Moral Revulsion is Good Reason to Reject a Christian Doctrine

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:02]Back in 1997, J.I. Packer, a very well-known conservative evangelical British Anglican theologian who taught for years at Regent College where I did my master's degree, he published this little article, "Evangelical Annihilationism in Review." And I wanted to look at one particular excerpt from it because I think it's very interesting and frankly fascinating and perhaps a little bit shocking even how poorly J.I.

[00:00:33]Packer understands or understood theological method.

[00:00:38]This is what he says.

[00:00:40]Views about hell should not be determined by considerations of quote-unquote comfort.

[00:00:48]Said John Wenham, "Beware of the immense natural appeal of any way out that evades the idea of everlasting sin and suffering.

[00:00:57]The temptation to twist what may be quite plain statements of scripture is intense.

[00:01:03]It is the ideal situation for unconscious rationalizing."

[00:01:09]So, uh the point that Wenham is making here, Wenham rejected the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, the doctrine that God will resurrect the reprobate or the lost or the damned to suffer an eternal an eternity of of torture as punishment or eternal conscious torment. Wenham rejected that view.

[00:01:33]Uh he adopted the annihilationist theological view, but he said we must be very careful to reject eternal conscious torment because we recoil in horror at the prospect of eternal conscious torment because that, in the words of Packer, would be to appeal to an issue of quote-unquote comfort, which is not a legitimate basis or theological criterion on which to form a doctrinal view.

[00:02:04]Similarly, he then quotes John Stott who said, "Emotionally, I find the concept of eternal conscious torment intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain."

[00:02:21]But then um Stott goes on and says this, "But our emotions are a fluctuating unreliable guide to truth and must be exalted to the place of supreme authority and must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining truth.

[00:02:38]My question must be and is not what does my heart tell me, but what does God's word say?

[00:02:45]So, both Stott and Wenham, who although they were annihilationists, they were saying you must be very careful not to become an annihilationist because of the comfort the doctrine offers over against the doctrine of eternal conscious torment because the sense of comfort or our feelings or our heart is an unreliable guide to the Bible.

[00:03:11]And Packer agrees with this. He says, "Both these men adopted adopted annihilationism in which they may be wrong, but they embraced it for the right reason, not because it fitted into their comfort zone, though it did, but because they found uh they thought and found it in the Bible.

[00:03:30]Whatever our view on the question, we too must be guided by scripture and nothing else."

[00:03:38]Uh and this is where I have to say Packer is completely wrong here.

[00:03:43]John Stott is completely wrong here as well.

[00:03:47]And I suspect uh based on the quote from Wenham that he's also wrong here.

[00:03:52]How dare I disagree with John Stott and J.I. Packer and John Wenham, but frankly, they're just wrong.

[00:04:00]Look at the way that let's return to the way that Stott talks about it.

[00:04:05]He says, "Our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth."

[00:04:10]Well, first of all, to frame them to frame what we're talking about here as emotions is to mislabel it.

[00:04:18]It's not simply emotions like sadness or revulsion that we're talking about here.

[00:04:26]It's what we call moral intuitions.

[00:04:30]And moral intuitions are not simply some fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth.

[00:04:37]Moral intuitions are the very basis of all our moral reasoning.

[00:04:44]All our moral reasoning begins with intuitions and we then reason out from those intuitions.

[00:04:52]Now, those intuitions are not infallible, but that's true of every aspect of our knowledge.

[00:05:00]Every source of our knowledge is is um fallible. It's prone to some degree of error.

[00:05:09]None of it is without any possible error. So, we can err in our moral intuitions about the good or evil, the right or wrongness of a particular truth claim.

[00:05:22]But, we can also err in any other area as well.

[00:05:27]And this is the starting point then is to recognize that the ground that what Packer tendentiously labels as comfort, what John Stott tendentiously labels as mere emotion, is in fact moral intuitions, which are the foundation of all our moral reasoning.

[00:05:48]And moral intuitions are indeed a significant factor when people think about and contemplate the prospect of the doctrine of eternal conscious torment.

[00:05:58]You think, for example, about specific instances of people being tortured.

[00:06:06]Uh people being suffering unimaginable anguish and pain in body and in mind.

[00:06:16]And you think, how could that be just?

[00:06:19]And most people today, when they think about the possibility of torture, let's say as a civic penalty, as a penalty in contemporary jurisprudence, they recoil at it.

[00:06:32]For example, if if you accept capital punishment, if you are humane and ethical, you will look for the most humane and ethical form of capital punishment.

[00:06:45]No ethical person today is going to look for a form of capital punishment that purposely extends maximal suffering in body and mind to the person prior to their being finally killed.

[00:06:58]It's not like we're going to say, "Okay, we're going to give lethal injection, but first we're going to ram bamboo shoots under the person's nails, and we're going to skin them alive, and rub salt in their wounds to maximize their suffering and anguish prior to administering lethal injection."

[00:07:17]People would be utterly repulsed at that idea.

[00:07:20]And that's because their moral intuitions, in a fundamental way, would recoil at the prospect of purposely torturing a person as a form of punishment.

[00:07:32]And then all you do is you say, "Okay, if I am repulsed at the immorality of torturing a person for a period of time, how would I feel about torturing them maximally forever?

[00:07:48]And if you are if you believe that you have strong moral intuitive grounds to reject categorically and in principle the ethics of torturing a person for a period of time in this life, how much more should you be repulsed by the prospect of a morally perfect loving God torturing a person forever in the afterlife?

[00:08:13]This is not simply comfort. We're not simply talking here about fluctuating unreliable emotions, as a start is oddly saying. We are talking here about some of the deepest grounds on which we have convictions.

[00:08:32]So, for example, I think in my view, the fact that it is intrinsically wrong to torture people is as deeply founded as any of my beliefs.

[00:08:44]So, if you were going to ask me, "Okay, but what about God torturing people forever in eternity? Or, as some like to say, what about God allowing people to torture themselves forever in eternity and appropriating their self-torture as God's mode of punishing them?"

[00:09:01]And I will say that is an utterly repugnant notion.

[00:09:05]When I do that, I'm not simply being driven by comfort or fluctuating emotions.

[00:09:11]I am allowing deep moral intuitions to guide and influence and shape how we do theology.

[00:09:20]In Romans 2:14 and 15, Paul says, "When Gentiles who do not have the law do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law.

[00:09:34]They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts.

[00:09:39]Their consciences also bearing witness and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.

[00:09:47]What Paul is talking about here are moral intuitions.

[00:09:52]A deep sense of right and wrong, of good and evil, which is written into the heart of every properly functioning human being.

[00:10:01]So, if you have moral intuitions in the wrongness of torture, certainly that is a legitimate ground on which one would reason theologically.

[00:10:14]If you have two different possible interpretations of Matthew 25:41-46, how should we think about the goats going away into a period of what is translated in English as eternal punishment? How should we understand or interpret that?

[00:10:32]Well, you've got different interpretations from the annihilationist, from the infernalist or the advocate of eternal conscious torment, but also in the mix, in your theological reasoning, you hopefully have these deep intuitions against the intrinsic wrongness of torturing people, let alone torturing them for eternity as a form of punishment.

[00:10:55]And if you have that, then absolutely that is part of in terms of weighing the scales of something you should weigh in favor of the annihilationist view and against the infernalist or eternal conscious torment view.

[00:11:10]Uh lastly, let me just say a a point about perfection intuitions.

[00:11:16]It's odd that somebody like Packer in that passage does not recognize, acknowledge how core our intuitions about the nature of perfection are to our theology. Let me just give you three quick examples.

[00:11:34]First of all, a-temporality.

[00:11:37]I was a seminary professor for 20 years, and every year when I would lecture on the divine nature and uh divine attributes, I would always ask people, "How many of you believe that God exists outside time?"

[00:11:54]And at least nine out of 10 students would say they believe God exists outside time.

[00:12:01]So, I would say, "Why do you think God exists outside time?"

[00:12:05]And typically, they would try to come up with some biblical rationale.

[00:12:10]God uh Jesus is the same yesterday, today, and forever. God is the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, things like that.

[00:12:17]But that language all at most suggests simpiternality, that God exists at all points in time, that God is backwardly existing, and God is forwardly existing.

[00:12:31]It doesn't say that God is atemporal, such that temporal predicates do not apply to God.

[00:12:38]The source of believing that God is atemporal or outside time comes not from the Bible, but rather from intuition that some people have about the nature of perfection.

[00:12:50]The belief being, and this really goes back at least to ancient Greece, that perfection is about being unchanging and having the fullness of one's illimitable life all at once, to make a reference to Boethius's definition of eternity.

[00:13:08]And if you have those intuitions about a-temporality, well, then that's going to inform how you read and interpret the Bible.

[00:13:16]It's also interesting It's interesting It's kind of sad, too, that many Christians don't even realize this, that most systematic theologians throughout Christian history believe that God was impassible, meaning that God cannot suffer in the divine nature.

[00:13:30]God cannot be acted upon. Now, again, there were several intuitions at play here with respect to the divine nature and perfection that led theologians to believe that God can suffer in the incarnation, the humanity of Jesus, but God cannot suffer in God's self.

[00:13:47]Uh and the last one I'll just note is moral perfection.

[00:13:51]We believe God is maximally perfect being.

[00:13:56]That may mean God exists outside time or not. It may mean God is impassable or not. It may mean God is moral morally perfect under one or another conception.

[00:14:07]In all of these cases, now here's a key.

[00:14:10]In all of these cases, we are going to be pursuing an understanding of God as maximally perfect.

[00:14:18]However, intuitions are going to differ to some degree. So, for example, I don't accept the idea that for God to be perfect is for God to be atemporal. I think God a better understanding of God is that God is sempiternal. God is backwardly existing and forwardly existing.

[00:14:38]Um I I'm don't accept impassability, either.

[00:14:43]So, I think that God can suffer in the divine nature.

[00:14:48]But the key here is not that our intuitions are infallible, because again, all of our human reasoning is fallible. The key, however, is that intuitions play a role in our theology.

[00:15:01]They play a role in how we interpret the Bible and how we construct doctrine.

[00:15:07]So, your particular intuitions on the nature of divine perfection and God's relationship to time is going to inform how you think about whether God is atemporal or sempiternal, whether God is impassable or passable.

[00:15:19]And in terms of moral perfection, I assume all Christians are going to agree that God is maximally perfect, but they're probably going to have different intuitions as to how that expresses itself.

[00:15:32]And at the very least, I would hope that Christians like Packer could recognize that people could have different intuitions than apparently he did about the compatibility of being morally perfect and torturing creatures eternally.

[00:15:50]And if you have deep moral intuitions that a morally perfect God would never torture his creatures eternally, that absolutely is a legitimate point, a legitimate criterion on which you might favor the annihilationist interpretation of the Bible and understanding of postmortem judgment over the infernalist interpretation.

[00:16:13]So, to conclude, we are not simply talking here about a subjective concept of comfort or some fluctuating and unreliable appeal to emotions or feelings.

[00:16:28]Rather, we are talking about deeply rooted moral intuitions and the role that they can have in theological reflection and construction.