Francis Chan and I co-wrote this book back in 2011. Much of what we think about hell comes from presuppositions and tradition. So Francis and I were eager to figure out what the Bible actually says about hell, and this book is the fruit of our study.
But we don't just look at verses and passages. We want to figure out how Christians should live in light of this difficult doctrine.
When I was nearing the end of Seminary back in 2002, I’ll never forget hearing that the great Evangelical leader John Stott was an “Annihilationist;” that is, he believed that hell does not consist of everlasting conscious torment. I remember thinking, “What? I thought that John Stott was a Christian?”
In my previous post, I said that while I am not an “Annihilationist,” I do see enough biblical support for this position to qualify it as an Evangelical option. I have not yet had the time to clear my desk to engage in prayerful, thorough, painstaking exegesis to have landed on this position. But from what I have seen, there’s a good deal of sound, biblical arguments for it. Before we examine these, we need to know what it is we’re even talking about.
I’ve tried my best to show that there are good, compelling, biblical arguments in favor of terminal punishment and that the eternal conscious torment view of hell, while possessing some biblical merit, is not the only clear way to interpret the biblical text.
As many of you know, I’ve been wrestling with the concept of hell for quite some time. It started back in 2011, when Francis Chan and I wrote Erasing Hell, which explored and defended the traditional view that hell is irreversible.
The doctrine of hell has always been part of Christian theology. Unfortunately, hell has had a bit of a checkered past. From the Apocalypse of Peter’s gruesome depictions of women hanging over boiling mire, to skin curling images of hell in Dante’s Inferno, to Jonathan Edwards’s blistering sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, to twentieth-century Bible-belt preachers barking with anger about the wrath to come, hell has been used—and some would say abused—to scare people into obedience or increase their tithe.
