Hell

Before anybody argues, sort the vocabulary, because the argument is unmanageable until this is done. The English word hell has been used to render at least four distinct terms: the Hebrew sheol, which occurs somewhere around sixty-five times in the Old Testament; the Greek hades, which occurs ten times in the New; gehenna, which occurs twelve times; and a verb formed from Tartarus, which occurs once. (The BSB keeps three of the four apart on the page, printing Sheol and Hades as names and hell for gehenna and tartaroo, which is better than older versions but still leaves two words under one English one.) They are not synonyms, they do not all mean the same kind of thing, and a doctrine built by adding together every verse in which an English Bible prints the word hell is a doctrine built partly out of translation history.

Sheol and hades first. Lesson 1 worked sheol: the realm of the dead in the Old Testament, the destination of righteous and wicked alike in the earlier texts, rendered in older English versions as the grave, hell and the pit in different verses. The Septuagint translates it with hades, which is why Peter can quote Psalm 16:10 the way he does at Acts 2:27. In the New Testament hades appears at Matthew 11:23 and 16:18, Luke 10:15 and 16:23, Acts 2:27 and 2:31, and Revelation 1:18, 6:8, 20:13 and 20:14. In Luke 16:23 it is plainly a place of torment for the rich man. But notice Revelation 20:13-14: Death and Hades give up the dead who were in them, and then Death and Hades are themselves thrown into the lake of fire. Whatever hades is, it is not the final state on anybody's reading. It is the interim, which is what lesson 1 was about.

Gehenna is the word Jesus uses, and it is a place name. Ge-hinnom is the ravine running south and west of the old city of Jerusalem, and what happened there is on the record: 2 Kings 23:10 and Jeremiah 7:31 say children were sacrificed there in the fire, and Jeremiah says God never commanded it and it did not even enter his mind. Josiah desecrated the site. Jeremiah 7:32 and 19:6 say God will rename it the Valley of Slaughter, and that they will bury the dead there until there is no more room. The word occurs twelve times in the New Testament, eleven of them on the lips of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels and once at James 3:6. One thing commonly said about it should be dropped from sermons: the claim that Gehenna was the municipal rubbish dump of first-century Jerusalem, kept perpetually burning, is traceable to the medieval commentator David Kimhi around the year 1200, and there is no archaeological or literary evidence for it from antiquity. Since this is a correction that contradicts almost every commentary a student will own, it should carry its source, and the standard one is Lloyd R. Bailey, 'Gehenna: The Topography of Hell', in The Biblical Archaeologist 49/3 (1986), pages 187 to 191. The background Jesus's hearers actually had is the one Jeremiah gave them, which is worse and more useful.

Two more. The verb tartaroo occurs once, at 2 Peter 2:4, where God did not spare the angels when they sinned but cast them deep into hell, placing them in chains of darkness to be held for judgment (the BSB footnote gives the Greek as 'cast them into Tartarus'). The word is borrowed from the Tartarus of Greek myth, its use here parallels the language of 1 Enoch, and its subject is angels rather than human beings. And the lake of fire belongs to Revelation alone, at 19:20, 20:10, 20:14, 20:15 and 21:8. Twice, at 20:14 and 21:8, it is called the second death, a phrase every position in this lesson claims and reads differently. Two details are worth holding: in 20:10 the ones tormented day and night forever and ever are the devil, the beast and the false prophet; in 20:14 what goes into it first is Death and Hades, which are not persons at all.

Then aionios, the adjective that carries the weight of Matthew 25:46 and that the whole argument circles. It is built from aion, an age, and the honest report on it has two halves that both have to be given. The first half: it is not a weak word. It is applied to God himself at Romans 16:26, to the Spirit at Hebrews 9:14, and to the life of the redeemed constantly (the BSB prints 'eternal' in all of these); in Matthew 25:46 one adjective stands over both nouns in one sentence, and any reading that gives it a lesser force for punishment than for life in that sentence owes an argument rather than an assertion. The second half: it does not by itself settle duration, because it can attach to a result rather than a process. Hebrews 9:12 speaks of eternal redemption, which is not a redemption that goes on being transacted, and Hebrews 6:2 of eternal judgment. Jude 7, where Sodom and Gomorrah are set out as an example, is cited constantly in this argument and is not a settled datum: the participle is present tense, so some read the eternal fire as the historical burning of the cities, which is not alight now, and others read it as the eschatological punishment its people are said to be undergoing still. The BSB prints the second reading, since its wording is 'an example of those who sustain the punishment of eternal fire', and it puts the people rather than the cities in the sentence; the first reading is at full strength in the Greek, where the grammatical subject of the participle is the cities themselves, and a reader should know the English has chosen. Note which reading each position needs and do not let anyone hand you either one as though it were the plain sense. Add one more datum, which is genuinely in the evidence and is argued in both directions: Greek has another adjective, aidios, which unambiguously means everlasting, and the New Testament uses it of God's power at Romans 1:20 and of the chains on the fallen angels at Jude 6 (both of which the BSB prints as 'eternal', just as it prints aionios), and never of the punishment of human beings. Those who make something of that say the choice of the less determinate word was not an accident. Those who do not say that an argument from a word an author did not choose is a weak kind of argument, and that aionios is applied to God himself in any case. All of this is common property. Every position below uses some of it, and no position wins on the lexicon alone.

The position, as its defenders state it, is that those who finally refuse God are raised, judged and consigned to a punishment which is conscious, just, and without end, in which the creature continues to exist and continues to be excluded from the life of God. Its defenders insist on two qualifications that critics usually drop. First, the essence of the punishment is separation from God rather than a mechanism of physical torture, which is why 2 Thessalonians 1:9 defines it, in the BSB's words, as the penalty of eternal destruction, 'separated from the presence of the Lord and the glory of His might', and why the tradition has usually distinguished the pain of loss from the pain of sense, poena damni from poena sensus, and given the first priority. The Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it that way at 1035, calling the chief punishment of hell eternal separation from God, and Calvin, in the third book of the Institutes, treats the fire and the worm and the darkness as metaphors for a horror the images cannot reach rather than as a description of furniture. Anyone who presents the doctrine as a chamber of physical torments is presenting the folk version and not the confessional one. Second, the punishment admits of degrees: Luke 12:47-48 gives different servants different beatings, Matthew 11:21-24 says it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon than for Chorazin, and the tradition has always taught that judgement is proportioned.

Its texts. Matthew 25:46, where one adjective governs punishment and life in a single clause, and where reversing the force of the adjective in one half of the sentence requires justification. Mark 9:43-48, where Jesus three times prefers maiming to being thrown into hell and closes by quoting Isaiah 66:24, 'where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched'. (The BSB prints that refrain only at verse 48; its footnotes note that the Byzantine text and the Textus Receptus repeat it at verses 44 and 46, which is why older versions show it three times.) Revelation 14:9-11, where the smoke of their torment rises forever and ever and day and night there is no rest. Revelation 20:10, where the devil, the beast and the false prophet will be tormented day and night forever and ever. Luke 16:19-31, where the rich man is conscious, in anguish, able to speak and to remember, and where 16:26 says a great chasm has been fixed so that none may cross. Matthew 8:12 and 22:13 and 25:30, with the outer darkness and the weeping and gnashing of teeth. Jude 13, where blackest darkness has been reserved forever. And Matthew 26:24, that it would have been better for that man if he had not been born.

Its theological arguments are three and they should be distinguished, because they are independent and a reader may find one persuasive and not another. The first is the gravity of sin measured by the one offended, argued classically by Anselm in Cur Deus Homo: an offence against an infinite God is not a finite matter and cannot be discharged by a finite penalty. The second is the persistence of the rebellion: the lost do not repent, so the state that justifies the punishment is renewed rather than exhausted, which is why the punishment does not become disproportionate over time. To that the tradition adds a claim about the will after death, worked out by Aquinas: a separated soul, like an angel, is fixed in what it has chosen, because the conditions under which a choice can still be revised belong to embodied life in time. If that is right, the impenitence is not a condition that might wear off, and the question of a further chance does not arise. The third is the argument from what the creature has chosen, put most memorably by C. S. Lewis in The Problem of Pain, that the doors of hell are locked on the inside, and dramatised in The Great Divorce; on this account God does not force anybody into glory and hell is the honouring of a refusal. Lewis's version is widely adopted by modern defenders and it is not the same argument as Anselm's, which matters when someone attacks one of them and announces that the doctrine has fallen.

Its history is the plainest thing about it. It is the position of the overwhelming majority of the Christian tradition, East and West, from the patristic period to the present. Augustine argues it at length in City of God book 21, and the fact that he spends so much of that book answering people he calls the merciful ones, who expected the punishment to end, is itself evidence that the alternative existed and that he thought it needed refuting. Aquinas teaches it. The Athanasian Creed says that those who have done evil go into everlasting fire. The Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 speaks of perpetual punishment with the devil. Westminster Confession 33.2 speaks of everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church at 1035 speaks of eternal fire. Every major communion's official teaching, if it has one, is this position. Its modern defenders argue it at book length as well: J. I. Packer wrote in its defence, Robert Peterson made the case in Hell on Trial in 1995, and the collection Hell Under Fire, edited by Christopher Morgan and Peterson in 2004, gathers the exegetical, historical and theological arguments in one volume. It remains the default of most Catholic and Orthodox dogmatic manuals currently in print.

Two further observations belong to this position and are usually missed. The first is that its Eastern form is stated in a different idiom from its Western one. Many Orthodox writers describe the final state not as a place of punishment prepared alongside heaven but as the one uncreated glory of God encountered by all, received as light by those who have been made able to receive it and experienced as fire by those who have not, so that the same love is heaven and hell according to the state of the person. That is still an unending conscious state and it is not the juridical picture most Western readers have in mind. The second is missional: the position's defenders regard it as the reason the apostles ran, and a great deal of the church's mission, hospital-building and prison work has come out of people who held it. Neither observation settles anything. Both belong in a fair statement of what the position is.

Its hardest question is proportionality, and it should be stated as sharply as its critics state it: how does a finite life, however wicked, incur a punishment without end? The answers given above are real answers and each is contested. Anselm's measure has been pressed on the ground that it proves too much, since on the same logic every sin would incur the same infinite penalty, which the tradition itself denies by teaching degrees. The persistence argument has been pressed on the ground that a creature who goes on sinning forever because he cannot do otherwise is not obviously the kind of agent whose acts deserve fresh punishment. And Lewis's argument has been pressed on the ground that it turns hell into something God does not will, which sits awkwardly beside the New Testament's language of God acting in judgement. Its defenders press a moral argument in the other direction, and it is not a rhetorical one: a justice which finally extinguishes the unrepentant leaves the worst things human beings have done to each other without a reckoning that answers to them, and they hold that only an unending exclusion is proportionate to what was actually done to the victims.

Its named weakness, then, stated plainly. The position has to carry the destruction vocabulary of the New Testament and give an account of why destroy, perish, death and end mean, in these particular texts, a continued existence. Its defenders do give that account: destruction in scripture regularly means ruin rather than cessation, as a wineskin is ruined without ceasing to exist at Matthew 9:17 (the Greek verb is apollymi, the root behind destroy and perish elsewhere), and Revelation 17:8 and 17:11 use the same root of the beast who goes to destruction and is nevertheless there. Note also what the 2 Thessalonians 1:9 wording does in the BSB: 'separated from the presence of the Lord' reads the Greek preposition apo as away from, which is the first position's reading and a natural one. The preposition can also mean from, in the sense of issuing from, and conditionalists argue that the destruction comes from the presence and glory of the Lord, the way Acts 3:20 speaks of times of refreshing that 'may come from the presence of the Lord'. The BSB's English closes a question the Greek leaves open. That is a fair answer and it is an answer rather than a plain reading, which is the concession the position has to make. A second and quieter weakness is internal: its defenders do not agree among themselves whether the torment is imposed by God's active judgement or consists in the creature's own persistence in refusing him, and those are two rather different doctrines flying one flag.

The position, as its defenders state it, begins with anthropology rather than with hell, which is why they prefer the name conditional immortality. Immortality is not a property human beings possess; it is a gift God gives in Christ. The lost are therefore raised, judged justly, and then destroyed, and the destruction is real, final and irreversible. Its defenders insist on two qualifications that critics usually drop. First, this is not a denial of hell or of judgement; the judgement is real, it is God's act and not a natural fading, and most of its defenders hold that it includes conscious punishment proportioned to guilt before the end comes. Second, the result is eternal in the fullest sense: what is lost is lost forever, which is why they hold that Matthew 25:46 is satisfied, since a punishment whose outcome is irreversible is an eternal punishment. There is real variety inside the position about how long the conscious punishment lasts before the end, from a period proportioned to guilt to something much briefer, and many of its defenders dislike the label annihilationism on the ground that it names only the last moment of a doctrine whose substance is about what kind of creature a human being is.

Its texts. Genesis 3:22-24, where the man is barred from the tree of life lest he eat and live forever, which treats unending life as something withheld rather than possessed. 1 Timothy 6:16, that He alone is immortal. 2 Timothy 1:10, that Christ has abolished death and illuminated the way to life and immortality through the gospel (the King James has 'brought life and immortality to light'). 1 Corinthians 15:53, that the perishable must be clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality. Then the vocabulary of the end: Matthew 7:13, the broad way that leads to destruction; Matthew 10:28, fear the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell, which names the soul specifically; John 3:16, that everyone who believes in him shall not perish; Romans 6:23, the wages of sin is death; Philippians 3:19, whose end is destruction; 2 Thessalonians 1:9, the penalty of eternal destruction, which conditionalists read as destruction that comes from the presence of the Lord rather than the BSB's 'separated from' it; 2 Peter 2:6, where Sodom and Gomorrah are turned to ashes and made an example; Jude 7, where on their reading the eternal fire of Sodom has already gone out (against the BSB's wording, 'those who sustain the punishment of eternal fire', which they say imports the people into a sentence about the cities); and Malachi 4:1-3, where the arrogant and evildoers are stubble left with neither root nor branch, and are ashes under the soles of the feet of the righteous. The Psalms are pressed into the same column: Psalm 1:4-6, where the wicked are chaff driven off by the wind and their way perishes, Psalm 37:20, where they vanish like smoke, and Psalm 37:10, where the wicked will be no more and though you look for them they will not be found. Conditionalists argue that this is the Old Testament's settled picture of the end of the wicked, and that a reader who finds unending conscious existence in the New Testament has to explain where it came from.

Its handling of the torment texts is where the work is done and it should be given in full. Revelation 14:11, the smoke of their torment going up forever and ever, is drawn from Isaiah 34:10, where the smoke of Edom's burning is said to go up forever and Edom is not smoking today; the image in its own Old Testament source describes a permanent ruin rather than a permanent burning. Revelation 20:10 names the devil, the beast and the false prophet, and on many readings two of those three are institutions rather than persons, so the verse is not straightforwardly about human beings. The lake of fire is twice called the second death, and conditionalists ask what a death is if not an ending. Mark 9:48 quotes Isaiah 66:24, and in Isaiah, as the BSB renders it, what the worm and the fire are consuming are the corpses of the men who rebelled, which do not feel. And on Matthew 25:46, they argue that aionios attaches to the result in Hebrews 9:12, Hebrews 6:2 and Hebrews 5:9, so that eternal punishment is a punishment whose effect is eternal, and the parallel with eternal life is preserved rather than broken, because both outcomes are permanent.

Its history includes ancient defenders, which is a fact about the past and not an argument. Arnobius of Sicca, writing around the year 300, argued in Against the Nations that souls are not immortal by nature and that the wicked are finally destroyed. Claims are also made for Irenaeus on the basis of Against Heresies 2.34, where he argues that continuance is God's gift, and that claim is contested by patristic scholars and should be reported as contested. The position was a minority through the medieval and Reformation centuries, was held by some Socinians and English radicals, and revived seriously in the nineteenth century with Edward White's Life in Christ in 1846 and the work of Henry Constable. In the twentieth century it was argued by Basil Atkinson, by Philip Edgcumbe Hughes in The True Image in 1989, by John Wenham, and above all by Edward Fudge in The Fire That Consumes in 1982; John Stott stated a tentative preference for it in print in 1988, in his published dialogue with David Edwards, and the controversy that followed was about who had said it as much as about what was said. Clark Pinnock argued for it in print in 1987, and the Church of England's Doctrine Commission report The Mystery of Salvation in 1995 described hell in terms of total non-being.

One further observation belongs here, because it parallels what was said of the previous position. Conditionalists hold that their account raises rather than lowers the stakes of the gospel, since on their reading what is offered is life itself and not a change of address for an existence nobody could lose in any case; and they take the resurrection of the just to be the decisive gift rather than one item in a sequence. Their missionary record is real as well: Edward White and the nineteenth-century conditionalists were evangelists. One more fact about the modern literature belongs in an honest account of it, because a student will meet it and should not be ambushed by it. A substantial part of the twentieth-century case was made from inside the Seventh-day Adventist tradition, which has held conditional immortality as a denominational doctrine, and Le Roy Froom's two-volume The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, published in 1965 and 1966, is the largest historical survey the position has produced. Evangelical conditionalists such as Fudge and Wenham argued independently of that tradition and are often at pains to say so, and critics have sometimes used the association as an argument. It is a fact about where the books came from and it is not an argument either way.

Its hardest question is whether it makes the stakes smaller than the New Testament makes them, since a punishment that ends in extinction may look like a lighter thing than what the Gospels are warning about. Its answer is that the permanent loss of everything, of God, of existence, of every good that was ever offered, is not a light thing, and that the New Testament calls it death and destruction because death and destruction are what it is. It also argues the reverse case against its opponents: that a doctrine of unending torment, more than any other, has driven people away from the faith and has been used to frighten rather than to convert. That argument is made and it should be noted that it is an argument about effects rather than about texts.

Its named weakness, stated plainly. Revelation 20:10 says tormented day and night forever and ever, and the reply that this is symbolic is available, is legitimate in the most symbolic book of the canon, and is also convenient, since the same reader takes the lake of fire seriously enough for it to destroy. Matthew 25:46 remains genuinely awkward, because the most natural reading of one adjective over two parallel nouns is that it carries the same force in both halves, and the appeal to the result rather than the process has to be argued in this verse and not merely shown to be possible elsewhere. A third weakness, pressed from within evangelicalism, is that the position's strongest theological argument, that the immortal soul is a Platonic import, is a claim about the history of ideas doing work in an exegetical debate, and module 4 will have shown you how contested that claim is.

The position, as its defenders state it, is that God's saving purpose in Christ finally succeeds with every human being, so that after whatever judgement is required, all are reconciled. Three things it is not, and the confusions are constant. It is not the pluralism of lesson 3: its defenders hold that salvation is through Christ alone and that no one is saved apart from him. It is not the denial of hell: most versions hold that hell is real, severe and terrible, and differ from the other two positions about whether it is final rather than about whether it happens. And it comes in two strengths that should never be run together: the dogmatic form, which asserts that all will be saved, and the hopeful form, which holds that a Christian may not assert it but may pray and hope for it, argued from within Catholicism by Hans Urs von Balthasar in Dare We Hope That All Men Be Saved? in 1986.

Its texts. Romans 5:18, that just as one trespass brought condemnation for all men, so also one act of righteousness brought justification and life for all men, with the same word for all in both halves. Romans 11:32, that God has consigned everyone to disobedience so that He may have mercy on everyone. 1 Corinthians 15:22, that as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive, and 15:28, that God may be all in all. Colossians 1:19-20, that God was pleased through Christ to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross. Ephesians 1:10, the plan to bring all things in heaven and on earth together in Christ. Philippians 2:10-11, that every knee should bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, read alongside 1 Corinthians 12:3, which says no one can say Jesus is Lord except by the Holy Spirit. 1 Timothy 2:4, that God wants everyone to be saved, and 4:10, that he is the Savior of everyone, and especially of those who believe. 1 John 2:2, that he himself is the atoning sacrifice (hilasmos, often translated propitiation) for the sins of the whole world. And within Revelation itself, 21:24-26, where the nations walk by the city's light and the kings of the earth bring their glory into it, 22:2, where the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations, and 22:17, where the invitation is still open on the last page.

Its handling of the judgement texts should be given in full, because it is where the position is usually caricatured. It does not deny that Matthew 25:46 speaks of punishment, and the BSB's 'eternal punishment' is the usual English rendering of it; it argues that kolasis is the Greek word for corrective punishment, distinguished in classical usage from timoria, which is retributive, and that the punishment described is therefore purgative and has an end. It should be said at once that this lexical distinction is contested, because the two words are not consistently distinguished in Hellenistic Greek, and defenders of the position concede the point and rest more weight elsewhere. On aionios they argue the same move the conditionalists make in the opposite direction, that the adjective is age-related rather than a simple quantity of time. The chasm of Luke 16:26 stands inside a parable whose point is the brothers who are still alive. And they press the structural argument that Revelation itself puts the lake of fire in chapter 20 and open gates, an invitation and healing for the nations in chapters 21 and 22, and never explains how those go together.

Its theological arguments are two. The first is a simple syllogism, most carefully set out by Thomas Talbott: God desires all to be saved, God is able to accomplish what he desires, therefore all are saved; and Talbott argues that the two standard escapes each deny something a tradition holds dear, since the Calvinist escape denies the first premise and the Arminian escape denies the second. The second is about freedom and answers the objection that eternal refusal must be permitted: a fully informed creature, seeing God as he is, cannot coherently prefer his own misery, so an unending rejection is not the exercise of freedom but its failure, and to be finally set free is to choose him. Its history includes ancient defenders, which is again a fact about the past. Origen taught a restoration of all things, apokatastasis, and the word comes into the discussion from Acts 3:21. Gregory of Nyssa argued it in On the Soul and the Resurrection, in the Catechetical Oration and in his treatise on 1 Corinthians 15:28, and Gregory is a canonised father, a defender of Nicaea and one of the Cappadocians, whom nobody proposes to remove from the tradition. Diodore of Tarsus held a version of it, Clement of Alexandria is claimed for it, and in the Syriac East Isaac of Nineveh in the seventh century wrote of a mercy reaching into Gehenna. Ilaria Ramelli's large historical study The Christian Doctrine of Apokatastasis, published in 2013, argues the view was far more widespread than is usually said, and other patristic scholars think she has overstated how many of her witnesses held it. Modern defenders include George MacDonald, Thomas Talbott in The Inescapable Love of God in 1999, Robin Parry writing as Gregory MacDonald in The Evangelical Universalist in 2006, and David Bentley Hart in That All Shall Be Saved in 2019; Karl Barth's doctrine of election is read by many as tending this way, and Barth deliberately refused to assert it.

One further observation belongs here, because it parallels what was said of the other two positions. Universalists hold that theirs is the reading which takes the universal texts at their ordinary strength instead of restricting them, and they press that Colossians 1:20 makes the blood of the cross the means by which all things are reconciled, so that on their account the cross is doing more work and not less. It should also be said plainly that the position is held by people with a high view of scripture and argued from the text: Parry and Talbott argue passage by passage and at length, as Thomas Allin did in Universalism Asserted in the 1880s, later reissued under the title Christ Triumphant, while Hart argues more from the doctrine of God and says so openly, which is a difference inside the position rather than a description of it. A student who wants the history rather than the argument can begin with Richard Bauckham's short survey of universalism in Themelios in 1979, written by someone who was not defending the view.

Its hardest question is the language of finality, and there is a lot of it. Matthew 25:46 sets the punishment and the life in exact parallel. Matthew 25:10-12 has a door shut and a man saying I do not know you. Mark 9:48 has a worm that does not die. Hebrews 6:4-6 says it is impossible for those who have fallen away to be restored to repentance. Mark 14:21 says it would be better for that man if he had not been born, which is a strange thing to say of someone who will end in glory. Its answers are given above and they are answers rather than evasions; its critics reply that on this particular front it has more texts to account for than the other two positions do, and its defenders answer that a reading is judged by how it accounts for texts rather than by how many of them there are.

Its named weakness, stated plainly. Its reading of aionios has to be weaker in the first half of Matthew 25:46 than in the second, and the argument for that has to be made from that sentence rather than borrowed from Hebrews, which is exactly the objection it presses against others. Its second weakness is practical and is felt by its own defenders: the apostles evangelised as people in an emergency, and a position which holds that the outcome is secured has to explain that urgency, which it does by locating the emergency in the present and in the real suffering of the interval, an answer its defenders hold to be adequate and its critics hold not to be.

Start with the plain count, because a student is owed it. Eternal conscious punishment is the majority position of the Christian tradition by an enormous margin and is the formal teaching of the communions that have formal teaching. The Catechism of the Catholic Church states it at 1033 to 1035. The Orthodox liturgical and patristic tradition overwhelmingly teaches it, whatever individual Eastern fathers held. Westminster Confession 33.2, the Belgic Confession 37 and the Second Helvetic Confession state it. It stands in the Athanasian Creed and at the Fourth Lateran Council. Nothing in this lesson is an attempt to make the three positions look equally represented in the tradition, because they are not.

The formal statements against the alternatives should be reported exactly, because they are routinely misquoted in both directions. On universalism: fifteen anathemas against Origen and Origenism are traditionally associated with the Second Council of Constantinople in 553, and their conciliar status is genuinely disputed by historians, since the bishops appear to have signed them before the council formally opened and they do not appear in the council's acts; what is clear is that later councils name Origen among those condemned. Article XVII of the Augsburg Confession, in 1530, condemns those who hold that there will be an end to the punishments of condemned men and devils. The Forty-Two Articles of 1553 included an article headed that all men shall not be saved at the length, and it was among those dropped when the Thirty-Nine Articles were drawn up in 1563, so the Church of England's standing formularies do not adjudicate it. And the Catholic Church has never condemned the hopeful form; Balthasar, who argued it, was named a cardinal by John Paul II in 1988 and died two days before the consistory.

On conditional immortality: no ecumenical council addresses it directly, which surprises students who expect it to have been settled. The nearest thing is the bull Apostolici Regiminis of the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513, which condemned the philosophical teaching that the rational soul is mortal, and which bears on the anthropology the position rests on rather than on its reading of the fire. The Reformation confessions that speak of everlasting torment exclude it by implication rather than by name. Article 40 of the Forty-Two Articles, against the sleep of the soul, is adjacent to it and is not the same thing, and it was dropped in 1563 as well. In practice, conditionalism has been treated in most evangelical bodies as a position within the boundary and in some as a position that disqualifies from office, and different bodies have decided that differently, which is itself a fact worth knowing before you announce what the church holds.

Now the thing this lesson exists to say. All three positions are held by people with a high view of scripture, and that is not a diplomatic sentence. Eternal conscious punishment is the position of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Edwards and the confessions, and of most of the people who wrote the books on your shelf. Conditional immortality is the position of John Stott, John Wenham, Philip Edgcumbe Hughes, Edward Fudge, Basil Atkinson and Clark Pinnock, men who held scripture to be God's word and who argued from the Greek. Christian universalism has been argued by Gregory of Nyssa, who is a father of the church and a pillar of Nicene orthodoxy, and in our own time by Robin Parry and Thomas Talbott, who argue passage by passage. Anyone who tells you that only one of these three can be held by someone who takes the Bible seriously is telling you something that is false, and you can now name the people who falsify it.

So this lesson does not resolve the question, and the refusal is not timidity. It is that the evidence does not resolve it, that the church has not resolved it, and that a teacher who manufactures a verdict here is training students to be ambushed the first time they meet a serious person who disagrees. What you should be able to do at the end of this section is state all three in words their own defenders would recognise, name the strongest text against your own view, and notice which of the three you find hardest to state fairly, because that is the one your instincts are protecting you from.

Four things can be said honestly whatever you conclude, and they are the things a pastor actually needs. God is just, and nobody will be treated worse than they deserve; every position in this lesson asserts that and none of them can be used to suggest otherwise. Judgement is real, and the New Testament treats the loss of a person as an emergency rather than a puzzle, which is why every position here has produced missionaries. The verdict on a particular soul is not yours to pronounce, and none of the three positions gives you the standing to pronounce it, which is the answer to the mother in the inquiry: you do not know, you are not the judge, and the judge is the one who died. And the doctrine is not an abstraction to anybody in this argument. Its defenders on every side have buried children. A teacher who handles this subject as an opportunity to win something has not understood what he is holding.