Annihilationism and Your Pet Cat

I was a Calvinist before I became an atheist. I was very Calvinist, in fact. It got to the point where I had eventually achieved such a robust Reformation theology that I accepted the idea that God could actually choose to send me to hell for eternity. I figured if it were to happen, it would be because God had determined in his divine will that it would bring him the most glory, and I was cool with that. But that was also kind of a wake-up call.

I think I stopped believing in hell before I stopped believing in heaven.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s the emergent movement started gaining traction among young-adults, college goups, small groups. I was not into it. Brian MacLaren… I wasn’t into it. Donald Miller… His first hit was interesting but not profound, but his second really got me. Rob Bell on the other hand…

He wrote something along the lines of, “What if someone finds through DNA evidence that Jesus was not born of a virgin. What if that doctrine is just one spring on the trampoline and it were removed—Could a person keep on jumping?” Many in the church immediately labelled Bell a heretic just for asking the hypothetical question (and this was years before he denied the doctrine of hell).

Well, the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14 does not say in the original Hebrew that “A virgin will conceive…” It says literally, “A young woman of marriageable age will conceive…” (Heb. almah).

Rob Bell’s book Love Wins came out back in 2012. I had a different reaction to it than I did to reading The Velvet Elvis. Though I didn’t read Love Wins, I read quoted excerpts, and I became quite familiar with it through the evangelical backlash. The reaction was bigger than the book itself, I think. (It’s ironic how un-Christian many Christians can behave when someone disagrees with them.) Our former mainline, Princeton-educated Presbyterian pastor had said once that he felt that if Rob Bell had been a Presbyterian he might have received a nicer/calmer reaction to his theories from his “constituency”.

Some Christians actually rethought their views and came to rediscover the views of John Stott and other annihilationists. But even fundamentalist fire-and-brimstone Christians already don’t mind annihilationism, as long as it’s for other species. When you flush your fish down the toilet or your cat gets hit by a car, or you have to bring your old sick dog to the vet to be put down, you have no problem explaining annihilationism to your children.

But most Christians refuse to accept annihilation for H. sapiens (at least not for the “saved” ones.)

If Jesus only died for Adam’s descendants, it doesn’t seem quite fair for Hobbits, Neanderthals, or Denisovans. If you expand to scope of the atonement to all humans, then you have to accept the salvation of chimpanzees, as well (Linnaeus originally classified chimps as genus Homo, and genetic studies about 10 years ago also recommended the reclassification). Let’s say you go ahead and admit the salvation of chimps. By observation, the lives and experiences of chimps are not much different in terms of mental and social complexity from the lives of the other higher apes. If you accept the salvation of chimps, then you also have to accept the personhood of all the great apes, and join the likes of Jane Goodall in fighting for animal rights.

But if you accept the salvation of apes, then your doctrine of The Fall and Original Sin goes out the window entirely, unless you consider Adam and Eve to be common ancestors to all apes. And really, they’d have to be, since the DNA bottleneck for humans was never smaller than 1,280. So much for the Flood and Noah’s Ark.

The fact is, there is no such thing as hell. Even the Anglican church knows this. As A.C. Grayling writes in The God Argument: “[A] decision of the Anglican Church in a 1996 Synod shed the doctrine of hell as a place of eternal punishment for sinners, redescribing hell as ‘the absence of God’ and saying that the punishment for very bad people is annihilation.”

In the New Testament, Gehenna was an actual place outside the city where they burned trash, and Jesus liked to use it as a metaphor. He speaks of a place of eternal fire prepared for demons, but then he says,

For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me. …Whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.

Matthew 25:42-43, 45 (NIV)

Two things here: 1) it was a parable, and 2) it’s about social justice. If you don’t do social justice, Jesus tells you to go to hell. Not literally. That’s not the point. The point is to take care of your neighbor as you’d take care of Jesus if he were among us. Otherwise your worth to him is rubbish.

“If you stop telling people it’s all sorted out after they’re dead, they might try sorting it all out while they’re alive.” —Terry Pratchett (HT @mattlibrarian.bksy.social)