Since no one has yet taken up the challenge I've issued twice now, I'll issue it a third time.
I'd like to ask the defenders of eternal torment here what they make of the fact that Jesus, who we evangelicals believe is our substitutionary, atoning sacrifice for sin,
died in our place.
Substitutionary, atoning, sacrificial death is worked into the warp and woof of salvation history from the beginning, from the garments of skin made for Adam and Eve from the first sacrificial animal death, to the Passover lamb that died in the place of the first-born of the families who placed its blood on their doorposts, to the animal sacrifices of the Mosaic covenant. This is why Jesus, as their typological fulfillment, is so consistently said to have died in the place of sinners, biblical authors using the Greek prepositions ἀντί and ὑπ́ερ to teach that Jesus literally took our place and suffered what we deserved when he died (e.g.,
Matthew 20:28;
Mark 10:45;
1 Timothy 2:6;
2 Corinthians 5:14;
John 11:50-52).
It seems eminently reasonable, then, that the penal consequences of sin, borne by Jesus on the cross as a substitute in the place of sinners, is the sort of death he suffered. Yet that sort of death—the privation of embodied life—is the very sort that the finally impenitent in hell will
never suffer, according to the doctrine of eternal torment. And so its defenders inadvertently end up denying the substitutionary nature of Christ's death, for whereas he died, the risen wicked will not.
Conservative evangelicals are ordinarily adamant that it is heresy to deny the substitutionary death of Christ, including Bruce Ware, John Piper, and Chuck Colson. Meanwhile, otherwise stellar, thoughtful exegetes and theologians end up inadvertently denying this evangelical essential, including Wayne Grudem. In his
Systematic Theology, he writes, "When Jesus knew that he had paid the full penalty for our sin, he said, ‘
It is finished’ (
John 19:30).” Grudem's use of the perfect-tense "had paid" demonstrates that in his view, Christ suffered the complete penalty for sin, the equivalent of the eternity of torment he thinks Christ's people deserved, and
then he died. So his death actually isn't substitutionary in this view; only his pain is.
Can any defender of eternal torment here simultaneously affirm the substitutionary nature of Jesus' physical death and the doctrine of eternal torment for the physically risen, immortal wicked in hell?
