One of my favorite resources is Rethinking Hell. Ultimately they are very persuasive in their claims that the original intended interpretation of the imagery of hell in scripture is total destruction – annihilation.
They present great arguments, but ultimately most bible fundamentalist Christians won’t be persuaded unless they show how scriptures on hell could be understood from an annihilationist view point.
The most obvious objection to Annihalationism is, “what about all those versus that talk about eternal torment?”. Interestingly, the term the bible almost always uses is not torment but punishment. or fire. Eternal destruction is punishment. It does not say eternal punishing, although tradition has trained readers to read that into the verse. The loss of life, total destruction, complete annihilation is punishment. Capital punishment is punishment.
There is one passage that does talk about eternal torment, and that is Revelation 20:10
the devil who deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where the beast and the false prophet are also; and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.
And of course, a few versus later the risen wicked join them.
I don’t have a particular way of understanding this verse, like many versus in revelation. It is important to understand that these are unclear versus because they are filled with apocalyptic imagery. A poor way of dealing with apocalyptic imagery is to interpret it and then use those unclear passages to interpret the clear ones. The highly symbolic imagery of revelation should not be the basis for building a sensible view of hell.
Of course if you’re going to, why not use Revelation 20:14 as your foundation? Death and Hades are thrown into the lake of fire, and we understand that this depicts total destruction. Death and Hades are no more. They’re not conscious entities capable of being tortured.
There are a lot of other versus where tradition skews our interpretation; confusing it for the most obvious interpretation. “Unquenchable fire” does not mean a fire that does not consume its victims, but a fire that cannot be stopped.
“Weeping and gnashing of teethe” is not set beside a duration. And those terms depict sorrow and anger, not pain. There is no reason to believe that weeping and gnashing of teethe will continue forever rather than will be had at the period of destruction.
To awake to “Everlasting contempt” is to be contempted everlastingly, not contempting everlastingly. The wicked in the scene are the subjects, not the objects, of contempt. The wicked are still contempted after they face the second death.
It is easy to think that the tradition is the obvious way to interpret these passages. But without the context of modern day Christianity impressing the idea that hell is eternal torment, the bible does not clearly describe that. The simple obvious way of understanding spiritual death is as the same thing as physical death only spiritual. That excludes spiritual consciousness as physical death excludes physical consciousness. The simple obvious way of understanding the destruction of the wicked is as annihilation.
“I killed your husband”
”Oh my!”
”Yeah, he’s in the other room being whipped”
”Wait, what?”
“The building was destroyed”
”Wow”
”Yeah, we’re still tearing it down”
”Wait, what?”
There are numerous passages that depicts the fate of the wicked as death and destruction. If there is an especially good reason to re-interpret these words from their plain annihilationist interpretations, then so be it. Maybe spiritual death means separation, but you can’t just assert it. In lack of an especially good reason to believe that (and the one verse in Revelation that says torment doesn’t qualify), we should understand them in the normal sense of the words. The traditional view of hell as conscious torment allegorizes the use of these terms, not the annihilationist view.
