And the Atheist Shall Lie Down with the Annihilationist: Part 1
By Clay Jones
Many Christians are replacing the traditional view of hell—that the rebellious will endure eternal suffering—with annihilation, the view that at the judgment the fires of God will consume rebels and then their consciousnesses will cease to exist. But there are reasons why eternal suffering might better serve the Lord’s purposes than annihilation. In this two-article series, I’m going to focus on one of those reasons: annihilation doesn’t deter many rebels from continuing their rebellion, especially in comparison with the deterrence of eternal suffering.
In Mark 9:42-43, 47-48, Jesus warned: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the sea. If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off. It is better for you to enter life maimed than with two hands to go into hell, where the fire never goes out.… And if your eye causes you to sin, tear it out. It is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than with two eyes to be thrown into hell, ‘where their worm does not die and the fire is not quenched.’” In this passage and similar passages, Jesus unambiguously employs hell as a deterrence or threat to the rebellious.
Annihilationists (they also refer to themselves as “conditionalists”) see the deterrence of annihilation as twofold. First, annihilationists believe that the rebel will be deterred by the fact that they will suffer as they are being annihilated. As annihilationist Edward Fudge put it, “There is no difficulty in integrating banishment, conscious suffering and destruction into a simplified whole. In that case, the sinner’s punishment or punitive consequences of wrong-doing, includes and incorporates banishment, destruction, and whatever sort, degree, and duration of conscious suffering God might see fit to impose in the process.”[1]
Second, annihilationists hold that after the rebel suffers the “potentially excruciating destruction in the fiery pit,” they will cease to exist.[2] Annihilationists argue that the cessation of one’s existence is a deterrent in and of itself.
In this first part, I will argue that annihilation—the cessation of existence—isn’t for many a sufficient deterrent by itself, especially as compared with eternal suffering. In the second part, I will argue that neither is a limited or “terminal” amount of conscious suffering that one will endure, prior to the cessation of one’s existence, much of a deterrent, especially as compared to eternal suffering.
As I wrote in my book Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It, I do agree that the end of one’s existence, the cessation of one’s consciousness, is, all by itself, a fearful prospect. After all, the end of one’s existence is the end of all one knows and has and loves. But to many, the prospect of annihilation isn’t very disturbing, especially in comparison to eternal suffering.
What follows are examples of non-Christian groups whose worldview anticipates their ultimate annihilation. Their members, therefore, won’t consider the Christian’s threat of annihilation to be a compelling reason to repent.
Theravada Buddhists Desire Annihilation
Although many Buddhists, such as Mahayana Buddhists, believe that in nirvana one’s consciousness in some form continues, in Buddhism’s oldest-existing and most conservative school, Theravada Buddhism, nirvana is the actual cessation of anything that is you. In Theravada Buddhism, in no sense does a person go on as a conscious being. Theravada Buddhists believe that those who achieve nirvana will ultimately be extinguished or annihilated. This is called “nirvana without remainder.”[3] So the goal then for tens of millions of Buddhists is to be annihilated.
The Sadducees Expected Annihilation
The Sadducees expected annihilation. Mark 12:18 tells us, “And Sadducees came to him, who say that there is no resurrection.” Similarly, Acts 23:8 reads, “The Sadducees say that there is no resurrection, and that there are neither angels nor spirits.” Additionally, Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews 18.1.4 reads, “But the doctrine of the Sadducees is this; that souls die with the bodies.” Further, Josephus in The Jewish War, 2.8.14, writes of the Sadducees, “They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades.” So, as opposed to living in desperate fear of annihilation, the Sadducees were satisfied with annihilation and rejected Jesus’s offer of eternal life.[4]
Naturalists Expect Annihilation
But there’s much more. Naturalists too hope for annihilation. Naturalism is the belief that nature is all there is; in other words, there is no God, no judgment, no afterlife, and so on. We live in an increasingly naturalistic world. Naturalists expect the cessation of their consciousnesses. Therefore, the Christian annihilationists’ threat of annihilation for naturalists who don’t repent isn’t compelling because the cessation of their consciousnesses is precisely their expectation.
As atheist Sam Harris told an audience, “The good news of atheism, the gospel of atheism, is essentially nothing, that nothing happens after death. There’s nothing to worry about, there’s nothing to fear, when after you die, you are returned to that nothingness that you were before you were born.”[5]
Charles Darwin certainly expected that when he died his consciousness would cease. But about the prospect of eternal suffering, Darwin wrote: “I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, my Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished. And this is a damnable doctrine.”[6] In other words, Darwin may not have liked the prospect of his annihilation, but he was horrified by the prospect of eternal suffering.
Similarly, New Testament professor Bart Ehrman, in answer to someone who asked whether death was “terrifying” and how to “get over” that fear, replied on his Facebook page, “Now my view is that death is the end of the story. We didn’t exist with consciousness before we were born. And we won’t exist with consciousness after we die.” Thus, continued Ehrman, the thought of death “does not greatly bother me anymore. It’s the reality of life.” So in that quote, Ehrman admits that the thought of his cessation of consciousness “does not greatly bother” him.[7]
But Ehrman in his book God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer, wrote that he “still wondered, deep down inside… Will I burn in hell forever?” He said, “The fear gripped me for years and there are still moments when I wake up at night in a cold sweat.”[8] Does the prospect of annihilation bother Ehrman? He said “not greatly” so. But he’s terrified at the prospect of eternal suffering.
New York University philosopher Thomas Nagel wrote, “If one thinks about it logically, it seems as though death should be something to be afraid of only if we will survive it, and perhaps undergo some terrifying transformation.”[9] Indeed, eternal suffering would be a terrifying transformation.
Mark Twain, who mocked Christianity, put the best spin on the Epicurean belief that all are going to be annihilated:
Annihilation has no terrors for me, because I have already tried it before I was born—a hundred million years—and I have suffered more in an hour, in this life, than I remember to have suffered in the whole hundred million years put together. There was a peace, a serenity, an absence of all sense of responsibility, an absence of worry, an absence of care, grief, perplexity; and the presence of a deep content and unbroken satisfaction in that hundred million years of holiday which I look back upon with a tender longing and with a grateful desire to resume, when the opportunity comes.[10]
So Twain considered annihilation to be a never-ending holiday! But here’s what Twain thought of Christianity. Twain, in a letter to his wife, wrote that “the Deity that I want to keep out of the reach of, is the caricature of him which one finds in the Bible. We (that one and I) could never respect each other, never get along together. I have met his superior a hundred times—In fact I amount to that myself.”[11]
Notice Twain says, “we could never get along.” Although I’m not going to develop this point here, I argue that the occupants of eternal suffering will be eternally unrepentant.[12] Even annihilationist John Stott wrote that perhaps “‘eternal conscious torment’ is compatible with the biblical revelation of divine justice, [if] the impenitence of the lost also continues throughout eternity.”[13] I agree.
So this makes sense, right? The cessation of consciousness has been, and is, what millions upon millions of people’s worldview anticipates. They expect annihilation. So the annihilationist’s threat to naturalists that if they don’t repent then they will be annihilated isn’t, of itself, much of a threat or deterrence to those who rebel against God. Marx, Mao, Pol Pot, and Stalin all anticipated their annihilation. The threat of eternal suffering is a much better deterrence to rebellion and is more likely to cause rebels to call out to Jesus to be saved than is the threat of annihilation.
As I mentioned, the cessation of existence is only one of the two deterrents that terminal annihilationists tout. The other deterrent is that the lost will suffer a terminal amount of torment prior to their annihilation, and my next article will examine that.
Notes
[1] Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011), 147.
[2] Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, 122.
[3] Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University, 2014), 589-590. I’m indebted to personal correspondence with Donald S. Lopez, Jr., for explaining this to me and for providing me with this article. Lopez is also the author of “Nirvana” for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
[4] One annihilationist objected that the Sadducees did believe in an afterlife and referred the reader to an article written by liberal New Testament scholar (who sought the “historical Jesus”) Thomas W. Manson, “Sadducee and Pharisee—the Origin and Significance of the Names,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 22:1 (1938), 154. In that article Manson wrote that “The Sadducean belief in Sheol is transformed, and in some measure misrepresented by Josephus (B.J, ii, 165; Ant., xviii, 16).” Manson is typical of liberal scholars who believe they can see behind what is actually penned to get to what was “historical.” For Manson to say that Josephus (37-c 100), who is by far the most reliable source we have of Jewish history near the time of Jesus, had “misrepresented” what the Sadducees in the first century believed is to be expected of liberal NT scholarship. Manson is accusing Josephus either of being dishonest or of knowing less than Manson does. Either way, how would Manson know that 1800 years later? Josephus wasn’t polemical when he wrote that. From all we can tell, Josephus was just reporting matter-of-fact observations about a group of people who were alive in his own lifetime. Furthermore, what Josephus wrote is consistent with the biblical narrative.
[5] Sam Harris, “Sam Harris: On Death,” Big Think, June 2, 2011 (accessed June 28, 2018).
[6] Christoph Marty, “Darwin on a Godless Creation: ‘It’s like confessing to a murder,’” Scientific American, February 12, 2009, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/charles-darwin-confessions/, accessed February 3, 2021.
[7] Bart D. Ehrman, “Bart D. Ehrman author page,” Facebook, September 18, 2016. https://www.facebook.com/AuthorBartEhrman/posts/1210103929061399 (accessed June 29, 2018).
[8] Bart D. Ehrman, God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 127.
[9] Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 94.
[10] Mark Twain, Autobiography of Mark Twain, vol. 2, eds., Benjamin Griffin and Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: University of California, 2013), 69.
[11] Mark Twain’s letter to his wife, Olivia Clemens, 7/17/1889.
[12] I developed that the lost are eternally unrepentant in my book Why Does God Allow Evil?: Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions.
[13] David L. Edwards and John Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1988), 319.
— Clay Jones is a visiting scholar at Talbot School of Theology and the chairman of the board of Ratio Christi. He has authored Why Does God Allow Evil? Compelling Answers for Life’s Toughest Questions and Immortal: How the Fear of Death Drives Us and What We Can Do About It. His website is clayjones.net.
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Clay thank you for your article on this difficult topic of hell. I have to disagree with your central thesis though. The idea that many people who would otherwise accept Christianity will not because they learn that the Bible supports annihilationism, is not what I have seen at all. I've been a firsthand witness to the opposite on many occasions now. My experience started in my early twenties when I saw a good friend deconstruct and leave the faith, at least in part, because he believed the Bible taught eternal conscious torment. Now that I am an author and have actively taken up the task of promoting annihilationism, I have read and heard the firsthand testimonies of many people now who have left the faith, stayed away from the faith, or suffered great damage to their experience of harmony and togetherness with God because they believed the eternal conscious torment view of hell. So the eternal conscious torment concept many times drives people away from God and not towards him. In the process of promoting my book on the topic of annihilationism I have had opportunity to sort through literally thousands of comments from real people which have been posted under YouTube videos on the topic of hell and in other places on the internet where the topic is discussed. What I saw was dozens of comments from people who left the faith, stayed away from the faith, or suffered severe damage to their relationships with the Lord because of the eternal conscious torment view. On the other hand, I found two comments that conform to thesis of your article. One guy said that he would leave the Christian faith if he came to believe that annihilationism were true instead of eternal conscious torment. The other guy said that eternal conscious torment scared him into being a Christian, but also caused his son to deconstruct and leave the Christian faith. What I observed is quite typical. Being threatened with endless torment does little to nothing to help people accept Christianity. Even the example you gave of Charles Darwin in your article illustrates what I'm saying. Your quote of him shows him saying that the eternal conscious torment view of hell is a reason to reject Christianity. This is regardless of whether or not endless torment frightened him. He cited it as a reason not to be a Christian. And this is not unique to Darwin. In fact, surveys of modern people may show the same thing. Dan Paterson, in his YouTube video entitled, "THE END OF EVIL? A Response to Gavin Ortlund on Hell", at the 1:00:11 timestamp mark in the video, cites surveys that have been done repeatedly in Australia showing that eternal conscious torment is one of the most common reasons that people there reject Christianity. This is in perfect alignment with the scripture because the scripture describes that the kindness of God leads to repentance and salvation:
[Romans 2:4-5 NASB20] 4 Or do you think lightly of the riches of His kindness and restraint and patience, not knowing that the kindness of God leads you to repentance? 5 But because of your stubbornness and unrepentant heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God,
Eternal conscious torment may be causing people to turn away from Christianity because it obscures people's view of God's kindness. If, on the other hand, we follow Jesus's instructions on what it is we are to fear, then maybe God's kindness is not obscured and people get saved:
[Matthew 10:28 NASB20] 28 "And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but are unable to kill the soul; but rather fear Him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.
This is precisely now what I have seen, over and over again. I've met many people who have outright rejected Christianity because of the eternal conscious torment view of hell, and then when they come to believe what Jesus says above in Matthew 10, they become Christians because they can, only at that point, clearly see the kindness of God. But maybe Jesus is contradicting himself in the Mark 9 passage you quoted, against the passage in Matthew 10 that I show above? It would seem so until we go and look at the Isaiah 66 passage that Jesus is quoting from in Mark 9, "where the worm does not die in the fire is not quenched":
[Isaiah 66:24 NASB20] 24 "Then they will go out and look At the corpses of the people Who have rebelled against Me. For their worm will not die And their fire will not be extinguished; And they will be an abhorrence to all mankind."
In Mark 9, Jesus is pointing to a passage which describes dead bodies, not endlessly tormented souls. And the word "extinguished", as the New American Standard Bible translates it above, is accurate. The Hebrew word there is used several times in the Old Testament in contexts where it cannot describe an endlessly burning fire. For example, the word is used to describe the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians when they burned Jerusalem. Jerusalem is still not on fire. The word just means extinguished, as in not put out by humans with a fire hose. It doesn't describe endless burning. The language of the worms also finds a revealing context in the Old Testament. Similar language is used to describe birds which feed on dead bodies. The birds, according to the Old Testament, will not be frightened away. This language does not describe birds which will be feeding for eternity. It just describes birds whose eating will not be interrupted as long as it naturally lasts. To see all of the more detailed evidence supporting what I'm saying here about Isaiah 66, with all of its scriptural references and quotations, please see this article, https://rethinkinghell.com/2012/07/17/their-worm-does-not-die-annihilation-and-mark-948/ and pages 207 to 209 of the free pdf download of my book "Hell is Made Holy" which you can get at https://go.davidaaronbeaty.com/hellbook . My book and the rethinking hell website may also be useful for you if you generally want to understand and directly refute the strongest arguments in favor of the annihilationism view, such as the several that I have written about here. These materials and others like the books "Rethinking hell" and "The fire that consumes" are the ones that you would need to refute if you want to slow the growing exodus from the eternal conscious torment view of hell. These contain the arguments which are convincing people. Maybe at some point you will be convinced. I can assure you that there is a very strong scripturally supported annihilationist argument against every argument that can be made in favor of eternal conscious torment. Thanks for your service to the Lord and God bless you.