Eternal Fire: A Common Assumption

Biblical descriptions of the fires of hell are often misunderstood, with the adjective attached to the fire frequently being cited as a reference to the duration of a person's punishment in hell.  This is a case of an easily identifiable confusion resulting in grossly heretical claims about the nature of God, hell, and justice.  How exactly does this confusion arise?

Jesus does describe hellfire as being eternal (Mathew 18:8, 25:41).  This cannot be legitimately denied by exegetes.  One must be careful not to draw unlinked conclusions from this fact, though.  For instance, the duration of the flames themselves, which is clearly defined as perpetual, tells us nothing at all about the fate of things thrown inside them.  These verses pose absolutely no threat to the doctrine of annihilationism, since it does not follow from the fire itself being eternal that anything placed in the fire will burn eternally without ceasing to exist.  Just because the fire itself exists forever does not mean that unsaved humans will last forever in the fire.

The confusion of eternal conscious torment (for all unsaved humans, I must clarify [1]) comes about when people read that hellfire is called eternal and then assume that "eternal" must also refer to the suffering of any being that enters hell.  This is both logically and textually an unsound conclusion, yet it is such a simple one that a person could go years without noticing it due to its commonality.  That something is entrenched so deeply in Christian subcultures does not make it true.

Since these verses (and similar ones about eternal fire or eternal destruction) are basically all that supporters of eternal conscious torment for humans have to rely upon to start making a Biblical argument, the very foundations of their claims are fatally flawed at the outset, for the fire's eternality does not even come close to establishing their other ideas--like the inherent immortality of the human soul or the inherent justice of eternal conscious torment.  Putting annihilationism in its rightful place as the acknowledged Biblical position on hell is the duty of any sound Christian thinker.


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