When the Fire Does Not Go Out: Facing the Reality of Eternal Punishment
When the Fire Does Not Go Out: Facing the Reality of Eternal Punishment
The renewed skirmish over eternal punishment—ignited again by Kirk Cameron’s recent nod toward annihilationism—reminds me how cyclical these debates are. Every decade or so, someone with a popular platform revives the hope that judgment might not be quite as dreadful as the church has always insisted. It’s a tempting hope, frankly. Annihilationism offers a softer landing, a kind of metaphysical anesthesia: the wicked simply cease. But whenever this discussion resurfaces, I find myself returning to the same stubborn texts that resisted me all the way through my dissertation work. Those passages—e.g., Matthew 25:46; Revelation 14:11; 20:10—have a granite-like durability. Whatever interpretive gymnastics one attempts, the stubborn parallelism of “eternal life” and “eternal punishment,” the smoke that “rises forever and ever,” and the devil’s being “tormented day and night unto the ages of the ages” refuse to be domesticated.
I’ve sometimes joked in discussions that if the biblical writers had intended to teach annihilationism, they chose a remarkably unhelpful set of phrases. But the troubling thing is that the recent wave of conditionalism often builds its case not from Scripture’s positive teaching, but from moral intuitions re-smuggled into the exegetical process. “Eternal conscious torment is incompatible with a loving God,” we are told, as though the cross provided no commentary on how seriously God regards sin, or as though Jesus Himself—the One who spoke most vividly of hell—had a more fragile sense of divine goodness than modern readers. There’s an irony here: annihilationism is frequently advertised as a more “biblical” view, yet the engine driving it is usually something other than the text.
What convinced me, during the years of archival reading and wrestling with Greek verbs (and let me tell you, aiōnios has been bent in more ways than a circus contortionist), was not tradition for tradition’s sake but the pattern of language itself. Scriptural descriptions of judgment bear the marks of continuity, not cessation. A state, not a moment. Consciousness, not collapse. Even the apocalyptic imagery—yes, with all its symbolic freight—presses in the same direction: ongoing ruin, ongoing rebellion, ongoing divine justice. It’s not pleasant to say aloud, and anyone who speaks of it lightly, as though cheering for the damnation of the wicked, has not stood long enough under the shadow of Gethsemane.
There’s a pastoral side to this as well. The doctrine of eternal punishment, rightly taught, has never been about morbid fascination. It’s about moral seriousness, about the weight of glory and the weight of sin, about human beings made for communion with God who nonetheless insist on rejecting Him. Hell is, in one sense, simply the dreadful dignity of human freedom hardened into permanence. C. S. Lewis once quipped that the doors of hell are locked from the inside; Scripture adds that those doors, once closed, do not swing back open.
The Cameron controversy will pass, as others have. Annihilationism will surge and ebb, seducing a few, frustrating others. What will remain, long after today’s flare-up is forgotten, is the unyielding witness of Scripture and the sobering conviction the church has carried from the earliest centuries: judgment is real, conscious, and unending. Not because God delights in ruin—He does not—but because His holiness is not a negotiable attribute, nor is human rebellion a trivial wound that can be excised without cost.
If that sounds severe, it is. But that severity is what makes the gospel blaze with such astonishing mercy. Only those who grasp the real peril of eternal punishment can begin to appreciate the staggering grace of the One who bore wrath so that we might bear life.
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