Dr. Glenn Peoples demonstrates that some early Church Fathers were conditionalists.
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Church Fathers who were Conditionalists
Glenn Peoples
Dr. Glenn Peoples runs the popular blog Right Reason and podcast Say Hello to my Little Friend. There and elsewhere Glenn writes and speaks on theology and biblical studies, moral and social philosophy and philosophy of religion. He completed undergraduate studies in theology at the Bible College of New Zealand (now Laidlaw College), followed by an MTheol and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Otago. Glenn's desire is to equip Christians to critically engage their culture and their critics, but he insists, "the first thing we need to engage is the person we see in the mirror. Criticising and challenging our own belief, our own faith, testing it, probing it, getting it right. Why do we believe what we believe? Does it make sense? Is it true? Are we repeating what out own church culture expects us to say, or have we seriously asked for ourselves whether or not this is what Scripture teaches? Challenging outsiders can be a sport, but challenging ourselves has got to come first, and the way that so many Christians think about hell is an area where they simply haven't done that." He and his wife Ruth have four children and they live in Wellington, New Zealand.
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5 thoughts on “Church Fathers who were Conditionalists”
I recently had a conversation with a man who had written his doctoral thesis on the early church fathers. I asked him about the church fathers and hell and he told me what I already knew, that the early church fathers were conditionalists. I was delighted to meet who I thought was another conditionalist and I told him so. His reply was something like this “I’m not a conditionalist, I believe in eternal torment. I’m a Roman Catholic.”
There are always going to be people who will ignore what you say and hold to their position against all evidence but I bet that there are a lot of people out there who are really going to benefit from these videos.
Besides, I really enjoy watching them. Thank you!
Fascinating post. I was wondering though, how we can reconcile the statements in your post with those on the following sites:
http://tinyurl.com/l73qyrj
http://tinyurl.com/lzmqdx4
The quotes from Irenaeus and Ignatius are or particular note. I’m curious, if they were conditionalists, why did they say that the wicked would go into “eternal fire” and not “eternal death”? I know that “eternal fire” is a Biblical expression, but do you know if there are any more quotes from these early Christians that shed any further light on how they viewed “eternal fire”?
It is interesting that although Arnobius is clearly an annihilationist, he still believes that the wicked are “shall be consumed in long-protracted torment with raging fire” before being destroyed. Do you think that it is plausible that Irenaeus and Ignatius possibly had similar views?
I’m a conditionalist myself, but I was wondering what you thought.
Eternal fire is, as you say, a biblical idiom. Traditionalists and conditionalists don’t agree about what it implies. But just at the explicit level, it says nothing about the lost enduring forever. I don’t think those Church Fathers who were clearly conditionalists say anything to explicitly unpack what they think that phrase means.
And sure, it’s quite possible that Ignatius and Antioch believed in a protracted period of destruction, but the safest thing to say is that we just don’t know.