Customer Reviews

Four Views on Hell

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This book accomplishes its objective of presenting four differing views on hell. Obviously, it consists of four authors submitting defenses of their particular positions. A couple of the writers are more persuasive than their colleagues. This persuasiveness, however, stems more from the positions themselves rather than from the skill of the persons penning them.

Walvoord begins with a simplistic, fundamentalist position of literal, eternal fire. Walvoord does a decent job of making his point. The issue is muddled, unfortunately, with the mantra of literal interpretation as the only method for persons who believe the Bible is inerrant. The connection with dispensationalism is apparent in the frequent, literal application of passages in Revelation.

Crockett steps to the plate next with the metaphorical view. His presentation is the most convincing of the four, partially because of his skill but mainly because of the strength of the argument itself. Crockett sticks to the point and drives it home.

Hayes takes his turn defending the purgatorial position. I was a bit surprised to find a serious consideration given to the idea of purgatory in a work of this nature. Hayes deserves credit for making a valiant attempt to communicate a Catholic belief to a predominantly Protestant audience. He offers little Scriptural support for his position, simply because there is little Scriptural support to be found.

Pinnock concludes the presentations with his view of annihilation. Pinnock is not as convincing as Crockett, but gives some substantial Scriptural evidence and theological reasoning to support his position. Crockett does an excellent job of refuting Pinnock's argument in the brief response he offers.

I intially planned to give this volume three or four stars, because at least two of the arguments presented are extremely weak. On second thought, however, the presentations are all fairly well done -- the problem is with the positions themselves. For anyone wanting a good overview of four doctrines of hell, I strongly recommend this book.

Four Views of Hell is one of the best books available on the subject. Unlike other books on the same topic, the book dares to allow differing voices to be heard. But, this book may tell us even more about the prejudices and preconceptions of those who contributed to it than about the afterlife.
John Walvoord is dogmatic in his "Literal" view that hell is a place of actual flames combining physical pain with mental and emotional depression and misery. I believe that literal is a particularly bad naming and this should have been called the "Traditional" view instead.
William Crockett allows more credence to other views but still suggests that his "Metaphorical" view, hell is a state of mental and emotional depression and misery without physical features, are the only reasonable views.
In the "Purgatorial" view, Zachary Hayes, gives an excellent synopsis of the development of this controversial idea, but the reader is left to wonder whether purgatorial is 'hellish' in the traditional sense or merely cleansing and refreshing. His treatment of the Roman Catholic doctrine is historical, fair, and unapologetic.
Clark Pinnock writes one of the best articles, to date, on the "Conditional" view. This view holds that in the end, most of the unsaved will become saved, and those who persist in rebellion and hold fast to doing evil will enter a state of oblivion and annihilation. Pinnock's article and counterpoints are excellent and by far the least prideful of the lot.
The flaw, not with the book but with the contributors, is that they don't seem to read what the others have written. In their rebuttals they pick and choose their attack points often missing the very solutions to the problems they point out.
I would be delighted if this book were revised in the future to include views on "Soul Sleep" and deeper coverage of the included views. Despite the pugnatious attitudes of some of the contributors, I would want to read a broader and deeper coverage of the different views rather than avoiding them or this book.
While Hell-ologists (to coin an understandable term) may be dogmatic and sometimes arrogant in their views, the book allows the reader to see what their views are about and to fairly weigh the views. I've yet to find another book on the subject which accepts counterpoints as well as this book in Zondervan's Counterpoints Series.

I think it was Spurgeon who said one should never preach on hell without tears in one's eyes. Do not be worried - none of these men presenting their views would disagree with that quote. None disavow that there is indeed a hell and that some people will end up there. What they are debating is how to read the biblical texts about hell, it's nature, etc. The book starts with the most traditional view, which it seems to me is the weakest one presented (or the weakest presentation) followed by the metaphorical - which seems so close to the traditional (especially when compared to the last two) as to render the differences nearly useless. Whether or not there are actual flames? Is this a burning question (pun intended ;))? After these two are the most interesting essays. A Catholic writer defends the idea of purgatory (technically not about hell, but about suffering in the afterlife) and makes a fairly good case. To do so, he must address differences that are basic to Catholic and Evangelical soteriology - justification and sanctification. I learned a bit I did not know. Finally, comes Clark Pinnock and the conditional view. Dr. Pinnock takes quite a bit of heat for some of his views including this one. He believes that the biblical data and what we know and believe about God tell us that the unrepentant sinner will not be kept alive merely to experience punishment and torment forever, but will be annihilated - eliminating rebellion from the Kingdom of God. Many tangential issues such as post-death salvation and redemptive suffering are addressed, especially in the last two essays. This volume really opened my eyes and made me dive back into the Bible to see what it had to say. I won't divulge my opinions - but they were different than what they were before I read this book!

A useful reference to different views and a plus for the Counterpoints series.

One thing I like about this type of book is different views are juxta-positional and short rebuttals are presented as well by all authors, leaving the final outcome to the reader to make their own decisions. The conditional view seems to carry the most weight in my opinion, but the others did a good job at describing their views. However, one thing that is not really brought out is the fact that some Conditionalists differ amongst themselves as to whether unbelievers will be raised at all.

Some disagreements will always exist, but this is the way to do debates in my opinion, though the answers and rebuttals should have been longer to present more of Scripture. For example in disproving the "immortality of the soul" it would be more of a benefit to have the reader search all instances where the Hebrew and Greek word appears and the different variants in which it was translated to demonstrate that the "soul" is never once connected with immortality in all 857 instances. However, this book is a good introduction to different schools of thought.

I've been raised in numorous Christian traditions and therefore, find these types of books (comparisions on doctrine) interesting and insightful. Out of these series of books, this one is probably the best. The contributors get right to the point and state their claims concisely.

Let me give an example on how this book affects one like myself. See, my uncle Jim was a Baptist minister and I often went to his church only to hear "fire and brimstone" sermons. Once, I even watched a film on hell. Needless to say, he believed in the literal view. For a couple of years, I became a Presbyterian and hell was hardly preached. When it was spoken of, it was in a "metaphorical" sense. Then during my teens, my mom converted to Seventh-Day Adventism and then I was fully indoctrinated into the "conditional" mortality view.

This book was good, because being an advid student of theology, I find this issue, though not essential, greatly interesting. Each side is represented by a highly qualified biblical expert. I was disappointed with Dr. Walvood who defended the "literal" view of hell. He was the least logical and in fact distorted the positions of others. Since he is so well known and qualified, I find it curious that he didn't build a stronger case. I was looking for a stronger case - something to challenge my presuppositions.

William Crockett (Metaphorical) and Clark Pinock (Conditional) presented their views the best. Both supported their views from scripture and with sound logic and biblical hermeneutics. Anyone with an open mind can see that these two positions call for more dialogue and study. It is easy to dismiss the conditional view because it is held by cults like the Jehovah's Witnesses and border line Christian sects like the Seventh-Day Adventist. To do this however, is to neglect the study of scripture with an earnest heart and mind.

I left the SDA denomination long ago (1989), but still find the conditional view a compelling doctrine, however, Crockett presented a great case and now for about seven years, I have had to re-think my position and seek further study into God's word.

I am a lay person who has a very open mind as to how others view Christianity and all that that entales. Hell is one subject that seems to be rarley discussed in pulpits but often enters into conversations with other people, Christian and non-Christian alike. This book helps understand how people view the different concepts of Hell.

If you are closed minded or rather already have your hard-core beliefs firmly in place, then you may want to skip this one. If however, you want to explore the concept of Hell and are not afraid to be challenged, then you will find this very interesting.

Each author presents his particular view of Hell and then backs it up both with argument and biblical application. The other three authors are then aforded the opportunity to rebuff or challenge that view. This in and of itself was worth the price of the book to me. I found myself rethinking many things as regards my own personal beliefs...but to me that is what this is all about, open dialogue and frank, respectful discussion.

The book presents no one view as the "right" or "correct" view, but instead allows each author to present his view and then leaves the reader to decide for him or herself to decide where his or her personal belief falls or where it is challenged to ponder the aspects of other views.

I used this book as the main text for a four week church study on the subject and many to date still feel this was the most thought provoking class they had ever taken.

I concede that if you only have 20 pages or so, you can't really get that deep into a topic like this. However, I found none of the arguments particularly persuasive (at least not after critical review).

For the record, I am a conditionalist, so I agree with Clark Pinnock that the wicked will not always exist but will one day be destroyed. I think this is the strongest position based on scripture.



I. LITERAL VIEW - John Walvord
Strengths: no lack of scripturall reference

Weaknesses: He takes some verses out of context (like Jude 7). He has a tendency to accuse those who disagree with him of "denying the doctrine of scriptural inerrancy" (even William Crockett who believes in eternal torment too but just disagrees about the nature of it). He seems completely ignorant of any conditionalist arguments other than "God is too loving to torture people for ever and ever." I could pretty easily myself refute just about every argument he makes for eternal torment, based mostly off a single verse here and a single verse there.



II. METAPHORICAL VIEW - William Crockett
Strengths: Well-researched, takes a very reasonable approach on the language of Hell.

Weaknesses: He devotes a big portion of his section to refuting annihilationism, but does so in a manner that seems convincing on the surface but is very weak upon examination.

He seems very ignorant of serious annihilationist arguments. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he just is unaware of them. For example, he argues against the bizarre idea that in Hell the "everlasting fire" is a fire that burns for ever and ever but destroys those in it. He ignores the more serious arguments based on a literal rendering of Jude 7 (which says Sodom and Gomorrah was itself punished with "eternal fire"), as well as the qualitative nature of the Greek "aionios" (eternal).

He misunderstands the contexts of various passages. He makes claims that aren't true. For example, he says that when Paul would would write about "destruction" or "death," that he must have meant eternal misery since he never told his Greek-minded audience that they were wrong about the soul's immortality. The problem is, he does so on a number of occasions (Romans 2:7 where he says immortality is something the righteous seek, 1 Timothy 6:16 where he explicitly says only God has immortality, 2 Timothy 2:10 where he ties immortality directly to the Gospel). Paul on a number of occasions told his Greek-minded audience things that explicitly went against their previous ideas of the inherently immortal soul, so we can't just assume Paul was going along with their pre-conceived ideas.

Probably out of ignorance of what annihilationists believe, he poo-poos the idea that annihilationists could believe in any finite conscious torment of the damned at all (which some do; I'm ambivalent but lean more towards that idea - at the very least, at the resurrection they'll be tormented by their consciences proportionally to their sin if nothing else).

He also argues against certain scriptural claims of annihilationists as if they are based solely on philosophy. For example, he deals with the claim that there will be no sin or evil in eternity. He says that we can't push our philosophical ideas of harmony on ancient writers; to them, all that mattered to many was that evil was out of their way. He then ignores passages like 1 Corinthians 15:24-28 and Ephesians 1:10, which override whatever some uninspired Pharisee thought, and argues only against the philosophical idea.

He takes a few quotes of early church fathers, none of which actually preach eternal torment explicitly, and uses them to insist that the early church believed in eternal torment uniformally (annihilationist Edward Fudge deals with this issue in much greater depth in The Fire That Consumes).

He insists that even when Jesus directly quotes the Old Testament when speaking of Hell, he must instead be referring to uninspired literature's use of those phrases and language because it is newer (ex. Mark 9:48 where Jesus quotes Isaiah 66:24 about fire and worms, which refers to corpses, and insists that Jesus actually meant it the way the uninspired book of Judith meant fire and worms, being a sign of eternal torment). He builds other claims off of claims he failed to prove in the first place.

He claims that Greek influences permeated Jewish thought before Jesus, thus they believed in eternal torment. Bravo! That helps my position! he admits that Jews who believed in eternal torment were basing it not off of scripture but off of false religion. But then he goes on to basically claim that the NT writers must have been so influenced too. So God inspired writers based their ideas off of false religions? He seems to be saying "everyone believed in eternal torment back then (not true by the way), and therefore the NT writers must have believed that too. Thus, the New Testament teaches eternal torment and any ambiguous texts must be read that way."

William Crockett's contribution is the most substantial but exhibits many many weaknesses often seen in defense of the traditional doctrine of Hell.



III. PURGATORIAL VIEW - Zachary Hayes
Note: the title is misleading. He is not saying Hell is merely a place where sinners go to be purged of sin (which many universalists believe). He believes in a Hell of eternal conscious torment. He instead is simply defending the Catholic view that there is a purgatory, where the saved go for a time to be purged of any remaining sins before they go to Heaven. Really, he doesn't even talk about Hell.

Strengths: he admits there is no real scriptural basis for purgatory.

Weaknesses: Like i said, no real scriptural basis for purgatory. For non-Catholics like me, his section makes an interesting read about the history and rationale for the doctrine, but it doesn't really say much that's relevant to me. Either you are Catholic and you believe what the church says, or you're not and, most likely, you don't believe it, just as i don't.



IV. CONDITIONAL VIEW (Annihilationism) - Clark Pinnock
Strengths: He agrees with me XD
He gives a good overview of texts and thematic arguments from scripture that positively point to annihilationism and a soul that is not on it's own immortal.

Weaknesses: Like I said above, no matter what you believe, this book is weak. Pinnock fails on many accounts. He devotes WAY too much of his argument to philosophical and emotional claims. It paints the picture of annihilationists as those who simply refuse to believe that eternal conscious torment in Hell is true because it's mean, not because the scriptures actually say it's not true. His explanation of Revelation 14:9-11 is quite shallow and leaves out the core of the argument, that it draws directly from Old Testament language of absolute destruction (see Isaiah 34:10 and Genesis 19:28).

Lastly, he doesn't even touch Revelation 20:10. You can't be an annihilationist if you don't have a good answer for a verse that says someone will be "tormented day and night for ever and ever"! Edward Fudge does have an answer (The Fire that Consumes). That's probably THE most important passage to answer. Maybe if Clark Pinnock had devoted less time to talking about how God is so loving and merciful, he might have had room to deal with this issue...

In short, save your money and check it out at the library. That's what I did.

This text is an instalment in Zondervan's Four Views series examining various religious and theological issues. The four contributions discuss the nature of Hell.

Walvoord - literal biblical interpretation
Crockett - metaphorical biblical interpretation
Hayes - Catholic purgatory view
Pinnock - Conditional interpretation (finite period of suffering then destruction)

From my perspective this instalment is similar to other contributions in this series - generally solid writing, but within an excessively narrow scope. The book may have been more interesting if Walvoord's and Crockett's pieces were combined and a different view included (e.g. liberal protest, Orthodox or Jewish). Overall, the book is not bad, if a bit narrow.

I'm glad to find few reviewers that are arrogantly condemning this book because it doesn't dogmatically support their particular view of the doctrine of hell. His objective is obviously to give leaders who support four chief views the opportunity to explain their position and back it up with available Scriptures or writings of church fathers. I like the fact that there is also opportunity for rebuttals. I wouldn't say this is an exhaustive work on the theological views of hell, but it lays out the primary positions quite lucidly and fairly.
I know that many non-Christians as well as Christians struggle with this doctrine because of the harshness and finality of the spiritual death/suffering of multiplied millions of humans. I believe that Crockett gives us much food for thought and I, for one, am grateful for the book.

This book is a good treatment of the issue of Hell's nature from four different, although essentially evangelical, perspectives. While all the authors claim to regard the Bible authoritatively, they all hold different interpretations of the real nature of Hell.

John Walvoord espouses the traditional view, which holds that Hell is a place of literal smoke and fire, where nonbelievers experience physical and emotional suffering throughout eternity. William Crockett contends that Biblical images of fire and so on are actually metaphores which represent separation from God. Zachary Hayes gives the purgatorial view of traditional Roman Catholocism. Finally, Clark Pinnock offers the conditionalist view, oftentimes known as annihilationism, in which nonbelievers are snuffed completely out of existence.

Of all the authors I am most persuaded by Crockett's view. As he points out, the metaphorical view does not imply a reduced trust in the Bible, but merely attempts to interpret verses responsibly. Out of all the authors, Crockett alone considers the important issue of what Christ's contemporaries would have thought of the verses, given cultural factors. Christ's sayings should be interpreted within the framework of the Biblical world, not simply viewed through the glasses of modern Western culture. Moreover, Crockett argues that it is almost impossible to take the descriptions of hell completely literally in the first place, since it seems contradictory that Hell should simultaneously be a place of fire and of darkness, and since Satan and other demons are said to suffer the fire in Hell, even though they lack material bodies which give physical pain significance. Thus, Crockett ably defends the metaphorical view.

Walvoord's essay is also well-written, but he almost entirely concerns himself with the issue of whether or not Hell involves eternal conscious existence. Although he provides a good case for the eternality of Hell, Walvoord's arguments are consistent with the metaphorical view. Strangely, he criticizes Crockett's view for supposedly undermining Biblical authority, but since it is an issue of interpretation and not of trustworthiness, his comments are misplaced.

Pinnock argues that Hell should be considered eternal death, in that nonbelievers will either be snuffed out of existence immediately or after some period of conscious punishment. He acknowledges that this controversial view is extremely rare amongst early Christians, but rightly claims that tradition is not infallible, and thus the arguments for eternal conscious punishment must be considered on their own rights. For an analysis of Pinnock's view, see my linked article.

While the multiple perspectives format of "Four Views on Hell" offers a great opportunity for readers to become accustomed to a variety of perspectives, the writers are given insufficient space to respond to eachother. Moreover, the book would have benefitted greatly if the individual authors were given a chance to respond to their critics. Despite this shortcoming, however, I recommend "Four Views on Hell" for any person who is interested in the theology of Hell from a Christian perspective.