Christian doctrine is grounded first and foremost in the testimony of Scripture. On this, evangelical Christians concur. Yet evangelicals often arrive at deep and seemingly irresolvable disagreements on the details and implications of that testimony. How sinners who lack faith in Christ Jesus will be punished at the final judgment is one such point of contention. Edward William Fudge and Robert A. Peterson intend to clarify this issue and move it toward resolution in their recently published exchange, Two Views of Hell.
Neither Fudge nor Peterson is new to this discussion. In 1982, Fudge published The Fire That Consumes: The Biblical Case for Conditional Immortality (Providential Press). It poses a significant exegetical challenge to the perpetuity of hell's conscious punishment and has received endorsements from respected evangelical scholars including F. F. Bruce, John Wenham, and Clark Pinnock, who also demur on the traditional doctrine. Fudge's position, which he refers to as "conditionalism," is among those Peterson answers in his 1995 volume Hell on Trial: The Case for Eternal Punishment (Presbyterian & Reformed). As its subtitle indicates, that book seeks to reverse the erosion of evangelical belief in the traditional doctrine of hell. Two Views consolidates this debate: Each theologian unfolds his case over several consecutive chapters and then submits it to his colleague for a chapter-length response. Thus, the volume represents a valuable opportunity for assessing the rational adequacy of each position with respect to how well it survives interrogation by a well-versed critic.
Part One of Two Views is generally excellent. The discussion begins with Fudge giving readers a helpful, concise introduction (seventy-two pages compared to the five-hundred-page first edition of The Fire That Consumes) to the main contours of his argument. Fudge alleges that the traditional doctrine of hell is a product of blind tradition rather than faithful exegesis. Attention to Scripture shows humans are contingent creatures wholly dependent upon "God's immediate gift of grace" for their minute-to-minute existence. The Church fathers and the Christian tradition that followed them overlooked this obvious Bible teaching because of being gripped by a false platonic philosophy that taught that the human soul is naturally immortal. But if Christians would only heed the "common, ordinary" meaning of the terms that Scripture uses to describe the punishment awaiting the wicked (e.g., die, perish, be destroyed) and accept the conditional immortality of human existence, then they would not be tempted to think that hell's punishment is unending. Fudge presents this position over four chapters that cover teachings from the Old Testament, Jesus, Paul, and the rest of the New Testament. Fudge claims that the Old Testament events, prophecies, and vocabulary concerning God's judgment of the wicked present a unified teaching of utter eradication and that the New Testament reinforces this outlook.
Peterson's response to Fudge is on point but detailed; so I will only mention some of the more material items. The impressive array of Scriptures Fudge marshals in support of conditionalism dwindles, Peterson says, if we exclude arguments from silence and Old Testament texts that "do not speak of the final fate of the wicked at all" but "of God visiting the wicked with premature death." Fudge's interpretation of passages about eschatological destruction involves specious arguments from linguistics and the passages contexts for restricting the lexical range of "die," "perish," "be destroyed," and "eternal punishment" to annihilation. Indeed, several Scriptural passages (Isa. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 25:31-46; 2 Thess. 1:9; Rev. 20:10 -15) seem recalcitrant to any meaning but the perpetual existence of the unrepentant outside God's favor and immediate presence. To the charge that the traditional doctrine has pagan origins, Peterson replies that Fudge's exposition "gives no evidence" for this assertion; it "ignores" key Scripture passages that indicate human souls are immaterial and survive bodily death (e.g., Luke 23:43, 46; Phil. 1:22 -24; 2 Cor. 5:6 -9); and it reverses the traditional chain of inference where human immortality is inferred from what the Bible teaches about the eternal, conscious destinies of both lost and saved.
Unfortunately, the discussion weakens in Part Two, where Peterson makes his case and Fudge responds. For example, in what seems to be a strategic error, Peterson presents the judgments of eleven distinguished theologians and the ecumenical council of Chalcedon against Fudge. The theologians and council are simply too much for Peterson to cover satisfactorily in the space allotted. Peterson then argues that these theologians' unanimous affirmation of the tradition makes it "highly unlikely" that they "all are in error"; and "if we take their own words seriously," we will conclude their belief was borne neither of vindictive hearts nor of pagan philosophy but of fidelity to Scripture. Yet establishing that these theologians unanimously affirm the traditional doctrine and consider their own judgments biblical doesn't answer Fudge's claim that the tradition is entangled in a systematic error that renders the majority's self-assessments mistaken. Similarly, Peterson's argument that an annihilationist substitutionary-atonement theory would conflict with orthodox Christology as defined at Chalcedon doesn't explain the council's soteriological and liturgical concerns. Bereft of that crucial information, Peterson's complaint appears to presuppose that agreement with ecumenical councils is intrinsically important, and Fudge easily dismisses that claim. Overall, Peterson's truncated explication of the tradition needlessly feeds Fudge's allegation that the traditional doctrine rests on inertia rather than on sound exegetical and theological grounds.
On the other hand, Peterson spends about forty pages on ten Old and New Testament passages that he claims demonstrate that the traditional doctrine is biblical. Although his argument is less clear and concise than his response to Fudge in Part One, Peterson makes some reasonable claims that deserve a reply. Yet Fudge devotes only six pages to these arguments, preferring instead to spend about eighteen pages rebutting Peterson's earlier nonexegetical arguments. In some cases, Fudge's paragraph-long dismissals of Peterson's arguments are valid because Peterson doesn't give Fudge's reading enough credit (as with Isa. 66:24) or the passages at issue are neutral to the conditionalist-traditionalist question (as with Matt. 18:6-9 and Mark 9:42-48). But in other cases, Fudge just repeats an interpretive move that Peterson has properly questioned (using Isa. 66:24 to explain away Dan. 12:1 -2) or he simply ignores Peterson's analysis (as with 2 Thess. 1:5 -10; Jude 7 and 13; Rev. 14:9-11; Rev. 20:10-15). Twice, Fudge claims Peterson "confesses" or "admits" that a Scripture passage "could teach annihilationism" while ignoring Peterson's qualifying phrases "considered by itself" and "[t]aken in isolation" that indicate that the passages support annihilationism only when wrenched from their contexts. InterVarsity's editors should not have permitted this, since it gives Fudge, who has the last word, an unfair advantage with less careful readers, and it needlessly taints Fudge's credibility with the more careful. In any case, Fudge doesn't adequately attend to Peterson's exegetical arguments, and this damages the cogency of his conditionalism.
So Two Views of Hell starts more strongly than it ends. Moreover, the volume's format prevents the dialogue from developing beyond the initial level of criticism, leaving its readers with the task of unraveling and clarifying the issues Fudge and Peterson both explicitly and implicitly raise. Yet this task must be done because some of these issues are crucial to the debate's direction and ultimately to its resolution.
For example, Fudge claims that his case "rests totally on Scripture" and "simply…[walks] through the Bible" in contrast to his opponents' case, whose nonexegetical contributions to the debate (e.g., philosophical theology and literary analysis) he portrays less charitably. Arguments of the latter sort are "rationalistic," "pagan," "nonbiblical," "unscriptural," "feudalistic," and "uninspired"; they provide "no reliable starting place" and their conclusions "cannot be proven." If Fudge's use of this language were merely descriptive, it would be accurate in many cases, since Greek philosophy is pagan, etc. However, his pejorative use of it gives the impression that his arguments are intrinsically more rational or trustworthy than his opponents' arguments, because he appeals only and more often to Scripture. But this is misleading.
The "emotionally charged language" describing traditionalism's hell as "torture" and traditionalism's God as an "eternal torturer" for which Peterson chastises Fudge in Part One multiplies from one pejorative usage in Fudge's exposition to ten in his response to Peterson. Fudge offers no Bible verses to back up these descriptions because there are none-no Scripture says that the unending punishment of unrepentant sinners would be unjust. Moreover, both his own assertion that it would be unjust to "punish people forever for deeds done during a few years on earth" (which, incidentally, impugns the justice of irreversible annihilation as well) and his three-paragraph rebuttal to Anselm's argument that everlasting punishment is fitting for creatures who have sinned against God's augustness belong to moral philosophy and philosophical theology, not to biblical exegesis.
So Fudge's rhetoric is inconsistent with his brand of biblicism, and it takes the moral high ground with paltry warrant at best. But upholders of the traditional doctrine should press him further. Fudge repeatedly states that the conditionalist account doesn't restrict whether and for how long God can justly inflict conscious pain on the wicked prior to their annihilation, most likely because mere annihilation doesn't capture the Bible's depiction of the eschatological sufferings of unrepentant sinners. But can he then furnish a sound argument that identifies a relevant ethical difference between the traditional doctrine and his conditionalism? On the one hand, if the traditional doctrine of hell condones torture, then so does Fudge's conditionalism; on the other, if there is an argument explaining why the potentially lengthy conscious sufferings of unrepentant sinners prior to their annihilation do not constitute torture, then the traditional doctrine may also stand exonerated. So not only does Fudge's response to Peterson use doubly unacceptable rhetoric, but the practical interests of pastoral caregivers, apologists, evangelists, missionaries, and others are not advanced by adopting his conditionalism.
Besides the relationship of exegesis and philosophy to doctrinal inquiry and each other, this dialogue raises the issues of whether in practice Fudge and Peterson base their exegetical cases on an accumulation of the evidence in the Scriptures or on a group of anchor texts (Ps. 110:12; Is. 66:24; Dan. 12:2; Matt. 10:28; Matt. 25:31-46; 2 Thess. 1:9; 2 Pet. 2:4-10; Rev. 20:7-15) and whether Fudge or Peterson presents the more accurate understanding of the zoen aionion or aionios zoe with which Scripture often contrasts the fate of the unsaved.
Pastors, evangelists, teachers, and other laity who read Two Views of Hell to obtain an immediately clear understanding of the conditionalist-traditionalist debate and a knockdown argument for either position may come away disappointed. But for those with less lofty expectations and time to think through the issues, Fudge and Peterson provide an invitation to this discussion and plenty of grist for our own theological milling.
