The Kirk Cameron Controversy
Kirk Cameron recently stirred up new discussion on an old topic regarding the character of God in relation to the nature of hell. Cameron framed the issue through an emotional appeal to parental instinct:
What if your son or your daughter looked you in the eye and said, “Dad, mom, I know you believe in hell. I know you believe that God is just. I know you believe that sin is serious. And I know that Jesus is the only way to heaven. So when an unrepentant person who doesn’t turn to Jesus dies, what does the Bible actually say happens to them? Are they preserved forever and kept alive by God in a place of endless conscious torment, suffering forever, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth with no end? Or is the judgment that Scripture describes something different? Is it still real, still just, still severe, but culminating in what the Bible calls death, destruction, or the Second Death, which is the lake of fire?” What would your answer be?1
1. Kirk Cameron, “Did I Change My Mind? | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 90,” YouTube video, December 17, 2025.
Cameron’s appeal to what “the Bible actually say[s]” is, ironically, evidence of the very confusion it claims to resolve. The language of torment, of suffering forever, and of weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth is not ecclesiastical embellishment, but the language of Scripture itself, as he concedes. To ask whether the judgment described therein might be “something different” is, at best, exceedingly misguided.
The alternative Cameron endorses is conditional immortality, associated with conditionalism and annihilationism. But that position arrives at the same view of death as atheism. The conditionalist Joey Dear states the position plainly:
Think of how an atheist views death, and what happens when we die; like, you don’t have a mind, you can’t think, you can’t feel, you have absolutely no conscious[ness] or awareness of anything; you’re simply a corpse. That’s essentially what we’re saying happens to people. They can’t be tormented, because, like if you poke a corpse with a knife, or set it on fire, no matter what you do to it, it’s not going to feel pain, or think, or anything. It’s just inert matter. That’s all that we necessarily are saying; now, whether the atoms are destroyed, like, that could happen, and it makes perfectly good sense to me, but it doesn’t have to happen.2
2. Joey Dear in “Episode 73: Exterminate Annihilate Destroy,” Theopologetics, February 1, 2012.
Why would a professing Christian adopt an atheist eschatology with respect to the damned? The answer, in Cameron’s case, appears to be emotional incredulity at the justice of God:
If you believe in eternal conscious torment, it’s not just that. What you’re actually saying is that if you are a sinner and you don’t give your life to Christ, you go to hell. Not just for a hundred years, not just for a thousand years, but for all of eternity. For literally we can’t even imagine how vast eternity is. After 10,000 years of anguish and pain and torment and darkness, you’re not one day closer to finding relief. You’re not even one second closer. After a billion years, you’re not one second closer to the end. We think of God as a just God. He is a just God. And we believe that the punishment should fit the crime. And so if the punishment was cruel and unusual punishment that went far beyond the severity of the crime, that would no longer be just. So is that really just an eternity of conscious torment for a limited lifetime of sin? I’ve learned that there are other positions and a very robust argument can be made for conditionalism or annihilationism. It fits the character of God in my understanding more than the conscious eternal torment position because it brings in the mercy of God together with the justice of God. It doesn’t leave judgment out. It is to die and it is to perish, not live forever in an eternal barbecue. So that’s where I am today.3
3. Kirk Cameron, “Are We Wrong About Hell? | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 86,” YouTube video, n.d.
In this essay, I will address Kirk Cameron’s incredulity regarding the duration and severity of eternal punishment while briefly addressing some of the purportedly robust arguments for conditional immortality. In short, my opposition to conditional immortality, or annihilationism, stems from biblical exegesis, a rejection of feelings-based theologizing, the simple character of God, and the nature of Christ’s atonement.
Conditionalist Confusion
Evangelicals suffer from a remarkably deficient understanding of the eternal state. Many wrongly understand heaven to be man’s final resting place, rather than the new heavens and new earth. In reality, just as our bodies are separated from the immaterial aspect of man in the intermediate state after death, so also heaven is divorced from earth during the Genesis 3 curse. And just as our bodies will one day be raised and reunited with that immaterial aspect in the resurrection, so also heaven and earth will be made one; the dwelling place of God shall be with man.
But what about non-believers? Certainly, they do not enjoy eternal life, and they face eternal death. Yet this eternal death must not be understood as non-existence. Rather, eternal death presupposes perpetual existence. No supernatural grant of “eternal life” is required for mere perpetual existence. You were created, right? Well then, you exist, and will go on existing. That does not mean a person has life in Christ, which Scripturally, involves much more than perpetual existence. Life in Christ is qualitative. The conditionalist/annihilationist operates with a naturalistic view of life, death, and eternity, and reads those meanings into the text of Scripture, when the issue is fundamentally qualitative. The fact that only believers are granted salvation does not entail that everything else is annihilated. The main question is this: What does relationship with God look like for the believer, and what does it look like for the unbeliever?
The idea of a created soul with perpetual existence is not unique to Greek thought, nor does it merely appear subsequent to it. Like the doctrine of “soul sleep,” the polyvalent idea that the soul experiences unconsciousness in the intermediate state between physical death and resurrection, the apparent nature of the soul is a significant plank in the conditionalist and annihilationist platform. But we can simply step around this debate altogether. Scripture teaches an intermediate state, and both believer and unbeliever alike are in fact raised for judgment. How could this be the case if perpetual existence had never been granted?
What Happens After Death: Three Key Verses
Revelation 14:9–11
Despite what the conditionalist might want to say, death does not always mean non-existence, and life does not always mean mere existence. Yes, Scripture speaks of death, destruction, and perishing in relation to judgment. But in no way does the external philosophy of conditional immortality and annihilationism follow from that. Rather, conditional immortality is an assumption brought to the text. If the eternal conscious torment of the wicked in hell were true, and I believe it is, then how else would God say it in Scripture? Why does he already use the very specific language of burning, undying worms, and the like?
Revelation 14:9b–11 says this:
9 If anyone worships the beast and its image and receives a mark on his forehead or on his hand, 10 he also will drink the wine of God’s wrath, poured full strength into the cup of his anger, and he will be tormented with fire and sulfur in the presence of the holy angels and in the presence of the Lamb. 11 And the smoke of their torment goes up forever and ever, and they have no rest, day or night, these worshipers of the beast and its image, and whoever receives the mark of its name.
We can forget the torment, forget the fire, forget the sulfur, and forget that “where there is [eternal] smoke, there is [eternal] fire;” focus on the fact that these worshipers of the beast and its image, “have no rest, day or night” (Rev. 14:11). This is not a picture of unfeeling, unsensing death. Rather, it speaks to a continued, conscious existence.
Revelation 20:10–15
Now consider Revelation 20:10–15, and note specifically what happens in the lake of fire:
10 And the devil who had deceived them was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur where the beast and the false prophet were, and they will be tormented day and night forever and ever. 11 Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. 12 And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. 13 And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. 14 Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. 15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.
The devil, the beast, the false prophet, and every non-believer is thrown into the lake of fire, which is a place of torment “day and night forever and ever.” A conditionalist functionally denies this passage through appeal to symbolism. If you tell him that the devil is thrown into the lake of fire, he might deny the devil is real. If you tell the conditionalist that the torment “day and night forever and ever” in Revelation 20:10 is parallel to the “no rest, day or night” in Revelation 14:11, then he will try to convince you these words are only symbolic. The conditionalist would have you believe Revelation is so beyond our understanding that death entails rest and no rest along with torment and no torment all at the same time!
In Revelation 22:8–15, note well the position of the wicked outside the city gate:
Even if Death and Hades being cast into the second death of the lake of fire does symbolically mean that death is no more, this would be inconsistent with the conditionalist claim that the death of the wicked is eternal. How can the death of non-believers be eternal (annihilationism) if the very reality of death has been destroyed and this is no longer an option? If death is destroyed, then the punishment of non-believers cannot be limited to the death. Beyond this, Gavin Ortlund is right to note in one of his replies to Kirk Cameron that the lake of fire in Revelation 20:10–15 endures; “Death ends, the people don’t.”4 The pattern of what happens to those people is the same as what happens to the devil just several verses earlier.
4. Gavin Ortlund, “Annihilationism: Why I’m Not Convinced,” YouTube video, May 19, 2025.
Revelation 22:8–15
8 I, John, am the one who heard and saw these things. And when I heard and saw them, I fell down to worship at the feet of the angel who showed them to me, 9 but he said to me, “You must not do that! I am a fellow servant with you and your brothers the prophets, and with those who keep the words of this book. Worship God.”
10 And he said to me, “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near. 11 Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.”
12 [Jesus speaking:] “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay each one for what he has done. 13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”
14 Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they may have the right to the tree of life and that they may enter the city by the gates. 15 Outside are the dogs and sorcerers and the sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
Conditionalists attempt to say this passage describes the present rather than the future, based on a misreading of the past tense in verse 8 (“saw,” which appears throughout the book) and based on the false claim that verse 10 supposedly ends the revelation of what is to come. Nevertheless, Revelation 22:14 continues to describe what is to come after everything is thrown into the lake of fire. The coming of Christ is still future, as is the right to the tree of life, as is entering the coming city by the gates. Thus the presence of the wicked outside the city gates in verse 15, too, describes future events. No sense can be made of saying that the wicked, given many descriptive words here in Revelation 22:15, are annihilated. The annihilationist cannot say this all refers to the bodies of the wicked alone, because whatever is not the wicked person’s body is what is responsible for the dogishness and sorcery and sexual immorality and murder and idolatry which was supposedly punished by non-existence, yet, here they are.
The truth is, non-existence is “better” than ongoing suffering of those who exist, as Jesus alludes to in Matthew 26:24, “The Son of Man goes as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed! It would have been better for that man if he had not been born.” The annihilationist idea that this verse need only refer to the greatness of Judas’s punishment in terms of his ruined reputation is ludicrous, as Judas would no longer be around to care. Those who suffer in Scripture frequently seek non-existence, not as a punishment, but for relief of suffering. So we see this in the case of righteous as in Job 3:11, “Why did I not die at birth, come out from the womb and expire?” But we also see this desire with the wicked in response to the torment with which God torments them in Revelation 9:1–6. God inflicts conscious torment on the wicked without letting them die, as that would cease their suffering.
Emotional Incredulity
Now that we have briefly addressed some of the arguments for conditional immortality, we return to Kirk Cameron’s incredulity regarding the duration and severity of eternal punishment. Recall Cameron’s complaint that we cannot imagine how vast eternity is. I suppose we can’t. You may have even met someone who questions how great the new heavens and earth can really be, when they just go on forever. Part of this worry is grounded in our current, cursed existence. But another, deeper source of the sentiment is that an infinite timeline is virtually inconceivable by man.
Not only that, but a punishment as promised by God to the wicked likewise strains human comprehension. The deep desire and sentiment to see ultimate justice carried out against the worst instances of evil provides us with a glimpse into the hatred God has toward sin. But, being sinners ourselves, we can never quite see sin as God does, and thus cannot understand how monumental the punishment for it must be. This is exactly Cameron’s problem, as he lets on when he says, in this context, “And we believe that the punishment should fit the crime. And so if the punishment was cruel and unusual punishment that went far beyond the severity of the crime, that would no longer be just. So is that really just an eternity of conscious torment for a limited lifetime of sin?”5 Cameron objects to the justice of God or eternal conscious torment as he construes justice. Recall how he says, “I’ve learned that there are other positions and a very robust argument can be made for conditionalism or annihilationism. It fits the character of God in my understanding more than the conscious eternal torment position because it brings in the mercy of God together with the justice of God.”6 Those words, “in my understanding” are very important.
5. Kirk Cameron, “Are We Wrong About Hell? | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 86,” YouTube video, n.d., emphasis added.
6. Kirk Cameron, “Are We Wrong About Hell? | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 86,” YouTube video, n.d., emphasis added.
Suppose we stick with Cameron’s concern for what we as humans feel fits from sin’s crime to sin’s punishment, and what we feel God must do in order to be just. Consider this passage from Sinclair Ferguson:
If you believe in the immortality of the soul [the traditional view], then it’s necessary for you to do something in your theology with that immortal soul that rejects God. In contrast, it is claimed [by the annihilationists], the New Testament’s teaching is different. We are to fear him who is able to “destroy” body and soul in hell, and this is what he will do. And it’s vital that we have a biblical response to that [annihilationist viewpoint]. And it seems to me that the biblical response to that is this: that the immortality of man—which of course is dependent on him who alone has immortality—is not rooted in a Hellenistic view of the immortality of the soul that certainly was not in the Old Testament, but is first of all rooted in the biblical doctrine of man as the image of God, created to bear his likeness and to whom he has committed himself to uphold an everlasting existence. And on the other hand, the doctrine of the general resurrection of the dead, which otherwise must be viewed as some kind of cynical joke in the heart of this All-Righteous God, that he punishes men and women and then raises them from the dead simply to annihilate them out of all existence. That’s a little bit like having shot Socrates in the head and taking him to the emergency room in order that he may live to drink the hemlock. And there is something in it that is altogether out of keeping with everything that Scripture says about the utter integrity of God and his dealings with men and women.7
7. Sinclair B. Ferguson, “Universalism and the Reality of Eternal Punishment: The Biblical Basis of the Doctrine of Eternal Punishment,” message, Desiring God 1990 Conference for Pastors, Desiring God, January 29, 1990.
Ferguson not only proposes good and logical reasons for his view, he actually feels that the alternative—Kirk Cameron’s annihilationist view—is inconsistent with the integrity of God. Or, consider that the families of victims of murder and rape and other awful crimes often feel that punishments other than death would serve the offenders well. Sometimes, people want less severe punishments. Other times, they want the offender to experience what the victim did, and maybe more. Death is too good for the perpetrator, especially if death is the cessation of suffering in non-existence.
We could go on, but the point is plain. Once we throw open the door of subjective feelings about the justice of God, and try to determine what God’s character must be like upon the basis of our feelings, we find no bottom to our unbelief. Cameron tips his hand when he, like an atheist, refers to an eternal barbeque pit. If eternal conscious torment is true, and it is, then Cameron flirts with that border of blaspheming by speaking of God’s altogether just actions as if they were cruel and severe. Moreover, why does Cameron want to wed justice and mercy? What mercy do sinners receive outside the gospel of Jesus Christ? None. To be clear, justice and mercy do coincide, but not with respect to the ruination of the reprobate. No, justice and mercy are perfectly related to one another in our standard for both, which is God.
Simple Justice
God has no parts, no composition, no separable attributes that can be set against each other. His essence is not a bundle of properties he happens to possess. God does not have justice the way a judge has a gavel. God is justice. His essence, his attributes, and himself are identical. To say that God’s justice conflicts with his mercy would be to say that God conflicts with himself. Thus, Knox Brown rightly notes:
The Bible gives us various truths about what (or who) God is, which we call divine attributes. Among many other things, Scripture teaches that God is holy (Lev. 19:2, Isa. 6:3), just (Ps. 7:17), loving (1 Jn. 4:8), omnipotent (Job 42:2, Ps. 115:3), unchanging (Mal. 3:6), and that he is one (Deut. 6:4). Each of these communicates something true about who (or what) God is. But these attributes do not apply to God in the same way they apply to creatures. Love is not just a latent property God has, which he can choose to activate in certain situations and ignore in others (perhaps activating “holiness” or “justice” instead). No, love defines who God is always. At the same time, neither the word “love” nor the word “holy” is sufficient to capture the full reality of what God is. If I say that “God is love,” the statement is true, but incomplete—at some point I must say that God is also holy. But it wouldn’t be right to say that God is love + holiness either, as if those attributes are pieces you can add together to get God. Instead, God is loving in all that he is and holy in all that he is.8
8. Knox Brown, “God Is Himself: Why God Is More Than His Attributes,” Christ Over All, February 13, 2026.
When God exercises justice eternally in hell, he is not choosing justice over mercy, as though he were resolving an internal dispute. He is simply being himself. And because God is both justice and mercy by way of simplicity, justice and mercy are not ultimately in tension. They are one. Hell, understood rightly, is not the absence of God’s love per se, but its presence experienced by those who have rejected God. Peter Leithart puts it like this:
Everyone, not merely the penitent who are saved, will spend eternity in the presence of God. Some will find his presence a delight. Some will find it a torment. We may take a further, more speculative step. God himself is a “consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29), especially when he burns with jealousy (Deut. 4:24). God’s jealousy is expressed as punitive wrath, but it’s fundamentally an expression of divine love. Any good lover defends what he loves. Since God is Love, he is jealous when his bride flirts with strange gods. If we follow this line of biblical imagery, we conclude that the fire of the lake symbolizes the burning love of the God whose Name is Jealous. An innumerable multitude (Rev. 7:9) will eternally warm themselves in the fiery love of the Triune God. Thrown into the same fiery love, the unbelieving and others will find it an eternal torture.9
9. Peter J. Leithart, “Hell Yes,” First Things, April 6, 2018.
The wrath of God and the love of God are not competing forces. They are the single, undivided being of God encountered differently depending on the posture of the creature. Brown continues:
It is terrifying, because it means that God acts toward sinners in wrath with all of himself. All of his holiness, omnipotence, love, and glory—all that He is in himself—is opposed to sin. There are not different parts of God—some reluctant to pour out judgment, some demanding that he must despite his reservations. No, all of God is hostile to sin. In the simple act of being himself, the burning, holy, omnipotent love that God is is set against sin and sinners. In hell, there will never be the slightest respite. The wrath God has for sinners will never diminish, because for that to happen God’s own being would have to diminish. He will always act in the fullness of himself.10
10. Knox Brown, “God Is Himself: Why God Is More Than His Attributes,” Christ Over All, February 13, 2026, emphasis in the original.
The very fact that we cannot comprehend eternal punishment for temporal sin is not an argument against eternal conscious torment. It is evidence for divine simplicity. God’s justice transcends creaturely categories because God is justice itself, not a scaled-up version of human jurisprudence. Our intuitions about proportionality are creaturely intuitions, and they were never meant to serve as the measure of divine judgment.
There is a further irony here. The conditionalist objection, pressed to its logical conclusion, actually strengthens the case for eternal conscious torment. If punishment must be proportional, who determines the proportion? If the answer is that God does, then we are simply asking what God’s justice requires, which returns us to the question of God’s nature. And if God is justice by simplicity, then whatever his justice requires is, by definition, just. The conditionalist cannot appeal to proportionality without implicitly appealing to a standard of justice outside of God, which is precisely the move divine simplicity forecloses.
Nor does this eternal conscious torment position commit someone to a type of dualism. Good and evil are not two fundamental, independent, equal opposing forces that shape the cosmos. Rather, God alone is good, God alone is fundamental, God alone is truly independent, and God alone shapes the cosmos. The creature’s ultimate good is in the knowledge of his Creator. For the unrepentant unbeliever, this means experiencing God in God’s severe disposition toward sin. If sustaining the possibility of evil for the sake of his glory, love, and creaturely freedom in an otherwise good creation in Genesis 1 was not a compromise of God’s goodness or sovereignty back then, there is no principled reason to regard the eternal containment of evil in hell as a compromise of God’s goodness or sovereignty now. The justification is the same in both cases. Scripture nowhere promises the annihilation of sinners as the condition of God’s final victory. God’s reign does not require the elimination of evil. It requires that all things, including evil, be rightly ordered to him. The just and the wicked alike are, for eternity, rightly oriented to God, with the one in communion, and the other in judgment.
Annihilationist Atonement
The gravity of any offense is rightly measured not only by the act itself but by the one against whom it is committed. An insult to a stranger and an insult to a king are not the same offense, though the words may be identical. Sin is not merely a finite act committed over a finite lifetime, but an offense against a God who is infinitely worthy in all his attributes. An infinite punishment must fit an infinite crime, but the sinner cannot fit the punishment in the finitude of his earthly life. The sinner cannot bear the full weight of God’s just judgment all at once, and thus the traditional view requires an eternity to bear the consequences of rebelling against an eternally worthy God.
However, the conditionalist disputes this. Their view renders an offense against God (who is worthy of an infinite honor) as commensurate with an offense against man (who is not worthy of infinite honor). The conditionalist framework collapses the uncrossable distance between Creator and creature.
Annihilationist popularizer Chris Date, in his appearance on Kirk Cameron’s show, said:
What we’re talking about when we’re talking about annihilationism is a final execution, a capital punishment. We’re not talking about—at least most conditionalists are not talking about—a punishment of pain that lasts for a long time and then once the punishment is exhausted then they’re annihilated. That’s for the most part a caricature of our view. Rather we see the punishment as everlasting death.
Note the punishment for sin that Date describes is everlasting death, in the sense of a final execution. Date continues:
All these various forms of capital punishment, despite all their different degrees and durations of pain, they all inflict the same penalty, which is the penalty of death, not being alive anymore. And if that penalty lasts forever, it is by definition an everlasting punishment. And that’s really what most of us conditionalists understand the eternal punishment to be; death forever.11
11. Kirk Cameron, “Hellgate: The Christian Debate We’re Afraid to Have | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 102,” YouTube video, January 28, 2026.
But later on in that same show, another annihilationist, Dan Paterson says:
I think the definition matters here because the argument is not the penalty for sin is annihilation. It’s the penalty for sin is death. Is death. And for embodied creatures, death is the first cessation of life, but then the idea of the ongoing probation. It’s not granted back to them by God. And so that’s all the conditionalist [annihilationist] says the penalty for sin is, is death. And Jesus did suffer a death on the cross, which was the ending of his physical life.12
12. Kirk Cameron, “Hellgate: The Christian Debate We’re Afraid to Have | The Kirk Cameron Show Ep 102,” YouTube video, January 28, 2026.
I will leave it to the reader to try and square these two annihilationists’ comments with each other. Nevertheless, if the penalty for sin is permanent non-existence, and Christ bore that penalty in the place of sinners, then Christ never actually bore it, because he never experienced its one essential and irreversible feature. Instead, he rose from the dead. He was not annihilated. The conditionalist cannot rescue this by appealing to Christ’s physical suffering or to the three days in the tomb, because on their own account the punishment is not pain or duration but permanent cessation. Christ’s resurrection means he never bore the penalty they describe. Paterson sees the problem and reduces the punishment to the death itself, while Date attempts to retain its eternality. Oops.
Surely the conditionalist will insist Christ’s death was uniquely substitutionary, but that claim only holds if what Christ bore exceeded what any human court could inflict. One cannot simultaneously insist that the penalty is death in the ordinary sense and that Christ’s death was uniquely sufficient.
The truth is, the person of Christ, as the Son of God, could bear the full weight of divine wrath in a way that a finite creature never could. Jesus bore the penalty for our sins, and what he bore was not non-existence, and not merely death, but the wrath of God himself. The cry of dereliction is the atonement’s own testimony against the conditionalist account of what the penalty for sin actually is. In Romans 3:25–26, Jesus is the one, “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
Conclusion
Despite a misguided warmth towards this view, conditionalism/annihilationism fails when it is weighed in the balance. This view fails the exegetical test in that it dismisses the language of eternal suffering as merely symbolic in Revelation 14:9–11, 20:10–15, and 22:8–15. This view fails on the character of God in that it pits God’s justice and his mercy against each other instead of recognizing God’s unified action—or divine simplicity—in all he does. And it fails at the atonement to account for how Christ being dead for only three days could pay for the penalty for all of God’s people. Believing in conditionalism or annihilationism may not be a “first-tier issue” that denies someone from salvation, but this view begins to significantly erode “first-tier issues” that relate to the very character of God, humanity, and the atonement. The embrace of open theism by some adherents to annihilationism (Clark Pinnock, Greg Boyd) only proves this point.
What is perhaps most concerning about annihilationism is the emotional appeal to God’s love and mercy by so many of its adherents. King Saul (1 Samuel 15) and King Ahab (1 Kings 20) rightly remind us that ascribing lenience where God prescribes justice is in fact a sin. Untethered empathy is on the rise in our cultural moment, and one wonders if the concurrent rise of annihilationism is a fruit of this rotten tree. Only eternal conscious torment upholds the biblical portrayal of the character of God, of the eternality of man’s immaterial aspect, and the nature of the atonement. We do not celebrate the death of the wicked, but we soberly receive what God has revealed to us about their eternal destiny, and this sober knowledge energizes our prayer and evangelism in the present.
