What I’ve since discovered is that while an emotional revulsion toward the traditional view is sometimes what prompts evangelicals to question it, what convinces them of its alternative (conditionalism/annihilationism) is Scripture. John Stott, for example, wrote, “I find the concept intolerable and do not understand how people can live with it without either cauterizing their feelings or cracking under the strain.” But when Stott is quoted (by traditionalists), what he went on to say is often replaced by an ellipsis: “But our emotions are a fluctuating, unreliable guide to truth and must not be exalted to the place of supreme authority in determining it. As a committed Evangelical, my question must be—and is—not what does my heart tell me, but what does God’s word say?” And what Stott and many, many other evangelicals have found as they’ve sought the answer to that question is that Scripture is clearly in favor of conditional immortality and the annihilation of the risen lost.

That’s certainly what I found as well. I’m a thoroughly conservative, Reformed evangelical, and emotions tugged me toward the traditional view of hell, not conditionalism. As I researched the issue I knew that if I were to come down against the traditional view, ministry doors would close to me and I’d be called a liberal, an eisegete, even a heretic. But my commitment to the inerrant and authoritative word of God forced me to reject eternal torment in favor of what the Bible teaches: that the risen lost will not live forever in torment, but will instead die a second time, in both body and soul (unlike the first death), and will never, ever live again.