Annihilationism is the doctrine that the souls of the wicked will be snuffed out of existence rather than be sent to an everlasting, conscious hell. The existence of the unrepentant will be extinguished, while the righteous will enter into everlasting bliss.
Christians through the centuries have affirmed that those who do not accept God’s offer of salvation in Christ will suffer conscious, everlasting torment. Denial of this teaching has, until recently, been limited almost exclusively to cultic or quasi-cultic groups. For example, the Jehovah’s Witnesses vociferously reject the orthodox teaching on hell, denouncing it as an error of apostate Christendom. They teach that the wicked will be “annihilated” rather than suffer eternal torment. Likewise, Herbert Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God, Christian Science, Mormonism, and the New Age movement all repudiate the orthodox doctrine. Besides these undeniably cultic groups, the Seventh-day Adventists also reject the historic doctrine in favor of annihilation. (Alan Gomes, PhD, Talbot School of Theology)
[Major Christian Denominational statements on Hell are vague at best. Here are just a few:]
Roman Catholic – “To die in mortal sin without repenting and accepting God’s merciful love means remaining separated from him for ever by our own free choice. This state of definitive self- exclusion from communion with God and the blessed is called “hell.” Catechism – 1033
Lutheran – “The doctrine of eternal punishment, repugnant to natural man, has been repudiated by errorists … but is clearly revealed in Scripture. To deny this doctrine is to reject the authority of Scripture.” LCMS
Methodist – “John Wesley himself believed in an intermediate state between death and the final judgment, where those who rejected Christ would be aware of their coming doom … This belief, however, is not formally affirmed in Methodist doctrinal standards, which reject the idea of purgatory but beyond that maintain silence on what lies between death and the last judgment.” UMC
Presbyterian – “The only official Presbyterian statement that includes any comment on hell since the 1930s is a 1974 paper on universalism adopted by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States. It warns of judgment and promises hope, acknowledging that these two ideas seem to be “in tension or even in paradox.” In the end, the statement concedes, how God works redemption and judgment is a mystery.” PCUSA
Baptist – “The unrighteous will be consigned to Hell, the place of everlasting punishment.” SBC [No vagueness there!]
(About.com)
Although the Church of England has through most of its history been closer to John Calvin‘s view of conscious continuation of the immortal soul, rather than Martin Luther‘s “soul sleep,” the doctrine of annihilation of the “wicked” following a judgment day at a literal return of Christ has had a following in the Anglican communion.
[Annihilationism] experienced a resurgence in the 1980s when several prominent theologians including John Stott were prepared to argue that it could be held sincerely as a legitimate interpretation of biblical texts (alternative to the more traditional interpretation of them), by those who give supreme authority to Scripture.
Annihilationist ideas have been canvassed among evangelicals for more than a century, but they never became part of the mainstream of evangelical faith, nor have they been widely discussed in the evangelical camp until recently. In 1987 Clark Pinnock authored a punchy two-page article titled “Fire, Then Nothing,” but this, though widely read, did not spark debate, any more than the 500-page exposition of the same view, The Fire That Consumes (1982) by the gifted Churches of Christ layman Edward William Fudge, had done. In 1988, however, two brief pieces of advocacy came from Anglican evangelical veterans: eight pages by John Stott in Essentials, and ten by the late Philip Edgecumbe Hughes in The True Image. These put the cat among the pigeons.
At Evangelical Essentials, a conference of 350 leaders held at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, Illinois, in 1989, I read a paper portentously titled “Evangelicals and the Way of Salvation: New Challenges to the Gospel: Universalism and Justification by Faith.” In that paper I offered a line of thought countering the view of these two respected friends. It turned out that the conference was split down the middle over the annihilation question. The Christianity Today report said:
Strong disagreements did surface over the position of annihilationism, a view that holds that unsaved souls will cease to exist after death . . . the conference was almost evenly divided as to how to deal with the issue in the affirmations statement, and no renunciation of the position was included in the draft document.
Historically, these are nineteenth-century views. The nineteenth century was an era of bold challenges to past assumptions, bold dreams of things made better, and bold enterprise, both intellectual and technological, to bring this about. Historic Christian teaching about hell was called in question in light of the utilitarian and progressive conviction that retribution alone, with no prospect of anything or anyone being improved by it, is in no case a sufficient justification for punishment, let alone unending punishment. From this it seemed to follow that the idea of God maintaining anyone in permanent postmortem pain was unworthy of Him, and therefore the traditional view of eternal punishment must be abandoned, and another way of explaining the texts that appear to teach it must be found. Bible-believing revisionists developed two ways of doing this. The first way was universalism, which says that all the humans there are will finally be in heaven, and speculates as to how through painful experiences those who die in unbelief will get there. The second way was annihilationism, which says that those in heaven will finally be all the humans there are, and speculates as to when unbelievers are extinguished. The arguments used by today’s evangelical annihilationists are essentially no different from those of their last-century predecessors.
(Evangelical Annihilationism in Review, by J.I. Packer)
Annihilationists point to the Bible references to the fate of the wicked as “the second death” (Rev 20:14) in support of their view. Since a person loses consciousness of this world at the first death (physical death), it is argued that the “second death” will involve unconsciousness in the world to come.
Scripture speaks of the wicked being “destroyed.” Paul said: (2 Thess 1:7-9) “And to you who are troubled rest with us, when the Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, In flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God, and that obey not the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ: Who shall be punished with everlasting destruction from the presence of the Lord, and from the glory of his power;
Annihilationists insist that the figure of “destruction” is incompatible with a continued, conscious existence.
The wicked are said to go into “perdition” (KJV) (2 Peter 3:7), and Judas is called the “son of perdition” (John 17:12). The word perdition (apoleia) means to perish. This, annihilationists argue, indicates that the lost will perish, or go out of existence.
Jesus said of Judas, who was sent to perdition, that it would be better for him if he had not been born (Mark 14:21). Before one is conceived they do not exist. Thus, for hell to be like the prebirth condition it must be a state of nonexistence.
Repeatedly, the Old Testament speaks of the wicked perishing. The psalmist wrote: “But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the Lord shall be as the fat of lambs: they shall consume; into smoke shall they consume away.” (Ps 37:20; cf. 68:2; 112:10). To perish implies a state of nothingness.
When examined carefully in context, none of the above passages proves annihilationism. At some points language may permit such a construction, but nowhere does the text demand annihilationism. In context and comparison with other Scriptures, the concept must be rejected in every case.
The first death is simply the separation of the soul from the body, not the annihilation of the soul.
For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also (James 2:26).
Scripture presents death as conscious separation. Adam and Eve died spiritually the moment they sinned, yet they still existed and could hear God’s voice (Gen 3:10). Before one is saved, he is “dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1), and yet he still carries God’s image (Gen 1:27; cf. Gen 9:6; James 3:9). Though unable to come to Christ without the intervention of God, the “spiritually dead” are sufficiently aware that Scripture holds them accountable to believe (Acts 16:31), and repent (Acts 17:30). Continued awareness, but with separation from God and the inability to save oneself—these constitute Scripture’s vision of the second death.
“Everlasting” destruction would not be annihilation, which only takes an instant and is over. If someone undergoes everlasting destruction, then they have to have everlasting existence. The cars in a junkyard have been destroyed, but they are not annihilated. They are simply beyond repair or unredeemable. So are the people in hell.
Since the word perdition means to die, perish, or to come to ruin, the same objections apply. In 2 Peter 3:7 perdition is used in the context of judgment, clearly implying consciousness. In our junkyard analogy, ruined cars have perished, but they are still junkyard cars. In this connection, Jesus spoke of hell as a dump where the fire would not cease and where a person’s resurrected body would not be consumed (Mark 9:48) Where their worm dieth not, and the fire is not quenched.
When [Jesus] says that it would have been better if Judas had not been born, Jesus is not comparing Judas’s perdition to his nonexistence before conception but to his existence before birth. This hyperbolic figure of speech would almost certainly indicate the severity of his punishment, not a statement about the superiority of nonbeing over being.
[Some have maintained that the snuffing-out will occur immediately upon Jesus’ sentence at the final judgment; others have thought that each person banished from Jesus’ presence will then undergo some penal pain, doubtless graded in intensity and length in light of personal desert, before the moment of extinction comes. Some base their annihilationism on an adjusted anthropology. They urge that endless existence is natural to nobody; on the contrary, since we were created as psycho-physical units, that is, personal selves (souls) living through bodies, disembodiment must terminate consciousness. So after our initial disembodiment (the first death) there is no interim state, only an unconsciousness that continues until we are reembodied on Resurrection Day, and after resurrected unbelievers are banished from Christ their consciousness will finally cease (the second death) when, and because, their resurrection body ceases to be. Some who reason thus, however, do in fact affirm a conscious interim state, with joy for saints and sorrow for sinners, as the general consensus in the church seems always to have done. All who embrace this adjusted anthropology call their view conditional immortality, a phrase coined to make the point that the postmortem continuance that religions envisage and most if not all desire, is a gift that God gives only to Christian believers, while sooner or later He simply extinguishes the rest of our race. Ongoing existence is thus conditional upon faith in Jesus Christ, and annihilation is the universal alternative. (Evangelical Annihilationism in Review, by J.I. Packer)]
Unlike parables which have no real persons in them, Jesus told the story of an actual beggar named Lazarus who went to heaven and of a rich man who died and went to hell and was in conscious torment (Luke 16:22-28). He cried out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame. But Abraham said, Son, remember that thou in thy lifetime receivedst thy good things, and likewise Lazarus evil things: but now he is comforted, and thou art tormented.” (24,25)
The rich man then begged that his brothers be warned “that thou wouldest send him to my father’s house:
For I have five brethren; that he may testify unto them, lest they also come into this place of torment. (28)
There is no hint of annihilation in this passage; he is suffering constant and conscious torment.
Jesus repeatedly called hell a place of unquenchable [fire] (Mark 9:43-48) where the very bodies of the wicked will never die (cf. Luke 12; 4:1-5:39). But it would make no sense to have everlasting flames and bodies without any souls in them to experience the torment.
John the apostle described hell as a place of eternal torment. He declared that “the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are, and shall be tormented day and night for ever and ever.” (Rv 20:10)
[There is no hint here that there is an annhilation of the Devil…but, rather, a daily torment for ever and ever. Also, we see that the beast and the false prophet had been suffering in the lake of fire for 1000 years prior to their dear friend, Satan, arriving. They were alive when they enterred, and were still alive 1000 years later.]
The fact that the wicked are “punished with everlasting destruction” (2 Thess 1:9) strongly implies that they must be conscious. One cannot suffer punishment without existence. It is no punishment to beat a dead corpse. An unconscious person feels no pain.
Annihilation would not be a punishment but a release from all punishment. Job would have suffered more than many lost people would have over their entire existence. The punishment of evil men in the afterlife would have to be conscious. If not, then God is not just, since he would have given less punishment to some wicked than to some righteous people. For not all wicked people suffer as much as some righteous people do in this life.
Annihilationists reason that God is a God of mercy (Ex 20:6), and it is merciless to allow people to suffer consciously forever. We kill trapped horses if we cannot rescue them from burning buildings. We put other suffering creatures out of their misery. Annihilationists argue that a merciful God would surely do as much for his creatures. [But, one must take into account all of God’s attributes, not just one. For, God is a God of mercy as well as a God of judgment, wrath, anger, and vengence. One attribute doesn’t cancel out the others’ effects.]
It would be contrary to the created nature of human beings to annihilate them, since they are made in God’s image and likeness, which is everlasting (Gen 1:27). Animals are often killed to alleviate their pain. But (the euthanasia movement notwithstanding) we do not do the same for humans precisely because they are not animals. They are created in the image of God and, hence, should be treated with the greatest respect for their dignity as God’s image bearers. Not to allow them to continue to exist in their freely chosen destiny, painful as it may be, is to snuff out God’s image in them. Since free choice is morally good, being part of the image of God, then it would be a moral evil to take it away.
To punish the crime of telling of a half-truth with the same ferocity as the crime of genocide is unjust. Hitler should receive a greater punishment than a petty thief, though both crimes affront God’s infinite holiness. Certainly not all judgment proportionate to the sin is meted out in this life. The Bible speaks of degrees of punishment in hell (Matt 5:22; Rev 20:12-14). But there can be no degrees of annihilation. Nonexistence is the same for all persons.
The doctrine of annihilation rests more on sentimental than scriptural bases.
(Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics by Norman L. Geisler)
