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Dear Friends of Reasonable Faith,
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We hope that those of you who are, like us, in the northern hemisphere are continuing to enjoy the summer. Jan and I love being able to swim every day in the community pool in the hot weather!
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Systematic Philosophical Theology
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 | Pieter Huys, The Last Judgment, 1553–1554, oil on panel. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore (37.262). CC0, Public Domain.
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I’m thrilled to report substantial progress on my Systematic Philosophical Theology. I am currently working on the last section of the last locus of the last volume! The last locus of my fifth and final volume is on Eschatology, or doctrine of the last things. The last section of that locus deals with the final state of the blessed and of the condemned (usually called “heaven” and “hell”). So as not to end my Systematic Philosophical Theology on a down note, I decided to reverse the usual order and treat hell first and heaven second, thereby ending on an upbeat. I have just finished the section on hell. The principal biblical question to be settled here is whether hell involves everlasting suffering or annihilation of the condemned. This is a very complex issue, and after studying it, I am more convinced than ever that the New Testament teaches the everlasting suffering of the condemned rather than their annihilation. Perhaps the major weakness in the case for annihilationism is the absence of any clear, explicit statement in the Bible that the condemned cease to exist. Instead, the position is based entirely on inference and innuendo, often on the assumption that human beings are not body/soul composites.
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The biblical view of hell encompasses several theses:
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- Christian particularism: The final state of persons who are not redemptively united with Christ is hell.
- Persistence: Persons who are condemned to hell will continue to exist there.
- Misery: Persons in hell will experience unrelieved suffering, excluded from the Kingdom of God.
- Perpetuity: Persons condemned to hell will remain there forever.
- Retributive punishment: The fate of those condemned to hell at the Last Judgement is their just desert.
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If those condemned at the Last Judgement are sentenced to everlasting suffering, then a number of difficult philosophico-theological questions naturally arise: (1) Is everlasting suffering compatible with God’s justice? (2) Is everlasting suffering compatible with God’s love? (3) Does everlasting suffering diminish God’s victory over evil? So in the philosophical portion of this chapter, I address these three questions.
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David Klöcker Ehrenstrahl, The Last Judgment, 1696, Storkyrkan, Stockholm. Photo: Rainer Halama, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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| Although many thinkers have objected philosophically to the justice of everlasting punishment, this objection is almost never developed in any depth but simply asserted. But if the sin of rejecting God himself, who is alone worthy of worship, is an infinitely grave sin, committed without justification or excuse, then it plausibly deserves an everlasting punishment. Such a fate is entirely consistent with the free choice of the condemned themselves. Separation from God is both their freely chosen fate and their just desert. God’s goodness does not obligate him to prevent such a choice either by overriding people’s free will or by refraining altogether from creating a world of free creatures. Creation of a world of free persons is worth the terrible cost of hell because it results in an incommensurable good: the knowledge of God himself.
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I am now just beginning to tackle the topic of the final state of the blessed. Fortunately, this topic is much less controversial, both biblically and philosophically, than the topic of hell. So I’m hoping that it will go more quickly.
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Meanwhile, with the invaluable help of Kevin Whitehead, a member of my Defenders class, I have returned the proofs of vol. III Doctrine of Creation, Doctrine of Man to the publisher Wiley Blackwell. Once they have made the final corrections and I have signed off on them, then the book can proceed to production. At the same time, Wiley Blackwell is sending to me the initial proofs for vol. IV Doctrine of Christ, Doctrine of Salvation to proofread. This is a slow and painstaking process, which I have just begun.
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During this past month, I have been preoccupied with writing on the topic of hell. Nevertheless, I continue to teach my weekly Defenders Sunday School class, write weekly Questions of the Week (we just reached the milestone of QoW #1000!), and record “Reasonable Faith” podcasts with Kevin Harris. I also sat for an interview on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus with a French podcaster.
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I’m also glad to announce that our newest Zangmeister video in the series on “The Attributes of God” dealing with the subject of the Trinity will be released in about a week’s time. The videos in this series are longer and deeper than the Zangmeister videos tracing the chapters of my book On Guard. They make excellent teaching tools for the Christian doctrine of God!
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For Christ and His Kingdom,
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