Authored by Tim Barnett and Greg Koukl
You may not have noticed, but Hell is not as popular as it used to be. Simply put, the doctrine of Hell has fallen on hard times.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have long denied Hell, at least the everlasting punishment part at the heart of the classical view, along with Seventh Day Adventists, each teaching that, in the final judgment, the unrepentant wicked will be snuffed from existence—annihilated.
Currently, however, it’s not just those on the theological fringes who are rejecting the idea of Hell as eternal conscious torment, but also respected evangelicals like theologian John Stackhouse and the late Anglican, John Stott, venerable rector emeritus of All Souls Church in London.
In recent years, opposition to the doctrine of endless punishment by those who are rethinking Hell has gained enough popular momentum that “conditional immortality”—also known as “annihilationism”1—has begun to make significant inroads into mainstream Christianity.2 This trend must be answered, for two reasons.
First, in our view the Gospel itself is undermined to some degree when Hell gets the short shrift. Though some consider extinction of self-consciousness a weighty sentence for earthly wrongs, it pales in comparison to never-ending conscious torment. The good news is only as good as the bad news is bad, and in Scripture eternal happiness and everlasting joy are balanced against the alternative—eternal misery and everlasting anguish. Indeed, Jesus put the calculus precisely this way, as you will soon see.
Second, and more importantly, Paul makes it clear that shepherds in the church must be “holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching,” and also must be able “to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict” (Titus 1:9). There is little question in our own minds which view has been “in accordance with the teaching” historically when it comes to the question of Hell. Here’s why.
Over 130 years ago, W. G. T. Shedd opened his classic work on Hell, The Doctrine of Endless Punishment, with these words: “The common opinion of the ancient church was that the future punishment of the impenitent wicked is endless. This was the catholic faith [i.e., the faith of the entire church]; as much so as belief in the Trinity.”3 Indeed, Shedd points out, there was more unanimity in the ancient church on Hell’s eternal torment than there was on Trinitarianism.
Further, the conviction of the early Christians flowed seamlessly from the OT rabbinic tradition of the time, with the schools of Shammai and Hillel both holding to the doctrine of eternal punishment, as did the Jewish synagogue in general throughout the entire first century.4 Later, the medieval church as well as the church of the Reformation—both Lutherans and Calvinists—were of one mind on the doctrine.5
It is possible for traditional teachings to be in error, of course. However, when Paul says that elders must hold fast to the faithful teaching, and when the writer of Hebrews calls the doctrine of “eternal judgment” an “elementary teaching,” part of the very “foundation” of instruction about Christ (Heb. 6:1-2), and when the vast chorus of the church faithful understood that Hell was a place of everlasting conscious suffering, then any departure from that “catholic faith” must be justified by a clear and unambiguous appeal to Scripture.
Making our case for the classical view, though, carries with it a liability. In one sense we find it a bit awkward to be the champions of perpetual punishment, everlasting suffering, and endless torment. We want you to know, then—just for the record—that we find no joy in this. It’s hard to think of a doctrine more painful to consider, more frightening to contemplate, or more bizarre to imagine than the classical conception of Hell. It is, in John MacArthur’s words, an “appalling truth.”
However, what we like or don’t like is hardly the point. “Emotionally, I find the concept [of eternal suffering] intolerable,” John Stott confided, “and do not understand how people can live with it without cauterizing 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.”6
Quite right. Taking counsel from our feelings on a revolting topic like everlasting torment is perilous, since we inevitably stumble into the error of sacrificing God’s justice on the altar of His love. But that will never do since both God’s love and His justice are grounded, so to speak, in the same thing: His goodness. Goodness informs both God’s mercy (through love) and God’s punishment (through justice) and neither can be sacrificed without sacrificing God’s noble character.
Thankfully, these are not in conflict in the Christian Story since both find their perfect harmony in the cross where God is both just and justifier of those who have faith in Jesus (Rom. 3:26). On Calvary God simultaneously expresses both His holiness and His compassion.
In the end, we side with C. S. Lewis who wrote, “There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than this, if it lay in my power. But it has the full support of Scripture and, specially, of our Lord’s own words; it has always been held by Christendom.”7 Stott adds, “As a committed evangelical, my question must be—and is—not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s Word say?”8
We agree. Our only legitimate course of action regarding the nature of Hell is to answer the question, “What does God’s Word say?” So to Scripture we shall turn.
There is a simple reason for the near unified voice of the church for over 1500 years regarding the unending torment of Hell. Those believers were convinced it was Jesus’ own view. Christ the appointed Judge made clear the price that would be paid when His gavel fell. “He took it upon Himself to sound the note of warning,” Shedd points out. “He, the Judge of the quick and the dead, assumed the responsibility of teaching the doctrine of Endless Retribution.”9
Note, for example, Jesus’ depiction of the final judgment at the end of the age found in Matt. 25:
But when the Son of Man comes in His glory, and all the angels with Him, then He will sit on His glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before Him and He will separate them from one another, as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats; and He will put the sheep on His right and the goats on the left. (31-32)
The sheep, blessed of the Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for them (34). The goats, however, face a terrible sentence:
Then He will also say to those on His left, “Depart from Me, accursed ones, into the eternal fire which has been prepared for the devil and his angels.” (41)
Jesus concludes His parable with a simple summary of the judgment: “These will go away into eternal punishment,” He says, “but the righteous into eternal life” (46).
What are we to make of this crucial pronouncement? At first glance the meaning seems unambiguous. The sheep experience blessedness forever and the goats experience punishment forever. The parallelism is clear-cut. The duration of the conscious experience for the first group—everlasting joy—is the same as the duration of the conscious experience for the second—everlasting torment. That is the plain sense of the passage, the ordinary meaning of the words, and the natural reading of the text.
Conditionalists, though, claim otherwise. Most recognize that eternal life and eternal punishment are both never-ending, after a fashion. They take the phrase “eternal life” in its ordinary sense—an ongoing, conscious, everlasting experience of life—but they take the term “eternal punishment” to be eternal only in its consequence—that the goats’ non-existence continues forever. “After all,” conditionalist Preston Sprinkle writes, “when Hebrews 9:12 refers to our ‘eternal redemption,’ it most probably doesn’t refer to a never-ending act of redeeming, but to the never-ending redemption that results from God’s saving work.”10
Though some might be tempted by Sprinkle’s point, it falters for a number of reasons. First, Sprinkle is only half right about Hebrews. Agreed, the passage does not refer to a never-ending act of redemption. It refers, rather, to a never-ending state of redemption (“having obtained for us an eternal redemption”), which state is subjective by nature (unlike annihilation). Keep in mind that being “redeemed,” like being “saved,” is not only an event, but an ongoing conscious experience.
Second, notice further that the “eternal redemption” of verse 12 secures for us the “eternal inheritance” of verse 15. The two go together, the eternal conscious experience of redemption making possible the eternal conscious enjoyment of the inheritance.
Finally, a simple appeal to common sense. No one would say that executed criminals are being punished for eternity just because they are dead forever.
No, Hebrews 9:12 does not invalidate the plain sense of Jesus’ teaching. Simply put, the conditionalist interpretation of Matt. 25:46 is not a natural reading, but a strained one, especially since the phrases “eternal punishment” and “eternal life” in are in unmistakable, deliberate parallel. The duration is the same for both groups. Only the quality of the conscious experience changes.
Here is the key question: What meaning did Jesus intend to convey in this passage? When we follow the flow of His reasoning starting earlier in chapter 24, His meaning is unmistakable. For two full chapters—97 verses—Jesus delivers a stern warning of final judgment using a series of vivid depictions that make a clear contrast between the fate of the righteous and the fate of the wicked.
In Matt. 24:45-51, the faithful and sensible slave is put in charge of all his master’s possessions, while the evil slave is scourged and banished to a place of “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” In the parable of the ten virgins, the prudent are welcomed into the joy of the wedding feast while the imprudent are completely shut out (Matt. 25:10). In the parable of the talents (Matt. 25:14-30), two faithful servants are invited to “enter into the joy of your master” (21, 23), while the wicked slave is thrown into “outer darkness” where there is “weeping and gnashing of teeth” (30). Finally, at the last judgment the righteous inherit the kingdom and eternal life, while the wicked are cast out (“Depart from Me”), into a place of “eternal fire” (41) where they “go away into eternal punishment” (46)11
The classical understanding that these passages teach conscious, never-ending torment follows smoothly from both the immediate wording of each passage as well as from the general flow of thought of the larger context. The righteous are rewarded, inherit the kingdom, enter into the feast and into the joy of eternal life. The wicked are shut out from the feast, banished to a place of outer darkness where they enter into eternal punishment, weeping and grinding their teeth in the agony of eternal fire.12 There is no mystery here; there is no ambiguity. Jesus’ meaning is unmistakable.
To sharpen the point, 24 verses into chapter 26 Jesus makes a dark appraisal of the fate of His betrayer: “It would have been good for that man if he had not been born” (Matt. 26:24). How does Jesus’ comment square with annihilationism?
If Judas had not been born, then he would not exist. If he were annihilated in judgment, then he would not exist. The last condition would be the same as the first. How could the first be “good,” then, by comparison? No, nonexistence can only be good compared to the everlasting torment of eternal judgment that Jesus had been warning of, time and again, in the previous two chapters. That is the flow of thought. That is the natural reading. 13
Jesus is also not ambiguous about the final abode of the damned. He says they will be banished “into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels” (Matt. 25:41). What fire is that, exactly? We find the answer in Revelation 20 where John completes the account of the great white throne judgment at the end of history that Jesus introduced us to in Matt. 25.
And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone where the beast and the false prophet are also, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever…. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire. (Rev. 20:10, 14-15)
All God’s enemies, then, spiritual and human alike—the devil, the prophet, the beast, the great multitude of the dead before the throne—all are destined for the same place, the lake of fire. Here is the key question: What happens to those thrown into the lake of fire? Do they experience unending conscious torment forever (the classical view), or do they forever cease to exist (the conditionalist view)?
Clearly, neither the devil nor the beast nor the false prophet are annihilated. That’s plain enough. Instead, they are “tormented day and night forever and ever.” Is it not equally clear that, in like manner, the wicked who are thrown into that same lake with the devil, the beast, and the prophet experience their same end? Indeed, that’s precisely what John described six chapters earlier. He wrote that those humans who worshipped the beast …
. . . will be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever; they have no rest, day and night…. (Rev. 14:10-11)
This dread sentence meshes perfectly with everything else God’s Word says about the fire of final judgment. John the Baptist warned that Jesus “will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire” (Matt. 3:12b). Jesus Himself warned often of the “furnace of fire” (Matt. 13:42), the “eternal fire” (Matt. 18:8), the “unquenchable fire” (Mk. 9:43), and the “fiery Hell” (Matt. 5:22). He likened that fire to Gehenna, where “their worm does not die, and the fire is not quenched” (Mk. 9:48).
Why does Jesus repeatedly say that Hell’s fire is eternal and never quenched? It’s because the task it was meant to accomplish continues forever. A fire that completely consumes what it burns (annihilationism) no longer blazes. Hell’s furnace of fire is everlasting because the fuel for the fire—the wicked—is never consumed. The fire is never ending because the punishing is never ending. That is Jesus’ point.
Nevertheless, conditionalists push back on this conclusion. For example, some read Jesus and John in light of Old Testament judgment texts like Isaiah 34. Since the imagery of the eternal judgment in Rev. 20 is in some ways similar, for example, to Isaiah’s description of the earthly judgment of Edom, and since Edom was utterly destroyed (annihilated), then the wicked of the great final judgment will share the same fate the argument goes. How do we respond?
Keep two things in mind when you consider this point. First, it’s not unusual for similar imagery to describe judgments that have consequences in different dimensions—temporal and eternal. In Revelation, for example, God lays waste to the nations on earth, then later gathers them together for an eternal judgment at the great white throne. Though both have grave consequences in their own spheres, these are entirely distinct aspects of God’s judgment—one earthly and temporal, the other heavenly and everlasting. Bodies are destroyed and nations laid waste, then souls are sentenced in a final scene of heavenly justice.14 The first both precedes and prefigures the second.15
Second, God’s truth in the bible is revealed progressively, with subsequent writers fleshing out and completing the partial picture revealed earlier. For example, John in Rev. 20 adds to and expands on what Jesus taught about the final judgment in Matt. 25.
There’s little question that Isaiah 34, for example, paints a picture of ultimate judgment making Edom desolate “from generation to generation” where “smoke will go up forever” from a fire that “will not be quenched” (10). Notice two things, though. First, the people along with their domestic animals (the lambs and goats and oxen and bulls) fall. That is clear (5-7). Second, however, only the land burns day and night, not the wicked. They’re dead.
Its streams will be turned into pitch, and its loose earth into brimstone, and its land will become burning pitch. It will not be quenched night or day; its smoke will go up forever; from generation to generation it will be desolate. None will pass through it forever and ever. (9-10)
This “desolate” land, however, remains inhabited by pelicans, hedgehogs, owls, ravens, jackals, ostriches, wolves, hairy goats, snakes, and hawks (11, 13-15). Isaiah’s intent, it seems, is to describe a judgment in which people are slain and the land is laid waste as far as human habitation is concerned. It returns to the abode of wild animals. This doesn’t sound a bit like John’s Hell to us—clearly nothing like the lake of fire in Rev. 20. The reason is that each is looking at different, but complementary, facets of God’s judgment, different dimensions of the same judicial act.
Edom’s civilization is destroyed and its land returns to its wild state. It’s the earthly aspect of judgment—physical destruction—that portends an everlasting punishment (“the smoke goes up forever”) that Jesus and John expand on.
We do not dispute that if Isaiah were read in isolation, annihilationism would be a possible inference from the text, though by no means a necessary one. We also do not dispute that there is a kinship between Isaiah’s depiction of judgment and John’s. Both portray ultimate judgment and both trade on the same imagery. Because of this kinship, though, we must insist that Isaiah not be allowed to have the last word. The final word on the final judgment should come from the final chapter of God’s Word. And here John speaks without ambiguity.
Revelation, in a sense, gives the rest of the story, describing the final disposition of anyone from any land—Edom, Sodom and Gomorrah, or the kings of the earth and their multitudes in Revelation trembling before God’s throne as the final gavel falls. These are not annihilated, but rather deported to outer darkness, away from the presence of the Lord, where there is no rest, only weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth as they are tormented day and night forever.
We have much more to say about the shortcomings of conditionalism. We will do that in part two of “Hell Interrupted” in the November issue of Solid Ground.
1 John Stackhouse and Preston Sprinkle prefer the phrase “terminal punishment,” though this characterization is a bit at odds with Jesus who depicted the punishment not as “terminal,” but as “eternal” (Matt. 25:46).
2 To be fair, conditionalists do not deny Hell outright. Also to be fair, though, by evacuating Hell of its central characteristic—endless punishment for the unrepentant wicked—they have so redefined the nature of Hell that it bears little resemblance to the Hell of classical theology.
3 W. G. T. Shedd, The Doctrine of Endless Punishment (Carlisle, PA: The Banner of Truth Trust, 1986; first published 1885), 1.
4 Alfred Edersheim, The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah, II. 789.
5 Shedd, 4.
6 John Stott, “Judgment and Hell,” in Rethinking Hell: Reading in Evangelical Conditionalism, ed. Christopher Date, Gregory Stump, and Joshua Anderson (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books), 51.
7 C. S. Lewis, “The Problem of Pain,” in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007), 620.
8 Stott, 51.
9 Shedd, 13.
10 Denny Burk, John Stackhouse, Robin Parry, and Jerry Walls, Four Views on Hell, ed. Preston Sprinkle and Stanley N. Gundry (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016), 194.
11 Jesus’ precise wording is significant: The accursed ones “go into the eternal fire” (41) and “go away into eternal punishment” (46), that is, they are sent away to enter into a fire which burns eternally and into a punishment that lasts eternally. This is not annihilation.
12 Jesus describes the place of torment as a place of weeping and gnashing of teeth multiple times, sometimes coupled with the location, either “outer darkness” or the furnace of fire” (Matt. 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13, 24:51, 25:30, and Lk. 13:28). Note, there is a conscious experience of profound, ongoing anguish while in the darkness or in the fire.
13 I guess one might counter that Judas would experience God’s wrath through some sort of temporal punishment before he is finally annihilated, and this is what Jesus is referring to, but we see no suggestion of that in the text. Further, if that were the case, then annihilation would not be an act of judgment (as conditionalists claim), but an act of mercy, ending Judas’ torment much like euthanasia is considered an act of mercy by ending a patient’s torment. No, this is not the plain sense of the text, especially considering Jesus’ grave warnings in Matt. 24-25.
14 Regardless of how one understands the nature of God’s final sentence in Rev. 20:15 (annihilation or eternal torment), clearly these events describe two distinct elements of God’s judgment.
15 Jude cites Sodom and Gomorrah in the same way, their earthly judgment “exhibited as an example in undergoing the punishment of eternal fire” (7), and “for whom the black darkness has been reserved forever” (13).
Tim Barnett and Greg Koukl
Hell is not a pleasant topic. It’s an ugly, unsettling, dangerous reality—expedient to dismiss, easy to avoid serious discussion about, convenient to disregard by joking about in a way that trivializes it.
This will not do, though, because the sobering certainty about Hell is this: One day every person who has ever lived will stand in judgment for their conduct in this life. For multitudes, that will not go well because for them, when the final gavel falls, Hell will be their sentence.
The nature of that sentence is our concern here. However, regardless of how one construes what happens in Hell, one point is clear: Hell is the end of the line. It is the final state. It is the ultimate destination for the damned. Hell’s door is shut forever, and its sentence can never be undone, revoked, or reversed. Ever.
When dealing with something as real and as dreadful as Hell, then, it is important we get our facts straight. Our interests are best served by sticking with a reliable authority. In “Hell Interrupted Part 1” 1 we reasoned that if you want to know what Hell is actually like, let God tell you. More precisely, listen to what Jesus says not just about the reality of Hell, but also about the subjective nature of that dread sentence. The Son created Hell. He sustains it. He is the one who decides who ends up there.2 And He is the one who sounds the clearest, unambiguous warnings of its dangers.
Here is what we found.
In our first installment we pointed out that what happens at the final judgment is a critical piece of the Christian theological puzzle. Eternal judgment (however it’s ultimately defined) is an “elementary teaching” at the very foundation of Christian doctrine.3 We also noted that for two millennia the church universal was not divided on the doctrine of unceasing suffering for those condemned to Hell. Indeed (we noted), there was more debate about the Trinity than there was about Hell’s misery.4
There was a reason for the large consensus in the church about Hell’s anguish. Christians were convinced this was what Jesus Himself taught. Christ said that when He comes in glory, He will banish the “accursed” goats from His presence sending them into the furnace of “the eternal fire…prepared for the devil and his angels.” There they will experience ongoing, conscious “wailing” and “weeping” and “gnashing...teeth” in the of agony of “eternal punishment.”5 This, we argued, is the plain, ordinary sense of Jesus’ teaching on Hell.
Further, we learned that Jesus’ own teaching dovetails perfectly with John’s description of the same event. At the end of the age the devil is “thrown into the lake of fire” where he “will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” All those who worship the beast and his image, along with all those whose names are not found in the book of life, suffer the same fate—”tormented with fire” with “no rest day and night”—in the same place, “the lake of fire.”6 Again, this is the ordinary and natural reading of John’s description of Hell’s punishing flames.
There is more to the story, though, some say. Conditionalists—those who hold to the annihilation of the wicked at the judgment—insist that Jesus’ and John’s descriptions be interpreted in light of other passages, texts they think give an entirely different picture. Fair enough. We’ll take a look. First, though, some basic rules of order.
Both conditionalists and traditionalists read the same biblical texts but come to different conclusions about what those passages mean. Is there a way to judge fairly between diverse interpretations offered by equally sincere people who all share a high view of Scripture? We think there is.
According to Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, a standard text on the craft of interpreting the Bible,7 “God intended the Bible to function… as a window into the worlds and meanings of the authors…,”8 and, “The writers…of the Bible intended to communicate to their readers in the same way people normally communicate [emphases added].” 9 These are common-sense notions everyone in this discussion is committed to.
Our goal when interpreting any communication, then, is to determine an author’s intended meaning using the ordinary conventions of language. Here’s where the basic “rules of order”—a handful of equally common-sense interpretive principles—come into play. We suggest three.
First, “Each statement must be understood according to its natural meaning in the literary context in which it occurs.”10 Simply put, context is king. The meaning of any text is derived from the flow of thought in the immediate context of a passage without reference to any other books—or, especially, another Testament—if the contextualized meaning itself is straightforward. As some have put it, “If the plain sense makes common sense, don’t add any other sense to it.”
Second, “The correct interpretation of Scripture is the meaning required by the normal meaning of the words in the context in which they occur [emphasis added].”11 Most words are equivocal (having multiple possible meanings) rather than univocal (having only one meaning). This rule says that we let the text tell us the specific meaning from the range of meanings of any word or phrase.
Our first two rules are consistent with our common-sense approach to ordinary communication. The third is unique to the Bible: “Biblical teaching in earlier parts of the Bible…are developed and enlarged in later revelation….In some instances, God reveals His truth progressively [emphasis added].”12
Often, the first word is not the complete story. Later revelation gives us the fullest picture, the most complete characterization. Consequently, “where earlier revelation has progressively prepared the way for later formulation of God’s truth, we must give priority to the later [emphasis added].”13 Put simply, the final word is the last word.
These three well-established, standard principles of hermeneutics are not controversial and comprise basic canons of biblical interpretation. They are the rules everyone follows to get the meanings right. We are looking for 1) the common-sense meaning of a passage, in light of 2) the meanings of the words as the authors use them in context, while 3) being sensitive to the flow of progressive revelation where later writers provide more clarity to our doctrine.
With those ground rules in place, it’s time to look at a central argument of the conditionalists: the language of death and destruction.
Let’s go directly to the heart of the conditionalists’ complaint, what might be called the “vocabulary of destruction.” Note Clark Pinnock:
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…. Does the burden of proof not rest with the traditionalists to explain why the strong impression of the destruction of the wicked that the Bible gives its readers should not just be believed? 14
Edward Fudge—who some consider the father of the modern conditionalist movement—writes, “The Old Testament utilizes some 50 Hebrew words and 75 figures of speech to describe the ultimate end of the wicked—and every one sounds… like total extinction.”15 The venerable John Stott weighed in with, “It would seem strange, therefore, if people who are said to suffer destruction are in fact not destroyed.”16
The point sounds compelling at first glance, but note D. A. Carson’s important observation:
Stott’s conclusion… is memorable, but useless as an argument, because it is merely tautologous: of course those who suffer destruction are destroyed. But it does not follow that those who suffer destruction cease to exist. Stott has assumed his definition of “destruction” in his epigraph [Carson’s emphasis].17
Do not miss Carson’s meaning. Treating “destruction” words (et al.) as if they had only one meaning (the conditionalists’ meaning) is not an argument, but question-begging (Carson’s “tautology”18). His point applies equally to Fudge’s references and to Pinnock’s “strong impression of the destruction of the wicked.” So here’s our question. Do those words mean total destruction, that is, complete non-existence—annihilation—as conditionalists conclude? They do not—at least, not necessarily, and that is the key.
“Destroy,” for example, does not always mean loss of being, but often means loss of well-being, as New Testament scholar Douglas Moo demonstrates:
The key words for “destroy” and “destruction” can also refer to land that has lost its fruitfulness (olethros in Ezek. 6:14; 14:16); to ointment that is poured out wastefully and to no apparent purpose (apoleia in Matt. 26:8; Mk. 14:4); to wineskins that can no longer function because they have holes in them (apollymi in Matt. 9:17; Mk. 2:22; Lk. 5:37); to a coin that is useless because it is “lost” (apollymi in Lk. 15:9); or to the entire world that “perishes,” as an inhabited world, in the Flood (2 Pet. 3:6). In none of these cases do the objects cease to exist; they cease to be useful or to exist in their original, intended state.19
This way of understanding “death” and “destruction” comports completely with our common-sense use of those notions. In fact, most of the time we do not use them to mean “cease to exist.” If a tornado destroys a house, the debris remains but is useless for its intended purpose as a suitable shelter. If bad news “destroys” our vacation, the enjoyment is gone, but the holiday labors on. If cancer kills a patient, the body remains even though some part of that person has “passed away.” Some part has gone elsewhere, which is precisely what the biblical record teaches (e.g., Lk. 23:43).
To be destroyed or to suffer death or to be “wiped out” or to “be no more” or any of its other equivalents does not mean to vanish. In the Bible, destruction language is not synonymous with nonexistence.
Here is the problem. Conditionalists jump to passages in the Old Testament describing the destruction of the wicked, yet consistently fail to make the distinction between earthly destruction and eternal nonexistence. Pinnock writes:
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 (v. 9-10), that they will perish and vanish like smoke (v. 20), and be altogether destroyed (v. 38).”20
However, in this very Psalm (like many others), David contrasts the earthly fate of the wicked with the earthly fate of the righteous. Verse 9 simply says, “For evildoers will be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord, they will inherit the land.”
Being “cut off” does not mean finally and irreversibly annihilated. It means to be killed. In Exodus God refers to Jews being “cut off from the earth” through pestilence (9:15). Sabbath breakers were to be “cut off from among God’s people” (Ex. 31:14)—executed, that is (cf. Num. 15:32-36). Indeed, Daniel tells us “the Messiah will be cut off and have nothing” (9:26).
David continues, “In just a little while, the wicked will be no more; though you look carefully at his place, he will not be there” (Ps. 37:10). The wicked are gone from their place. That’s all. Pinnock’s passage does not teach that they cease to exist. It doesn’t address that issue. That is not David’s intention.
Examples like this are legion. “Let sinners be consumed from the earth, and let the wicked be no more” (Ps. 104:35), or, “He has utterly destroyed them. He has given them over to slaughter. So their slain will be thrown out, and their corpses will give off their stench….” (Is. 34:2-3), or, “I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land…” Gen. 6:7.
The wicked are physically destroyed. Their bodies are blotted out and their cities vanish in the smoke of judgment. That is the plain sense of these passages. That is the intended meaning, in the context. That and no more.
Here we return to one of our core hermeneutical rules of order. Everything hinges on how “destruction” words were treated by the original authors. Check any Old Testament text cited to support annihilation and ask if the author is principally describing the physical, earthly perspective, or is he unequivocally describing the eternal fate of the wicked. 21
Contrary to the conditionalists’ view, death and destruction and nonexistence simply are not interchangeable terms in these texts. It does not matter how many Old Testament examples there are—thousands, even—if the entire lot of them is compromised in exactly the same way. Nothing can be inferred about the eternal state of the wicked from statements that focus on temporal punishment. That must be determined on other grounds.
Do any Scriptures address the eternal fate of the wicked? Yes, they do, with clarity.
Scripture uses destruction language to describe eternal judgments, too. Jesus said, “Do not fear those who kill the body, but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in Hell” (Matt. 10:28). Does Jesus mean annihilation? He doesn’t say, but Paul does.
Paul offers a clear picture of the nature of eternal destruction in 2 Thess. 1:9. He says that at the coming of Christ the wicked “will pay the penalty of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power….”
Once again we have destruction language, but notice the qualifier. The apostle uses spatial language. A nonexistent being can have no spatial relationship to God. Those who do not exist are not “away” in any sense.
Earlier in this passage (v. 6) Paul also says it is “just for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you.” The punishment is in kind—affliction for affliction. Affliction is felt and banishment is experienced. Both require conscious existence. None of this can happen with annihilationism.
Additionally, Paul’s destruction/banishment language fits like a glove with Jesus’ and John’s own characterization of the damned who are told to “depart” who are “cast out” and “thrown out” and “go away into eternal punishment” and are “thrown into” the lake of fire.22
Because they are banished, the wicked are “destroyed,” that is, ruined for their original purpose of eternal friendship with God. Destruction isn’t eternal annihilation; it’s eternal alienation—total and everlasting separation from God.
There is complete harmony with each of these texts. Not surprisingly, these details come from the New Testament, completely in keeping with our rule regarding progressive revelation. The Old Testament gives us part of the picture; the New Testament provides the rest.
How do conditionalists respond? Since it’s difficult to take exception with the plain sense of 2 Thess. 1:9 read in context, conditionalists contest the translation. They contend the Greek should not be rendered “away from” but rather “comes from,” that God’s presence is the source of the destruction with nothing said about location. Note conditionalist Pere Grice: “The conditionalist reading is that the glorious presence and power of the Lord causes the punishment of destruction, which is everlasting because it is God’s permanent judgment.” 23
This simply will not work. Virtually all modern translations render the Greek as “away from,” “separated from,” or “shut out from” for good reason. Paul quotes Is. 2:10 here. In the Septuagint—the Greek translation of the Old Testament that Paul is probably quoting from here—the Greek is almost identical. Isaiah describes the wicked hiding “from the terror of the Lord and from the splendor of His majesty.” That’s spatial language. The translators have not erred.
There is no safe harbor for conditionalists with this move. Paul speaks clearly. The plain sense of the passage makes common sense. No need to add any other sense to it.
Conditionalists frequently make what they think is an obvious point: Christians live forever (i.e., have eternal life) and the dead die forever (i.e., cease to exist). They say that on the traditionalists’ view, though, the “dead” don’t die, and the wicked get eternal life.
Note how conditionalists have expressed their concerns: “Eternal life is made possible and received only through Christ”24 and, “Everlasting life is existence that continues without end, and everlasting death is destruction without end,”25 and, “The word ‘death’ has in Scripture its natural meaning of the extinction of life”26 or the “end of existence,”27 and, “It would be hard to imagine a concept more confusing than that of death which means existing endlessly without the power of dying.”28
These statements are an interesting mixture of both truth and confusion. First, the truth. We would never deny that eternal life is made possible only through Christ. We also can’t deny, for example, that “death is the cessation of life” or that “everlasting life is existence that continues without end.” Of course death means dying, just like “those who suffer destruction are destroyed.” We cannot take exception here either since both phrases are, once again, mere tautologies. Those observations take us nowhere. That’s part of the confusion.
The key issue for us is the biblical meanings of “death” and “eternal life” (as opposed to everlasting life). The idea that everyone exists forever does not mean, as one put it, “Everyone has eternal life!”29 That is not the way the biblical writers use that term.
So, what is the meaning the biblical authors employ for these words?
First, the phrase “eternal life” is a term of art—it has a specialized meaning in biblical use that is different from our ordinary understanding of the words. Jesus tells us, famously, “This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (Jn. 17:3).
For Jesus, the point of eternal life was not the duration of existence, but the quality of relationship. Eternal life, then, is the Christian’s present, precious possession of an intimate friendship with God that never ends. This is Jesus’ definition, in context. It does not follow, though, that other human beings—the damned—do not have everlasting existence. Again, that must be determined on other grounds.
It is clear that John intends us to understand Jesus’ words this way, since he uses the same grammatical structure in other passages: “This is my commandment, that you love one another” (Jn. 15:12), and, “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments” (2 Jn. 6), and, “The testimony is this, that God has given us eternal life” (1 Jn. 5:11).30
In Scripture, eternal life simply is not a synonym for “everlasting existence,” so it is a mistake to force that meaning on it. Neither, as it turns out, does “death” mean non-existence. It refers, instead, to a kind of separation. In physical death the soul is separated from the body, so the body expires, but the soul lives on. In spiritual death the person is estranged from God, but the person lives on.
In the garden, God told Adam and Eve, “In the day that you eat from [the tree] you will surely die” (Gen. 2:17). Clearly, though, they did not die physically on the day they disobeyed. They “died” in a different way. Their relationship with God was severed. Separation of man from relationship with God is what God Himself calls a death.
This concept of separation fits the biblical teaching of both life and death in our relationship to God. In the New Testament, those who do not know God are spiritually “dead in…transgressions and sins,” even though they may be physically alive (Eph. 2:1). Conversely, Christians are “alive together with Christ” (Eph. 2:5), even though they may be physically dead (like the martyrs in Rev. 6:10-11). This biblical understanding of death and life also meshes perfectly with Rom. 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” And if “death” does not mean destruction in the sense of annihilation, then “everlasting death” does not mean everlasting annihilation. That meaning must also be determined on other grounds.
There are many other examples such as this, but these are adequate to answer the only question that matters regarding the conditionalists’ concern: Are the terms “death” and “eternal life” as used in the Bible synonymous with annihilation and everlasting existence, respectively? Clearly the answer is no. So, again, it is a mistake to force those meanings on them to justify conditionalism.
Put simply, the classical view fits the plain sense and the common sense, so far, of all of the passages in question. Therefore, there is no need to strain at finding any other sense (e.g., conditionalism/annihilationism). That move is an artificial one, considering the author’s meaning in those texts.
In “Hell Interrupted Part 3,” we will look closely at the book of Revelation, which presents—by the conditionalists’ own admission—the most powerful evidence for the traditional view. Consistent with the pattern of progressive revelation, the final word will be the last word.
1 Available in enhanced digital form at str.org.
2 Col. 1:16-17, Acts 17:31.
3 Heb. 6:1-2.
4 Please note that, though we think our case is strengthened by the general consensus of the church over the ages, it is not the basis for our view. Rather, we’re convinced Scripture teaches eternal torment, and so we argue here. Thus, dissenting voices from the past in themselves have no bearing on our argument.
5 Matt. 8:12, 13:42, 13:50, 22:13, 24:51, 25:30, 25:41, 46; Lk. 13:27-28.
6 Rev. 14:9-11, 20:10, 15.
7 It’s the text I (Koukl) was assigned as a grad student at Talbot seminary.
8 Klein, Blomberg, and Hubbard, Introduction to Biblical Interpretation, 3rd Ed. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2017), 264.
9 Ibid, 264.
10 Ibid, 298.
11 Ibid, 325.
12 Ibid, 586.
13 Ibid, 586.
14 Clark Pinnock in Rethinking Hell: Reading in Evangelical Conditionalism, ed. Christopher Date, Gregory Stump, and Joshua Anderson (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books), 64.
15 Ibid, 79.
16 Ibid, 51.
17 D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 522.
18 Simply saying the same thing twice in a different way.
19 Douglas Moo in Hell Under Fire (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004), 105.
20 Rethinking Hell, 64.
21 Strictly speaking, all we have to show is that earthly judgment is a reasonable understanding of these texts and that annihilation is not required, though we think our case is much stronger than that.
22 Matt. 8:12, 25:30, 41, 46 and Rev. 20:15.
23 http://rethinkinghell.com/2016/11/annihilation-in-2-thessalonians-19-part-1-destroyed-by-the-glory-of-his-manifest-presence/.
24 Glenn Peoples in Rethinking Hell, 12.
25 Philip Hughes in Rethinking Hell, 162.
26 Basil Atkinson in Rethinking Hell, 114.
27 Harold Guillebaud, in Rethinking Hell, 162.
28 Philip Hughes, The True Image: The Origin and Destiny of Man in Christ (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1989), 403.
29 Glenn Peoples in Rethinking Hell, 12.
30 Note the present tense here.