Clark H. Pinnock on the Gravity of Annihilationism

        [W]hatever hell turns out to be like, it is a very grim prospect. Though annihilationism makes hell less of a torture chamber,[1] it does not lessen its extreme seriousness. After all, to be rejected by God, to miss the purpose for which one was created, to pass into oblivion while others enter bliss, to enter into nonbeing—this will mean weeping and gnashing of teeth. Hell is a terrifying possibility, the possibility of using our freedom to lose God and destroy ourselves. Of course we do not know who or how many will be damned, because we do not know who will finally say No to God. What we do know is that sinners may finally reject salvation, that absolute loss is something to be reckoned with. I do not think one needs to know more about hell than that.

 

Clark H. Pinnock, ‘The Conditional View’, in William Crockett (ed.), Four Views on Hell, 1st edn, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 1996), p. 165

Copyright © Clark H. Pinnock, 1996. All rights reserved.

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Notes

        1. That is, ‘less of a torture chamber’ than the conventional view of ‘hell’. The traditional understanding of the future and final state of the unrighteous is that they are to experience endless bodily and soulish suffering in Gehenna/the lake of fire, along with the Devil and his angels.
        2. Twenty years after the release of the first edition of Four Views on Hell (1996), an entirely new edition of this volume has been released under the same title with four different contributors contending for four discrete perspectives on the doctrine of eschatological punishment. See Preston Sprinkle (ed.), Four Views on Hell, 2nd edn, Counterpoints: Bible and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Academic, 2016).  —J. D. Gallé

(Revised second note on Thursday, 28 October 2021.)

Addendum (21 Sept. 2022).  Clark H. Pinnock (1937–2010) died on Sunday, 15 August 2010, aged seventy-three.

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