Tag: conditional immortalism

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The Rethinking Hell Conference

By Jim Spiegel

Last weekend’s Rethinking Hell conference at Fuller Seminary in Pasadena went extremely well.  Greg Stump, Christopher Date, et al. did a superb job organizing and directing it.  Those in attendance represented the spectrum of Christian views on the issue: traditionalists, universalists, and conditional immortalists.  I was one of six plenary speakers, three of whom (including me) affirm conditional immortalism.

For those not aware, the three views are as follows.  Traditionalists maintain that the damned suffer eternal conscious torment in hell.  Universalists believe that, though some may suffer in hell for some indeterminate length of time, everyone is ultimately restored to fellowship

Greg Stump, David Instone-Brewer, Jim Spiegel, Oliver Crisp, Jerry Walls, and Robin Parry
Greg Stump, David Instone-Brewer, Jim Spiegel, Oliver Crisp, Jerry Walls, and Robin Parry

with God.  And conditional immortalists maintain that the damned suffer for a finite period in hell and are ultimately annihilated (hence the term “annihilationism” that is sometimes applied to conditionalists).

For more information resources on conditionalism, check out the Rethinking Hell website.

The plenary speakers featured traditionalists Oliver Crisp and Jerry Walls, universalist Robin Parry, and conditionalists David Instone-Brewer, Christopher Date, and myself.  All of their presentations were very good and generated substantive discussion with the audience.  And I greatly enjoyed the discussion with them in between the sessions.

Jerry Walls is especially enjoyable to engage with, as he is a zealous Arminian and strong critic of Calvinists (like me) and anyone who shows sympathy with Roman Catholicism (like me).  But we do agree on much more than we disagree about, especially when it comes to moral and social issues.

Future Rethinking Hell conferences are tentatively planned for the United Kingdom and Australia.  And there is also talk of regional Rethinking Hell conferences.  Stay tuned!

In the meantime, check out the Rethinking Hell podcasts and consider joining the Rethinking Hell Facebook Group.

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The Best and Worst of 2014

By Jim Spiegel

It’s been another exciting year, and we want to thank you all for reading and, if applicable, posting comments on our blog. Once again, we would like to close out the year with some summary remarks about good and bad stuff related to film, music, books, sports, and family.

Best and Worst Film Experiences:

  • Jim:  This was a down year for me in terms of watching films. I viewed a lot of “tweeners” that wouldn’t fall anywhere near the “best” or “worst” categories—e.g., Interstellar, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.  Probably the best film I watched all year was the Israeli drama Fill the Void, a powerful story of a young Haredic Jewish woman who is pressured by her family to marry the widower of her older sister, who died in childbirth. On a lighter note, but just as memorable, is the endearing Jon Favreau comedy Chef. As for my worst film experience of the year, the choice is easy: Gone Girl, which Amy and I reviewed here and here.
  • Amy:  While Jim was in California, I pretty much anesthetized myself with any television series I could get my Netflixed hands on. While there was a great deal of loving or listing it, hunting for houses and cousins with kitchen, I did watch some quality shows, most of them dark and mysterious. I think the new paradigm of shows created directly for streaming and released in their entirety has real potential. Here are a few to which I became hopelessly addicted, with the usual disclaimer that since they are mostly British, they tend to be a wee smutty and anti-religious, but well-written and well-acted: Hinterlands, The Killing, Happy Valley, The Fall. My best experience, however, was watching Mockingjay: Part One with my older boys. I know it isn’t saying much to say it is the best in the series so far, but it was. There was popcorn and bonding, so take that and stuff it in your high culture hat.

Jim’s Best and Worst Musical Experiences of the Year:  The highlights for me were Morrissey’s World Peace is None of Your Business (despite the Moz’s increasingly sardonic perspective on life) the Black Keys’ Turn Blue (my review of which is here), and U2’s Songs of Innocence (despite the popular trend of hating this album just because it was simultaneously gifted to millions of people). The low point, as it probably could be most years, was catching “highlights” of the MTV awards. Blecch.

Amy’s Best and Worst Eating Experiences of the Year: Best: Finally got to experience (free range) pork belly and it did not disappoint. Like pork chops wrapped in bacon. Thank you, Barn Brassiere in Muncie, Indiana.  Worst: The hundredth Subway tuna sandwich on flat bread I ate with the kids while traveling back from California. Every woman has her fast food sub-sandwich limit and I reached mine somewhere in Kansas.

Jim’s Favorite Sports Moments of the Year:  It was a thrill to see both the Ole Miss and Mississippi State football teams in the top five, with the latter enjoying the #1 position for several consecutive weeks of the season.  I also enjoyed the Kansas City Royals’ exciting run to the World Series.  And as I write this I’m enjoying the Detroit Lions season culminating in a playoff appearance, though I expect the end of their run will make my “most disappointing sports moments” for 2015.

Amy’ Favorite Sports Moments of the Year:  Watching all my kids play soccer this fall. I had to step up my spectator skills in order to do play-by-play for Jim while he was in California. I saw Bailey score his first goal in a high school game, Sam play keeper (a position he and his high threshold of stimulation were born for), Maggie deceive many an opponent with her flighty demeanor, and Andrew take charge of his defense. So fun to watch them all, though the rides home were admittedly a little stinky (but only literally).

Jim’s Most Disappointing Sports Moments of the Year:  Although I’m not a Kansas City Royals fan, I got caught up enough in their improbable playoff run to be really deflated by their falling just short in game 7 of the World Series.  If Salvador Perez swings just half an inch higher on that final pitch, the Royals win the championship on a walk-off two-run homer rather than losing on a feeble pop-out. It’s a game of inches… And speaking of disappointments related to teams I don’t normally root for, it was also painful to watch Peyton Manning’s Broncos so thoroughly dismantled by the Seahawks in the Super Bowl.

Amy’s Most Painful Sports Moment of the Year: Having to tell Jim, who was suffering from amnesia at the time, that Peyton Manning didn’t play for the Colts anymore. He looked so devastatingly baffled. At least he forgot about it five minutes after I told him.

Satisfying Reads of the Year:

  • Jim:  I was delighted to have the time to finally read Melville’s Moby Dick, my reflections on which you can see here.  I also enjoyed Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead—an achievement that is as subtle as it is profound.  The best work in philosophy I read this year was Jason Baehr’s The Inquiring Mind, a rich and insightful work on virtue epistemology.  Also, I greatly enjoyed—and was happy to do a back-cover endorsement for—the book Rethinking Hell, a compendium of important articles and essays defending the doctrine of hell known as conditional immortalism (the view that the damned are eventually annihilated, as opposed to suffering eternally).
  • Amy:  I read so many good books this year. From contemporary fiction to 19th century memoirs, this was a great reading year for me. Here are just a few of my recommendations: The Warden by Anthony Trollope, People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (though I hated Brooks’ March), Where’d you go, Bernadette? by Maria Semple, a couple by P. G. Wodehouse, 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup, Half-Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls, The Year 1000 by Robert Lacey, Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner, Extraordinary, Ordinary People by Condoleezza Rice and The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Best 2014 Memories of Our Kids:

Amy:  Our trip out west was the big one. Sitting on the beach with Jim at Big Sur watching the kids playing in the water and looking for creatures was a near perfect moment. Looking at their happy and surprised faces when Jim told them we were getting a dog was priceless. Not being found first every time during Christmas bedtime hide and seek was pretty sweet too.

Jim:  Traveling through Arizona and California with my family in October, experiencing together such sites as the Grand Canyon, Sequoia National Park, Yosemite National Park, the Pacific coastal highway, and Alcatraz. Our kids have always been good travelers, but they blew us away with their endurance on this extended sojourn.

Best Maggie Quotes of the Year:

In the past we’ve reserved this spot for memorable quotes from all of our kids, but this was such a great year for quotes from our daughter Maggie (who is ten years old), we decided to simply list some of her more memorable ones:

  • “When I grow up, I’m gonna make an exact copy of the earth, then cut it in half with a big knife to see if the center of the earth is really so hot.”
  • “Sometimes being hungry can be satisfying. Unsatisfaction can be satisfying.”
  • “I never talk to myself when I’m alone in my room. I just talk to the Beatles and my stuffed animals.”

Most Satisfying Shared Experiences of the Year: 

  • Amy:  There were quite a few this year: Kayaking through the beautiful mangrove forest and onto the open ocean while in the Bahamas. Seeing so many beautiful places on our trip out west. The night Jim surprised me for my 40th birthday by driving me around to collect lovely, encouraging notes from my friends. However, number one has to be picking him up from the airport in December, knowing he was home to stay.
  • Jim:  Dittos on all of that.

New Year’s Resolutions:

  • Amy:  Somehow managing to maintain the new perspective Jim’s being gone gave me. Appreciate him more, worry about the little things less. Enjoy and encourage my kids more, criticize and hide from them less. Accomplish the fitness goals I set but didn’t quite reach for 2014. Watch more quality films with Jim. Put more time and energy into plans for my professional future and of course, read lots and lots of books.
  • Jim:  To read half as much as my wife did this year, which would mean reading twenty-six books next year. Good luck to me on that.

Happy 2015 everyone!

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Hell and the Undermining of Heavenly Happiness

By Jim Spiegel

Lately, I’ve been pondering some of Thomas Talbott’s arguments against the traditional doctrine of hell (in his 1990 Faith and Philosophy essay “The Doctrine of Everlasting Punishment”).  He makes many interesting points, both in criticism of eternal conscious torment and in defense of universalism.  One of the things he discusses is how damnation of the lost will affect those who go to heaven.  I’m sure that most Christians have wondered how we could be truly happy in heaven if we knew that some of our loved ones were suffering the agonies of hell.  Talbott addresses a few popular lines of response to this problem.

First, some argue that when we get to heaven we will be see the justice in God’s damnation of our loved ones, so it won’t cause us sorrow or otherwise undermine our happiness.  But Talbott notes that seeing the justice in our loved ones’ punishment would not eliminate the sadness of their plight.  After all, even when our loved ones suffer just punishment in this life, we are still reasonably sorrowful about it.  Moreover, we could still regret that God did not move in the hearts of our loved ones to prompt repentance in them as he did those of us who are redeemed.

A second way of dealing with this problem is to propose that God will change our attitude towards our lost loved ones.  In short, God will turn our love for them into hatred.  We will despise them for their wickedness, just as God does (assuming that God truly hates those he damns, as the traditional view seems to entail). This approach is even more problematic, however, since (1) God commands us to love others, even our enemies, and (2) our love for those closest to us is so tied up with who we are that to so dramatically change such attitudes and affections would be to fundamentally alter one’s character.

So if these lines of response are of no help in explaining how we could be happy in heaven despite the on-going agonies of some of our loved ones, then what alternative explanation is more promising?  If there are no better approaches, then chalk this up as another point against the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.  

Talbott recognizes that affirming the eventual annihilation of the damned does circumvent this problem, which is somewhat of a relief to me, as a conditional immortalist.  Still, his analysis left me wondering whether even conditional immortalism supplies a sufficient shield against this problem.  After all, might we not also be saddened that some of our loved ones were destroyed and that we will never see them again?  This, too, appears to undermine our heavenly happiness.  Clearly, the problem is not as severe for conditional immortalism as it is for the traditional view of hell.  Given conditionalism, at least the sufferings of your loved ones will eventually end.  Not so for the traditionalist, whose loved ones’ unspeakable agony will continue for eternity.

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A Defense of Conditional Immortalism

By Jim Spiegel

Conditional immortalism is the view that human beings are not naturally immortal but are only granted immortality (eternal life) by God as part of our salvation.  In other words, immortality is conditional upon divine grace.  Thus, those who are saved in Christ live forever with him, while those who are damned suffer in hell for some finite period and are eventually annihilated.

Conditional immortalism should not be confused with other versions of annihilationism which say that the damned are immediately destroyed upon death and do not suffer in hell.  And conditional immortalism contrasts with the traditional view (since Augustine) that the damned suffer eternal conscious torment.

Six Arguments for Conditional Immortalism

1. The Language of Destruction — Numerous biblical passages refer to the wicked and the damned being destroyed or perishing (Ps. 37:38, Ps. 68:2, Ps. 145:20, John 3:16, Phil. 3:19, etc.).  But if the damned live forever, then they are never destroyed.  Also, the biblical imagery of fire  (Isa. 34:10-11, Ezek. 20:47-48; Amos 5:6, Mt. 3:12, Mt. 13:49-50, Rev. 20, etc.) suggests obliteration of the wicked, since fire consumes what it burns.

2. The Opposing Concepts of Damnation and Eternal Life — In Scripture the eternal life promised to Christians is opposed to the damnation of the wicked.  But if the damned live eternally in hell, then their fate also is eternal life.  After all, they never die.  Theirs is a painful eternal life, but it is still eternal life.  The conditional immortalist view makes much better sense of the biblical contrast between damnation and eternal life.

3. Reconciliation of All Things to God — The Bible says that God will reconcile all things to himself (Col. 1:20).  If the damned live forever in hell, then they are not reconciled to God.

4. Matthew 10:28 — In this passage Jesus says that God can “destroy both body and soul in hell.”  This suggests that hell is indeed a place where souls are destroyed.

5. The “Second Death” — Conditional immortalism makes the best sense of the concept of the “second death” referred to in Rev. 20:14-15 and Rev. 21:8.  If the damned soul lives forever in hell, then there is no second death, thus contradicting Scripture.

6. The Argument from Justice — If all of the damned suffer in hell eternally, then this constitutes an infinite penalty for finite sins, which is profoundly unjust.  Some traditionalists insist that sins against an infinite and holy God require a temporally infinite penalty.  But this is a non-sequitur.  It does not follow from the fact that God is infinite and morally perfect that punishment of those who sin against him must be infinite in duration.

So where did the doctrine of eternal conscious torment come from, if not Scripture?  It appears that the culprit is the Platonic concept of natural immortality.  Socrates and Plato affirmed the notion that the human soul is naturally immortal.  This idea found its way into Christian theology in the late second century and later through Augustine.  It should be noted that while Augustine had most things right, he was not infallible.  He read the Platonic doctrine of the soul’s indestructibility into Scripture, and the church followed his cue.

Replies to Counter-arguments

1. Matthew 25:46 — In this passage Jesus says the wicked “will go away to eternal punishment” which suggests eternal conscious torment.

Reply:  The word translated here as “eternal” is aionias, which literally means “of the ages” (cf. Rom. 16:25).  However, even if aionias is taken to imply an everlasting state, conditional immortalism is not contradicted in this verse.  Those who go to hell are eventually annihilated and they remain destroyed forever.  This is a perfectly natural understanding of “eternal punishment” in this verse.

2. Revelation 20:10 — As commonly translated, this passage declares that the devil, the beast, and false prophet “will be tormented day and night forever and ever” (NIV).

Reply:  These are special cases and should not be taken to represent the fate of all of the damned, particularly human beings.  More importantly, the phrase often translated “forever and ever” (again involving aionias) is better translated “for ages upon ages,” as it is in some Bible translations.  This signifies a much longer torment but hardly that which is everlasting.

For an extensive discussion and defense of conditional immortalism, see Edward Fudge’s classic work The Fire that Consumes.  And for an informative scholarly dialogue between proponents of the traditional and conditional immoralist views, see Two Views of Hell, co-authored by Edward Fudge and Robert Peterson.  Also, check out this interview with Fudge about his view.  Lastly, the eminent evangelical biblical scholar John Stott defends conditional immortalism view in his Evangelical Essentials.  In fact, it was Stott’s arguments that finally persuaded me to embrace conditional immortalism.