For quite some time (since my first year of college in 2006-2007), I thought that the scriptural case for conditional immortality (hereafter 'CI') was decent, but that there was just a "little too much text" suggesting eternal conscious torment (hereafter 'ECT') as the final fate of the wicked, and enough room to understand the 'CI texts' from an ECT framework. I couldn't quite embrace CI. Over the last 6 to 9 months, I have become convinced that CI is indeed the consistent teaching of Scripture. I am not nearly as sure of this doctrine, though, as I am of doctrines like the deity of Christ, the Trinity, the basic nature of the atonement, etc.
I now think with regard to the passages that previously gave me pause about CI not only that they could be interpreted as being consistent with CI (I am not interested in seeing "how much theological margin Scripture lets me get away with but rather what precisely it teaches on any given topic), but that even they probably should be understood as teaching CI rather than ECT. That fact, plus the idea that a cumulative hermeneutic (a hermeneutic that reads the canon from "left to right," as it were, generally privileging earlier established categories when interpreting later texts and themes [not to neglect the legitimate category of "mysteries"--things somewhat hidden and later revealed, such as the full inclusion of the Gentiles]) points in the direction of CI, plus some of the very strong CI texts that ECT does more than stumble over in attempts at exegesis, made me comfortable enough with the idea of landing in that camp (albeit a bit "softly" still).
I held to the doctrine of ECT since being taught it as a kind of default by my parents as a young child, all the way through serious theological study, inclusive of a couple of handfuls of formal seminary courses, despite being emotionally uncomfortable with it. I thought Scripture teaches it. If Scripture teaches it, and I am now wrong about CI, then ECT is true, regardless of how I or any other fallen human being feels about it. If Scripture teaches ECT, then it is a just and good sentence for a holy God to carry out against the finally impenitent wicked. I don't think moral intuitions, theological feelings, etc., are totally unimportant to consider in the debate over final judgment, but because of the noetic and affective effects of sin, I am highly suspicious of them as any kind of theological guides. Scripture must control our thinking in this and every area. Sinners tend to minimize sin and judgment and underestimate the holiness of God and severity of his judgments against evil.
Here I place myself in the ranks of evangelical CI adherents of past and present, who esteem(ed) the final authority of Scripture, like I. Howard Marshall, John Stott, Dale Moody, and Preston Sprinkle, to name just a few. I don't mean I place myself with them in terms of education or importance or theological knowledge or stature (very far from it), but in terms of kinds of conditionalists. We think it is scriptural, and we do not think it is heretical (early ecumenical creeds do not specify ECT, and early church theologians were themselves not even agreed on the matter--nor were 2nd Temple Jews, which is worth noting).
I am a member of a Reformed church in a Presbyterian and Reformed denomination--the Presbyterian Church in America, and I have at times considered whether I may be called to formal ministry. So far, the "answer" to that based on life circumstances, my inclinations, and my level of holistic Christian maturity thus far, has seemed to be "No," and now it seems highly unlikely, unless my views change, that I would ever be able to minister in a denomination like the PCA, which upholds the system of doctrine taught in the Westminster Standards as the doctrinal standards of its officers. I personally think that CI does not threaten the "system" of doctrine set forth in those standards, but I would bet most of the leadership in the PCA would regard the position of CI as sufficiently different on a sufficiently central point of doctrine (the nature of final judgment) to preclude ministerial candidates holding to it from ministering in their churches. And I think that is completely understandable. For a good while now I've also rejected Reformed Sabbatarianism (obligatory weekly Sabbath-day keeping on the Lord's Day or otherwise) and most forms of Reformed cessationism, on exegetical grounds--so I would have had an interesting time being examined by a PCA presbytery, anyway...Perhaps I will find myself called to ministry in a Reformed Episcopal/Anglican church or another broad-orthodoxy Protestant group in the future. Who knows.
For now I have every intention of staying at my church and leading small group Bible study at times or even leading or teaching in other Christian education venues connected to our church, when asked to. But I have no intention of proactively promoting my view of CI in these contexts, since it is against our denomination's doctrinal standards, it is not a "gospel issue" in the sense of threatening one's salvation if they believe the wrong thing about it, and yet it has the potential to cause disunity if introduced into a context where ECT is taken for granted as obvious biblical orthodoxy. I most likely won't even link to this blog post on social media pages followed by many people from my church. If I am asked by anyone I will give my opinion in measured terms, and probably leave it at that. And if the topic comes up tangentially when I am teaching on other areas, I will likely restrict myself to explicit biblical language without much further comment.
But I wanted to write about this in an organized way here at least a little bit, and let anyone who follows this blog with any regularity (probably one or two people, if that), or anyone I point toward this article in the near future, push back and challenge my thinking in this area if they have any good challenges to present. I want to have more confidence in what Scripture teaches, and I (I think genuinely...) would like to be corrected if I am wrong here. This post will only contain discussion of 1) below, and we'll make this a series.
Biblical and Theological Themes and Passages that Teach or Demonstrate Conditional Immortality of Humanity and Annihilation as the Fate of the Finally Impenitent Wicked
The categories, which overlap a bit, are:
1) General scriptural teaching on life and death
2) General scriptural teaching on natural human mortality (apart from Christ)
3) General scriptural pattern of judgment and the fate of the wicked
4) Scriptural teaching on God's plan to end evil itself
5) Specific scriptural teaching on the nature of final judgment for the wicked
6) The nature of Christ's atonement as substitutionary accursedness
7) Most ECT objections beg question, specially plead in exegesis, or speculate philosophically
Before beginning each line of evidence, let's get a definition before us, lest there be any misunderstanding. The key feature of CI or evangelical annihilationism is not some precise view of the eternal fate of the molecular or atomic matter of the finally impenitent (or any analogous "spiritual" material of the same human souls, if the soul is a distinct, separable substance). The point is that the finally impenitent or "wicked" will be raised from the dead on the Last Day, and they and all the wicked who are still living at that time will be judged by Christ and sentenced to be holistically destroyed/slain/killed, forever. Their bodily life and any other sense of life they have, including consciousness, will end permanently. This may or may not be preceded by a protracted time of suffering, which may or may not include literal fire. The focus of the Bible, though, is eternal destruction and death, without those words meaning something radically other than what they normally mean (in Greek or English).
1) Life and Death
From Genesis 1, God is the source of all life, and especially embodied human life. It is when God breathes the breath of life into the nostrils of the man made from the dust of the earth that he becomes a living being (nep̄eš ḥayah (Heb.) or psychēn zōsan (Gk. from 1 Cor. 15:45)). In Genesis 3 when humans rebel and fall, and are driven out of the garden, precluded from access to the tree of life, there are different senses in which they experience "death," and legitimate layers of how we talk about that experience as death-like, but the ultimate concern of the rest of the biblical narrative taken together is the problem of "death" in the normal sense of cessation of bodily animation. The patriarchs are promised descendants which in a sense extend their own "life" and name in the world, but as Jesus argues against the Sadducees, the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" is the God of the living, and (implicitly) the patriarchs must all rise in order to fully receive the promises made to them. (This passage is often inadequately taken as referring to Abraham's present "spiritual life" with God in the intermediate state--hardly a useful polemic against resurrection-deniers like the Sadducees).
True, Adam and Eve's fellowship with God was broken. True, they were driven from his special presence to confer eschatological blessing. True, their original righteousness was marred, and hearts and minds darkened by sin from then on (what some mean by "spiritual death"). But the primary effect of the Fall was (as God had warned, "in the day that you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil..."), death in a holistic and inclusively bodily sense. This is nowhere more obvious than in Romans 5:12-14 where Paul makes an empirical argument about Death's "reign" from Adam to Moses, even over those who were not direct recipients of a formal covenant command the way Adam was. Anything less than physical death of humans being in view here would lack sufficient rhetorical strength for Paul's point about original sin. You can't see a hypothetical "Sin-death" that doesn't touch physical life.
But Adam and Eve didn't drop dead that day. So don't we need to appeal to a category of "spiritual death" or "covenantal death" or "Sin-death" (as the hyperpreterists put it), in order to protect the integrity of God's word here? I'm not convinced by those readings at all, based on the rest of Scripture. But if we say that God simply mercifully stayed the originally threatened sentence (perhaps even substituting the [physical] death of the animals implicitly used for the provided skin coverings), why do humans continue to die physically and why do I think that's still important as something related to sin? The simplest answer is that the Bible does. Again, Paul in Romans 5 marks normal human "death" as related to (at least) original sin. As will be discussed under the section about human mortality and immortality, while an immediate death sentence was stayed, immediate access to the tree of life was also removed. I understand the tree of life as something Adam and Eve were not explicitly prohibited from, but were at least providentially, if not implicitly covenantally, hindered from partaking of, prior to completion of the probation test of the other tree. They had the opportunity for eternal life, understood as more than the supernatural impartation of everlasting bodily life (indeed as much as an elevated "glorious" and "Spiritual" life--cf. 1 Cor. 15:44-49), but no less than and arguably centrally everlasting bodily life (note the emphasis on categories of "imperishability" and "immortality" in 1 Cor. 15:42, 50ff).
So what happened re: human "death" on the day of the Fall? A few things: 1) the direct, personal sentence of death as the threatened "wages" of sin was mercifully stayed in Adam and Eve's case, at least temporarily and/or in some restricted sense (see #3); 2) it seems a proto-sacramental animal sacrifice occurred (a physical death!) so that Adam and Eve could be robed as priests and continue to function as such, albeit outside the original holy realm of the garden now; 3) sin and death "entered the world" such that all humans descending from Adam by ordinary generation are marked by a default status of "death," anticipating a fate of permanent physical death unless divine salvation intervenes (and nothwithstanding a temporary resurrection unto final judgment and condemnation of eternal death).
What about other NT passages that speak of "life" and "death" in ways that seem to go beyond bodily life or death? In the high priestly prayer of John 17 Jesus prays to the Father that, "This is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent" (v. 3). Does this not show that Scripture conceives of life or at least "eternal life" as something more than everlasting bodily animation? Of course it is true that everlasting life in the context of salvation does involve more than mere bodily animation just because it is facilitated by relationship to Father, Son, and Spirit in a covenant. But that is actually the main point of John 17:3...just as John 6:63 says that the words of Jesus "are life" (obviously meaning they give or lead to life, it is knowledge of the Father and the Son that leads to eternal or everlasting life. While acknowledging that Christian life de facto involves more than mere ongoing existence, we need not over-spiritualize the vocabulary of "life" itself, or even "eternal life." Speaking of the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, note the reoccurrence of the language "live forever" in vv. 51 and 58.
Ephesians 2:1-10 is a classic "Calvinist passage" used to support the doctrines of total depravity and irresistible grace--monergistic regeneration in the face of radically corrupted human nature. And fair enough! But it is often spoken of as if what is in view is primarily a "spiritual" or "inward" state of death which is reversed in an inward way by regeneration when God's Spirit causes someone to be united to the risen Christ. I don't object to that idea, even as an implication or presupposition of this particular passage; however, it's not what the passage focuses on. Even as Richard Gaffin, Jr. notices in 'Perspectives on Pentecost', what Ephesians 2 brings into view is the activity of the unsaved person in following the devil and the "course of this world" vs. their activity after saving union with Christ, in carrying out pre-ordained good works, where the unsaved activity is described as "death." To be "dead in trespasses and sins" is not so much to have a dead heart (though it certainly results from that), but to display a status of death and to live as a metaphorically "dead" moral agent in the world. It is "spiritual" death only in the Pauline sense that the person's life and body lack the controlling animation of the Holy Spirit which he provides in salvation. It is faith-union with the physically-killed-and-now-bodily-risen Christ that saves from the full range of what the "dead" status of v. 1 means, and if we look at the cross and resurrection, we will understand the center of what it means (we'll discuss this more in section 6 of the series). It means we were "dead men walking," but now the Spirit animates our bodies as we live the Christian life, and one day will animate our physical bodies with the fullness of everlasting, glorious life. For us physical death is a doorway to Paradise rather than a wage for sin or a remaining legal status in the heavenly courtroom.
There's a lot more to say, and we will say most of it in succeeding sections on mortality, judgment, atonement, etc. For here it's enough to remind ourselves not to over-spiritualize biblical categories of "life" and "death." While life and death and images of resurrection can and are sometimes used as metaphors in Scripture (think of Ezekiel 37's valley of dry bones, or at least one layer of the meaning of Daniel 12:2 in context), the Bible is a nitty-gritty book about concrete life in this very physical world God has made and cares deeply about. The wages of sin is death but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ (Rom. 6:23). Any and all, and only those who eat of the "bread" of Christ will "live forever" (Jn. 6:51, 58). The promises to Abraham were about a multitudinous seed living securely in a Promised Land. Canaan was a shadow, sure. But the substance is not more shadowy. With God there is order, formed-ness, fittedness for fruitfulness; sin spells disorder, chaos, dissolution, barrenness--death.
