Joe Hinman, a fellow Cadrist (who started the Christian Cadre web journal for Nicene apologetics), who is an Arminian annihilationist, asked me last week for some comments on John Patrick Harding’s article against annihilationism at JPH’s Tektonic apologetic website. JPH is an Arminian proponent of one type of eternal conscious torment or ECT, sometimes called incarcerationism although I’m not sure JPH would consider the final fate of the lost to be incarceration by God per se. This article can be found here (tektonics.org/af/annix.php), and features no dating so I don’t know how old it is. It is entirely possible that JPH has adjusted for problems since writing the article.
I like JPH a lot, and very much appreciate many of his apologetic works (so does Joe), but I have some strong theological (and exegetical) problems with his agonistic theory of eternal conscious torment. (By agonistic he means a shame-based ECT, not physical agony by the way.) In the past he has gone very far (including going farther between two publications) in divorcing what happens to lost souls from God’s active punishment – and I have observed that in the earlier of those two works, JPH himself acknowledges that God only actively punishes someone to lead them to repentance and salvation from sin, so there’s a convenience in how his later work happens not to mention that point while further divorcing the final fate of the lost from God’s active punishment.
Annis of my acquaintance would have a similar problem with JPH’s result: even if the language is a poetic representation of what’s happening, the Biblical language is one hundred percent in favor of God actively inflicting it on impenitent sinners, whether NT or OT.
Doubtless they would also complain about JPH’s reason for avoiding discussing OT testimony (namely there’s too much of it and it would take too long), because from their perspective it’s important that the OT features very little or no suggestion that people who (both Annis and ECTs think) are ultimately lost continue existing that way.
(I don’t think either side has given enough attention and credence to a lot of OT features pointing to the repentance and restoration of sinners whom God punishes even to death, and the combined testimony that Arminians and Calvinists both separately and differently appeal to for God’s saving scope and victorious persistence; but that would be my point, not usually an Anni point. Annis or ECTs could of course go pretty far with post-mortem salvation, like C S Lewis (whether for ECT or for anni!), and still be ECT or anni, Calv or Arm varieties either way.)
Some Annis would definitely agree with me on a related criticism of JPH’s argument, that by divorcing God’s action so strongly from the fate of the lost, this also divorce’s God’s action from keeping the lost in existence; and that really ought to result in annihilation: no creation starts to exist independently from God’s ongoing providential upkeep, and especially not sinners as a consequence of their sin! That would be like saying Satan was right, though in a pyrrhic way, that sinners can become like God by sinning! If God stops acting toward sinners at all, then annihilation must follow consequentially; and that’s a choice by God, so that’s actually a direct action of annihilation. If God is still acting to keep them in an existence of punitive inconvenience due to their sin, then God is actively punishing them, and JPH himself thinks (or at least has thought) that ought to have a goal of leading them to repent and be saved. (A Calvinist might complain that this is a particularly Arminian conclusion or at least such a position; I think it’s a trinitarian theology conclusion, although I’m dubious from past experience that JPH accepts that. But we’re both big fans of Lewis, and I know where I first came across some scattered hints of connecting God’s salvific love to the nature of the Trinity, so…)
JPH does actually agree with conditional immortality in the sense that immortality is conferred by God not inherent to the soul, but I’m not sure from previous work (and from this article) that he takes the concept as far as acknowledging that creations don’t ever start existing independently from God’s ongoing upkeep.
JPH is willing to agree with Annis that “the majority of verses that describe Hell say nothing at all about timeframes for occupation of Hell by the wicked”. This is a curious agreement, since when Annis say this they’re including the OT testimony and JPH is focusing on the NT testimony, where frankly I find it pretty common to have to deal with terms which MIGHT involve a “timeframe for occupation”. I see Annis dealing with those terms, too, on a regular basis. If somehow a majority of such NT verses don’t use the term “eonian” or related prepositional phrases like “into the eon”, I would think the majority is so slight as to be trivial.
But to get around such a supposed majority lack of testimony, JPH appeals to Josephus’ report that the Pharisees fully believed that the souls of the wicked went on to eternal punishment. I’m not so sure the position was so strong among the Pharisee party – a lot of the evidence for what JPH himself acknowledges as “a diversity in Jewish views of the ultimate fate of the wicked” come from a time when the Pharisee party had triumphed in surviving past the Essenes and Sadduccees et al, after which there were divisions among the party just as there was already a major division between Shammai and Hillel schools in Jesus’ day. (The Hillel school took decisive control after the fall of Jerusalem.)
But anyway, I’m actually willing to grant that the Pharisees opposing Jesus believed in SOME kind of hopeless punishment from God; because when I’m adding up the narrative and thematic contexts of the Gospel reports, I find Jesus opposing them FOR INSISTING ON SOME KIND OF HOPELESS PUNISHMENT!
Naturally that isn’t a position JPH is arguing against or even addressing in this particular article, so it wouldn’t be fair to crit him for not doing so; I only mention it to observe that in theory an annihilationist could try a similar argument (and I think I recall some doing so): Jesus was critting such Pharisees and teaching something differently by opposition, and the exegetics might involve Him opposing false views of post-mortem punishment. If they all (or if all the ones leading the opposition against Him) happened to believe in some kind of eternal conscious torment, the evidence might suggest that belief was one of Jesus’ targets; an annihilationist would argue the correction to be in favor of annihilation instead, of course.
And JPH ought to be sympathetic to that line of approach, since even JPH doesn’t try to argue that the Pharisees believed in a totally hands-off non-active punishment-only-for-lack-of-something-else-to-call-it by-God-sort-of on lost souls!! They obviously believed in God’s active punishment, not merely God’s active judgment, of impenitent sinners, including post-mortem, and JPH is arguing for something rather importantly different from that.
(Beyond this, I find it a little curious that JPH doesn’t actually quote Josephus on this. His phraseology might allow a broader idea of what the Pharisees believed; a breadth that might fit better with subsequent Pharisee variances. But being lazy and busy with other things, I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader to check.)
Note that this criticism is not quite the same as what JPH reports from Powys; and I’m a little suspicious that Powys is only assuming what he sets out to prove. I would want to see more evidence indicating that Powys is ONLY ASSUMING FROM THE OUTSET that Jesus didn’t accept the Pharisaic ECT (neither does JPH when it comes down to it), but threatened them with it anyway, and in other places only used the concept of ECT rhetorically and evocatively; and then that Powys is circularly arguing to that conclusion by using the assumed premise of the supposed conclusion. That’s a strong charge, and JPH doesn’t give anywhere near enough evidence to substantiate it.
Certainly when I’m arguing that Jesus is using a you-shall-be-judged-by-your-standard-of-judgment reflexive test against the Pharisees (and against His own apostles, also thus against any subsequent disciples like ourselves), in a Nathan-ish “Thou art the man” surprise turnabout, I’m arguing that from the shape of the data. Maybe Powys is, too. But I’m not arguing, and annihilationists generally don’t argue (I strongly suspect Powys doesn’t argue), that Jesus never “make[s] it clear anywhere that he did not accept” ECT, even if we’re arguing that Jesus is turning their own beliefs against them (albeit turning it against them in a subtly different way than literally all ECT proponents everywhere, including JPH, themselves think Jesus was turning such a belief against them! – no ECT thinks Jesus wasn’t warning His opponents about something the Pharisees were sure wouldn’t happen to them.) I don’t believe Jesus was using the concept of ECT (or annihilation) at all, even when He was using language that His opponents (sometimes including His own chief apostles) could interpret that way in their uncharity toward their opponents – and so condemn themselves.
JPH proceeds to discuss verses that “contain explicit reference to a time frame”, and that gets him into discussions of {aionios} the adjective of eon. He happens to be wrong that “no other Greek word can refer to an eternal period of time” – {aidios} and a couple of other words can, and in fact those words were often used by the subsequent Greek Fathers to bolster “eonian” or even to substitute for it, talking about aidios life instead of eonian life for example. There are also prepositional phrases, which outnumber the use of eonian in the NT, which can refer to an eternal period of time (or so I acknowledge, although other universalists would hotly dispute that, arguing that time itself must come to an end and so also the eons of the eons. JPH and I are both using “eternal” in describing a “period of time” rather loosely to mean only that the time happens to never end, not that time is itself on ontological par with God the Eternal. Except when JPH accidentally requires this in order to get around a problem with his argument; more on that later.)
Obviously, this observation isn’t damaging to JPH’s argument, since both {aidios} and phrases like “into the eons of the eons” both do occasionally apply to the punishment of the wicked – or perhaps {aidios} does in Jude (I argue from the contexts that it’s actually meant as a-idios, a term for invisibility direcrtly related to hades) – but I thought the claim was strangely reductive.
More importantly, no annihilationist of my acquaintance even slightly denies that eonian (or those other words and phrases) refer to an eternal period of time. In fact, they often (I think my experience may even be always) argue that those words NECESSARILY ALWAYS MEAN THAT when disputing against universalists like myself! Some universalists argue that terms and phrases related to eon never refer to a never-ending period of time; others that they can refer directly or secondarily to a never-ending period of time, but that context determines when this is happening; and some argue rather like annihilationists that the term always means an eternal period but that the result is what is eternal and the result cannot be established merely by reference to the term. Some also argue that it refers to that which comes uniquely from God, the only one Who is truly Eternal. (I go with that and with a variable reference to less than never-ending realities: eonian means “lasting”, but how lasting depends on other factors on a case by case basis.)
JPH notably has to exclude usage from the Greek OT to make his case, which was not only strongly in use in Jesus’ day but which very frequently doesn’t feature eonian being used for eternal periods whether frontward or backward. He also has to exclude Greek outside the NT, where in non-Christian documents up to the time of Jesus whether in Greek or Latin (aevum being the same term as aiôn, with a slightly different pronunciation) authors did use the adjective form variably, and where in Judeo-Christian texts after the canon where authors do use the terms variably. It isn’t impossible that the NT canon, situated among that evidence of Judeo-Christian works in borrowing literary terms from their surrounding culture, always happens to use the term to refer to never-ending realities, but it would be strange if that happened. This is aside from how Aramaic speakers (like Jesus and His apostles and countrymen) would be using their underlying term, which again has variance just like the Hebrew olam and ahd which the Greek translates.
JPH tries to get around this: “To try to deflect the meaning of a Greek word through use of one in Hebrew does not do full justice to the intricacies of one langauge to another that is completely different.” But we’re talking about translating one language(group) into another, and about a familiarity with how one language (Hebrew) was translated into another (Greek) for the OT. That isn’t “deflecting the meaning”, that’s recognizing that the underlying conceptual matrix leaves room for variant meanings. But JPH has conveniently shut out appeal to the OT, so hard that he afterward has no idea where Will is getting his “examples as proof” for saying that the word eonian “may [mean] a week, a month, a year, an age, or a series of ages.” Even in the NT, it ought to be at least obvious for anyone who has studied how ideas connect together that “eonian” refers to ages of ages (though I expect that wasn’t the examples as proof that JPH was looking for); whereas in the OT it could refer to something that began and ended in three days!
Even assuming for purposes of argument that JPH was right that olam (and ahd, which he doesn’t seem to know about) refers not to things which will end (in fact both refer to the hills ending as hills compared to the eonian ways of God, in Habbakuk) but to things that did end but were meant not to, that still opens up the possibility that eonian can refer to things that are meant not to end but still do! It isn’t like the ordinances in the Jewish law, being described as eonian / olam at the time, show any indication in the texts where they’re being given that they’re going to come to an end later. We find out in other texts that they’re going to come to an end, and that they do come to an end. Arguably, they come to an end after the close of the NT canon depending on whether any of the canon was written after 70. But I don’t think I would want to be the Christian who had to argue that God never even intended for the Jewish ordinances which pointed to Christ to end with their fulfillment in Christ, or that God never even intended for Jonah’s imprisonment to end, but that these things ended anyway!
Again, if the term can be used as JPH explicitly acknowledges for a figurative sense of forever, then that means the term can be used for a figurative sense of forever, duh! Context determines whether the term is being used that way or not.
JPH is well aware that even in the NT, there is at least one time that eonian refers to something that definitely came to an end, specifically Rom 16:25. He tries to get around this by arguing that it goes backward into never-ending eternity – although he has enough sense not to try arguing that olam things which came to an end didn’t go backward into never-ending eternity – but that’s basically the same as saying that the times of the secret never had a beginning, and so that Nature is just as eternal as God! Just as importantly, Paul (along with Habbakuk in the OT by the way, not on the same topic) shows there that it’s entirely possible to use the same exact term of eonian to compare and contrast two ideas which are only superficially similar; and that opens up (Matthew or whoever’s Greek translation of) what Jesus says at the end of Matt 25 about comparing eonian punishment with eonian life.
JPH’s attempt at leaning on eonian as being decisive is swissed from the outset, and that’s before getting to the part where he has to acknowledge that Annis agree with him that it always means eternal and never anything else ever ever ever. (Not all annihilationists do that, but it’s pretty common in my experience, enough so that I wouldn’t think there’s any point trying this against them.)
(As a sidenote, not to knock Barr, but Konstan and Ramelli may now have the premier study on Biblical words for time, and they don’t reach Barr’s conclusion.)
Moving on to his second key word, JPH acknowledges that this word {apollumi} can and sometimes does refer to things which not only weren’t annihilated, and not only weren’t killed, but which weren’t permanently lost either. That means he can’t turn around and use it for decisive evidence in itself that people are permanently lost in ECT. But annihilationists aren’t usually appealing to the word merely by itself for “favoring annihilation”; they’re appealing to (what they think are) the contexts the word is sometimes used in. When Annis talk about how the word and its Hebrew / Aramaic background are used, what I find they’re usually appealing to is the idea that nothing more is said of the slain people right that moment in the immediate context. In practice occasionally I find this is false – a few verses later God is talking about what’s going to happen with those people after He shatters them like pottery or whatever – but more importantly the question is whether anything more is said about those people later in other contexts. Almost always the answer is yes, simply because most of the time I find Annis appealing to deaths which precede the final general resurrection as though those deaths count as examples of annihilation! – which would punt back to the question of whether the wicked as well as the good will be at least briefly resurrected, but almost all Annis in my experience agree that’s going to happen. So the vast majority of such supposed evidences of annihilation just aren’t annihilation at all in the sense they require. I’m not entirely sure I’ve seen ANY such example from them that doesn’t apply to someone being killed by God before the general resurrection; but supposing for purposes of argument that some such examples exist, which don’t also involve language suggesting they continue existing for at least a long time (mainly involving the lake of fire judgment, which many Annis agree will last for an indeteriminately long time before annihilation but which then on that interpretation can’t count as evidence for annihilation per se), the question just punts back to us universalists over how good our case is that God will save such punished people from their sins after all, and maybe punts back over to ECT proponents that God intends to keep them in existence forever but hopelessly lost after all, compared to principle arguments that God intends to annihilate perma-lost sinners eventually after all.
On to specific cites with JPH:
Matt 10:28 / Luke 12:4-5 – JPH (with ECTists generally) agrees with Annis (generally) that these are clear statements that God will definitely absolutely kill both body and soul of at least some people in hell; they only differ in what it means for God to definitely do that to some people someday. (Or rather, JPH actually doesn’t believe God does this, but rather that it kind of happens as a side effect that God would prefer otherwise to prevent. But still, definitely a hopelessly final death somehow.)
In fact, they aren’t any such testimony at all. They’re testimony that God CAN do this, not that God WILL BE doing this. The Greek is pretty clear about the distinction either way: God is able (in GosMatt) and has the power (in GosLuke) to do it. Jesus says this as a way of nixing excuses not to do one’s evangelical duty out of fear of execution, which is definitely the preceding context in both accounts (whether given at different times in Jesus’ ministry, or ported topically around by the authors): if you’re going to make a choice based on fear, obviously the logical choice is to fear God Who has the power and ability to do worse to you than any creature can! Jesus then goes on soon afterward to reassure listeners that they shouldn’t fear God after all, and that God cares more for any man than for a flower of the field which is burnt up (and effectively annihilated) in a furnace.
(There is a side dispute over whether Jesus has God in mind as the one to fear, since Jesus doesn’t specifically say so; but the OT reference Jesus is using has YHWH explicitly in mind to fear rather than human threats, and I would argue as a theological point that no Christian should believe any creature up to and including Satan has the authority and power to destroy both body and soul in hell. There is also a side dispute, common among both annihilationists and universalists, over the fact that the Greek and Aramaic word Jesus is using in either Gospel report is Gehenna, but I have no problem agreeing that hell is a proper enough translation, and in fact I would point to these verses as direct evidence that Jesus uses Gehenna as a poetic figure for post-mortem punishment.)
JPH thinks “annihilationists and [sic] conditionalists” (as though he has two different groups in mind??) “have a great deal of trouble with this verse,” (meaning both verses), but I don’t know what books he has been reading that ever even suggests they have problems with it. He certainly doesn’t quote anyone having trouble with it; he quotes Fudge immediately on a different topic in the dispute (whether the resurrection body of the wicked has the same nature as that of the justified). On the contrary, in my universal experience this is one of the key verses annihilationists appeal to, on the ground that Jesus’ wording in GosMatt’s account sounds like such a specially emphatic destruction (plus Jesus not happening to talk any more here about anything more happening to anyone God has the power to do this to.)
JPH says Annis tend to argue that there is no distinction between killing and destroying here. Actually their argument is that since there is an obvious distinction between killing only the body but not the soul, and destroying both soul and body, then the stronger distinction means either killing and destroying mean basically the same thing, or that destroying here actually means more than merely killing in parallel with the stronger comparison. JPH whiffles by this by, on one hand, simply asserting that this “seems all too obviously without any linguistic support” – as though {apol-} and its cognates never ever means killing, when in fact it sometimes does – and on the other hand by jumping to a different topic on the nature of the resurrection body of the unjust.
This tactic would not impress me as an annihilationist (it doesn’t as a universalist either), and it doesn’t help that in trying to rebut his chosen topical shift JPH says that “there is neither scriptural nor social warrant to suppose that there will be any difference in [the nature of the resurrection bodies of the just compared to the unjust]”. But Annis do argue from scriptural testimony that eonian life involves a transfiguration of the body from a mortal body into an immortal body; that’s a key point in their overall argument, since they go on from this to infer that the mortal resurrected body, which continues to die, finishes dying. In fact, this is a point ECTists often make as well, the only difference being that the raised mortal bodies will always be dying. Both sides agree on scriptural evidence about this (1 Cor 15 being the most obvious but not the only reference); and I certainly don’t disagree that the bodies of those accepting eonian life will be transfigured into something other than our mortal bodies, while those not accepting eonian life are provided with bodies that continue to die – maybe something akin to the modern zombie resurrection joke (which isn’t too modern since Paul in 1 Cor 15 is replying to mockers of just that kind!)
On this, JPH either hasn’t paid sufficient attention to his sources – I’m sure these things are discussed in Fudge et al – or maybe has unconsciously (I would hate to say consciously) blocked the material because he can’t figure out how to deal with it. It’s a bizarre rebuttal attempt in any case.
Skipping ahead a little, JPH grants the Anni argument that the scriptures nowhere hint that the permanently lost receive an indestructible body. He says he gets that idea from extrascriptural logic, not from scripture but not against scripture. His first of extrascriptural argument in favor of the wicked receiving a body of the same transfigured sort as those who accept eonian life, is that Paul doesn’t say that the resurrection body of the wicked in 1 Cor 15 will be different from that of the saved. At best that’s a purely negative argument from silence, though, not an example of logical argument FOR the proposition! – and it rather flies in the face of Paul’s insistence on identifying the transfigured superior body with those loyal to Christ.
JPH would have been better off trying to make a scriptural argument from the logic of Paul’s digression in the middle of 1 Cor 15, about all men being given life by Christ in parallel with all men being given death by Adam, and how the final enemy being abolished is death. That is in fact one key place that other ECTs argue it from scripture; it also happens to be one key place that universalists argue for Christian universal salvation.
But JPH’s extrascriptural logical argument in favor of a body of the same nature for both the finally saved and the finally lost, goes further than merely observing that Paul doesn’t talk explicitly about the wicked having a different body. JPH goes on next as part of his argument that they shall have the same nature of body, by acknowledging, “I would agree that the resurrection body of the wicked will be different from that of the Christian”! So it isn’t only annihilationists after all who “deny that the nature of the resurrection body of the wicked is the same as that of those of the justified”! – the wicked body is a different nature after all! Different how?! Uh… … “But there is nothing in Scripture that contradicts the idea that the bodies of the wicked will be somehow destructible.”
That’s an inadvertence I’m sure – JPH meant to write in-destructible, since his whole point is to argue that they have indestructible bodies. By accident, in this case, he’s acknowledging again what he acknowledged at the start of this section: scripture nowhere even hints that the wicked receive an indestructible body, more precisely a body of the same nature as that of those who are saved.
In conclusion of his argument that he derives from logic, JPH writes, “On the other hand, this argument may be pointless to begin with; if hell is a place of shame rather than of literal flames, then the bodily ‘destruction’ is completely metaphorical – and the nature of the body is irrelevant to begin with.” But that isn’t any kind of argument, even an extrascriptural one, that the bodies of the saved and the perma-lost have the same nature and so are both indestructible. That looks more like an attempt to dodge a losing issue by trying to call it irrelevant! But while some annihilationists may insist on the body being finally destroyed by literal flames, no Anni insists on the soul being finally destroyed by literal (more properly physical) flames, and their point is really that the permanently lost are destroyed BY GOD regardless of what the fire ‘really’ is or is not.
Finally, back to the parallel verses from Matt/Luke, if someone argues elsewhere that Isaiah 66:24 refers to annihilation instead of to eternal conscious torment (or to anything else), and so argues that these verses mean the same thing by also referencing Gehenna (an obscured translation in many English Bibles), that is definitely not the same thing as “begging the question”; but JPH thinks it is. Granted, someone being sloppy could beg the question along this route, but that isn’t necessarily what’s happening by the appeal, so JPH is at least wrong, and unfairly wrong, to generally dismiss such appeals as “generally” begging the question.
On to JPH’s next specific cite.
Matt 12:31-2 / Mark 3:29 – this is the sin against the Holy Spirit. I don’t personally know or have read any Annis who try to argue for annihilation instead of ECT here on the basis that such a sin could only have been committed right there and then in that specific incident (I’ve never even read of any universalists trying to argue that, although this sounds more like that kind of defense); but if any do, then they would still agree with JPH that, even if that’s true, it still refers to eternal punishment. The difference is still that the Annis would regard the punishment of those particular Pharisees as eternally final.
Personally I would like to see who JPH had in mind for making such an argument, that the super limited application of the judgment THEREFORE means Anni and not ECT. He doesn’t reference a source, much less quote a source, and doesn’t even give the gist of the argument. I can’t help but be suspicious that he read this from some annihilationist who was arguing the point separately from annihilation, not as pointing toward annihilation.
JPH does quote Fudge from The Fire That Consumes, where he writes that the form of the punishment is beside the point, thus it doesn’t specially count in favor of eternal conscious torment over-against annihilation.
JPH thinks this begs the question in favor of something, though he say specifically in favor of what. Not in favor of annihilation, surely, since Fudge couldn’t have been clearer in that quote that he wasn’t arguing that the unforgiven sin points more toward annihilation than toward ECT. JPH however begs the question in favor of ECT by reading Fudge’s “never forgiven” in terms of never-ending conscious choice to forgive someone who still exists to be theoretically forgiven, instead of the far less specific wording of the scriptures which are only “will not be forgiven”. “If a special point is made that a sin is ‘never’ forgiven, then it seems to me to imply that the person will always be around to experience the non-forgiveness. …]” Nope, an ongoing-never-forgiving isn’t grammatically found in the Greek there, and Fudge’s never fits annihilation just as well. “Why [would Jesus] make a special point to say that a sin in [sic is] never [original emphasis] forgiven in given time periods, unless one will be around to fully experience those time periods?” But annihilationists are fine with them existing only for those given time periods, if those terms should be interpreted as limited time periods (which ECTists usually argue otherwise about), just not forever. So Fudge isn’t making Jesus’ teaching there “superfluous” despite what JPH insists.
JPH next quotes Hayes: “One could ask what meaning this text could have if it were not possible that some sins could be forgiven in the next world.” JPH replies that he thinks Hayes is missing the point of the hyperbole here, but that even assuming the language allows some sins to be forgivable after death in contrast to this sin, that still leaves this sin unforgivable. JPH thinks Hayes is trying to “[get] around eternal punishment in this way.” I rather doubt Hayes is trying to argue against ECT altogether in favor of Anni instead by such a method, but I don’t have his book at hand; where I can check JPH’s evaluation of his opponents’ arguments, though (as with Fudge just previosly), doesn’t give me confidence he’s evaluated Hayes’ attempt correctly.
My own analysis of this incident would be much more extensive on narrative and thematic contexts, plus some of the odd grammar, than anything JPH is dealing with here, which I won’t try to summarize here, but which I’ll mention that JPH hasn’t addressed in passing either. Put very over-shortly, I think Jesus is warning the Pharisees that they will be punished with the same condition from which they insisted God couldn’t or wouldn’t save someone else; so I’m sure not going to insist that God can’t or won’t save them (or anyone else punished by God for sinning like them) from that condition!
On to JPH’s next specific cite:
Matt 25:46 – this is the end of the judgment of the sheep and the baby goats, where the sheep will go away to eonian punishment but the righteous to eonian life.
JPH cites Pinnock objecting to this verse being used for ECT on the ground that it gives no indication that the eternal destiny involves conscious suffering. JPH thinks Pinnock’s only answer to the counter-argument that if the eternal life is conscious then the punishment also must be conscious, is “I beg to differ.” I suspect that wasn’t only Pinnock’s answer (I don’t have his book at hand to check), but JPH thinks he’s overtly and literally begging the question thereby. No, Pinnock replying to people insisting that life must be some state so parallel to punishment that both must be conscious, which is more like begging the question in favor of ECT. The ongoing consciousness of the punishment isn’t “quite evident in the text”, despite what JPH tries to insist; consequently, it isn’t “obvious” that “‘begging’ the question” (punning Pinnock begging to differ) “is really the only way to get around” such a claim about ongoing consciousness of punishment.
JPH thinks Shaw makes a “more vague” argument that the length of aionios must be determined by context, and that in this case the context involves “the character of the existence out of or apart from fellowship with God”. That may sound “vague” to JPH, but it sounds to me like Shaw is trying to say that extended context involves being outside God’s omnipresence, and that sinners don’t start existing independently or in dependence on some fundamental reality greater or beside God, consequently that they cease to exist. But maybe Shaw really doesn’t bother explaining this, or maybe he has something else in mind he doesn’t bother explaining. JPH can’t imagine what he could mean, so he dismisses it as making absolutely no sense at all and goes on to Williamson’s commentary.
JPH thinks Williamson’s “somewhat preterist” eschatology, which seems entirely preteristic involving the sheep and goat judgment already being fulfilled (somehow) in the events of 70 AD (sic, JPH means AD 70 or 70 CE), is “a much better argument”. For the reply JPH refers to another essay against Matt 25 “and onward” being completely fulfilled by 70 CE, but rather referring to the age following 70 which ends with the final judgment. Since I agree it isn’t preteristic (and even that Jesus probably didn’t mean that judgment to be partially preteristic, partly fulfilled with the fall of Jerusalem), as do many annihilationists, I’ll skip on to his final remarks on Fudge.
JPH presents Fudge as a second argument about eonian, namely that the word has a qualitative as well as quantitative sense, which JPH agrees with as well as with Fudge’s examples: the judgment is a one-time event with continuing results, as is the eonian redemption, and so on.
JPH’s problem with this attempt, is that the word for punishment does not indicate in and of itself something with a single and solitary point of action with only results (rather than actions) that persist. He tacitly acknowledges that neither does punishment (actually {kolasis}) have an inherent meaning that necessarily involves a persisting action of the same kind – except where in fact he agrees with Annis that some such words do, like judgment and redemption – but that the parallel phrase for eternal life provides the “only real clue” for this verse on that topic. He thinks “we have seen that attempts to dis-establish the parallel do not work” (I think quite otherwise; it’s one of the weakest points of his paper), but he doesn’t quite get around to spelling out that he would need eternal life to involve a continuing action of eternal life in order to create the continuing action of punishment he needs. I’m not actually sure JPH acknowledges that eternal life involves God’s continuing action of eternal life! But even if he does, he’s setting up a parallel that I have found him to have severe problems with in other regards: he works hard elsewhere at dis-establishing (so to speak) God’s continuing action of punishment on the permanently lost!
For what it’s worth, I acknowledge God’s action of punishment there, and that it continues for as long as God sees best to continue it. So do most annihilationists, not incidentally! I go into a lot of contextual detail about why we ought to expect the eonian punishment to come to an end with the salvation of those baby goats from their sins, but since JPH naturally isn’t addressing those kinds of contextual arguments here I’ll move on. I don’t think the other NT use of this form of kolasis, at 1 John 4:18, “carries the strong implication of retribution” of the sort JPH needs here; but I do know there are other cognates of the word in the NT canon, one of which definitely involves what JPH would call remedial punishment (I would call it truly re-tributive punishment), and while Paul doesn’t use the term at Romans 11 he’s certainly using the agricultural metaphor for hopeful not hopeless punishment – and warning that we had better not despise people currently being punished by God that way, or we’re lining up to be grafted out of the vine by God as well! (I would also argue this is very much the point of the judgment of the sheep and the goats, by the way.) But since JPH doesn’t go into detail there, I’ll move along, too.
Next JPH accuses annihilationists of creating a grammatic rule where eonian always signifies a process with a completion when paired with a noun. I don’t think I’ve ever heard of any Annis making this argument, and JPH provides no examples of it. He does provide a couple of examples of Anni arguments based on thematic comparisons, but that’s such a different argument that it’s bizarre for JPH to treat it as a grammatic argument.
He does sort of treat the represented arguments on their own merits (not as grammatic arguments), too. His reply to the argument that eonian salvation in Heb 5:9 refers to something finally completed and therefore punishment should be treated the same way, is that this simply assumes in a question begging fashion that punishment is in exactly the same (conceptual) category as “sin” and “salvation”. Fair enough, although by inadvertence JPH seems to be agreeing that “sin” is in fact in the same category of “salvation” in the sense of being eventually finished and not ongoing! – whereas his position definitely involves people sinning guiltily forever.
JPH doesn’t actually cite any annihilationist sheerly asserting that the phrase “eternal sin” in Mark 3:29 surely does not mean that the one who is guilty continues sinning forever; nor does he quote or cite anyone trying to argue otherwise based on a comparison to eternal salvation at Heb 5:9. Presumably one or both kinds of arguments are being replied to here. But if all that can be argued is that eonian can reference things that are finished and don’t continue as ongoing actions of the same type, like salvation and (JPH agrees with Annis) judgment, then by the same token “eternal sin” at Mark 3:29 could reference a sin that finishes and doesn’t continue. It would be question-begging to assert that that’s certainly the case, but if the position is developed elsewhere then all that’s necessary is to observe that the position can be imported here just as well; it’s a defensive argument but not necessarily question begging. Similarly, an ECT proponent shouldn’t just beg the question by asserting that sin is the kind of action that does go on forever unlike the action of saving people from their sins; but if that was developed elsewhere, the phrase here could easily be interpreted along the same line.
As it happens, the Greek grammar for that phrase at Mark 3:39 is rather more squirrely than JPH (or most commentators) bothers to notice, which is exactly why there are some notable variances in subsequent copies, sometimes changing the word for sin to what looks like a better cognate form to fit the idea of a continuing ongoing sin, sometimes changing the word for sin to a different word altogether (kolasis being the favorite substitution). The issues here are rather more murky than tend to be reflected in English translations; I would argue from surrounding contexts that the idea of people never being saved from sin by God is what is being condemned, and that the strange original grammar fits this idea by having the idea of eonian sin being what is itself under judgment. But I admit the grammar is odd enough that I wouldn’t hang anything on the grammar even that way – maybe there’s an underlying Aramaicism which Mark is reporting. My only point here is that the case is a lot more complex than what JPH is reporting (and ECTs usually, and Annis usually for that matter).
On to JPH’s next specific cite:
Mark 9:43-8 (cf Is 66:24) – this is the main Gehenna block in Mark, largely paralleled with some different material in Matt 18 (and Matt 5), also paralleled without the Gehenna warning in several Luke areas (one of which connects to the Rich Man in hades).
I pause to note with amusement that, as usual, someone citing this section stops at verse 48, without continuing with Jesus’ own explanation of the purpose of the unquenchable eonian fire of Gehenna in the next two verses; but since Annis also usually ignore that explanation, and since that explanation doesn’t help either Anni or ECT theories at all (to say the least), I suppose there’s no reason for JPH to bring it up when disputing with Annis.
JPH is perfectly willing to appeal to extra-biblical cultural contexts here as a setting for the meaning of Gehenna as eternal post-death conscious torment, though not to the extra-biblical cultural contexts for eonian. Be that as it may, I agree the Pharisees Jesus was opposing had some kind of finally hopeless punishment in mind (typically eternal conscious torment), and that the chief apostles Jesus is opposing here also had that idea in mind. Whether Jesus had one or another or no kind of finally hopeless non-salvation (and punishment) in mind, and meant to affirm it, is the more important question.
JPH grants that the word for dead bodies in the Isaiah verse mentioned by Jesus does only apply to corpses. He thinks Isaiah 66:22-23 indicate that the righteous continue to come for worship forever, though, and so that they must see the burning corpses forever. If so, they must be abhorred by whatever they are seeing forever, which would be a pretty damn horrible final salvation! – the grammar is quite clear that the visitors are the ones being disgusted.
JPH thinks that even if the dead bodies are perpetually burning, that this would “certainly not [give] any sense of annihilation,” as though people couldn’t be annihilated so long as their bodies are still around along with their weapons and so forth; on the same principle, had the verse only mentioned their weapons, that would count just as much against the people being thus annihilated as people.
JPH wonders what the point would be for an option of entering hell / Gehenna with a whole body if a person is not conscious? I have a hard time believing not one of his Anni sources anticipated this for him to counter-reply to, but from their perspective the point should be pretty obvious: Jesus would have been saying that it’s better to enter into life maimed and repentant of your sins, than to go into a situation where your unmaimed body will do your evil and impenitent soul no good at all – much the same as ECTists in principle. In fact Annis in my experience appeal to just that wording of “entering into life”, contrasted to going into the unquenchable eonian fire of Gehenna, as evidence that the lost will be dying (again, after the resurrection) instead of continuing to live in Gehenna.
JPH makes a decent point about Annis who complain about treating the Isaiah verse typologically, but I would carry it further: EVERYONE uses that verse typologically, even full preterists who regardless of their soteriological flavor (whether anni, ECT, or “Katholistic”; and whether Calv, Arm, or Kath) have to ignore various pertinent details to make it ‘work’ as nothing further than a prophecy of the fall of Jerusalem in 70. Annis are no different, whether fully or partially preteristic. (I don’t know any interpreter who completely denies that any prophecy has anything to do with the fall of 70.) The scene involves the burning and burying the dead bodies of the pagan armies who would have taken rebel Jerusalem if YHWH hadn’t personally and visibly intervened to save His rebel people at the last moment, leading them to finally and permanently convert back to faithfulness to Him. That hasn’t happened yet (and sure didn’t happen in 70!); but unless the annihilationist is just flat denying the resurrection of the wicked along with the good, this isn’t a prophecy of annihilation per se in the sense they require. At best it’s a typological picture of annihilation.
On to JPH’s next specific cite.
2 Thess 1:8-9 – this is Paul’s most famously explicit warning of apparently hopeless punishment, although JPH salts the scales by using a translation that features a more specific idea of the lost being “shut out from” the presence of the Lord. The Greek isn’t that specific; it only uses {apo}, “from”. It could mean “away from” in the sense of being pushed by the punishment away from the presence and away from the majesty of the power of the Lord; or it could mean “from” in the sense of the punishment coming from the presence and the majesty of the power. Or it might mean both! There is no way to decisively tell by nearby context. But in the referential context, where Paul is citing Isaiah 2, the unjust are fleeing unsuccessfully (and somewhat humorously) from the presence of YHWH; and in the referential context of a nearby preceding verse, talking about much the same thing from Jeremiah, the unjust are being punished by the presence of YHWH.
So it can mean both, but with the restriction that the doers of evil won’t actually be able to escape the presence of God, and God isn’t necessarily trying to push them away. (On the contrary, later in the same Isaianic prophecy, God reveals that His purpose in punishing His rebel daughters like that, even to death, is so that they will repent and seek reconciliation with those who being righteous survived the coming of YHWH, whereupon God will clean His rebel daughters of the filth of their murders by the spirit of judgment and of burning, restoring their fellowship with Him in peace! This is at least post-mortem salvation, and the flashforward at the start of this prophetic block, at the beginning of chapter 2, suggests the end result will be no remaining evildoers.)
JPH unfortunately hangs a lot on {apo} meaning very specifically “shut out from the presence of the Lord”. He’s clearly aware that an annihilationist would have less than no problem with that idea, since being shut out completely from the presence of the Lord would involve non-existence outside God’s omnipresence; so he adds parenthetically, with no rationale for doing so, that “this refers to the loss of fellowship with God and has nothing to do with God’s omnipresence as such”.
Even with that unexplained and unjustified parenthetical interpretation of his unjustified interpretation of {apo}, an annihilationist who accepted both points could easily still say that this refers to the coming of YHWH and not necessarily to the final judgment after the resurrection of the dead (which is a topic that neither Paul nor his two prophetic sources discuss here, unless the wicked seeking and receiving reconciliation from the righteous who survived the coming of YHWH counts). Or at the very least, annihilation also involves being shut out from fellowship with God; in fact, that means not getting eonian life, and JPH himself has hung a lot on eonian referring to something that necessarily continues forever. By contrast the Anni would say that getting eonian olethron and not getting eonian life, implies annihilation. It’s at worst a dispute that would have to be settled on other grounds.
But no, JPH thinks that with his unjustified parenthetical interpretation of his unjustified interpretation of {apo} (at best he didn’t think the effort to justify those two positions worth including in his article), those two verses are “therefore perhaps the strongest verse[s] against annihilationism, and the least able to be re-interpreted.”
To that amazing leap, I might as well reply that the Greek of verse 9 actually reads that those who (from verse 8) do not know God and do not obey Jesus’ gospel, shall {tio} positively honor/value the {dikê} justice of eonian olethron from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of His power.
Coming to positively value one’s own divine ruination doesn’t fit ECT or Anni very well. But it does fit a bunch of other things I could cite from the scriptures, starting with that Isaiah prophecy which Paul is verbally referencing, where those who aren’t the survivors repent and are washed clean of their sins by the spirit of judgment and of burning; and immediately including Paul’s only other use of {olethron} to talk about the coming day of the Lord, 1 Cor 5, where Paul hands the Stepmom-Sleeping Guy over to Satan for the olethron of his flesh so that the SSG’s spirit may be saved in the same Day of the Lord Paul is talking about here in 2 Thess. It wasn’t a hopeless punishment in 1 Cor 5, especially in relation to this coming Day of YHWH; and even if those who are not called the survivors in Isaiah 4 might be interpreted as evildoers who impenitently survived this coming Day of YHWH, their eonian olethron still leaves them able to repent and be saved (and encourages and teaches them to do so).
So taken in grammatic and referential context, I think this citation is far from being the strongest verse for either ECT or anni.
Naturally JPH isn’t replying to that kind of argument (so no fault to him for not doing so); but he does talk a little more about the anticipated Anni rebuttal that he is foisting a notion of God’s presence or lack thereof into the text.
JPH could have replied that the scriptures do talk elsewhere about a lack of fellowship with God being described as a lack of God’s presence, so that there is at least some possibility that Paul here means only a lack of fellowship not a lack of God’s omnipresence. But JPH is otherwise committed elsewhere to the idea that this punishment does involve sinners continuing to exist apart from God’s continuing action to keep them in existence, which is a point just as antithetical to supernaturalistic theism (though JPH doesn’t realize it) as existing outside God’s omnipresence would be.
So instead, JPH replies that Paul is talking in these verses of “two degrees” “of God’s presence” – which JPH prefers instead of “two kinds”, but which then connects a lack of fellowship directly back to existing outside God’s omnipresence. He doesn’t bother explaining in the least why or how Paul is supposedly talking about two degrees (or kinds or whatever) of God’s presence here; he doesn’t even try to hang that on “from the presence” and “from the power”.
He does try to argue that “the active voice of the verb in this passage suggests a continual existence” for those being punished, except he doesn’t say which verb. Presumably he means {tio} which is the only verb “in the first part of this verse”, where he thinks the sting against annihilation lies; but as I previously noted, it’s actually is a verb about positively honoring and valuing something, including a secondary meaning of paying something but still in the sense of positively honor/valuing it. As much as JPH’s notion of ECT hangs on shame and honor, one might have thought this would be an important bit of evidence; but then, the evidence runs exactly against his theory of permanent shame for the perma-lost, so maybe it’s better that he didn’t mention which verb he had in mind for implying an active continual existence.
To be fair, I wouldn’t go so far as to say the active form of the verb means those doing the {tio} will be always actively doing it; but I do think the active form is important here: it emphasizes that the people being punished (the punishment being implied from other words nearby) will personally {tio} the justice (the {dikê}) of their eonian olethron. This is so obvious (although the form {tio} there is admittedly rare) that even interpreters of hopeless punishment here sometimes acknowledge it! – by translating the verb to mean the evil-doers will be paying the dikê, although then they’re stuck with what that could mean, so they translate this shorter form of “justice” as “price” or “cost” or something along that line.
The verb definitely does not mean “to punish”, although by a secondary analogy “justice” can refer to punishment (via the idea of a just punishment imposed by justice), so to interpret “they shal tio the dikê” as meaning “they will be punished” is a pretty loose effort that loses some important nuances along the way. But JPH’s argument hinges entirely on losing those nuances.
JPH also has a problem in that the active voice of the verb, if it refers to punishment, would mean someone is actively punishing the perma-lost; and by his own (somewhat unjustified) extrapolation of the implication of the voice, someone is continuing to do so. That someone could only be God (especially by St. Paul’s citational refs to Jeremiah and Isaiah here and nearby); but JPH is strongly committed to the idea that God doesn’t in fact continue to punish the lost! – and he isn’t very keen on the idea that God directly punishes the perma-lost at all (even if God judges them).
This is tied directly into JPH’s denial that the lost continue to exist in the presence of God, and this denial goes beyond the mere loss of personal fellowship with God. He actually argues “the preposition here (apo) literal [sic] implies separation by distance”. But a literal separation by distance involves an idea categorically different than a mere formal loss of fellowship; nor would a literal separation by distance involve the slightest reduction of God’s omnipresence. (Besides which, {apo} only involves a separation by distance, figuratively or literally, when it means “away from”; when it means “coming from” a source, then that would if anything involve closing a distance, perhaps uncomfortably so! JPH ignores this meaning altogether, although examples aren’t hard to find. This is why there is a hot debate on this verse about whether {apo} means the olethron is away from God, or sourced from God, or perhaps both.)
In case it might seem unclear what JPH is aiming for by treating {apo} as though it only (or at least here necessarily) means separation by distance, he goes on to anticipate the obvious annihilationist reply that such an emphasis on separation by distance, even if figurative, would involve sinners continuing to exist apart from God’s active upkeep even if somehow not also apart from God’s omnipresence.
But JPH thinks he’s just fine with sinners continuing to exist without God’s active upkeep! He doesn’t think the Bible teaches anywhere that God’s {ischus} continually holds any of God’s creations in existence. That’s quibbling, though; the Bible certainly teaches that all things continually hold together by God (and even by Christ, as any trinitarian apologist ought to know). Whether that’s by God’s dunamis or by God’s ischus (as if there’s a practical difference when talking about God) is irrelevant.
Moreover, JPH “[can’t] see why the sustaining power, even if in this sort of relationship, has to be in a continual relationship [his emphasis] as opposed to one, let us say, that allows for a ‘single shot’ of power at a given point that lasts in effect through eternity”.
I don’t know how to discus this briefly (in a critical reply, now exceeding 9600 words!), but to put it as shortly as I can, JPH is committing here to the idea that something that didn’t exist independently can begin to exist independently. Dependence of existence is merely a temporal relationship then, like a man begetting a son or a man creating a chair, where the originator and the new independent existence now co-exist independently.
This means we aren’t even talking about God Most High anymore, but rather something like a Mormon god creating other gods like himself! – now co-existing as distinct entities within a shared overarching reality, which must itself be substantially different and truly self-existent. JPH ought to know better than to go this route; and if the topic was something other than his (ultimately hopeless) soteriology, I imagine he would know better. But I have long discovered that trinitarian theists will tacitly or even explicitly chunk important points of the doctrinal set in order to cling to a hopelessly final non-salvation of sinners from sin.
Note that it doesn’t matter that JPH’s somewhat novel variation of this tactic, doesn’t involve the sinners coming to self-exist or to exist dependently on something other than God now (such as Satan or a system of Nature equal to God in self-existence). Instead, on his theory, God shoots forth a divine power that starts existing independently from God, becoming in effect a separate God co-existing along with God – except maybe this power is impersonal although still divine and capable of keeping created persons still in existence as persons. Either this is Christ the power of God, in which case the Unity of the Trinity is being sundered and denied; or (especially if this is an impersonal power somehow keeping persons in existence) this is an independently co-existent force that shares an overarching existence together with the Trinity! – either way the ground of fundamental existence being shared by the separate entities of God and whatever this new divine power is, is the real God Most High (or perhaps some atheistic reality??) which JPH hasn’t been talking about at all.
A proponent of eternal conscious torment could, at least in theory, affirm that God continually keeps sinners in existence, and that they do not begin existing independently or in dependence on something other than God. But that would mean God is actively punishing those sinners to at least some real degree, without acting toward leading them to repent and be saved by God from their sins; and that is a position JPH has been apo-ing from for a while now.
On to JPH’s next specific cite.
Jude 7 – this is where Sodom and the surrounding cities (clearly referring to the people who commit ultra-prostitution and going after other flesh, not merely to the physical locations) experience the justice of eonian fire (JPH cites a translation of {dikê} there as “punishment” instead) as a sample of what is going to happen to false Christian teachers denying the only God and master of us, Jesus Christ, and teaching sexual wantonness.
Of course if those people come to actively honor-value the justice of their punishment by God, then this isn’t a hopeless punishment at all; and Ezekiel prophecies that the people slain in Sodom for their sins will one day be reconciled to even-more-sinful Israel under God. Be that as it may.
Annis appeal to this verse to say that what happened to Sodom is either annihilation – in which case they must deny the resurrection of the wicked, with the Sodomites already having been annihilated out of existence – or stands as a typological figure for annihilation, which would fit better with the idea that they will be raised and then annihilated.
JPH replies well enough that if Sodom and its allies are a sample of God’s punishment, then it might be a sample of them being slain and yet still existing (to be raised again). Also, if an eternal fire is true then there could never be any earthly parallel since any earthly fire will go out.
He does not anticipate that an Anni might reply that this means any figure of fire counts more toward annihilation than otherwise! I would have replied that since people on all sides can agree that our God the consuming fire won’t cease existing, and that the scriptures use natural fire occasionally as a symbol for God the Holy Spirit, then it is in fact possible and even somewhat common for an eternal fire to be scripturally figured by a non-eternal fire. To which I would add that, ontologically speaking, there can be only one eternal fire, “the fire the eonian” as Jesus calls it twice (by Matthew’s report) in connection with Gehenna and the judgment against the baby goats: namely God the Holy Spirit. But then this verse would be neutralized for counting toward either ECT or anni; anyway, JPH doesn’t go this route.
I am much more surprised that JPH doesn’t take the opportunity to appeal back to verse 6 (Jude only has one chapter) where the punishment of rebel angels is shown as another example of what’s awaiting anti-Christian Christian teachers. This is one of the few NT uses of {aidios}, if indeed that’s the word and not a-idios (invisible, as in the Petrine scripture Jude is paralleling here though Peter doesn’t use that particular word for the idea). And it’s used to describe the chains under darkness which imprison those rebel angels until the judgment of the Great Day. But if God lets them loose once or twice (per RevJohn) before that ultimate judgment, then even if the word is aidios, it doesn’t actually refer to something that lasts forever here. Most Greek sources before and after the NT (including the Christian Fathers) treat {aidios} in a fashion rather like high-godly to mean something stronger than eonian, though, so I usually find ECT proponents appealing to verse 6 not only against universalists like myself but also against annihilationists. Anyway, there is some room from other testimonies (such as God visiting human and angelic rebels after imprisoning them in defeat, using a term which means to set free when applying to someone already “visited” with a punishment) for verse 6 to be flexible beyond ECT.
On to JPH’s next specific cite.
Rev 14:9-11 – these are the verses that talk about those drinking the wine of God’s fury being tormented with burning sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and of the lamb, with the smoke of their torment rising into the eons of the eons, and with those who keep worshiping the beast and his image and who keep accepting the mark of his name having no rest day or night.
JPH accepts Fudge’s comparison to the fate of Edom, although he thinks Fudge’s argument “begs the question of whether Isaiah is using ‘eternal’ language hyperbolically to describe Edom’s fate, and since he is describing events on earth as opposed to those in heaven, one may argue that there is a strong likelihood that this is what Isaiah is doing.” I would go further, that there is a decisive likelihood that Isaiah talks about animals living in the ruined mess of Edom and then goes on soon afterward to talk about how God will restore Edom so that people can not only pass through it on the way to Jerusalem but also settle there in reconciliation with God.
So, sure, compare what’s happening here with Edom, but what happens to Edom doesn’t fit eternal conscious torment or annihilation very well. But JPH doesn’t mention those other details, leaving the impression Edom really is destroyed (in a continuing existent state) forever.
I don’t have Pinnock’s book in front of me, so I’m suspicious that he claims “that [there] is no indication of how long the suffering described in this verse is to last” (as JPH reports him). I suspect Pinnock means that the eons of the eons continue for an indeterminate time and could eventually end, with annihilation for example. Williamson thinks (on JPH’s report) that no one can or will worship anything while in torment, but also that (quoted by JPH) “torment is suffered while the worship of the beast is in progress.” Those are two contradictory statements; and while I certainly run across people flatly contradicting their own positions like that to keep some kind of hopeless punishment or fate for some sinners, I notice one of them wasn’t quoted from Williamson which makes me suspicious since JPH has shown some habit of omitting inconvenient contexts. But leaving out the suspicious non-quote from Williamson, obviously the principle that evildoers suffer torment while worshiping the beast doesn’t preclude them from ceasing both torment and worship simultaneously eventually.
Meanwhile, I can’t figure out why JPH replies to this indicate those verses foretell of those presently worshiping the beast; there is nothing in the typical usage of Greek grammar there which prevents it being something foretold of those who will be worshiping the beast during that torment. Possibly JPH has in mind prophecies that all creatures shall come at last to worship God; but those prophecies (as noted above) are about positive grateful confession of God’s mighty saving victories – the terms in Greek and Hebrew are not about worship with the lips only but also true worship of the heart, the latter of which God accepts not the former which He definitely never seeks! An annihilationist would appeal to those verses as evidence there shall be no more rebels eventually (having been annihilated, per what the Anni thinks is testified elsewhere).
This has more than a little relevance to John forseeing another flashforward soon after this one – the torment into the eons is certainly a flashforward of some kind compared to the general development of the revelation narrative – where, at the beginning of chapter 15, many clearly righteous people are standing on the sea of fire and glass loyally worshiping God, having come out from worship of the beast as conquerors paralleling Christ’s earlier exhortation for sinners to conquer their sins, singing about how all the nations shall come and worship God with numinous fear.
JPH rightly retorts to those who cite Rev 10:6 to supposedly read that time shall cease, that the better sense of the verse is that there shall be no more delay in completing the divine purpose. Whether there are other verses suggesting the ages come to an end (I think there are) and that this means time comes to an end (I don’t think so, not for any creature), is a further question not to be settled merely by translating Rev 10:6 in context. That the redeemed need no light other than Christ to walk by, and so have no day or night, doesn’t prevent day and night cycles continuing including for those not yet redeemed; but an annihilationist could agree with that in principle, the idea being that the existence of the lost stops in a way that can be described as the outer darkness, after eons of the eons (independently of whether or not day and night continue in other regards).
I doubt Fudge is admitting at all that it may be true that the suffering will last day and night always, if he is going on to explain that it may come to an end after going on without pause both night and day; I suspect JPH is who inserted that parenthetical always into the non-quote. Annihilationists are usually comfortable with the idea that punishment continues before annihilation.
JPH seems to say that Pinnock admits that the devil, the beast, and the false prophet are clearly tormented forever, but while he cites a page number he doesn’t quote P; and even if P admits that, that would make him quite unusual for an annihilationist in my experience. Annihilationists don’t usually restrict annihilation to human sinners! But if JPH is reporting P correctly, I would tend to agree with JPH that there is no support in this or other texts that some persons will cease to exist in the lake of fire and others never will.
Much to my not-surprise, though, JPH sails right past the implication that the evildoers are being tormented in the presence of Christ (= God) and the holy angels. Nor, a little more surprisingly, does he refer to the smoke of their torment; but that suggests some kind of change, so maybe I’m not surprised there either. Annis would say the smoke represents the results of their annihilation rising up into the eons of the eons. I would say it analogically represents their cleaning and sanctification, along with the imagery of sulfur, fire, and the term for “torment” there which refers to testing gold: the vision combines gold refining imagery (always a remedial punishment idea elsewhere in scripture) with sacrifices being washed and salted clean in the sea-of-fire-and-glass before God’s throne in the Temple so that it may be offered acceptably to God with an aroma rising to heaven. Be that as it may.
On to JPH’s next specific cite.
Rev 20:12-15, 21:8 – these are the main lake of fire judgment verses. JPH (if he is accurately reporting) reports Williamson arguing that since sin is the first death, the second death must be the last and thus annihilation, otherwise this verse would be describing a third death.
Oddly, JPH doesn’t reply that on this theory annihilation is still a third death, since the second death wouldn’t be sin but the death of the body! But I think most Annis would be fine with not treating sin as the first death in an exclusive sequence of only two deaths, or anyway combining the death of sin with the death of the body which results from sin; leaving over the lake of fire as the second death.
JPH thinks whatever the second death it, it happens after the stopping of death and pain; but if that was true, it could only refer to annihilation since only annihilation is a finally hopeless death that also stops all death and pain. Eternal conscious torment sure doesn’t fit that bill! Otherwise Annis would just agree with most ECTists that when Jesus is talking about the stopping of death and pain, He only means for the saved – annihilation would stop it in another way later, but until then death and pain would continue for the unsaved.
I think that whole corner of the dispute is mistaking a prophecy of the final result – the stopping of death and the wiping away of tears from every eye – with continuations of the process that are described afterward leading to that result. There are at least a couple of indisputable examples of such flashforwarding in both RevJohn and OT prophecies (the start of Isaiah 2 comes to mind, where the peace of God’s holy mountain to come sure doesn’t come before the vengeance on evildoers which in turn leads to repentance and peace, even if the latter point is disputed).
Moreover, death itself is thrown into the second death along with hades (the abode of the disembodied dead), so the second death involves the death of death itself, the final enemy to be defeated. But neither annihilation nor eternal conscious torment involves death itself being finally defeated; which may be why JPH doesn’t point out that the death of death would point toward ongoing life even for the unsaved.
If Williamson really does try to argue that there could be no salvation if ECT is true on the ground that therefore all who have ever been sinful must be in the lake of fire, then I agree with JPH’s rebuttal that the verse doesn’t say all who were ever fearful and unbelieving but refers to those who at the time of judgment are fearful and unbelieving. I’m somewhat doubtful JPH is reporting Williamson correctly, though. After all, JPH thinks that arguments observing that the verses do not specific conscious suffering, are “speculative” arguments; whereas, if they are wrong, it wouldn’t be by speculating beyond the evidence but truncating too far by appealing to an argument from silence. Annis would instead say that ECTists are who speculate never-ending suffering beyond the actual language of the text. Whereas ECTists (JPH demonstrably included) would say they aren’t speculating that either, but importing it from other testimony! It’s all too easy to refuse to even answer a point by name-calling it as speculation. (Which by the way is why, although I recognize that arguments can be weak from speculation, I rarely ever charge that against opponents.)
On a bag of further citations:
Isaiah 27:1 – some annihilationists apparently try citing this as evidence that Satan can and will be killed. JPH tries to get around this by saying the enemy there is “Leviathan”, which he says is used symbolically to represent all of God’s enemies, although on this I think the cultural weight is entirely against him: Leviathan is a nickname for the greatest rebel spirit, just like “Satan”. When RevJohn is talking about the Dragon as the Devil, that’s a reference to Leviathan, the dragon living in the place of imprisoned spirits (typified as the dangerous / salty-poisonous ocean). But then JPH nerfs his own rebuttal by admitting that all God’s enemies “would likely include Satan”, so why even bother with rebutting that it means all God’s enemies? For that matter, does JPH really think that it is only LIKELY that Satan is among all of God’s enemies??? The whole rebuttal is an exercise in throwing fog: why should this verse be reduced so far from any “literal” sense that JPH doesn’t see fit to supply even a vague alternate meaning for it?
For that matter, God goes on a few verses after talking about killing Leviathan on the Day of the Lord to come – and in the midst of several chapters of colorfully destructive wrath against evildoers – to state that He has no wrath in Him, but only fights those who go out to war against Him, and then only fights to burn up the thorns and thistles they’re trying to fight Him with, so that they will cling to Him instead and make Him their friend. No doubt this doesn’t mean, as JPH quips against the idea that God will slay Leviathan, that God likes fighting weeds; but it means more than the mere imagery, not less. Actually, it means that this is God’s method and goal of fighting Leviathan, too, however broadly or narrowly or metaphorically or literally one wants to interpret those verses! – even if God slays Leviathan, He has no wrath in Him, and only acts to destroy Leviathan’s self-harmful method of trying to fight against God, with the goal of leading Leviathan to cling to God instead of to those thorns and thistles.
In other words, the nearby context itself testifies that God’s purpose isn’t to annihilate (even!) Leviathan. But then, God’s purpose there doesn’t fit ECT either. (Neither does the material ending the preceding chapter by the way: to the righteous people God recommends they hide away until His punitive wrath has passed, but God hears those whom he has already punished to death, repenting of the vanity of their sin, and consoles them that they shall rise from the dead and shout for joy. They aren’t annihilated, and they aren’t tormented eternally.)
JPH doesn’t explain why Rev 12:9 “has no applicability at all” to an argument that Satan will be annihilated in reference to Isaiah 27:1. One might have supposed that his reply would be that Rev 12:9 seems to be describing the fall of Satan and his fellow rebels from heaven, not Satan’s death (much less his annihilation). Ditto Rev 20:2, where Satan is bound for a thousand years: that’s hardly annihilation and if it shed any light on Isaiah 27:1 it would be that Satan’s death not only involves just being imprisoned, but that he’ll be back to wreck more havoc at least once more (after the passing of the thousand years)! Jer 10:11 does seem relevant to the death of Leviathan, where the rebel gods shall perish from the earth and from the heavens they did not make. But the surrounding context is more about the even-more-worthlessness of idols made by hands, so maybe that’s why JPH doesn’t think it has any applicability at all. (Maybe he was getting tired at this point, so didn’t bother explaining why. He mentions 1 Corinthians also not being applicable but forgot to mention which chapter and verse he thought the Annis were appealing to there.)
I agree with JPH that {apollumi} doesn’t offer the support for annihilation its proponents usually think it does, and so adds no special weight to Mark 1:24 against the demons expecting to be destroyed. (To which I might add that maybe unmerciful demons shouldn’t be regarded too closely anyway for what they might expect from God, since they’re likely to expect what they would inflict if they were God!)
JPH thinks Ezekiel 28 (including 18-19) doesn’t refer to Satan at all. Obviously it refers to the king of Tyre (since that’s what the prophet himself says, and several details along the way confirm it), but he’s being compared to the anointed covering cherub in Eden who shined like precious stones and walked blamelessly until he rebelled, in love with his own beauty, and made himself out to be equal to God especially in his wisdom. That definitely isn’t the king of Tyre, neither is it Adam exactly. Part of the point of poetry is that person X can be poetically compared to person Y for purposes of illustration. (Isaiah compares the pagan tyrant Cyrus, who doesn’t even know God, to God’s own coming greatest Messiah for example.)
The Anni could reasonably say that even if this doesn’t refer to Satan, it still refers to the king of Tyre being destroyed until he is no more; but just because nothing more is talked about in that prophecy doesn’t mean nothing more will happen to him later: the prophecy doesn’t talk about him being resurrected for judgment and punishment either, but unless the Anni is denying that then that’s going to happen. The proper reply JPH could and should have given is that, regardless of whether Tyre’s king is being compared to Satan or not (though I think he is), a lack of detail in one version of a story doesn’t undermine the testimony of other details elsewhere. If the Bible says the Son will raise the dead unjust ones to judge them with the goal and result that all shall be honoring the Son and the Father, then that extends to the king of Tyre, too. If the Bible says the Son will raise the dead unjust ones to judge them with the goal and result that all of those being judged shall never come to honor the Son and the Father, then that extends to the kind of Tyre, too. The purpose of that judgment either way, whichever way the testimony runs, would even apply to Satan in principle, even if God isn’t exactly raising him from the dead (or not the same way).
I agree with JPH that if Annis find it hard to imagine a concept more confusing than that of endlessly dying without the power of dying, then they could try starting at Genesis 3 and extend that onward forever. But of course not all Annis find that confusing; they just think the Bible testifies that it isn’t going to go on forever like that (bodied or disembodied).
To the argument that if God has no pleasure in the death of the wicked (from Ezek 33:11), therefore we shouldn’t believe they will forever be tormented with undying death in His presence, JPH replies that this is an illegitimate exegetical jump: “the goal is not God’s pleasure but righteousness.”
I agree the goal is righteousness, but righteousness isn’t achieved by permanently existing doers of unrighteousness! – nor would I say it’s achieved by the elimination of those who finally refuse to do righteousness, although superficially and in some practical ways that would achieve a reality where only righteousness is done. I submit that a harmony where disharmony continues forever is not really a harmony, even if a place is found for the disharmonious; and while that idea might be Jewish, Jesus might have a superior idea of righteousness involving, you know, RIGHTEOUSNESS not final unrighteousness. Certainly the final unrighteousness of sinners is not the reconciliation of all things to God "in line with verses like Col 1:20); Paul is quite clear a few verses later what it means to reconcile sinners to God, and continuing to sin forever isn’t it. (Nor is annihilation for that matter: those who are reconciled to God are not annihilated out of existence! If we have been reconciled to God through the blood of the cross, how much moreso shall we be saved into His life!)
JPH thinks that 1 Cor 15:26 is “in a passage that has to do with resurrection and physical bodies, [but] not eternal issues”. He does not explain how the Son subjecting all enemies to Himself and then presenting them in subjection with Himself to the One Who subjects all things to Himself, so that God will be all in all, does not count as “eternal issues”. But then JPH thinks this both “says nothing either way about eternal, conscious torment for the wicked” and also that “if anything, [it] works in favor of it”. Even though it supposedly says nothing either way about it.
Probably “the death” there means Satan; if so, then he’s the final enemy to be subjected to Christ in communion with the Son’s subjection to the Father. If “the death” is some kind of impersonal force, then at least physical bodies will no longer die; subjection to the Father along with Christ indicates there shall no longer be any spiritual death either. Those who are annihilated for not being subject to Christ do not thus become subject to Christ (unless they still exist after annihilation, which isn’t the annihilation Annis are looking for); but an Anni could reply to JPH that if physical death ceases, then so much for his contention that the lost continue in undying physical death!
JPH concludes by addressing some extrabiblical critiques of ECT by Annis (and occasionally by Kaths).
• The finite sins argument appeals to the idea that a creature (in principle including Satan although I’ve seen some proponents exclude him and sometimes fellow rebel angels) can only sin in a limited way, and therefore does not deserve an unlimited punishment. JHP doesn’t accept Anselm’s argument of sin against an infinite God being infinite, so this objection doesn’t apply to him and moves on.
I would have replied that any Anni appealing to this critique (not all do) had better be careful not to insist that annihilation is just as maximally eternal a punishment as ECT. That it would of course be maximally eternal in a different way, would not keep it from being in its own way an unlimited punishment – which on this objection no creature could deserve!
I acknowledge however that other Annis are thinking in terms of annihilation being the natural result of any creature acting against the ultimate ground of that creature’s existence, and that such creatures only avoid that fate by the grace of God (their ground of existence) choosing to keep them in existence as capable persons anyway – until whenever God sees best to stop keeping them in existence anyway. I strongly agree with that position so far as it goes; I only disagree about whether God ever sees best to stop keeping them in existence. (On the contrary, I would argue that the fact God chooses to keep sinners in existence at persons at all indicates His gracious intentions toward the person!) An ECT might in theory try a similar agreement.
• The happy saints argument asks how those who make it into eternal joy be happy knowing the unsaved are suffering forever? JPH does not, in my reckoning, get around this objection very well. His first answer would necessarily imply that at that point the saved will be happy with eternal joy over the justness of the situation, having come to see things exactly as God sees them; but JPH seems to dodge spelling out that conclusion, which would better fit his general approach that God Himself will be permanently unhappy with the fate of the lost. (It isn’t about God’s pleasure being fulfilled by the ongoing existence of unjust people who shall never come to do justice at last, but about God’s justice being fulfilled by the ongoing existence of unjust people who shall never come to do justice at last, as JPH sort of replied earlier but without that level of detail.)
JPH thinks the position also seems to rely on a view of hell as literal fire, which he thinks his paradigm of mental anguish of shame somehow avoids as though that did not also involve suffering unhappily forever. But even if sinners were perfectly happy forever being impenitently unjust (which JPH’s agonistic paradigm definitely doesn’t involve, or else they would have no shame in their evil), the perfectly just could not be coherently imagined to be happy with ongoing final injustice. I would even add that they could not be coherently imagined to be happy with an achievement of final injustice that ended in annihilation; they would only not be bothered by pity for the lost, and there are other ways around that such as coming to naturally forget the lost – or coming to forget the lost by divine alteration of their memory – which don’t require annihilation to achieve that result.
• The spirit of Christian love and kindness argument suggests that it is kinder to put evildoers out of their misery than to keep them in miserable existence. JPH doesn’t reply to that version of this argument; I would reply to it by arguing that no person can be better off after being annihilated than before being annihilated: their condition cannot be improved by removing all conditions! They aren’t better off, they aren’t worse off, they aren’t the same-off, they aren’t anything at all, period. Kindness isn’t being done to annihilated persons by annihilating them, although kindness might be done to those who love them by putting them out of a misery that those who love them feel with (or at least for) them. But there are other ways around the misery of the saved for the lost, as noted above.
JPH rather replies to a version of this argument provided (apparently if JPH is reporting him accurately) by Williamson, who appeals to the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son. JPH notes that such an appeal would count against annihilation just as much as against ECT, and rather in favor of universal salvation! Beyond that, however, I don’t think JPH’s reply is very strong: it’s true that the lost sheep is compared to one who repents, but it isn’t true that the comparison involves the idea that Jesus only goes out to save those who first repent! – the thrust for both versions of that parable (plus the tenth coin) is that God will definitely succeed in saving all of whomever He intends to save (which includes leading them to repent of their sins), and will persist at it until He gets it done. That doesn’t fit an Arminian version of ECT (or anni) at all, including not JPH’s hell-shame paradigm. (Calvs, whether ECT or anni, would argue that Christ only goes out after all of some subset of sheep, not out after all sheep; or out after all sheep but not after any goats.)
Similarly, when JPH observes (correctly) that the prodigal son had to return to the father, that only counts against a notion of universal salvation where the Father doesn’t seek repentance and to save sinners from sin, and also against a notion where the Father never seeks to save sinners at all but only waits around hoping for the best! Obviously JPH knows better than that God never seeks to save the lost – he knows about the parable of the lost sheep at least (and more than that, I know) – but his rebuttal only works against the appeal to the spirit of Christian love and kindness if the Father not only never goes out to seek the prodigal, but also only if the Father only cares to welcome the lost son if the son returns. In fact, the Father cares a whole lot more than that, even in the parable: he is sitting waiting watching the road and hoping for the return. JPH’s rebuttal here is no rebuttal at all.
I do agree with JPH in principle that the proper meaning of {agapê} love is not exclusive of just punishment. I feel pretty safe in presuming that Annis agree in principle with that, too! What all three sides are disagreeing about is what constitutes just punishment. Consequently, JPH’s final rebuttal attempt to this argument simply fails. Whether the proper meaning of God’s true love is not exclusive of eternal conscious punishment, so that some kind of ECT is a just punishment, is the real question at stake. JPH of course thinks God’s true love is perfectly consonant with inflicting a punishment of anguish in shame forever; except when JPH himself goes far in disassociating that result with God’s action to punish thereby! – a disassociation associated with the idea that we shouldn’t expect God to keep acting to inflict that punishment (and maybe not even act to inflict it at all) because that wouldn’t be properly loving. (This idea that even the hell-shame paradigm couldn’t be kept up by the true love of God, is the concept behind JPH’s idea that God may shoot out an independently existent but impersonal divine force, which created persons then depend on rather than on God’s own continuing personal action to keep them alive. God isn’t Who keeps those sinners in existence to suffer forever, it’s that divine power He shot out once long ago: God has no choice in the matter anymore, except whether He will accede to whatever that power impersonally does. As noted above, that isn’t even supernaturalistic theism anymore, much less a coherent trinitarian theism!)
JPH might be able to get around those problems (though he’s never going to be able to get around his radical though inadvertent contradiction of trinitarian theism, as long as he keeps to the notion that something other than God ultimately keeps sinners in existence including as persons), if he adjusted his theory so that God continues always acting toward saving those sinners from sin even if in order to keep the free will of those persons God never manages more than an ongoing stalemate for at least some sinners. If he adjusted along that route, he could not only keep the hell-shame paradigm (meant to teach them and lead them to repentance along with other factors), but he wouldn’t have to daff their existence off on the continuation of some power other than God’s action (fixing his inadvertent trashing of even supernaturalistic theism by ceasing to trash it). Naturally this would also fit the argument from the Christian spirit of love and kindness.
The only problem, if he considered it a problem, would be that technically he would then be a Christian universalist instead of an Arminian (broadly speaking): God persistently and originally acts toward saving all sinners from sin and doesn’t stop acting toward that short of victory. God doesn’t choose to quit; and nothing (including the sinner) makes Him quit. Such a minimal universalism wouldn’t necessarily require the victory; but then of course JPH might start to notice and accept more seriously the scriptural prophecies and promises and assurances that we can trust God to succeed at that goal.
• The name-calling arguments are actually quite different from each other, but collected together by JPH as merely attempts to sway emotion.
The argument that ETC means God is a loser in the battle for souls is not an argument against ETC at all, since it applies just as well to annihilation. It’s actually an argument against Arminian soteriology – JPH doesn’t clarify whether Pinnock or Shaw (or both) tried this appeal, and I don’t know whether one or the other are Calvinist (I think Pinnock…?); although I can’t say I’ve always seen Arms be coherently Arm (or Calvs be coherently Calvs for that matter), so I wouldn’t be surprised if an Arminian tried that but wasn’t paying attention.
JPH thinks it suffices to reply that all who choose Hell do so of their own will; but that doesn’t keep the charge from being true: God is loser in the battle for souls, and actually more of a loser than usual on the increasingly common notion (first popularized by Lewis and followed here by JPH) that God can’t save them because they’ve locked the doors of Hell from the inside: a highly unbiblical position, excluded by repeated Biblical testimony that God is actively and authoritatively putting them outside!
(JPH is unfortunately one of those people who likes to criticize his opponents for taking what he thinks are unbiblical positions, while taking a flagrantly unbiblical position because he thinks it makes better sense. A harsh judgment I know, but consider his claim vs the mountain of scriptural testimony otherwise, and compare it to his own chosen title for this article. If he expects people to grant him enough leeway to allow that his nearly-opposite interpretation of active punishment language might even theoretically be Biblical in character, he ought to be willing to grant the same leeway to people taking destruction language rather more seriously than he himself is taking the active destruction language.)
Again JPH seems to think that the mental agony of shame involves less suffering than what he keeps calling “literal fire” – as though ECT proponents never talk about anything more or other than a physically natural fire when talking about fire, which is itself a strange lapse – but it doesn’t matter about the intensity, the question is whether God is the one authoritatively putting those people into the torment: and again it is the Biblical authors (and Jesus by report) which calls it torment, using not only a term that can mean torture, but even (from Jesus in Matt 18) using a term for those who inflict the torment.
And JPH simply whiffles away the idea that God authoritatively inflicts that state of agony: they have selected their own fate, not God, they impose it upon themselves (“a condition brought upon the sinner by his persistent self-will”, quoting Chan, again quite oddly given his base soteriology which is even more at odds with this idea) and so is not imposed upon them by God. They lock the doors from the inside, God doesn’t lock them out, God doesn’t shut them out from His presence. Except when JPH thinks it’s more convenient to his position to affirm that God “shuts out” people from His presence – he flip-flops back and forth on this, quite shamelessly (so to speak).
• The argument from harmony involves Annis appealing to verses like Isaiah 65:17, and Rom 8:19-23 (I could extend those refs, no doubt Annis can, too), to indicate that eventually no disharmony will exist in God’s creation. ECT requires that disharmony continues to exist in God’s creation, even if they’re sequestered off in a pocket somewhere out of contact with the rest of creation.
JPH connects this with the idea that there is no possibility that God will “lose” (his quote?) the battle for souls – maybe this comes from Shaw, since he’s the only shared reference between this and the previous mention of losing that battle? As I already noted, that’s a Calvinistic criticism of Arminianism, not an Anni criticism of ECT: God still loses the battle for souls if He annihilates them, although some Arminians (whether ECT or Anni) might prefer instead to say that God doesn’t lose the battle for souls but changes His mind about what the goals of the battle are. (Some Arms take the position that God isn’t defeated by sinners, but just loses patience or decides for some other reason to stop trying to save them; which necessarily implies that He could in fact save them if He chose to continue. This isn’t a Calv position, whether ECT or Anni, where God never even intended to save those sinners in the first place, but in both versions the choice is ultimately up to God. The softer Arminian position of God being forced to give up, because the damned lock the doors of hell from the inside or whatever, involves God losing the battle for those souls.)
JPH’s main answer to this is “that this is imposing our modern view of what constitutes harmony on a text written prior to our time”. Admittedly, ancient cultures (and many modern cultures!), including ancient Jewish contexts, didn’t have a problem with final disharmony counting as a final harmony; ancient Jewish contexts eventually settled on God being one and only one Person, too, and all ancient (and modern) contexts ridicule the idea of the one and only ground of all existence choosing to be born of a baby to die a cursed death on a cross.
JPH ought to realize that an appeal to ancient context only goes so far: if the ancient context is self-contradictory nonsense (e.g. an ultimately final harmony that involves ultimately final disharmony), that would be a good reason to suspect revelation to be correcting the context! He really ought to be painfully aware of appeal to ancient context, since his favorite idea of a hands-off sad defeat of God as sinners lock themselves away in a self-imposed shame-and-no-other-agony-at-all, was absolutely not only not the ancient context at all, but is absolutely not the prima facie picture routinely portrayed in the Judeo-Christian canon!
I do of course agree with JPH’s subsequent criticism, that Annis who go this route “might just as well argue that annihilation equates with disharmony, for it [quoting Chan vs. annihilation] ‘means the unmaking of free, created agents (and)… the taking away of that freedom which defines the structure of the moral relationship between God and man.’” (I’m starting to wonder if this is Francis Chan; JPH accidentally lost most of his reference list, and FC doesn’t have a book I know of with the initials LH. Despite being Calvinist, FC has a notorious habit of talking as though God actually intended to save all sinners from sin and empowered them with the capability to accept His leading on this – like an Arminian would believe – so I can’t tell who this is.)
More to the point, salvation and condemnation isn’t about mere harmony or disharmony, which could be theoretically answered by everything merely being in its proper place. That isn’t even an ethical issue (a point JPH’s beloved ancient contexts would often agree about!) It’s about justice and injustice. On JPH’s appeal to a disharmonious total harmony, those who do injustice really shouldn’t be saved from sin at all – that would be disharmonious, since they ought to be in a place of final perdition instead! Nor should any sinner repent of their sins if given the opportunity and capability by God, since that would be disharmonious: as sinners they have a proper place, and they should choose to stay there. Everyone should, on this plan, reject the disharmonious God Who wants to save them and insist on locking the doors to hell from the inside where they can be in their proper place forever. The doers of injustice become the heroes of the story, holding out defiantly against the disharmonious God Who threatens the proper status quo!
This is where I will observe, as I often do when evaluating these defenses of non-salvation, that JPH never even once in this article talks about salvation from sin. But more tellingly, and maybe more importantly, he never once treats his own salvation (from sin or from whatever) as though he is being saved from one kind of harmony – the proper harmony of disharmony where as a sinner he ought to harmoniously stay in his proper disharmonious place – into a different kind of harmony.
This isn’t about a mere Taoistic harmony, which is perfectly content to settle for a black equal to the white, or for an eternal black going on forever. This is about creatures for whom God is authoritatively responsible, acting against the ground of all existence, which if trinitarian theism is true means doers of injustice are acting instead toward permanently breaking fair-togetherness between persons. Not surprisingly, this idea is never even hinted at by JPH; but then, JPH’s idea about ultimate justice (and ultimate harmony) runs completely against the idea of God always acting toward fulfilling fair-togetherness between Persons.
Not coincidentally, those verses of final creational ‘harmony’ which Annis (and Kaths) refer to, aren’t about a modern or ancient idea of ‘harmony’ at all in the sense JPH is thinking of. They’re about rebels ceasing to be rebels. I would add they’re often about rebels ceasing to be rebels and choosing to be loyal to God instead – not about being annihilated out of existence so that the loyalists can get on with being loyal without being distracted. But either way (and that’s a dispute between Annis and Kaths), they’re about sinners ceasing to be sinners, and about creation ceasing to be affected by sin.
And since JPH likes to talk about honor and shame in his soteriology, the Biblical harmony has a lot to do with the Father and the Son giving creation to each other (and the Spirit giving creation to the Father and the Son) with a goal that the Persons of God shall be finally honored, not finally dishonored. JPH is welcome to try to argue that God’s ultimate harmony is accomplished by God giving creations to God which finally and ultimately dishonor and blaspheme God; but I’m glad I don’t have the dubious honor of that task!
Another specific cite:
Matt 13:30, the climax of the parable of the wheat and the weeds, with the wheat being gathered into the barn and the tares being tied in bundles to be burned. Since nothing happens to be said in this parable about what happens to the tares after being burned, ECTists and Annis like to cite this as some kind of hopeless punishment; Annis take that argument from silence further and cite this as evidence the tares are annihilated.
Annis would probably complain that JPH is taking the literal imagery of the fire too literally in his reply that it converts matter to another form instead of annihilating it. JPH is anyway quite wrong that what is burned becomes of no use, which is how he tries to fit this with an idea of shame and disgrace as the fate of the wicked instead of being tormented physically (as though the distinction between that and less abstract or mental agony is that the burned things are useful instead). They’re useful for heat and light, for cooking, and their ash is good for fertilizer; the smell can be good, too (though probably not the tares which have a noxious odor).
JPH thinks Annis are begging the question about what happens to the tares by arguing from silence that their fate is annihilation (but they aren’t begging the question, they’re arguing from silence); I would continue that JPH and ECTists are arguing from silence that the fate of the tares is eternal conscious torment, and that God either can’t or won’t restore them (unlike a human farmer) and convert them to wheat. Certainly God, unlike the human farmer, won’t be taken by surprise when his enemy sows the darnels in the field! So the parallels shouldn’t be pushed too far in any case; a point JPH actually agrees with in principle, when he quips (rightly so) that taking the analogy for the wheat as far as Annis want to take it for the weeds, the righteous will be ground up and made into bread! But then sauce for their goose is sauce for his gander, too. And despite JPH’s further agreement with a reader about the metaphor expressing that the believer will “fulfill the purpose for which the Almighty has always intended it”, JPH himself doesn’t think that’s true about the weeds! – this parable is a favorite of Calvinists because the weeds are created that way and never ever turn into wheat, nor was that ever the intention of anyone. But then again, on that interpretation no one would ever be saved from being weeds into being wheat (as an Arminian would quickly retort), since only those created righteous would be saved – and only saved from being in the presence of the weeds!
The whole parable could be considered a refutation of both Arminian and Calvinistic soteriologies broadly speaking while testing whether people will read those notions into it. Maybe the most important detail is that the weeds turn out to be “sons of the kingdom”, a phrase Jesus always uses elsewhere to talk about people who are or will be saved even if they’re currently sinners now.
Another specific cite:
Matt 5:26 – this is one of the three somewhat similar parables of the unmerciful and unforgiving servant who will not leave the torment he has been put into (with tormentors!) until or unless he has paid the last penny.
I don’t know why Annis per se would bother referring to these parables for their case: getting out of jail isn’t annihilation, and if this reference is post-mortem punishment it would be a hope of post-mortem salvation. Fudge thinks the release from prison if they pay the final penny means they’re allowed to die out of existence, which is surely running against the grain of the parable as far as possible! Probably Annis think of it in much the same terms JPH himself does, that the people cannot in fact pay the last penny and get out of jail, but that neither do they live forever in the jail.
JPH somehow thinks an argument that they can get out of jail “fails to account for the reality of debtor’s prison”, where barring intervention the person never pays the last penny because they can’t get out of prison to make money to pay the debt. He rightly criticizes Fudge’s efforts here, but that isn’t the same as Fudge not accounting for the reality of such a prison – in fact JPH essentially complains about Fudge accounting too much for the reality of such a prison, since even if ECT is true there couldn’t be a proper earthly parallel to illustrate that concept of it! No doubt JPH wouldn’t say he himself is failing to account for the reality of such a prison when he denies that God actually sends people to such a prison to be tormented by tormentors.
For that matter, shouldn’t the prisoners here be locking the doors from the inside in a successful attempt to keep desperate loved ones from bailing them out?! And was Jesus Himself failing to account for the reality of JPH’s eternal non-prison when He suggested that they could leave?
But the whole thing about the last cent being money or something they can’t possibly earn enough to pay back, is misguided anyway: in none of the three parables, especially from Matt 18, are the prisoners sent to prison for a monetary debt. They’re sent because they refuse to reconcile with and forgive their enemies under God. What they owe isn’t money – the king of the unmerciful embezzler forgave a debt of ten thousand talantons of silver already – but rather what they refused to give for which they were put in prison (but for which they demanded to be imprisoned): mercy to others, forgiveness to others, reconciliation under God with their enemies (even if the enemy as per Matt 5 is given a nickname for Satan!)
If they pay that final cent, they can come out. Until and unless they do, they won’t.
But their imprisonment is due to an attitude much closer to an insistence on some kind of ECT or annihilation, an insistence that there must be final and ultimate disharmony for ultimate harmony to be true, than on trusting God to save all sinners from their sins – and into a cordial harmony of no disharmony at last. I don’t doubt that the problem there is not one of doctrine per se, which people may blamelessly hold by mistake (and from his attitude I do think JPH is one who is holding it by mere mistake – his attempts at mitigating eternal conscious torment show well enough that he isn’t insistently rejecting that other people be saved from their sins). But there are people who hold such doctrines of non-salvation out of hatred for those they think won’t be saved, and I think that’s a problem. And I think Jesus was warning about that problem in a lot of the scriptures which people afterward are interpreting as hopeless punishment texts, whether for ECT or for Anni, in Calv or Arm varieties either way.
JPH ends his analysis by dismissing a cluster of verses cited as Pinnock that “either do not specify any sort of time frame or else refer to judgments on earth”. I tend to agree: they either refer to acts before the general resurrection, or their apparent strength relies on an argument from immediate silence about anything further happening (sometimes both). I will fairly note however that if nothing more was ever suggested or indicated elsewhere about God’s intentions and capabilities in ultimate punishment and salvation, then appealing to a lack of further description wouldn’t be an argument from silence; and an annihilationist could make some adjustments to (at least try to) argue that preliminary punishments, though not annihilations themselves, represent what will eventually happen later. At least some of the cluster dismissed by JPH from Pinnock could be re-presented along one or both of those lines; and since I don’t have that book at hand, maybe Pinnock does so.
JPH closes with a personal note, complaining that “critics like Pinnock and Clark fudge the data and then accuse proponents [of ECT]” of using the position for personal gain. I appreciate that JPH has never operated that way even when he believed in what he calls “a literal flame-hell”, and that he understands and worries about people rejecting Christianity (including in his own family) in part because of other people that did wield the eternal punishment stick.
But people can wield any threat of punishment like a stick; JPH’s own eternal hell-shame theory can be wielded that way, except of course so far as God is divorced from acting in any regard to put people in that position – which JPH isn’t always consistent about himself, which isn’t surprising since the Biblical testimony is so thoroughly and pervasively against such a soft, inactive, abstract “judgment” of evildoers by God. Consequently, even on a hell-shame theory, Pinnock’s objection does not go completely out the door; if his objection goes out the door, it would be on grounds that sinners torment themselves forever while God looks helplessly and tragically on, and that would be regardless of the mode of torment. But then so far as actively inflicting a judgment can count as a threat, so could the action of God annihilating sinners: some of the Fathers whom Annis like to cite on their side are definitely threatening evildoers with some kind of punishment from God! – which must be the kind of “ultimate big stick” to stem heresy and get some comfort out of persecution, which they accuse ECTists of doing.
That being said, JPH himself can’t be exonerated from doing exactly what he accuses his opponents of doing, and his final paragraph is a final example of this throughout his article. Pinnock, whom he addresses in that paragraph, might very easily and accurately reply: how did you come to believe hell as a place of mere shame, as though shame doesn’t count as torment, with the door locked from the inside, and no active punishment from God? One must face the fact, he might say, that God’s active punishment, a punishment of real torment, is taught in the Bible, and deal with it. Whether you choose to do so with acceptance, or by means of paste and scissors, is up to you, James Patrick Holding. Exegeting that active punishment out of existence is not a viable option; and your position, as it stands, is very very clearly an unbiblical doctrine – even if it does happen to be unpopular.
Or, if you don’t think your flagrantly radical departure from the obvious details of scripture is an unbiblical doctrine, then you’re being extremely unhelpful when you accuse others of relying on unsaid conditions or twists on the language of the text against the social background data and the agreement of the early church that God definitely punishes sinners actively: why do you, JPH, conclude that it is extremely unlikely (your own emphasis) that the NT can be read any differently than that?
We have plenty of full preterist universalists around here. They typically tend to be what we call ultra-universalists, denying that God will be punishing anyone at all again ever, all His wrath having been expended at Jerusalem in 70. Or all of it at the cross, and then also at 70. Anyway, all prophecies apparently pointing to God’s wrath no longer apply after one or both of those. There are variations. I’ve even met a brother team from TN (I think), whose book I’ve sadly forgotten how to get and never got around to getting (since it sounds quite uniquely audacious and I’m at least curious to see how they try what they were trying), who argue that all prophecies of coming wrath were completely fulfilled at and by Christ’s death and so Jerusalem’s fall didn’t fulfill them.
). It’s important to get all the code and yet not slur over into other commands on the address line.
Not all of which function like verbal plenary dictation. It is entirely possible (in fact there are undisputed scriptural examples, though most people aren’t aware of them, the most relatively famous perhaps being Caiaphas) that God might inspire someone to testify against themselves, for example, and that would affect how we should use and interpret what’s provided.
)
I suspect they were conveniently ignoring some things as Christian interpolations; the rabbi in the 1980s would have been highly tempted to drop out several Pauline texts as spurious including Ephesians.
