Monday, September 23, 2024

Romans 1 And Death: The Deserved Fate Of Sinners

Not the most overt or renowned of the many passages that directly or indirectly teach annihilationism, Romans 1 still leads up to its last verse emphasizing that sin deserves death in spite of its subjective appeal to those who seek only to appease themselves.  Nowhere does Paul mention eternal torture, something that would contradict Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 25:1-3) and thus the moral nature of Yahweh that the Law articulates.  Yes, although he doe does not list all possible sins, he does reference many specific ones or their general categories, and he clearly insists that all of them deserve the cessation of life.  In fact, he does not mention torture at all, despite how the process of dying in Gehenna could be quite painful (Luke 12:47-48, Revelation 20:15).

Paul touches upon some miscellaneous sins like idolatry (Romans 1:22-23), self-deception (1:21, 25), homosexual behaviors (1:26-27), greed (1:29), slander (1:30), and general irrationalism in that the wicked he speaks of are living for their own preferences or hedonistic fulfillment rather than truth for the sake of truth.  Even if Christianity is not true, the kind of people he refers to are absolutely irrationalistic and thus unworthy of existence.  He does not mention and does not necessarily need to mention even worse sins like rape (Deuteronomy 22:25-27) or extreme, unbiblical forms of torture that go far beyond the very limited punishments of Yahweh's laws to be correct in saying that, on the Christian worldview, all of these people deserve to die (1:32).

Those who practice such things deserve death, Paul says, echoing the more concise statement he makes later in the same book when he declares that the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23), which itself is a New Testament restatement of Ezekiel 18:4's comment on how the soul that sins will die.  Consciousness is not the body.  The former is immaterial and the latter is physical; the former is epistemologically self-evident along with logical axioms, though its immateriality is not, while it is very difficult to prove to oneself that the latter exists.  Regardless, Ezekiel 18:4 says that the souls of sinners will die, which either encompasses the whole of a person if referring to the mind-body composite or more narrowly specifies that their immaterial mind will cease to exist for their unrepentant sin.

Just because the mind and the body are metaphysically different does not necessitate that the immaterial lives on outside of its material shell.  Some annihilationists are indeed irrationalistic fools, just of a lesser degree that the typical Christian when it comes to hell, and they might be less irrational than the rest to the extent that they see the Bible does not teach eternal torment for all the wicked while still being philosophically in error.  They might assume that the Bible is true or hold to something else on faith, rather than on the basis of logical necessity and its epistemological light, such as the idea that if the mind does not love separately from the body, it is the same as the body.

Paul's stance on sinners eventually being eradicated from existence--the same stance hinted at in Genesis and that the prophets, Jesus, and various New Testament authors besides Paul all posit--can be true whether or not the mind exists without the body for a time.  The Bible does clarify its doctrine on this matter: a sinner's mind will be reduced to nonexistence (Matthew 10:28) and their body to ashes (2 Peter 2:6), but this is after their bodily resurrection (Daniel 12:2), before which their spirits will be unconscious along with everyone else in the intermediate Sheol (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10).  Nonetheless, if the Bible had said nothing of what happens to people between death and their resurrection to face the second death, verses like Romans 1:32 still address how the deserved final fate for sin is death.

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