To look up at the painting The Last Judgment, by the famous Italian artist Michelangelo, on the vast wall of the Vatican's Sistine Chapel, is to receive a glimpse into the sheer power that the notions of death, judgment, heaven and hell had upon the Renaissance mind. In what is surely one of his greatest masterpieces, Michelangelo portrays the almost universal verdict of the church that following the judgment, an irrevocable separation takes place between those who are destined to enjoy the bliss of eternal life and those who face a terrifying future of everlasting pain and misery.

While this tradition of heaven and hell prevailed amongst Christians up until the rise of rationalism in the 18^th century, in the last 50 years or so it has fallen upon hard times, especially among evangelicals.

Donald Bloesch, in his Essentials of Evangelical Theology, commented in 1978 that heaven and hell had virtually disappeared from evangelical preaching. What lies behind this disappearance is not easy to explain. W. G. T. Shedd, writing at the end of the 19^th century, suggests that the idea of endless punishment has found it hard to survive in ages which are dismissive of the notions of sin, traditional morality and retribution. In his Dogmatic Theology he notes that one period of intense opposition to this particular doctrine in the USA during the 1880s also happened to coincide with a dramatic string of business and political scandals which shook the nation. Perhaps the same is the case in more recent times.

However, what is troubling today is the sheer confusion that exists about the meaning and nature of hell in many of the churches that huddle under the evangelical umbrella. For example, in what is known as the Emergent Church movement, Rob Bell, a well-known leader and writer, redefines hell in very "this-worldly" terms. In his book, Velvet Elvis, he says,

When people use the hell, what do they mean? They mean a place, an event, a situation absent of how God desires things to be. Famine, debt, oppression, loneliness, despair, death, slaughter they are all hell on earth. What's disturbing then is when people talk more about hell after this life than they do about hell here and now.

Apparently, in Bell's mind at least, the prospect of everlasting suffering following the judgment is not really as bad as the diagnosis of cancer, war or financial crisis.

Brian McLaren, another leader in the emergent movement, regards the biblical doctrine of endless punishment as the invention of a divine sociopath. In his book, The Last Word, he writes:

God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life, and if you don't love God back and cooperate with God's plans in exactly the prescribed way, God will torture you with unimaginable abuse, forever...

Apparently, McLaren's view is that the traditional doctrine of hell implies that God is a sadist. Clearly, if Bell and McLaren are any gauge of the modern scene, then the traditional doctrine of hell is in trouble.

However, another view that challenges the traditional understanding of hell has been promoted amongst evangelicals in recent times and has as much, if not more, potential to undermine the preaching of the gospel. I am referring to the doctrine of annihilationism, or what has become known by its proponents as "conditional immortality". Annihilationism is a doctrine that has been traditionally associated with cults and groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christadelphians, Seventh Day Adventists and liberal theologians. It teaches that after death the person, in both body and soul, ceases to exist in any form.

Annihilationism has an ancient pedigree that can be traced as far back as the Greek philosopher Aristotle. In his Nichomachean Ethics, he said that death "appears to be the end of everything" (3:9). Likewise, Epicurus, another Greek philosopher in the third century BC, said that death should be "of no concern to us; for while we exist death is not present, and when death is present we no longer exist". The fact that several pagan philosophers, liberals and a number of cults have embraced this view hasn't dampened enthusiasm for this position among some evangelicals. Several prominent leaders in the movement, such as John Stott, Philip Hughes and Stephen Travis, have all expressed sympathy for the annihilationist position.

Proponents of annihilationism claim that the traditional doctrine of endless punishment is based on a misunderstanding about the nature of the soul. They say that the soul is not innately immortal. According to them, the immortality of the soul is a Platonic concept which became tied to the biblical teaching about hell and later adopted as official church doctrine by various councils, one of them being the Roman Catholic Church's Fourth Lateran Council in 1512. This "set in stone", so to speak, the doctrine of endless punishment and made it appear as though it was thoroughly grounded in Scripture. However, evangelical annihilationists allege that this is simply not the case.

Instead, they claim that since the soul is created and has no independent existence, it cannot be immortal. Only God is immortal (1 Tim. 1:7; 6:16). Further, they assert that when God made us in His image, He never conferred immortality upon our souls. Rather, He made us "both potentially immortal and potentially mortal". Those who believe in Jesus Christ as the Saviour receive immortality as a gift from God (Rom. 6:23). Those who reject Christ, on the other hand, do not receive this gift. They are effectively annihilated following the final judgment. Curiously, they don't explain why the soul could not have had the property of immortality conferred on it as a gift at the point of creation but is able to receive it later when a person turns to Christ. (I'll leave you to think about that one.)

Now, since our destinies turn on this question, it's important to establish exactly what the Bible teaches. If hell is a conscious and unrelenting tragedy, as Jesus suggests, then to deny its reality is an even greater tragedy. The issue is clear: does Jesus teach that there will be little or no suffering for those who reject the gospel, or does He suggest that continuous impenitence will lead to everlasting suffering? That's the choice.

When we turn to the Gospels we receive the strong impression that Jesus taught the doctrine of endless retribution. As the judge of the living and the dead He constantly warned His hearers about the dangers of hell by using graphic and terrifying imagery of the inconsolable suffering of the lost. In the parable of the sheep and the goats, Jesus says to those who have refused to follow Him: "Depart from Me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels ... Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life" (Matt. 25:41, 46). Also consider Mark 9:47, 48.

Again, in order to pre-empt the possibility that His hearers might imagine that their sufferings would finish in death, Jesus taught the eternal anguish of the wicked. In the parable of the rich man and Lazarus He alluded to the conscious nature of their suffering: "In hell, where he (the rich man) was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side" (Luke 16:23). Further, in the parable of the wheat and the tares He depicts hell as a place where sentient beings will experience unimaginable torment: "...they shall be cast into a furnace of fire and there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth" (Matt. 13:42). Elsewhere the apostle John says of the wicked, "the smoke of their torment ascends up forever and ever" (Rev. 14:11).

Despite these clear statements of Jesus about the eternal and conscious experience of endless suffering by the lost, it may come as a surprise that John Stott expresses serious misgivings about the everlasting torments of hell. He states his views in a book entitled, Evangelical Essentials (IVP, 1988), which is a series of responses to a liberal theologian, David Edwards. It is here that he advances his preferred position of annihilationism.

What, you may ask, gives rise to Stott's uncertainties about the traditional doctrine? Well, he believes that a more balanced appreciation of Jesus' words and images about hell leads to the conclusion that the suffering of the wicked comes to an end at the judgment when they are annihilate. For instance, in reference to the parable of the sheep and goats, he says:

Jesus contrasted 'eternal life with eternal punishment' (Matt. 25:46). Does this not indicate that in hell people endure eternal punishment? No, that is to read into the text what is not necessarily there. What Jesus said is that both the life and punishment would be eternal, but He did not in the passage define the nature of the evil. Because He also spoke of eternal life as a conscious enjoyment of God (John 17:3), it does not follow that eternal punishment must be a conscious experience of pain at the hand of God. On the contrary, although declaring them to be eternal, Jesus is contrasting the two destinies.

Stott's point here is that though the duration of the destinies is the same, their natures (a life of bliss versus a life of punishment) are different. For Stott, it seems contrary to God's nature to permit a life of conscious, eternal suffering for the wicked, although this is the dear intent of another parable, that of the rich man and Lazarus. Instead, he believes that eternal punishment means annihilation. However, since annihilation implies non-existence — and hence non-consciousness — in a curious form of logic, Stott turns a life which Jesus describes as one of eternal, conscious punishment into one of eternal, non-conscious, non-punishment.

Again his treatment of the rich man, who claims to be "in agony in this fire" (Luke 16:33), turns out to be nothing more than the wicked coming to "the unimaginably painful realisation of their fate". But, then, Stott goes on to assure us that "this is not incompatible, however, with their final annihilation" (317-318). It seems that in Stott's judgment, at least, the pain of hell must be relatively fleeting, whereas Jesus gives the impression that it is interminable.

While Stott goes on to assure the reader that he does not wish to dogmatise about his views on annihilation, he nevertheless affirms that "the ultimate annihilation of the wicked should at least be accepted as a legitimate, biblically founded alternative to their eternal, conscious torment" (320). Despite his claim to the contrary, this conclusion seems reasonably dogmatic to me. In Stott's view, annihilation should be on the table as an acceptable and Scripturally-based position for evangelicals.

It is at this point that the rubber hits the road. I think most Christians would agree that what we believe about the future, and specifically about hell, has important implications for evangelism. Certainly Paul believed so. "Knowing therefore the terror of the Lord, we persuade men..." (2 Cor. 5:11). Without a due sense of the dire and eternal consequences of rejecting Christ, our presentation of the gospel is likely to be truncated and nothing more than a message of salvation from life's anxieties, pressures and frustrations. And, as such, it will fall seriously short of Paul's message of "deliverance from the wrath that is to come" (1 Thess. 1:10). In that sense, it will become a false gospel.