The Gods Of Hell

People do not always understand the gravity of investigating what the Bible teaches about hell--on one hand, majority tradition and consensus states that the unsaved will suffer physical pain indefinitely in hell, and on the other hand, a competing ideology says that the unsaved will be "executed", if you will, at some point after entering hell.  What they do not always grasp is the fact that the gods of both positions have, in truth, diametrically opposed natures.  To worship or believe in one over the other is not entirely incomparable to worshipping or believing in the god of one religion over another.

The god of annihilationism and the god of eternal conscious torment are two mutually-exclusive, irreconcilable, and drastically different deities.  It is clear that a deity who would torment people infinitely, without respite or cessation, is a completely different deity than one who would only torment people for what we would call a finite time before vaporizing them.  Thus, depending on which is the true god of Scripture, morality is quite different, for justice is a central part of morality, and human residence in hell is ultimately a matter of cosmic justice.  And so the issue of discovering which fate for the general unsaved is taught by the Bible is certainly no minor theological activity, for it generates ripples that affect so much else within Christian doctrine--morality, God's nature, and eschatology, to name a few.  The god of eternal conscious torment is nothing like the god of annihilationism.  In fact, little to nothing about the moral natures of these two deities regarding justice is synonymous.

Human nature is also irreconcilably different according to each position.  One advocates that humans have inherently immortal souls that will inescapably exist forever simply because they are human souls; the other claims that fallen humans are by their very nature incapable of existing forever unless they relationally realign themselves with their Creator, doomed for eventual extinction of consciousness without the eternal life that Christ revealed.  Again, a massive ideological split lies here--people who do not take the ramifications of these two different ideas of hell seriously are neglecting the major ripples that will come from each.  Ideas have consequences, after all.  And for one idea to be true, its negation and any ideas that contradict it must be false.

Far too much is at stake in the clash between these two doctrines for Christians to idly squander the opportunity to study them, appraise them, or lapse into comfort with the unbiblical tradition of eternal conscious torment.  The two gods stand opposed to each other, only one able to hold the position of the God of Christianity.  I will say it again--the god of one is not the god of the other.

I have previously addressed both the overwhelming evidence for the annihilation of the unsaved [1] and how certain Biblical exceptions to annihilationism do not disqualify general annihilationism itself [2].  I do not want people to minimize the enormous theological significance that the issue of hell possesses for Christians.  Annihilationism needs to be taken seriously by Christians at large, not only because it IS Scripturally true, but because people need to examine beliefs carefully to recognize the impact and implications of each one.  The gods of competing models of Biblical hell are extremely dissimilar, and Christians need to at least admit this much.


[1].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html

[2].  http://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/03/revelation-20-and-annihilationism.html