Thanks for the feedback
I take CS Lewis' view not so much from 'The Great Divorce,' but from the chapter on 'Hell' in 'The Problem of Pain.' Here, I think, Lewis does deal with some detail oriented questions. I will quote him below...
"It is not necessary to concentrate on the images of torture to the exclusion of those suggesting destruction and privation... destruction, we should naturally assume, means the unmaking, or cessation, of the destroyed. And people often talk as if the 'annihilation' of a soul were intrinsically possible. In all our experiences, however, the destruction of one thing means the emergence of something else. Burn a log, and you have gases, heat and ash... if souls can be destroyed, must there not be a state of having been a human soul? And is not that, perhaps, the state which is equally well described as torment, destruction, and privation." (page 127)
It seems pretty clear here that Lewis is attempting to combine EM and EE. It also seems to me that the ONLY thing holding Lewis from going wholly in the EE direction is his belief in the immortality of the soul. In any case, the quote still seems to favor the EE view. If all he means by continued existence is parallel to gas/heat/ash, that's not much of an existence at all.
But just a page later, Lewis balances this out with quotes that seems to favor EM more than EE:
"To enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man, it is 'remains.' To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man- to be an ex-man or 'damned ghost'- would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. It is, of course, impossible to imagine what the consciousness of such a creature... would be like." (page 128)
So here he parallels it more to a ghostly existence, but even then still questions whether it would be a conscious state.
NT Wright does something very similar. In his book "Surprised by Hope," he discusses the 'traditional' view of conscious torment, then mentions the 'universalist' view, then finally the 'conditionalist' AKA 'annihilationism.' But after very briefly describing each view, he suggests the following:
"Over against these three options, I propose a view that combines what seem to me the strong points of the first (EM) and third (EE)... my suggestion is that if it is possible for human beings so to continue down this road... that after death they become at last, by their own effective choice, being that once were human but now are not, creatures that have ceased to bear the divine image at all... those creatures still exist in an ex-human state." (page 181-183)
Personally, I don't really feel a need to give EM some continued existence (pardon the pun). It should just be put out of its misery (again, sorry). But I know how difficult it is for most people to abruptly abandon a position they long thought was the only Scriptural view. It is dangerous to mess with people's foundations (a lot of people got saved, initially, because they were afraid of everlasting misery). I offer this 3-legged merger as a helpful transition for traditionalists into open-minded thinking.
