The Hell Debate: Eternal Torment, Annihilation, or Universalism?
Many Christians are surprised to discover that bonafide and respected Christians hold not only competing views on eternal conscious punishment but also outright alternatives to it. For example, N. T. Wright argues that the damned will indeed suffer in hell forever but will become less and less human until they no longer bear the image of God —something like the transformation of Sméagol into Gollum in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings . 1 Shawn Bawulski also affirms eternal torment, yet he maintains that the lost will in some sense be reconciled to God, submitting to him and ceasing to sin. 2 Others have reconsidered the doctrine more dramatically. Preston Sprinkle recently abandoned eternal torment altogether after publishing a widely read defense of it only a few years earlier. 3 Around the same time, Terrance Tiessen also left the traditional view behind, despite having defended it not long before in a respected academic theological dictionary....