Chapter 27: The Language of Destruction (Matthew 10:28; Romans 6:23; Philippians 3:19)

I used to be an annihilationist. For several years, after I could no longer stomach the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, I found refuge in conditional immortality. The lost, I believed, simply ceased to exist. It felt cleaner. More merciful. More honest about what the word "destroy" actually means.

I still think the conditionalists are right about one big thing. The Bible’s word for the fate of the lost is, over and over, destruction. Not endless torture. Not preservation in agony. Destruction. And that matters.

So this chapter walks a careful line between two views I respect, and explains why I now hold a third. The word "destroy" is at the center of the conversation, and we need to ask what it means with fresh eyes.

That word "destroy" (Greek apolesai, a form of apollumi) sits at the heart of a three-way debate. And the debate runs far beyond a single verse. Paul warns of "destruction" (Greek olethros) in 2 Thessalonians 1:9. He names those "whose end is destruction" (Greek apōleia) in Philippians 3:19. And his plainest statement of wages and gifts says simply: "For the wages of sin is death" (Romans 6:23).

The traditionalist says the destruction texts describe conscious ruin, not the end of existence. On this reading, "destroy" means to ruin or to deprive of well-being, not to annihilate. So these verses are fully compatible with endless torment.

James B. De Young, in Exposing Universalism, argues that hell in Jesus’ teaching is described by three ideas: punishment, destruction, and banishment. Under the heading “Hell Is Destruction” in chapter 12, he gathers the key texts: the broad way that leads to destruction (Matt 7:13–14), the house built on sand that collapses (Matt 7:24–27), the word “perish” in John 3:16, and similar texts in the apostles (2 Thess 1:5–10; Rev 20:14; 21:8). On De Young’s reading, destruction is not annihilation but the loss of real life. The universalist, he contends, cannot account for the finality these words carry.¹

The conditionalist says these texts mean exactly what they sound like. Edward Fudge, in The Fire That Consumes, argues that "destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matt 10:28) is plain speech. God will end the existence of the finally impenitent. The wages of sin is death, real death. The wicked "perish" and suffer "destruction," and fire consumes rather than preserves. John Stott stunned the evangelical world by endorsing conditional immortality. He argued that the language of destruction sits far more comfortably with extinction than with endless torment.³

Both readings deserve a fair hearing. I want to grant what is right in each one, and then show why a third reading, the restorationist reading, fits the evidence best.

B. The Text in Context

The words at stake come from three different Greek roots, and they appear across the New Testament in a wide range of settings. We need to see the whole family together.

The first word is apollumi ("to destroy, to ruin, to lose"). It appears over ninety times in the New Testament.⁴ The second is olethros ("ruin, destruction"), appearing four times.⁵ The third is apōleia ("destruction, waste, perdition"), appearing about twenty times.⁶ These three words together form the Bible’s "language of destruction." Whatever they mean, they shape how we read the fate of the lost.

In Matthew 10, the context is a sending-out speech. Jesus sends the twelve apostles on a mission and warns them about coming persecution. He tells them not to fear people who can kill the body but not the soul. Instead, fear the One who is "able to destroy" (Greek dunamenon apolesai) both soul and body in Gehenna. Two things stand out. First, Jesus says God is able to do this. The word is dunamenon, meaning "having the power to."⁷ That is a statement of capacity, not a declaration of intent. Second, right after this warning, in the very same breath, Jesus turns to comfort. Not one sparrow falls apart from the Father’s will. The hairs of your head are numbered. "Fear not, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows" (Matt 10:31). The warning and the comfort sit side by side.

In the same chapter, just eleven verses later, Jesus uses the same Greek word in a very different way:

The word translated "lose" here is apollumi, the same word translated "destroy" in verse 28. George Sidney Hurd makes a sharp observation about this. The translators render apollumi and psuchē ("soul/life") as "destroy the soul" in verse 28. But in verse 39 they translate the same words as "lose his life." This leaves the impression that Jesus was talking about two unrelated things. He was not. Both statements involve the apollumi of the psuchē.⁸

This matters deeply. If "losing" your soul-life for Jesus’ sake means you find it, then the destruction of the soul is not simply extinction. It can also mean the undoing of the old, self-ruled life so that a new and God-ruled life can emerge.

C. The Heart of the Case

1. The Lexical Move: What Do These Words Actually Mean?

Let me start with the words themselves. A word study is not the whole argument, but it sets the ground. If "destroy" simply means "annihilate" and nothing else, the conditionalist wins. If it simply means "ruin" and nothing else, the traditionalist wins. But the truth is that these words carry a wide range of meanings. And that range is the first clue that neither simple reading is the full picture.

The Greek verb apollumi can mean "to destroy or kill," "to lose or suffer loss from," "to perish or die in a lost state," or simply "to be lost." Kittel’s Theological Dictionary of the New Testament identifies these four distinct but related senses.⁹ W. E. Vine puts it memorably. He writes that for apollumi, "the idea is not extinction but ruin, loss, not of being, but of well-being." This is clear, he says, from its use of marred wineskins (Luke 5:37), lost sheep (Luke 15:4, 6), the lost son (Luke 15:24), perishing food (John 6:27), and refined gold (1 Peter 1:7).¹⁰

Consider a few clear examples. When the Pharisees plotted with the Herodians how they might "destroy" (apollumi) Jesus (Mark 3:6), they meant to kill His body. They did not mean to wipe Him from existence. They believed in the resurrection.¹² When Peter tells us that the ancient world "perished" (apollumi) in the flood (2 Peter 3:6), the earth did not cease to exist. We still live on it.¹³ The prodigal’s father says, "This my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost (apollumi) and is found" (Luke 15:24). Nobody thinks the son had been annihilated. He was lost. He was ruined. And he came home.

The same range holds for olethros. Paul uses it of the "destruction of the flesh" in 1 Corinthians 5:5, where the purpose is explicitly restorative: "deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." The man is not annihilated. His fleshly self-will is broken so that his spirit can be rescued.¹⁴ Paul also uses olethros in 1 Timothy 6:9, where those who desire to be rich "fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and harmful lusts which drown men in destruction (olethros) and perdition (apōleia)." These people are alive. They have not ceased to exist. Their lives are in ruins.¹⁵

As Hurd observes, the buildings of Antigua Guatemala were "destroyed" by earthquakes but never ceased to exist. Some are still in ruins. Others have been restored. Destruction is not the same thing as annihilation.¹⁶

The lexical evidence, then, cuts against both a flat "annihilation only" reading and a flat "conscious ruin only" reading. The words carry a range. They can mean death. They can mean ruin. They can mean loss. They can mean the undoing of what something was, in preparation for what it will become. The question is which meaning fits best when we read these words in their full biblical context.

One more observation about how Paul uses this family of words. In Romans 14:15 he writes: "Do not destroy (apollumi) with your food the one for whom Christ died." A few verses later, in 14:20, he defines what he means: "Do not tear down the work of God for the sake of food." And in verse 21: "It is good neither to eat meat nor drink wine nor do anything by which your brother stumbles or is offended or is made weak." As Beauchemin points out, Paul defines apollumi here as "tear down," "stumble," "offend," and "make weak."⁴³ Can we annihilate another believer by our diet? Of course not. The word describes harm and setback, not cessation of existence.

Even more striking, the very ones Christ came to save are called the "destroyed" ones. "For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost (apollumi)" (Luke 19:10). The word that describes the condition of the sinner is the same word that calls forth the Savior. As Beauchemin writes, apollumi is the condition that qualifies us for salvation. "Are the lost (apollumi) ones then, the annihilated ones or those not yet found?"⁴⁴

2. The Conditionalist Case, Granted in Part

Before I make the restorationist case, I want to be honest about what the conditionalists get right. And they get something important right.

The natural sense of the word "destroy" is not "preserve forever in agony." When Jesus says God is able to "destroy both soul and body in Gehenna" (Matt 10:28), the plain reading moves toward termination, not toward eternal preservation in torment. When Paul says "the wages of sin is death" (Rom 6:23), "death" sounds like an ending, not a conscious existence of suffering without end.¹⁷

The conditionalists have pressed this point powerfully. Edward Fudge, in The Fire That Consumes, gathers an impressive range of texts where destruction, death, and perishing all point toward an end, not a beginning of endless pain.¹⁸ John Stott, one of the most respected evangelical leaders of the twentieth century, acknowledged that the language of destruction sits more comfortably with extinction than with eternal torment.¹⁹

Here I side with the conditionalist against the traditionalist. The doctrine of eternal conscious torment asks us to believe that "destroy" means "preserve," that "death" means "endless life in agony," and that "perish" means "exist forever in torment." That is a very heavy load to place on these words. The language of destruction does not support it.

So if the conditionalist is right that these words do not support endless torment, why did I move beyond conditional immortality? Because I came to see a third possibility in the very same words.

3. The Restorationist Turn

Here is the question that moved me. If apollumi can mean "to ruin" or "to lose" as well as "to kill," and if the same word is used for the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son, all of whom were found, then maybe destruction in God’s hands is not the final word. Maybe it is the painful middle of a story that ends in restoration.

Go back to Matthew 10. In verse 28, Jesus warns about the destruction of soul and body. In verse 39, He says: "Whoever loses (apollumi) his life (psuchē) for my sake will find it." The same word. The same concept. But the losing leads to finding. The destruction of the old, self-ruled life is the doorway to a new, God-ruled life.²¹

The grain of wheat must die. Its old form must be destroyed. But the death of the seed is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of the harvest. Paul picks up the same image in 1 Corinthians 15:36: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." The destruction of the old is the prerequisite for the life of the new.²²

This is what I missed as a conditionalist. I saw that "destroy" did not mean "preserve in agony." I was right about that. But I stopped too soon. I did not yet see that God’s destruction could be the severe mercy that tears down in order to rebuild. The destruction of the evil need not mean the annihilation of the person.

The psalmist caught this centuries earlier: "You turn man to destruction, and say, 'Return, O children of men'" (Psalm 90:3, NKJV). As Hurd observes, that is God’s way with all the children of Adam: first destruction, then restoration.²⁴

Paul makes the pattern concrete in 1 Corinthians 5:5. A man in the Corinthian church is living in flagrant sin. Paul’s instruction is not to annihilate him but to "deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction (olethros) of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus." The destruction is real. It is painful. And it has a purpose. The flesh is destroyed so the spirit can be rescued. As both Robin Parry and Thomas Talbott note, this is the same word Paul uses for the "eternal destruction" of 2 Thessalonians 1:9, and yet here the destruction is plainly redemptive.²⁵

I find the pattern everywhere I look. God told Israel through Moses, "I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal" (Deut 32:39). Hannah sang, "The LORD kills and makes alive; he brings down to Sheol and raises up" (1 Sam 2:6). Hosea pleaded with the people, "Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up" (Hos 6:1). The tearing comes first, but the healing is the purpose. The striking down comes first, but the binding up is the goal.

Hurd puts it this way: "Many fail to see that death or destruction is a necessary prelude to one’s being saved and restored." He tells his own story. Raised in a religious family, he would never have seen his lost condition if he had not gone into the far country and destroyed his life. Only then, in his lost and hopeless state, did he cry out to the Lord. Some, he writes, are so set in their own ways that they will need to be brought low before they finally look up.⁴⁵

4. The Whole-Canon Move

Now set the destruction texts beside the great hope texts we have already seen. God’s purpose, as Paul declares it, is that "as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive" (1 Cor 15:22). The end of God’s plan is not destruction but resurrection. The last enemy to be destroyed is death itself (1 Cor 15:26). And the goal of it all is "that God may be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28, discussed fully in Chapter 5).²⁶

Peter speaks of "the restoration of all things, which God has spoken by the mouth of all His holy prophets since the world began" (Acts 3:21, NKJV; see Chapter 13). Paul writes that God’s plan for the fullness of time is "to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth" (Eph 1:10). The cosmic sweep of these promises does not leave room for a permanent population of the annihilated.

When we read the destruction texts in this light, a coherent picture emerges. God destroys what is against Him in a person, in order to save the person. He kills and makes alive (Deut 32:39). He wounds and heals. He turns man to destruction and says, "Return." He brings down to the grave and brings up (1 Sam 2:6). "Destroy" and "make alive" are not two separate programs. They are two halves of one work.²⁷

The fire that we examined in Chapter 17 refines and purifies. The chaff is burned, but the wheat is saved. The wood, hay, and stubble are consumed, "but he himself will be saved, yet so as through fire" (1 Cor 3:15). As Hurd writes, "The wheat and the chaff are not two classes of people, but rather the chaff is the outer shell that is still clinging to the grain of wheat after being harvested." The fire destroys what is consumable. What remains is the person, purified.²⁸

Gerry Beauchemin puts the pattern plainly: "Whatever is meant by death and destruction, it cannot be unending torment or annihilation." He points to the grain of wheat that dies and bears fruit (John 12:24), the sowing that "is not made alive unless it dies" (1 Cor 15:36), and the paradox of the cross: "He kills and makes alive. He destroys to make new."²⁹

Beauchemin gathers a striking list of verses that show this pattern. Adam was told he would surely die, yet he lived 900 more years. Israel was told they would "perish" (apollumi in the Septuagint, Deut 30:18), yet Israel endures. Job says God "destroys the blameless and the wicked" (Job 9:22), yet the blameless are not gone forever. The righteous "perishes," Isaiah says, "and no man takes it to heart" (Isa 57:1). Wineskins are "marred" (apollumi, Mark 2:22). And "death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor 15:54). In all of these cases, Beauchemin writes, "utter or permanent annihilation cannot be the true meaning of death and destruction."⁴⁶

The pattern is consistent. Destruction is not the final chapter. It is the prerequisite for what comes next.

5. The Honest Fallback

I want to be clear about something. If the restorationist reading of the destruction texts should fail, I would not return to eternal conscious torment. I would return to conditional immortality. That is my honest fallback. It always has been.

The conditionalist is an ally, not an enemy. We agree on the most important negative conclusion: the doctrine of eternal conscious torment is not taught by the Bible’s destruction language. We part company only on the positive conclusion. The conditionalist says the destruction of the wicked is the end of the story. I believe it is the painful middle of a story that ends in restoration.

The disagreement is family-sized, not a chasm. I hold the conditionalists in genuine respect. Fudge and Stott have served the church by forcing a fresh look at texts that were too long obscured by the assumption of endless torment. If I am wrong about universal restoration, their reading is the one I would adopt. Not eternal conscious torment. Never that.³⁰

6. The Constructive Move: What the Language of Destruction Really Tells Us

So what does the language of destruction tell us, on the reading this book defends?

It tells us that God’s judgment is real. It is severe. It is not a metaphor for a mild correction. The word "destroy" carries weight. When Jesus warns about the destruction of soul and body in Gehenna, He means to be taken seriously. The refining fire hurts. The loss of the old self is a genuine death. We should not minimize this.

But the destruction is the destruction of evil and death. It is not the destruction of the person made in God’s image. God destroys the rebellion. He destroys the sin. He destroys the death that holds the soul captive. And when the destruction has done its work, the person emerges, not annihilated, but renewed. The grain of wheat has died and borne fruit. The lost sheep has been found. The lost son has come home.³²

Think of it this way. A surgeon destroys a tumor. The patient is not destroyed. A fire consumes a disease-ridden forest floor. The forest is not gone. It comes back greener and stronger. A refiner melts gold. The dross is consumed. The gold remains, purified. In each case, destruction serves a purpose beyond itself. It clears the ground for new life.

I believe this is what God does with the human soul that refuses Him. He does not preserve it in endless agony, as the traditionalist says. He does not annihilate it, as the conditionalist says. He destroys the rebellion, the sin, the self-will, the hardened crust of refusal. And when that painful work is done, the person stands before Him, broken and renewed, ready at last to say yes.³³

This is the reading I hold. The language of destruction is real and severe. But it describes the painful work of God as He tears down everything in a person that stands against Him, in order to raise that person to life. And the God who does this work is the same God who "kills and makes alive" (Deut 32:39), who "turns man to destruction" and then says, "Return" (Ps 90:3), and whose final word over His creation is not ruin but restoration (Acts 3:21; see Chapter 13).

D. Engagement with Specific Scholars

George Sidney Hurd has given the most sustained restorationist response to the annihilationist reading of the destruction texts. In Extermination or Restoration?, he argues that the concept of annihilation is "ontologically unbiblical," because all creation came from God and must return to Him. "The only thing which is not eternal and will pass into oblivion is evil," Hurd writes, "since evil has no real substance but is rather a mental abstract which only exists in the will of fallen moral beings."³⁴ He supports this with a striking quotation from Gregory of Nyssa:

Evil will be destroyed. But the person in whom evil resided will not be destroyed. The evil has no existence of its own. When every will comes to rest in God, evil simply has nowhere left to live. That is what the destruction texts describe: the end of evil, not the end of persons.³⁵

Hunter Coates, in Grace Abounds, strengthens the case from a different angle. He observes that in Matthew 10:28, the Greek dunamenon ("being able to") does not say God will destroy but that He can. It is a statement of power, not a promise of annihilation. Coates also notes the parallel with Isaiah 10:17–18, where "soul and body" is a figure of speech meaning "entirely," and yet Israel was not annihilated. On the contrary, Israel was later restored and blessed.³⁶

David Bentley Hart, in That All Shall Be Saved, reads the Gehenna imagery with appropriate restraint. Hart acknowledges that Jesus’ images of total destruction could be read as pointing to annihilation. Dead branches, darnel weeds, chaff burned in ovens: these sound final. But Hart also notes the "until" of Matthew 5:26 and 18:34. The servant is delivered to the torturers "until he should repay everything he owes." The debtor will not come out "until you repay the very last pittance." And some wicked servants "will be beaten with many blows" while others "with few blows" (Luke 12:47–49). These details suggest a punishment measured to fit the offense, not an endless sentence.³⁷

Hart also points to Mark 9:49: "Everyone will be salted with fire." The fire here is the fire of Gehenna, yet salting is an image of purification and preservation. "Salt is good," Jesus adds (Mark 9:50). If the Gehenna fire is meant to preserve and purify, then the destruction it produces is not annihilation. It is the burning away of what does not belong.

Robin Parry, in The Evangelical Universalist, adds a careful study of how Paul uses olethros. He notes that the word appears only four times in Paul, and the most revealing use is 1 Corinthians 5:5, where Paul commands the church to hand an unrepentant sinner over to Satan "so that the sinful nature may be destroyed (olethron) and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord." Parry observes: "The destruction experienced by the man was an annihilation of his sinful nature, not of his humanity or his existence. The destruction was intended for his own good and salvation." This is the same word Paul uses in 2 Thessalonians 1:9 for "eternal destruction." Parry is careful not to press the parallel too far. He admits that the contexts differ. But his point stands: Paul could and did conceive of a destruction that was "ultimately good for the person concerned, even if it was painful at the time."⁴⁷

Thomas Talbott, in The Inescapable Love of God, presses the 1 Corinthians 5:5 argument further. He notes that Paul's tone toward the incestuous man was harsh, as harsh as anything in 2 Thessalonians 1. Yet the punishment was for the man's own redemption. Talbott argues that in Paul's theology, "the destruction of the flesh" and "the salvation of the spirit" are two sides of the same coin. Every vessel of mercy, Talbott writes, represented the destruction of a vessel of wrath. Paul himself was once Saul the persecutor. The old Saul was destroyed. The new Paul was saved. In that sense, destruction is salvation, seen from the other side.⁴⁸

On the other side, De Young and the traditionalist commentators read these same texts as confirming a permanent state of ruin. De Young replies directly to the universalist argument about Matthew 10:28. Universalists note that Jesus says God is "able" to destroy, not that He "will" destroy. De Young counters by pointing to the larger context of Jesus’ afterlife teaching and to the lexical evidence: Gehenna in the Gospels is, as BDAG notes, a "place of punishment in the next life." His reading deserves respect. But it asks us to believe that "destroy" means "preserve forever," and I do not think the words can bear that weight.³⁸

Michael McClymond, in The Devil’s Redemption, traces the history of the conditionalist debate. He observes that both John Stott and Clark Pinnock used what he calls a "final victory" argument: it was inconceivable that any creature could remain in eternal opposition to God. McClymond then makes a striking admission. He notes that some of the arguments used in support of conditionalism "could also be used in support of universalism." That is exactly the path this book follows. If the conditionalist is right that "destroy" cannot mean "preserve forever in torment," and if the restorationist is right that God’s purpose in destruction is to make alive, then the destruction language points neither to endless torment nor to extinction. It points to the severe mercy of a God who tears down in order to rebuild.⁵⁰

Fudge and Stott, for their part, read the words honestly. They are right that the natural sense of "destroy" is termination, not preservation. Where I part from them is in the follow-through. They stop at termination. I follow the story to its end, where the God who destroys also makes alive, and where the lost are not lost forever but found.

E. Counter-Objections

Objection 1: The Traditionalist Reply

"Destroy" just means "ruin," so these texts are fully compatible with endless conscious torment.

I acknowledge that apollumi can carry the sense of "ruin" rather than "annihilation." The lost coin was "ruined" in the sense of being out of use. The prodigal was "ruined" without ceasing to exist. So the traditionalist is right that "destroy" does not necessarily mean "wipe out of existence." But the traditionalist then takes this observation much too far. If "destroy" means "ruin," it still does not mean "preserve in an ongoing state of agony forever." Ruin is not preservation. A ruined building is not a building maintained at great expense in its ruined condition for all eternity.³⁹

The lexical range of these words actually cuts against the doctrine of eternal conscious torment, not in favor of it. Destruction, ruin, loss, perishing: all of these point toward an ending, a breaking-down, a coming-apart. None of them point toward an endless, conscious, actively maintained state of suffering. On this point, I stand with the conditionalist. The destruction language does not support the traditional view.

Objection 2: The Conditionalist Reply

"Destroy means destroy. You are over-reading these texts toward universal restoration. The simplest reading is that the wicked simply cease to exist."

I grant the force of this objection. It is a fair reading of the words in isolation. If Matthew 10:28 were the only verse in the Bible, the conditionalist reading would be the most natural one. God destroys both soul and body. The end.

But Matthew 10:28 is not the only verse. It sits inside a canon that speaks of God making all things alive (1 Cor 15:22), reconciling all things to Himself (Col 1:20), becoming all in all (1 Cor 15:28), and restoring all things (Acts 3:21). It sits inside a chapter where the same word, apollumi, means "lose your life in order to find it" (Matt 10:39). And it sits inside a Bible where God says, "I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal" (Deut 32:39). The pattern of death-then-life runs through the whole story.

I concede that this is where the universalist and the conditionalist honestly part. The conditionalist reads "destroy" as the final chapter. I read it as the painful prelude to the last chapter, which is resurrection. I understand why a thoughtful, Bible-believing Christian could land on either side. But I believe the wider biblical pattern, the pattern of the seed that dies and bears fruit, the pattern of the God who kills and makes alive, tips the evidence toward restoration rather than extinction.⁴⁰

F. Conclusion and the Boundary

The Bible uses the language of destruction. It uses it seriously and often. Jesus warns about the destruction of soul and body in Gehenna. Paul writes that the wages of sin is death. The wicked face ruin, destruction, and perdition. None of this is softened or waved away in the reading this book defends.

What changes is the purpose. On the traditional reading, destruction is preservation in agony. The words cannot carry that meaning. On the conditionalist reading, destruction is termination. The words can carry that meaning, and I respect those who hold it. But on the restorationist reading, destruction is the severe, painful, real undoing of everything in a person that stands against God, so that the person, purified and renewed, can finally live.

This is what I believe. I believe it because the same Bible that speaks of destruction also speaks of God making all things alive. I believe it because the same Jesus who warns about the destruction of the soul also says that whoever loses his soul-life will find it. I believe it because the seed must die in order to bear fruit, and because God "turns man to destruction" and then says, "Return, O children of men" (Ps 90:3). And I believe it because the God who "kills and makes alive" (Deut 32:39) is a God whose last word is always life, never death.

If I am wrong about restoration, I will land on conditional immortality. The conditionalist is my neighbor. We share the same conviction that God does not preserve souls in endless agony. We part on what follows the destruction. But we never part on the character of God.

The hope this book defends is not a soft hope. It does not minimize judgment. It does not pretend that the fire is painless or that the destruction is a metaphor for a slap on the wrist. It holds that the language of destruction means exactly what it says. God destroys. He destroys sin, death, rebellion, and the old self that clings to all three. And when the destruction is done, the person who once was lost is found, the grain of wheat that died has borne its fruit, and the God who kills and makes alive stands revealed as the Father of all, who would rather break you than lose you.⁴²

That is the hope. It rests on the character of God and the testimony of Scripture. And the words of destruction, far from defeating it, are its evidence.

Notes

↑ 1. James B. De Young, Exposing Universalism: A Comprehensive Guide to the Faulty Appeals Made by Universalists (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock / Resource Publications, 2018). De Young argues throughout his treatment of the judgment texts that the language of destruction, ruin, and perdition in the New Testament points to a permanent state of conscious ruin rather than cessation of existence, and that universalism has no adequate answer for the finality these words imply. His most concentrated treatment of hell as destruction appears in ch. 12, “The Parables of Jesus and His Additional Teaching about Hell,” under the heading “Hell Is Destruction.”

↑ 2. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12, “The Parables of Jesus and His Additional Teaching about Hell,” under the heading “Hell Is Destruction.” De Young identifies three ideas that characterize hell in Jesus’ teaching: punishment, destruction, and banishment. He writes: “The three terms may also be understood more broadly: punishment may also be described as rejection and deprivation; and banishment may also be described as separation, retribution, and disintegration. The idea of destruction does not mean that one ceases to exist, as in annihilationism, but that one ceases to experience real life as it normally is before death.” The quotation is drawn from the resident copy in the Anti-Universalism library. De Young also treats Gehenna and Matthew 10:28 in ch. 2, “The Meaning of Hell,” under the heading “The Meaning of Gehenna.”

↑ 3. Edward William Fudge, The Fire That Consumes: A Biblical and Historical Study of the Doctrine of Final Punishment, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2011). Fudge's work is the most comprehensive modern defense of conditionalism. John R. W. Stott expressed his sympathy for conditional immortality in David L. Edwards and John R. W. Stott, Evangelical Essentials: A Liberal-Evangelical Dialogue (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1988), 312–20. Both are represented at naming level; neither is a resident or pasted source in this session.

↑ 4. The verb apollumi (απολλυμι) appears approximately 92 times in the New Testament, according to standard concordances. BDAG (A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature, 3rd ed.) gives the principal senses as "to cause or experience destruction" and "to lose."

↑ 5. The noun olethros (ολεθρος) appears at 1 Corinthians 5:5; 1 Thessalonians 5:3; 2 Thessalonians 1:9; 1 Timothy 6:9. BDAG defines it as "a state of destruction, ruin."

↑ 6. The noun apōleia (απωλεια) appears approximately 18–20 times depending on textual variants. BDAG gives the basic sense as "destruction, waste, ruin." W. E. Vine defines it as "loss of well-being, not of being." See W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1984).

↑ 7. The participle dunamenon (δυναμενον) is from dunamai, "to be able, to have power." Hunter Coates makes this observation in Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (2024), where he argues that the text describes God's capacity, not a declaration of what He will do. See Coates, Grace Abounds, in his discussion of Matthew 10:28.

↑ 8. George Sidney Hurd, Extermination or Restoration? A Restorationist's Response to Annihilationism (2018), ch. 7, "Destruction of Soul and Body in Gehenna." Hurd notes the translation inconsistency in most English versions. See also George Sidney Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy: The Reconciliation of All through Jesus Christ (2014), "Gehenna and the Destruction of Soul and Body."

↑ 9. TDNT (Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, ed. Gerhard Kittel), s.v. apollumi. Kittel identifies four principal meanings in New Testament usage: (1) to destroy or kill, (2) to lose or suffer loss from, (3) in the middle voice, to perish or die in a lost state, and (4) to be lost. See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "Defining Destruction," where these four senses are summarized.

↑ 10. W. E. Vine, An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words, s.v. "destroy, destroyer, destruction." Quoted in Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5. The quotation is verified from the resident copy of Hurd.

↑ 11. Vine, Expository Dictionary, s.v. apōleia. Vine defines olethros as "ruin or destruction" and apōleia as "loss of well-being, not of being." As cited in Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5.

↑ 12. Mark 3:6. The Pharisees "went out and immediately held counsel with the Herodians against him, how to destroy (apollumi) him." Since the Pharisees affirmed the resurrection of the dead (Acts 23:8), they could not have intended "destroy" in the sense of annihilation. See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5.

↑ 13. 2 Peter 3:6: "the world that then existed was deluged with water and perished (apollumi)." The earth was destroyed in the sense of undergoing a catastrophic change, but it continued to exist. The same word is used in 2 Peter 3:7 of the coming judgment. See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7, "The Day of Judgment and Perdition."

↑ 14. 1 Corinthians 5:5. Paul's command to "deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction (olethros) of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus" provides the clearest single instance in the New Testament of destruction serving an explicitly salvific purpose. The man's flesh is destroyed; his spirit is saved. See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, and Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, "Eternal Destruction." Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed., 163–64, provides the most careful survey of all four Pauline uses of olethros, noting that this use "seems to refer to annihilation rather than mere ruin, but it is in a particularly interesting context."

↑ 15. 1 Timothy 6:9. Here olethros and apōleia appear together, describing the ruin of people who are still alive. As Hurd observes, "to drown oneself in destruction and perdition does not refer to annihilation but rather a Gehenna-like experience of suffering and anguish in this life, being pierced through with many sorrows." See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7, "Eternal Destruction."

↑ 16. Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7, "Eternal Destruction." The Antigua Guatemala illustration is drawn from Hurd's personal experience and appears in both Extermination or Restoration? and The Triumph of Mercy.

↑ 17. Romans 6:23. The contrast between "death" and "eternal life" is stark. If "eternal life" means conscious, ongoing existence in God's presence, the natural counterpart, "death," seems to point toward an ending rather than a conscious, ongoing existence in torment. The conditionalists have made this point forcefully.

↑ 18. Fudge, The Fire That Consumes, passim. Fudge's work, now in its third edition, gathers the Old Testament, intertestamental, and New Testament evidence for the view that the final punishment of the wicked is their total destruction, not their eternal preservation in torment. Represented at naming level.

↑ 19. John R. W. Stott, in Edwards and Stott, Evangelical Essentials, 312–20. Stott's endorsement of conditional immortality was widely regarded as a watershed moment in evangelical discussions of final punishment. Represented at naming level; publication data verified from standard bibliographic sources.

↑ 20. The author's rejection of eternal conscious torment is developed more fully in the discussion of the purifying fire (Chapter 17), the meaning of aiōnios (Chapter 18), and the lake of fire (Chapter 26). See also the theological commitment stated in the preface to this book: "The author rejects the doctrine of eternal conscious torment as incompatible with the character of God revealed in Christ."

↑ 21. Matthew 10:28 and 10:39 together. The connection between the two uses of apollumi with psuchē in the same chapter is central to Hurd's argument. See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7, and Hurd, The Triumph of Mercy, "Gehenna and the Destruction of Soul and Body." Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, presses the same parallel using Mark 8:35, asking why conditionalists believe the same verb joined with the same noun implies extinction in Matthew 10:28 but not in Mark 8:35. See also Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 5.

↑ 22. 1 Corinthians 15:36. Paul's seed metaphor is part of his argument for the bodily resurrection: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies." The principle that death is the doorway to new life runs throughout the Pauline corpus (see also Rom 6:3–4; Gal 2:20; 2 Cor 4:10–12). See Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, "Apollumi."

↑ 23. The pattern of destruction-leading-to-life is identified in Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "Destruction Is the Prelude to Salvation." Hurd writes: "Many fail to see that death or destruction is a necessary prelude to one's being saved and restored." See also Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, "The Cross."

↑ 24. Psalm 90:3, NKJV. Hurd cites this verse as the clearest Old Testament expression of the destruction-then-restoration pattern: "You turn man to destruction, and say, 'Return, O children of men.'" See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5.

↑ 25. 1 Corinthians 5:5. Both Hurd (Extermination or Restoration?, chs. 5 and 7) and Hurd (The Triumph of Mercy, "Eternal Destruction") treat this verse as a paradigm case of destruction serving salvation. The word olethros here has an explicitly redemptive purpose clause: "that his spirit may be saved." Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2025), 163–65, surveys all four Pauline uses of olethros and argues that 1 Corinthians 5:5 demonstrates Paul could conceive of a destruction that was "ultimately good for the person concerned." Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023), notes that "the destruction of the flesh" and "the salvation of the spirit" are two sides of the same coin in Pauline theology.

↑ 26. 1 Corinthians 15:22, 26, 28. For the full exegesis of this passage see Chapter 5. The last enemy to be "destroyed" (katargeō, "to render inactive, to abolish") is death itself, and the result is God being "all in all." Even here, the destruction of death is not its preservation but its abolition.

↑ 27. Deuteronomy 32:39: "I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal." 1 Samuel 2:6: "The LORD kills and makes alive; he brings down to Sheol and raises up." See also Hosea 6:1: "Come, let us return to the LORD; for he has torn us, that he may heal us; he has struck us down, and he will bind us up." The Old Testament pattern is consistent: God's severe acts serve His restorative purposes.

↑ 28. Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7, "Ashes and Stubble." The passage on the wheat and chaff is drawn directly from the resident copy. See also 1 Corinthians 3:12–15 for Paul's own application of the fire-that-consumes-the-works-but-saves-the-person.

↑ 29. Gerry Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell: The Righteous Purpose of God's Judgment, "Apollumi." Beauchemin observes that Andrew Jukes wrote: "He kills and makes alive. He destroys to make new." Beauchemin then gathers a list of passages (including John 12:24 and 1 Cor 15:36) demonstrating that "utter or permanent annihilation cannot be the true meaning of death and destruction in any of these cases."

↑ 30. The author's relationship to conditional immortality is stated in the theological commitments at the opening of this book: "If the one open question were ever to cut the other way, the author's fallback is conditional immortality (annihilation of the finally unrepentant), never eternal conscious torment." This chapter owns that statement and develops it most fully. See Chapter 2 for the character-of-God case against ECT.

↑ 31. The full boundary between the biblical, creedal universalism this book defends and the counterfeits it refuses is stated in Chapter 1 and detailed in Appendix B. In this chapter, the boundary is internal: conditionalism is treated as a respected ally, not a counterfeit.

↑ 32. The lost sheep (Luke 15:4–6), the lost coin (Luke 15:8–10), and the lost son (Luke 15:24) are all described with forms of apollumi. In every case, the "destroyed" or "lost" one is found and restored. As Hurd observes, Jesus told these parables in direct response to the Pharisees' complaint that He was befriending sinners (Luke 15:1–2). See Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "The Savior of the Lost / Destroyed."

↑ 33. The three-way distinction between the traditionalist, conditionalist, and restorationist readings of the destruction texts is the central argument of this chapter. The traditionalist says "destroy" means "ruin, kept alive forever in that ruin." The conditionalist says "destroy" means "end of existence." The restorationist says "destroy" means "the end of the rebellion, the prelude to restoration." The restorationist agrees with the conditionalist that the traditionalist is wrong (destruction is not preservation) and with the traditionalist that the conditionalist stops too soon (the God who destroys also makes alive).

↑ 34. Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "Created Out of Nothing or out of God?" Hurd writes: "The only thing which is not eternal and will pass into oblivion is evil, since evil has no real substance but is rather a mental abstract which only exists in the will of fallen moral beings." The quotation is from the resident copy.

↑ 35. Gregory of Nyssa, as quoted in Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5. The quotation is drawn from the resident copy of Hurd. Gregory is widely regarded as one of the most articulate patristic defenders of universal restoration. See also Chapter 1 and Appendix B for the patristic witness.

↑ 36. Hunter Coates, Grace Abounds: A Holistic Case for Universal Salvation (2024), discussion of Matthew 10:28. Coates observes that the Greek dunamenon "most commonly refers to 'being able'" and that "it is very rare (practically unheard of) for this verb to be used to mean 'will' in any definitive case." He also notes the Isaiah 10:17–18 parallel, where "soul and body" is a figure of speech meaning "entirely," yet Israel was not annihilated. Drawn from the resident copy.

↑ 37. David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019). Hart's discussion of the Gehenna imagery and the destruction texts appears in his treatment of Christ's eschatological language. The references to "until" texts, "few blows" and "many blows," and "salted with fire" are drawn from the resident copy.

↑ 38. De Young, Exposing Universalism, ch. 12, “Hell Is Destruction.” De Young gathers the destruction texts from Jesus’ teaching: the broad way leading to destruction (Matt 7:13–14), the house that collapses (Matt 7:24–27), the servants cut to pieces (Matt 24:51), those destroyed like those on whom the tower of Siloam fell (Luke 13:3–5), and the “perish” of John 3:16. He writes that these texts, alongside 2 Thessalonians 1:5–10 and Revelation 20:14 and 21:8, confirm that destruction describes a permanent state rather than termination. In ch. 2, under “The Meaning of Gehenna,” De Young also addresses the universalist argument about dunamenon (“able to”): “Universalism argues that just because Jesus said that God is able to cast such into hell doesn’t mean that he actually will.” De Young responds by pointing to BDAG (153), which notes that in the Gospels Gehenna is the “place of punishment in the next life.” Drawn from the resident copy.

↑ 39. The analogy of the ruined building is drawn from the logic of Hurd's Antigua Guatemala illustration (Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7). Destroyed buildings are not actively maintained in their state of ruin for eternity; some are restored, others crumble further, but none are "preserved" in destruction. The analogy cuts against the traditionalist claim that "destruction" is compatible with eternal conscious torment.

↑ 40. The "wider biblical pattern" referred to here is developed across multiple chapters of this book. See Chapter 5 (1 Cor 15:22–28), Chapter 13 (Acts 3:21), Chapter 17 (the purifying fire), and Chapter 30 (the cumulative case). The restorationist reading of the destruction texts does not stand on any single verse but on the convergence of the whole biblical witness.

↑ 41. The mutual respect between conditionalists and restorationists is real and significant. Both reject eternal conscious torment. Both take the language of destruction seriously. The difference is whether destruction is the last word or the prelude to the last word. The author regards this as an in-house disagreement among those who honor both God's justice and the plain sense of the biblical text.

↑ 42. The concluding image draws on the convergence of Psalm 90:3 ("You turn man to destruction, and say, 'Return'"), Deuteronomy 32:39 ("I kill and I make alive"), 1 Corinthians 15:36 ("What you sow does not come to life unless it dies"), and Luke 15:24 ("this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found"). The language of destruction, read within this canonical pattern, becomes evidence for the restorationist hope rather than evidence against it.

↑ 43. Romans 14:15, 20–21. The observation that Paul defines apollumi with terms like "tear down," "stumble," "offend," and "make weak" is drawn from Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, "Apollumi" ("Scripture Interprets Itself"). This is one of the clearest cases where the biblical author himself shows that apollumi does not mean annihilation.

↑ 44. Luke 19:10. Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, "Apollumi." The rhetorical question "Are the lost (apollumi) ones then, the annihilated ones or those not yet found?" is drawn from the resident copy. See also Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "The Savior of the Lost / Destroyed," where the same connection is developed at length.

↑ 45. Hurd, Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 5, "Destruction Is the Prelude to Salvation." Hurd writes from personal experience: "Being raised in a very religious family, I would have never come to see my lost condition if I hadn't gone into the far country, destroying my life on drugs. Only then, in my lost and hopeless state, I cried out to the Lord and He saved me." This personal testimony grounds the theological point in lived experience.

↑ 46. Beauchemin, Hope Beyond Hell, "Apollumi." The list of passages demonstrating the pattern of destruction-not-as-annihilation is drawn from the resident copy of Beauchemin. He writes: "Please take a moment to reflect on what we have just read. Adam died on the same day he sinned, yet lived 900 more years. Israel perished. The blameless were destroyed. The righteous perished. Wineskins were marred. The dead are alive to God." In all of these, destruction does not mean cessation of existence.

↑ 47. Robin Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2025), 163–65. Parry surveys all four Pauline uses of olethros (1 Cor 5:5; 1 Thess 5:3; 2 Thess 1:9; 1 Tim 6:9). He notes that in 1 Corinthians 5:5 "the destruction experienced by the man was an annihilation of his sinful nature, not of his humanity or his existence." Regarding 2 Thessalonians 1:9, Parry argues that olethron aiōnion is better translated "the destruction of the age to come" rather than "everlasting destruction," leaving open whether this ruin is the person's perpetual fate. Quotations from the resident copy.

↑ 48. Thomas Talbott, The Inescapable Love of God, 3rd ed. (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2023), discussed in the chapter on 2 Thessalonians 1:9. Talbott argues that in 1 Corinthians 5:5 Paul "presented 'the destruction of the flesh' and 'the salvation of the spirit' as two sides of the same coin," so that the concept of destruction there is "explicitly a redemptive concept." He observes that Paul's harsh tone toward the incestuous Corinthian would not, on its face, suggest redemptive intent, yet Paul explicitly states the purpose: "that his spirit may be saved." See also Andrew Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 5 (Postmortem Salvation library), which draws together Talbott’s argument with Parry’s analysis. Quotations verified from the resident copies.

↑ 49. The Talbott quotation on apollumi and psuchē is cited in Hronich, Once Loved, Always Loved, ch. 5 (Postmortem Salvation library), drawing from Talbott’s dialogue with Glenn Peoples. The observation that Mark 8:35 uses the same verb (apollumi) conjoined with the same noun (psuchē) as Matthew 10:28 is also made by Hurd (Extermination or Restoration?, ch. 7), though the Talbott quotation here draws the implication more explicitly: "One kind of life must be destroyed in order for another (more abundant) kind of life to be secured. But in no case, so far as I can tell, does the destruction of a specific kind of life entail the extinction of a person." See also Parry, The Evangelical Universalist, 164–65, where Parry notes that in Pauline theology "salvation from sin comes through identification with Christ's death" and thus "a Christian is, to Paul, a person who has died and been reborn." Quotations verified from the resident copies.

↑ 50. Michael J. McClymond, The Devil’s Redemption: A New History and Interpretation of Christian Universalism, 2 vols. (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2018), V 1, pp. 109–17. McClymond provides a thorough history of the conditionalist debate, noting that John Stott’s public endorsement of conditional immortality in 1988 “provoked international debate among evangelical Christians on eschatology.” He observes that “both Stott and Pinnock used a ‘final victory’ argument — that is, that it was inconceivable that any creature could or would remain in eternal opposition to God” and that, looking back, “it is clear that some of the arguments used in support of conditionalism (e.g., the ‘final victory’ idea) could also be used in support of universalism.” McClymond also cites the Doctrinal Commission of the Church of England (1995): “Hell is not eternal torment, but it is the final and irrevocable choosing of that which is opposed to God so completely and so absolutely that the only end is total non-being.” Drawn from the resident copy.