Greg Boyd, in Satan and the Problem of Evil (Downers Grove, IL:
InterVarsity Press, 2001), attempts to handle the texts used to
argue for the eternal conscious torment of hell and the texts used
to argue for annihilationism by "affirming both views as
essentially correct" (p. 336). On the one hand, he says, "When all
the Biblical evidence is viewed together, it must be admitted that
the case for annihilationism is quite compelling" (p. 336). But on
the other hand, he sees some texts on the other side that do not
fit the simple annihilationist view (he mentions Revelation 14:10;
20:10; Matthew 25:34, 41; 2 Thessalonians 1:6-9, p. 336). He asks,
"Where does this leave us? For my part, it leaves me in a
conundrum. I do not believe that either the traditional position or
the annihilationists' position adequately accounts for all the
Biblical evidence cited in support of the opposing side's position.
Yet I do not believe that Scripture can contradict itself (John
10:35). This raises the question: Is there a logically consistent
way of affirming both views as essentially correct?" (pp.
336-337).

His answer is yes: "I will attempt to move beyond the impasse of
the traditional and annihilationist understandings of eternal
punishment and construct a model of hell that allows us to affirm
the essence of both perspectives" (p. 339). He attempts to show
that "Hell is the eternal suffering of agents who have been
annihilated" (p. 356).

He states a crucial premise: "There can be no shared reality
between those who say yes to God and those who say no, just as
there can be no shared reality between the actuality that God
affirms and the possibilities that God negates" (p. 347). Here is
the conclusion that follows: "Love is about relationships, and
relationships are about sharing reality. Hence, when in the
eschaton reality is exhaustively defined by God's love, the
'reality' of any agent who opposes love cannot be shared by anyone
else and thus cannot be real to anyone else. It is experienced as
real from the inside of the one who sustains it by his or her
active willing it. But to all who participate in reality –
that is, who are open to God and to each other through the medium
of God's love – it is nothing. It is eternally willed
nothingness" (p. 350). "Hell is real only from the inside" (p.
348).

Thus "we are able to affirm that in one sense the inhabitants of
hell are annihilated, though they suffer eternally. From the
perspective of all who share reality in the eschaton, the damned
are no more (Obadiah 16). They exist only as utter negation. . . .
They continue to experience torment, but it is a torment of their
own pathetic choosing in an illusory reality of their own damned
imagining" (p. 350). As Scripture says, they are extinct, reduced
to ashes, forever forgotten . . . But we may also accept the
scriptural teaching regarding the eternity of the torment of the
reprobates. . . . From the inside of the rebel experience, the
nothingness that they have willed is experienced as a something. To
all others, it is nothing" (p. 353).

"Stillborns of the probationary gestation period, these rebels
will timelessly endure in the loveless, illusory separate reality
that they and their ruler have imagined. As they are forever in the
past to participants of the kingdom of God, the joy and peace of
the kingdom that they truly desire and were created to share in
must forever lie in unattainable future for them. This torment is
their eternal dignity and humiliation, their choice and their
damnation, and it expresses God's eternal love as well as his
eternal wrath" (p. 356).

I am thankful that Boyd feels bound by Scripture to affirm the
conscious, eternal misery of the damned. "The world of the will
that says no to reality must be eternally vacuous and eternally
miserable (p. 350). He accepts "the scriptural teaching regarding
the eternity of the torment of the reprobates. . . . From the
inside of the rebel experience, the nothingness that they have
willed is experienced as a something" (p. 353). "This torment is
their eternal dignity" (p. 356). It may be unreal to those in
heaven, but it truly experienced by those in hell. Though "hell is
'a state of mind,'" this mind experiences "torment." "It is
experienced as real from the inside" (p. 350). "Inside the
self-chosen negation . . . 'life' goes on" (p. 350).

But I am not persuaded that Boyd's complex and paradoxical
"model" can survive close scrutiny.

1) It doesn't seem to me that Boyd has established the
"unreality" of the willing self in arguing that this self wills
only unreality. "It can continue to exist, but this existence can
only be the existence of utter negation" (p. 342). I do not see how
he moves from "utter negation" to "utter non-being." I admit that I
do not understand his precise meaning for the concept of
"negation." I searched carefully in the forty pages devoted to the
question of annihilationism (chapters 11-12) and could not find a
clear explanation of this concept. Therefore I am not as persuaded
by the unreality of hell vis- à -vis heaven as I am the true
ongoing experience of misery in the consciousness of the lost.

2) It is not clear to me that Boyd comes to terms with the
Biblical importance of the human body in the eternal suffering of
the lost. Since he does not argue for a short-term physical hell
followed by extinction, which some annihilationists do (and thus
give an account of why the body of the wicked would be raised,
Daniel 12:2; John 5:28-29; Acts 24:15), I do not know what account
Boyd would give of the resurrection of the body of unbelievers.
According to Matthew 10:28 it is "soul and body" that are
"destroyed in hell." Boyd does not take this "destruction" to mean
the absolute non-being of the soul; so I am not sure why he would
take it to mean the non-being of the body.

3) Boyd seems to embrace the (doubtful) annihilationist argument
that the redeemed could not be happy in heaven if they knew that
the lost were eternally miserable in hell: "The joy of heaven is
only conceivable if the damned have been annihilated and are
remembered no more" (p. 336). Yet his own view does not seem to
answer this objection, since it affirms the "eternal suffering" (p.
356) of the lost, and the "eternity of the torment of the
reprobates" (p. 353), and that the damned are "eternally miserable"
(p. 350). To be sure, he says that this is "unreal to those in
heaven" (p. 350), and that the lost "are forever in the past to the
participants of the kingdom of God" (p. 356), nevertheless I must
ask: How can we know so much now about the "eternal suffering" of
the lost (and thus maintain compassionate missions zeal to reach
them with the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ), and yet the perfected
saints in heaven know so little about this eternal suffering (and
thus, supposedly, find relief from the sadness that such knowledge
would cause)?