Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

• In my book "Marston (Paul) - Hellfire and Destruction: What Does the Bible Really Say about Hell?", and in "Marston (Paul) - Death and ‘Hell’: What the New Testament Does and Does Not Teach", I show the New Testament is absolutely clear that the ultimate end of the determinedly unrepentant is destruction – meaning ceasing to exist. This is not based on any elaborate exegesis or inference, but because the New Testament repeatedly says it is ‘destruction/perishing’ and when these Greek terms are used in a judgmental sense against humans this is what they always mean. The denial of this in favour of hell as unending torment is based on some weird reinterpretations of plain terms.
• The New Testament is also totally clear that at some time in the future there will be a general resurrection, and everyone will be judged by God according to what they did on earth, some heading ultimately for destruction and others for eternal life in a new heaven and earth.
• My books also look at the issue of what happens to us between death and resurrection. But on this the New Testament is not at all specific or clear, and any conclusion has to be tentative.
• My own conclusion is that it is most likely that for both unrighteous and righteous people this intermediate time involves total lack of consciousness, analogous to a time spent under general anaesthetic. The next thing of which everyone will be aware after death is resurrection to judgment.
• I am well aware that others have taken various New Testament verses to imply some kind of consciousness in this intermediate period. The core problem with this is that each of the verses cited would give a different version of this experience, and for many of the verses a very ingenious exegesis is required for them to be connected at all. The most attractive option would seem to me to be a kind of dream like semi-consciousness (seemingly a view in N.T. Wright) but actually none of the cited biblical sources seem to imply this.
• That Gehenna implies destruction not unending torment is both clear in Scripture and concerns the very nature of God himself so I feel strongly that those who love God and accept Scripture should recognise it. The idea that in the state between death and resurrection to the final judgment those as yet unjudged should be suffering agony in the sight of righteous in bliss is also repugnant, but dream-like semi-consciousness for the righteous is not, and I feel no particular antipathy to the idea, though see no evidence for it in Scripture.
• However, let us look at the various verses cited by different people to determine some kind of conscious intermediate state, and what that state is: