Thoughts on Conditionalism

Last year, I wrote and published a book on Christian eschatology; it was modest in scope and somewhat revisionist in intention. You can get a copy here and other places as well. One of the main ´isms’ of that volume, one of my main departures from the received dogmatic traditions of my youth, is conditionalism, or the belief that the unsaved ultimately perish rather than experience endless torment throughout the ages.

If you introduce yourself as a conditionalist to someone with a more traditional bent to their eschatological views, the interaction can fork in any of a few different directions:

You are the dreaded, fuzzy, bleeding heart liberal. This is a very bad thing and you must accept it as such. The traditionalist interlocutor in the conversation must assume the moral ascendancy here and look down on your heterodoxy. Somewhere, you lost the moral courage to continue believing that those reject the claims of the Gospel/Christ must be (rightfully) tortured forever and ever.

Aww, youre just confused! That is really sweet of you to think that the suffering of the godless savages should end at some point. Unfortunately, sinning against an infinite being requires an infinite punishment. So, obviously, hell must mean eternal conscious torment. Your heart is in the right place, though.

Wait, how does that work? So the unsaved people just..die? What about hell lasting forever? Isn´t that what the Bible teaches? Tell me more about why you think that.

I have encountered all of these types. Number one is the most frustrating. (Three is fun!). If you meet someone who believes that the unregenerate face billions of years of torment in the afterlife, at which point their pain will have only just begun (!), does it really follow that they are made of stronger moral fiber? There may well be a strong conviction in play. But I think it most likely that this person (like millions of Christians?) has not spent a lot of time reflecting on this reality in a deep, granular way. In other words, has that conversation partner really considered billions of fellow humans—Jewish neighbors, Sikh classmates, Muslim brothers-in-law—on a cosmic hamster wheel of endless pain because they believe differently?

So strong is the dissonance, Jonathan Edwards and others resolved it by suggesting that believers will look down with glee and delight at the torment of the wicked (I find this line of thinking deplorable, although that is not how I view Edwards on the whole). I think these people simply affirm what they were taught—to be fair—and eternal conscious torment was portrayed as central in their reception of the Christian gospel.

Number two also thinks you are wrong, but instead of berating you for lacking nerve, she commends your expression of ultimately misguided pity. Here is the redirect: if you actually love people, you will tell them they are heading to endless hell (when that is evidently accurate). Although this is really not the approach of the apostle Paul—he often connected the good news of Jesus with some cultural element or longing—I can accept it in principle. The problem arises when this interlocutor does not give a fair hearing to alternative views on the endlessness of hell.

Lastly, the open mind. Oh, how I love an open mind! It always pierces me to read of those Greeks hearing Paul speak at Mars Hill and declare, we will hear you preach on this matter again (Acts 17:32). In the main, I think the open minded interlocutor will find that the New Testament reads more cohesively and clearly when a conditionalist, death-as-death approach is adopted. Gospel imagery makes more sense. Human destiny makes more sense. The justice of God makes more sense. There are no literary or exegetical contexts in which this reading is awkward and many where it resolves confusion (cf. Romans 6-7). I, for one, need all the helps and correctives I can get when I am tasked to read a first-century Book with a twenty-first century brain.