An Anthropological Case for Annihilation

Every Christian has been faced with the question, and most have actually wrestled with it themselves. The question is, “How could a loving, benevolent God punish people in an eternal Hell?” Of course, there are several theodicies which attempt to solve this seeming contradiction. But, to my mind, the recurring weakness in all is that each makes God the defendant and assumes his actions need to be justified. That is one of the troubles of a theodicy. They are based on human reasoning and fallen ethics rather than scripture.

As a theodicy, Annihilationism (the doctrine that those who are not saved do not suffer eternally in Hell but are annihilated) is among the worst offenders. Most of the arguments I have heard for this viewpoint have centered on the notion that God’s love is inconsistent with eternal judgment. Passages which discuss judgment in terms of eternal destruction are interpreted literally, perhaps rightly. But I have never been tempted to accept the Annihilationist viewpoint for its value as a theodicy.

I have, however, become more open to it from an anthropological standpoint. Some years ago I began to reanalyze dualism as a legitimate anthropology and came to the conclusion that the biblical understanding of humanity is that a human is a UNITY of body and spirit. The model described in Genesis is that God created the body, breathed life (spirit) into the body and man BECAME a soul. So that, people don’t have souls, they are souls.

Going one step further, most Christians accept, without much reflection, the idea that the spirit is a ghost-like being that lives inside their bodies and that the real person is the spirit, the body is just a shell or cloak which the spirit “wears.” This is easily more compatible with 2nd and 3rd century Gnosticism than biblical theology. In fact, the silly Gospel of Judas states that Christ’s goal was to shed the physical body so that the real person underneath could be free. This is why Judas is seen as the hero, because he freed Jesus from “the man that clothes me.” This view necessarily separates “mind” from “brain.”

Phenomenologically speaking, science seems to be coming to the conclusion that the brain and thought and feeling are inseparably linked. The recent Time article a few weeks ago was about how it may be possible to link a person’s moral viewpoint with problems in their brains. (Who knows whether there is a causal link one way or the other?) But it seems to me that this view is much closer to biblical anthropology than any other. We were created physical and meant to live physically. We are physical people with spiritual application.

To my mind, the spirit is literally our personality. It is that part of us which thinks, feels, loves, and wills. It is inseparably linked to our body. That being said, if my view is the most scriptural (and I believe it is—I should be presenting a lot more research and scripture, but I’m in a hurry and want to get this on today…I may add more later), this has massive implications on eschatology.

It seems to me that Romans 8 describes the “redemption of our bodies,” vs. 23. Someday, those who are in Christ will be raised from the dead and have their bodies renewed, just as their spirits had been renewed, redeemed, and reconciled to God in life. The new, glorified body will be like Christ’s, vs. 29. We will have physical bodies which are incorruptible. This is the only way we can continue life—it is not possible for us to be as God designed us and live outside of our bodies. We are not spirits who happen to be in bodies but can live apart from them. We are soul-units!

The implication this has on Hell is also plain. If Hell is a place of eternal destruction—the picture is always fire—how can it be that our bodies would survive in such a place? The question is then, does God resurrect the unsaved into glorified bodies for the sole purpose of torturing them for all of eternity? It certainly doesn’t make sense to believe that a spirit can live forever without the body—because humans are souls, not ghosts trapped in machines. If my anthropology is correct, and if I’m understanding Hell as an eternally destructive place, then it does not make sense to see the punishment of Hell as being an eternal place of pain and suffering.

What, then, is Hell? Certainly it is a place of suffering. And, certainly it represents eternal separation from God—and ultimate separation from others and within ourselves. To the unsaved, death would represent the ultimate destruction of the body. Those who survive until the return of Christ would be destroyed in the final judgment, sent to the final separation of Hell. But the suffering would only last until the body was destroyed. At that point, the being is completely and eternally separate from God and unable to continue on.

I’m just sitting on this right now. I’ve had difficulty motivating myself to blog lately and am working on beginning a new project exploring the implications of the incarnation on divine immutability. But I may return to this to beef it up and add things later.