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© Rev. Dr. Curtis I. Crenshaw 1995
(The following are just summary notes, not an in depth study.)
Introduction
Some say it is not nice to teach on hell, yet Jesus taught more on hell than all the rest of the Bible combined. We could wish hell were not true, but we must not apologize for God’s truth. Every fiber of my being could wish it were not true, but every fiber of my being tells me it is true if God has righteousness — and He does.
Every fiber of our being should seek Christ, the only deliverer from infinite punishment.
Most cults and all liberals deny hell, for they think of man as not so bad and God without justice.
Soul sleep (that one is unconscious, extinct, after death) and annihilationism almost always go together.
One of the issues regarding eternal punishment is what “death” means in Scripture. “Death” in Scripture usually means “separation,” not annihilation. Physical death is the separation of the spirit from the body (James 2:26), and spiritual death is the separation of the soul from the favor of God (Eph. 2:1ff; Rev. 20:11-15; 21:8).“She who lives in pleasure is dead while she lives” (1 Tim. 5:6). How can there be a second death unless “death” does not mean annihilation? (Rev. 20:14).
Time never ceases to exist for creatures, for only God “inhabits eternity.”
I. History of the Doctrine
The early fathers taught the immortality of the soul and the doctrine of hell, meaning eternal punishment. Most also held to degrees of punishment and that the fire was material, not just figurative.
The protestant reformers universally taught the everlasting punishment of the wicked as have all Reformed churches since then. Some Anabaptists taught restorationism and some Socinians the annihilation of the wicked.
Treatises by Reformed theologians on hell are by William G. T. Shedd in his Dogmatic Theology and Jonathan Edwards in his writings. John H. Gerstner has written an able defense (Repent or Perish) against annihilationism, especially against Fudge’s The Fire That Consumes. The last two centuries have seen a number of people espouse the errant teaching of annihilation. A popular preacher around the time of the Civil War, Henry Ward Beecher, was going to debate Shedd on eternal punishment. When Beecher read an advanced copy of Shedd’s defense, however, he wired: “Cancel engagement, Shedd is too much for me. I half believe in eternal punishment now myself. Get somebody else.”
In this century such heavy weights as Philip E. Hughes and others have adopted the annihilation view. Denying this doctrine, however, severely compromises evangelicalism, as we shall see.
II. How the Non-Orthodox Argue Against Hell
1. The soul is tied to the body so that when it ceases, the soul ceases. In other words, the soul is not immortal. Fudge, for example, in The Fire that Consumes argues that it is Platonic to argue for the natural immortality of the soul. But this is a straw man, for the Bible does not teach the natural immortality of the soul but the supernatural immortality of the soul, for it is only in God that “we live, move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). There is no being but God who is “naturally” immortal (1 Tim. 6:13-16); all others depend on Him moment by moment for their existence. He is the only One who has life in Himself (John 1:4; 5:26).
2. They argue that to perish or be destroyed implies annihilation, but we shall see that this is not true nor did the early church fathers, who were close to the Apostles and knew Greek as their first language, understand the words in their contexts this way.
3. They argue that the opposite of life is death, assuming that death means cessation of existence, which is not the Bible’s definition. In Scripture, “death” means separation.
4. They challenge that those whom the Lord raised from the dead while He was on earth must have been non-existent, or else the Lord took them from heaven only to die again and be subject to losing their salvation (Lazarus in John 11). But it is not certain that one loses his salvation, though we cannot go into that here. They did die again, but what may have been the special circumstances surrounding their deaths and resurrections, the Bible does not say. But if one is glorified at death as the Bible apparently teaches (1 John 3:1ff), how could the Lord bring one back to this sinful world, back to an earlier point of his sanctification, they argue? Part of the answer is that until the Lord’s Ascension, most saints had not gone to heaven but were in sheol/hades. It was at His Ascension that “He led captivity captive,” that the saints were glorified. Now after His Ascension, saints are not resurrected. Glorification is still in the future (1 John 3:1-2).
5. They say that the traditionalists do not have an explanation of the body of those resurrected who are damned, which is not true and irrelevant. We believe that their bodies will not be glorified as the bodies of the righteous but nevertheless will be raised and joined with their souls in hell. The Bible does not describe such bodies as it does the elect, so we go no further. It is irrelevant because it has nothing to do with how long one stays in hell.
6. Hades and sheol, they maintain, only mean the grave, not some place after death where people are still conscious. This is emphatically not true, the words meaning either grave or hell, depending on context, and the vast majority of time they mean the place of departed spirits. The fathers almost universally understood sheol/hades as the place of departed spirits, not the grave.
III. Particular Passages that Teach Eternal Punishment
1. Jesus taught more on hell than all the rest of the Bible combined.
2. In Matthew 11:21-22, the Lord taught degrees of torment: “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works which were done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I say to you, it will be more tolerable for Tyre and Sidon in the day of judgment than for you.” If it will be “more tolerable,” then their punishment will be less than others. Some will be beaten with many stripes and others with few (Luke 12:48). There can be no degrees of punishment if annihilationism is true, for there are no degrees of non-existence.
3. “And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. But rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matt. 10:28). It is a sin to fear man and a sin not to fear God, but if God could do no more than man, namely, bring about extinction, what is the point of the Lord? Annihilationism teaches us not to fear God, for He terminates all suffering in annihilation.
4. Body and soul can be separately killed, thus indicating that the soul may not “die” with the body (Matt. 10:28). If man can kill the body and the soul cannot be separated from it, then Christ’s statement has no meaning, for man can indeed kill the soul as well as the | 