book review: four views on hell 2

May 6, 2008

Part 1

John Walvoord advocates the conventional view, which embraces that Hell is literally a place of smoke and fire, where nonbelievers undergo physical and emotional agony throughout eternity. Verse upon verse is utilized to establish that the vengeance of God is more than sheer physical death. Words such as “olam” and “neash,” generally translated “ever”, are in some contexts limited as to duration in time (e.g. Ex. 27:21), but says Walvoord, “such termination is never once mentioned in either the Old or New Testament as relating to the punishment of the wicked… there is no intimation that this punishment should not be taken literally and continue eternally.”

William Crockett asserts that the Biblical representation of hell as fire is metaphor, symbolizing separation from God. While Crockett concurs with Walvoord that hell is a place of everlasting cognizant chastisement, he advocates that New Testament portrayals of both heaven and hell are fundamentally figurative and not an exact depiction of the worlds to come. He contends that ancient teachers used hyperbole to underscore the overwhelming dreadfulness of the judgment of God.

Zachary Hayes gives the purgatorial view of customary Roman Catholicism: that eternal fate is set irreversibly at the instant of death; that the majority of people are not corrupt enough to be relegated to a perpetual hell, nor are they good enough for heaven; therefore, some sort of “purification” process needs to take place between death and access into heaven. Roman Catholic theology affixes to this theory the likelihood of being aided in the cleansing method by those alive on earth.

Finally, Clark Pinnock offers the conditionalist view, oftentimes known as annihilationism, in which nonbelievers are eradicated entirely out of existence or after some period of conscious punishment. He acknowledges that this controversial view is extremely rare amongst early Christians, but rightly claims that tradition is not infallible, and thus the arguments for eternal conscious punishment must be considered on their own rights. Pinnock claims the innocent acceptance of the concept of the immortality of the soul, which is placed behind the conventional understanding of hell, direct traditionalists to ignore the literal meaning of many Scriptures. Pinnock then provides a good account of those key Scriptures that shore up the conditionalist view.
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