By Jimmy Stephens and TheSire

I don’t want to gatekeep, and I don’t think you have to be a heretic to hold annihilationism. Some might use it in ways that do undermine God’s justice or slide toward universalism, and that would be serious error. But people like Chris Date aren’t badly motivated for believing it. My point is simply that there are some basic, substantive reasons to reject annihilationism.

Debates about hell often stall on slogans: “eternal conscious torment” vs. “conditional immortality” or “annihilationism.” But beneath the labels are real exegetical and theological tensions—especially around two biblical themes:

1. The eternity of punishment.
2. The degrees of punishment.

Traditionalists argue that the lost suffer consciously and forever. Conditional immortality proponents respond that the wicked are finally destroyed— they cease to exist—and that this irreversible loss of life is the “eternal punishment” Scripture speaks of.

At first glance, that sounds coherent: the punishment is “eternal” because the result (non-existence) is never undone. But once you bring in biblical teaching on degrees of punishment and the structure of texts like Matthew 25:46, serious tensions emerge.

Let’s start by stating the view as fairly as possible.

Conditional immortality (CI) or annihilationism claims that the wicked do not endure everlasting conscious torment. Instead:

• The wicked are raised, judged, and punished.
• They may experience real suffering and retribution.
• But the final punishment is death—the destruction of the person, body and soul.
• That death is irreversible. There is no resurrection-from-hell, no second chance, no eventual restoration.

So when CI proponents read passages like Matthew 25:46—“these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life”—they typically say:

• “Eternal punishment” = not an eternal process of punishing,
  but an eternal result (eternal death, permanent loss of life).
• “Eternal life” = ongoing life with God.
• The adjective “eternal” in both cases refers to the everlasting outcome.

From that angle, the logic runs like this:

Conditional immortality proponents argue that the punishment is “eternal,” but only in the sense that the wicked will never exist again. The Bible, however, seems to teach both that the punishment is eternal and that there are degrees of punishment. Some try to account for this by saying that some people will simply be annihilated “more harshly” than others.

Now consider a simple point that almost everyone in the debate grants:

• The Bible teaches degrees of punishment (e.g., Luke 12:47–48; Matthew 11:20–24).
• Yet it also speaks of an eternal punishment (e.g., Matthew 25:46; 2 Thessalonians 1:9).

If annihilationism is true, then in terms of ultimate destiny, everyone ends up in the same condition:

• The murderer and the moralist, the false prophet and the lukewarm church kid—if finally lost—are all non-existent forever.
• Whatever their path to that end, their final state is identical: no existence, no consciousness, no experience.

So we can put the problem like this:

There are different levels of hell, but if annihilationism is true, then everyone ultimately gets the same punishment. However, if the punishment is actually the means God uses to annihilate, then that ongoing punishment is what makes it an eternal punishment.

Conditionalists see this kind of argument and say, “You’re loading in a traditionalist understanding of ‘eternal punishment’ and then faulting us for not matching it.” So how would Rethinking Hell style conditionalists respond?

(a) “Eternal punishment” can mean eternal result

First, they’ll say you’re demanding that “eternal punishment” must describe an unending experience of pain. But in biblical language, deverbal nouns (“punishment,” “destruction,” “redemption,” etc.) can refer either to:

• the act (the punishing), or
• the result (the punished condition).

So, they argue, there’s nothing strange about:

• “eternal destruction” = a destruction whose effect is eternal,
• “eternal punishment” = a punishment whose outcome (death) is everlasting.

On their view, the wicked are punished by being killed, and that death never ends or reverses. In that sense, the punishment is truly eternal.

(b) Degrees of punishment occur in the process and in lasting shame

Second, they’ll say your “everyone gets the same punishment” objection is simplistic because it only looks at the final state, not the path and honor/shame dimensions.

They’ll say, for example:

• Different sinners may endure different degrees of suffering—greater or lesser torment, longer or shorter duration—before annihilation.
• Scripture’s talk about “many stripes” vs. “few stripes” (Luke 12:47–48) can map onto variations in the severity, intensity, and duration of pre-annihilation punishment.
• Beyond that, there may be degrees of shame in how these people are remembered in God’s world; some are “more infamous” in the eschatological memory of the redeemed than others.

So, yes, the final destiny is death for all, but the process and the dishonor can be richly differentiated.

(c) “Your argument boomerangs on ECT”

Third, they’d point out that your intuition—“if everyone ends up in the same general state, degrees don’t really matter”—cuts against eternal conscious torment (ECT) as well.

On ECT:

• Ten billion years into eternity, everyone in hell is still enduring misery with no exit.
• Even if you posit different “levels” of torment, all differences are swallowed up in the sheer infinities of duration.
• So, by your own standard, everyone “ultimately” gets the same thing: unending conscious misery.

So conditionalists push back: if common destiny plus infinite duration erases meaningful degrees on their view, it does the same on the traditional view.

I think their reply has real force—but it doesn’t fully solve the problem.

The Issues

Conditionalists say degrees are accounted for in the process (more or fewer “stripes”) and in lasting shame. But consider:

Process-based degrees.
If all the degrees are located in the pre-annihilation phase, then:

• Punishment is finite for everyone.
• The only eternal difference is that everyone equally stays dead forever.

That makes “eternal” functionally a label for irreversibility, not ongoing retribution. And if there really is some kind of torment involved in that process, then that torment is itself part of the punishment. It’s not some extra, pre-judicial stage you pass through in order to finally reach the “real” punishment. On their own terms, those processes are what should count as the eternal punishment—yet they’re explicitly finite.

Shame-based degrees.
If degrees are also located in how we remember the wicked, that’s at least an ongoing reality—but then the punishment is not primarily what they bear, but how we regard them. It shifts punishment outward, away from the subject, into the memory of others. A further problem is that this “degrees of shame” proposal quietly shifts the focus of judgment away from God’s moral verdict and onto a kind of eschatological shame culture. Final judgment in Scripture is not primarily about how other people think of you, but how God judges your life before His law and His glory. Will God really calibrate degrees of punishment by simply ensuring that all believers think of you more or less terribly forever? And even if He did, why would that matter to someone who has spent their entire life indifferent to God’s opinion in the first place? If the annihilated unbeliever was unmoved by the disapproval of God Himself, it is hard to see how the lingering disapproval of other redeemed creatures—whose approval or disapproval is obviously lesser—could be cast as the great, enduring weight of their punishment. On this model, the “eternal” aspect of the penalty ends up located not in any state borne by the wicked, but in the attitudes of other people—a strange downgrade from divine retribution to social perception. We are not the ones punishing sinners in hell; God is. It hardly makes sense to think our private opinions play that constitutive a role in their final judgment.

Does the “eternal result” account match Matthew 25:46?

Take Matthew 25:46:

“And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

Two observations:

1. The verse sets up a tight parallel: eternal punishment vs. eternal life.
   • Whatever we say about “eternal life” is not just an instantaneous event but an ongoing state.
   • The natural reading is that the “eternal” aspect of each corresponds in mode, not just duration.
2. “Going away into” eternal punishment sounds like being placed into a continuing condition, not merely experiencing a temporary process that terminates in non-existence.

Conditionalists reply, “Yes, but ‘eternal life’ is the ongoing enjoyment of God, while ‘eternal punishment’ is the irreversible deprivation of that life.” The challenge is that Scripture presents these as dual destinies with symmetrical weight. Choosing to make one an ongoing conscious state and the other a past event with a static result strains that symmetry.

Punishment ordinarily implies something borne by a subject. It is someone who:

• suffers loss,
• bears penalty,
• endures pain or deprivation.

But on annihilationism:

• After the last moment of consciousness, the person is gone.
• There is no “them” to experience anything, no ongoing subject to whom the punishment is present.

At that point, what is “eternally punishing”? Not the person—there is no person. It’s just an eternal absence.

That creates an odd picture:

• God eternally relates to a fact (that they once existed and now do not).
• But the person themselves does not eternally bear anything.

Calling that “eternal punishment” starts to sound like saying:

“I punished him eternally by killing him once and never bringing him back.”

We can certainly say it’s a decisive punishment, a final punishment, but the biblical language presses us toward something richer than a single, unexperienced finality.

So where does this leave us?

• Conditionalists rightly stress that death—the wage of sin—is a central biblical category. They are right to warn traditionalists against a caricatured hell that has little to do with Scripture.
• But at the same time, the logic of annihilation flattens the final destiny of the wicked:
  whatever degrees exist in the path, the ultimate horizon is identical non-existence.

That creates two problems:

1. The experiential problem:
   Once a person is gone, they are no longer bearing anything. Their punishment, as far as their own experience is concerned, is over. To call what continues “eternal punishment” is really to say that God’s decision not to bring them back is eternal. But that is a divine stance, not a punishment borne by a subject.
2. The degrees problem:
   Scripture’s language of degrees seems most naturally at home in a framework where lives and histories terminate in different kinds of ongoing states, not all dissolved into the single condition of non-being.

If we take seriously:

• the parallels between eternal life and eternal punishment,
• the personal character of divine judgment,
• and the meaningfulness of degrees in eternity,

then a model in which all the lost converge into the same final state of non-existence looks increasingly strained.

Annihilationism offers a powerful emotional and rhetorical appeal. It emphasizes God’s final victory and the end of evil. But when you press on the biblical pairing of eternity and degrees, its internal tensions become hard to ignore. It risks turning “eternal punishment” into something that is eternal only in God’s memory, not in the lived reality of those who rejected Him.

If hell is anything, it is the place where persons reside under the righteous judgment of God. Whatever form that takes, it must remain both eternal and personal in a way that a once-for-all annihilation struggles to sustain.

This is ironic, because conditionalists often argue that penal substitution fits poorly with ECT—on the grounds that Jesus did not literally suffer eternal conscious torment in hellfire, and thus did not endure exactly what the wicked would have faced. But that same stringent principle backfires on annihilationism: if substitution requires Christ to undergo the exact same punishment the lost would have borne, then he would have to cease to exist as they do on that model—which is impossible without collapsing into Christological heresy. So either way, that rigid “one-to-one identity of punishment” principle undermines both views, and shouldn’t be used as a weapon against ECT in the first place.

The deeper problem is that annihilationism makes the penalty of sin a personal cessation: the impenitent sinner, as a concrete someone, finally stops existing. It is not merely that their body dies, but that they—the person—are no more.

Christology Issues

By contrast, in orthodox Christology:

• The Person who suffers on the cross is the eternal Son.
• In the incarnation, the Son assumes a true human nature permanently; once the Word becomes flesh, he does not later stop being man and then start being man again. Scripture presents his humanity as enduring from the incarnation onward: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), the holy one born of Mary is explicitly called “the Son of God” in his human conception (Luke 1:35), and even in his exalted, post-resurrection state he is still “the man Christ Jesus” (1 Tim 2:5). After the resurrection he insists, “a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (Luke 24:39), ascends bodily (Acts 1:9–11), and is described as the one in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). Scripture already gives us examples of human beings who continue as human persons in God’s presence rather than being emptied out into some non-human mode of existence, such as Enoch, who “was taken up so that he should not see death” (Heb 11:5), and Elijah, who was taken up into heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kgs 2:11). And even in the state of death, Christ does not cease to be the God–man: while his body lay in the tomb, he as the incarnate Son continued to exist and act, even “proclaiming to the spirits in prison” (1 Pet 3:18–19; cf. 4:6). As our high priest, “he had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Heb 2:17) and now “holds his priesthood permanently” (Heb 7:24), which presupposes the ongoing reality of his glorified human nature.

So if you try to map the annihilationist penalty onto Christ, you hit a Christological wall:

1. If you say the person must cease to exist, then Christ did not bear that penalty. The eternal Son never went out of existence, and the hypostatic union was never broken. The very thing that, on annihilationism, constitutes the climactic punishment of the wicked—the ceasing of the person—is precisely what cannot be true of Christ.
2. If instead you say that his human nature ceased to exist, you create a different Christological problem. Once the Son assumes a human nature, he is forever true God and true man. The New Testament knows nothing of a period in which the incarnate Son is no longer human and then becomes human again. That would effectively treat “Jesus the man who died” and “Jesus the man who was raised” as numerically distinct human individuals—functionally two human “persons” associated with the same divine Person.

Either way, annihilationism’s notion of punishment as the ending of the person does not fit cleanly with substitution. If the wicked are punished by personal extinction, and Christ never undergoes personal extinction, then he does not bear the same kind of penalty they would have borne—which is exactly what annihilationists need if their atonement model is going to work.

Motivational Problem

Jimmy Stephens argument would be that the core motivations for annihilationism are incoherent once you think through what a human person actually is.

1. What does it even mean to “annihilate” a mind?
   Annihilationism only really “works” cleanly if you’re a physicalist—if you think humans just are their bodies or brains, so that once the body is destroyed, the person is gone.
   But most evangelical annihilationists are not physicalists. They’re some kind of dualist. And on dualism, you don’t get rid of a person simply by killing the body. The mind/soul is not automatically destroyed just because the body dies.
2. You can’t kill a mind by killing a body.
   All the standard annihilation prooftexts are about death, perishing, destruction—and in context these are overwhelmingly about bodily death and judgment, not the metaphysical deletion of a soul. A mind, as such, is not vulnerable to fire, decay, or bodily ruin. If you’re a dualist, you need more than just “the body died” to get to “the person no longer exists.”
3. So the annihilationist faces a dilemma.
   • Option A: Embrace physicalism.
     Bite the bullet and say humans are purely physical, so once the body dies there is no surviving subject. That makes annihilationism tidy, but now you’ve paid a huge metaphysical and theological price somewhere else.
   • Option B: Posit a special act of divine soul-deletion.
     Say that God not only kills (or simply refuses to raise) the body, but also takes an extra step: He actively erases the person from existence. But now notice:
     • The texts don’t actually say this. They say “death,” “perish,” “destroy,” not “God will un-create your soul.”
     • You’ve smuggled in an extra metaphysical move—divine obliteration of the person—that isn’t found in the passages you’re appealing to.
4. Death ≠ nonexistence.
   Biblically, “death” is consistently treated as the privation of life, not the non-existence of the subject in every sense. If you insist that “death” means nonexistence in the annihilationist passages, you’re already loading your metaphysics into the text, not deriving it from the text.

So either way, the annihilationist’s motivations don’t hang together:

• If he wants “death texts” to mean literal nonexistence, he’s assuming a picture that only really tracks if he’s a physicalist—and most aren’t.
• If he wants to keep the soul, then “death” in those passages does not, by itself, yield annihilation of the person; he has to add a second, unspoken step: God’s active obliteration of the soul.

In the end, he either butchers the death texts to squeeze nonexistence out of them, or he butchers his own anthropology to make physicalism do the work. What he can’t have is a neat, text-driven annihilationism with tidy moral and metaphysical motivations that all line up. The mind is by definition immortal. It’s not possible to kill a mind because a mind isn’t physical in the first place.

The Resurrection and the Logic of Punishment

Another serious problem for annihilationism is the resurrection of the wicked.

If the damned are raised only to be annihilated, there’s no clear pragmatic or moral sense to it: they are raised just to be un-raised. That looks less like a distinct final judgment and more like re-applying the same punishment twice—first in ordinary bodily death, and then again in eschatological death—without any clear gain in terms of justice.

By contrast, on the traditional view, the resurrection of the wicked introduces a unique, final state: they are raised, judged, and then enter into an ongoing condition of retributive, conscious punishment. In that sense, ECT preserves the distinctive finality of the resurrection judgment.

I’m not a fan of the labels “ECT” or “infernalism”; they’re loaded and often used rhetorically. The real issue is that the traditional view is the one that actually fits a robust notion of retributive and restitutional justice, which is precisely where annihilationism runs into deeper problems.

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Death, Justice, and the Nature of the Crime

Ask a simple question: If death pays the penalty for sin, why isn’t the unbeliever’s first death sufficient?

• The annihilationist wants to say that final death (second death) is the true penalty.
• But bodily death has already occurred once before. If death, as such, is what pays for sin, then the unbeliever already “paid” that penalty at their first death.

The traditional view avoids this confusion by treating:

• The first death as part of the general curse on Adam’s race.
• The final state after resurrection as the true and personal execution of retributive justice.

Now bring in the worth of God:

• If God is worthy of perpetual worship and obedience, then sin against Him is not a momentary misstep but a crime with ongoing significance.
• A merely finite, bodily death—especially one already suffered once—hardly seems proportionate to a life of continual rebellion against an infinitely worthy God.

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Can “Death” Be a Perpetual Punishment?

Annihilationists often try to answer this by saying that death is a perpetual state. The wicked, once destroyed, remain dead forever, so the punishment is “everlasting.”

But this runs into a basic problem about the nature of punishment:

• You cannot have a perpetual punishment without a perpetual subject of punishment.
• On annihilationism, after the final destruction there is no subject left—no person to whom the alleged ongoing punishment can be present. There is only the absence of a person.

That’s not a state they are in; it is the fact that they no longer are anything.

It’s like saying, “Nonexistence is a perpetual punishment.” But prior to my creation, I was also “nonexistent.” Was I being punished then? Obviously not—because there was no ‘I’ to punish.

So on the annihilationist scheme:

• Death may be final, but it cannot be perpetually punitive in any meaningful, experiential sense.
• The language of “eternal punishment” gets hollowed out into “an eternal fact about the past,” not an ongoing, justly proportioned penalty borne by a living subject.

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The Confusion

Put simply, annihilationism ends up confused on several fronts at once:

• About the nature of punishment: treating the bare fact of nonexistence as if it could function like an ongoing penalty.
• About restitution and retribution: acting as if a crime against an infinitely worthy God can be fully answered by a finite, already-once-experienced bodily death.
• About time and penology: treating a single act with a past, static result as though it constituted a genuine, enduring punishment in time.

The traditional view may be emotionally difficult, but it at least preserves the intuitive structure of justice: a perpetual subject bearing a perpetual consequence for a perpetual offense against a God of infinite worth.