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| Acknowledgments | 9 | (2) | |||
| Introduction: What's All the Fuss About? | 11 | (8) | |||
| Part One: The Case for Conditionalism | |||||
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19 | (5) | |||
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24 | (13) | |||
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37 | (16) | |||
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53 | (11) | |||
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64 | (16) | |||
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80 | (37) | |||
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83 | (34) | |||
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| Part Two: The Case for Traditionalism | |||||
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117 | (12) | |||
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129 | (41) | |||
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170 | (39) | |||
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182 | (27) | |||
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| Notes | 209 | (12) | |||
| Indexes | 221 |
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Chapter One
An Introduction
to Conditionalism
T he Bible clearly teaches that those who persistently reject God's mercy throughout this life will one day face him in judgment and finally be cast into hell. Hell is real. It is fearful beyond human imagination, and those who go there will never come out again. From at least the time of Augustine (A.D. 354-430), most Christians have taught that God will keep hell's inhabitants alive forever so they can suffer everlasting torment of body or soul or both, in an agony that somehow corresponds to the pain inflicted by fire.
It is not surprising that when Jonathan Edwards preached on hell, colonial Americans sometimes fainted with fright. Edwards admonished:
To help your conception, imagine yourself to be cast into a fiery oven, all of a glowing heat, or into the midst of a blowing brick-kiln, or of a great furnace, where your pain would be as much greater than that occasioned by accidentally touching a coal of fire, as the heat is greater. Imagine also that your body were to lie there for a quarter of an hour, full of fire, as full within and without as a bright coal of fire, all the while full of quick sense; what horror would you feel at the entrance of such a furnace! And how long would that quarter of an hour seem to you! ... And how much greater would be the effect, if you knew you must endure it for a whole year, and how vastly greater still if you knew you must endure it for a thousand years! 0 then, how would your heart sink, if you thought, if you knew, that you must bear it forever and ever! ... That after millions of ages, your torment would be no nearer to an end, than ever it was; and that you never, never should be delivered! But your torment in Hell will be immeasurably greater than this illustration represents.
A century later Charles Spurgeon minced no words as he described hell's torment to his London audience:
Thine heart beating high with fever, thy pulse rattling at an enormous rate in agony, thy limbs cracking like the martyrs in the fire and yet unburnt, thyself put in a vessel of hot oil, pained yet coming out undestroyed, all thy veins becoming a road for the hot feet of pain to travel on, every nerve a string on which the devil shall ever play his diabolical tune.
This style of preaching is now in rapid decline. Many advocates of the traditional view now say the fire is likely metaphorical. Hell's pains result more from deprivation than from external infliction, they explain, and are probably spiritual and emotional in nature rather than physical. The real agony will be the smitten conscience and the sense of loss, according to most of Spurgeon's and Edwards's modern descendants. Evangelist Billy Graham is among those who reject the lurid descriptions of hell once popular among advocates of everlasting torment. Says Graham in an interview:
The only thing I could say for sure is that hell means separation from God. We are separated from his light, from his fellowship. That is going to be hell. When it comes to a literal fire, I don't preach it because I'm not sure about it. When the Scripture uses fire concerning hell, that is possibly an illustration of how terrible it's going to be--not fire but something worse, a thirst for God that cannot be quenched.
The fact is that the Bible does not teach the traditional view of final punishment. Scripture nowhere suggests that God is an eternal torturer. It never says the damned will writhe in ceaseless torment or that the glories of heaven will forever be blighted by the screams from hell. The idea of conscious everlasting torment was a grievous mistake, a horrible error, a gross slander against the heavenly Father, whose character we truly see in the life of Jesus of Nazareth.
Scripture teaches instead that those who go to hell will experience "everlasting destruction" in "the second death," for God is able to "destroy both body and soul in hell." The actual process of destruction may well involve conscious pain that differs in magnitude in each individual case---Scripture seems to indicate that it will. Whatever the case, God's judgment will be measured by perfect, holy, divine justice. Even hell will demonstrate the absolute righteousness of God. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible repeatedly warns that the wicked will "die," "perish" or "be destroyed." Those who die this second death will never live again.
A growing host of respected biblical scholars now publicly question the traditional notion that God will keep the lost alive forever so he can punish them without end. These include such luminaries as F. F. Bruce, Michael Green, Philip E. Hughes, Dale Moody, Clark H. Pinnock, W. Graham Scroggie, John R. W. Stott and John W. Wenham. These men represent evangelical Christian scholarship at its best. They recognize that Scripture must judge all traditions and creeds, not the other way around. They realize that most of the church was wrong for centuries on doctrines far more fundamental than the doctrine of hell, and they understand that it would be presumptuous to suppose that the majority might not have erred on this point just as it did on others.
J. I. Packer rightly notes that "we are forbidden to become enslaved to human tradition, ... even `evangelical' tradition. We may never assume the complete rightness of our own established ways of thought and practice and excuse ourselves the duty of testing and reforming them by Scripture." John Stott reminds us that "the hallmark of an authentic evangelicalism is not the uncritical repetition of old traditions but the willingness to submit every tradition, however ancient, to fresh biblical scrutiny and, if necessary, reform. The growing evangelical rejection of the traditional doctrine of unending conscious torment is not propelled by emotionalism, sentimentality or compromise with culture but by absolute commitment to the authority of Scripture and by the conviction that a faithful church must be a church that is always reforming.
Dust Creatures in God's Image
The Bible's opening chapter tells us that there was a time when humankind did not exist, and that when God made us, he made us from dirt--from the very elements which also compose our planet. The author of Genesis allows us to watch over God's shoulder as he makes the first human (Gen 2:7). God carefully shapes a human body from clay scooped from the earth. The Almighty stoops and breathes into its nostrils. Suddenly what began as a life-size mud doll becomes a living being! God names him Adam , a Hebrew word that also means "dust." Earthly elements plus the "breath of life" have become a whole man--in Hebrew "a living soul." From a rib of Adam, the story continues, God then makes Eve--also in the image of God (Gen 2:21-22).
Since humans did not exist until God formed them and gave them life, each moment of life is God's immediate gift of grace. Eventually God reclaims the breath of life and we return to the ground from which we were taken (Eccles 3:18-22). The Bible always portrays human beings within this framework of God's creation. We cannot exist for even one moment apart from God, who made us.
The gift of life. The biblical view of humans as God's dependent creatures differs sharply from the view taught by the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. According to Plato, each human being has a body that is mortal and will finally die. Plato taught that each person also has a soul that is immortal and cannot die. Plato's student Socrates continued his master's philosophy. As he faced his own execution, Socrates welcomed death, for to him it meant escaping the lower realm of mortal bodies and returning to the higher sphere of immortal souls. Like his teacher Plato, Socrates believed that the soul cannot die nor cease to exist. Plato died before Jesus was born, and thus before Jesus revealed that God "can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Mt 10:28). Socrates' view also differs from the view expressed by his predecessors, the Old Testament writers, who consistently dreaded death as the end of life. Unlike those Scriptures, Socrates did not view man in relation to the living God.
The most notable characteristic of the dead in the Old Testament is that they are cut off from God. This is a dreadful thought because, of all the living creatures, only humans know God person-to-person. Humans alone exhibit volition and awareness of their mortality. Even though Adam lived 930 years, he too finally died (Gen 5:5). As his descendants returned his lifeless body to the soil, they must have grieved at the thought of their own mortality and the brevity of their lives. The Old Testament writers disagree with later Greek philosophers who portray humans as immortal souls entrapped for a time in mortal bodies. They picture humanity's state after death with the imagery of Sheol.
Sheol--the realm of all the dead . The word Sheol is used in the Old Testament sixty-five times. The King James Version translators rendered it either "hell" (thirty-one times), "the grave" (thirty-one times) or "the pit" (three times). The translators of the American Standard Version simply left it "Sheol." In the New International Version the word is usually translated as "grave," though at least once it is rendered "the realm of death" (Deut 32:22). Sheol is not a physical hole in the ground, but it might well be translated "gravedom." Biblical Greek writers used the word Hades (literally "unseen") for the Hebrew word Sheol , both in the Greek translation of the Old Testament and in the New Testament.
Job describes Sheol as "the place of no return, ... the land of gloom and deep shadow, ... the land of deepest night, of deep shadow and disorder, where even the light is like darkness" (Job 10:21-22). David calls it "the place of darkness" and "the land of oblivion" (Ps 88:12). Although individuals are sometimes pictured in the Old Testament as conversing in Sheol or engaging in other such lifelike pursuits (Is 14:9-18), the Hebrew text tells us that they are mere shades, shadows of whole persons who once lived and loved on the earth (Is 14:9).
Some writers have suggested that Sheol was a place of punishment for sin. The translators of the King James Version contributed to this misunderstanding by rendering Sheol as "hell." However, such faithful saints as Jacob, David and Job all expected to go to Sheol when they died (Gen 37:35; Ps 49:15; Job 14:13). Most importantly, Jesus Christ himself went to Sheol (Greek Hades ) upon his death (Acts 2:27, 31). On the third day Jesus came back from the grave in victory, and he now holds as trophies "the keys to death and Hades" themselves (Rev 1:18). One day death and Hades also will be cast into the "lake of fire"--which is a way of saying they will cease to exist (Rev 20:13-15).
No wonder that righteous men and women throughout the Bible repeatedly express confidence that God will restore them from Sheol to enjoy life in his fellowship again (1 Sam 2:6; Ps 16:9-11). No biblical character is ever said to have placed hope in philosophical notions of natural immortality, or to have supposed that human beings have some mysterious part that cannot die. Whatever the state of mortals between earthly death and the resurrection, their only hope for survival lies in the hands of the Creator who alone is inherently immortal (1 Tim 6:16).
Excerpted from TWO VIEWS OF HELL by Edward William Fudge & Robert A. Peterson. Copyright © 2000 by Edward William Fudge and Robert A. Peterson. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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