.I. Packer, a prominent and highly respected British Evangelical Anglican theologian and scholar. In his response, Packer respectfully argued the Traditionalist view, but pointed out that the controversy should not cause Christians to break fellowship, easier said than done. Stott was branded a heretic by the most rabid dogmatist Traditionalists (try googling “John Stott” “heretic”). Edward Fudge went to law school and became a Texas class action trial lawyer. After reading Fudge’s excellent book, one must speculate that God blessed Fudge with a career change after suffering the persecution of speaking the truth as his conscience required. J. I. Packer described the violent Traditionalist reaction to the credible annihilationist challenge of Stott, Fudge and others, writing:

Annihilationist ideas have been canvassed among evangelicals for more than a century, but they never became part of the mainstream of evangelical faith, nor have they been widely discussed in the evangelical camp until recently. In 1987 Clark Pinnock authored a punchy two-page article titled “Fire, Then Nothing,” but this, though widely read, did not spark debate, any more than the 500-page exposition of the same view, The Fire That Consumes (1982) by the gifted Churches of Christ layman Edward William Fudge, had done. In 1988, however, two brief pieces of advocacy came from Anglican evangelical veterans: eight pages by John Stott in Essentials, and ten by the late Philip Edgecumbe Hughes in The True Image. These put the cat among the pigeons.

At Evangelical Essentials, a conference of 350 leaders held at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, in 1989, I read a paper portentously titled “Evangelicals and the Way of Salvation: New Challenges to the Gospel: Universalism and Justification by Faith.” In that paper I offered a line of thought countering the view of these two respected friends. It turned out that the conference was split down the middle over the annihilation question. The Christianity Today report said:

Strong disagreements did surface over the position of annihilationism, a view that holds that unsaved souls will cease to exist after death . . . the conference was almost evenly divided as to how to deal with the issue in the affirmations statement, and no renunciation of the position was included in the draft document.

After this, at the request of John White, then president of National Association of Evangelicals, the late John Gerstner wrote a response to Stott, Hughes and Fudge under the title Repent or Perish (1990); and in 1992 the papers read at the fourth Edinburgh Conference on Christian Dogmatics came into print as Universalism and the Doctrine of Hell. Included were John W. Wenham, “The Case for Conditional Immortality,” and Kendall S. Harmon, “The Case Against Conditionalism: A Response to Edward William Fudge.”

Nor was this all. Semipopular books reaffirming the reality and endlessness of hell began to flow: Ajith Fernando, Crucial Questions About Hell (1991); Eryl Davies, An Angry God? (1991); Larry Dixon, The Other Side of the Good News (1992); William Crockett, John Walvoord, Zachary Hayes and Clark Pinnock, Four Views on Hell (1992);16 David Pawson, The Road to Hell (1992); John Blanchard, Whatever Happened to Hell? (1993); David George Moore, The Battle for Hell: A Survey and Evaluation of Evangelicals’ Growing Attraction to the Doctrine of Annihilationism (1995); Robert A. Peterson, Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (1995). All these books argue more or less elaborately against annihilationism. The debate continues.

(footnotes ommitted, emphasis added)

I was a Christian in the 1980s, but I missed the controversy, and was surprised to read this past Spring that the 350 Evangelical leaders who met to discuss this in 1989, as Packer describes, were “split down the middle over the annihilation question.” To this day, in 40 years I have never met an Evangelical Christian who claimed belief in annihilation over eternal torment, or who admitted to this.  There are some cults, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, that deny eternal torment, but no mainstream Evangelical groups, although I have read that the Anglicans tolerate the doctrine.  Both John Stott and C. S. Lewis were Anglicans. It is improper for a Traditionalist to try associate Evangelicals who embrace annihilationism with heresy unorthodoxy, Glenn Peoples has written:

. . . any traditionalist who tries to smear annihilationists by associating us with Jehovah’s Witnesses has opened the door to a barrage of similar attacks on his own position. Mormons and Muslims, for example, believe in eternal torment. Does that make it false?

I have attended large megachurches, and I would suppose that there were those who were educated on this issue who subscribed to the annihilationist view, but kept their belief to themselves to avoid being branded a heretic. For example, my wife was impressed with John Stott’s argument in Essentials and shared a copy of the excerpt linked above with her friend. Her friend was shocked, and believing my wife and I had succumbed to heresy, she ceased communications with my wife because of “the elephant in the room” as she referred to this theological issue.  And she and my wife had been close friends for 15 years, or so my wife thought. Apparently, my wife’s friend bases her salvation on her prior fear of eternal torment, and delivery from that fate. I believe that a Christian should base his salvation on the truth of the gospel, and the promise of eternal life, not delivery from death, but this may be a semantic point, because foundationally, I believe that God saved me by his mercy and grace and nothing I may have thought or believed about the moment I believed has any truth or merit, other than thankfulness to God for saving me.  I have not found that scaring people with fire and brimstone is an effective way to explain the love of God and his plan for salvation.

I have not read all the works written in reaction to the annihilationist arguments of Fudge, Stott and others cited by Packer. I have read Glenn Peoples work. “Who is Glenn Peoples?”, you may ask. Glenn Peoples is a bright articulate New Zealander who has a graduate degree in theology, as well as a Ph.D in philosophy. I first heard him debating on the British Evangelical Christian talk and debate program, “Unbelievable” hosted by Oxford University educated Justin Brierly. I was impressed by People’s intellect and articulate defense of his position. Peoples has published a lengthy scholarly explanation in a draft for a podcast, Why I Am an Annihilationist on his blog, where he states plainly and simply that “Annihilationism is the view that eternal life is the gift of God, and that those who do not receive this gift will not live forever.” He has written “An Open Letter to My Traditionalist Friends” where he shows with many examples from the most respected Traditionalist responses to the Annihilationist view, including some of those cited by Packer above, how the Traditionalist arguments are not well-stated or convincing. He introduces his letter

Dear friends

Not just friends, but brothers and sisters. Some of you might think that I am feigning my treatment of you as both friends and even family. I’m not sure how to persuade you that I’m genuine, but I am. I’m writing this open letter because I don’t know you all personally (in fact I don’t know any of you personally), and I also think other people might benefit from seeing what I have to say.

Who are you? In the long and protracted debate over the biblical teaching on judgement and final punishment, you’ve gained the label “traditionalists.” You say that the Bible teaches that God will punish the lost with eternal torment. There’s a range of different terms that many of you use, but that’s a reasonable summary. Some of you use those terms, while others prefer what you take as less crude language like “eternal separation from God.” But you believe that it will last forever, it will be a conscious experience, and it will be horrific. In particular, I write this for those of you who are apologists for this belief. The people I have in mind have contributed to a veritable torrent of books, articles, public talks and sermons on the subject, assuring the church and the public that the Bible teaches eternal torment.

I don’t believe you’re correct. I am persuaded that the Bible teaches annihilationism. You don’t like that fact. Many of you are on record telling people that annihilationism is false and unbiblical, that it is clearly so, that it undermines the Gospel, that it misrepresents God, that it underestimates sin, that it is a concession to postmodernity and so on. Many of you swarm theological organisations, gatherings, websites and so on, reassuring your peers and your readers that you hold the solid, clearly biblical position, and that annihilationists quite clearly lack biblical support for their view, and many of you encourage theological organisations and colleges that would literally exclude me from working or even studying there because I am persuaded as I am.

Other readers who perhaps do not wade into theological controversy and who might not be familiar with this issue will likely find this letter rather dreary and irrelevant. They can simply ignore it, I suppose. But I am writing to you. What’s more, I have nothing personally to gain in writing this. Your colleges will continue to be unlikely to hire me because of my beliefs on this issue (and writing this will certainly not help this situation), and mainstream colleges will be uninterested in the fact that I have an interest in the subject at all. I will not increase my number of friends, but may potentially increase the number of people hostile to me. But I’m writing to you anyway.

As you know – and some of you express dismay over it – if this theological disagreement were a war, you would be losing. Christians are turning away from your point of view. In spite of the fact that you have spilled more ink than anyone else in this disagreement, evangelical Christians are, more and more, adopting different views on hell from yours. In particular, the doctrine of annihilationism now has more evangelical adherents than it has, I believe, ever had before. I’m writing this letter to tell you why I think this is happening.

Why do you need this commentary? It’s because of this: I believe that you are partly responsible for this shift. Now ultimately I think the teaching of Scripture and a changing attitude to tradition is responsible for this shift, but you have certainly contributed. I suppose if you had simply remained silent, the change would be happening anyway, but you would be mistaken to think that you are stemming the tide. You’re not. Please hear me out. I am going to say some things that you will not like. I am not setting out to offend you, but that may happen. Some Christian scholars do not react to criticism very well at all. When some of my criticisms of one of your author’s arguments was published a few years ago, he accused me of making personal attacks on him. To this day I do not know what he was referring to. When I, a couple of days ago, told one of you that his book really didn’t contain any new arguments for eternal torment that had not been addressed before, he told me, “I take exception” to being told this. I don’t know how else I could have stated the facts. I don’t think reactions like this are appropriate. If you have chosen to enter an ongoing discussion and to criticise the beliefs of others, then you need to make yourself teachable, and you need to be willing to listen to the criticisms that other people present you with. Or at least, you need to not take personal umbrage when they do it.

I’m going to explain why your published arguments have not helped your case, in the sense that they have not caused a swing back to traditionalism – and why they are unlikely to do so in future. These are not pleasant things to be saying, but they are true. I am going to tell you that your endless stream of apologetics on behalf of your doctrine of eternal torment is very poorly argued, fallacious, tiresome, ineffective and even just lazy sometimes. That will appear very blunt. Those sound like insults to some people. But if they are true, then you are not helped by not being told these things. You need to hear them. There has to be a context in which you are willing to hear people tell you these things if they believe they’re true.

There is a sense in which I am also expressing personal frustration with you. That’s not necessarily an inappropriate thing to do. However, I will attempt to be truthful and clear without letting that frustration get in the way of the fact that I do regard you as, all things being considered, being on the same “team” as me. We have a lot more in common than not as fellow believers in Christ.

With these things said, let me get to what I take to be the facts.

Peoples then goes through the flaws he finds in the arguments of Traditionalists, citing examples of poor scholarship and faulty argument.  For example, he writes:

. . .

2 Your exegesis sometimes engages in special pleading

I have already said (and will say more) about specific points of exegesis in other sections, so let me be brief here. Sometimes – especially at really crucial points in your argument for traditionalism or against annihilationism – you engage in special pleading. This is where you appear to need a word or words, or a biblical motif, to work fundamentally differently from the way it normally works, in a context where your case needs it to work differently.

For example, annihilationists have pointed to verses like Matthew 10:28 where Jesus says that God will destroy the lost in Gehenna, “body and soul.” Many of you have asked us to believe that apollumi here does not carry the strong sense of killing or destruction, but rather “ruin” or “loss.” Perhaps you think that Jesus meant that God will lose a person’s body and soul in hell, but “ruin” is more likely what you have in mind. However, it is relevant to note that when the word is used as a verb form everywhere else in the Synoptic
Gospels to describe the actions of one person or agent, it does mean kill or destroy in the strong sense that annihilationists see in Matt 10:28. For example, Herod wanted to actually kill the baby Jesus (Matthew 2:3), a demon tried to throw a boy into water or fire to kill him (Mark 9:22), the owner of a vineyard actually killed the workers in his vineyard (Mark 12:9) and so on. Every single instance where these factors are present (used as a verb, present in the Synoptics, used to describe the actions of one person or agent against another), the meaning is the same. To ask us to make one exception for the sake of your case against annihilationism then is rather obvious special pleading.
A similar thing occurs in the book of Revelation. When you are not thinking about how to defend your doctrine of hell and attack annihilationism, you recognise a range of things that are relevant here. For example, you recognise that when death is thrown into the lake of fire, it means that death will be no more. Of course the action isn’t literal, but that’s what this action signifies. You recognise that the “beast” referred to is not a literal creature, but rather a kingdom, a corporate entity, and that this image is drawn from the book of Daniel, where we also see the beast being destroyed as a symbol of worldly kingdoms being destroyed and God’s kingdom being established. But suddenly when it comes to defending the doctrine of the eternal torments of the damned in hell, the symbolic nature of much of the language in the book of Revelation disappears. Now all of a sudden, but only when defending your doctrine of hell, you interpret the lake of fire, apparently, as a literal place where people burn (or else a symbol of something just like that, minus the burning, where people suffer in some other way). It stands out that for people who are not known for their bizarre literalism in general when it comes to the book of Revelation, you suddenly become literalists when the doctrine of hell is in question.

Surely this too is special pleading. I grant that it is not as obvious a case as the previous one, but it is special pleading nonetheless, as it involves a sudden change of rules when it suits your position.
. . .
4 Your exegesis sometimes appears to intentionally exclude important evidence from the very
texts it is meant to be explaining.

We understand that there are some texts that become “favourites” when looking at what the Bible says about specific issues. That’s normal. Some texts do speak more clearly about some issues than others. One of the favourites among those who think the Bible clearly teaches eternal torment, and clearly teaches against annihilationism, is Isaiah 66:24b. This part-verse reads: “…. for their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.” Many of you regard this text as especially important because Jesus is recorded as quoting this verse in Mark 9:48 when referring to the fate of the lost. A number of you claim that this passage in Isaiah teaches the doctrine of eternal torment of people who are consciously enduring the anguish of hell.

Not long ago on the Stand to Reason radio show Christopher Morgan spoke with host Greg Koukl. One of Morgan’s comments was that Isaiah 66:24 “talks about where the worm doesn’t die and the fire is not quenched and the permanence of the suffering of the wicked.” The first thing to say is that this third element is simply incorrect. Yes Isaiah speaks about the worm and the fire as Morgan correctly observes, but it says nothing in addition to this about suffering. But in addition to adding in claims that the text never makes, there’s a deeper problem with Morgan’s exegesis, and he is certainly not alone. Many of you have done this, whether you are quoting from Isaiah 66 or from Mark 9, which quotes Isaiah 66 verbatim. The problem is that many of you have snipped out the last few words of Isaiah 66:24 and quoted them all by themselves, when in fact the whole verse, if it had been quoted, would have painted a different picture. The entire verse reads:

“And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm
shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.”

What a different scene from the one typically painted by traditionalists when they quote only 24b. When we step back just a little to see the whole verse, we realise that contrary to what Morgan (like many of you) says, there is no reference to people consciously suffering. These are dead bodies. And when we step back one more level and read the paragraphs that come immediately before this, any excuse that you might have had for misunderstanding this evaporates:

For behold, the Lord will come in fire, and his chariots like the whirlwind, to render his anger in fury, and his rebuke with flames of fire.  For by fire will the Lord enter into judgement, and by his sword, with all flesh; and those slain by the Lord shall be many.  Those who sanctify and purify themselves to go into the gardens, following one in the midst, eating pig’s flesh and the abomination and mice, shall come to an end together, declares the Lord.

For I know their works and their thoughts, and the time is coming to gather all nations and tongues. And they shall come and shall see my glory, and I will set a sign among them.  And from them I will send survivors to the nations, to Tarshish, Pul, and Lud, who draw the bow, to Tubal and Javan, to the coastlands far away, that have not heard my fame or seen my glory. And they shall declare my glory among the nations. And they shall bring all your brothers from all the nations as an offering to the Lord, on horses and in chariots and in litters and on mules and on dromedaries, to my holy mountain Jerusalem, says the Lord, just as the Israelites bring their grain offering in a clean vessel to the house of the Lord.And some of them also I will take for priests and for Levites, says the Lord.

For as the new heavens and the new earth that I make shall remain before me, says the Lord, so shall your offspring and your name remain.
From new moon to new moon, and from Sabbath to Sabbath, all flesh shall come to worship before me, declares the Lord.

And they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me. For their worm shall not die, their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh.

Any hope that you might have had of saying that perhaps the last line was ambiguous is gone. When you quote verse 24b, why do you not tell your audience about 24a, which tells us that the verse speaks of dead bodies? Why do you not tell your readers that the whole passage depicts a great onslaught of God directed at his enemies, when he comes and slays them with the sword, leaving them lying dead on the ground for all to see? Why do you leave out such important information? Why do you instead tell people that this is about the sufferings of the damned in the flames of hell?

What’s interesting is that biblical scholars who write commentaries on these texts and who are not attempting to score a theological point in their favour do not miss out these facts. Douglas Hare is a normal example:

It is clear in the Isaiah passage that the apostates whose worm and fire are unending are “dead bodies.” There is no suggestion that these evil persons will suffer eternally; their carcasses will remain indefinitely as a reminder of their rebellion against God.

Glenn People’s letter to Traditionalists is obviously worth quoting at length.  Although Edward Fudge’s work, The Fire that Consumes, is required reading, People’s Why I am an Annihilationist is a good start, compactly comprehensive, 43 pages in pdf. After sufficient reading, People’s open letter describes in scholarly fashion, the difficulty having civil argument with Traditionalists.

I cannot do the quality of work that these scholars can do, and I highly recommend the resources I have cited and included links to above.  Researching the history reveals that the immortal soul is a concept borrowed from the Greeks when the early church fathers, like Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr  began synthesizing Christian doctrine with Greek thought, quoting Plato with praise.  Somehow it became incorporated into Christian doctrine such that the gift of eternal life to the saved is matched by the curse of eternal life to the damned, spent in some kind of burning hell.  After 1800 years, it is difficult to stand up to the doctrine, but I have always been a Berean since I was saved reading the Bible in 1971, as described in my Spiritual Memoir tabbed above.  The Bereans who lived in Berea, where else, (a small city in Greece north of Mount Olympus) heard Paul preach the Gospel on one of his missionary journeys.

Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true.

Acts 17:11 (New International Version 1984)

When I look at the Scriptures I cannot find anywhere that would support God giving those who are not saved, but lost for eternity, eternal life in order to suffer conscious torment.  I see the lost are destroyed, perish, or punished with death, like we humans punish our most serious crimes, with death.  There is a death that is eternal, a final second death after this death.  That seems to be the fate of the lost as I read Scripture.

That God would destroy for eternity those He does not save is keeping with his nature.  God is not a torturer.  He is a God of love.  Though the lost condemn themselves, as John’s Gospel says, they forego eternal life, receiving death and destruction instead.

Nevertheless, the proponents of Traditionalism vigorously cling to the eternal torment of those who are condemned.  R. C. Sproul is a gifted Christian teacher and writer.  His book Chosen By God is for me the clearest and most convincing exposition of the Doctrine of Grace and Predestination, much more accessible reading today than John Calvin.

R. C. Sproul’s teacher and mentor at Pittsburgh Seminary was the late John Gerstner.  Gerstner was cited by Packer above as one of the staunch defenders of the doctrine of eternal torment in Hell.  Sproul told a story about Gerstner as follows:

One student asked Dr. Gerstner, “How can I be happy in heaven if I’m aware that one of my loved ones is in hell?” Dr. Gerstner responded: “Don’t you know that when you are in heaven you will be so sanctified that you could look at your own mother in hell and rejoice in the display of the justice of God.” And Sproul burst out laughing, informing Dr. Gerstner that his statement was absolutely ridiculous.

Sproul was a student then, and maybe now he doesn’t think it is so ridiculous since he is a Traditionalist today.  But it hurts me to think that to be Holy and Sanctified would cause me to lose all natural affection for my mother and rejoice at her suffering in Hell. The Gerstner response assumes eternal torment, then conforms his vision of sanctification accordingly.   I’m pretty sure my mother  is in Heaven, but nevertheless there are others I have loved and who have died, perhaps without the Lord  . . .   After reading God’s Word for 40 years, that does not sound like God to me.  If a 13 year old boy who likes to play violent pagan themed video games and whose parents are heathens who never took him to church dies in a car crash without knowing Christ, is it just to torment him in eternal fire for 13 million years, let alone infinity?  That does not sound like something my God would do.  I do not believe I can posit God changing me to rejoice in the suffering of children in torment for eternity, for example.

How can this judgment be proportional to the sinfulness, regardless of how cold-hearted the 13 year old adolescent boy whose brain was not mature, might have been? How can a God who is love torment this child for eternity? After 40 years of reading the Bible, this does not seem to me to conform to the nature of the loving God that I know. The Godly principle of proportionality in judgment and punishment is revealed in the Mosaic law:

But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

Exodus 21:23-25 (New International Version 1984)

Jesus himself modified this principle for mankind in his sermon on the mount:

You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’  But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

Jesus implies that God will punish the evil person, so we should not take personal vengeance proportionately or at all.  But He is not abrogating the proportionality principle of justice.   Jesus promises death and destruction to those who are perishing.  Capital punishment is reasonable and just, according to the Scripture.  There is no Scriptural authority that would support eternal torture as a reasonable and just punishment for fallen humans with their short lives on earth.   As the Psalmist says:

“You have made my days a mere handbreadth;  the span of my years is as nothing before you.   Each man’s life is but a breath.”

Psalm 39:5 (New International Version 1984)

We get our sense of justice from the Lord.  He made us in his image, and we have the mind of Christ.

A keyword search of the New International Version 1984 for “immortal” brings up 7 verses.  Among them are these:

In the way of righteousness there is life; along that path is immortality  Proverbs 12:28 

 To those who by persistence in doing good seek glory, honor and immortality, he will give eternal life. Romans 2:7 

So do not be ashamed to testify about our Lord, or ashamed of me his prisoner. But join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God, who has saved us and called us to a holy life—not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time,  but it has now been revealed through the appearing of our Savior, Christ Jesus, who has destroyed death and has brought life and immortality to light through the gospel. 2 Timothy 1:8-10

Immorality, Eternal life, is the gift of salvation.  Death is the sentence for not believing in Jesus who was sent by the Father to redeem His people. As the Apostle Paul wrote in Romans:

But who are you, O man, to talk back to God? “Shall what is formed say to him who formed it, ‘Why did you make me like this?’” Does not the potter have the right to make out of the same lump of clay some pottery for noble purposes and some for common use?

What if God, choosing to show his wrath and make his power known, bore with great patience the objects of his wrath—prepared for destruction?

Romans 9:20-22 (New International Version 1984)

And again, Jesus’s admonishment:

“Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

Matthew 10:28 (New International Version 1984)

I cannot say that I know this to be Biblical truth, but I am persuaded that it is supported by the Scripture, and great men of God, like John Stott and C. S. Lewis have found it to be so substantially supported in Scripture that they could no longer claim that eternal torment is the fate of the lost, rather publicly claiming to be tentative or agnostic on the destiny of the lost.  No matter how convincing the argument may be for annihilationism, the courage required to stand up publicly against 18 centuries of tradition is likely more than most can muster.

Here is a video of a lecture by Edward Fudge on “Three Views of Hell.”  In this comprehensive lecture, Fudge explains how the Greek doctrine of the immortal soul entered the Church in the 3rd and 4th centuries, especially in the work of Augustine.  I discuss the false doctrine of the immortality of soul further in Part 2 of this series on Annihilationism or conditional immortality.

An excellent scholarly argument for annihilationism by Clark Pinnock is here:   Pinnock – The Destruction of the Finally Impenitent [Original Paper]

Click this for Part 2 of this discussion, with additional discussion of the false doctrine of the immortality of the soul in  ”Do Lost Souls Consciously Suffer Enternal Torment in Hell Fire Part 2″.

This Post is also located at the Tab above “Hell?”

“So when you give to the needy, do not announce it with trumpets, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, to be honored by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.”

Matthew 6:2-4 (New International Version 1984)

In this passage, Jesus instructs us to have a pure unselfish motive when we give to the poor. We are not to give charity publicly in order to receive the praise of men, and satisfy our pride. Instead, we are to give freely and secretly, and so freely and so unconsciously, that even our left hand does not know what the right hand is doing. It seems that Jesus is purposely warning us that our own consciousness of our charity is corrupting and stains our good work. He tells us that God, who sees the good work and the motives of the heart, will reward us. However, Jesus does not want us to act out of selfish desire for a reward. Otherwise, the admonition to keep the act secret, even from our conscious self, were it possible, such that the cells in our body outside the right hand that gives the alms are not aware of the charitable gift, would be empty. It is difficult to imagine giving without some selfish thought entering our mind and motivation.

In the beginning of Thomas Hobbes‘ 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil, [as it says on the back of the Cambridge edition, arguably the greatest piece of political philosophy written in the English language], Hobbes works through his theory of the psychology and actions of the individual, a theoretical precursor to a theory of moral legitimacy of the political state which he calls the Leviathan. In discussing the relations of man and his relationship to people and things, and specifically the transfer of the right to possession of things, property (or money), he defines the free gift as follows:

Free-gift When the transferring of Right, is not mutuall; but one of the parties transferreth, in hope to gain thereby friendship, or service from another, or from his friends; or in hope to gain the reputation of Charity, or Magnanimity; or to deliver his mind from the pain of compassion; or in hope of reward in heaven; This is not Contract, but GIFT, FREEGIFT, GRACE: which words signifie one and the same thing.

As Hobbes defines the free gift, there is no mutual exchange — the transfer of right to property or money appears gratuitous, the giver giving without receiving anything material in return. He lists reasons why the giver gives, assuming that we necessarily act with a reason, though our reasons may be various. In each of his reasons, however, there is the hope of personal gain from the gift at root, i.e., gain in the friendship or service of others, gain in reputation as a charitable person, avoidance of the pain of compassion for suffering, and lastly, personal gain in the promised reward from God.

These reasons or motives that Hobbes attributes to a free gift reveal Hobbes’ belief that we always act out of selfish desire, even when we give alms. Even if we are not getting something that gives us pleasure in this life, like friendship, good reputation, or freedom from suffering guilt, at a minimum we act in exchange for the hope of a future reward from God in the afterlife.

However, even though Hobbes was writing as a professed Christian in a 17th century Christian Europe, it seems un-Christian to give in order to get, even if it is a heavenly reward. Jesus would not have warned us not to let the left hand know that the right hand just gave a beggar a twenty dollar bill. He would have said to give in order to get the heavenly reward. Jesus knew that fallen creatures like us cannot easily do anything without some selfish motive, if it is even possible.

Hobbes was being realistic, then. He could not think of a reason for giving a gift without some selfish motive, so the tag “free” only refers to the lack of material exchange for the right, but not that our act of giving is actually a free gift. We expect something immaterial and emotionally pleasurable in return. Thus, for Hobbes, a “free” gift is free to the recipient, but not freely given by giver, who acts for selfish gain, whether immediate or in the hereafter.

Likely, it is impossible to give with a pure unselfish motive, even anonymously, or with a pure attitude of unconditional love. How can we keep our mind from considering the pleasure, or the reward, even if we believe in God and the world expects us to act in holiness, and not as the hypocrites?

We can have a primary good motive though. Jonathan Edwards, the 18th Century American theologian and preacher, wrote that our will is determined by our strongest motive or desire at the moment, such that our acts are the result of our competing desires.

Hobbes did not consider that we may have competing or complementary desires and motives. He also did not include the desire itself to help another in need as a reason for a free gift. He assumed personal gain as the general reason motivating all voluntary action. Acting out of love is not necessarily pleasurable, as in the case of “tough love” interventions or withdrawals of support for loved ones who are suffering from addiction. But even in that case, there is a hope for the recovery of the loved one, and freedom for a time, whether brief, from despair for their life.

We strive to act from unconditional love, but few of us have the ability to act even out of love without considering the impact of the proposed act on our selves. Can I afford it? Do I have the time? Will he become dependent? Will he get the wrong idea? These thoughts despoil the purity of charitable acts.

In my own life, despite my Christian beliefs, I struggle to give freely. I have often found that whenever a charitable proposal enters my mind, there is a counter-argument for not giving presented to my consciousness. There is nothing I can do about it.

Thus, it seems that the more I can keep myself out of the deliberation and charitable conduct, the more I satisfy the Biblical standard of purity of motive. I believe that the act of charity is the work of the Holy Spirit, whether we believe or not. For a Christian believer, however, in order to allow the Spirit to inspire us to do our good works, we need the grace of God. As Paul the Apostle wrote:

For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith — and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God — not by works, so that no one can boast. For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.

Ephesians 2:8-10 (New International Version)

If I act in blind obedience to God’s command to honor the request from the beggar on the street (or the inclination to respond to any charitable request), careful not to think about it or try to discern whether the beggar is deserving, I can approach a purity of motive, even though there is a natural discomfort to obey left in my nature that tries to gain my attention.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:

Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back.

Luke 6:30 (New International Version 1984)

Taken literally and without the counsel of requirements of stewardship for what God provides, there would seem to be no limit to giving. To follow such a stringent command, we have to act in obedience and trust that God will only bring those into your path that you have the means to help.

In summary, I believe the best habits to develop are to pray for circumstances and desires that are God’s will for giving to others, and when we give charitably, to act out of obedience first and primarily, with an attitude of love for God and man, and dismiss as best we can, the thoughts of gain and good feelings that we cannot help but endure most of the time. Otherwise, the gift is never freely given, always done with selfish gain in mind, as Thomas Hobbes believed to be the case.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing hereinabove is intended to be or should be construed as a condemnation of quiet humble participation in public and civic charity and philanthropy. No trumpets sound when we write checks to large charities, and certainly no trumpets sound at the IRS if and when our charitable deduction is reviewed or entered into a database. Taking a charitable deduction for tax purposes is good stewardship, and is a legal incentive to help the needy.