Hell under fire

I'm going to comment on some arguments by Glenn Peoples:

http://www.rightreason.org/article/theology/annihilationist.pdf

For purposes of this post, I'll use "traditionalist" as a label for Christians (like myself) who uphold the Biblical doctrine of conscious everlasting punishment. Keep in mind that I recently did two posts on annihilationism:

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-fudgesicles-chance-in-hell.html

http://triablogue.blogspot.com/2015/01/the-hermeneutics-of-annihilationism.html

So I'm going to skip over a lot of Glenn's arguments. I already covered much of the same ground, so I won't repeat myself here.

The real issue, which is obscured in this reply, is not whether or not the soul is “inherently” or independently immortal, but whether it is immortal at all.

Yet Fudge says:

Conditionalists begin with the premise that only God is inherently immortal.
First Timothy 6:16 says that only God has immortality in himself. Humans are not naturally immortal. 

http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/ask-a-conditionalist-response

I guess Glenn and Fudge need to have a little powwow to decide what's the real issue:

The consequences are literally unspeakable. Man is not permitted to have access to immorality in his fallen state, and God will not even speak of such a thing. Human death entered the world.
But if this is so, then the lost cannot live forever, and if they cannot live forever, then the doctrine of eternal torment is false, because if it were true, then the lost would live forever.
But since the immortality of the soul is a claim that the lost either do or will have immortality, it must be rejected for reasons just outlined.

That's confused in several respects:

i) One of Glenn's tactics (unless he's just confused) is to frame the issue in terms of "immortality," by which he means deathless existence. If, however, the Bible teaches postmortem survival (i.e. the intermediate state and/or the general resurrection), then that implies immortality, even though biological life was interrupted by physical death. Physicalists like Glenn must resort to the ad hoc expedient of saying the damned are annihilated the moment they die (indeed, everyone is annihilated at the moment of death), then temporarily resurrected, only to be annihilated all over again. 

Instead of framing the issue in terms of immortality (as he defines it), it would be more accurate to frame the issue in terms of postmortem survival. Life after death. 

ii) Glenn confuses immortality per se with biological immortality in particular. But biological life (and death) is a separate issue from the immortality of the soul. 

iii) Biological mortality and immortality are not contradictory, for it's possible to die, then resume living. As of the general resurrection, the lost will live again–forever–in hell. 

The lost never go out of existence. They live and die, pass into the intermediate state, and participate in the general resurrection. 

That people are mortal in a fallen world is a given for traditionalism. Death is undeniable. That's beside the point. The question at issue is what happens to you after you die. Glenn's framework is an exercise in misdirection.  

Unfortunately, traditionalists have little to say about the direct Scriptural statements about immortality.

i) That's based on OT and NT prooftexts for the intermediate state, resurrection of the just, and/or general resurrection. 

ii) Incidentally, although Glenn glancingly interacts with Daniel Block, he ignores his case for the intermediate state of the lost in the OT. 

There is no getting away from the fact that traditionalism teaches that the lost will be made immortal.

That's equivocal. The lost are already immortal vis-a-vis the soul. They will be made immortal vis-a-vis the body at the general resurrection. 

Scripture tells us that a time will come when evil will be no more. 

Begs the question.  

There is literally nothing that is not under Christ. The picture is one of perfect unity and peace everywhere. But given such a perfect picture, what room is left for evil?

i) Scripture uses the imagery of military subjugation–putting his enemies under his feet. That's "peaceful" in the sense that God's enemies will forcibly subdued. 

ii) And other Scriptures speak of how they will be quarantined. It will be peaceful everywhere on earth. 

Perversely, defenders of the doctrine of eternal torment have taught the opposite of Scripture here, and even worse: That not only will creation be forever divided into a stark dualism of glory and anguish, heaven and hell…

A biblical dualism. 

…but that this will actually be something that we take great pleasure in. 

i) A few traditionalist authors say that. It's not essential to traditionalism. 

ii) But as far as that goes, Rev 18 is a classic taunt-song. The saints celebrate the fall of Babylon. 

In Matthew 10:28, Jesus tells his disciples that rather than fearing men who can kill the body, they should “be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” We know what Jesus meant with His reference to men who can kill the body. Here, the ultimate power to kill the whole person in Gehenna (unhelpfully translated “hell”) is affirmed by Jesus.

That text poses a dilemma for a physicalist like Glenn. He doesn't believe humans are embodied souls–a composite of an incorporeal soul united to a physical body. From his perspective, everyone is destroyed when they die. 

The gist of the response I would make here is that what is qualified as “eternal” is not any duration of suffering, or the people who are subject to eternal fire, but only the fire itself.

i) That poses another dilemma for annihilationists. Given the symmetry of Mt 25:46, by denying the eternal existence of the damned, they thereby deny the eternal existence of the saints. 

ii) We must also take into account how Mt 25:41,46 would be heard by a Jewish audience, accustomed to debates between Pharisees and Sadducees. It's not jus a question of what the words mean, but their literary and cultural connotations. 

When Edward Fudge, for example, makes the observation that the worm in this picture “is a devouring worm, and what it eats – in Isaiah’s picture here quoted without amendment – is already dead,”
If the unsaved really are the “fuel” that sustains the fire then in order for them to provide a perpetually undepleted source of fuel they would quite simply have to keep producing more material to be burned or they would need to have infinite mass.

Traditionalists don't think God is punishing corpses. That confuses a symbol with what it stands for. Same thing with the objects of fire. 

Perhaps the traditionalist might want to insist that in order for a person's shame and/or contempt to go on existing, it must be the case that the person in question is still alive. But what good reason is there to think that this is true? In fact, there's a biblical example that shows that this is not true.
Isaiah 66:24 – in this context God has just victoriously slain his enemies, in vv 15ff
What has happened to the wicked? Simple: They are dead. But notice the word “abhorrence” here in the ESV. It varies from one translation to another, “they shall be loathsome” or “they shall be an abhorrence” are common. But here's the thing: It's the same word translated “contempt” in Daniel 12:2, dara'ōn. Here in Isaiah, the contempt is held by the people of God, for the slain enemies of God. Likewise in Daniel 12:2, it's the contempt, not of the wicked, but of the people of God, or perhaps even of God Himself, that is eternal.

That disregards a key difference between Isa 66:24 and Dan 12:2. A traditional way of dishonoring the enemy is to refuse them burial. Their corpse suffers the ignominious fate of being scavenged. Isa 66:24 trades on that imagery.

In Dan 12:2, by contrast, the lost are restored to physical life to experience reproach. The imagery is not about dead bodies, but about the living. Slain enemies have been raised from the dust in order to be shamed. I'd add that Dan 12:2 has NT counterparts (e.g. Jn 5:28-29; Acts 24:15).

A fire that is not “quenched” is one that is allowed to burn unrestrained (i.e. “unquenched”) until it has consumed the object being burnt. This is exactly how such language is used, for example, in Ezekiel 20:47-48.
The language used here of the followers of the beast is almost exactly like that used in the prophecy against Edom in Isaiah 34:9-10
No exegete has ever suggested that Isaiah 34:9-10 is a reference to the eternal torment of the inhabitants of Edom.

Glenn commits several basic hermeneutical gaffes:

i) He begins with a NT text which echoes an OT text, he puts the NT text on hold while he decides what he thinks the OT text really means, then he transfers that interpretation to the NT text. But that, itself, is hermeneutically fallacious:

a) When a NT text echoes an OT text, the primary question we need to ask is how the OT text now functions in its NT setting. How does the NT author appropriate that passage? What role does it perform in the flow of argument or narrative strategy?  

b) Oftentimes, a NT author will use stock imagery from the OT for its precedential resonance. That isn't a prediction/fulfillment relation. Rather, that's based on broad analogies or theological motifs. It doesn't have the same frame of reference. It needn't "mean" the same thing. 

ii) In the nature of the case, historical judgments in the OT are localized in time and space. But eschatology typically intensifies the scope of judgment. You can't simply collapse NT eschatological imagery back into historical OT judgments, as if these share the same restrictions.

iii) Likewise, I think Isaiah's imagery is hyperbolic. But there's an escalation as we move from historical OT judgments to eschatological judgment. What is hyperbolic in reference to ancient Israel's historic enemies isn't hyperbolic in reference to the final judgment, which is sweeping in scope. 

If the traditionalist were to apply the same method of interpretation to both Revelation and Daniel, we would end up with a glaring contradiction, because if one is slain then one cannot also be kept alive and tormented day and night forever and ever (quite apart from the fact that the beast is not a “someone” who can suffer such a fate).

That's quite nearsighted. Someone can be slain, then resurrected to face never-ending punishment. It's not a "glaring contradiction" at all. It's a simple matter of distinguishing between earlier and later stages of judgment.  

Glenn makes a big deal about 2 Thes 1:9, as if that somehow favors annihilationism. However, as Abraham Malherbe observes:

Paul uses olethros ("ruin") only in eschatological contexts (1 Cor 5:5; 1 Thes 5:3; 2 Thes 1:9). It is related to apoleia ("destruction"; 1 Tim 6:9), but rather than imply annihilation "it carries with it the thought of utter and hopeless ruin, the loss of all that gives worth to existence" (Milligan, 65). 

The translation  "eternal ruin" renders olethron aionion…it does not mean annihilation, but everlasting ruin. The Letters to the Thessalonians (Yale 2000), 292,402.

As a member of the Yale Divinity School, one can't seriously contend that his interpretation is driven by traditional dogma. In his new commentary, Jeffrey Weima observes:

The word olethron occurs three other times in Paul's letters (1 Thes 5:3; 1 Cor 5:5; 1 Tim 6:9), where it appears to have both the literal meaning of physical destruction and the metaphorical sense of disaster or ruin…Here the apostle calls it "eternal" that is, "a period of unending duration, without end" (BDAG 33.3). That Paul does not have in view a destruction of the person that lasts forever (i.e., their annihilation) but rather their unending ruin (e.g., their continuing punishment) seems clear from three factors. First, this is the teaching of Jesus (Mt 5:29-30; 12:32; 18:8-9; 25:41,46; Lk 16:23-25), with which Paul would have been familiar. Second the eternal punishment of the wicked was a common conviction in the apostle's Jewish heritage (e.g. 1QS 2.15; 5:13; Pss. Sol. 2:35; 15:11; 4 Macc 10:15). Third, the following parallel phrases ("from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might") presuppose the ongoing existence of the wicked rather than their annihilation. 1-2 Thessalonians (Baker 2014), 474. 

Given how liberal Calvin Seminary is, I seriously doubt Weima's interpretation is dictated by traditional orthodoxy. Back to Glenn:

When Death is thrown into the lake of fire, it is “killed.” This raises questions over the meaning of the lake of fire. If an entity like death can be thrown into it, then does this not make it difficult to conceive of it as a place or state of conscious suffering? It seems clear, as Roloff notes, that the point of depicting Death being cast into the lake of fire is to show that death itself will one day be done away with altogether. This in itself seems to suggest that the lake of fire itself signifies an end, a “death.” Mounce affirms this understanding, connecting death’s fate in the lake of fire with Isaiah 25:8, which declares that our God will “swallow up death forever.”

i) To destroy death is like a double negation which results in something positive. If death is the loss of life, then "destroying" death entails immortality–for better or worse. The wicked lose the escape route of death. In fact we have an explicit example of this in Revelation:

And in those days people will seek death and will not find it. They will long to die, but death will flee from them (9:6). 

ii) Another problem with Glenn's position is the use of psychological terms like "torment" and having no "rest" in Rev 14:10-11. In the nature of the case, that's only applicable to conscious agents.  Nonentities can't experience torment or lack of rest. 

iii) Although Glenn glancingly interacts with Beale, he ignores Beale's analysis of the second death. Taking their cue from Kline, commentators like Poythress and Beale relate the categories in terms of antithetical parallelism:

First death is physical–second death is spiritual (i.e. misery)

First resurrection is spiritual (i.e. intermediate state)–second resurrection is physical (i.e. resurrection of the just)

The second death is not a synonym for oblivion, but misery.

iv) Finally, Glenn constantly treats fire as a destructive element. But in Scripture, the symbolic significance of fire is variable. Sometimes it symbolizes a purifying process, sometimes a destructive process, and sometimes punitive pain and suffering (i.e. blistering heat, thirst). The parable of Lazarus and Dives is a classic example of fire as a symbol, not of destruction, but punitive pain. 

And in Revelation, fire can signify pain rather than destruction. For instance:

8 The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and it was allowed to scorch people with fire. 9 They were scorched by the fierce heat, and they cursed the name of God who had power over these plagues (16:8-9). 

Notice in this passage that purpose of the fire is not to destroy the wicked, but to inflict pain.