Based on the title, you may be wondering what connection diabetes has to the doctrine of hell. Diabetes is no fun, but it certainly isn’t *that* bad.
The connection between the two is one that I am able to make based on my own personal experience, and it is one that can be surprisingly helpful in addressing a concern that can certainly arise if the evangelical conditionalist view of hell (i.e. annihilationism) turns out to be true. 1 The term “evangelical conditionalism” was coined at Rethinking Hell to describe the doctrine of conditional immortality/conditionalism when held from a biblically conservative, evangelical standpoint. Some evangelical conditionalists, like myself, often just call it “annihilationism” because it is easier and more widely used.
A Difficult Truth If Evangelical Conditionalism Is Correct
If annihilationism is true, then one of the implications is that a lot of very wise and godly people – even the majority of Christians for most of church history (definitely after Augustine) – have gotten a major doctrine wrong. Furthermore, I have noticed a trend that has accelerated since early on in my annihilationism journey (2008 for all intents and purposes). This trend is conditionalist apologists, especially in Rethinking Hell spheres and unabashedly including myself, emphatically calling out the often exceptionally poor argumentation, exegesis, and reasoning of those who defend the traditional view of eternal conscious hell.
The claim that so many Christians throughout history have so badly failed to correctly understand the Bible’s teachings on hell is an audacious one. Not that annihilationism is a new view, or that everyone has gotten it wrong until recently, but the false view of eternal conscious hell has nevertheless been very dominant. 2 For more on Christians denying eternal conscious hell in the early church, see “Introduction to Evangelical Conditionalism: The Doctrine of Eternal Torment Was Not Universal in the Early Church“. For a detailed look at one major example, Irenaeus of Lyon, see. Chris Date, “Deprived of continuance: Irenaeus the conditionalist“. See also William Tanksley, “Irenaeus and Continuance” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. There are Christians who, when presented with the case for the evangelical conditionalist view, really struggle with this element of it.
Church History Is Not Just A Point of Discomfort For Annihilationists
Now, I will just say that this is going to be something you’re going to run into even if you don’t accept annihilationism. If you’ve been around Rethinking Hell for a bit, then you how know I (and others) feel about forms of eternal conscious hell that eliminate fire, physical torture, etc. Think C.S. Lewis and hell as separation from God, or the modern Eastern Orthodox view where heaven and hell are both God’s presence and hell is the experience of God’s love by those who hate him. These views are historically novel and really have no leg to stand on by any measure – as has been addressed here before. 3 For more on why the fireless, tortureless view of hell is especially week, see “The Many and Varied Problems with the Modern, Metaphorical View of Eternal Conscious Hell“. For a critical look at how those who hold such a view can dismiss their own tradition, see “The Cop-Out of Calling Eternal, Fiery Torture a “Caricature” of Eternal Conscious Hell“.
More broadly, if you’re a Protestant like me, then we must acknowledge that our worldview requires a lot of people to have been wrong as well. This is especially true for the more evangelical/Baptist strain of Protestantism. And it’s not as though church history has been nearly as unified on theological particulars as Roman Catholic and Orthodox apologists would try to have us believe either. Along these lines, I highly recommend reading our ongoing church history series, “The Not-So-Traditional View: Does Your Particular Belief About Hell Really Have Church History On Its Side?” (currently up to Part 5). Many Catholic and Orthodox apologists hold to forms of the softened, fireless view I mentioned above, and so the fact that they so wantonly depart from church history when it comes to hell serves to de-legitimize their claims that they are the one true church because they don’t depart from church history.
Getting Back To The Point At Hand
With that in mind, the main that way we demonstrate that so many great Christians really have misunderstood the truth about hell is to show what the Bible teaches about hell. We also will frequently address many of the arguments for eternal conscious hell head-on and show that they are false. Gravitas and authority can only carry so much weight for someone who cares about truth – which needs to be every Christian. Let God be true and all men be honestly mistaken.
But if so many people got it wrong, then sometimes we also need to look at things in a more big picture sort of way. Co-contributor Glenn Peoples famously and quite capably did so in 2011 with his essay titled “An Open Letter to My Traditionalist Friends.” 4 The essay can be found at: https://www.rightreason.org/2011/an-open-letter-to-my-traditionalist-friends/. Glenn also appeared on the Rethinking Hell podcast, Episode 8 to discuss it. Here, I am looking to do so as well.
Why My Diabetes Experience Highlights How Geniuses Can Lack Knowledge
In a nutshell, I have a less common variation of a very common chronic illness, and even top tier doctors seem to have shockingly little knowledge of it if they are not specialists who deal with it regularly.
I have type 1 diabetes. Unlike most type 1 diabetics, I did not develop it as a child. I was misdiagnosed as type 2 in 2024, and was properly diagnosed earlier this year (shortly after I turned 37).
Now, I wouldn’t normally get into much detail at all, but this will become important later. Technically, my formal diagnosis is a slower-developing form of type 1 diabetes called latent autoimmune diabetes in adults (or LADA for short). I will note that it’s a bit of a gray area in my case, because it’s not like testing for a virus where there is a specific LADA virus and a specific traditional type 1 virus. It’s a judgment call based on the same series of tests, as well as considering age and how long it took to go from the first signs of diabetes to being insulin-dependent (which we don’t know in my case because I didn’t get annual check-ups for a while – don’t be like me, get your annual check-ups – and I was already pretty sick and in need of insulin when I was first misdiagnosed as type 2). The words of the endocrinologist who looked over my bloodwork were “you’re type 1…or LADA at least.” But that isn’t the important part, either for annihilationism or my own health journey. 5 LADA and regular type 1 diabetes are fundamentally the same in that they are autoimmune diseases in which the immune system attacks the parts of the pancreas that produce insulin. That’s why I will never, ever use the colloquialism of calling it “type 1.5 diabetes.”
Theories differ as to what causes it to onset slowly for some adults, rapidly for other adults, and typically really rapidly in children – as well as what differences do or not exist at the cellular level. Both LADA and regular type 1 ultimately have the same outcome: total or near-total inability of the pancreas to produce insulin. As dire as this all sounds, type 1 diabetes has gone from being a death sentence before the creation of injectable insulin in 1923 to being a daily hassle that people like US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor have managed to live with for 60+ years.
The important part, and the reason I even bring up the LADA element to this at all, is because multiple doctors I saw did not know what LADA was.
Multiple doctors did not know what LADA was.
I learned about it from Google and Reddit, which is how I was able to bring it up with my primary care physician (PCP) and get the ball rolling. 6 A PCP is just what we call a family doctor or general practitioner (GP) in the United States. They’re the ones who do physical exams and have a more general medical skillset than a specialist.
Yes, it is not as widely known as regular type 1 or type 2 diabetes, but it’s hardly an obscure disease. Not only did a primary care doctor not know what it was, but neither did an ophthalmologist. Not an optometrist, but an ophthalmologist, a licensed medical doctor (MD) who specializes in eye care. And in this case, this was one with decades of experience who specializes in retinopathy, which means she sees a lot of diabetic patients.
It is more popular now than at probably any time in the last 100 years to rag on doctors and modern medicine, but to be a licensed doctor in the United States is still an incredibly arduous task. You have to forget more about natural sciences, especially human biology, than I will have ever learned. And I am blessed to be in a region with some of the top rated doctors and medical institutions in the country. These doctors went to the best medical schools and win awards. They are bona fide geniuses.
And to my PCP’s credit, she was not the archetypal villain doctor who poo-pooed my suggestion that my type 2 diabetes that wasn’t getting better could actually be this form of type 1 that I found online. Once I brought up the idea, she looked it up on doctor-Google and ordered the tests.
And that’s probably because she is among the top tier of medical professionals. Part of real intelligence is knowing that you don’t know everything. On the other hand, I know some adult type 1s who have been told by nurses and even primary care doctors that they are not type 1 because only kids get type 1. For a layperson, I totally understand not knowing much about the different kinds of diabetes (there are actually several more than the two most people think of). I hear that all the time. But knowing that people hear this from licensed medical professionals takes it to a whole different level of absurdity and makes my eyes melt out of my skull.
And that is part of it as well. Many who were diagnosed with type 1/LADA as adults have had similar experiences to my own and often much worse ones at that. In my relatively short but impactful time in the type 1 community, it is something of a trope that if you are 20 or older, it feels like you’re practically guaranteed to be misdiagnosed with type 2 at first because you’re not a kid, and type 1 diabetes is for kids (silly rabbit).
How Annihilationism And My Diabetes Connect
On the one hand, this whole thing is wild to me, especially because my doctors are among the best of the best.
But on the other hand, having been an annihilationist for so long, and having been so intimately involved in studying the doctrine of hell, I largely can understand it.
Really, my experience forms a sort of synergy. We see both doctors of medicine and doctors of the church having shocking blind spots. Once you have seen it happen with one, it becomes far less surprising when you see it with the other. And that second time makes the first time all the less surprising than it once was.
Put another way, when you’re used to having to explain to theologians with Ph.Ds that the English word “quench” means to extinguish, and that therefore a fire that dies out because it has consumed all of the available fuel has not been “quenched,” you get used to that sort of thing in the medical field – and vice versa. 7 Nothing in the Hebrew of Isaiah 66:24 or Greek of Mark 9:48 indicates anything different, of course. And examples in the Old Testament of fires that were not to be quenched in Hebrew and are not still burning – such as Ezekiel 20:47 and Jeremiah 17:27 – drive this point home further.
Ultimately, there is only so much that a person can learn and retain. The smartest among us can learn more than the rest, but they too are limited. And while this doesn’t explain why the small number of traditionalists who specialize in studying hell have still believed in eternal torment, it does help make the broader picture make sense. Most theologians don’t specialize in hell. Not that it is anyone’s only point of focus (I would certainly hope it isn’t), but just as it was only an endocrinologist who specialized in diabetes care that saw “GAD65” on my bloodwork and knew that it was a game-changer, so too those who specialize in studying a given doctrine of their religion will tend to have a better understanding of it than a generalist will.
Now, I will of course highlight that annihilationism is not *only* something you can determine after extensive study. Most of the Bible, even at a shallow, face-level reading, would indicate annihilationism if you didn’t already take eternal conscious hell for granted. 8 For more on this, see “A Face-Value Introduction To The Biblical Case For Evangelical Conditionalism“. Most of the extensive study is just done to demonstrate that numerous passages stating that the wicked suffer death, are destroyed, are incinerated by God, etc., do actually mean what they sounded like the first time.
I have virtually no doubt that someone who has never read the Bible before, and who also lived under a rock and didn’t know that eternal torment was the assumed view for Christianity, would think that the Bible taught annihilationism until they hit the book of Revelation. At that point, they would be confused. Perhaps they would think Revelation 20:10 (and maybe 14:9-11) taught eternal torment and so this book contradicted everything they just read. Maybe they would think the book contradicted itself because of the death references (both “second death” and mass slaughter scenes at the hands of angels and Christ himself). Maybe they’d think that three beings are tormented forever while the lake of fire kills everyone else. Of course, they might then wonder how an abstract entity like death could literally be killed or literally tormented forever.
They would certainly not think that the Bible consistently and systematically taught eternal conscious hell, and would instead think that those 1-2 passages from Revelation were the outlier. 9 Even the main eternal torment texts outside of Revelation really don’t even sound like eternal torment if you don’t have eternal torment in mind. Mark 9:48 is just weird. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and its reference to “eternal destruction” sounds like…destruction. Maybe Matthew 25:46 sounds a bit like eternal torment, although at face value “eternal punishment” is juxtaposed with “eternal life” so they probably would just scratch their heads again.
Therefore, it’s not a perfect analogy. There still is something about this particular doctrine that really can make things go off the rails. Glenn Peoples’s open letter is still as true as ever.
But when your health struggles show you first-hand the limits of people who are far more knowledgeable than you, not just as one bad experience but as a widespread and systemic issue, then the idea that a lot of theologians missed the boat on hell becomes an easier pill to swallow.
| ￪1 | The term “evangelical conditionalism” was coined at Rethinking Hell to describe the doctrine of conditional immortality/conditionalism when held from a biblically conservative, evangelical standpoint. Some evangelical conditionalists, like myself, often just call it “annihilationism” because it is easier and more widely used. |
|---|---|
| ￪2 | For more on Christians denying eternal conscious hell in the early church, see “Introduction to Evangelical Conditionalism: The Doctrine of Eternal Torment Was Not Universal in the Early Church“. For a detailed look at one major example, Irenaeus of Lyon, see. Chris Date, “Deprived of continuance: Irenaeus the conditionalist“. See also William Tanksley, “Irenaeus and Continuance” Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3. |
| ￪3 | For more on why the fireless, tortureless view of hell is especially week, see “The Many and Varied Problems with the Modern, Metaphorical View of Eternal Conscious Hell“. For a critical look at how those who hold such a view can dismiss their own tradition, see “The Cop-Out of Calling Eternal, Fiery Torture a “Caricature” of Eternal Conscious Hell“. |
| ￪4 | The essay can be found at: https://www.rightreason.org/2011/an-open-letter-to-my-traditionalist-friends/. Glenn also appeared on the Rethinking Hell podcast, Episode 8 to discuss it. |
| ￪5 | LADA and regular type 1 diabetes are fundamentally the same in that they are autoimmune diseases in which the immune system attacks the parts of the pancreas that produce insulin. That’s why I will never, ever use the colloquialism of calling it “type 1.5 diabetes.”
Theories differ as to what causes it to onset slowly for some adults, rapidly for other adults, and typically really rapidly in children – as well as what differences do or not exist at the cellular level. Both LADA and regular type 1 ultimately have the same outcome: total or near-total inability of the pancreas to produce insulin. As dire as this all sounds, type 1 diabetes has gone from being a death sentence before the creation of injectable insulin in 1923 to being a daily hassle that people like US Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor have managed to live with for 60+ years. |
| ￪6 | A PCP is just what we call a family doctor or general practitioner (GP) in the United States. They’re the ones who do physical exams and have a more general medical skillset than a specialist. |
| ￪7 | Nothing in the Hebrew of Isaiah 66:24 or Greek of Mark 9:48 indicates anything different, of course. And examples in the Old Testament of fires that were not to be quenched in Hebrew and are not still burning – such as Ezekiel 20:47 and Jeremiah 17:27 – drive this point home further. |
| ￪8 | For more on this, see “A Face-Value Introduction To The Biblical Case For Evangelical Conditionalism“. |
| ￪9 | Even the main eternal torment texts outside of Revelation really don’t even sound like eternal torment if you don’t have eternal torment in mind. Mark 9:48 is just weird. 2 Thessalonians 1:9 and its reference to “eternal destruction” sounds like…destruction. Maybe Matthew 25:46 sounds a bit like eternal torment, although at face value “eternal punishment” is juxtaposed with “eternal life” so they probably would just scratch their heads again. |