Ian wrote:Doug wrote;
I think that annihilation is the most satisfying of the theories
My mother is not a professing Christian but is rightly horrified and sickened to the core by the antics of Ariel Castro. Nonetheless according to this doctrine, will be equally annihilated alongside him. Where is the justice in that?
As was pointed out, the advantage to annihilation is that it provides a meaningful custom amount of pain and torment for each person judged depending on his bad acts in life.
The following is an illustration that we'll use to evaluate all three approaches. Assuming some kind of torment is involved, for each sin you did you have to undergo one minute of immersion in hot lava. You have two people to judge. One, Jimmy, is 10 years old. Through whatever mysterious mechanism God has put into place Jimmy reached the age of accountability this morning because he finally did one more sin, became aware that it was a sin, felt convicted of it by the Holy Spirit, blew off God, ran out the front door and was hit by a car. On the other hand, you have Joe who is the worst murderer in the history of the world. He is responsible for ordering the deaths of about 50 million people. I'll assume each one is a sin. Both Jimmy and Joe have to spend trillions of trillions of trillions of years in hell paying for those sins.
For eternal conscious torment, Jimmy decides to get his one sin out of the way the first day, and so spends the rest of the time sitting around with nothing to do. Joe decides that he will do a minute a week, with the rest of the time spent sitting around with nothing to do. Eventually they are both done and sit around with nothing to do. We can't say that they are constantly perpetually tortured because they have only committed a certain number of sins and according to Revelation 20 they are both judged for their sins. We might try to extend the time allotted for the torture by cutting the number of calories of heat down to 1/2 and then double the number of torture events. But, eventually, they are sitting around with nothing to do because infinity is a big number. If we do this enough times then they are perpetually sitting in a hot tub because we've run out of heat, so I don't think this is a good approach. The real problem here is time. One ECT theory worth pointing out comes from L. S. Chafer (this is as far back as I've been able to trace it) through Dallas Theological Seminary. In their atonement scheme Jesus indeed paid for all personal sin other than unbelief in himself (since he did actually believe in himself he couldn't pay for that one), so that the only sin Jimmy and Joe are paying for is unbelief in Jesus, and so they both get the permanent max sentence. This strikes me as a bit unfair, but was a novel attempt on their point to get out from under universalism while still keeping penal substitutionary atonement.
I am not an expert on universalism, but it seems to me that there are two basic approaches. In the first one, God says that Jimmy and Joe are both pardoned and are both immediately allowed into heaven. This strikes me as at least unjust, and probably a bad idea for a couple of other reasons. The second approach says that Joe and Jimmy are in hell until they are tortured for their sins and then they are restored. I could live with that, but I don't see that mechanism described anywhere in scripture.
For annihilation, we basically start with the eternal conscious torment model and say that when they are done paying they blink out of existence. For both parties it would be fair since they were tortured the right amount for what they did wrong. No one gets away with anything, and the punishment is fair. No one is entitled to exist eternally, eternal life is a gift from God to those who've complied with his program. I think there is a great deal of scriptural evidence pointing to this system as opposed to universalism. Though there also seems to be some evidence for eternal conscious torment, I think a close look will reveal that it's not as well documented as the proponents assume. Steve has done a good job of describing this on one of this interviews I listened to.
Doug
