Pinnock asks - Is unending conscious torment in hell, just?

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This article is about two views of punishment in Hell. 

 ANNIHILATIONISM (CONDITIONAL IMMORTALITY) VS UNENDING CONSCIOUS TORMENT IN HELL (TRADITIONALIST DOCTRINE)

 Pinnock argues his case below: 
The principles of justice also pose a serious problem for the traditional doctrine of the nature of hell because it depicts God acting unjustly. Like morality, it raises questions about God’s character and offends our sense of natural justice. Hell as annihilation, on the other hand, does not. 
What lifestyle, what set of actions, would deserve the ultimate of penalties—everlasting conscious punishment? It is easy to accept that annihilation might be deserved by those whose lives turned in a definitive No to God, but it is hard to accept hell as everlasting conscious torment with no hope of escape or remittance as a just punishment for anything. It is too heavy a sentence and cannot be successfully defended as a just action on God’s part. Sending the wicked to everlasting torment would be to treat persons worse than they could deserve.
Consider it on the basis of an Old Testament standard of justice, the standard of strict equivalence: An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (Exod. 21:24). Did the sinner visit upon God everlasting torment? Did he cause God or his neighbours everlasting pain and loss? Of course not; no human has the power to do such harm. 

 Under the Old Testament standard, no finite set of deeds that individual sinners have done could justify such an infinite sentence. This point stands even without invoking the higher standard from Jesus on this very issue. “You have heard that it was said.… But I tell you” (Matt. 5:38–39). Jesus’ followers are called to a higher standard of justice in the name of the Lord God, who himself operates on a higher one. The commandment of Moses limited the vengeance of unlimited retaliation, and Jesus limits it still more. Under gospel ethics the traditional view of hell is inconceivable.

 Pinnock continues: 
It would amount to inflicting infinite suffering upon those who have committed finite sins and goes far beyond an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It would create a serious disproportion between sins committed in time and the resulting suffering experienced forever.
Pinnock then makes a mistake regarding the holiness of God:
Anselm tried to argue that our sins are worthy of an infinite punishment because they are committed against an infinite majesty. This may have worked in the Middle Ages, but it will not work as an argument today. We do not accept inequality in judgments on the basis of the honor of the victim, as if stealing from a doctor is worse than stealing from a beggar. The fact that we have sinned against an infinite God does not justify an infinite penalty. No judge today would calibrate the degree of punishment on a scale of the honor of the one who has been wronged. The old arguments for hell as everlasting punishing do not work.
Is Pinnock correct in comparing the majestic God with human Judges?
What purpose of God would be served by the unending torture of the wicked except those of vengeance and vindictiveness? Such a fate for the wicked would spell endless and totally unredemptive suffering. Here would be punishment just for its own sake. Surely God does not act like that. Even the plagues of Egypt were intended to be redemptive for those who would respond to the warning. Unending torment would be utterly pointless, wasted suffering that could never lead to anything good. My point is that eternal torment serves no purpose at all and exhibits a vindictiveness totally out of keeping with the love of God revealed in the gospel. 
Pinnock is asking God's purpose in eternal torment - in fact, he is questioning the phrase from Revelation 20:10 "forever and ever." His answer is from our perspective it seems unfair and from God's perspective out of balance and un- redemptive. 

 Hans Küng says the following: 

  Even apart from the image of a truly merciless God that contradicts everything we can assume from what Jesus says of the Father of the lost, can we be surprised at a time when retributive punishments without an opportunity of probation are being increasingly abandoned in education and penal justice, that the idea not only of a lifelong, but even eternal punishment of body and soul, seems to many people absolutely monstrous

 Küng draws attention to the fact that the ideal of punitive, retributive justice underlies traditional thinking about the nature of hell. Sinners will have to pay back what is owed to the last farthing and beyond. God is the ultimate harsh judge in this way of thinking. No doubt it is feared that, should sinners not have this stick raised against them, they would not be deterred from committing offenses against God and humanity.

 Pinnock believes the only way to make God look good is to adopt annihilationism. He says this: 
Annihilation, on the other hand, makes better sense of hell in terms of justice. If people refuse God’s friendship, it would not be right to visit on them a punishment beyond what was deserved, such as everlasting conscious torture would be. What would be just is not to keep totally corrupt people alive forever. God has no obligation to keep such souls alive. Destruction is the obvious fate for them. As long as we do not hold to the unbiblical doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the extinction and elimination of the wicked is the obviously just solution. But if so, what about possible degrees of punishment in hell that some texts suggest (Matt. 10:15; Luke 12:47–48)? How could extinction make room for that? I am not exactly sure how to answer that because it requires more detailed knowledge of the precise act of damnation than we have been given. I am sure that it is not beyond God’s wisdom to figure about how degrees of punishment might enter into this event. Maybe there will be a period of punishment before oblivion and nonbeing. What there cannot be is what the tradition insists on excessive punishment.
Pinnock fails in several areas.  
Pinnock, C. H. (1996). The Conditional View. In S. N. Gundry & W. Crockett (Eds.), Four Views on Hell (pp. 151–154). Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan.

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