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.
Top image: Rogier van der Weyden: The Last Judgment
Purchase One Subscription, Get a Second One Free!
Looking for a good gift for a family member or friend interested in the Christian worldview or apologetics? For a limited time, purchase a year’s subscription for yourself for only $30, and receive a free subscription for a family member or friend!
Simply subscribe below and email us at worldviewbulletin@gmail.com and tell us the email address you subscribed with, and let us know your family member’s/friend’s email address. (If you’re already a subscriber, you can send a gift subscription here.)
“The Worldview Bulletin is a must-have resource for everyone who’s committed to spreading and defending the faith. It’s timely, always relevant, frequently eye-opening, and it never fails to encourage, inspire, and equip.”
— Lee Strobel, New York Times bestselling author of more than forty books and founding director of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics
News
The Christian Peacemaker Who Left a Trail of Trauma—Judy Dabler built a career helping reconcile conflict within ministries including RZIM and Mars Hill. But a new investigation says she abused her authority to protect those with power.
Bertrand Russell: An Atheist Philosopher Christians Should Know
3 Ways to Help Muslims Understand the Cross
Latest Discoveries in the Field of Structural Biology Point to Intelligent Design
Lewis Phenomenon Continues in The Most Reluctant Convert
Two Reasons There Are Variants in Our Copies of the Bible
Top Ten Discoveries Related to Joshua and the Conquest
Christian Florist agrees to pay $5K to end lawsuit over refusal to serve gay wedding
Podcast: Cosmic Chemistry with John Lennox
Video: Is It Possible to Know God? (Reasonable Faith)
(*The views expressed in the articles and media linked to do not necessarily represent the views of the editors of The Worldview Bulletin.)
Book Deals and Resources
Look here for Faithlife’s free eBook of the Month.
Visit here to get the Logos Free Book of the Month. You can download the free version of Logos which will allow you to access the monthly free books. Logos 9 is a great investment, though, and has tons of tools that make Bible study easier and richer. New users can get 50% off of the Logos 9 Fundamentals package, which discounts it to $49.99.
Get a second free book of the month here.
See the Logos Monthly Sale for dozens of good deals, which includes Black Friday deals that change weekly. Until 11/30, get up to 60% off books by Zondervan Academic.
Christianaudio free download for November: The Hidden Life of Prayer
Audiobook: The Abolition of Man and The Great Divorce by C. S. Lewis, $1.99
Audiobook: Short Stories by C. S. Lewis, $1.99
Stream the ESV Bible for free on ESV.org or the ESV Bible app on iOs and Android. Read by award-winning modern hymn writer Kristyn Getty.
Get a free month of Zondervan’s Masterlectures by using the code POFINTEREST at checkout. Masterlectures has hundreds of course videos taught by Christian scholars.
Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science is available free as an open-access book (download the full book using the “Download” button on the right side of the screen, opposite the cover image).
Articles from the Tyndale Bulletin journal are now freely available at their website.
Eerdmans Year-End eBook Sale – 850 Titles up to 80% off!
HarperCollins Bible Dictionary-Revised & Updated, $1.99
Walking Through Twilight: A Wife's Illness—A Philosopher's Lament by Douglas Groothuis, $3.99
Unveiling Grace: The Story of How We Found Our Way out of the Mormon Church by Lynn K. Wilder, $2.99
The Gospel According to Satan: Eight Lies about God that Sound Like the Truth by Jared C. Wilson, $2.99
The World's Greatest Book: The Story of How the Bible Came to Be by Jerry A. Pattengale and Lawrence H. Schiffman, $2.99
Loving God with Your Mind: Essays in Honor of J. P. Moreland ed. by Paul Gould and Richard Brian Davis, $2.99