No, I meant how many of you guys have come here to this forum all at once?
Great, I understood you correctly the first time then! The answer is 2, if by "all at once" you allow a span of a couple of days. An army of two conditionalists have joined in recent days. I've read conversations here since last year, but finally took the plunge to sign up and chime in. I see one other conditionalist on this forum who signed up a few days ago. Perhaps you were thrown by the conspiracy theory being pushed here. First, an admin's claim that there had been "a steady influx" of conditionalists "over the past few days." But there was only 1 at that time who had influxed themselves to the forum. Since then, I'm the second and final influxer. The original poster had registered a few weeks ago, and another conditionalist here had been on the forum since last year. So there's no hostile takeover; no "concentrated effort by a special interest group to overpower the forum with their heresies." Just people sharing their convictions. 4 people, plus those who disagree. Baptists all. It'd be great if that could be done without the narrative of suspicion (from others, not yourself), including the unfortunate suggestion that two different people are really the same person.
I'm familiar enough with the doctrine and some groups who hold it.
OK, well I'm not familiar with any groups who hold it in the form evangelicals do. That's why the distinction is made between evangelical conditionalism and any others. The particular distinctives of our view include standard first-tier evangelical affirmations (Trinity, etc.), an insistence upon the resurrection of all people, and the exclusion of any view on the intermediate state and anthropological constitution (read: dualism is just fine).
As a movement within the evangelical church, it is odd to hear it conveniently cast aside as "heresies." Do Baptists ascribe any more heresies than the broader evangelical church does, which I somehow don't know about? Which ecumenical councils do we hold to as authoritative that also condemned conditionalism/annihilation as heresy? (A: none). Conditionalists can readily affirm every word of the SBC's Baptist Faith and Message, and every word of the ecumenical creeds. The most that could be said against it is that statements of faith for some Baptist institutions exclude it, but by no means all, and that conditionalists can't affirm every single word of the 1689 Baptist confession (which hardly makes it a heresy).
To appreciate how Baptist non-conditionalists should regard and interact with fellow Baptist conditionalists, look no further than
Al Mohler's dialogue with Chris Date of Rethinking Hell (the host of that show being also a conditionalist).
Seems most of the objections to eternal torment are on philosophical grounds, then it simply becomes a doctrine in search of a text. ... That leads to the illegitimate totality transfer that I mentioned on the (i think) first page of this thread. The blanket assertion (and insistence) is made that eternal life means such and such.... but you know as well as I do, something does not become true just because somebody keeps saying it over and over and over.
I'm sure that the OP knows that as well as we do. I'm sure you can appreciate that, due to certain constraints, it's OK to make your assertions up front and then proceed to justification later as needed. I recall that he has pointed to his word studies on his own blog; whether that covers the point you highlighted, I'm not sure. But I think we can credit him with having formed his views in more than thin air, just as it ought to be admitted that the conditionalists I mentioned above are no slouches in this area. J.I. Packer disagreed with their view, but nonetheless called them "
honored evangelicals," regarding it "
distasteful to argue in print" against them.
I'm familiar with the conditionalist-traditionalist conversation on the whole, and what I've found regarding disagreements over what "eternal life means," is that both sides are willing to affirm both the qualitative and quantitative meanings. There is a long history in theology, particular in the patristic writers and then again in the Reformed tradition, of "eternal life" being that which Adam might have enjoyed had he not fallen, including, as prelapsarian life did, a full fellowship with God. As you know, the future vision of eternal life in Revelation draws upon imagery from Eden, and is seen as a kind of recapitulation and consummation of it. So there is a continuum between creational life as given first to Adam and Eve (and as redeemed by Christ and participated in now through the Spirit), and eternal life with God. There is more than one usage of "life" in the scriptures, but if we can be so bold as to claim a general "biblical definition," it must surely be grounded in the life given to human beings as "living creatures" animated by the "breath of life," the God we worship being the one who "gives life and breath and everything" to all of us.
I'm not going to give a discourse on it, but there are good reasons to think that Jesus spoke in both qualitative and quantitative terms, not one or the other. Since you're not convinced of the quantitative, I will simply offer his statement in John 12:25—
"Anyone who loves their life will lose it, while anyone who hates their life in this world will keep it for eternal life."
A plain sense reading of the logic of this saying suggests that any human's life is "kept" for eternal life if and only if they hate how this is experienced in the present world/age. Given that psychḗ is the term here for ordinary life (and whether that is understood to refer to one's breath, or to one's soul, or to the vital principle more generally), it does seem to be implicated in eternal life. Jesus presents a similar continuum elsewhere, saying things like "T
he one who believes in me will LIVE, even though they DIE; and whoever lives by believing in me will NEVER DIE." and "
Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they DIED. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and NOT DIE. ...Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has ETERNAL LIFE, and I will raise him up on the last day. ... This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like the bread the fathers ate, and DIED. Whoever feeds on this bread will LIVE FOREVER." He also said that the sons of the resurrection are they that "
can no longer die."
It's not that there is definitive proof here either way. But both sides need to account for the recalcitrant data, as is often said. And there's plenty of it in our favor, right through Paul's writings where the doctrine of overcoming death and mortality by a glorious resurrection is made explicit.
Seems most of the objections to eternal torment are on philosophical grounds
You know I couldn't disagree more. I'm absolutely convinced that the explanation for the rise of evangelical conditionalism again in our day (just as it rose in the nineteenth century) is the compelling biblical case. It is a common and unjustified myth that the motivation and substantial case of conditionalists is something other than that. The movement's published works are a testament to that (and I have read whole collections of them). In my opinion, the reverse tends to be true, if anything. Traditionalists are those who typically tend to jump to philosophical argumentation. The two most common examples of this are the infinite God=infinite torment argument, and the aggregate sin argument (whereby endless torment is justified by positing perpetual, impenitent fist-shaking in hell). Two contradicting arguments, by the way.
