Conditional Immortality Supports Annihilationion, Refutes Eternal Conscious Torment and Universalism

[1stcenturylady]

2 Peter 2

20 For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. 22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: “A dog returns to his own vomit,” and, “a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire.”

No one has addressed any of my posts of the state of the spirit, whether it is mortal or immortal, so I'll just post my thoughts here to myself.

When I have read the above statement, I have wondered if the reason for the last condition being worse than if they had not known the way of righteousness.

Could that be because once a person goes from death to life and their spirit is reborn and made immortal. If then they go back, does their punishment go on forever, as opposed to those who never accepted Him in the first place, and were just destroyed.

 

[woobadooba]

I appreciate your respect and kindness. It's refreshing

I am a conditionalist for many, many reasons beyond just statements by Jesus and others in which final punishment is described as death, destruction, and reduction to ashes. If you're interested in just some of those reasons, check out my plenary presentation at last year's annual Rethinking Hell conference in London:

I'd be happy to discuss here with you any questions you have in response.

Will the Rethinking Hell Conference be available for free viewing online?

 

[stuart lawrence]

This is not a question of who is deserving of hell, but one of justice. How is it justice to sentence a person to eternal suffering for spending a lifetime not believing in God?

If a person rejects Christ they reject God, agreed?
Imagine this earth if Gods presence did not exist in it. It would be a terrifying place wouldn't it. You would have great anguish, and gnashing of teeth. You could be said to be consumed by a fiery torment of anguish.
If people reject Christ they therefore reject God, so if they then get to a place where Gods presence does not exist, and suffer because of it as described, that is what they chose, a life without God/ his presence. God did not chose that for them

 

[redleghunter]

This person had an opportunity to accept Jesus but wouldn't.

Hebrew 10:28-31

 

[Chris Date]

Will the Rethinking Hell Conference be available for free viewing online?

Various presentations at our annual conferences are available online. Here are a few:

 

[Chris Date]

Will the Rethinking Hell Conference be available for free viewing online?

Also, here are some other videos and audio recordings you can check out, which were not at Rethinking Hell conferences:

Unbelievable? Should Christians rethink Hell? Dr Al Mohler & Chris Date debate the traditional & conditionalist view: Saturday 03 January 2015 2:30... - Premier Christian Radio

 

[Chris Date]

OK everyone, I'm bowing out for now. I'll try to reengage tonight.

 

[woobadooba]

Various presentations at our annual conferences are available online.

Thanks for sharing.

 

[ToBeLoved]

2 Peter 2

20 For if, after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, they are again entangled in them and overcome, the latter end is worse for them than the beginning. 21 For it would have been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than having known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered to them. 22 But it has happened to them according to the true proverb: “A dog returns to his own vomit,” and, “a sow, having washed, to her wallowing in the mire.”

No one has addressed any of my posts of the state of the spirit, whether it is mortal or immortal, so I'll just post my thoughts here to myself.

When I have read the above statement, I have wondered if the reason for the last condition being worse than if they had not known the way of righteousness.

Could that be because once a person goes from death to life and their spirit is reborn and made immortal. If then they go back, does their punishment go on forever, as opposed to those who never accepted Him in the first place, and were just destroyed.

I'll comment later about it when I get on my computer. These are good verses.

 

[redleghunter]

One is Matthew 10:28, in which Jesus exhorts his followers not to fear men, who can kill the body but not the soul, but rather to fear God, who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.

The word translated "destroy" is the Greek ἀπόλλυμι, and is here used in what linguists call the "active voice." In the synoptic gospels, when this word is used in the active voice, transitively to describe what one person does to another, it means slay or kill. (See, for example, Glenn Peopes, "The meaning of 'apollumi' in the Synoptic Gospels, Rethinking Hell [blog], posted October 27, 2012, The meaning of “apollumi” in the Synoptic Gospels.)

So contrary to the doctrine of eternal torment, in which the resurrected lost will be alive forever, body and soul, Jesus taught instead that they would die forever, body and soul.

What Jesus said was "can." The text does not indicate He will certainly make someone extinct.

Let's look at the same discourse from Luke's perspective:

Luke 12: NKJV
4 “And I say to you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. 5 But I will show you whom you should fear: Fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I say to you, fear Him!

 

[redleghunter]

In fact, the Jews to whom I'm referring were not Saduccees.

Which 1st Century sect? Jesus encountered Saducees and Pharisees. The former not believing in any afterlife and the latter believing in the resurrection of the dead.

 

[Mark Corbett]

If a person rejects Christ they reject God, agreed?
Imagine this earth if Gods presence did not exist in it. It would be a terrifying place wouldn't it. You would have great anguish, and gnashing of teeth. You could be said to be consumed by a fiery torment of anguish.
If people reject Christ they therefore reject God, so if they then get to a place where Gods presence does not exist, and suffer because of it as described, that is what they chose, not what God chose for them

Stuart, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Many Christians have thought in terms of the unsaved "choosing" hell. Indirectly, there is some truth in this, since they chose to reject God's truth:

ESV 2 Thessalonians 2:9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

But this does not mean that the unsaved want to be thrown into the Lake of Fire. They certainly do not. Also, the Bible does not describe God as being passive in carrying out His sentence on the unsaved. It pictures God actively destroying them:

NIV Matthew 10:28 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.

In parable form, Jesus compares God to a King carrying out just vengence:

NIV Matthew 22:7 The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

God promises to actively avenge those who persecute His children and never repent:

2 Thessalonians 1: 5 It is a clear evidence of God's righteous judgment that you will be counted worthy of God's kingdom, for which you also are suffering,
6 since it is righteous for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you
7 and to reward with rest you who are afflicted, along with us. This will take place at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with His powerful angels,
8 taking vengeance with flaming fire on those who don't know God and on those who don't obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
9 These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the Lord's presence and from His glorious strength
10 in that day when He comes to be glorified by His saints and to be admired by all those who have believed, because our testimony among you was believed.

This passage from Thessalonians shows the final judgment involves God paying back the unrepentant persecutors. This will result in them being destroyed forever. The destruction which lasts forever will not take forever to carry out, for it happens "in that day".

 

[stuart lawrence]

Stuart, thanks for sharing your thoughts. Many Christians have thought in terms of the unsaved "choosing" hell. Indirectly, there is some truth in this, since they chose to reject God's truth:

ESV 2 Thessalonians 2:9 The coming of the lawless one is by the activity of Satan with all power and false signs and wonders, 10 and with all wicked deception for those who are perishing, because they refused to love the truth and so be saved.

But this does not mean that the unsaved want to be thrown into the Lake of Fire. They certainly do not. Also, the Bible does not describe God as being passive in carrying out His sentence on the unsaved. It pictures God actively destroying them:

NIV Matthew 10:28 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.

In parable form, Jesus compares God to a King carrying out just vengence:

NIV Matthew 22:7 The king was enraged. He sent his army and destroyed those murderers and burned their city.

God promises to actively avenge those who persecute His children and never repent:

2 Thessalonians 1: 5 It is a clear evidence of God's righteous judgment that you will be counted worthy of God's kingdom, for which you also are suffering,
6 since it is righteous for God to repay with affliction those who afflict you
7 and to reward with rest you who are afflicted, along with us. This will take place at the revelation of the Lord Jesus from heaven with His powerful angels,
8 taking vengeance with flaming fire on those who don't know God and on those who don't obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus.
9 These will pay the penalty of eternal destruction from the Lord's presence and from His glorious strength
10 in that day when He comes to be glorified by His saints and to be admired by all those who have believed, because our testimony among you was believed.

This passage from Thessalonians shows the final judgment involves God paying back the unrepentant persecutors. This will result in them being destroyed forever. The destruction which lasts forever will not take forever to carry out, for it happens "in that day".

Jesus said believers make the world tolerable. They have Gods presence in them. Without that presence the world would be intolerable.
If you live in an intolerable place you have great anguish and gnashing of teeth. It could be illustrated as being in a lake of fire, a fiery torment within you, in which you must spend eternity. Those flames never go out. The bible is written much of the time with illustrations of spiritual fact. Therefore it doesn't have to mean you are thrown into a literal lake of fire.
If your choice is to reject God, you choose eternity outside of his presence. You suffer for making that choice. He doesn't want that for you, he doesn't choose it for you, you choose it. You bring destruction on yourself

 

[redleghunter]

Harold Guillebaud and Basil Atkinson were both born in that century, and were conditionalists.

Jacob Blain was a Baptist minister who was a conditionalist in that century. William Huntington was acknowledged even by critics of conditionalism to be a presbyter in good standing, despite being a published conditionalist in that century.

Those are a few.

Thanks. I will look for their essays in the Evangelical Theological Society's archives.

 

[redleghunter]

Harold Guillebaud and Basil Atkinson were both born in that century, and were conditionalists.

Jacob Blain was a Baptist minister who was a conditionalist in that century. William Huntington was acknowledged even by critics of conditionalism to be a presbyter in good standing, despite being a published conditionalist in that century.

Those are a few.

Thanks. I will look for their essays in the Evangelical Theological Society's archives.

 

[redleghunter]

The claim that it has only been explored by Evangelicals in the last ten years is completely incorrect. Philip E. Hughes, Basil Atkinson, John Stott. Clark Pinnock, John Wenham, Edward Fudge, Richard Bauckham, Anthony Thistleton, E. Earle Ellis, R. T. France, and I. Howard Marshall are all Evangelical scholars (except Fudge) and all held to Conditional immortality/annihilation in the 20th century. This cannot be described simply as a phenomenon of the last ten years.

Yet having difficulty finding their works in the archives of the Evangelical Theological Society archives. Yet a cumbersome site, I will keep looking.

I hope you don't mind keeping Stott out as his polemics state annihilation is what a loving God would do. That is an appeal to human emotion. However, the gentlemen posing conditional immortality here do not appeal to this.

I'll look at the sources and what responses they received from their contemporary Evangelical scholars.

 

[Friend-of-Jesus]

God’s Word teaches us what to believe. We learn specific truths from the Bible, sometimes called “doctrines”, or more simply “beliefs”. The Bible also teaches us to think like God thinks. The more we read and listen to His Word, the more our thought patterns become like His. In this opening post I will write about a specific belief called “conditional immortality” and will also try to help you see how the Bible trains us to think in patterns consistent with this belief.

Conditional immortality is a doctrine based on the Bible which says that people will live forever only under certain conditions. This doctrine can be seen quite clearly in many verses which discuss eternal life. In these verses a condition is either explicitly stated or else strongly implied. After this paragraph are some examples. Don’t rush through them. This is God’s Word and you will benefit by reading them slowly and thinking about them even if they are familiar to you:

We can see from these examples that God, through His Word, conditions us to think of eternal life (immortality) not as something that all humans automatically have no matter what, but rather as a special gift from God which depends on us meeting a condition: namely faith in Jesus Christ.

Sometimes, the condition given is that we live the kind of life and make the kind of decisions which demonstrate that we really do believe in Jesus. In these cases, there is still a “condition” and there is still “immortality”, but the condition is stated as an evidence of faith in Christ rather than simply faith itself. Here are two examples:

If you would like to see a few more verses where this pattern of conditional immortality can be seen, look up these verses and see if you can identify the condition and the immortality:

John 3:15, John 4:14, John 6:47, Romans 2:7, Romans 5:21, Titus 3:7, 1 John 5:11

There are other verses, but you have seen enough to see how clear and consistent this pattern is. We will live forever only by God’s grace which we receive only if we have faith in Jesus. Our faith is in a Savior who changes how we live.

Now, we might wonder about the “negative side” of conditional immortality. God holds out hope through gracious promises for those who believe in Christ. He also gives warnings of the tragic consequences for those who do not believe:

Consistency and Inconsistency

One of the many signs that the Bible is inspired by God is that it is consistent in what it teaches. This is true even though, from a human point of view, the Bible was written by many authors over a period of more than 1,400 years. The doctrine of conditional immortality is an example of Biblical consistency. On the one hand, from Genesis to Revelation the Bible never says that all people are immortal. It never says that the unrighteous will live forever. On the other hand, the Bible consistently offers eternal life to those who put their faith in Christ. “Conditional Immortality” is seen consistently throughout Scripture.

While the Bible is 100% consistent, we are not. The Bible is perfect, but our understanding of it is flawed. Even as Christians who really believe the Bible is God’s inerrant Word, and who really have put our faith in Jesus, and who really seek God’s truth, we still have errors mixed into our understanding. One sign of an imperfect understanding of the Bible is when part of what we believe is not consistent with the rest of what we believe. Another sign of misunderstanding is when something we believe requires us to talk in ways that are different from the way the Bible talks. Here is an example:

Can you see how the slogan on the t-shirt is inconsistent with the consistent Bible teaching about conditional immortality?

It’s not just t-shirts and bumper stickers that contain this inconsistent way of thinking. Good, godly, Christian pastors, authors, teachers, and others often think in terms of UN-conditional immortality. In other words, they believe and talk as if all people will live forever whether they are saved or not.

Seeing the relationship between the doctrine of conditional immortality and the doctrine of the final fate of the unrighteous clarifies the problem:

What do you think?
Do you believe that everyone is immortal no matter what?
How does your view on immortality influence your view on Hell?
Do you believe the Bible teaches Annihilationism, Eternal Conscious Torment, or Universalism?
Why?

This post is slightly modified from a post on my blog.

I agree, unbelievers burn in hell in eternity forever.

 

[woobadooba]

Thanks. I will look for their essays in the Evangelical Theological Society's archives.

Somehow you accidentally put my username in a quote I am not responsible for. Here's the original post.

 

[Mark Corbett]

I hope you don't mind keeping Stott out as his polemics state annihilation is what a loving God would do. That is an appeal to human emotion. However, the gentlemen posing conditional immortality here do not appeal to this.

First, thank you for recognizing that those of us here who believe in Conditional Immortality are not basing our case on emotion.

I can't blame you personally for accusing Stott of basing his case for annihilationism on "an appeal to human emotion". This charge has been repeatedly leveled against him in various settings. Chris Date mentions this in the video he posted in Comment #89. These accusations are usually based on taking Stott's words out of context. Below I quote the relevant paragraph. I will put the part of his quote which is often used against him in red and the part which is often left out in blue.

Well, emotionally I find the concept [of eternal conscious torment] intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either 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. As a committed evangelical, my question must be -- an 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 directions of annihilation, and that "eternal conscious torment" is a tradition that has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture. There are four arguments; they relate to language, imagery, justice, and universalism. (Quoted from Judgment and Hell, by John Stott, in Rethinking Hell: Readings in Evangelical Conditionalism, pg. 51. This is an excerpt from the book Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialog.)​

Stott then goes on to give a brief, exegetical, defense of annihilationism. He quotes verses, explains the meaning of Greek words, discusses passages which are often viewed as supporting eternal conscious torment and explains how they can be read in harmony with annihilationism, and finally very briefly presents arguments for annihilationism based on theological concerns. In other words, far from being an appeal to emotion, he presents a rational case based on reasoning from Scripture. Stott has been unfairly slandered (but again, I don't blame you, as it seems likely you were just repeating what others have said).

 

[Mark Corbett]

I agree, unbelievers burn in hell in eternity forever.

I'm a bit confused. You quote my opening post and say "I agree", but then you seem to say that you believe in eternal conscious torment, or at least I think that's what your words mean. However, my opening post explains and defends Conditional Immortality, including a belief in annihilationism. So could you help me understand? Do you believe in eternal conscious torment or in annihilationism? Thanks!