This is part of my Exegetical Compilation Project, which I am verrrrry slowly posting up, and which can be found here.
2 Thess 1:6-10 – this is one of the Big Guns commonly shot off against any idea of the eventual salvation of all sinners from sin, especially since it’s the strongest such statement made in the surviving epistles of St. Paul. (The legitimacy of 2 Thess is often rejected nowadays, even by some conservative Christian scholars, but I accept it and all the canonical epistles as legitimate.) These verses have numerous complex issues, however, which will take some time to unpack.
Usually this saying is debated between proponents of eternal conscious torment and of annihilation, although both sides naturally consider it strong testimony against the salvation of these sinners from sin.
Let me start by conceding a point that is sometimes brought into the dispute: there is no distinction between the uses of {apo} in this sentence. The whole-ruination comes from the Presence/Face of God (a Hebraism referring to the Angel of the Presence Who was YHWH Himself, the Visible of the Invisible, in the OT) and from the glory of His strength. No one would ever bother saying that the whole ruination comes away from the glory of His strength! – and rhetorically the two prepositional phrases stand in parallel unity anyway (the “glory” being another Hebraism for the Visible Presence of God, the Shekinah.)
At the same time, if someone insists on translating the first {apo}, or both its usages, as “away from” so that those who {tisosin} the {dikên} of God do so “away from” His presence and "away from " His glory (instead of “from” His presence and glory as a result of His presence and glory); then they should either read total annihilation from this, or else interpret their translation so that the omnipresence of God is not denied in the eternal conscious torment – unless translators are content to deny the omnipresence of God (and thus deny a doctrine of even mere supernaturalistic theism, including orthodox trinitarianism)!
This naturally leads into a closer examination of verse 9 which is the key verse under contention. In Greek (with a stable textual transmission) it reads, continuing a sentence from the previous verse:
hoitines dikên tisousin olethron aiônion apo prosôpou tou kuriou kai apo tês doxês tês ischuos autou
The second half of the sentence has already been discussed, although it will have a further part to play in the account of the interpretation soon: from {apo prosôpou} onward means “from (the) face of-the-lord and from the glory the strength of-him”. (In English we would usually change “the glory” to an adjective to describe “the strength”, and that’s a legitimate translation.)
The first five words of the verse are the crucial center of the meaning, and why people have generally interpreted the translation to be one of St. Paul’s few statements in favor of hopeless punishment.
The first word, {hoitines}, is a referent plural pronoun, “anyone-who-plural”. Thus it cannot refer back to Jesus Christ in the preceding verse, even though as the closest referent noun that would otherwise be a reasonable first inference. The closest and contextually most probable matching grammatic reference would be to “those not obeying the gospel of the Lord of us Jesus Christ”. (To which I will note that one’s larger-scale interpretation of this verse will depend on what one considers to be the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ! Be that as it may.)
That second word, {dikên}, is simply a simple form of the word “justice” (though not the special compound form also commonly used, {dikaiosunê}) with the grammatically proper suffix for its logical place in the sentence.
Yet many translators don’t want to call it justice. The New International Version calls it “punishment”; ditto the Revised Standard Version. Green translates it as “penalty”, as does the New American Standard and the Holman CSB. Knoch’s literal concordance, though, translates it more directly: justice.
The whole paragraph, going back a few verses, is saturated with references to justice: the afflictions endured by the church are a display of God’s “just judging” ({tês dikaias kriseôs}, and note that “crisising” is here applied to people who all translators agree are God’s people being saved by God). It is a just thing {dikaion} with God to repay the ones afflicting these people with affliction (and also to repay the ones being afflicted!) Those who do not know God shall receive {ekdikêsin}, out-justing (usually translated “vengeance”).
“Those who do not know God and those who do not obey the good news of our Lord Jesus” shall have justice dealt out to them by our Lord (in verse 8) when He is revealed from heaven in flaming fire (verse 7). So it makes a lot of contextual sense that Paul continues to talk about justice in verse 9.
God was the verb-er of the justice previously in Paul’s paragraph; but here “those not obeying the gospel” are the doers of the verb, and justice is the object of the verb. In other words, Paul is saying “those” shall-be-verbing “justice”. That verb is the unusual term {tisousen}, and its meaning is highly important to the proper interpretation and translation of the sentence. But because the verb is unusual – and because the usual New Testament applications of other forms of this verb would not fit a hopeless punishment interpretation, and even would strongly argue for the expectation of the salvation of the punished – I can foresee a reasonable appeal to establish surrounding contexts first and then check to see how most reasonably to fit this term into the contexts. So I will come back to this word later.
In English we would skip over the next term, {olethron}, to put its adjective {aiônion} or “eonian” (the adjective form of “eon” or “age”) first. “Eonian” sometimes describes things that go on forever never-endingly (especially when referring to God and God’s intrinsic characteristics), and sometimes describes things that had a beginning or have had an end. So since its meaning varies, it has to be determined by context – except insofar as the object which “eonian” describes comes uniquely from God, which is certainly true here. (There may be a few exceptions to that observation, but not in the New Testament so far as I recall.)
This happens also to be important for reckoning this testimony in trinitarian apologetics! The term “eonian” itself is one indicator that Paul is identifying the person of Jesus as God Most High, even though Paul also distinguishes between the persons of “Jesus” and “God” in some real and significant fashion (such as in verse 1 of this same chapter).
Moreover, Paul is personally putting Jesus in the action of ultimate judgment ascribed only to YHWH in the Old Testament, not to any lesser lord or god.
And that isn’t only a generalized observation. Paul is referencing a specific portion of scripture here: the judgment of YHWH in the day of YHWH’s forthcoming appearance, described in Isaiah 2:10: “from the terror of YHWH and from the splendor of His majesty”; also paralleled in verse 21 as “before the terror of YHWH and the splendor of His majesty”. (Similarly, shortly prior to 2 Thess 1:9, in verse 7, where Paul is speaking of the Lord Jesus being revealed from heaven with the angels of His power, he is referencing Zechariah 14:5b where the prophet says in regard to the same situation, “Then YHWH my Elohim [one of the plural name-titles for God] will come and all the holy ones with Him.”)
This Isaianic prophecy extends from chapter 2 through the end of chapter 5. It criticizes the unjust and oppressive Jewish rulers and population, although especially the rulers. YHWH declares that they shall be (in effect, although the exact term isn’t used) wholly ruined in the Day of the Lord to come, at the coming of YHWH among them.
This is not the end of their story in these chapters, however! – although this can be obscured by the fact that Isaiah does not report things in sequence. He starts with the end result, for example, chapter 2 verses 1 through 4, where the mountain of the house of YHWH will be established as the chief of mountains, and all the nations shall stream to it to be taught YHWH’s ways by YHWH, so that they may walk in His path; and YHWH will act as arbitrating judge among the nations so that they will live in peace with one another ever afterward.
It is in context of looking forward to this day that Isaiah calls Israel to stop their injustice and their idolatries and repent and come back to walking in the light of YHWH. People, especially the egotistical leaders, who refuse to do so, will be humbled and abased so that YHWH alone will be exalted in that day. A repeated theme in chapter 2 (verses 10, 19, and 21) is that doers of injustice will try to hide in caverns from YHWH’s appearance; but they will also throw away their idols (verses 18 and 20) – possibly into the same caverns (with the moles and the bats!) where they themselves attempt to hide.
In the second half of chapter 3, Isaiah switches metaphors and begins to speak of rebel Israel as daughters of Zion who are proud, seductive adulteresses, who shall be humbled in fashions analogically parallel to the more masculine humbling imagery elsewhere in the prophecy. The outcome of this, however, is more fully reported: defeated rebels shall appeal to the righteous to save them and to take away their reproach. And notice: the righteous remnant, “everyone who is recorded for life in Jerusalem”, the holy ones “who are left in Zion and remain in Jerusalem”, servants adorned by the beauty of the Branch of YHWH (a reference to the Messiah, thus to Jesus), are called the “survivors” in distinction from the rebels pleading for salvation! (That’s in verses 1 through 3 of chapter 4.) The rebels pleading for salvation, like desperate women after a battle begging to be made the indentured servant concubines of the conquerors, did not survive the coming terrible splendor of YHWH!
In other words, this part of the vision isn’t looking at however many of the unjust survived the coming of YHWH, now pleading to be included – although some prophecies do look in that direction since the principles are similar (and even in this prophecy not all the unrighteous died immediately). God is showing Isaiah something that will (also) happen after the general resurrection: the defeated rebels have been resurrected and are now pleading with the righteous survivors.
Nor shall the pleas of the defeated rebels be rejected! YHWH shall wash away the filth of the rebel daughters of Zion (referring to both men and women with that recent analogy), who were slain as impenitent rebels during His coming. He shall purge the bloodshed of Jerusalem from their midst {en pneumati kriseôs kai pneumati kauseôs} in a spirit of judgment and a spirit of burning. And yes, this “crisis” as the Greek Old Testament translates the original Hebrew, is the same “crisis” (down to the same grammatic form) which St. Paul was talking about in 2 Thess!
The result will be that the pillar of daysmoke and nightfire (as in the presence of YHWH during the Exodus, the same presence by which the rebels were originally slain) will be a shelter from the storm and the rain and the heat. (Chapter 4 verses 4 through 6. Chapter 5 goes back to the theme of coming punishment for rebel Israel and does not mention salvation of the rebels again.)
In this context, Isaiah 2 verse 9 (preceding verse 10, referenced by St. Paul in 2 Thess 1:9) should not be translated “But do not forgive them”, as for example in the New American Standard Version. The primitive verb there, which means to lift and has a wide variety of usage in the OT, should be interpreted in a sense parallel to other portions of the same chapter instead: do not lift up the humbled proud again to their former status of exalted rebellion. (For example chapter 2 verse 22, “Cease from man whose breath is in his nostrils, for in what should he be esteemed?”)
In any case, the context of Isaiah 2 through 5 indicates that the fate of rebels wholly ruined from the presence of YHWH is not hopelessly final. Even the proudest rebels are shown in a process of preliminary repentance (though not yet seeking salvation) by throwing away their idols; other proud rebels seek repentance, including by petitioning the victorious righteous survivors, and receive reconciliation with YHWH; and the whole prophecy begins with a portrait of broad repentance among all the nations in the day of YHWH to come: which by narrative and thematic logic must necessarily be subsequent to the punishment related afterward in the chapter, resulting in loyal fellowship with YHWH where no such fellowship previously existed, and peace among the nations under YHWH’s fair justice.
So, unless the apostle Paul is completely changing (not just expanding) the contextual meaning of his Isaiah reference, he’s talking about a situation that is expected to lead to the repentance and salvation from sin of those who – unlike the “survivors!” – are wholly ruined by YHWH in His coming judgment of avenging fire!
This isn’t something that should be swept aside. Not only is it directly relevant in a positive way to the intention and result of the judgment of 2 Thess 1:9 (and its immediate contexts), it also is in just the same proportion relevant to trinitarian apologetics. Saint Paul’s specific allusion to Isaiah 2 demonstrates that in calling Jesus “Lord” Paul very certainly means “YHWH”, not some lesser lord or god.
This also gives us a clear contextual rationale for how to translate “eonian” this time: it means less than never-ending; and considering the strong connections to the punishment coming from God’s unique presence, it most likely refers to the {olethron} coming uniquely from God. (Although it could also refer to the {olethron} being specific to the special coming eon in which it occurs.)
I have been using the term “whole-ruination” so far, since that is a fairly literal translation of {olethron}. Sometimes this is translated “extermination”, or in some other excessively destructive way; and that’s fair enough, too. But does the term itself intrinsically point to a hopeless final situation?
Well, St. Paul himself doesn’t think so! He uses the exact same term in a very certainly hopeful sense at least once elsewhere, namely 1 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 5. Paul condemns the flesh of his opponent among the Corinthian church, the Stepmom-Sleeping Guy, to whole-ruination (same term) so that the SSG’s soul may be saved in the day of the Lord to come: the exact same day which Paul is talking about here in 2 Thessalonians 1:9!!
Paul also uses the same term at 1 Thess 5:3, as part of his birth-pangs analogy of the pain coming to the wicked in the Day of YHWH to come. But a woman’s birth-pangs, though they can be dangerous beyond even painful, are not typically regarded as intrinsically hopeless; Paul himself typically regards birth-pangs as hopeful, such as at the famous description of the cosmos afflicted by sin in Romans 8.
Even without that definite evidence of term usage, though, I would still regard 2 Thess 1:9 as talking very certainly about the same situation as Isaiah 2 through 5, which is not only hopeful for the sinners who are so destroyed (compared to the righteous survivors) but reveals the end result to be their eventual salvation from sin: a total sweeping victory of salvation for and by God Most High! – even though the same chapters also hint it’ll happen in waves, so to speak, with some sinners holding out or trying to dodge longer than others.
I really do not know any other way in which it could be truly said, that those wholly-ruined in the second coming of our Lord could even possibly come to VALUE His justice, up to and including the justice of His ruination of them!
Obviously, most translators have no clue how that could ever happen either, if universalism isn’t true! – which is why we rarely see even the common term for “justice” translated accurately here in this verse!
But, even though Isaiah indicates rebels eventually come to value the justice of eonian punishment (though he doesn’t directly say they “value” it), why would I think that’s an important concept here in 2 Thess 1?
Now it’s time to talk about that highly unusual remaining word, {tisousin}.
Like everyone who aren’t themselves experts in Greek, I have to depend heavily on people who are experts in Greek, most of whom are not universalists by the way; but sometimes when digging around I find evidence that ideological context is dictating translation instead of exegetical context dictating ideology. This is one of those times.
Everyone (so far as I can tell) agrees that the word {tisousin} is a third person plural verb form, indicating future action by the doer of the verb; and everyone seems to agree it is derived either from {tinô} or from a rare alternate emphatic form {tiô}; but there’s some debate about which of those it’s derived from.
The problem is that {tinô} means to pay in the sense of valuing or honoring. A slightly modified form of it, {timê}, shows up numerous times in the New Testament in several cognates. As the verb {timaô}, it always means to honor or to value; in an adjective form it always describes its objects as valuable; and its noun form indicates ‘value’ as a concept. Consequently, it can also refer to payment, but it doesn’t mean merely to pay. The New Testament authors had an entirely different word for that, {apodidômi}.
Tinô and its cognates are definitely and clearly used everywhere else in the NT (with two debatable exceptions I’ll mention in a minute) for valuing or honoring something in a positive way (unless maybe it’s phrased in a negative fashion, a’tino-something, which this word is not.) Someone can honor the wrong things, of course, but it’s the object that makes it wrong, not the verb. No one in their right minds would say you aren’t supposed to value or honor the justice of God!
Tiô would mean to value or honor more strongly. But because {tisousin} is found only one time in the whole NT, and because that one time is here in 2 Thess 1:9, and because people already think on other grounds that there is no hope for those people being wholly ruined (which would be a reasonable inference from extended context elsewhere if that was solidly established, but which would render this verse useless as strong exegetical evidence for such a position); then translators have a debate over whether this word is supposed to be derived from {tinô} (which would clearly make no sense) or from {tiô} – which would make even less sense but it’s very rare so who knows maybe some rare reversal-meaning-by-emphasis was attached to it (by Paul or whomever he learned it from).
Now, there are some pagan Greek authors, who use the term this way along with “justice” for punishment, and those authors may or may not be thinking in terms of hopeless punishment. But no one denies Paul is talking about some kind of punitive effect here; what I’m challenging is whether the punishment being described is hopeless (whether ECT or annihilation ether one).
But just as Paul could in theory be using a hopeful punishment term from surrounding pagan society for an actually hopeless punishment; by the same token, even assuming the surrounding cultural context always promoted “value/honor justice” as a hopeless punishment, that doesn’t mean Paul is necessarily following suit. Paul could just as easily be thinking something like I do when I see the word “retribution” used for hopeless punishment: real re-tribut-ive punishment is about bringing the punished one back into loyal tribute to proper authority. Which, not incidentally, is also what Paul’s scripture citation turns out to be about!
The only other times a cognate of the word {timê} is used for punishment, are in Hebrews 10:29, {timorias} a singular noun being used as a genitive “of punishment”; and in Paul’s testimony about his oppression of the church in Acts 22:5 and 26:11, {timôreô} which literally means ‘value-lift-guard’. (The same suffix, Oreo, is used as the brand name for a popular chocolate cookie which eaters frequently value-lift, too, in order to eat or lick the crème in the center guarded by the shield of the round cookies!)
Paul’s behavior in oppressing the Church before his conversion, fits the notion of remedial synagogue punishment testified elsewhere: in extreme but not-yet-capital cases, the Jews would punish someone, hoping the punished person would recant their sin and come back to communion with the congregation. The punishment might be to within an inch of their lives such as the 39 lashes, where 40 would be a legal execution, but it wasn’t supposed to be an execution as that would defeat the intention of the punishment! (The verb is active at 26:11 where Paul talks about actively punishing the Christians; and passive at 22:5, where the Christians are being punished. Paul himself regularly suffers synagogue punishment during his Christian missionary work.)
The context of Hebrews 10, meanwhile, cites Deuteronomy 32, where the whole point of the vengeance of God is to vindicate His rebel people, or (in a word) re-tribute them, bringing them back into tribute to Him: which He prophecies will succeed, even after the people have been so destroyed that they are “neither slave nor free” (a poetic way of describing total destruction to the farthest possible death).
This is also important because sometimes in debates about Christian universalism, the topic comes up about whether “timoria” was used for hopeless punishment in the surrounding Greco-Roman culture (contrasted to “kolasis”). Both terms are used in the New Testament, but by context “timoria” turns out to involve hopeful punishment every single time, and “kolasis” by context turns out to involve hopeful punishment at least sometimes (such as with the sheep and the baby goats!)
Keeping these things in mind, the proper translation for 2 Thess 1:9 would be nothing worse than “paying honor” to the justice of God; and any true payment of honoring God’s justice would involve coming to truly value the justice of God (even if that involved punishment against one’s self). Remember also that the form of the verb indicates that the subject of the verb (those who do not obey the good news of our Lord Jesus Christ, thus being wholly-ruined by the Lord) shall in the future be acting the verb. They aren’t receiving the action of the verb, they are doing the verb. This is exactly why some English translations prefer “earning” or some other active verb; but the word here doesn’t mean “earning” either. It means to actively pay for something valued by the payer. But in this case what shall be payed by sinners is quite simply and literally the {dikên}, or justice, specifically the justice of their own eonian whole-ruination by God.
They couldn’t actively “pay” such justice, of course; but they could come to actively value it, which is not only the base meaning of the term anyway, but is also what happens eventually in the prophecy from Isaiah being referenced by Paul’s phraseology: the sinners being punished by YHWH’s judgment are not only being cleaned from their filth and bloodshed in the fire of His judgment (washed by the spirit of judgment and the spirit of burning, as it explicitly says in Isaiah 4:4, which on any trinitarian account must refer to the action of the Holy Spirit), but also come to value His judgment of them.
So “value”, in context, is a good way to briefly and accurately get across the meaning (even though the term itself means to pay honor, or to value something enough to pay for it.)
The rather schizophrenic fashion in which translators regard this term can be exemplified by Thayer’s lexicon for its cognate {timoria} which gives punishment only as its third meaning, the more primary meaning being “to render help” or “to assist”! That is because both meanings happen to be Biblically true in the same Biblical usages. The Greek of Prov 19:29 is another example; the term is used in context of verse 25 where scoffers reject discipline but receive it anyway so that they may eventually become wise; wise men receive discipline in order to become wiser! This is one of the scriptural appeals for the synagogue beatings such as Saul of Tarsus gave and then had to receive later as Paul; and it has a lot of topical relevance to Heb 12, where God punishes those He loves in order to help them – even though no one likes it at the time! Thus there is also a direct lexical connection between Heb 10’s use of {timoria} in punishing the worst kinds of sinners, and Heb 12’s hopeful punishment of those whom God intends to save from sin.
In summary: those who refuse to obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ, shall come to value/pay the justice of their whole-ruination by the Lord (YHWH) Jesus at His coming, a very positive, not negative result for them. Paul uses “whole-ruination” in at least one other place, 1 Cor 5:5, to describe the physical death (or at least the punishment) of a highly immoral false teacher thus handed over to Satan, so that his soul may be saved in the Day of the Lord to come – the same day Paul is talking about here! So the term does not necessarily mean hopeless punishment; and if those being punished come to value the justice of their punishment – which is how the terms would be typically translated aside from bias toward hopeless punishment, and which is exactly what indisputably happens to at least some sinners similarly punished by the presence of YHWH in the Isaiah prophecy St. Paul is referencing – then their whole-ruination will not be everlasting either.
Having said all that: while I do think the testimony here goes far in an unexpected direction opposite to the expected testimony for hopeless punishment, I don’t think a total scope of salvific intention is mentioned here or back at Isaiah (even though the holy mountain prophecy might imply it). So while I do think it testifies to the punishment being hopeful, and the salvation of the rebels certain despite the punishment, and even that the salvation for some rebels will be after the general resurrection (with lake of fire connections), I wouldn’t go all the way to universal salvation with these verses. But clearly their testimony fits very easily with Christian universalism.
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And then later they’re contrasted directly to the righteous who survived the coming of YHWH, so that seems like a big clue about what happened to them if other scriptures, like for example the slightly previous Jeremiah [Zech] reference, weren’t sufficient to indicate YHWH slays a lot (if perhaps not all) of them.
), there is evidence the story goes on hopefully past the general res and the l-o-f judgment.
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