Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.

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(note-there are large amounts of Hebrew and Greek words in this episode. While I have done my best to get the word correct in the transcript I may have gotten it incorrect (apologies in advance if so)

Seth - Intro 0:00

Before we get started some quick appreciation to those of you that have gone onto iTunes and rated the show. If you haven't done that, click the button. I would I would ask you to click all five stars, but you're more than welcome to just do four if you feel so lead. But no, seriously, thank you so much for your engagement for your involvement. And for those of you that have shared the show, you are the engine that drives the conversations that we have. And I enjoy doing them. And I'm glad that that it is helping some of you ,as it as it is me. I would ask if you could click the Patreon button at CanISayThisAtChurch.com learn a bit more about this show. If your feeling what is happening here and you'd like to be a little more involved, your generosity would go a long way more than you know. And so here we are.

My guest today for the show is fellow podcaster, author, blogger, overall smarter than me guy by the name of Chris Date. He runs the Rethinking Hell podcast and the website. He is featured on many YouTube debates and videos. He's also organized conferences about the topic of hell. This episode was not able to be aired before the most recent one that happened in March. So the question is, why revisit hell? Some of the feedback that I got after Dr. Stackhouse interview on the conditionalist, or annihilationist view of hell was that we didn't really touch much on the Biblical and hermeneutical and exegetical foundation for this view. And so I was able to talk with Chris, about some of that. Let's get into it.

Seth 2:10

Chris, thank you so much for joining the Can I Say This At Church podcast. I like, well I more than like, I enjoy very much you're Rethinking Hell podcast, it has helped me a lot. The episodes that I've listened to kind of work through some of this and full disclosure, I still am not 100% certain whether or not I want to lean towards evangelical universalism, or conditional salvation. But I know, I'm not eternal conscious torment. That's where I'm kind of coming from at this time. So and that's okay. That's I think, in my mind, at least, that's okay. Because I do want to make sure where I come down, that I come down there for for reasons that I can sleep with at night.

Chris 2:58

Sure, I totally get it.

Seth 2:59

I'd like to start with a bit about you. What can you tell the listeners about yourself? I've heard you on other podcasts on the Bad Christian podcast and others. And so I'm certain that there's some people that that are not familiar with either your, your podcast or some of your views, and kind of just a bit about you and your training.

Chris 3:16

Okay, well, first of all, on a more personal note, I am a husband of 17, almost 18 years, my wife and I have four sons ranging in age from four to 16. I, myself am 38 and my wife is nearly 38. Although I should say she's 28 because of course, wives are perpetually 28.

I am a by trade a software engineer have been for the past 17 something years, but very early on in my faith, I developed a passion for for Biblical exegesis and theology and apologetics and things like that, and knew that I would have loved to have changed the time gone back in time and done an actual degree. I at the time did not have any sort of higher education I just had a high school degree and I've worked my way into software. And I knew I wanted to go back and get a higher education in theology or something because this was my new passion. But I thought at the time that it was not going to be affordable both in terms of finances and time as a husband and full time father and and full time software engineer.

But then about I want to say around six years ago, my best friend and the person who was responsible for the discipling me early on in my faith, he began a seminary education at Liberty University. And when he told me about it, and I looked into what its costs are and what an education online looks like, I realized it was eminently achievable in terms of time and finances. And so I began an undergraduate in you know, bachelor of science and religion a little over, must have been something like a little…about four years ago, graduated with my bachelor's degree religion, summa cum laud at the beginning of 2017, at which point I enrolled or applied to and was accepted in the Fuller Theological Seminaries, Master of Arts degree in theology. And my my dream is one day to be a professor at a seminary or a Christian University. And as such my plans after graduating from Fuller, Lord willing, is to go on to enter a prestigious PhD program. I know I'm rambling, I'll stop in a moment. But just for listeners sake. When they hear names like Fuller and Oxford and Cambridge, they might be thinking screaming liberal, no, I'm extremely conservative, almost as conservative as you can get.

I'm in an inerrantist, I'm even a young earth creationist, it's crazy, people are gonna think I'm crazy fundamentalist. The reason I chose Fuller, and the reason I want to go to somewhere like Oxford and Cambridge is because I don't think that the education is going to prepare me for the kinds of challenges I'm going to face in academia in Christian apologetics, if I get my education at an echo chamber. I wanted to go somewhere where I would be challenged, stretched, presented with things that I wouldn't agree with and have to evaluate them and so forth. And that's why I ended up going with fuller and why my dreams are to go somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge.

Seth Price 6:16

I think that's wise. I think that's wise, because I can tell you personally, when I left Liberty, and quickly realized that things were not the way I was taught, the bottom fell out. And it took a while of faking it. And pretending before I had the guts, at least, to question things. So I think that's, I think that's wise, because there will be many people like myself, and I think it's wise to be able to speak to both aspects of that.

Chris 6:44

I think you're right, although I will say it in Liberty’s defense, that that was not my experience.

Seth 6:50

Oh I loved [my time at] Liberty, I just don't know that I agree with a lot of what I thought I believed when I went into Liberty, it is not what I believe now.

Chris 7:00

Fair enough, what I will say about Liberty, though, in their defense is just that I was exposed to rigorous articulations and defenses of views that aren't lot that don't line up with Liberty’s views. I was even assigned textbooks which presented those views. I'm looking behind me, for example, at my bookshelf, where I've still got a book called Across the Spectrum co-written by Greg Boyd, you know, and it had things like I think, a Christus Victor view of atonement and other things. And I articulated, I defended views that go very contrary to Liberty’s, stated views in a number of things. I'm a Calvinist, for example, I'm as will be discussing what sometimes called anhilationist. And I defended these views in in my papers and got top marks on them all, so it's not the kind of school where although they have a very fundamentalist, very conservative ethos, they're not going to, you're not going to be experienced view point discrimination. And I also think that people will be exposed to a variety of views, not like you're being sheltered and not exposed to those things. But, I hear what you're saying, I just I hope people will, I'm a big fan of liberty, as I know you are as well. And I just want people to know that it maybe doesn't deserve quite the reputation it has, you know what I mean?

Seth 8:15

Well, yeah, well, I think the reputation it has is not theological. The reputation it has is when it tries to mix theology and politics. And that's, that's, that's probably a bad thing to do in any age, because your ship will sink or sail on on the political winds.

But you alluded to it a minute ago. And I know when we first started conversing, and I find it odd. I don't know if on your podcast, but on this one, I'll ask people for feedback. And sometimes I'll get some and it's rare that I do and so I was surprised to get yours. You, you had said, and Dr. Stackhouse and I had spoken on it very briefly, that that the conditional list view or the annihilationalist view does hit quite a bit on atonement. And we didn't really get into that. And, and so what do you mean by that?

Chris 9:08

Well, so um, first of all, there are a number of areas where somebody like Professor Stackhouse and I agree, in certain particulars of this topic, but there are a few in which we do not and one of those is that I don't want to misrepresent my, what I consider a friend, and I think he does me as well. I don't want to misrepresent Professor Stackhouse. But he would argue and has argued both in with me in recordings and in book form, that the penalty for sin is at least in large part, some sort of conscious suffering, and that in hell, when the last have finished paying for their sins by suffering, then they will die. I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's a Biblical testimony. And that's not what we Rethinking Hell, which is the ministry I'm a part of. It's not what we argue what we argue is that the punishment is this. Now that punishment might be inflicted, and probably will be inflicted by violent, painful means, just like Christ's death was inflicted. But that punishment is death, the privation of embodied life, that the privation of psychosomatic life, that unity of body and soul of human beings have souls that separated at death, and the body is no longer alive, this embodied physical life that death deprives a person of is the punishment for sin. And we will look at various models of the atonement various doctrines of the atonement as Professor Oliver Crisp, at Fuller Seminary might call them. Most mainstream views of atonement entail some sense of substitution.
I am an advocate and defender of penal substitution atonement, but even views like Christus Victor, you know, which is also known as the ransom view, the sort of Anselmian satisfaction view, these mainstream views of atonement, they all include an element of substitution. Which just means that what Christ bore He bore in our place-in our stead, so that we won't have to. Now the question is, what did he suffer on our behalf and the Biblical testimony, as I argue in the, in a paper that's about to come out in the McMaster Journal of theology and ministry, and as I'll be arguing at the upcoming rethinking hell conference, which we'll talk about a little bit later, probably.

What I argue is that, you know, from a variety of angles, both from animal sacrificial themes in the Old Testament, as well as explicit statements in the original Greek of the New Testament [is] that Christ died for our sins, the Greek word ____ or ____, meaning something like instead of or in the place of, he died in place of his people.

Now, when we think about what a substitution is, imagine if I hired a needed to hire a substitute teacher. And so I went, and I looked at a bunch of CVs or resumes for people that want to be substitute teachers and I hire one, but I assign them to go substitute for a pitcher on a baseball field. Well, just because, you know, I guess what I'm trying to get at is that the by pitching baseball's at a baseball field, even though I hired what I'm claiming, as a substitute teacher, nobody in the right mind would grant that what that person did was substitute for the teacher, because what they did was radically different.
Okay. But if Christ was our substitute, and bore what we should have borne what we deserved, as the consequence for our sin, whether it's penal or otherwise, then, and if as scripture testifies, what he bore in our place was death, the privation of embodied life, then the consequences that we would have faced in hell had he not done that for us and ergo, the consequence of winning those for whom he didn't die, if somebody is a Calvinist, like me, or at least those who fail to believe appropriate his atoning work to themselves through faith, they too uncovered by the blood of the Lamb, their punishment that's awaiting them in hell must likewise be death, the privation of embodied life.
And that doesn't sound all that controversial until you realize that the traditional view, the doctrine of eternal torment that has dominated Christian thinking on this topic, since about the time of Augustine, that view, entails the resurrected, immortaliization of resurrected lost people. They will be raised back to life, they will be granted bodily immortality and they will go into eternal life. Albeit in a bad place instead of a good place.

And you could see this all throughout the history of the tradition. So if Christ as our substitute for death, but what the last way in hell is everlasting life and immortal bodies that live on forever in torment, you couldn't get more different in terms of what he did on our behalf what he did in our place, and I've gone on and on, but basically, so the point here is, is that we can we can discern from the atonement, that since Christ died in our place, so that Christ died in our stead, so that we wouldn't have to, therefore we will live but those who aren't covered by his blood will themselves die-and forever.

Seth 14:18

Are there any versions of atonement, that in a conditional view is not going to hold water? So you got like mimetic or even Christus Victor, it sounds like it would for that. But are there any views of atonement, regardless of how far out there they are that a conditional view can't maintain?

Chris 14:39

I wouldn't say there are there any that condition was can't maintain. I mean, I'm a memetic view. First of all, I'm a huge critic of mimetic theories of atonement and other things in Scripture. And we don't have to talk about that here.

Seth 14:55

Good because I have not prepared for that.

Chris 14:58

Well, I'm not prepared for it either. But I would say there aren't any doctrines of atonement that a conditionalist view of conditional immortality view is incompatible with. But I would say that this argument that I'm making this positive argument for conditionalism isn't an argument that would be easily easily made in certain other models.
So for example, you have views like the vicarious penitence model of atonement, which Oliver Crisp calls a non penal substitution view. In that model, that doctrine of atonement Christ died, not in our place, but as a demonstration of what our sin deserves. Well, if he died, not in our place, but as a demonstration of what sin deserves, well, then you would think that sin deserves death.
So there's a there's a doctrine of atonement, that is not mainstream, but which would lend itself to the positive argument I'm making. On the other hand, you have something like the governmental theory, which Oliver Crisp calls penal non substitution, in that view, Christ bore a punishment but it wasn't in our place, and the punishment that he bore isn't necessarily equal to the punishment that we deserved. It was some sort of equivalent that may or may not be identical. And an analogy might be something like, imagine you owed me $1,000. Well, you owe me $1,000. But I might accept as an equivalent payment, a painting on your wall that's worth around that much money. That's not the same thing. But it's worth something equivalent. And so one could argue from the eternal torment side of things that Christ bore death, but but that's not what we deserve, we deserve something similar or equivalent to that, which is eternal torment. But of course, know that, although that doesn't lend itself to a positive argument from conditionalism, it also doesn't lend itself a positive argument for eternal torment.

Seth 16:52

Yeah, at least in my understanding of the cross, it seems kind of a weak argument, overall. But that's a different topic. You had talked a bit about or alluded to, there are a lot of similarities between you and Dr. Stackhouse, and there are things that you differ on. And one of the things that we discussed in brief, is a label that he used his “terminal punishment”, and that that you and most of your compatriots at rethinking hell would would have issue with that terminology for conditionalist view, why?

Chris 17:27

Well, again, remember, as I explained a little bit ago, our view at rethinking hell and I think the Biblical view is that the punishment is death, not suffering, and then after the suffering exhausts the penalty owed, then they die. That I think, is a fair way of characterizing Professor Stackhouse’s view. Now, if you think about the word terminal, and phrase-ology that we're accustomed to hearing that word and think of something like terminal illness, right, or terminal disease I mean, that's not the only example the word terminal is used, but I would say that's one of the most common one of the most recognizable. And what is a terminal illness? A terminal illness could be construed in at least one of two ways. It could be an illness that results in death, or and I think this is probably more likely, it's an illness that ends with death. Okay, so in either of those cases, it's not that the illness is death, it's that the illness produces or ends up with death. Okay. But if the punishment, as I would argue, and as we rethinking hell would argue, is death itself and not something leading up to death? Well, then terminal punishment communicates something a little bit different terminal punishment would indicate that there's a finite duration of punishment that ends in death.

And my biggest problem with that is simply that the Bible says in places like Jesus doesn't Matthew 25:46, that the punishment is eternal, not get the punishment last for a time and then ends, but that the punishment itself is eternal. As a conditionalist, that holds to my understanding of conditionalism, I can say that the wicked in hell will be raised, they'll be judged, and then they'll be punished with death, and their privation of life will last forever, it will be an eternal punishment.
I don't think that Professor Stackhouse can make that claim as consistently as we can at we rethinking hell and that's why I don't like the label “terminal punishment”, because it leads our critics to think that what we're saying is that the punishment is finite in duration, and then after it's over, then the wicked will die.

Seth 19:29

And one of the other critiques that and rightfully so, in my episode with Dr. Stackhouse, is we didn't give, we gave a lot of emotional and we have a lot of subtext. And we talk a lot about the Bible, but we don't really ever name any Scriptures. And so some of what I've read and been, not accused of - but allowed, was just weak hermeneutics, weak exegeses, with very little Scripture to stand on for those that are listening.
And so I would like to dedicate a good portion of time, specifically to that. And so I have many questions that I've tried to gather of everything opposing and some of them are my questions, because as I alluded to earlier, I still don't know where I am. And so this should be interesting.
And so I'll just start with Matthew 25, that you just alluded to—the thing that I've noticed is everyone that believes in the quote “traditional view”, seems to use very similar Scriptures, but just in a different way. And so in Matthew 25, everyone tells me “Well, you know, this means just this, and this is what it means. This is what it's always meant. And if you read it any other way, you are bordering on heterodoxy, possibly heresy”. And if, for instance, like Matthew 25:30, and I can't quote it, because I don't have my Bible in front of me. What would you say to people that say, “Well, this is how you read Matthew 25, where you use the eternal torment” its also in Jude 6 and in Matthew 8:12. And Matthew 22:13, just the eternal eternal torment.

Chris 21:08

Okay, so I want to break that down and cover three verses in that text, because that chapter has three verses that I think the traditional view likes to focus on. But before we do that, what I want to do is just say, because you mentioned emotions and things like that, for the listeners sake, I want them to know that, prior to becoming conditionalist, and since becoming conditionalist, I have never had any sort of emotional or philosophical or moral objection to the doctrine of eternal torment. And maybe that makes me hard hearted, somewhat, you know, a curmudgeon, or something like that. But honestly, I've never really wrung my hands over that idea.
I'm conservative, I'm reformed, I think that God has every right to dictate based on his own Just and holy nature, what the appropriate punishment for sin is. And if that punishment is eternal life in torment, then so be it. I can trust him in that. And meanwhile, all of my emotions pulled me and continue to pull me in the opposite direction back toward the traditional view. And that sounds really bizarre, but consider that when people adopt alternatives to the doctrine of eternal torment, it often endangers their livelihood. It endangers their social community at church and things like that. I mean, their churches, I could not only teach that I couldn't even be members at their schools. I couldn't teach that or even be a student that their ministries like Answers in Genesis where somebody who becomes convinced of conditional immortality for Biblical reasons, is forced to resign. And and I say that as a fan of Answers in Genesis, I'm a young earth creationist, as I said, so I knew it would be, it would make me somewhat of a pariah in the very conservative circles I most identify with. And so everything pulled me in the direction of the doctrine of eternal torment. But I was taught very early on in my faith, that it is important that one follows the Bible wherever it leads. And I did that and that's how I came to the view that I have now.
Now, having said that, I'm, I'm glad we turned the Matthew 25. First, because as I often tell people, the thing that convinced me of conditional immortality more than anything else, was that with virtually no exception, every single prooftext that historically has been cited in support of the doctrine of eternal torment, proves upon closer examination to be better support for conditional immortality. And this is no exception to that rule. So let's go through the three verses in this text that I think the traditionalist is going to argue from at least the primary ones, and we'll just take them one at a time and you can ask your questions back and forth.

You started with verse 30,

cast the worthless servant into outer darkness in that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Now, first of all, let's acknowledge what this verse doesn't say. This verse doesn't say that weeping and gnashing will go on forever, number one. Number two, that verse does not say that their punishment is weeping and gnashing of teeth, it only says that that's what will occur there. And with those two things in mind, if you imagine somebody being capital punished, like even an electric chair today, or hanging or something like that, there's going to be pain, visceral, terror, and emotion and pain as a person is dying. And when they die, it's over. And it could equally be said, of such a person that in that electric chair or in that noose, there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. There's just nothing incompatible there with this verse. But I don't want to leave it at that. I'm not simply going to say this verse is perfectly consistent with our view, I would actually argue that it's more consistent with our view. And it's because of the way that weeping and gnashing of teeth is used elsewhere.
So for example, in Matthew 13, there's this parable that Jesus tells of the wheat and the tares. And at the end of the parable, Jesus quotes the person in the parable saying “gather the weeds first [or the tares], and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”
And what's critical there is that the word burned, that's actually not the best translation of that word. the word is κατακαίω.

The verb in Greek kaio, by itself means burned. But the word κατακαίω means completely burned, burned up, burned down, burn the ashes, that kind of thing.
Now, if the parable weren't enough, Jesus goes on in verse 40. Actually, a few verses before that, but he goes on to interpret that parable that he had just told him which weeds are burned up in fire. And what he says is that just as the weeds are gathered and burned with fire, so will it be at the end of the age, the Son of Man will send his angels and then they will gather out of his kingdom, all causes of sin and all law breakers and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place, there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
So what we could see here is that Jesus interprets his own parable and which tares are completely burned up, reduced to ashes in a fire. And he says that, just like those weeds, the wicked will be thrown into a fiery furnace, and there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. The picture is that just like these weeds are burned down to ashes, so too will the wicked and a fiery furnace; and of course, there's going to be weeping and gnashing in that kind of an experience.

But the picture again, is one of complete consumation, complete consumption. And just as one little last bit of evidence there what Jesus is also alluding to is Malachi chapter four, which says,

Behold, the day is coming burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evil doers will be stubble, the day that is coming shall set them ablaze so that it will leave them neither root nor branch.

It goes on to say in verse three,

you shall tread down the wicked, for they will be ashes under the soles of your feet.

So I'll put all these things together. And what you have in the picture of weeping and gnashing is a picture of exclusion from God's kingdom and capital punishment. There's just nothing there about eternal torment at all. In that parable in verse 41, Jesus says,

Depart from me, you cursed into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.

And when people hear eternal fire, one thing they sometimes think of especially because this is the way they've been trained to understand the phrase, eternal fire, is a fire which continues to burn forever, because it never runs out fuel. You could even look into some of the first few centuries, when defenders of eternal torment would say things like the fires of hell melt off your flesh, but then simultaneously regenerate the flesh. And so the fire never runs out of fuel to burn. But that's actually not what the phrase eternal fire is a reference to.

First of all, this isn't the first time that Jesus uses that phrase. He also uses it, Matthew 18, verses eight and nine, where he sets it in parallel to Gehenna, which is the New Testament Greek transliteration of the Old Testament Hebrew valley of the sons of hinnom. And when you look at places like Jeremiah 7:33, the Valley of the Son of Hinnom, God promises will one day be called the Valley of slaughter, the corpses of God's slain enemies won't be buried because there won't be any room in the ground. And so they'll just be left scattered on the ground where they'll be eaten up by scavenging beasts and birds that can't be frightened away from these corpses upon which they feed. So by setting that picture, and that's not the only picture, mind you, but I mean, that's not the only place where the Gehenna is talked about as being a place of death.
But when Jesus sets that picture in parallel to eternal fire, you see a fire not that forever has fuel to burn, but a fire which completely burns up. It's irresistible because it's God's fire. It's its fire, as if from God Himself, and God is the quintessential, consuming fire.

But that's, but that's not the only evidence for eternal fire, meaning what I'm talking about. You could also go look at Jude, verse seven, and I say verse seven and not chapter something seven, because Jude only has one chapter. Jude, verse seven says that Sodom and Gomorrah eternal fire rain down from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah, as an example of what awaits the ungodly. And Second Peter 2:6, Peter’s own accounting at the same kind of ideas as Jude.
He says that

just as Sodom and Gomorrah will reduce to ashes, so too, will the wicked be in the end.

So this language of eternal fire doesn't lend itself to the doctrine of external torment either. And then with that, that brings us to verse 46

Seth 29:54

This is the verse that I seem to find Matthew 25:46 seem to find the most rebuttal. And I don't know why it's probably because of J. I. Packer. And I do want to read something that he said before you kind of write down and so I quoted it. So he says,

It boils down to whether when Jesus said that those banished at the final judgment will, go away into eternal punishment. He envisaged a state of penal pain that is endless, or an ending of conscious existence that is irrevocable. And that is a punishment that is eternal in its length or on its effect, and that mainstream Christianity has always affirmed the former, and still does, and evangelical annihilationalist unite with the many Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventist and liberals.

And by that I assume he means progressive Christians,

and just about all indeed who are not Universalist to affirm the latter.

And beyond this point, he goes on to say that annihilationalists have fanned out and that there is no unanimity.

Chris 30:54

What do you want me to begin with that?

Seth 30:56

I mean, so with that in mind, he said, seems pretty damning in his “No”

Chris 31:03
Excuse the pun, right.

Seth 31:04

Well, no…no pun intended. But vitriolic in his stance that this is wrong. It's always been wrong. The church has never believed this. And others have told me You must be a fool if you believe this. And so with that being said, how then do we view Matthew 25:46?

Chris 31:28

Well, very briefly, or at least relative to how non brief I usually am. Let me just mention two things. First of all, you know, he mentioned Jehovah's Witnesses and Seventh Day Adventist and things. I could equally say that defenders of the doctrine of eternal torment unite themselves with the Westboro Baptist Church and you know, Appalachian snake Wranglers and the Mormons and Muslims, all of those groups and many others believe in the doctrine of eternal torment. So I'm not sure what this poisoning the well, or this guilt by association is intended to accomplish.

Actually, that's not true. I know exactly what it's about, and trying to accomplish. Secondly, as for whether or not the doctrine of eternal torment has always been the Christian view, that's simply false and scholars nowadays know as much. The reality is that in the first few centuries of the church, you had all three major views of hell represented by one respected teacher or another.
I think Universalists overstate their case when they claim that universalism was the dominant view in the early centuries of the church, and I think that's wrong, but it certainly was prominent. There were some who held it, but so too, was conditional immortality. And so you've got people like Clement of Rome and Ignatius of Antioch and Iranaeus of Leon and Athanasius the Great and Arnoviusa Sikka, you've got a number of people in those first few centuries of the church prior to Augustine, who all held to this view.
So it's simply false to say that this is a novel invention, that only soft hearted liberals and progressive and so forth there are turning to in order to escape this terrible notion of eternal torment. So those out of the way, let's look at Matthew 25:46.

Packer is, right, Jesus does, quote, the king in this parable, saying these will go away into eternal punishment. But perhaps, intentionally, or perhaps not, Packer doesn't go on to quote the rest of that verse. Because the verse goes on to say,

but the righteous will go away into eternal life.

Now, it's true that both punishment and life there are described using the same adjective in Greek, it's aiónios. And it doesn't mean I think, anyway, something like everlasting, but in that way, their duration is, in fact the same. They are parallel in terms of duration, they both last forever. But the judicial context here means that the one fate assigned to the one cannot likewise be the same fate assigned to the other otherwise, what would be the point of the contrast? In other words, there's not only a parallel, there's also a contrast.
But if the righteous are the ones that go into eternal life, then surely eternal punishment can't also be eternal life, that wouldn't make any sense at all. And so at the very least, on the very surface of it, the punishment, we ought to expect not to be some sort of eternal life and torment, but rather eternal death, the capital punishment, eternal capital punishment would be a good way of putting it.
Now, of course, that raises the question, how could that kind of punishment be called eternal? After all, it only takes a few minutes to die, right. Well, there there are two things that I will say to that, first of all, as far back as a Augustine you know, people like a Augustine, were acknowledging that the duration of the death penalty is not measured in the time that it takes to die. If that were what the duration of capital punishment were measured in, then lethal injection, which involves a relatively small amount of pain would be merciful compared to 20 years in prison. Right.
But nobody thinks that way everybody recognizes the capital punishment, no matter how briefly, it takes two to inflict is more severe, more egregious, or, you know, whatever, more dire, more serious than 20 years in prison. And so a Augustine observed that the duration of capital punishment and by and by the way, Augustine was a defender of eternal torment. But he said that capital punishment is measured, not in how long it takes to die, but in how long one remains dead. And so if the wicked are raised, and if they're punished, and their life is deprived, it's taken away, and it remains taken away for eternity. Well, that's an eternal punishment.

Now, the second thing I would offer in response to this issue about eternality is that when in other places in the New Testament, when the Greek adjective aiónios is used to describe what could be called nouns of action, meaning, nouns that sort of share an idea with a verb, but have lost the verbal aspect of it. The adjective describes the outcome of the verb, that that noun communicates. Now that sounds like a bunch of gobbledygook, but let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. So because it'll be clear what I mean.

I'm in the book of Hebrews. In Hebrews 5:9, the author of Hebrews says that

Jesus became a source of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.

Now the verb that shares this, you know, that is in this family as the noun salvation is, of course, save. Jesus isn't saving us anymore, arguably, I mean, he is sanctifying us, he is interceding on our behalf. And if somebody wants to claim that that is continuing to save us, that surely won't go on after we are glorified. And we no longer sin any longer because there'll be no more, you know, our sin nature will have been completely obliterated will be completely transformed, we won't sin any longer there will be no need to intercede on our behalf anymore.
And similarly, the author of Hebrews says that Jesus in verse in Hebrews 9:12,

by needs of his own blood, Jesus secured eternal redemption.

Again, the verb there that is associated with redemption is redeem. But nobody thinks that Jesus is still redeeming us. What is forever in both of these cases, what is eternal, is the outcome of saving and redeeming. The saving took a little bit of time, the redeeming took a little bit of time, but the salvation-the redemption, that results from those acts are forever.

Well, so if we look at that, if we take that concept now back to Matthew 25:46, what we can see is that eternal punishment can easily be understood as a punishing that lasts for a time, you know, the infliction of the punishing is brief, but the punishment, the deprivation of life, that constitutes capital punishment, that lasts forever. So on every level, there's just no arguing from this passage against our view. It lends itself in every imaginable way to conditional immortality.

Seth 37:54

What would you say, or especially Scripturally, what would you say—and so one of the feedbacks that I got was, it's not just the act of sending that you have to keep in mind that God is an infinite being. And so it's it's not you sinning but it's who you send against, and so an infinite God would require an infinite punishment. So scripturally, is there anything, either for against that?

Chris 38:22

Well, the answer to that question, is there anything biblically to support that notion the answer is no. Anselm if I'm not mistaken as the first person to have made this argument, in defense of his satisfaction view of atonement. And Anselm, we're talking something like 1000 years after Christ, I find it interesting that apparently nobody thought of this argument prior to Anselm in the first thousand years of the church. But let's let's assume for the sake of argument, I have no problem affirming the notion. Because if the penalty that is required is an infinite penalty. Sure, eternal torment would qualify. If death is the punishment, if death last forever, then that punishment is likewise infinite, infinite in duration, infinite in severity. They will never ever, ever, ever live again, their punishment goes on forever. So annihilation, the complete obliteration of a person's life and being would qualify as an infinite punishment.

Seth 39:19

So the other text and and oddly enough, my, my wife and I volunteered to teach Sunday school, at our church, and we just literally on Sunday went through Luke 16:17, through the end of the, of the chapter there of Lazarus, the rich man, the beggar, we took it more from a perspective of if you are blessed with things, you need to share it how best could we have been, you know, if we were the rich man? But it's also used quite frequently and and oddly enough, one of the older middle schoolers asked an aside in the middle of it of, well, what is hell? What does that mean? What was he trying to warn his family of? And I'm was like, well we can talk about that after class? And I'm not sure what to tell you. And I and I didn't really answer his question. I kind of just gave him more questions. But you'll see people use Luke 16:22-24 of the rich man is burning, and they'll say, you know, he's burning eternally. He says as much and I'm up here, and please let me go back and save my, you know, my family, someone has to tell them. And so how do you answer that? All right, let's take it in a different way. Because I find that most people accuse it and it can condition a list of hermeneutics, Lee using eternal weekly and I don't believe that you are doing that. But is that version of Lazarus burning? Different than throwing that Lazarus, the rich man burning different than, than anything that used anywhere else in either Matthew or revelation?

Chris 40:54

Well, the thing that you need to remember about the story of Lazarus and the rich man, even if we take a completely literally, is that there is a bit of a hangover that modern translations sometimes suffer from that resulted from the King James translation, you know, back 400 years ago, whenever that was produced, and that is the King James translators, for whatever reason, they translated a number of different Greek words all the same.

And so you have passages like the one I quoted earlier, Matthew 18:8-9 where Jesus sets up Gehenna as a parallel to eternal fire Gehenna is properly translated hell, if what we mean by hell, as most people do nowadays, is future punishment, a place where we go to in the final day to be judged.

But the King James Version also translated another Greek word in the New Testament, hell, and that Greek word is hades, meaning, Hades. Hades is the New Testament Greek equivalent of the Old Testament Hebrew word Sheol. And sheol, even if we take the what I would argue to be poetic verses in the Old Testament where sheol was described as having people rise up out of it to greet people, Kings that are dying, and so forth. Even if we take all of that literally, then sheol in Hebrew thought was the place of the disembodied, conscious dead.

Okay. And that's what at most, Luke 16 is describing and we know that for three reasons.

First of all, in verse 22, the text says that both Lazarus and the rich man died and were buried. Okay, there's, there's no, and this is important because hell, when we talk about future punishment, eternal torment is after resurrection, it's after people come back out of the dead. Secondly, the text explicitly calls this place, Hades, not Gehenna, not hell, anything like that. And then thirdly, the rich man's brothers in the parable or in the story are still alive. And you'll remember that the rich man pleads with Abraham, please let me go and warn my brothers. That kind of thing couldn't happen in hell. Because Hell is when we talk about the place of future final punishment. The judgment has happened, the judgments done, people are either in one place or the other. There's no third place where people need to be warned not to head to the bad place. None of that makes any sense at all.

Meanwhile, you have places in Revelation chapter 20, where Death and Hades are emptied of their dead at resurrection, and then thrown into the lake of fire. And sure enough, Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, that the final enemy to be destroyed is death. So the picture of all of this is Sure, let's, for the sake of argument, say that Luke 16 has to be taken completely, literally. And what Jesus is doing is giving us some sort of historical account of some of these two people's experiences in Hades. It's Hades, it's the intermediate state, it's, you know, the place where disembodied dead people go to await the resurrection and final judgment. I mean, there's a reason that theologians call it the intermediate state, because it comes to an end eventually, and resurrection. So no, I don't think there's any arguments to be made here for eternal torment.

Seth 45:10

Is there and this is a question as I was driving back and forth today that hit me. And it may be off base, and if I am telling me as much so it seems, if one wants to hold a view that it seems like if I want to hold this view that I have to be willing to think at some level, that souls have no intrinsic value at all, and that only Christ can give value; which sounds beautiful, especially if you believe in Christ. But it also sounds horrible if you've never been in a place that you've been evangelize to, or never have gone beyond any form of common knowledge of a creator. And so do you think that souls have an intrinsic value, with or without Christ?

Chris 45:57

No, I don't think that's the case at all. I think that life is intrinsically valuable. There's a reason why as a Christian, I'm opposed to abortion and to euthanasia. It's because I think that life is intrinsically good, intrinsically valuable. And I actually would argue that final capital punishment, as I've described it, honors, the dignity and the value that human beings have. And I write about this in an article at rethinking hell called intrinsic value, sanctity of life and capital punishment, a response to JP Moreland. In this article, I quote JP Moreland who in in the, in a section of Lee Strobles book The Case for Christ, he argues that, that an annihilationist treat life as if its value is in its quality of life rather than quantity. And I showed that that's not, that's not the case at all. And in quite the contrary, Moreland himself in other books, defends RL defends objections to the death penalty on the grounds. And I'm not saying you have to accept his grounds. I'm just saying I'm using his own argument to illustrate my point. He argues that capital punishment says your, your dignity is such that your choices have genuine consequences, severe consequences, in fact, because your choices matter. When you sin, however grievous it may be or however not grievous it may be in from a certain perspective, you are not only disobeying an infinite God, but you are doing things that you're not meant to do, as a human being being created in God's image. There's a host of ways that you could try to describe what it is that I'm saying. But the point that I'm getting at is that a philosopher like JP Moreland argues that capital punishment, doesn't dishonor a person-doesn't say life is valueless, quite the opposite in upholds the value of life because it says that life is so precious, and sin so severe, so serious, that it warrants the cessation of life as a punishment.

Now, you don't have to accept that argument, I do. But the point that I'm getting at is that don't need to think that annihilation assumes that souls are valueless. Quite the contrary, you can accept that what God is doing is he has said, because he reflects his character, that sin is so serious, that it warrants the worst imaginable penalty; and that penalty is the privation of the very life that is so precious, that is so valuable, and anything else, and that wouldn't be as severe with it. You know, imagine if the penalty were to be to have $10 taken away, you know, which is more precious, which is more valuable? $10 or life, right? Well, life!

Seth 48:56

Yeah. How do we deal with, and you've alluded to it, and so I'd like to end with that and then we'll wrap up.

So I'm alive now, I die eventually—there's some intermediary period of whatever the duration is, and then I am resurrected and I'm held account and Revelation speaks to this in many different ways. And Revelation is a book that has always intimidated me and still to this day, but how do we deal with you know, that that second death? How do we, how do we view that and specifically, you'll see that as “no, everything is going to be consumed and fire” everything is they just use it the same way? But revelation seems to imply, at least from what I've heard, I have not read Mr. Fudges book, but from what I've heard him say in some other just clips, that that the eternal way takes that in the wrong direction. The eternal conscious torment way.

Chris 49:54

Takes what in the wrong direction? That verse? The second death?

Seth Price 49:59

Yeah, I've heard someone tell him “Well, this is just a text that you can't, it's hard for you to interpret and it's hard for a conditionalist to speak from a position of authority hermeneutics on this text.

Chris 50:12

Well, I mean, first of all, in another article that I've got being published in the day now and Evangelical Quarterly, which is called the hermeneutics of conditionalism, the defense of the hermeneutics method of Edward Fudge, I actually argue from these texts that hermeneutics, if we exercise standard accepted, respected principles for hermeneutics, we will come away with the impression that Revelation actually supports conditionally mortality rather than work against it.
And I could spend hours explaining why but I'll just suffice it to…I'll just say two things briefly, number one, both outside of the book of Revelation, and inside the book of Revelation, the extreme imagery that's used in places like where the devil, the beast, and the false prophet are tormented forever and ever in a lake of fire (that’s Revelation 20) and Revelation 14 where smoke rises forever from the torment of beast worshippers that are being tormented day and night. That all of this imagery is used outside of the Bible and outside of the book of Revelation, and in the book of Revelation itself to communicate destruction. And just as one example, in Revelation chapter 18, and 19 there's this familiar duo to anybody that is fascinated by the Book of Revelation, as I am. You have this mystery Babylon, this blood drunk, vampiric prostitute riding on the back of this seven-headed 10-horned beast, and together this this duo persecutes the saints, but in Revelation 18 John sees this mystery Babylon prostitute being tormented in fire. She drinks the fullest measure of God's wrath, which is language used in Revelation 14 and at the end of the beginning of chapter 19, a chorus cries out

Hallelujah, smoke rises for her forever and ever.

So you've got the fiery torment in fire and brimstone and chapter 18. You've got drinking the fullest measure of God's wrath and chapter 18. And in chapter 19, you've got smoke rising from her forever. But when the angel tells John what this symbolism means, at the end of chapter 18, he says,

so the great city will be thrown down with violence and will not be found any longer.

You see the picture of this, imagine if you saw a mushroom cloud today, you would think that something had been obliterated. And that's what all of this, this confluence of imagery is intended to communicate; it overwhelms the imagination and it appeals to smoke rising in the Old Testament and Edom being turned to pitch and smoke rising from it forever and ever. And Isaiah 34:10. It's appealing to all this language familiar to John's readers, it communicates complete destruction.

And John's angel tells him as much at the end of chapter 18, that's what that imagery symbolizes in the case of Mystery Babylon. So when we turn to Revelation 14 and 20, and see that same imagery being used to describe the lost in hell, why would we assume that [in] those places it's intended to be taken literally, but in this place it's intended to mean something other than that, it just doesn't make any sense..so that's firstly.

But secondly, the second death, what a lot of defenders of eternal torment, don't realize, and this is forgivable, because this is not something that as interpreters of Revelation we are trained to see. There is this dynamic all throughout Scripture, between the imagery in a prophets vision, and that which it actually means in reality, and there's a particular way that interpreters throughout Scripture characterize the meaning of the symbolism. And let me give you just one example, I'll give you three very briefly, Joseph, with the cup bearer and the baker in prison way back in the book of Genesis. Each of them had these wild dreams. And when Joseph interprets these dreams, he says to the cup bearer,

the three bugs on the branch are three days, after which you will be restored to your office.

And then when he interprets the Baker's dream, where the baker has the three baskets on his head. Joseph says the

three baskets are three days, after which you will be killed.

And then later, Joseph interprets Pharaoh's dream. And in Pharaoh's dream, he sees the seven healthy cows come up out of the Nile. And then he sees these seven sickly cows come up out of the Nile and eat up the healthy ones. And when Joseph interprets this bizarre, perplexing imagery, he tells him,

the seven cows are seven years. And the seven sickly cows are seven years of famine.

So and these are just, this is a handful of examples. You can find these kinds of examples in the New Testament as well. Now with that in mind, consider that in Revelation 20:14, and in Revelation 21:, John, in the first of those two cases in God in the second interpret the lake of fire, they say the lake of fire is the second death.
Now, here's what's important about that, besides the fact that what they're doing is interpreting is the point that when interpreters interpret imagery, what they tell you, it means is delivered in plain, ordinary, straightforward language. That's why…that's how it can interpret the imagery. If Joseph had told the baker that three baskets on his head were three wuzzlewoos, or you know, even some…that was terrible, but you know, some other weird imagery to describe it, the baker would have no idea what Joseph was saying. It's only because Joseph delivered the interpretation in plain language that it made any sense. And it's the only reason that we can make any sense of the dream.
So we have this dynamic in Revelation 20, where the lake of fire with this eternal torment of the beast and the false prophet and the devil, this is all the imagery, all the all the stuff that John is seeing in this bizarre dream is having this bizarre vision. But when he tells you what it means in Revelation 20:14, and when God tells you what it means, in Revelation 21:8, they're telling you that this bizarre imagery is symbolizes the second death.

The second death is the plain, ordinary, straightforward meaning of the imagery. And what would we take second death to mean, we would mean dying a second time. And that's what we conditionalists believe the resurrected last who had formerly died a first time or raised back to life judged and die a second time, it makes perfect sense. And it respects, it honors, this dynamic between imagery and interpretation in the book of Revelation, but now consider what the traditional view does to it. The traditional view, the doctrine of eternal torment, says, the second death is actually a metaphor. The second death is some sort of code language. That is actually that actually means eternal torment, you know, like a fire. So they're actually treating the lake of fire as the plane St. Language and second death as the metaphor as the symbol. And that's exactly backwards of how this dynamic works throughout Scripture.

Seth 57:08

Making a metaphor of the metaphor.

Chris 57:12

Right, exactly, although, metaphor of what they think is the literal, when in fact it's the other way around. So those are just two and then there's a lot more, it could be said, in fact, there's a talk I did at our second annual conference, where my friend and I give a presentation arguing for conditional immortality and against universalism, from the book of Revelation. And maybe I can send you a link to that. So you can include your short show notes.

Seth 57:37

I definitely will. But let's end there, so you have a conference coming up in Dallas, 2nd week of March, talk a bit about that, and then and point people to where they can get engaged, where they can, definitely rethinking how your website is full of more information than I can read, ever, I think, but good information. What I like about your website is, instead of just speaking at people, you tend to quote people when they say something so that your answers have context, which I find extremely helpful for someone like myself with a very cursory knowledge base of many, many, many things. So talk a bit about your conference coming up, how can people interact with that register for it? Come? And just all about that?

Chris 58:30

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. So it's March 9, and 10th. That's a Friday and Saturday coming up in just under four weeks. It is, as you said, in the Dallas Fort Worth area. And basically, this is our fifth annual conference, we've had four previous ones. And at this conference, you know, we've covered a variety of different topics related to this one. But this year, we're going to be focusing on the atonement, which we talked about at the beginning of this episode. And so the theme of the conference is crushed for our iniquities, hell and the atoning work of Christ, then a plenary session speakers, that the keynote speakers if you want to use that language, instead, they include four people. First is Preston sprinkle. He is a he was a professor at a turn of eternity Bible college. And he co-authored erasing hell with Francis Chan A number of years ago, and at the time, they both landed on the doctrine of eternal torment. But Preston has since become convinced of conditional immortality, and will be speaking on the topic of this conference. He's also published a number of other books, he's extremely popular. And I think people would really enjoy hearing what he has to say. We've also got Dr. Craig Evans, he is a scholar from Houston Baptist University. Very well known, very well respected. And he actually from what I understand, will be arguing for neither one position of the debate nor the other, but rather laying out some biblical principles that need to be kept in mind as the two sides of this debate. You know, continue the conversation. We also have Greg Allison, he is a historical theologian from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, and he is a defender of the doctrine of eternal torment. And he'll be presenting a presentation that covers the history of health throughout church history, arguing that the that the dominant view has been eternal torment. And then last, but most most certainly least, is myself. And I'm going to be giving a presentation based on the atonement based on that paper that I've got coming out in McMaster. So there's a whole lot going on. It's really going to be great.

Seth 1:00:25

That's great. Well, Chris, thank you for spending your evening with me. I appreciate it very much. I've enjoyed…I've enjoyed it. I don't… I'm saying it wrong. I greatly enjoyed doing this.

Chris 1:00:39

So have I it’s been my pleasure and honor.

Outro 1:00:55

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