(
Matt. 10:28) These words of Jesus the Roman Catholic priesthood and Protestant clergy of Christendom have used to argue that the human soul is unkillable and that it is, as the ancient Babylonians and the pagan Greeks claimed, an “immortal soul.” The Holy Bible, in both its Hebrew Scriptures and its Greek Scriptures, teaches that the human soul is mortal, not immortal, destructible, not indestructible. Eighty-eight or more Bible texts can be quoted to show that the human soul dies; no texts show that it is immortal.
What, then, did Jesus Christ mean when he said: “Do not become fearful of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul”? He meant that such opposers and suppressors of the preaching of God’s kingdom cannot keep the faithful Kingdom preachers from having a resurrection of their souls from Haʹdes, the common grave of dead mankind.
Many have been told that the early Church Fathers, medieval theologians, and Reformers argued that the torments experienced in hell are everlasting? It may surprise you to know that some highly regarded Bible scholars are now challenging that view. In Britain, one of them, John R. W. Stott, writes that “Scripture points in the direction of annihilation, and that ‘eternal conscious torment’ is a tradition which has to yield to the supreme authority of Scripture.”
His first argument involves language. He explains that when the Bible refers to the final state of damnation (“Gehenna”), it often uses the vocabulary of “destruction,” the Greek “verb
apollumi (to destroy) and the noun
apòleia (destruction).” Do these words refer to torment? Stott points out that when the verb is active and transitive,
“apollumi” means “kill.” (
Matthew 2:13;12:14; 21:41) Thus, at
Matthew 10:28, where the
King James Version mentions God’s destroying “both soul and body in hell,” the inherent idea is destroying in death, not in eternal suffering.
At
Matthew 7:13, 14, Jesus contrasts the “narrow . . . road leading off into life” with the “broad . . . road leading off into destruction.” Comments Stott: “It would seem strange, therefore, if people who are said to suffer destruction are in fact not destroyed.” With good reason he reaches the conclusion: “If to kill is to deprive the body of life, hell would seem to be the deprivation of both physical and spiritual life, that is, an extinction of being.”
Regarding those cast into Gehenna, Jesus said that “their maggot does not die and the fire is not put out.” (
Mark 9:47, 48)
Isaiah 66:24, the scripture that Jesus evidently alluded to, says that the fire and the maggot are destroying the dead bodies (“the carcasses,” says Isaiah) of God’s enemies. There is no hint of everlasting conscious torment in either Isaiah’s words or those of Jesus. The imagery of fire symbolizes complete destruction.
Revelation 14:9-11 speaks of some who are “tormented with fire and sulphur . . . And the smoke of their torment ascends forever and ever.”
* Does this prove eternal conscious torment in hellfire? Actually, all this passage says is that the wicked are tormented, not that they are tormented forever. The text states that it is the
smoke —the evidence that the fire has done its work of
destruction— that continues forever, not the fiery torment.
R
evelation 20:10-15 says that in “the lake of fire and sulphur, . . . they will be tormented day and night forever and ever.” At first reading, this might sound like proof of eternal conscious torment by fire, but it definitely is not. Why? Among other reasons, “the wild beast and the false prophet” and “death and Hades” will end up in what is here called “the lake of fire.” As you may easily conclude, the beast, the false prophet, death, and Hades are not literal persons; therefore, they cannot experience conscious torment. Instead, writes G. B. Caird in
A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, “the lake of fire” means “extinction and total oblivion.” This realization should be easily reached, for the Bible itself states about this lake of fire: “This means the second death, the lake of fire.” —
Revelation 20:14.
In spite of these arguments, many believers insist that “destruction” does not mean what the word says but means eternal torment. Why? Their thinking is influenced by hellfire’s religious twin —the doctrine of the immortality of the human soul. And since their church may have mothered these twins for centuries, they may feel that texts that speak of destruction actually mean eternal torture. After all, the immortal human soul cannot go out of existence —or so it is reasoned by many.
But note the point made by Anglican clergyman Philip E. Hughes: “To contend that only the human soul is innately immortal is to maintain a position which is nowhere approved in the teaching of Scripture, for in the biblical purview human nature is always seen as integrally compounded of both the spiritual and the bodily. . . . God’s warning at the beginning, regarding the forbidden tree, ‘In the day that you eat of it you shall die,’ was addressed to man as a corporeal-spiritual creature —should he eat of it, it was as such that he would die. There is no suggestion that a part of him was undying and therefore that his death would be in part only.”
Similarly, theologian Clark Pinnock remarks: “This concept [that the human soul is immortal] has influenced theology for a long, long time but it is not biblical. The Bible does not teach the natural immortality of the soul.”
Ezekiel 18:4, 20 and Matthew 10:28 confirm this. Moreover, Jesus himself spoke of his dead friend Lazarus as having “gone to rest,” or sleep. Jesus said that he was “to awaken him from sleep.” (
John 11:11-14) So the human being, or human soul, Lazarus had died, but even after some time passed, he could be resurrected, brought back to life again. The facts prove that. Jesus resurrected Lazarus from the dead. —
John 11:17-44.
