One charge frequently leveled against annihilationists is that they are simply unable to stomach the idea of eternal, conscious torment. They are driven by their emotions rather than the biblical text.

It is true that some annihilationists find the traditional view of hell to be abhorrent, but that is not their exclusive, or even primary, basis for the position. Addressing the popular view of final punishment, John Stott writes:

I find the concept [of eternal, conscious torment] intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterising their feelings or cracking under the strain. But our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth and must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining it. As a committed Evangelical, my question must be—and is—not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s word say? And in order to answer this question, we need to survey the Biblical material afresh and to open our minds (not just our hearts) to the possibility that Scripture points in the direction of annihilationism, and that “eternal conscious torment” is a tradition which has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture.¹David L. Edwards and John R. W. Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 314–15.

Stott is correct: The question must be, what does the Bible say? The doctrine of eternal, conscious torment has a long pedigree in the church, but tradition must yield to the supreme authority of Scripture. The case for conditionalism is exegetically sound. The final authority for all matters of faith and practice is the Bible, and it is in the pages of the Bible that the final annihilation of the wicked is most clearly seen.

Of course, church tradition must bear appropriate weight in any theological discussion. While it is possible that the church has been wrong, we should be slow to dismiss what the church has long understood to be true—unless there is clear exegetical basis for doing so. This is particularly true if the teaching in question is completely novel. If no one in two thousand years of church history has taught a doctrine, it is almost certainly incorrect. This is not, however, the case with annihilationism.

Early Church Fathers

For the first few centuries of new covenant church history, most who wrote on hell simply employed biblical language. That, in and of itself, does not help us to determine what they believed, because both traditionalists and conditionalists appeal to biblical language in support of their view. There are, however, some instances in which early fathers broke away from biblical language. When they did, they normally wrote in conditionalist terms.

Dr. John Roller completed his doctoral thesis on the doctrine of immortality in the early church. He studied the writings of every Christian writer between 95 and 310 who addressed the subject of immortality. Dr. Roller self-published his findings in The Doctrine of Immortality in the Early Church, and concluded that, of the thirty early Christian writers who spoke to the subject, twenty were definite or probable conditionalists and nine were definite or probable traditionalists. Roller leaves the remaining writer unclassified and concludes,

It is clear … that Conditionalism was the original doctrine of the Early Church (AD 95–177), and that [eternal, conscious torment] was first introduced by Athenagoras of Athens, and popularized by Tertullian of Carthage, after whose time it rapidly became the predominant view, though there continued to be an outspoken minority of Conditionalists.² John H. Roller, The Doctrine of Immortality in the Early Church (self-published), Kindle edition (location 3450).

We will consider some of the actual writings of the early church fathers in another post, but suffice it to say for now that the traditional view does not stretch back as far as is sometimes claimed. If Roller is correct, and traditionalism was introduced by Athenagoras of Athens, then the earliest evidence we have of traditionalism is 177. Every writer prior to that who spoke of immortality did so either in the language of the Bible or in clearly conditional terms.

Historical Church Figures

A number of Christian writers from the fourth to the eighteenth centuries held to conditionalism. Edward Fudge does a sterling job surveying historical and contemporary Christian figures. Among historical figures whom he names as conditionalist are William Tyndale, Isaac Barrow, Henry Constable, Charles Ellicot, William Gladstone, Joseph Parker, J. H. Pettingell, Samuel Richardson, Joseph Nichol Scot, Sir George Stokes, and Richard Francis Weymouth.

The twentieth and 21st centuries saw a number of other annihilationist scholars. Fudge is again helpful, listing as conditionalists Basil Atkinson, Horace Bushnell, S. Parkes Cadman, E. Earle Ellis, R. T. France, Harold Guillebaud, Homer Hailey, Philip Edgecumbe Hughes, Dale Moody, I. Howard Marshall, Emmanuel Pétavel-Olliff, Clark Pinnock, W. Graham Scroggie, and John Wenham. As we saw above, John Stott likewise wrote in conditionalist terms, though traditionalists argue that his embrace of annihilationism was cautious at best and that he never fully embraced the teaching.

Contemporary Annihilationists

A number of contemporary theologians hold to conditional immortality, including Richard Bauckham, Jeff Cook, Roger Foster, John Franke, Edward Fudge, Michael Green, David Instone-Brewer, Gordon Isaac, Douglas Jacoby, Thomas Johnson, Claude Mariottini, Christopher Marshall, David Powys, Jim Spiegel, John Stackhouse, Preston Sprinkle, Richard Swinburne, Anthony Thistleton, Stephen Travis and Nigel Wright.

While a great many traditionalists consider annihilationism to be outside the pale of evangelicalism, there are some who have stated that they consider annihilationism to be an orthodox evangelical alternative. Fudge lists among these Craig Blomberg, Mark Galli, Roger Olson and Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen.

Many Reformed Confessions explicitly teach eternal, conscious torment. This is true of the Westminster Confession of Faith (article 32), the Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (article 32) and the Belgic Confession (article 37). In contrast, the earliest creeds of the church were more generic in their teaching on final judgment and allowed for either traditionalism or annihilationism.

The Nicene Creed affirms belief in “the resurrection of the dead, in the everlasting judgment of souls and bodies, and the kingdom of heaven and in the everlasting life.” The Apostles’ Creed speaks of belief in “the resurrection of the body; and the life everlasting,” and makes mention of “hell” only when it says that Jesus “descended into hell.” The Athanasian Creed affirms that, at Christ’s coming, “all men will rise again with their bodies; and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting; and they that have done evil, into everlasting fire.” None of these early creeds says anything with which annihilationists would disagree.

Sola Scriptura

Of course, the matter will not be settled by appealing to respected Christian thinkers (past or present) or to creeds and confessions. As Alister McGrath says, “Tradition is to be honored where it can be shown to be justified and rejected where it cannot.”³ Alister E. McGrath, Doing Theology for the People of God: Studies in Honor of J. I. Packer (Leicester: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 160.We ought to be careful of too quickly casting aside long-standing traditions of the church, but if we are convinced from Scripture that those traditions are not grounded in biblical truth, our ultimate allegiance must be to the Bible.

The appeal, then, is to exegesis. We must look at specific texts of Scripture to see what they tell us about the nature of final punishment. If we are convinced that those texts agree with the popular doctrine of hell, we must affirm it with all our being. If we are convinced to the contrary, we must stand on Scripture alone.