The Conditionalist Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

V. Recapitulation: Twin Fallacies of Tertullian and Origen

1. UTTER ERADICATION OF EVIL PROMISED

God has promised the complete termination of moral evil. As the Inspired Word has revealed the origin of evil, so has it likewise declared that it will have an end—and that forever. It did not exist from all the eternity of the past, and it will not persist throughout all the eternity of the future. Evil is a thing of time, not an inevitable part of eternity. Evil will be blotted out, and not continue on in indefeasible defiance without end. All of God’s attributes of mercy, holiness, justice, and power are pledged to its extirpation. The necessity of His own nature and character demands it. And He who was able to create is able also to destroy. CFF1 1023.4

Hell is not to be the eternal abode and spawning place of endless evil—intensifying, imprecating, darkening, and ineradicating—throughout all futurity. The Hell that God has prepared is for the utter and eternal eradication of all sin and sinners. Tertullian’s fantastic secret fire was a pagan importation. The fire of God’s kindling openly and completely consumes and ultimately obliterates. The evil of the universe will be compassed by it, and be blotted out forever. Tertullian’s Hell was a monstrosity, an imaginative concoction, a blot upon the character of God. Evil and misery are to be vanquished forevermore. That is the second death—and Tertullian forgot that the greatest punishment for the greatest crimes is to be cut off by death. CFF1 1024.1

But there is Heaven, as well as Hell. Heaven is for sinners who have been redeemed and become saints. Hell is for the incorrigibly wicked and according to their deserving will be their just suffering. But when that designated time is over they will cease to be. All will then be wrapped in the slumber of eternal death. Rebellious life will die out, and with it the consuming fire in the charred and burned—out furnace of Hell. Unbroken silence will reign throughout its confines. Those who have not found life, so freely offered, will have found death. And the results will remain unaltered forever. There will be no unending dualistic clash of good and evil, no eternal jarring note, no unextinguishable sin. Righteousness alone will fill the universe. Evil not only will have died out but, according to the determinate promise of God, will never rise up again. CFF1 1024.2

2. FALLACIOUS THREATS AND DELUSIVE PROMISES

Origen’s Restorationism was a revolt against Tertullian’s Eternal Torment. Tertullian, in his misconception of Hell and human destiny, saw in every volcano a chimney of Gehenna, with the lost suffering in Eternal Torment. This brought a violent reaction to Origen. But Origen’s Hell was equally fallacious, unwarranted, misleading, and un-Biblical. The fires of destruction will at last go out because those incorrigibles committed thereto have been burned up. CFF1 1025.1

It does not cease because its victims are purified, and thus released for Heaven. Unrepentant sinners, human and demonic, will be obliterated, not restored. Hell is not a circuitous back door to Heaven, but the direct exit to oblivion. Its fateful work accomplished, it too will pass away forever, and a clean universe ensue. CFF1 1025.2

So both Tertullian’s and Origen’s fire and Hell are alike false, fantastic, and fatal to true Christian faith, though in opposite ways. One threatened what God has never decreed; the other promised what God has never authorized. One is as false as the other. Origen boldly taught the spiritual purgation of all sinners by the cleansing fires of personal remorse. Thus he left Christ and His saving grace largely out of the transaction of restoration. It was largely a process of self-purification. And all this, Origen held, would consume innumerable ages, and thus strike again at the historic Biblical belief in the prophesied Second Advent and the judgment. CFF1 1025.3

God’s lake of fire will be real and effective and final. It will accomplish its designated purpose—the saints all safe, the sinners all obliterated. The universe will be clean at the close of sin’s tragic, futile experiment. The chaff, the tares, the severed branches, will all be burned up, destroyed, reduced to ashes, come to nought, be as though they had not been. The wheat will be gathered into God’s heavenly garner for all eternity. That is the finale of the plan of redemption. Grace and retribution, mercy and justice, will have had their righteous sway. And the redeemed of the universe will proclaim, “Just and true are thy ways, thou King of saints” (Revelation 15:3). That is the precise opposite of both Tertullianism and Origenism. CFF1 1025.4