Category: Atonement

Introduction:

In a recent Q&A response on his webpage called Annihilation and Atonement, William Lane Craig answers questions relating to whether annihilationism is logically incompatible with Jesus’ substitutionary atonement on the cross. The main premise of the argument against annihilationism leveled by the inquirer is if the true wage of sin is annihilation (ceasing to exist), then Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross would require Him to be annihilated to pay that price. This assumes a silent premise that the first and second deaths are to be regarded as being the same in every way. The idea is to draw attention to a logical conflict for conditionalists, for if it is logically impossible for God the Son to cease to exist—even temporarily—the penalty paid on the cross cannot be annihilation; it must be separation from God.

The silent premise behind Craig’s perspective

There is a silent premise behind Craig’s discussion on whether annihilation can be integrated with the doctrine of PSA. He is committed to the belief that Christ’s soul survived the death of the body. If the final punishment for sin is the death of the soul and body (Craig would say the annihilation of the person) then Christ’s death could not possibly be the death that the sinner will die at the final judgment. Matthew 10:28 is useful in navigating this subject.

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.

The first part of this verse indicates that the soul survives the death of the body. However, the second part of this verse states that the body and soul suffer the exact same fate in Gehenna.¹The English word ‘hell’ translates the Greek word that means γέεννα (geenna). The dominant position held by traditionalists throughout the entire history of traditionalism is that those who end up in Gehenna (hell) are there in an embodied state.²There is a novel and outlier position within traditional ranks that the body is destroyed in hell at the final judgment, leaving those in hell in a disembodied state. As it is an outlier position, it can hardly be representative of historical traditionalism. This means that under traditionalism, the second death cannot be exactly the same as the first death. It is immediately apparent that the silent premise in the question posed to Craig, and his response to it, are false.

Perhaps this is why Craig de-emphasizes death when discussing the punishment that Christ suffered on behalf of sinful humans.

It is not enough to say merely that Christ died for our sins. Human death is not extinction but simply the separation of the soul from the body. Christ’s experiencing a human death is far from adequate as a punishment for the sins of all mankind. Annihilationists themselves recognize that the damned do not deserve merely to die, but to be annihilated. So how can Christ, who cannot be annihilated, bear our just desert and so satisfy divine justice?

His insistence on the inadequacy of Christ’s death as a punishment for the sins of all humans turns on his particular view of human death as mere separation of the soul from the body. Craig leverages this understanding of human death through the notion that the soul survives the death of the body as if the death of the soul and body cannot be considered the death of the whole person. But if the first death is the separation of the body from the soul, then he cannot say that Christ’s death itself was the punishment due sinners in hell, because as a traditionalist he holds to the belief that those in hell will be in an embodied state. So, his own silent premise pushes him to imply that the punishment Jesus bore on behalf of sinners was not his death, but his alienation from God (see also Death and Punishment).

On another note, Craig inaccurately represents Evangelical conditionalists by stating they recognize “the damned do not deserve merely to die, but to be annihilated.” While recognizing there is a difference between the first and second death, they simply point to Matthew 10:28. Referring to this verse, Chris Date (3:06:24 minute mark) has expressed how this is viewed under a conditionalism plus dualism model.

Jesus says there’s a difference between the first and the second death and the difference is that the death extends to the whole person and not just the body in the second death

Even conditionalists who are physicalists will simply say that Matthew 10:28 refers to people being killed in Gehenna. What all conditionalists share is the conviction that God will slay the person at the last judgment. Any pushback from the likes of Craig on this question misses how conditionalists arrive at the conclusion that the result of the whole person being slain is that there is no surviving remnant of that person. We are committed to the proposition that the Bible teaches the final punishment is the actual death of the person. With the whole person being killed then that person (including the soul) would be inert, inactive, insensate, and inanimate. The person no longer has conscious existence, even if there could be fragments of that person’s soul or body remaining after death. So, conditionalists are not committed to affirming the final punishment is annihilation per se. We are committed to affirming that punishment has to do with the actual death of the person. If Craig is dissatisfied with this statement then I would ask him what he thinks would happen if a person’s soul is killed along with the body?

Does Jesus’s death pose a problem for conditionalists?

Craig devotes a significant portion of his response to describing how he thinks Jesus’s death poses a problem for annihilationists if Penal Substitutionary Atonement (PSA) is shown to be true. The thrust of his argument mirrors that noted in the introduction of this article:

Christ did not cease to exist when he died; indeed, it is impossible for him to cease to exist, for he is a divine person, the second person of the Trinity, and therefore necessarily existent and eternal. Therefore, he cannot be annihilated. Therefore, he cannot suffer the punishment that I deserved for my sin.

At first blush, this may appear to the reader to be a significant problem for conditionalists. However, if we deny the hidden premise in Craig’s argument, as I have above, then any conditionalist who also holds to dualism can point to Matthew 10:28 to show that Craig is mistaken to think that Jesus must have ceased to exist when he died. Chris Date has published an article in which he answers the very objection leveled by Craig.³Christopher M. Date, ‘The Righteous for the Unrighteous: Conditional Immortality and the Substitutionary Death of Jesus’, in MJTM 18 (2016–2017) 69-92. You can find a link to Date’s article here. Date argues for the position known as “holistic dualism,” the view that a human person is a psychosomatic unity. That is, the body and soul of a human are a unified whole. Date explains further,

Assuming, therefore, an anthropological dualism in which human souls exist and remain conscious after death, humans are alive only if they are embodied and their bodies continue to breathe. Conditionalists see death—whether temporal or eternal—as the privation of this psychosomatic life.⁴Ibid, 83.

Though the first and second deaths are not exactly identical in every way (i.e. in the first death the soul survives the death of the body), both do involve the privation of human psychosomatic life. This means Christ’s human death can be considered to be the same as that inflicted on sinners at the last judgment: in both cases the punishment is the privation of life. So, conditionalists can hold to PSA without having the burden of having to address the question of Christ ceasing to exist when he died.

But, Craig primarily has physicalists in mind in his response. Glenn Peoples plots a way that Christ can be thought of as being annihilated without falling into heresy.⁵Glenn Andrew Peoples, ‘The Mortal God: Materialism and Christology’, in  The Ashgate Research Companion to Theological Anthropology, ed. Joshua R. Farris & Charles Taliaferro, Kindle ed.  (Ashgate Publishing: 2015), 331-344. Some aspects of his view involve avoiding thinking the Logos became material in the incarnation. Rather, the Logos “entered a relationship with something that was fully human,”⁶Ibid., 332. while the Logos is timeless. Peoples adopts the classical view of divine timelessness. The Logos’s existence is not divided up through time, so He has all his existence. So, what happened to Christ in time does not affect the Logos. Under this particular physicalist point of view, though no remnant of Christ’s person remained when he died in time, this could not affect the timeless Logos. In my mind, this appears to be a plausible account of how Christ could die while the Logos remains immortal. I see no reason why we could not also say the person of Christ ceased to exist for those three days between his death and resurrection. So, there are at least two ways in which conditionalists can escape Craig’s argument.

Both of these views will have their critics, but both do offer a plausible way forward using premises regularly accepted within Christianity. Craig is known for arguing that a posited view only needs to be plausible to defeat an argument against that view. Yet Craig does not seem to even know that Date and Peoples have put forward separate plausible models that account for the very problem he thinks rules out annihilationism. In fact, his admission that “I have yet to see them offer a plausible solution” to the question of how we account for Christ’s death if annihilationism is true comes across as a cavalier dismissal of a view he barely seems to understand. In effect his lack of knowledge of conditionalists own views on the very subject he is discussing creates the illusion of explanatory depth. Craig does not know what he does not know about conditionalism, so has mistakenly argued there is an insurmountable problem for conditionalists.

When I started writing this blog article I did not intend to include more than a few pages of information. Yet as I came to understand Craig’s view with more depth I found that there are many more problems with his reasoning for rejecting annihilationism than I previously thought. I have split the article into smaller sections.

 

Stand by for part 2.