In this episode of A Reasoned Response, Robert Bosley addresses the appeal of annihilationism—the belief that the wicked are eventually destroyed rather than eternally punished—and explains why it ultimately fails both logically and biblically.

Bosley argues that annihilationism rests on a flawed assumption: that sinners somehow stop sinning once they die. Scripture, however, presents the wicked in hell as unchanged in nature—still hating God, still rebelling against Him, and therefore still deserving of punishment. Because the sinner’s rebellion continues, the measure of guilt is never exhausted.

While eternal conscious torment is difficult to contemplate, Bosley explains why it alone accounts for God’s justice, the ongoing nature of sin, and the biblical portrayal of judgment. This episode calls listeners to submit their understanding of hell not to emotional comfort, but to the coherence and authority of God’s revealed truth.

The person who says that you're sinning against God so you deserve to be eternally tormented, I would disagree with. Unless the Scriptures say that. Problem is, I don't find that in the Scriptures. He's simply wrong to say that we have no example of this in Scripture. It's right there.

Welcome to A Reasonable Response. And no, I'm not Robert Bosley. I am producer Cameron. On this podcast, We deal with issues related to the Christian faith from a Reformed Baptist perspective, and we do this through what we call our breakdown segment, where we take a video and respond to it based on the topic at hand. And that topic today is annihilationism.

Particularly, we're going to be looking at Kirk Cameron and his sons video where they discussed this issue That took the Christian internet sphere by storm in early December now admittedly We're a little bit late in our response But we still thought it would be worthwhile to carefully and biblically give our response to that video. So with that, let's jump into the breakdown. Today for the breakdown, we're going to be looking at an episode of the Kirk Cameron Show titled, Are We Wrong About Hell? This episode of Cameron's show went viral among the Christian internet sphere in mid-December and created a lot of controversy and talk about the nature of hell, debates about eternal conscious torment versus annihilationism, and so I thought it would be worthwhile responding to. Now while I hold to eternal conscious torment, the traditional view of hell, I do not think that this is a matter of heresy.

I'm not willing to say that Kirk Cameron and his son, because they are holding to annihilationism now, are heretics and should no longer be considered Christians. So while I wouldn't say that they're apostates or not Christians, I do think it's important that we critique this view. It is unorthodox. It's not been the dominant view throughout church history, and I think for a reason. So I think it needs to be responded to, critiqued, answered carefully, so that we can see why it doesn't actually hold up to scrutiny.

And with that, let's begin. If I was to sin every single second, from the moment I was born till the second that I die, would the just punishment of that be an eternity of torture? Yeah. Yeah. Is that just?

Is that just? Is that just because 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? This is really the overarching question of the whole video from Cameron, that is this a just punishment?

Is an eternity of conscious torment the appropriate response to a limited lifetime of sin? There's two things to consider with this. First, it's just if God says it's just, but second, he's also seeming to assume that the sinner stops sinning when they die. We'll see throughout the rest of the video, there's an assumption here that seems to work in a lot of their conclusions that after death the sinner is no longer really a sinner. They're only being punished for what they did in this life.

And that's one of the questions we'll seek to answer through the rest of the video. I think we came to the understanding that it'll be worse for some on the day of judgment than it will be for others. It says it'll be worse for you, Capernaum, than Tyrae and Sidon on the day of judgment, because if the miracles that were done here were done there, they would have turned from their wickedness. It'll be worse for you, those who cause one of my little ones to stumble on the day of judgment. There seems to be degrees of judgment and punishment for the severity of your sin.

Exactly. So if you believe in eternal conscious torment, are you saying that the barbecue is going to be turned down for sweet old grandma who really didn't do much bad, she just wasn't a Christian, and it's going to be turned up for someone like Mao or Hitler? He's right that the Bible presents that there are varying degrees of sin, there's varying degrees of punishment for sin. As he said, Tyre and Sidon will not have as severe of a punishment as those who rejected Jesus in the first century. That's true, and I believe that's the case even in hell.

There will be varying degrees of punishment according to a person's sin and the severity of their sin, just as we read that there are varying degrees of reward in heaven based on what believers have done. There's no conflict inherent to the idea of varying degrees of reward on the one hand or varying degrees of punishment with an eternal reward or a eternal punishment. Both can be true at the same time and they don't seem to acknowledge or understand that. In James's illustration of a grandma who just happens to not be a Christian compared to a tyrant like Mao or Hitler, he's really diminishing the severity of unbelief. It is a very serious thing to not believe in God and in the Savior He sent to redeem His people.

And so yes, the unbelieving grandma who may have done all sorts of wonderful sweet things, if she dies in unbelief, yes, she is worthy of God's judgment because she has lived a life of rebellion against the God who has given her everything she enjoys, who has given her life and breath and all things. She has lived in rebellion against him. Hades and Sheol is what? It's essentially the grave. It's the holding place and the realm of the dead.

Right. It's right. The wicked will be turned into hell, into Sheol. And then we have the word Gehenna, which is a different Greek word. And that's describing something really unique in the scriptures, which is the Valley of Hinnom or the Hinnom Valley.

And that was used as a illustration of destruction and judgment. And it was actually a real place outside of Jerusalem, which was often described as a burning landfill, a burning refuse waste site where you had corpses, You had burning trash, you had human and animal waste there. It was just a site of absolute horrors and filth, stench and destruction. And that is also translated as hell in the New Testament. I think there's another word to Tartarus, which is in there too.

And it's, it's, there's a word for the pit. There's outer darkness. Then we get into the lake of fire, which is also found in Revelation. So all of these words, and many of them are just called hell. Now they mentioned that several of these words are translated as hell in several different Bible versions.

It's really just the King James version. Most modern translations differentiate them, even the new king James. So when James calls these different types of hell in the Bible, that's not really a very fair way of putting it. Sheol and Hades are the Hebrew and Greek word that seem to refer to primarily the same idea, the place of the dead, both in the literal sense of an actual physical grave, but also in the spiritual sense, where the dead go awaiting the final judgment. Most agree that Sheol and Hades are not actually what we typically think of when we think of the word hell in the English language.

What we think of as hell is typically the word used in the New Testament, Gehenna, used by Jesus throughout his ministry as well as the rest of the New Testament. Kirk in explaining Gehenna he talks about it being a valley outside of Jerusalem. That's true. We see it in the Old Testament. It references to the Valley of Ben-Henom, but he's actually wrong to refer to it as this giant fire pit, basically, a place where they burned all their trash, and that is why it became an image of hell.

I know that's a common explanation used in commentaries and pulpits. The problem is there's just no real evidence of it. Instead of relying on this very tenuous idea that the Valley of Ben Hinnom was this burning trash heap, we ought to look at what the rest of the Old Testament says about that valley to see if that informs the usage of Jesus and the apostles using the term Gehenna and I think we see that when we look at 2nd Chronicles. 2nd Chronicles chapter 28 verse 3 reads, he burned incense in the valley of the son of Hinnom or the valley of Ben-Hinnom and burned his children in the fire according to the abominations of the nations whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. That's the imagery is a place where This abominable practice of child sacrifice occurred and this image of burning your children in this valley, which was something that provoked God's anger against the nation.

That is the source of the imagery of Gehenna, a valley of burning and the punishment provoked by God's wrath. He also mentions Tartarus found in 2 Peter, as well as the imagery of a bottomless pit and lake of fire and all these things that we see, for example, in the book of Revelation. These other words are used as further symbols and pictures of what hell is like and we have to carefully distinguish these things because even in this video they actually confuse them for example when we get to the end of the book of Revelation and they say hell is thrown into the lake of fire and therefore destroyed when actually the Greek is Hades is cast in the lake of fire. We have to keep these things in mind otherwise our interpretation is going to be sloppy. If we believe that hell is eternal conscious torment, why would it talk about your soul and body being destroyed in hell?

Yeah, because the soul can't be destroyed. The soul lives forever. Exactly. Right? Yeah.

So does that mean something else or does it mean that the soul does not live forever? I think we as Christians have a idea that the body will perish, but the soul is eternal. Yeah. And That's what I've always heard. Through my research and through my understanding, although it may be limited, I have not found that.

I have not found that the soul is necessarily always eternal. The Bible does not talk about the eternality of the wicked. All I found is the eternality of the righteous. There's a couple things to respond to here. First is the idea, as James says, we have this idea as Christians that the body perishes but the soul is eternal and then Kirk says that that's what he's always heard.

The problem is that's not actually the historic Christian view. The Christian view is that both the body and the soul will endure forever. That doesn't mean it's eternal in the sense that God's eternal were creations, but that they do endure. For instance, in the Apostles Creed, one of the earliest creeds of the Church, we confess that we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Even in the Old Testament there is this expectation of the resurrection of the body.

It's not talked about very often, but there are a few bright lights of clarity in the Old Testament scripture, such as in Daniel chapter 12 verse 2 and many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake some to everlasting life and some to shame and everlasting contempt the there's this idea in the book of Job that in his flesh he will see God. The scriptures are clear that the body itself is raised and he's right a lot of people are very confused about this. We are more informed by Tom and Jerry than the Bible that our eternal existence is just one of being disembodied spirits, when in reality what the Bible teaches is that we will be embodied. We were made to have bodies. Salvation isn't escaping the body.

Salvation is being freed from our sins and the punishment that our sins demand. Second is what does it mean that body and soul are destroyed according to Jesus's words in Matthew 10 28. It's interesting they take a very literal view of the word destroyed and then question the permanence of the body and even the soul because they take this literal view of destroyed when in reality we ought to have a little bit of a more careful understanding of what it means to be destroyed. This brings up the idea of hyperbole or exaggeration for effect. That's probably how the word destroyed, apollomai again, is being used here.

It's a term of destruction, ruin, death, as an exaggeration. Jesus is making his point with this exaggerated term to describe this is so catastrophic. Do all that you can to avoid going to this place. Don't fear men who can kill you, fear God who will destroy you. And I mean, another verse though that I think is interesting to look at is Psalm 37 verse 20, and it says, "'But the wicked will perish.

"'The enemies of the Lord are like the glory of the pastures. They vanish like smoke. They vanish away. That's talking about like vanishing, destruction, gone. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and, And I'm, that's always the picture in the Old Testament. That's true. When you look at God's judgment upon individuals or on nations, cities, empires, he says they're gone. Like the symbolism is scorched earth, destroyed, gone, and their name is remembered no more.

You know, the jackals and the owls will come and inhabit their land, and they're not coming back. Of course, the Old Testament is primarily referring to temporal judgments in time against the enemies of God, the enemies of Israel. Even in the example he just gave of the jackals coming back to inhabit their land. That's clearly talking about something that happens in this life, not in the afterlife. So this appeal to the Psalm, Psalm 37, doesn't really work because it's talking about judgment against God's enemies in this world.

They will perish, they will die. God will destroy their nation, their people now. It's not saying one way or another what happens to them after they die. The other verse that's mentioned is Matthew 3.13 where John the Baptist says, His winnowing fan is in his hand and he will thoroughly clean out his threshing floor and gather his wheat into the barn. He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire." And the point really being made is, well, the chaff is burned up.

It ceases to exist. Well, of course it does. It's a metaphor. It's talking about wheat and chaff, the one gathered into the barn, the other being burned up. That's what they did.

It's a picture of judgment. We're not actually wheat that's going to be gathered into a barn. That's not what the status of the righteous will be. In the same way, you can't press the metaphor too far and say that the wicked will be burned up because in John's metaphor, the chaff is burned up and no longer exists. It's a picture.

That's all it is. Other parts of the New Testament very strongly indicate that the burning, yes, is eternal, but so is the one suffering the judgment. Is that the opposite? What? The opposite of life is what?

Well, I would say death. Exactly, that's what I would say too. But here, The contrast is, and the wicked will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous will go into eternal life. Yeah. I think the question there is, is eternal punishment also punishment while being alive or is that eternal separation from Christ?

I actually think this is a really good argument for annihilationism. And what you're saying is that just because the righteous go to eternal life, which is the gift of God, eternal life, the gift of God. What you're saying is not that the wicked are granted an eternity of punishment. You're saying that the punishment of the wicked is final. It is irreversible.

There is no relief from that punishment in terms of ever going back. It's done. It's over. It's permanent. And you can't stop it.

And eternally separated from God. And you are, and it is eternally so. Yeah. And here we really get to one of the core arguments used by annihilationists, that the eternal punishment, the everlasting punishment is only the effect that is eternal or everlasting. It's not the punishment itself, as Seem, where he describes, that it's the punishment that is final.

It is, it's enduring. What has happened in the punishment is what continues. But he's really neglecting that these two things are paralleled with one another. That the eternal life doesn't just mean it's life with an ongoing effect. It's the life itself that is ongoing.

Again, we're not saying that life is mere existence. The blessings that we receive from God in eternal life, knowing Christ and enjoying God forever, that is what endures. That is our life. They make the point that the opposite of life is not punishment in normal use of language, but death. And that's true, but again, as Christians, we come to this understanding that we don't believe death is the end of existence.

To really make this perspective work, you have to redefine what death means when you come to the punishment of the wicked in the afterlife. As Christians, we acknowledge, even annihilations acknowledge that death, physical death, is not the end of your existence because there will be the resurrection and the righteous will inherit eternal life. If we're going to be consistent, we have to see that The opposite here of eternal life is eternal punishment. It's not cessation of existence, but it is a kind of death, a separation not of body and soul, but a separation of the creature from God and of all blessings and goodness. It's an eternal punishment, and that is a punishment itself that endures, not just the effects of it.

And I think a good way to put this for me is, when we say that you and I have eternal salvation. We say everybody would say that's true in Christ. We have eternal salvation. Does that mean that we are being saved continually forever and ever and ever and ever. Is God continually saving us?

No, we were saved. We're working out our salvation now and we are fully and finally saved in the presence of God. But that salvation lasts for eternity. When we die, we do not become God. We will continue, I believe the scripture indicates, that we will continue to grow and learn And just continue to marvel and be amazed at and learn from God forever, farther up and farther in, as Lewis put it.

There is a sense in which our glorification will be ongoing. So yes, There is a sense in which we can rightly say that our eternal salvation is ongoing in its effects and in that God is always saving us because if God for any moment would not hold on to us, we would be lost. We'll be perfected in heaven. Yes, that's true. But God will always be saving his people because we are creatures in need of him to sustain us even in eternity.

The person who says that you're sinning against God, so you deserve to be eternally tormented, I would disagree with. Unless the Scriptures say that. Unless we can find someone in the Scriptures where we say that's actually how it works, just like in a caste system, in a feudal system, that you have a hierarchy of punishments based on the importance of the person you're sinning against. Problem is, I don't find that in the scriptures. He says that he can't find any instance of this in scripture, that if you lie to your dog for instance you're not punished but if you lie to the government you could be thrown in prison.

In the Old Testament God does not prescribe the death penalty for telling a lie yet in the New Testament Ananias and Sapphira lie to the apostles and Peter says they lied to God and God himself killed them for it This very idea of lying we can't kill people for lying but God can because he's the one sinned against an infinitely, holy perfect being who is the object of our sin when he should be the object of our worship and reverence. And because he is so great, the punishment is correspondingly great. So he's simply wrong to say that we have no example of this in scripture. It's right there. You're right, James.

That is the best that we can do. We are finite beings. Scripture is hard to understand. Paul even said that there are things that are difficult to understand. I say that this is right at the top of the list of difficult things.

The sovereignty of God, the will of man, divine wrath. And at the end of the day, let's not camp out on hell. Let's camp out on heaven, right? It's down with hell, whatever it is, conscious, eternal torment or annihilation. And by the way, within the annihilationist view, there is also room for judgment.

It doesn't just mean that Hitler and sweet little grandma who sinned a couple of times are both just snuffed out like this candle flame. Watch this. Everybody's just gone. No, no, no, there's room for judgment in that view where Hitler gets his appropriate punishment. Full measure of his punishment, yeah.

After the full punishment is executed, then he is removed from the land of the living. Yes, there are varying camps within the broader annihilationist category. Some say that the wicked are annihilated immediately upon death, some seemingly what Kirk holds to, that they're punished for a time and then destroyed, which I think is probably actually the majority view. And so this is why people claiming that Kirk Cameron has now rejected hell or rejected judgment of the judgment of God are incorrect. He's not saying hell doesn't exist.

This is a debate about the nature of hell. But there's an interesting phrase that he used a couple times here about sinners receiving the full measure of their punishment that the sweet little grandma and Hitler receive the full measure of their punishment and then are destroyed. The problem with that is that assumes that sinners stop sinning once they go to hell, which maybe you've never thought about before, but that's a really incoherent way of considering the afterlife. The wicked do not stop sinning just because they've died. You don't become righteous once you go to hell.

That's one reason why eternal conscious torment makes sense, because the wicked, cut apart from all of God's grace, will always be sinning. So even if we assume the annihilationist position, how could Hitler or the sweet grandma who happens to not be a Christian, How could either of them ever receive the full measure of their punishment? Because they are continuing to sin against God, even in hell. They're still hating God. So how could they ever actually achieve that full measure?

Because they're continually adding to the measure of punishment they deserve. This is really the core problem with annihilationism. Well, maybe they say that God just has enough and he's done with it, But then is God really being just and punishing them fully for their sins before annihilation? It doesn't seem to logically work. Whereas eternal conscious torment, as horrible as it is to hear and to contemplate.

It makes logical sense and it makes biblical sense. The sinner in hell is still a sinner And so he eternally is being punished because his nature hasn't changed. He's still a rebel hating his maker. Well, that's all the time we have for today. If you'd like to connect with me personally, you can do so on X at R.

Bosley 1689. If you'd like more information about church and family life, you can go to churchandfamilylife.com. And don't forget, we have our national conference coming up in May in Ridgecrest, North Carolina on biblical manhood and womanhood. We'd love to have you Join us. Thanks.

See you next time.