Hell, Eternity and God's Love

In the preceding chapter we saw how God, to continue to be righteous in delighting in his glory, had to punish Eve and Adam for scorning that glory, revealed most clearly in the benevolent love he extended to them. The punishment consisted in an increase in pain for both: Eve would suffer great pain in childbirth, and Adam, excluded from the fruit-bearing trees of Eden, must toil unceasingly to get food from the ground until he and Eve died and decomposed into the dust from which he had been made.

Later revelation, particularly that given by Jesus Christ, makes it clear that the ultimate death promised in Genesis 2:17 for despising God's mercy is an eternal hell: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt. 10:28). The misery suffered there is as eternal as everlasting life is for those in heaven: "Then [the wicked] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life" (Matt. 25:46).

This is indeed a sobering subject, perhaps best approached by considering, one by one, the steps leading to the conclusion that an eternal hell awaits those who persist in rejecting God's mercy. In the process it will become evident that it is only because he does mete out such punishment that God can remain loving. The chapter will then conclude with a consideration of the theory, quite popular today, that God's final punishment of the wicked consists simply in his annihilating the existence of those who remain impenitent.

I. The Eternity Of Hell and God's Love.

Step #1.

Our consideration begins with a point made in chapter eight: God's righteousness consists in his fully delighting in his praiseworthiness, or glory. As with people, so with God: he serves what he worships, and thus his every action is based on whether or not it will uphold, in the long run, the glory of his unsurpassed goodness. Many statements in scripture affirm that God acts out of consideration for the integrity of his name, among them the following: God created people for his glory (Isa. 43:7); for the sake of his name he redeems people and forgives their sins (Ps. 25:11; 79:9; 1 John 2:12), and likewise guides them in the paths of righteousness (Ps. 23:3; 31:3). When the king of Assyria with his far more numerous army was about to capture Jerusalem God declared, "I will defend this city and save it, for my sake" (Isa. 37:35), and when Israel sinned in wanting a king so she could be like the other nations, nevertheless "for the sake of his great name" God did not reject his people (1 Sam. 12:22). But perhaps the most striking of all the passages expressing this idea is the following: "For my own name's sake I delay my wrath; for the sake of my praise I hold it back from you [Israel], so as not to cut you off. . . . For my own sake, for my own sake, I do this. How can I let myself be defamed?¹ I will not yield my glory to another" (Isa. 48:9-11).

It was such scripture passages that led Jonathan Edwards in his essay on "The End for which God Created the World" to conclude that God's sinlessness consists chiefly in his love for his own glory: ". . . the moral rectitude of the disposition, inclination, or affection of God, chiefly consist in a regard to himself, infinitely above his regard to all other beings; or, in other words, [God's] holiness consists in this [delight in himself]"² (1:98).

Step #2.

Therefore if God does everything for his glory, and if he expends his omnipotence in delighting in his goodness, it follows that he will also take great pleasure in those who share in this delight. Thus "[God's] pleasure is not in the strength of the horse, nor his delight in the legs of a man; the Lord delights in those who fear him, who put their hope in his unfailing love" (Ps. 147:10-11). "A horse is a vain hope for deliverance; despite all its great strength it cannot save. But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those who hope in his unfailing love, to deliver them from death and keep them alive in famine" (Ps. 33:17-19).

Step #3.

If God so loves his glory that he employs his almightiness in delighting in it, then that very same power will be directed for the benefit of the people who also love his glory. So it is that God pursues after them to do them good and rejoices in blessing them with his whole heart and soul. And Paul prayed for Christians to realize God's "incomparably great power for us who believe" (Eph. 1:19). But if God's uses his great power to work all things together for the good of those who delight in him, then he must direct the full force of that power against people going in the opposite direction, resting their hopes not in the Creator but in things in the created world that seem to promise a happy future. So Ezra 8:22 says, "The gracious hand of our God is on everyone who looks to him, but his great anger is against all who forsake him."

God cannot remain indifferent to those who are going in this opposite direction. Indeed, since he loves his glory with all his power, he cannot but oppose with all his power those scorning and thus opposing his glory. To do this only half-heartedly would imply that his glory was not sufficient to satisfy his need-love. This in turn would be tantamount to admitting that since he was unable to satisfy his own need-love, neither could he fully meet that of others. But because God could never imply such an outrageous falsehood, he most certainly does oppose those who scorn his worth, thus showing that he is indeed the fully benevolent God, desiring the people he created to share with him the complete joy he has in himself. We argue, therefore, that God could not be loving to those who seek him if he did not vent the power of his wrath against those who remain impenitent. Far from being irreconcilable opposites, God's love and his wrath are simply two ways in which he makes it clear that he himself fully honors his name.

But during people's relatively short lifetimes on earth--seventy years according to Psalm 90:10--God shows love toward both the good and the evil: "He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" (Matt. 5:45). Romans 2:4 makes clear, however, that God does this, not because he is indifferent to evil people, but because his kindness seeks to bring them to repentance. To those who respond to this kindness and turn to worship and serve the Creator rather than something in the created world (Rom. 1:25), God gives the privilege of sharing with him in the fellowship between the Father and the Son (1 John 1:3). But those creature-worshipers who during their lifetimes misinterpret God's many blessings as evidence that he is pleased with them--these succeed only in "storing up wrath against [themselves] for the day of God's wrath, when his righteous judgment will be revealed" (Rom. 2:5). Death marks that time when God's patience with evil people ends, for "[Men and women are] destined to die once, and after that to face judgment" (Heb. 9:27). Then the dam holding back God's pent-up wrath will burst against those who have continued to scorn his loving entreaties, and he will oppose those who have opposed his glory with the omnipotence by which he himself delights in that glory.

An analogy to the equivalence between God's love for his glory and his severity in punishing people in an eternal hell is found in the way human governments operate. For the governed to continue to enjoy the benevolence and blessing of their government, they must honor its laws, since the aim of each law is to enhance people's freedom to pursue happiness. So when individuals violate a law and, at the expense of others' right to pursue happiness, claim for themselves a greater right, the government cannot remain indifferent to their arrogance. Instead it proceeds to apprehend, prosecute, convict, and punish law breakers by depriving them of an amount of happiness approximately equivalent to the amount of freedom to pursue happiness that they took from others. How much of this freedom a government takes from lawbreakers, by fines, hours spent in doing community service, imprisonment, and even death, is keyed to how serious their breaking of the law curtailed the victims' freedom to pursue happiness.

So those parking overtime lessen to some extent the freedom of others to accomplish their business in a downtown area. Therefore the loss such parking violators suffer will about equal that which they inflicted on others, which may mean forfeiting the happiness that twenty dollars or more could bring them. This enacting of parking laws expresses the government's benevolent purpose to hold open for the greatest number of people the desirable but limited parking space in a shopping area. Thus as officers are seen ticketing those who have parked overtime, the government maintains credibility in its concern for people.

Greater crimes--running a red light, speeding, hit and run, armed robbery, kidnapping, murder, and treason imply in an ascending degree a deprivation of others' freedom to pursue happiness. Therefore the punishment for armed robbery may well require a ten-year loss of freedom, while intentional murder will often require life imprisonment or even death, because the victim of this crime has lost all freedom to pursue happiness in this world.

The most serious of all crimes, however, is treason. Traitors arrogate to themselves the right to acquire happiness at the expense of millions of their fellow-citizens, who are then deprived by the enemy of virtually all freedom. Though Norway had abolished the death penalty in 1905, nevertheless after it was freed from German occupation in 1945 it executed a traitor, Vidkun Quisling. Quisling, a Norwegian who before the war had held high positions of trust in various government posts, was executed for his role in aiding the Nazis as puppet governor of Norway from 1940 to 1945. In that role he both helped the Nazis to bleed Norway white and also to apprehend and execute many Norwegians for working with the underground resistance. Therefore after the war the government felt that his crime in inflicting such great hurt on some four million people demanded the death penalty. Only this ultimately severe punishment would befit the enormity of Quisling's crime and fully restore confidence that Norway's post-war government would again vigorously work to maintain the welfare of all.

So to maintain credibility in its benevolence a government must match the severity of punishment to the enormity of the crime. The argument for an eternal hell therefore rests upon this correspondence between enormity and severity. If it can now be shown in the final step of the argument that humanity has sinned in the worst possible way against God, then our sense of justice must call for the severest punishment, and the biblical teaching of eternal misery in hell for the impenitent meets that requirement.

Step #4.

In an earlier chapter we saw how the greatest possible insult we can render a person is not to trust him or her (above, ). The greater the benefit promised and the more revered the maker of the promise, the more outrageous becomes the insult in not believing that promise. In the preceding chapters we have said that God is the most praiseworthy of all beings, because as the only all-wise and all-powerful God he has promised to give those who depend on him the greatest blessing possible, namely, the privilege of sharing with him for eternity the joy that he has in himself. Therefore those who persist in the independence Adam and Eve exhibited in the fall are guilty of a sin of the greatest enormity. And for God to be consistent with his burning desire to be fully benevolent to people, he must punish this enormity with the greatest severity. Thus the biblical teaching of eternal torment in hell for rejecting God's mercy should accord fully with our sense of justice.

Jesus called people the sons [and daughters] of hell (Matt. 23:15), and a passage that helps us see our total depravity is God's description of Israel as "people [who] come near to me with their mouth and honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me" (Isa. 29:13). We all know how much more our hearts are inclined to think about succeeding in our tasks. How unwilling we are each day first to spend time in prayer, seeking God's wisdom for handling the affairs of that day and also asking him to guide us that we might accomplish the purposes that he has for each of our lives! The heinousness of this rebellion against dependence on God is strikingly stated in Jeremiah 2:9-13:

"Therefore I bring charges against you again," declares the Lord. . . . "Cross over to the coasts of Kittim and look, send to Kedar and observe closely; see if there has ever been anything like this: Has a nation ever changed its gods? (Yet they are not gods at all.) But my people have exchanged their Glory for worthless idols. Be appalled at this, O heavens, and shudder with great horror," declares the Lord. . . . "My people have committed two sins: they have forsaken me the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water."

This, then, is the sense in which people are totally depraved: we have all treated God in the most insulting way by registering again and again a vote of "No confidence!" in his promises.³ How often we refuse to "give thanks in all circumstances" (1 Thess. 5:18), because we do not believe that God truly is working everything out for our good. People who profess to know God but are not "joyful in hope [and] patient in affliction" (Rom. 12:12) make God ashamed that they call him their God (Heb. 11:16). Their downcast and complaining temperament dishonors him before others, and discourages them from turning the controls of their lives over to "the faithful God" (Deut. 7:9).

Therefore we understand our total depravity primarily to consist in heaping the greatest insult upon God by refusing to regard him as trustworthy. And this unbelieving attitude toward God also renders great injury to other people, for it reinforces their inclination to trust in themselves rather than in God to satisfy their need-love. So the enormity of people's total depravity consists both in treating God in the worst possible way and in deterring others from knowing the unsurpassed blessing of having him work for them to do them good with his whole heart and soul. The enormity of such a crime therefore requires a punishment having a corresponding severity. And the Bible's teaching that this punishment consists in eternal torment in hell has that corresponding severity. We therefore conclude that it is just and right for God to consign the impenitent to an eternal hell.

But there is a tendency today, even among Bible-believing Christians, to say very little by way of warning people that they will spend eternity in hell if they are not looking to God to give them the happy future they desire. One reason to shrink from declaring this part of the biblical message is that at first glance it seems so contrary to God's love. But we believe that the explanation in the preceding section makes it clear that God can remain loving only by opposing, with the full fervency of his love for his own glory, those who oppose him by scorning the opportunity he gives to enjoy that glory. Great wisdom, however, must be used in presenting this truth. Paul told Timothy to preach the word, God's whole purpose, but "with great patience and careful instruction" (2 Tim. 4:2). This highly sensitive but most important matter should therefore be set forth only when there is opportunity to show people, step by step, that the enormity of their sinfulness in being totally depraved requires God to render such a corresponding severity of punishment on the impenitent. Then ministers of the word will not risk calling in question God's love or be charged, as sometimes happens, with finding sadistic delight in teaching this sobering subject.

There is evidence in Paul's farewell address to the elders of the Ephesian church that he was thinking about judgment and hell, for just before his affirmation of faithfulness in preaching the whole gospel he said, "I am innocent of the blood of all men" (Acts 20:26). This echoes the threat God gave Ezekiel to urge him to warn Israel of the severe judgment against those who persisted in sin:

When I say to a wicked man, "You will surely die," and you [Ezekiel] do not warn him or speak out to dissuade him from his evil ways in order to save his life, that wicked man will die for his sin, and I will hold you accountable for his blood. But if you do warn the wicked man and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his evil ways, he will die for his sin; but you will have saved yourself (Ezek. 3:18-19; see also v. 20 and 33:7-9).

No teacher of scripture would want to share the blame for any of their hearers who have refused to give up their independence and become like little children in trusting God. How terrible it would be at the judgment day to see people condemned because, while we had taught them parts of the biblical message, we had said little or nothing about hell! It should also be pointed out how the above warnings reveal God's great love for people in wanting them to be clearly confronted by every reason for worshiping and serving him rather than the creature. So we please God when we warn people about hell, even though such preaching can incur anger and ridicule. But as preachers and teachers of the word we surely will want to please God rather than people, for as Paul said, "If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ" (Gal. 1:10).

Paul always wanted to lay primary emphasis on God's love and kindness: "Consider therefore the kindness and sternness of God: sternness to those who fell, but kindness to you, provided that you continue in his kindness" (Rom. 11:22). Here God's kindness is mentioned first and last to show that for Paul, this is most important. But God's sternness is also mentioned twice in between, for Paul dare not downplay his severity, and thus risk its being overlooked. And it is in this same sense that we should understand such statements as "[God does not want] anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance" (2 Peter 3:9); "God . . . wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth" (1 Tim. 2:3-4); and Jesus' lament over Jerusalem, "How often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, but you were not willing!" (Luke 13:34). Here we see that God's joy comes from saving people who repent, not from punishing those who persist in sin. And of the many biblical passages that make this explicit we cite Ezekiel 33:11, Luther's ultimately comforting verse: "As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live. Turn! Turn from you evil ways! Why will you die, O house of Israel?"

Therefore we may sum up the relationship between God's love and wrath with the statement--so vital for understanding his plan in redemptive history--that God's kindness (or mercy, or benevolent love) is his free, ultimate work, the work in which his soul finally and fully delights, whereas God's wrath in punishment is his necessary, penultimate work. Though he finds no pleasure in punishing the wicked, he nevertheless does it as something he must do, so that without devaluing his glory he can fully rejoice in being merciful to the penitent.

III. Is Annihilation the Punishment for the Wicked?

Necessarily, then, the foregoing passages imply that not everyone will heed God's warning and repent, so that a part of the human race will be eternally punished. But some evangelicals today, while agreeing that part of the human race will be lost, are finding it increasingly difficult to teach that these lost will suffer in an eternal hell. They believe that the Bible's statements about hell can be understood as teaching that punishment for the wicked will consist simply of annihilation as centers of consciousness.

One such evangelical is Clark Pinnock, a theology professor in Toronto, and we cite his brief, two-part argument for annihilation: (1) the "exegetical flimsiness of the traditional view of hell" and (2) "the moral horror" of that view.⁵

Pinnock argues first that annihilation, not conscious punishment, is implied by the biblical statements regarding the fate of the wicked. Pinnock sees this, for example, in John the Baptist's reference to Christ's burning the wicked as chaff (Matt. 3:10, 12), because what is burned is consumed. Annihilation is also taught, he argues, in Jesus' warning to fear God's ability to cast both the resurrected physical body and the soul into hell (Matt. 10:28).⁶ To him this means that both body and soul will be destroyed. As for Matthew 25:46, "[The wicked] will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteousness to eternal life," Pinnock insists that the eternal punishment of the wicked is not God's "eternal punishing," but an irrevocable punishment consisting in annihilation: "The fire of hell does not torment, but rather consumes the wicked."

Pinnock next argues that conscious torment for eternity in hell in inconsistent with the love of God. . . . the traditional understanding of hell is unspeakably horrible. How can one imagine for a moment that the God who would give his Son to die for sinners because of his great love for them would install a torture chamber somewhere in his new creation in order to subject those who reject him to everlasting pain? According to Pinnock, this traditional understanding is morally flawed and ". . . is accelerating the move toward universalism." But he wants to remain true to scripture, and so he says, "I cannot eliminate the dark side of divine judgment from the picture. The judgment is a terrible event because God's wrath against obdurate sinners is serious and consuming." "After all," he says, "the notion of being condemned to nonexistence is pretty grim . . ."

But here we must question Pinnock's explanation of divine judgment as "terrible" because ceasing to be a center of consciousness is "serious" and "consuming." Indeed, losing all consciousness of one's existence and being consumed would be "serious" rather than casual, but for many, such a prospect would be desirable rather than "terrible." Shakespeare's Hamlet (Act III, sc. i), for example, toys with the possibility of killing himself with a dagger, so as to be free from the guilt of his misdeeds. But then he recalls how few people actually have the courage to commit suicide, because they cannot be sure that they would thus escape having to endure the pain and misery of punishment for their sins. Common experience therefore told Shakespeare that for some, annihilation would be a prospect welcomed rather than feared, a fate fervently desired, as by his Hamlet, though by no means assuredly attainable.

In fact, people hardened in wickedness could take real comfort in the thought that they would simply cease to exist at death rather than having to answer to God for their sins. What must surely have consoled Adolf Hitler as he saw the inevitability of the German defeat was that he could annihilate himself as a center of consciousness by committing suicide just before the Russians overran his bunker in Berlin; he must have scoffed at the idea of ever having to answer before God for the millions he had had killed, and to be punished accordingly. So his certainty of annihilation must have made it easier for him to carry on his wickedness. Nor can any of us justifiably classify as "terrible" the non-existent state in which all of us were for the countless ages before our births; though without any center of consciousness, no one remembers that time as at all undesirable.

A second problem with annihilationism is that it does not have a severity that corresponds to the enormity of our sin of heaping insult after insult upon God by failing to believe his promises. The cessation of existence is by no means a severe enough punishment to pose the sort of threat that such sin against God's credibility deserves. If "every violation and disobedience [will receive] its just punishment" (Heb. 2:2), then something more than annihilation must be in store for wicked people.

Certain scriptures also present serious difficulties for annihilationism. Jesus said concerning Judas that it would have been better for him "if he had not been born" (Matt. 26:24), which necessarily implies that something far worse lay in store for Judas than his non-existence before birth. Another problem is that five times in Matthew's Gospel Jesus spoke of how people would weep and gnash their teeth after learning of the terrible future that lay ahead of them as outcasts from God's kingdom (8:12; 13:42; 22:13; 24:51; 25:30). Matthew 13:41-42 is particularly instructive: "The Son of man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. They will throw them into the fiery furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." Annihilationism finds difficulty in explaining why people will weep and gnash their teeth in a fire that, according to its theory, will so quickly snuff out all consciousness.

Annihilationism also takes away the sting of Jesus' warning not to fear those who can do nothing more than kill the body, but to fear God who has power to cast both body and soul into hell (Matt. 10:28). The nub of the argument is that we are not to fear what people can do to us, for while they can end our physical lives, they cannot erase our being centers of consciousness as those who have souls. But we are to fear God, who does control the status of our souls. If as Pinnock teaches, however, all that God does with the unrepentant soul is to snuff out its existence along with that of the resurrected body, then what is there to fear in the resulting non-existence?

Finally, annihilationism does not accord well with Paul's statement that God will "punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished [lit. "be recompensed"] with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the majesty of his power" (2 Thess. 1:8-9). Understanding the wicked's continued existence as suffering eternal exclusion from God's presence fits in better with the idea of a "recompense" than the exclusion from his presence of those who have merely ceased to exist. Moreover the continued existence of the wicked accords better both with our sense of justice and with the thesis of this chapter, that there must be an equivalence between the enormity of the crime involved in rejecting the gospel and the severity of the punishment for this crime. Simply to lose all consciousness falls far short of the severity needed to indicate the awfulness of failing to glorify the God who longs to be gracious to people and to work for their benefit throughout eternity.

What then of Pinnock's argument that it is impossible to imagine for a moment that the God who would give his Son to die for sinners because of his great love for them would then install a torture chamber somewhere in his new creation in order to subject those who reject him to everlasting pain? The basic problem with Pinnock's objection is that he does not probe deeply enough into the reason why God sent his Son to die for sinners. He certainly did it because he loved them, but why did this love mean that his Son had to die for them? The scriptural answer is that Christ came to die "as the one who would turn aside [God's] wrath" (Rom. 3:25 margin). Jesus had to appease God's anger so that God would remain just when he forgave sinners and in no wise tarnish his own glory. "He [sent Christ to die] . . . so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus" (Rom. 3:26).

So the marvel of God's love in sending Christ to die is the length to which he was willing to go to forgive sinners, yet without depreciating his glory and thus becoming unjust. And we have seen that God's love to sinners consists in giving them the opportunity to share with him the joy he has in his glory. Therefore, since we will exult in God's glory through eternity to come, we should rejoice in all that he does to keep his glory from being profaned. One means to this end, as we saw in 2 Thessalonians 1:9, is his punishment of sinners in hell as a recompense they pay so that their having flouted God's glory will never succeed in profaning it. Consequently, this eternal punishment should be a satisfaction to all the saints in heaven, whose greatest delight is in sharing with God the joy of his glory.

Jonathan Edwards preached a sermon entitled "The End of the Wicked Contemplated by the Righteous: or the Torments of the Wicked in Hell, no Occasion of Grief to the Saints in Heaven" (2:207-212); it was based on Revelation 18:20, "Rejoice over [Babylon], O heaven! Rejoice, saints and apostles and prophets! God has judged her for the way she treated you." Edwards emphasized that this rejoicing of the saints in the punishment of the wicked

. . . will not be because the saints in heaven are the subjects of any ill disposition. . . . The devil delights [like the S.S. at Auschwitz] in the misery of men from cruelty, and from envy and revenge, and because he delights in misery, for its own sake, from a malicious disposition. But it will be from exceedingly different principles, and for quite other reasons, that the just damnation of the wicked will be an occasion of rejoicing to the saints in glory . . . . It will be no argument of want of a spirit of love in them, that they do not love the damned; for the heavenly inhabitants will know that it is not fit that they should love them, because they will know then, that God has no love to them, nor pity for them. . . . [The suffering of the wicked] will be an occasion of their rejoicing, as the glory of God will appear in it. . . . God glorifies himself in the eternal damnation of the ungodly men.⁷

Pinnock should therefore take seriously God's statement in the closing verse of Isaiah: "And [the saints] will go out and look upon the dead bodies of those who rebelled against me; their worm will not die, nor will their fire be quenched, and they will be loathsome to all mankind" (Isa. 66:24).

Thus in this chapter we have talked of the recompense impenitent sinners must pay to repair the injury their sins have inflicted on God's glory. And we have argued that scripture is clear that the only way they can render that recompense is to suffer the eternal punishment of God's almighty wrath in hell. If, however, that were the only way God could maintain the integrity of his glory, then he could not realize his most cherished purpose to extend the joy of his goodness outward to many, many people in the world he had created. But in God's dealings with Adam and Eve we noted that he was acting toward them not only in terms of justice for their sin of unbelief but also in terms of mercy, because his purpose to fill the earth with his glory had not changed. How God could then maintain this merciful purpose, even after people had sinned, is the subject of the next chapter, which tells how Jesus Christ, through his incarnation, death, and resurrection, paid to God the recompense our sin demanded.

Send comments to dfuller@fuller.edu (Daniel Fuller)

Notes

¹ To force our minds to think clearly about what is being said, we should rephrase the rhetorical question (in italics) as a declarative statement: "It is impossible for me [God] to do anything that would defame my name in any way."

² Edwards, Works, 1:98

⁴ A large percentage, however, will be saved, with many yet to be converted in the future, especially after the return of Christ to earth and before the creation of the new heavens and earth. See also Rom. 11:12 ("But if [Israel's] transgression means riches for the world, and their loss means riches for the Gentiles, how much greater riches will their fullness [their conversion--see v. 26] brirrg!"). The "fullness" of Israel here must mean their conversion, since it is the opposite of their impenitence spoken of earlier in this verse. Then since verse 15 is so similar to verse 12, we can say that "life from the dead" coming from God's acceptance of Israel must also be a hyperbolic way of designating the greater numbers of Gentiles on earth who will then turn to God.

⁵ Clark Pinnock, "Fire, Then Nothing," Christianity Today,March 20, 1987, 40-41. See also David L. Edwards, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1988), which includes a response from John Stott. In Stott's reply to Edwards, he said, "It would be easier to hold together the awful reality of hell and the universal reign of God if hell means destruction and the impenitent are no more. I am hesitant to have written these things, partly because I have a great respect for longstanding tradition which claims to be a true interpretation of Scripture [eternal punishment in hell], and do not lightly set it aside, and partly because the unity of the worldwide Evangelical constituency has always meant much to me.... I do plead for frank dialogue among Evangelicals on the basis of Scripture. I also believe that the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal conscious torment" (319-20).

⁶ Scripture teaches the future bodily resurrection of both the wicked and the just in Dan. 12:2, John 5:28-29, and Acts 24:15.

⁷ Edwards, Works, 2:208-9.