rethinkinghell.com/assets/im … detail.png Thanks to our annihilationist friends over at Rethinking Hell.
saw that. excellent.
I think the diagram has potential, although calling the majority view ‘traditionalism’ is calculated to cause offence. Also ‘conditionalism’ is a cosier name than the more usual ‘annihilationism’ which has a dictator’s final solution ring about it for me 
. What I like in the diagram is its contrasting of what happens to evil in the three views and the words along the three sides which show what each pair of views have in common over against the third view. Maybe its my bias, but I think the conditionalist/annihilationist author has unwittingly shown the superiority of universalism, by placing it at the top and giving it the monopoly on restorative justice. Nice work! 
I still think “Limboism” is a fourth view of hell. It seems to be Charles Schmitt’s view (I quoted one of his booklets on the subject in another thread).
In a nutshell, his view is that the lost will repent and be reconciled to God — will cease to be enemies of God, and God will deliver them from the post-mortem suffering which they will initially undergo. However, they will not be “saved” in the sense that they will go to heaven at any point. Charles seems to leave them in Limbo, seemingly a permanent Limbo — though I am not certain of this. I recently communicated with him by email, and he responded to my initial email. But when I asked him about the ultimate fate of the lost, he did not respond.
I understand from a marketing perspective why an annihilationist would want to call it conditionalism (because that sounds more vague to the common ear); and I understand from a historical perspective why they would want to call it that (because back in the early days of Christian philosophy ECT and Kath proponents argued largely on the basis of Greco-Roman philosophy that souls must be inherently immortal instead of the Biblical view that souls exist in continuous dependence upon God).
But ECT and Kath proponents rarely take the position now (and haven’t for a long time) that derivative souls are inherently immortal: pretty much everyone agrees that souls are conditionally dependent for their existence on God. (Although I do think ECT proponents have a tendency to forget to take this into account. But they aren’t arguing specifically against it.)
There are other reasons why some conditionalists prefer the phrase “conditional immortality” to “annihilationism.”
First, the term “annihilation” is terribly misunderstood by traditionalists, who think we’re saying that God will snap His fingers and the unsaved will instantaneously vanish into the proverbial ether. Of course that’s not what we’re saying; we’re saying they’ll be executed, permanently. “Executionism,” however, is not an accepted term, unlike “Conditionalism,” so there’s that 
Second, even though traditionalists today are increasingly abandoning the inherent immortality of man for a contingent immortality of man, nevertheless they believe in unconditional immortality to all human beings. So “conditional immortality” still sets us apart quite nicely; we think immortality is conditioned upon salvation by grace through faith in Christ alone.
As for “traditionalism,” that’s an accepted term in this debate, even by traditionalists like Robert Peterson. Conditionalists don’t use it intending to suggest that beholdedness to tradition is what motivates those who hold the view. We just mean that’s the traditional view, so those who hold it are called traditionalists.
Theo, Thanks for clarifying the use of these definitions, that’s helpful.
This comment interests me. Are you advocating this view of God? If so, it sounds like you have a very scary image of God. How do advocates of this view square it with the strong scriptural theme of God’s everlasting, unconditional love, with God being ‘light and in him is no darkness’ etc? What about verses like Lamentations 3.22, 31-33? The cold executioner of this conditionalist position does not sound to me at all like the God I love and read about in the Bible.
The persons are being executed by God either way, and permanently cease to exist either way; what’s the salient difference in principle (other than leaving a bunch of stinking recently resurrected bodies behind to annoy the saved)?
Being “conditioned” by something “alone” leaves God’s authoritative action to keep people in existence out of the account. I know you don’t mean that, but the description could be improved: maybe something like ‘immortality is conditioned by God’s gracious choice alone for those He chooses to persist leading into faith in Christ’. Arminian conditionalists could then explain why God doesn’t persist for some people; and Calvinist conditionalists could then explain why (or at least that) God persists for all those He chooses to save but doesn’t choose to save all persons from sin.
And universalists conditionalists, who also think immortality is conditioned upon God’s gracious choice to lead sinners into salvation through faith in Christ, can explain we think God will persist for all sinners until they are in a position to receive eonian life, not merely immortality.
Universalists and annihilationists both agree that immortality is conditioned secondarily upon salvation by grace through faith in Christ, and primarily conditioned upon God’s gracious choice to keep people in existence until He brings them to the other condition. The term “conditionalist” still doesn’t distinguish between those two points of the triangle: the obvious difference is that God annihilates some people, for whatever reason (whether Calv or Arm types of reason), rather than persisting in bringing them to the secondary condition. That choice to annihilate some and not others (or to otherwise choose to act in such a way that annihilation is the consequence) is related to the primary ontological reason (generally agreed to in principle by all three proponent types) for creaturely immortality of whatever kind: God acts to keep the creatures in existence.
Maybe instead of “conditionalism”, “selective immortality” would be a more positive way to put it? That would distinguish topically between ECT and Kath proponents, both of whom believe God isn’t selective about which persons continue existing.
Otherwise, I at least recommend phrasing conditionalism such that it’s distinguishable from universalism as well as from traditionalism.
Drew,
Theo is Chris Date, who was switching over to anni (or had just recently done so) at this time last year. He hosted my radio debate with ECT/Calv apologist “TFan” (local forum discussion of which can be found here); and I’m currently in a three-way essay debate with him and an ECT proponent (locally discussed here.)
Hi Chris! I promise not to call you Theo again. 
I doubt he minds. I was just filling in some details.
It sounds to me like the God who killed the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, destroyed countless in the flood, killed Ananias and Saphira, and on and on the list could go. I think God is just to capitally punish those who are not covered by the blood of Christ.
Oh I agree that principally there’s no different. That doesn’t change the fact that traditionalists misunderstand what we mean by annihilation.
I don’t believe it does. Yes, it is up to God whether one will continue to exist, but the condition which He says must be met is faith in Christ alone.
All the more why “conditional immortality” is a good way to distinguish our view from the other two, for even though it is, in your view, “conditioned” upon God’s choice, it is a condition which will be met for every single human being ever to have existed, making the condition rather moot in terms of differentiating the three views. Only we conditionalists believe that the condition will be met only by some.
Again, since universalists and traditionalists may believe immortality is conditional but that it is a condition which is met universally, it’s not a label that meaningfully applies to them. Conditionalists, on the other hand, believe the condition will not be met by some, and therefore it’s a helpful label for our view.
Perhaps, though I think since “annihilationism” and “conditionalism” are the leaders, it’ll ultimately be one of them.
As I explained, I believe it already is. And I don’t think a label other than the frontrunners–annihilationism and conditionalism–is ever going to catch on.
I don’t mind
I mean, imagine you’ve got three high school teachers, and people say that receiving an A from these teachers is conditional upon the teacher deciding to give it. One of those teachers gives out As whether students receive 90% on a test or not (traditionalists); the second of those teachers gives ut As only to students who receive 90% on a test, but waits to issue a grade to any given student until he or she receives 90% (universalists); the third of those teachers gives the test once, issues As to students who score 90% or over, and other grades to those who don’t (conditionalists). To claim that it would be misleading or unhelpful to differentiate his grading practice by calling it “conditional As” would be pretty silly, I think. To whatever extent “conditional” could apply to the other two teachers is pedantic; whatever “condition” must be met is a condition which is universally met.
I’ve been very lax recently catching up on my side of the 3-way debate, btw. Sorry. Will work harder on that this week. (But apparently not today… 
)
I… um…
I guess I’m still missing where you explained why they’re “terribly” misunderstanding. If snapping the unsaved out of existence instantaneously is principally no different from executing them permanently, how are the traditionalists terribly misunderstanding you by thinking you’re saying God will snap them out of existence? Leaving bodies behind to annoy the saved makes that much of a misunderstanding to be regarded as terrible if traditionalists don’t include the detail?! 
That seems very strange. What am I missing in what you said?
In other words, the relevant distinction is the annihilation. And personally, I don’t regard God’s ongoing choice to keep me in existence as moot: not only does it have very practical claims on my gratitude and loyalty, but the ontological distinction is important for supernaturalistic theism (including trinitarian theism) compared to other theologies and philosophies.
If on the other hand you were not talking about the immortality (which is ontologically conditioned by God so which cannot be “met” by anyone other than God the one and only Independently Self-existent reality), but rather about the condition of faith in Christ alone: isn’t that also primarily conditioned by God’s gracious choice to lead and empower sinners into salvation?
If God doesn’t choose to do so, a sinner has no hope of salvation. Arminians have to explain why (or at least that) God doesn’t choose on His side of things to persist in allowing the condition to remain (and annihilating some sinners would certainly disallow the condition to remain in effect!) Calvs have to explain why (or at least that) God never chose to allow some sinners such a condition in the first place.
Leading back to my next comment:
It is a label that applies meaningfully to us as not being cosmological dualists (e.g. God/Anti-God or God/Nature) or otherwise believers in a philosophy or theology of multiple independent facts (such as an ontologically ‘higher’ Mormonism of three Gods Most High). If you’re trying to say (although I doubt so) that people can annihilate themselves apart from the choice of God to keep them in existence or not–which is a problem Arminians sometimes get into but which Calvinists typically avoid in principle–then we have waaaay hugely more problematic theological differences than our soteriologies.
But if (as you seem to agree) people depend on God alone as to whether or not they continue to exist, then NOBODY “meets” such a condition (except for God Himself, in all three Persons Self-existent), regardless of whether annihilation is true (in a Calv or Arm variety) or not.
An Arminian might go on to say that God has acted to provide real and sufficient opportunity and capability for all persons to be saved by repenting unto the forgiveness of their sins, so if they don’t then eventually God ratifies their choice (having authoritatively allowed the secondary condition to contribute to the outcome) and annihilates them. But Calvinists are distinctly different on that matter: God never even intends to empower those for salvation who are ultimately lost. It isn’t a question of them meeting a secondary condition authoritatively allowed by God, because God authoritatively chooses never to allow them a secondary condition. It’s beyond even saying God allows them a condition impossible for them to meet, as some Arminians would have it: 3rd century BCE Africans for example being hopelessly lost due to being impossibly able to meet the technically allowed condition. Calvinists rightly critique this as being in essence an elective choice by God never to empower them for even possible salvation, so why aren’t such Arminians Calvinists? Or for that matter the typical Arminian stance on rebel angels never being given any real capability by God to repent and be saved: that’s principally the same as limited election. It isn’t that the conditions are really but only technically offered and impossible to meet–it’s that the conditions are never provided in the first place. (Not incidentally, it’s much more common to find Arminians denying the existence of rebel angels, as persons or at all, than to find Calvinists denying their personal existence: once an Arminian realizes that his position about rebel angels never being offered salvation is Calvinistic limited election, the only way to save the Arm position is to deny the rebels, maybe by reducing them to mere forces.)
Anyway, Arminian annihilationists are no more “conditionalistic” in that regard than Arminian traditionalists: some sinners will choose to meet the conditions actually provided by God, and others will not. But Calvinistic annihilationists are no more “conditionalistic” in that regard than Calv traditionalists for an opposite reason: no such secondary condition was ever actually provided by God. At best calling the position “conditionalistic” would be a legal fiction: some sinners never meet a condition provided to other sinners but not provided to themselves! How can an utter lack of condition in regard to a set of people qualify a position for being positively called “conditionalistic” in regard to those people?!
“Selective immortality” avoids all those theological potholes: God selects (in a Calv or Arm fashion) who won’t be given immortality. Which is the same as “annihilationism” (since the distinction is once again back to those people ceasing to exist), but it sounds nicer.
As to whether it ever catches on, that would depend on whether people who hold that position start to use it.
This is all completely aside from the fact that “immortality” per se is quite distinct from “eonian life” per se, even on (most) annihilationistic understandings: unless the sinner ceases to exist immediately after death and never comes back into existence (thus the exception), the sinner literally continues immortal (unable to utterly die) until God turns off the immortality. And even annihilationists who think God poofs unsaved sinners immediately and permanently out of existence usually agree (unless they’re one type of Arminian who think sinners succeed in annihilating themselves against all God’s actions otherwise–which effectively denies supernaturalistic theism) that God could keep the sinners in existence without giving them eonian life. If it isn’t sharing in God’s own life, it isn’t eonian life. 
Which would of course be totally true, and quite an importantly distinct position from people who say that the state gives the grade or that students can grade themselves or whatever.
The analogy doesn’t hold because you’re talking about grading quality of result, with the first teacher assigning value regardless of actual quality: surely you can’t be trying to say that the second and third type of students are creating ongoing life (a perfect test score, or close enough to be recognized by the teacher as an A) according to the quality of their work, and that this is the distinction compared to the first situation!
I think the analogy would be more illustrative if more details were added in, and the qualitative judgment was about moral character. One of those teachers gives the test to everyone, but some people refuse to take the test, or intentionally mark it up wrong: those are the ones who fail. They still can’t get an A from anyone else than the teacher, nor even the test itself, but they did have a real opportunity to take the test and within the authority of the teacher it would make some real sense to say that whether they passed or failed was conditional on how well they did on the test. But this would be true regardless of whether the failing students were executed or imprisoned after the test. (It would also be true regardless of whether or not the teacher continued trying to teach the failures after the first test until she decided some of them were hopelessly beyond her competency to teach, or outright lost patience with them, or quit for some other reason.)
The other teacher only gives the test to some students, and in regard to those students she keeps on teaching and correcting them until they get an A (assuming she doesn’t just give them an A no matter what). Maybe that means further classes after the test, or maybe she only chooses to instruct students she figures she can teach without additional instruction after one test, or maybe she’s just that good of a teacher but for her own inscrutable reasons chooses not to be that good of a teacher to the other students. In any case the other students never get the test at all, much less any persistent help from the teacher, nor even any actual instruction (except what they overhear from instruction of the other students), aside from maybe some critical remarks from her about how they can’t do anything right, and she marks them down with a 0. How would it make any sense to say that whether the failing students failed was conditional on whether they passed a test they were never given nor were ever empowered to take? Would it not make more sense to say that whether they passed or failed was conditional on the teacher? But then that’s primarily true of each of the teachers! Nor is the situation altered in principle whether the students who never received the test, much less help from the teacher, are executed or imprisoned after class.
She also gives the test to every student with at least some real preparatory instruction (like the first teacher in the amended analogy), and persists in helping all the students until they achieve 100% quality. Even if they have to stay after class, or be held back some grades, while the other students go out to play or graduate and get jobs as responsible adults. Even if it seems like hell to the intractable students. She also grades according to their capabilities, not holding their difficulties against them, while similarly expecting more from those with more talent and fewer difficulties. But she’s determined to heal the difficulties some students are having, and she expects real A-level behavior from them, too, once they’ve been healed–which is why she doesn’t wait to start training them at least a little, so they can put that training to good use once their difficulties are gone (crippled hands, mental disturbances, bad eyesight, etc.) Those who refuse after being healed to go on past basic instruction to put that instruction to good use learning other things, have to stay in remedial class until whenever they finally agree to learn.
What she doesn’t do, unlike the other two teachers, is imprison or execute her students eventually.
At least it’s a condition actually met, rather than a non-condition which isn’t met but called a condition anyway.
Your analogy only holds, even on its own terms (where A = immortal life), if all the students are really empowered to take the test. But that Arminian scope is true of all three of your teachers: your analogy is about Arminian traditionalism, universalism, and Arminian annihilationism respectively.
And the Arminian annihilationist shares a point of contact with the universalist (or with the purgatorial universalist anyway) that it really does matter whether the student passes or not: unless and until the student gets a 90% they don’t get an A. That can hardly be called a pedantic similarity! (Meanwhile, the first type of teacher couldn’t be called a conditionalist because the students don’t actually meet the condition yet are granted the result anyway.) The salient difference is Calvinistic persistence for the universalist teacher, which your Arminian annihilationistic teacher lacks along with your Arminian traditionalistic teacher.
If you want to switch that around so that all the teachers (being Calvs or universalists) have Calvinistic persistence for whomever they choose to teach, that’s fine: but then we’re back to the teacher never even trying to really teach some students. Saying that their A or lack of an A was conditional on them scoring 90% on a test they couldn’t possibly take, because the teacher chose never to empower them (in various ways) to do so?–that sounds like worse than a pedantic usage of “conditional” to me. If you meant the student’s A or lack of an A was authoritatively conditional on the teacher, that would be true–but that would be true regardless of whether the teacher foisted everyone with an A (a poisoned A somehow in some cases) or not.
Your analogy also treats the A result (of immortal life) as if there was no distinction between the immortal life of those who pass the universalist or annihilationist test, and the immortal life of those who fail the traditionalist test; and I think that’s a pretty severe conceptual problem, too. An A is a proper and desirable result in three of your examples, but also worse than an F in one of your examples.
It would need a separate thread (and I don’t have time) - but it depends on your hermeneutic. For example, the writers of the OT stories you refer to could have been wrong in attributing those violent, destructive actions to God. They thought that God was like the gods of other nations, but they were mistaken - as we can see through the lens of Christ. As for Acts 5, the text does not say that God killed Ananias or Sapphira. I can’t see how the God you are describing would be worthy of worship and love (as opposed to terrified obedience).
As for your final point, I’d say you are imposing a limited human view of justice (punishment of those who are wrong) on God, whereas God’s justice, in OT and NT is far greater, more compassionate and more comprehensive, offering hope for transgressors as well as those who are transgressed against. Secondly, anihilation is not just capital punishment; its permanence makes it even more harsh and cruel. Finally, one could easily make a biblical case that all people are covered by the blood of Christ, that Christ died to save all people and achieved no less than that.
just a quick thought…
when i was an Annihilationist (or however you want to brand it ), i was convinced by the Christadelphians. they argued that those who were in sin would be “outside the gates” of the new city, and that they would live out their lives…possibly with some punishment if they were very wicked (the talk of many versus few stripes), and then they would die without resurrection (this is post judgement, so after the first resurrection of all the dead).
so rather than being executed, they are allowed to live naturally and die naturally, and then i suppose one day though we’d miss any loved ones in that crowd, we’d eventually get over the mourning, as we do now.
that makes more sense to me than this idea of “execution”.
we have to judge the passages of the Bible that deal with God killing humans by what we know of His character. that may sound contrary to inerrancy, but really we ALL do this anyway. i am simply saying we should do it for the right reasons, using the right criteria. i don’t really believe God killed people…but even if He did…i can NOT believe (anymore) that He does so permanently. such a thing is contrary to His character as clearly and overwhelmingly revealed by the metanarrative.
this is why i no longer am an Annihilationist, though i give that alot more credit than i give the anti-Biblical, blasphemous notion of ECT. Annihilationism, like ECT, in no way addresses the problem of evil. it just shifts the problem to another location…in this case, oblivion. UR is the only system i have seen where evil is PROPERLY dealt with. IT is annihilated, but what can be saved IS saved…for each and every human being. killing an evildoer does not undo his evil…undoing his evil undoes his evil (ie, a murderer executed for his crime does not bring back his victim…bringing back his victim undoes his crime. God has this power.
grr sorry, that WAS meant to be quick, and i didn’t intent to ramble at the end
You actually don’t get over that sort of thing. After a while you think about it a little bit less, but no – you don’t get over it.