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Annihilationism versus eternal torture
8 minutes to read …and why I don’t have anything to do with the Christian Apologetics Alliance.
A friend asked me to comment on J C Lamont’s recent screed, Annihilation versus Eternal Torment: What Does the Bible Really Teach? Ordinarily I wouldn’t interact with such lowbrow work; one should go after the strongest representation of an argument. But this is what he asked me to comment on, so I am.
Having assessed annihilationism in the past, my summary would be that it is linguistically incompetent. At first blush it seems plausible; but the deeper you dig the more you notice how it fumbles the use of language. There’s a woodenness, a lack of finesse, in the annihilationist exegetical arguments. Lamont’s piece certainly does nothing to overturn my impression.
It’s also ironic that annihilationists are often at pains—in my experience—to present their case as exegetically-driven, rather than emotional. But then you get people like Lamont tipping their hands (or perhaps wringing them) by breathlessly claiming that the very character of God is at stake.
This shouldn’t come as any surprise given how tendentiously she frames the debate from the beginning. Traditionalists, following the Bible, don’t view hell as a “torture chamber”. We don’t get our theology from Dante’s Inferno. Lamont should know that.
Anyway, on to her points, which I shall number as they appear in her article. For brevity, I won’t quote her.
A. Annihilation as the traditional Jewish view
Lamont ambitiously sets out to show that annihilationism is actually not a fringe heresy; indeed, its pedigree is as nothing less than the standard Jewish (and then early Christian) view. She offers the following evidence:
1. Ezekiel 18
(a) What warrant is there to say that “death” here cannot be physical? Lamont just asserts it. But Ezekiel is addressed to a people in exile who were already suffering immediate judgment from God; additional punishment via physical death was a serious possibility. Moreover, Ezekiel 18 canvases prior OT laws which frequently cite capital punishment as the penalty for sin. So it is grossly unjustified to assume that the death in view here cannot be physical.
(b) Even if physical death is not in view, Lamont flagrantly begs the question against the traditionalist by presupposing the very thing she needs to argue for: namely, that “death” with respect to the soul means annihilation! It’s not as if traditionalists haven’t heard of the second death.
(c) Apropos (b), the traditionalist understanding makes far better sense of death as described in the Bible. Annihilationists seem to start with the characteristics of physical death, and try to reason out from there that death = destruction. Traditionalists start with how the Bible first talks about death in Genesis 2:17, and follow the text straightforwardly on that point to say that Adam and Eve actually did die “on the day” they ate the fruit—because death is not primarily a physical term, but a term of separation from life, and judgment for sin. This in turn produces physical death.
2. Rosh Hashanah
(a) Let me quote Semitics scholar Michael S. Heiser on the Talmud in another context:
Basically, the Talmud and similar rabbinic material is the LAST place you’d want to go to do exegesis in the Hebrew Bible. It’s really a compendium of speculation and not much more. If you think “the rabbis” were busy doing careful exegesis of the OT in its original context, you’re sadly mistaken. They were interpreting the OT in light of their own community’s (better, communities’) religious arguments. They had no access to the comparative material so crucial today for getting back to the Hebrew Bible’s true context — the context that produced it (i.e., the ancient Near Eastern world). The Talmud is sort of like listening to celebrity Christian mega-pastors — you’ll occasionally come across a valuable insight and be entertained a bit, but most of the time you’re thinking, “What are these guys on?”
(b) The Talmud is part of the rabbinical teaching that Jesus repeatedly condemned as the tradition which had made void the word of God (Mark 7:13; Titus 1:14 etc). So as pedigrees go, that’s not a great start.
(c) Not only this, but citing Rosh Hashanah 17a immediately bites Lamont in the proverbial. Remember, she is saying that this represents a respectable, mainstream view in Judaism—one the New Testament presupposes. But does she think that wrongdoers of Israel, and Gentile sinners, upon death, physically “go down to Gehinnom [ie hell] and are punished there for twelve months”? No? Does she think that “after twelve months their body is consumed and their soul is burnt and the wind scatters them under the soles of the feet of the righteous”? Does she think souls can be burnt? Or that we are walking about on their ashes? No? How about that sinners like Jeroboam “will go down to Gehinnom and be punished there for all generations … Gehinnom will be consumed but they will not be consumed, as it says, and their form shall wear away the nether world”? Well she certainly doesn’t believe that because it is the traditional view of hell! So even if Rosh Hashanah 17a wasn’t about as useful as the Book of Mormon, at best it supports both views.
3. New Testament references
(a) Citing “perish” in John 3:16 is just as question-begging as citing “death” in Ezekiel 18. You don’t get to assume that dying entails complete destruction when that is the exact point in dispute. As I’ve already said, the biblical view of death is far broader and more nuanced.
(b) Jesus couldn’t do a “horrible job” of trying to get the Jews to see the error of their ways in Matthew 10:28 if, in fact, their prevailing view of hell was not annihilation. Since the only evidence Lamont has offered for this is either question-begging or equivocal, her claim is overblown to say the least.
(c) It is rather incredible to think that the Jews all believed in annihilationism when they not only had passages like Daniel 12:2 and Isaiah 66:24, which certainly seem to speak in never-ending terms; but also Second Temple literature written shortly before the time of Jesus which makes comments like these:
Woe to the nations that rise against my people! The Lord Almighty will requite them; in the day of judgment he will punish them: he will send fire and worms into their flesh, and they will weep and suffer forever. Judith 16:17, NABRE
And the Lord said unto Michael: ‘Go, bind Semjaza and his associates who have united themselves with women so as to have defiled themselves with them in all their uncleanness. And when their sons have slain one another, and they have seen the destruction of their beloved ones, bind them fast for seventy generations in the valleys of the earth, till the day of their judgement and of their consummation, till the judgement that is for ever and ever is consummated. In those days they shall be led off to the abyss of fire: and to the torment and the prison in which they shall be confined for ever. And whosoever shall be condemned and destroyed will from thenceforth be bound together with them to the end of all generations. 1 Enoch 10:12-15 (H.R. Charles Oxford: The Clarendon Press)
B. Greek belief in the immortal soul & unending punishment
Here Lamont seems to borrow a page from the Open Theist Cookbook by implying that traditionalist doctrine actually derives from pagan mythology about Hades. This becomes clear in section D, where she asserts, without argumentation or citation, that it was this pagan influence which led an initially annihilationist church to embrace the doctrine of eternal hell. Talk about revisionism.
Needless to say, if the Bible itself teaches an immortal soul and unending punishment, and if Second Temple literature taught it, and if Jesus’ Jewish audience presupposed it when he told the parable about the rich man and Lazarus where he explicitly stated that the rich man was “in torment in Hades” (Luke 19:23), which is the Greek underworld, then this supposed wedge between Greek mythology and biblical theology disintegrates. Jesus felt quite free to draw on Greek mythological terms like Hades to express Jewish theological truths.
C. Manhandling Greek
Here we get to the main issue with annihilationism: how to understand key terms in other languages. Much of the debate revolves around the Greek term aionios, usually translated “eternal”, and this is where Lamont goes. Let’s ignore the fact that she—a supposed student of Koine Greek—grossly misspells it, and move on to assessing her arguments…
Roman emperors described as eternal
(a) Without any actual citations to back up her claims, it’s really impossible to comment about this. But in light of the Imperial cult, it strikes me as very implausible that Roman emperors would be called “eternal” only in the sense that their human reign lasted for as long as they lived. Julius Caesar was called “god and savior”, and seemed to inherit the idea of divine monarchy from his ties to Cleopatra of Egypt. Domitian demanded his subjects call him their “lord and god”. I’m not familiar enough with Roman religion, and its development after Julius Caesar, to say for certain that the emperor was viewed as an immortal deity himself, or merely as an avatar of one, or as a semi-divine but mortal descendant (or all three, depending on time period). But on the face of it, this is a pretty obvious objection that a self-styled historical apologist should anticipate.
(b) Let’s suppose Lamont is right, and that aionios can refer to something “unceasing until the end”, rather than an unending age. How does this prove anything at all about the way it is used in the Bible? To emphasize one possible meaning of a word in another context, and then to juxtapose it against the traditional translation of key biblical passages, is just a ham-fisted semantic fallacy. Aionios has a semantic range far broader than Lamont lets on, and frankly her “argumentation” here just comes across as underhanded.
(c) Let’s see how her new translation of aionios fares in Matthew 25:45-46, where the adjectival form aionion is used twice:
Then he will answer them, saying, “Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into punishment without ceasing until the end, but the righteous into life without ceasing until the end.”
Or how about Daniel 12:2 in the LXX:
And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to life without ceasing until the end, and some to shame and contempt without ceasing until the end.
Oh, you think that wrecks the obvious meaning of the text? You want the eternal life to actually be unending? Yeah, so do I. In which case, by parity of meaning, so must be the eternal shame, contempt, and punishment.
Dead Sea Scrolls
(a) Let’s assume 1QS 4.11-14 means what it seems to say. What does Lamont think the idiosyncratic beliefs of a fringe Jewish sect prove? Does she also think that the Sadducees denying the resurrection is significant for our belief in that? So why should the Essenes denying the eternality of hell be of any significance?
(b) You might think I’m missing the point, which is that Lamont is actually illustrating from this passage how the term “unending” is compatible in ancient thought with final destruction. But I’m not, because her argument is from the Greek word aionios. But 1QS 4 is written in Hebrew. So that argument fails immediately.
(c) I don’t have any problem acknowledging that one can speak, poetically, of “eternal” shame that nonetheless ends in destruction. The question is whether the Bible is speaking that way. And if it is, what hope do we have in our “eternal” life?
D. Combating universalism
Having constructed—unfortunately only in her fevered imagination—a clear proof that the Jews and early church were all annihilationists, Lamont goes on to explain how this got distorted into the doctrine of hell in response to universalism. I’m really not qualified to speak on this matter, since I am not a historical theologian; moreover, it is pointless to comment on how such a transition might have happened when the case for the early church believing in annihilationism to begin with is so comically weak.
4 comments
JC Lamont
1) Hell is English / Hades is Greek / Sheol is Hebrew. All 3 are for land of the dead.
2) Gehenna/Lake of Fire / 2nd death = final destiny in which even death is thrown
3) Judaism has always believed in annihilation (at least since the time of Ezekiel — the soul that sins shall die; the soul of the righteous shall live…according to the Bible, Jesus’ adoptive father was righteous, and he died, thus we know Ezekiel is not speaking of physical death. The Targum (Aramaic commentary) links references to Isaiah’s worm with Jeremiah’s Gehenna/Valley of Hinnom, and the
the Talmud states that there will come a day when Gehenna is no more. “There will be no Gehinnom in future times” (RH 17a; Tos. toRH 16b; BM 58b; Ned. 8b and Ran, ibid.; Av. Zar. 3b). ) Also in Judaism, the fires of Gehenna acts as a purging process that readies a person for Paradise, which later sages say took 12 months maximum. If one was not purged in that time, they were burnt up/annihilated, and their ashes metaphorically spread under the feet of the righteous).
5) Jesus is a Jew, raised in Judaism/annihilation, and he warns his disciples to fear he who can kill the soul in Gehenna. (Almost every time Jesus says “hell” the Greek word is actually Gehenna.
Paul warns that wicked will be destroyed in Gehenna (2 Thessalonians 1:9), and John says they will be perish (John 3:16*).
6) Whereas the modern definition of the word “eternal” means “without ceasing with no end,” the ancient definition (Hebrew or Greek) meant “without ceasing until the end” which can be seen in many Greek manuscripts which say an emperor’s reign was eternal (meaning uninterrupted, not he lived and reigned forever), and Hebrew manuscripts, including the dead sea scrolls where it says the wicked undergo “eternal suffering till they are destroyed with none of them surviving or escaping” (1QS 4.11-14).
The Bible itself confirms this use of eternal when it says Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with eternal fire — the fire had a beginning and an end — Sodom and Gomorrah are not still on fire (Jude 1:7). Thus, what it means is that Sodom and Gomorrah burned without interruption until they were consumed/destroyed entirely.
7) 2nd Century church: Many 2nd century church fathers believed in conditional immortality/annihilation (conditional immortality = eternal life granted only to the saved / wicked will be annihilated — John 3:16, Rom 2:7 and 1 Timothy 6:12, Clement of Rome (who died about100 AD), Ignatius (died about 107), the Didache (about 120), Barnabus (died about 140), The Shepherd of Hermas (about 154), Justin Martyr (about165), Tatian (about 172), Iranaeus (about 202).
The above points reflect a method of interpretation called exegesis. Exegesis seeks the original intent of the text/authors. Most people do not consider grammatico-historical exegesis to be lowbrow scholarship, but obviously, there are exceptions.
Another method of interpretation called eisegesis which is when the reader brings his own background, beliefs, and presuppositions to the text.
For instance:
1) From 5th century bc, many Greek Gentiles believed the soul was not only immortal but also “imperishable” (See Plato’s play, On the Soul, aka Phaedo).
2) Greek Gentiles believe the pagan god, Hades, tortured people in the land of the dead without end since souls were imperishable.
3) 3rd Century Church — It was not until the Apocalypse of Peter (which replaces the torturing Hades with God and His angels, Who upon Peter’s tears, forgives and releases the tortured) and then and the rise of Universalism that eternal torment started to gain popularity amongst the church fathers. At first many early church apologists understood that the Bible’s emphasis on “eternal” meant that judgement is final (ie Universalism is false). But from 3rd/4th century onward the meaning of eternal as “torment until the end” changed to “torment without end,” and by the 6th century the “imperishability” of the soul became dogma (John 3:16 was considered symbolic), and the doctrine of conditional immortality was lost.
In conclusion: It’s quite easy to see how Gentile eisegesis could lead to understanding scripture to mean eternal torment. It is left to the modern reader to decide for themselves which they believe is the more plausible and/or accurate method of interpretation — exegesis or eisegesis.
*conditional immortality / eternal life is without end because death has been destroyed, therefore there is nothing to interrupt the eternality of it.
Dominic Bnonn Tennant
JC:
Hell is not typically English for Hades; it is English for Gehenna. Gehenna was an extremely well-developed concept in Second Temple Judaism as the place of eschatological judgment. Generally it was unending judgment. You need to do your homework. See http://bnonn.com/what-is-hell-and-is-it-biblical-3/
You’re trying to flatten Second Temple theology into a monolithic set of beliefs. Either you’re playing dumb, or you’re too ignorant to be commenting at all. As I document in this very article, appealing to Rosh Hashanah is self-refuting, since it claims that sinners like Jeraboam “will go down to Gehinnom and be punished there for all generations … Gehinnom will be consumed but they will not be consumed, as it says, and their form shall wear away the nether world.” You are dealing dishonestly with the texts, and you’re not advancing the argument.
And you have given us no reason to think that destruction or death in the Bible involve annihilation. Your position is completely question-begging. John himself describes this perishing in terms of a second death which constitutes unending judgment. And when we talk about destroying people’s lives, we don’t think we are annihilating them. Your wooden use of language would be comical if it weren’t so…destructive.
Again, this is simply false. The usage comes from as far back as Aristotle and Plato and doesn’t mean anything like that. http://bnonn.com/what-is-hell-and-is-it-biblical-4/ You’re manhandling the evidence. Moreover, as I’ve already documented, this makes a mockery of the gospel blessings and eternal life. I’ve already covered these points. Is this how you argue with nonbelievers? When they refute your argument, you just repeat the argument?
It never occurs to you that this might be a poetic device to describe fire from God (the eternal one), as opposed to ordinary earthly fire.
Of course, you don’t bother to document this. But given that you think John 3:16 is one good example, why should we take your reading of any early documents seriously? You obviously have a tin ear that can only pick out the notes you like, even if they aren’t being played. You cite Irenaeus, for example; but this is just comical, because I use him as an example of how annihilationists cherry-pick and make assumptions without bothering to carefully exegete him in this article on hell in church history: http://bnonn.com/what-is-hell-and-is-it-biblical-7/. As it turns out, Irenaeus clearly believed in eternal conscious punishment, and he described it as destruction—completely scuttling your view.
I am literally laughing out loud at you trying to school me on the basics of reading the Bible.
Even if this were true—and it is flagrantly false—all this would tell us was that the church fathers were wrong, since eternal punishment is one of the most clearly-propounded doctrines of Scripture.
Rob Bright
“I am literally laughing out loud at you trying to school me on the basics of reading the Bible.”
I’m certainly not going to attempt to school you, but since you appear to be positively disposed towards Heiser (as do I) and have quoted him in this article, perhaps you will want to take it up with him, as he’s likely more schooled than either of us, and he leans towards annihilationism (while acknowledging that eternal conscious torment is still on the table).
See Page 7 here:
https://nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Transcript-59-QA4.pdf
See Page 4 here:
https://www.nakedbiblepodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Transcript-108-QA-14.pdf
Or listen to audio here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlLnIdZMpB0
And see some discussion of it here:
https://drmsh.com/romans-512-part-5-a-few-more-replies-to-replies/
After considering Heiser’s position on the issue and then reading over half (so far) of the quite comprehensive “The Fire That Consumes” by Edward Fudge, I now also lean towards annihilationism after 30+ years of being all in on eternal conscious torment (mostly because that was the only thing I was presented with in my former church and I wasn’t curious enough to poke around back then).
Heiser and Fudge are hardly alone, as several scholars leaning the same way are noted in the linked article by Christopher M. Date.
https://www.scribd.com/document/420690917/The-Hermeneutics-of-Conditionalism-a-Def
But then you may well be aware of much of that.
Regardless, I’m not going to be surprised or disappointed if I get to judgment day and find out that either option is actually the truth. It really doesn’t matter all that much, practically speaking. If one is loyal to YHWH, then they’re not going to “hell” – whatever that is. And if one isn’t loyal to YHWH, then they’re certainly going to find out whatever “hell” is.
It should be noted that in other comments I can’t seem to locate at the moment, Heiser is open to the idea of punishment for each non-believing person commensurate with the degree of evil they did, followed by annihilation. Which has some appeal to me as a theory, as I’m an attorney who has done a significant amount of criminal defense. Murder doesn’t get the same punishment as larceny in our human “justice” systems.
It is interesting to note that in both our culture and in Old Testament culture, the laws considered the death penalty to be the most severe punishment available. More severe than an extended period of torture.
Why is that? Death by electrocution, lethal injection, guillotine, or even stoning involves far less actual pain and suffering than being tortured for hours/days/weeks/months on end. Yet the death penalty is what humans have typically prescribed as the punishment for the most severe criminal offenses.
The idea that Hitler will get more or less the same punishment as Joe Blow down the street who did not choose Jesus Christ but is a “decent” fellow who committed no serious crimes, nor abused his wife or children or neighbors in any obvious way that humans consider “bad”… well, that’s not justice as we humans understand it. God, of course, has His own rules and His ways are higher than ours. But, frankly, that side of the doctrine of hell never made any sense to me. If it makes sense to God and that’s what it turns out to be, so be it.
I suspect that there’s a bit of desire for revenge and sadism behind the human desire for hell to be eternal conscious torment – and the way some people defend the doctrine (not referring to your approach at all), there does appear to be a desire for it to be true and for sinners to get their “just reward” (eternal conscious torment) for their sins, with the person arguing for it seeming almost happy about it. That doesn’t, of course, mean that eternal conscious torment isn’t what’s going to happen. But the approach of some people to the issue in that way bothers me.
And that leads to trying to coerce people into a decision for Christ to avoid hell. Which doesn’t seem the ideal approach in most instances. They’re supposed to primarily be drawn by the good news/goodness of God, not beaten over the head with the bad news. But it could be that my former cultish church’s approach (with lots of metaphorical beatings until morale improves) has made me uniquely sensitive to those sorts of things…
Dominic Bnonn Tennant
Rob, I think Mike is squishy on hell for the same reason he is squishy on penal substitution: there’s just too much humanism in his overall worldview. He relies too much on culturally-conditioned intuitions and expectations (which is ironic, as I note here).
The fact that you describe hell in terms of torture, and think that everyone in hell gets “more or less the same punishment,” tells me that you need to actually familiarize yourself with the doctrine you’re thinking of rejecting. Read the best representatives of both sides; don’t pit Fudge against your previous cult leader. That’s insane.
But this is completely reversible. Look:
I suspect that there’s a bit of desire for niceness and friendship with the world behind the human desire for hell to not exist – and the way some people attack the doctrine (not referring to your approach at all), there does appear to be a desire for it to be false and for sinners to get their “fair reward” (as opposed to eternal conscious torment) for their sins, with the person arguing for it seeming almost happy about it. That doesn’t, of course, mean that annihilationism isn’t what’s going to happen. But the approach of some people to the issue in that way bothers me.
Candidly, if you don’t desire someone like, say, Josef Mengele to be punished in hell, I doubt the accuracy of your moral compass. (If you’re not familiar with Mengele, look up his experiments with children.) It’s not a desire for revenge, nor is it sadism; it is a desire for retributive justice built into us by God, in response to sadism.
The problem with this criticism is that this is exactly what Jesus often did. Indeed, just today I was reading Luke 12, where Jesus encourages his own disciples by saying:
Do you have a better approach to evangelism and discipleship than Jesus?
I don’t see the dichotomy. The good news that the apostles preached is that Jesus is now reigning as king over all, and that every person is required to turn to him from their previous loyalties to escape his judgment. Those who do will be made sons in his kingdom. Those who won’t will be cast onto the trash-heap outside. Maybe we understand the gospel itself differently?