Over the years, I’ve spoken with certain atheists who were angry with the idea of God. They would usually present arguments of logic as their reasons to reject belief in God – but a deeply emotional reaction would often ensue as the weaknesses in their arguments were pointed out. Their moral scruples, they said, could never allow them to believe in a divine monster who would torture his creatures for all eternity. (And who can blame them for that!)

I came to realize that the real problem that such atheists have with belief in God and religion isn’t intellectual or driven by a concern for evidence, but rather a moral or ethical problem, and often as such centered on the religious idea of hell.

I’m a conditionalist. I’m grateful to be raised in a church that on a solid basis distances itself from the fundamentalist teaching of an eternal hell. If this weren’t the case, I’m not sure that I would be a Christian. The Seventh-day Adventist Church teaches conditionalism and annihilationism—that no created being possesses natural immortality, that immortality is a gift given on the condition of faith in Christ, and that the wicked will finally be annihilated and cease to exist, not live eternally in torment. But how can such a view be defended by the Bible alone, as Protestants seek to do? Doesn’t the Bible say that the wicked will suffer eternal punishment and burn forever? Isn’t the Bible clear on the issue?

The Hebrew context. The Bible is written in an ancient Hebrew culture. It’s mostly written in Hebrew and Koiné Greek by Jewish writers. Sadly, fundamentalists often ignore this fact in their interpretations of Scripture. Fundamentalists often insinuate that since the Bible is inspired by God, it’s easy to understand for everyone who reads it. But even the Bible itself tells a story that demonstrates that this is not true. An Ethiopian convert tried to read the Scriptures on his own in the days of the early Christian church, but he couldn’t understand what he read (Acts 8:29-31). He needed the guidance from someone more acquainted with Scripture than himself. There’s no reason to assume that it’s any easier for us to understand the Bible 2,000 years later without the guidance from more knowledgeable people.

Keeping this in mind, let’s delve into the Bible’s internal logic of hell as interpreted by annihilationists.

The myth of the immortal soul. The main fundamentalist teaching that powers the idea of eternal torment for the wicked is the doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The idea that the soul cannot die (that is, cannot cease to exist) is the battery that powers the popular conceptions of an eternal hell. If the souls of the wicked are immortal, logically they’ll have to live and suffer for all eternity in hell.

Firstly, there’s not one scripture that states or infers that human beings by nature have an immortal soul. On the contrary, the apostle Paul explicitly writes that God is the only one who is immortal, and that man is mortal (1 Timothy 6:16; 1 Timothy 1:17; Romans 1:23). There’s no reason to assume that these texts only speak of the physical body and not the soul. Quite the contrary. According to the creation account in Genesis 2, the soul and body are inseparable.

The holistic human soul. Genesis 2 explains how human beings were created: God first made Adam’s body from dust, then breathed into it the breath of life – then the man became a living nefesh, which is Hebrew for “soul” (Genesis 2:7). This text does not suggest that the soul is a separate entity inside the body, but rather that the body and breath of life together comprise the soul. (The pervasive idea the soul is an entity “trapped” inside the body is mind-body dualism and stems from Greek philosophical thought.) In other words, the soul is an irreducible combination of God’s breath of life and the physical body. If the body is destroyed, the soul is gone. The ruah, which is Hebrew for “breath” or “spirit”, then “returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:7, ESV). The breath or spirit referred to here is not the conscious mind of a person; it’s the breath or life energy that comes from God.

The soul is an irreducible combination of God’s breath of life and the physical body.

The analogy of the computer. An analogy I like to use of the biblical notion of the human soul is the computer. The computer’s hardware corresponds to the human body. The computer software corresponds to the soul—that is, the conscious mind and emotions of person. The electricity that powers the computer and generates the software, corresponds to the breath of life or spirit that comes from God.

Just as there is no computer software without a computer hardware, likewise there is no soul or mind without a body. The electricity in a computer is not itself the software—rather, the electricity is the power that generates the software. Likewise, the breath of life (or spirit) in a person that returns to God at death is not itself the conscious soul, but is the life energy that generates the soul/mind.

If the computer hardware is destroyed, the electrical power cannot run through it and generate software. Hence, the software cannot exist without the computer hardware. This demonstrates the holistic and irreducible nature of the human soul as taught in the Bible—that there is no human consciousness, emotion or thought without a functioning body. (Also God, who is spirit, is described in the Bible as having a bodily form (Exodus 33:18-23; John 5:37).)

Some Christians have the idea that people in the afterlife will be immaterial spirits floating about in an immaterial world. This is also unbiblical. In the afterlife, humans will be resurrected in a physical body—the just will be resurrected in an immortal human body just as Christ was resurrected in an immortal human body (1 Corinthians 15:35-53). The wicked will be resurrected in their mortal body to receive their judgment (John 5:28-29). The outcome is conditional and depends on the faith and moral virtue of the person (Ephesians 2:8-10; Romans 6:23; Romans 2:6).

Conditional immortality since the beginning. When Adam and Eve sinned, they were expelled from the Garden of Eden in order that they might not eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.

Then the Lord God said, “Behold, the man has become like one of us in knowing good and evil. Now, lest he reach out his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat, and live forever—” therefore the Lord God sent him out from the garden of Eden to work the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man, and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life.

Genesis 3:22-24, ESV

This is a strong piece of evidence that God did not make humans immortal upon creating them—or else the Tree of Life would be redundant and this verse wouldn’t make sense. This verse also implies that God would not allow sin and suffering to exist for all eternity if sin happened to enter the world. While God allowed the couple to use their free will and eat of the forbidden fruit and thus commit sin, he did not let the couple eat of the Tree of Life and live forever after they sinned. This shows that eternal life in biblical thought is conditional and a gift that God only grants to those who trust God and obey (Romans 6:23); it’s not a natural, inborn quality that all humans possess. Eternal life was always conditional. “If you eat of the forbidden fruit you will die,” was God’s warning to Adam. But what does it really mean to die? Is it only a spiritual death? How does the Bible actually describe death?

The oblivion of death. Death is explicitly and repeatedly described as a state of oblivion and unconsciousness in both the Old and New Testament. Logically, if the soul/mind cannot exist or operate without the body (as the creation account implies), being dead must be a state of complete unconsciousness. The book of Ecclesiastes describes death as a place without any knowledge, wisdom or emotion, stating explicitly that “the dead know nothing” (Ecclesiastes 9:5-10, ESV). Multiple texts in the Old Testament speak of death as a sleep (such as Deuteronomy 31:16; 2 Samuel 7:12; Job 7:21; 14:12; Psalm 13:3; 76:5; 1 Kings 2:10; 2 Kings 24:6; Daniel 12:2). As believers in the Hebrew Bible, Jesus and the writers of the New Testament naturally also spoke of death as a sleep (John 11:11-15; Matthew 27:52; Acts 7:60; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-16).

It’s important to note that the Bible mentions certain exceptions where dead people were immediately resurrected and taken to heaven. The Bible mentions certain people who are in heaven already now, such as Enoch, Moses, Elijah, and other resurrected saints (Matthew 17:3-4; Matthew 27:52-23; Hebrews 12:23). But these are exceptions to the rule that the dead remain dead and unconscious until the future resurrection.

One other seeming exception to this trend is found in the book of Samuel in the Old Testament, where a medium upon the request of king Saul summons what appears to be the spirit of the dead prophet Samuel (1 Samuel 28). The apparition is described as “a god coming up out of the earth” and looks like “an old man rapped in a robe” (verses 13-14). Based on the appearance of this spirit entity, Saul concludes that this is the dead prophet Samuel. However, necromancy was strictly forbidden by God and associated with idolatry and the worship of evil spirits (Deuteronomy 18:10). The apostle Paul warned the early Christians that Satan transforms himself into an angel of light (2 Corinthians 11:14). The biblical evidence indicates that the spiritual entity that was summoned by the medium in this story was not really the dead prophet Samuel, but an evil spirit impersonating him.

A surprising amount of Protestant Christians seems to completely ignore the mass of biblical evidence, claiming that the dead are now in heaven looking down on us or down in hell and being tormented. Many point to allegorical passages in the Bible as proof that the dead are conscious and alive, contrary to the rest of the biblical evidence. One passage that Christians often point to in this regard is Jesus’ parable of the rich man and the beggar Lazarus found in the Gospel of Luke 16:19-31. Let’s explore it.

Building doctrine on one allegory. Firstly, this story is a parable, an allegory, which is a made up story that is meant to teach one single moral lesson. Reading the Bible faithfully means that we must take it for nothing more and nothing less than what it itself claims to be. There is plenty of allegory in the Bible, and when the allegorical passages are marked in various ways as being clearly allegorical, they should be read allegorically, not as historical and precise descriptions of reality. This is, however, the core mistake that many Christians make when reading this parable, not understanding the imagery or cultural context in which this parable was given.

In this parable, Jesus tells the story about a rich man who lives in selfish pleasure while ignoring the suffering of the beggar Lazarus lying outside his gate. The rich man eventually dies and wakes up in torment in hell. He then shouts to Abraham and the beggar Lazarus (who is now in Abraham’s warm embrace up in heaven), asking them to come down and cool his tongue with a drop of water. (Imagine – would some drops of water ease the torments of hell? This is an important cue as to the allegorical nature of this story.) When the rich man is denied his wish, he implores Abraham to send people from the dead to warn the living of being selfish as he had been. Abraham answers by telling him that the living have God’s word written in the Bible, and if they refuse to follow God’s word, they won’t be persuaded by miracles either. The moral point of the story is that miracles (such as raising people from the dead) won’t persuade people to be good if they refuse to listen to truth and reason.

Jesus told this parable to an audience who was waiting for the prophesied Messiah and was demanding some supernatural sign from him that he was the Messiah. They saw his unselfish life, his wisdom and power to heal, and yet they demanded a sign. Interestingly, Jesus did grant them a sign later by raising his friend Lazarus from the dead (John 11)—but as Jesus had predicted, the religious leaders refused to believe in him, and even plotted to kill both him and Lazarus!

The parable of the rich man and Lazarus plays on images of the afterlife that were prevalent in Jesus’ day. People imagined that the righteous dead were gathered to “Abraham’s bosom” in heaven and the wicked dead went down to hell and were tormented until the day of judgment. These popular ideas were not based on the teachings of the Hebrew Bible, but were the result of pagan influences, first during the Jewish exile and later from Greek philosophy. The idea that the soul lives on after death is fundamentally a pagan belief. If we consider the totality of Scripture, this parable is the odd one out in the Bible’s general descriptions of death and judgment. And since it’s a parable, a made-up allegorical story, annihilationists such as myself argue that it should not be interpreted literally in questions of Christian doctrine.

However, there are several texts in the Bible that are not allegorical and that describe the wicked as being punished with “eternal fire” or “unquenchable fire”. What do they mean? Let’s take a look.

The fire that no one can put out. The fire with which God will punish the wicked on judgment day is referred to by Jesus and prophets in the Old Testament as an “unquenchable fire” (Jeremiah 17:27; Isaiah 66:24; Matthew 3:12; Luke 3:17; Mark 9:43-35). Reading these texts in their immediate context makes it evidently clear that the fire is unquenchable in the sense that it burns and cannot be put out until the subject is completely destroyed. The goal is complete and unhindered destruction. The fundamentalist will take the term “unquenchable” and impose the biased and unreasonable idea that the subject is never fully destroyed by the fire, resulting in their endless torment. But this is nonsensical and goes against the rest of Scripture. In all instances in the Bible the “unquenchable fire” fully destroys (annihilates) whatever it burns. That is the whole point of the fire. One prime example of this is the story of the wicked city of Sodom.

A tangible example. The epistle of Jude describes the city of Sodom as being punished with “eternal fire”, serving as an example of the final judgment of all the wicked on judgment day (Jude 1:7). It’s evident that the city is not still burning to this day, but is in ruins and buried. This serves as a very tangible example indicating that the final judgment of the wicked will result in their annihilation. God’s final judgment of the wicked is also described in the books of Isaiah and Ezekiel. In Isaiah, the wicked on judgment day are described as dead bodies (not immortal souls) that are burned by “unquenchable fire” (Isaiah 66:24). According to Ezekiel, the wicked will be consumed by fire from heaven and their bones will be finally buried by the righteous (Ezekiel 38:22; 39:11-16). If these texts weren’t clear enough, the prophet Malachi writes explicitly that the wicked on judgment day will be turned to ashes (Malachi 4:1-3). These texts are strong evidence that the “unquenchable fire” is not an eternally burning place. The fire is unquenchable only in the sense that nothing can stop it from fully destroying the object set ablaze. When the object is finally destroyed and annihilated, the fire ceases.

In all instances in the Bible the “unquenchable fire” fully destroys (annihilates) whatever it burns.

In Isaiah, God’s judgment on the land of Edom results in the smoke of the land rising up “forever” (Isaiah 34:9-10). In the Bible, the terms “eternal” and “forever” can signify events that are irreversible. One example is Samuel the prophet who was to remain in the temple “forever”—that is, as long as he lived (1 Samuel 1:22). The smoke rising up from the land of Edom “forever” means that the land of Edom would be irreversibly destroyed and laid waste, as the text also says later. The same Hebrew mode of speech is also present in the New Testament (since it’s written by Jewish authors), and especially in the book of Revelation—another text that is often misused by fundamentalists.

The second death. In the book of Revelation, an evil trinity consisting of the Devil, “the beast”, and “the false prophet” are described as being tormented “day and night forever and ever” in the lake of fire (Revelation 20:10). Death and Hades are also thrown into the lake of fire (Revelation 20:14). Clearly, the lake of fire is an eternally burning hell tormenting sinners eternally, isn’t it?

Firstly, the book of Revelation as a God-inspired book cannot be taken to contradict what the rest of the Scripture says on the issue. If all the books in the Bible canon are inspired by God, which Christians affirm, all the books of the Bible must agree with each other. Secondly, it’s clear from the rich imagery employed in the entire book of Revelation that it’s allegory. The book of Revelation has been notoriously hard to understand because of its rich use of allegory and cryptic imagery, such as “the beast” and the number 666. The lake of fire is no different, but is part of the rich imagery and symbolism in this book.

Sometimes the book of Revelation explains the meaning of its own symbols. Twice it states that the lake of fire is the “second death” (Revelation 20:14 and 21:8). Now, what should we make of this term, the “second death”?

It’s evident that the book of Revelation is written by a Bible-reading Jew (the apostle John), because most of the symbolic imagery found in Revelation resembles that in the Hebrew Bible. This is crucial. Death in the book of Revelation must have the same meaning as death in the Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament). As we have seen, death in the Old Testament (and the New) is described as unconscious sleep. The second death after God’s final judgment must therefore refer to a second and eternal sleep. When the Devil, the beast, and the false prophet are tormented in the lake of fire “forever and ever”, this signifies the irreversible outcome of their torment and death (which is total destruction) in line with the mode of speech found in the Hebrew Bible. It does not signify an eternal process of pain and dying; this we can know for certain by looking at an Old-Testament prophecy concerning the Devil’s final punishment.

The Devil will be turned to ashes. The prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament describes God’s final judgment on the cherub who sinned (the Devil). The end result will be that the Devil is turned to ashes (Ezekiel 28:18). As mentioned earlier, the prophet Malachi describes the punishment of the wicked on judgment day and writes that they will be consumed and there will be left neither root nor branch (Malachi 4:1-3), meaning that no wicked entity, neither the Devil nor his followers, will remain. These texts emphatically convey that the Devil and evil will not exist forever, but will finally be annihilated by God. The apostle Paul writes plainly that the wicked will be eternally destroyed (2 Thessalonians 1:9). Eternal destruction is destruction that is irreversible—not an eternal process of being destroyed. (Just as eternal salvation is salvation that is irreversible, not an eternal process of being saved.)

The apostle Paul also wrote that death will be the last enemy that God will destroy (1 Corinthians 15:26), meaning that death will finally cease to exist. In the book of Revelation, Death and Hades are illustrated as being thrown into the lake of fire. After this, the book states that death shall be no more, nor mourning, nor crying, nor pain, since the former things shall pass away (Revelation 21:4). This verse doesn’t make sense with an eternally burning hell somewhere filled with people who are being endlessly tormented. This verse reinforces the understanding that all sin and evil will at last be annihilated and cease to exist. The lake of fire is a symbol of total and final destruction of evil.

A hell that makes sense. If we lay the Bible aside and look at the notion of hell from a common-sense perspective, the idea that God would choose to keep evil people alive and in existence for all eternity makes little sense. Just as a gardener wants to root out and get rid of the weeds from a garden, it seems evident that God in His wisdom and goodness is seeking to completely root out evil from the universe in order to preserve His creation. It is the superstitious belief that humans are born immortal that has led to the monstrous belief in eternal suffering for some people. The back-lash effect of this terrible belief is the trauma, bitterness, and cynicism found among certain atheists who cannot accept such deeply immoral and unjust teachings.

However, the biblical evidence shows that the idea of an eternal life in hell is foreign and does not have its roots in biblical teaching. Sadly, it’s spread through the ignorance about the Bible and the misuse thereof among Christian fundamentalists.

This is my testimony. What is yours? Feel free to share in the comment section below!