In August, Christianity magazine in the UK published a letter by Paul Marston, offering a response to comments made by Dr R. T. Kendall. The letter engages with key theological questions about judgement, annihilation, and the nature of eternal life, all topics which are explored in depth in the book Death and ‘Hell’: What the New Testament Does and Does Not Teach.
Letter text (as published in August)
Questions for Kendall
It was lovely to hear from the 90-year-old, faithful Christian leader, R. T. Kendall (‘A word from America’, July). My late friend and co-author Roger Forster was friends with R. T. and held a different theology but was equally faithful.
It may be a puzzle, though, to some of us how a “four and a half-point Calvinist” (as R. T. described himself in his letter) can believe that Jesus died for everyone’s sins, but God chose only a few on whom to irresistibly force repentance and give the benefit of eternal life, while consigning the rest to unending torment.
It is also puzzling to me why he wrote of people who “run to the teaching of annihilation”. As I have explained in my books Hellfire and Destruction and Death and Hell (Grove Books), the consistent teaching of the New Testament is that the final end for the determinedly unrepentant is “destruction”. This is a word which, when applied in judgement, means terminating someone or something entirely. To make it mean otherwise requires exegetical ingenuity.
Advocates of unending torment like R. T. have to perform this ingenuity, and take recourse to tendentious interpretations of parables, or some sentences in the book of Revelation, which is a book that actually says death will be flung “into the lake of fire” (20:14), and “will be no more” (21:4). Believing that body and soul are destroyed in hell is not “running away” from anything but taking Jesus at his word (Matthew 10:28). Nor is this any disincentive to evangelism. All of the annihilationists I know are keen to extol the blessing of eternal life in Jesus without any need to terrify people.
As R. T. said in the closing of his article: “If you are in the minority but trust in the Bible, stick to your guns. Don’t give up.”
Paul Marston