Fourth post in a series on annihilationism.
To recap what I said in the previous post: Jesus bore the penalty for our sins in his own body. And the penalty was, he was put to death. That is exactly what we would expect, based on the apostle Paul’s clear statement: “The wages of sin is death …” (Ro. 6:23).
Jesus merely died for our sins; he did not suffer eternal torment. This fact was recognized as a theological problem in the Middle Ages. Anselm and Aquinas both tackled the problem. They argued that Jesus suffered relatively briefly because he is divine. To paraphrase them, Christ’s finite but divine suffering is adequate to offset the infinite but merely human suffering which would otherwise be our punishment.
In my opinion, the argument is both unbiblical and illogical. It is illogical because a finite amount of suffering cannot be equivalent to infinite suffering, even if the sufferer is God.
(If anything, I would expect the proportions to be reversed. The argument is akin to saying that if a rich man pays a small fine, that’s equivalent to a poor man paying a large fine. That can’t be right. But the fundamental difficulty is, the infinite cannot possibly be equivalent to the finite.)
The rationale is unbiblical because the Bible affirms that Jesus suffered as a human being:
… who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. (Php. 2:6-8)
Since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things, that through death he might destroy the one who has the power of death …. (Heb. 2:14)
God cannot die. Jesus had to become a human being in order to experience death. Thus the speculative explanation of Anselm and Aquinas is both illogical and unbiblical.
How did the Church start down this errant path? The answer is this: the Church Fathers imbibed the dominant view of their culture. According to the ancient Greeks, the human soul is immortal and indestructible. Edward Fudge summarizes the arguments of Tertullian, a second-century theologian:
Some things “are even known by nature,” Tertullian writes, and “the immortality of the soul is held by many. … I may use, therefore, the opinion of a Plato when he declares, ‘Every soul is immortal’.”1
Plato says that the human soul is immortal. But what does the Bible say? The Bible says that God is immortal whereas human beings are mortal:
Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. (Romans 1:22-23)
… he who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality …. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen. (1Ti. 6:15-16)
According to the Bible, only God is immortal. That’s why eternal life, promised only to those who believe in Jesus Christ, is the greatest imaginable blessing. Immortality is not our native state.
The wages of sin is death, not eternal torment. We know this from Paul’s clear statement in Romans 6:23; but we know it best of all because of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Jesus died and, by dying, bore the penalty for our sins.
3. The consummation of God’s saving activity
Finally, I wish to turn our attention to eschatology.
We are trying to determine whether the traditional view of hell is consistent with core Christian beliefs. We have considered God’s justice and Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Now I want to discuss the consummation of God’s saving activity.
Remember the first post in this series? There I presented seven texts which seem to teach that every human being ultimately will be saved. Each of the seven passages describes salvation in absolute terms: “all people”, “all things”, “the whole world”.
Colossians 1:20 is representative: “… through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.”
All things ultimately will be reconciled to God? What about the millions — billions? — of impenitent sinners suffering eternal torment in hell? Clearly they are not reconciled to God.
This problem largely disappears if we annihilationists are right. Again I turn to John Stott for support:
The eternal existence of the impenitent in hell would be hard to reconcile with the promises of God’s final victory over evil, or with the apparently universalistic texts which speak of Christ drawing all men to himself (John 12:32), and of God reconciling all things to himself through Christ (Colossians 1:20), and bringing every knee to bow to Christ and every tongue to confess his lordship (Philippians 2:10-11), so that in the end God will be “all in all” or “everything to everybody” (1 Corinthians 15:28).
These texts do not lead me to universalism …. But they do lead me to ask how God can in any meaningful sense be called “everything to everybody” while an unspecified number of people still continue in rebellion against him and under his judgement. It would be easier to hold together the awful reality of hell and the universal reign of God if hell means destruction and the impenitent are no more.2
Stott does not need my validation but, for what it’s worth, I think he is exactly right.
Conclusion
In this post, we have looked at the forest rather than the trees. We have used systematic theology as our starting point: that is, we have measured the traditional understanding of hell against the great themes of the Bible:
| Doctrine | Explanation | Implications |
|---|---|---|
| God’s justice | punishment must be proportionate to harm | an infinite punishment is necessarily unjust; there must be an upper limit |
| Christ’s atoning sacrifice | by dying, Jesus bore the full penalty of our sins | the wages of sin is not eternal torment, but death |
| the consummation of God’s saving activity | all things ultimately will be reconciled to God | consistent with annihilationism, not traditionalism |
Is it unthinkable that the Church could have been wrong through all these centuries?3 Until relatively recently, the Church did not adequately understand justification by faith. It was only in the sixteenth century that the doctrine was given its rightful place, at the center of Christian theology, by the leaders of the Protestant Reformation.
The Reformation — unlike Christ’s propitiation for sin — was not a once-for-all event. I want to introduce you to a Latin phrase, semper reformanda, which means “always reforming”. It is the short version of a slogan coined during the Reformation, “the reformed Church is always being reformed according to the Word of God.” It
refers to the Protestant argument that the church must continually re-examine itself, reconsider its doctrines, and be prepared to accept change, in order to conform more closely to orthodox Christian belief as revealed in Holy Scripture.
It is unlikely that you will be completely persuaded by my arguments here. I did not accept the argument, either, when I first encountered it. It isn’t prudent to reverse direction without first giving it some careful thought.
I ask for no more than this: that you keep an open mind on the subject.
That said, remember the principle: semper reformanda — always reforming! I think it is high time that the Church reconsidered its teaching about hell.
Previous posts in the series:
• … to reconcile to himself all things
• Eternal torment: the New Testament Texts considered
• Eternal torment: theological considerations, pt. 1
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
originally posted March 2006
1Edward W. Fudge and Robert A. Peterson, Two Views of Hell: A Biblical and Theological Dialogue, InterVarsity Press, 2000, p. 187.
2David L. Edwards and John Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue, InterVarsity Press, 1989, p. 319.
3The traditional view has been challenged from time to time. According to Wikipedia:
“The Annihilationist position is not without some historical warrant. Early forms of conditional immortality can be found in the writing of Justin Martyr (d. 165) and Theophilus of Antioch (d. 185), although Amobius (d. 330) was the first to defend annihilationism explicitly. … Since the Reformation, Annihilationism has periodically surfaced, as in the 1660 confession of the General Baptists.”
Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version, copyright 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. I sometimes take the liberty of inserting paragraph breaks where I deem them appropriate.
