Hell: Eternal Conscious Torment (Traditional view) examined

• Traditionalists believe that the soul was created immortal.  

o Greek philosophy held to an immortal soul and some early church theologians held this view as well and it became the default position in the church since.  

• The fire may be literal or figurative 

o CS Lewis and NT Wright take the view of someone becoming less of the image of God (Eternal Goluming) 

o Tertullian, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, and Johnathan Edwards believed that the saints would rejoice to see the justice of God in the torment of the lost.    

Scriptural 

• Genesis 2:17​  

• Daniel 12:2  

• Isaiah 66:24 

• Mark 9:43​-44 43   

• Matt 25:41​,46 41  

• Luke 16:24​ 24  

• 2 Thes 1:9  

• Revelation 14:10​-11  

• Revelation 20:10​, 14-15     

Strengths 

• Tradition and History 

• A Motivational tool for evangelism (turn or burn) 

• “Takes sin seriously”   

Weaknesses 

• Many assumptions built into their exegesis of scripture which we’ll address in the next video.  

• Paints a picture of God that is a bit monstrous. Why create people just to torture them? 

• Doesn’t account well for the severity of punishment based on the crime. All is equal. Some try to say that there is a spectrum of pain based on the sinner, but this is speculation and not in the Bible.  

• No text in the Bible states that the lost will live forever and there’s no text in the bible that says man is immortal 

• God giving people a lobotomy so that they don’t remember parts of their life in order to not mourn the lost is problematic. If we are made for fellowship with God and each other it seems like it’s a terrible thing to do to eliminate memories of those we loved.  

• Though ECT is a good tool for evangelism, is it true? In Acts the disciples and evangelists never used Hell in their evangelism sermons. They occasionally used judgment but talked about the one who was going to judge (Jesus) and not the method of judgement. ECT is not in Acts at all, so should we use it as a tool to evangelize?  

• No torment text in the OT (Daniel just says contempt and Isaiah talks about dead bodies). If this was that important why wouldn’t God mention it earlier? And why not have Israel evangelize the pagans, instead God has nothing to do with them.  

• ECT’s view of infinite punishment for sin against and infinite God goes in the face of “each will be judged according to their works”. There seems to be levels of reward and punishment that ECT doesn’t account for except in the level of pain which is nowhere in scripture.   

• ECT never actually deals with the problem of sin if sinners are allowed to exist eternally. So God never actually wins and as a creation where righteousness dwells (2 Peter 3) and he is all in all (1 Cor 15). The books are never closed.