Conditional Immortality Supports Annihilationion, Refutes Eternal Conscious Torment and Universalism

Chris Date said:

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.

Click to expand...

woobadooba said:

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?

Click to expand...

woobadooba said:

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

Click to expand...

woobadooba said:

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

Click to expand...

woobadooba said:

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

Click to expand...

Chris Date said:

Various presentations at our annual conferences are available online.

Click to expand...

1stcenturylady said:

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.

Click to expand...

Chris Date said:

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.

Click to expand...

Chris Date said:

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

Click to expand...

Mark Corbett said:

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".

Click to expand...

woobadooba said:

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.

Click to expand...

Chris Date said:

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.

Click to expand...

Darren J. Clark said:

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.

Click to expand...

Mark Corbett said:

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.

Click to expand...

redleghunter said:

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

Click to expand...